Opening Line By A Friend #1: Brooke Ashley Kolcow

I was all alone in a room, there were no doctors around, and I didn't know how to get out. So began my new existence, reincarnated as an abstract kitten; someone's thought process against the background of a million other thought processes. Maybe I was some kind of mental expansion of that old Schrodinger's cat experiment, in a much larger room rather than a hypothetical box. If so, I didn't imagine the rest of my life to be a pleasant or particularly long one, even if my chances at survival were set up to be slightly better. Either way, I could feel myself being carefully explained, as if by some brass-throated physics professor, trying to get a complex theory across to a small group of devoted students in the simplest way possible. It was just as likely I was being brought up as some kind new-wave of thought experiment in a non-traditional Economics textbook.

It's almost strange that I'd come into being knowing exactly what I was without knowing the manner of my existence. I wondered if all the Farmer Browns I'd heard about in math class ever questioned why five or six apples were so gosh darn important to keep track of in their little bubble universes when there were certainly a vast many other apple trees they'd be responsible for and several different time-consuming duties they would need to tend to were they actual farmers. I imagined whatever or whoever was explaining me must have done a good job setting me up or I would not be so self-aware.

I wondered what would happen to me once their explanation was over.

Also there was a doctor. He sprang up just as I was reasoning these things out, and I imagined whatever this thought experiment was supposed to illustrate was about to become terribly clear.