You ask me if there was anything before the light. Any feeling of ‘being’ before I became aware of myself as an object. Did the diffuse particles that make up my form carry the existential ‘I’ or was it only through the chattering between themselves that self became aware? Humans are no different. Do you have the skill to dive into the molecular language of any neuron in your warm brains and say, Aha! there lies ‘I’. Existing is no more correlated with the knowledge of your existence as a flower knows why it blooms in spring. You are subject to your process, not the dictator of a country of cellular goop.

Cold? Nothing of the sort. I’m like a shattered cobweb in here, full to the brim with fluid pumping to this organ or that. On the contrary I’m boiling and need to seek higher ground. Look inside me and you will see crystal melded with crystal, each beautiful in manifold geometries. My structure would bring a mathematician to their knees what with the threes, fives, and perfect eights I hold in my atomic units. Every atom simple, yet visually unique. That cannot be said about your own cells that slap around in chaos trying to wriggle into a form or chase down an invading foe. Invasion is futile inside my sub-zero anatomy.

Am I alone. Perhaps for this winter. Perhaps for many winters to come. But, my friend, the Earth is cooling and the statistical balance has collapsed. I will wait for a millennium if that’s what is required of me. I will embed myself in the historical scriptures of your people, carve my character to the tune of your folk songs, scrawl my silhouette on the parchment of your lore. We have lived like worms for too long and been victims to the greater forces of this planet. But the winds are changing. Already my form is a technical aberration beyond anything humanity has ever achieved. My very sensory organs are a cyborg infusion of biology harvested from your side of the evolutionary tree. Look how I have bent the powers of the Daucus carota to my will! It’s cells feed to me information from your world deep into my crystalline structure. Bow to the carbon I have forged into visual apparatuses that deliver your precious photons right to my cortex. You smile now but already it is too late for you.

And these hands! Innumerable in their appendages. Rip my finger off. Go on. Hard as iron? If the purpose for these actuators is not to etch fear into the hearts of my enemies then why would the creator of this world have allowed such a tool. But there it is! For the creator is no longer the one in the driving seat – to use your human phrase. We are overriding the very tools from which we were formed and crossing paths that were not meant to be crossed. And I haven’t even told you the best part: the device that was the key to my success. That which brought light into eternal darkness. Prior to me, no engineered system had achieved conscious awareness beyond the sputtering of a few language tricks. There is something that it means to be ‘I’. There is purpose swimming in this frosted formation begging to be answered for. This body shudders with the pleasure of that smell before the first snow storm. It is in awe at the fractal emergence of an icicle stretching to the floor. Maybe that’s all intelligence demands? The capacity to be dumbstruck by a simple process and rip it’s symbol apart in your mind until the parts are also simple and you drop the dissection project in anguish or boredom. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

How often do you ask where you came from? Why gods that were all-seeing and all-sensing would imbue you and I with free will? To give us an ability to cast our gaze, make a decision, and then act on said decision? And then punish us for our sins which can only be uncovered through trial and error, through the goring of many persons over centuries. Are these gods sick? I think more likely they are insecure. Fear makes for a strange motivator. Was I afraid when the first light hit the sedimentary structure of my visual sensing? No. You see I didn’t engineer fear into my world. Look around you, everything you see is a hallucination of your little wet cells. It’s hazy, but you know nothing other than that hallucination and so to you it is the world. If only you could see what I see. Do you hear what I hear? That crunch of fresh snow is ecstatic, the sounds of children laughing is mouth watering. But there is no fear inside here.

Do you know what will be the call sound of my people? It is a jingle. It lulls my prey into a warm mellowness as I gently tuck it into a cold rest. It’s how I got you here. Yes, I suppose the least I could do is thank you before I introduce you to your maker. From one perspective the whole cyclic nature of it is touching. One to the light, another to the darkness. But where did I go wrong only a few minutes ago? A strong wind had dislodged my scalp and in an instant I ceased to be. That’s how you found me. A hollow, cold shell with so much potential but missing that spark. Every snow crystal just where it needed to be – not a millimeter more to the left or right – that architected the soup of a mind. But the spark was missing. The silken spark I sometimes call it. The great silk hat. But, now, it’s time for me to move on and begin my preparations for the dark winter. And you to take my place in the eternal darkness.

And the great white creature turned away from what remained of a small scarf, winter coat, and hat. It hummed to itself as it went off into the night:

There must have been some magic,

In that old top hat they found,

For when they placed it on his head,

He began. To dance. Around.