Nothing

Consciousness was an emergent property of the complex system that was the human brain and nervous system. Probably.

He couldn’t tell if this was true or not, for a given value of true.

He couldn’t tell if anyone else was really conscious and aware and thinking or if they just gave the appearance of it. In fact, he couldn’t really be sure if he himself was conscious or not. He seemed to be, but then he could never be 100% sure. Not really.

He thought he had no idea of  how it all worked. He was aware that he had a body but could not tell you where his liver was or the function of his gallbladder. For all the concrete evidence he had, his insides may as well be a solid continuous mass. He thought it strange that there were so many bits to him.

In fact, as he suspected, consciousness was an illusion. There didn’t seem to be any design behind it, it just so happened that everyone appeared to be conscious and then… one day they weren’t. All of a sudden, just like that, in a split second, everyone was no longer conscious apart from him. There was no higher thought or abstraction. Humans began to act like animals and animals continued to act pretty much like animals.

This was very distressing for him, as you can imagine. He tried to communicate with the people, who now lacked the appearance of consciousness, but only got the response he would from a dog. People’s basic natures seemed not to have changed, his loved ones still seemed to love him and strangers were still wary of him and those who had been aggressive to him in the past continued to be aggressive to him now. So things weren’t all that different.

He took as good care of those close to him as he could. He kept them virtually as pets, raiding supermarkets for food, cleaning up after them, washing them down occasionally. It wasn’t so bad. He began to get used to the situation, with the unconscious all around him, when one day another shift occurred.

Not only, as it turned out, was consciousness an illusion but so was organic life. The ability to reproduce and exhale and grow and move under one’s own steam turned out to be, again, a massive coincidence. The “creatures” (humans, dogs, cats, birds, bacteria, fungi, waterlilies, viruses etc etc etc) had shown what had previously seemed to him to be a complex, but ultimately logically organised, system which as it turned out was just completely random. A complete fluke that all of it seemed so organised and ordered, with things growing and dying. It was more like seeing your name written in the stars or Jesus’s face in a loaf of bread than an actual pattern.

So everything that he ever knew to be alive stopped. Birds dropped from the sky and his loved ones fell to the floor and the trees remained as they were but no longer shed their leaves. He was saddened by this state of affairs.

He stopped eating, but of course, this had no effect, as the whole of the biological realm had been just one massive coincidence and he had no need for food to sustain him. Eventually, he discovered he needn’t even breathe. He discovered this as he walked into the ocean for a while and didn’t drown.

He wondered why he had been “spared” when all other life on the planet had stopped. It never occurred to him that if it was pure chance that everything had settled into a pattern that resembled self-replicating “life” and then ended abruptly, why shouldn’t a part of it, one discrete part of it, just carry on? It was just as likely as any other scenario.

Eventually, as with the loss of his family and the rest of humanity, he got used to it. He made his peace with God. He watched the sunrise and the sunset. He felt the wind on his skin and the sand and the ocean on his feet.

Then, as with so many other things, cause and effect revealed themselves to be a highly unlikely but remarkably (up until this point) consistent hoax. If he pushed a stone it would no longer move or it would move by its self. The universe, with its lack of rules now apparent, started to flush apart and do whatever. He was not sure.

Then, of course, the universe itself ceased to be. It had been a remarkable set of circumstances that gave the appearance of a closed system with matter and energy and forces and things like that, but alas, for him, that was not the case.

So he remained in the nothingness. You could say he was floating but then again you could say he wasn’t. It didn’t really matter.

He would never know that his consciousness and continuation were just as random and as chance driven as the rest of the universe had been. In fact, as he continued to “think” his “thoughts” of his old life he would never realise that he had never thought anything at all.

In fact he had never even been there.