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When life comes, it comes all at once.
His senses don’t fade in one at a time, giving him a moment to get used to each new way to perceive his surroundings. It’s something like- one second he’s nothing, he simply isn’t. Then before he even knows it, he’s this gasping gaping creature, desperately trying to make sense of a tiny, watery world.
He focuses enough to see a wall, and understands that this is the limit of all there is. He watches it, unaware he can do anything more, and suddenly he’s somehow right next to it, parts of himself still fluttering in the substance he’s submerged in.
So he has a body, and he can move. That is the sum of the knowledge he gains in his first few seconds of existence. Not bad, considering that he’s having to learn it all himself.
Is there anything else like him? Anything that lives, that learns? He sees nothing around himself but the water and the walls, each smooth plane of confinement bearing a dizzyingly different appearance. But when he looks at each of them, they don’t look back.
He almost resigns himself to loneliness, then realises there’s one more direction: up. There’s no wall above him, but no water either, just as surely preventing him from venturing upwards. All he can do is see, into an endless blue column of emptiness.
Until it’s not empty. At first, he only sees a long, dark shadow, then something crouches down to get a closer look.
He has no way to understand most of the being’s features, and he doesn’t try. He sees all that he needs to: eyes that recognise, analyse, wide-open windows set in front of a real and living soul.
They could communicate like this forever, he thinks, but the being above him has other ideas. Sound doesn’t travel too well underwater, so it’s muted and muffled when it reaches him, barely intelligible even if he understood the significance of the words.
Something in him still leaps for joy.
It’s the first sound he hears, but not the last. The creature above the water keeps talking, and the longer he listens, the more sense it starts to make.
He learns that his name is New Milo, or just Milo sometimes, and he’s a fish. He also learns that his companion’s name is Wilbur, or just Wil sometimes, and he’s a human. Wilbur can’t breathe in the water, and Milo can’t breathe outside of it, but even that doesn’t keep them from getting along.
Milo also learns more about their environment, more from Wil’s habitual mutterings to himself than from conversation directed towards him. Outside his own little crevice, there’s some sort of platform for the human to walk around on, one he continuously adds to with materials that seem to appear from nowhere. He sounds proud when he talks about it, so Milo’s proud of it too, even if he’ll never see it.
As for what’s beyond the platform, Milo can’t even begin to guess. Sometimes Wilbur falls, screaming and cursing all the way down, but then he’s back as if nothing happened. He has no other experience to compare this too, so he has little trouble assuming it must be normal.
It’s not a bad life, he decides, though he doesn’t really know what a bad life would be like.
“Are you all right?” Wil asks one day. “You’re not moving.”
Though Milo doesn’t respond with words, neither of them doubt that he heard. It’s true, he hasn’t been moving much, but what should he be moving to? He’s explored his entire block, every square inch a hundred times over. There’s no point in swimming to the other side to see if anything’s changed when he can tell from here that it hasn’t.
Wil leaves to do other things, and Milo thinks no more of it, until there’s a pickaxe being taken to the wall.
He braces himself to finally see whatever’s behind it, but when the last of it crumbles away, he’s faced with another wall. It’s equally uncompromising, but it looks a bit different, and it’s further away. He has more space? This was really possible all along?
It was, he realises, but this doesn’t mean it was easy. Wilbur worked for this, the ability to expand Milo’s world a bit further. He shows his gratitude by darting into it, taking care not to look too closely. He finds himself wanting to savour the novelty for a while longer.
But he has little to worry about now, in that department. The renovations continue, until Milo has two, then four, then six times the space he once had. He might say he’s living like a king, if he had any concept of monarchy.
As for the pufferfish… the less said about that, the better.
They aren’t the only two creatures in the universe, as it turns out. There’s quite a few more, all appearing from the same mysterious nothingness as the building materials, and generally occupying the same platform as Wilbur himself- some for longer than others.
Each failure to preserve an animal’s life hurts Wil deeply, and it’s always Milo he turns to for solace. Even if he wanted to leave, his aquatic nature keeps that from being a possibility. He’s rewarded for his loyalty- random scraps of undersea plants become his possessions, and occasionally he even gets to inspect some other item, briefly tossed into the water then scooped back up.
