Chapter 0-Page 0
s
Panel 1: You and I are two nits with nothing to do except float in an area of empty space. We are humble creatures, very small with hardly any traits at all. Even if we study really hard, the best we can become is a pair of nit___s. We don't remember being anywhere else, and it's really dark and cold out here (and boring).
Panel 2: All of a sudden, we're not alone. Another nit appears about a mile away, or at least, it seems like a mile to us. The new nit didn't come from anywhere; it merely blinked into existence. A moment later, we feel a jerk; something shoves us away from the newcomer. After we recover, we notice we are moving away from the third nit at a slow, steady speed. We feel another shove from our right, and we take a look. Sure enough, there's another nit over there we didn't notice before. What's going on? What's pushing us around?
Panel 3: The four of us stayed close to each other about a year ago. Since then, we have grown to a drifting population of five hundred nits. We certainly aren't lonely anymore and not bored either because we get pushed around whenever, pop, there's another new nit.
Panel 4: So there we were, sort of drifting along together, when something new happened, but we didn't know it was new at first. I remember it as if it were yesterday (it's hard to tell without a sun coming up in the morning). We were pushed from our left (we thought), so we expected to see a new arrival in that direction, but we only saw all our old friends. (Nits may all look the same to Earth humans but not to us.)
Puzzled, we look around, and oh no, one of our buddies to the right is gone. After a quick count, we see only four hundred and ninety-nine of us.
Chapter 0-Page 0
