No Sense of Other

Hello, everyone! A while back I had what I thought about as an interesting thought experiment: what is it like to have no sense of "other"?

We all know about the "self consciousness" question we put around other beings, or the "when does this dolphin get to be considered a person" kind of thing. And yeah, you can be on both sides, including "Animals can never be people!" or "Some animals are already self-aware enough to be considered people". Neither is inherently wrong, albeit somewhat naive in the sense that there is no true answer, because they are subjective, and strictly tied to the culture of the person saying them. But we're not here to talk about animal rights right now, are we? That sounds like an interesting topic for some other time.

How would such an "entity" perceive things around it? If there is no "other", then "self" must extend to include other, to perceive other as part of it. This means that it cannot just be a regular being, it must be formed out of something non-solid, that permeates the nearby surroundings and "integrates" them. Think of something along the lines of you growing another arm, having full control of it, feeling everything that arm feels, but instead of an arm, it can be an entire rock, or a school of fish, or the water around you. You would feel every vibration on such a deep level as if you were not only touching them, but being them, everything the fish would feel would be part of what you felt, every ripple in the water would move you, every tremor of the earth would be both you and caused by you. It's a bit mind-boggling, isn't it? It was for me.

I was so intrigued about this thought experiment that I decided to write a short little story... long story short... it turned out slightly bigger than originally intended... it reached around 40000 characters. In this "tiny" plot I decided that the entity should have power beyond measure, be stuck at the bottom of a deep ocean trench and have control over reality as if it were a child playing with toys. A research station was formed to study the "anomaly".

Then I thought: why not do something different? I could post the original story, or I could learn something new, that seemed to fit the actual story. I decided to convert the story into the plot for a game (and I vowed to not overcomplicate things). It ended up better than I expected, though I did slightly complicate it, wanting to keep as much of the original story as environmental storytelling (more or less), and some things are still not perfect, some endings still need a little bit of refinement, but it's mostly there. It was a fun little experiment, that I plan to publish on itch.io for free maybe later this week, if I finish polishing it.