It’s enough of a life for him, but not for Wilbur. It’s easy to tell that he wants something- no, that he’s missing something, and won’t be satisfied until he has it. Whenever he delivers a beseeching prayer, upward or outward, Milo once again wishes he could give him some “dirt”- whatever that is.
Maybe he should have wished harder, because the lack of it only drives Wilbur to worse places. Threatening to fall from the edge with a rabbit, very nearly doing it, then setting off an explosion when his efforts fail- what’ll he resort to next, if even that doesn’t help?
Milo can’t be certain, and that scares him, though he’s not afraid for himself. He can’t imagine having anything to fear from the person who strokes his scales, who offers endless words of encouragement despite never getting any back, who willingly immerses himself in a substance he can’t breathe just so they can be close for a while.
Wilbur’s taught him plenty of words by now, and there’s one he understands more than any other. Friend.
His friend next chooses to be friendly by expanding Milo’s space even further, taking up most of what used to be his own. He really couldn’t ask for anyone better to share this world with, could he? Even if he does play strange games sometimes, like when he lays a roughly crafted wooden plate on the floor, and starts encouraging Milo to swim over it.
Well, why not? His fins brush the plate, pressing it into the ground, and a bucket materialises in Wil’s hands. He takes it away, and that’s the last Milo sees of him for a while.
Did he make a mistake? He’s never been left alone for this long before. If only he could just ask, formulate a single word to recapture a fraction of attention…
But the Sky Gods must be fresh out of miracles, because none of the little bubbles he sends to the surface become words when they burst.
He has all the space he could ever want, and he’s never felt so trapped.
He’s resigned himself to eternal solitude when a bucket rather rudely interrupts, snatching him from his home along with barely enough water to breathe in.
A voice apologises- and it’s the voice, his voice, the only voice Milo’s ever heard. Completely unchanged, as if no time’s passed at all. Bucket snugly cradled in Wilbur’s arms, Milo briefly lets himself wonder if he might have died and gone to Heaven.
Then he sees the tank, and he’s certain that he has.
Not only is it wide, but deep- he can swim in patterns he’s never even thought about before, and adjust how much light he wants to take in by hovering at different levels. Wilbur even starts visiting again. It’s not like the old days, when they had nothing but each other’s company, but never getting those back isn’t as painful a prospect as he might have expected.
Little changes keep coming over time, even to an environment that Milo would have already thought perfect. More coral, more grass, and even windows, giving him a view of what goes on outside. Usually it’s just Wil, assembling buildings from an endless supply of stone, but sometimes a four-legged creature called a “cat” comes and stares at him. Wil doesn’t like it when the cat does that. Milo doesn’t see the harm in it.
Nothing more of note happens for a while, except for the arrival of the “dirt” Wilbur’s been waiting for. If Milo’s being honest, he doesn’t see the appeal- it’s dull and brown, and packed into a rather unexciting block shape. At least it makes him happy.
Oddly enough, it ends up as part of his own tank, with a few strange little green things protruding from it. It almost looks like his seagrass, but on land- what a funny idea!
He’s so busy contemplating the land grass that he doesn’t even notice the block that appears in Wil’s hands, purple and covered in indecipherable but familiar symbols. It’s only his quiet reaction that gets Milo’s attention.
“If there’s one more thing… it’s very simple.”
And he climbs into the tank, stashing the block away in favour of a bucket.
Milo doesn’t understand. He can see every new building, and there’s nothing aquatic- could Wilbur really intend to return him to his old living space? But why?
Fear overtakes him, and he swims away, managing to evade capture. Once at a safe distance, he turns around to see where Wilbur is, and catches sight of his smile.
There’s nothing menacing, or even indifferent, in that expression. He sees hope, joy, determination- things he wouldn’t know a thing about, if not for Wilbur.
Milo stops, stares for a moment longer, then swims into the bucket.
I trust you.
Once he’s in the bucket, Wil stops moving, and they both disappear.
At least, that’s what he thinks- he’s not even aware it happened until they arrive somewhere else. It’s not really a memory, but Milo somehow knows of a short but frightening gap of time during which he simply didn’t exist, or maybe just didn’t perceive. He’s not sure why the same oblivion he came from frightens him so much. Maybe because he knows what’s missing from it now?
The world fades back into view, and Milo catches a glimpse from the depths of his bucket, and this isn’t their home.
His first impulsive thought is that he might die, that the sheer shock’s killing him, but it’s a reaction that doesn’t make much sense even to himself. When the sight doesn’t reveal itself to be an elaborate trick of the light, he keeps drinking it in. A gargantuan layer of water that extends so deep he can’t even see the floor, and so far that it penetrates the horizon in every direction… How can something like this exist? Who could possibly create it, and for what?
Wilbur speaks, and Milo tears his attention from the water to listen, in hopes of his question being answered.
“New Milo, when I brought you into the world, I said to you… This is the world. I showed you my one-by-one block, and I said, this is the world. This is all there is. Just a single block of existence, and you will live here forever.”
And it was, until it wasn’t. Their little world grew, piece by piece, each block telling its own part of a story. He knows that if he had come to life after it was all built, it wouldn’t be the same- the process was what made it theirs.
“New Milo… I may have fabricated the truth slightly.”
This new place is overwhelming, it’s true, but he can feel it: he’s ready. Whatever happens, they can take it on together.
“New Milo, there’s a lot more to the world. And you may be thinking… there’s so much more to this world that you wish you could go and explore. Well, I’ve got good news for you, New Milo.”
They sink into the depths. Even as the light fades, Milo still sees something new no matter where he looks. Among the seagrass, he notices some small dark shapes, moving in a familiar way…
“You can go and explore it.”
The bucket turns upside down, and the movement’s force pushes Milo out of it. Left with nothing between himself and the endless ocean, his first impulse is to retreat back to safety, but it’s already gone. There’s no going back.
He knows that, even before Wilbur starts rising to the surface. Without him.
Even if he followed, leapt back into the bucket, demanded that they return to the world he knows… it could never be the same. Not after seeing this.
So he swims forward, tentatively at first, then picking up speed as his fins get used to the temperature and pressure of the deep sea.
He finds that in this ocean, life packs itself into the smallest spaces. Milo sees tiny shelled creatures creeping out from under rocks, he sees minuscule fish peeking through holes in plants, he sees tiny little flowers blooming in cracks in the stone floor. All of that, and more, in a space no larger than his very first enclosure. Their worlds are small, but they aren’t contained.
After swimming for a while, he looks back the way he came, just once.
It’s as he expected: Wilbur’s gone. But Milo doesn’t know which of them was the first to leave.
He doesn’t go back to check. He keeps swimming, keeps exploring, honours the time they had together by doing exactly what he was brought here to do.
And he doesn’t stop.
He’s grown, he thinks, though it’s impossible to be certain when he never visits the same location twice. By now, he’s probably seen twice as much as a fish who’s spent its entire life here, and it’s still not enough.
Am I looking for something? It’s not the first time he’s asked himself that, and not the first time he’s found himself with no answer. Maybe this is just what life is- an endless pursuit of something nameless and unknowable, perhaps never to be found, or only found when it ceases to matter.
How’s he supposed to know? He’s a fish.
He rises, looking around before breaking the surface. The shore here’s dangerous. It’s home to humans, who create the most enticing and unique sights, but if hunger strikes them, he’s a very likely target. He inches closer, ready to turn tail at any time.
A great tower rises from the land, lights flashing at the top. It was the light that drew Milo closer, until he could see the patterns of what had first appeared as a featureless stick in the distance. And above the lights, hanging from the tallest spire…
“New Milo!” Wilbur smiles and waves, his open warmth recalling, for the briefest of instants, something like a great burst of sunlight. It flares, then fades, and he’s back to work as if nothing happened.
He doesn’t feel the need to stay any longer. Not when he’s finally realised: the two of them, they never really left their world. No, this whole vast universe has become their world. And even if he crosses a thousand oceans, they’ll meet again.