And on the Fifth Day Brian set forth in the static chaos.
He traced his way along the vertical planes and navigated the graduated horizontal planes and made his way into a louder place. This place was brighter than the last, and all manner of forms surrounded him. Some, the vertical planes rising into the sky and the horizontal planes extending into the distance, Brian felt he had some chance of understanding, with sufficient time and effort. Others, like the tall thin somewhat amorphous cylinderoid objects and the squat nearly half-sphere objects, were less easily deciphered, especially since, while they were unmoving, they never seemed to be in the same place or in the same configuration upon subsequent viewing. Or rather, sometimes they were, but sometimes they weren't.
Brian took a step backwards and bumped into something, but when he looked nothing was there.
Occasionally he would almost hear words in the jumble of sounds, but when he concentrated on them, they moved away and were lost in the chaos. The sound roared and sighed, chattered and clattered, but Brian was unable to effectively discern between the sounds, or to isolate one out of the many.
He made his way to one of the solid vertical planes and leaned heavily on it. It supported his weight. He rested there for some time; he felt weak and there was something wrong in his middle, but he couldn't figure out what. It had been this way for some time now, but he didn't know how long; his watch had ceased making sense. Eventually, he walked, his hand on the vertical plane for guidance.
He was doing much better, he thought, than when he first woke into this world. However many hours or days or years ago that had been, he'd been unable to discern anything but a jumble of light, reflected in shades of grey. It had taken him some time to decipher "up" and "down" in this new world. Brian had a vague concept that he was in a place called "My Apartment" that existed within a larger place called "South Philly," and that this itself was nested within a larger place and so on. However, none of this correlated with his current experience, and he was unable to make sense of the spaces and forms within the "My Apartment." Brian suspected that he had somehow moved to some alternate "My Apartment," where his senses were inadequate to the task of interpreting the world. Perhaps, he thought, I am seeing into the Fourth Dimension. Perhaps, he thought, I am seeing a place that is nested withing My Apartment. Perhaps, he thought, My Apartment, South Philly and all the rest were really constructs that rested upon this deeper world, and that he had somehow broken through the crust.
Brian moved along the vertical plane until it ended. He stood there for a while, confused, remembering colors. Everything looked frozen, dead, without color. A light grey light blinked at him. He discovered that the vertical plane hadn't really ended; it had merely turned right: the inverse of what he had discovered of vertical planes withing My Apartment. He kept his hand on the vertical plane and followed it.
Brian spent a good deal of time those first days learning to distinguish forms. First he concentrated on simple geometric forms - planes, triangles, curves, squares. Once he felt he had a rudimentary grasp of this, he started synthesizing these to create Objects. He spent a great deal of time on each Object, checking each Object from as many different perspectives as he could think of in order to construct the totality of the Object in his mind. He hoped one day to determine Function as well as Form, but he was content for now to simply unjumble his world.
Occasionally he slept, but he did not dream.
The vertical plane turned again, and again, and again. Brian followed where it led. Eventually the light slowly dimmed and the world grew dark, with pinpoints of light. In the dark the sound had grown, but Brian was beyond caring. The pain in his center had become intolerable. He leaned heavily against the vertical plane and slid down it into a seated position and closed his eyes.
Brian slept soundly that night, propped against the wall in front of his apartment building in South Philadelphia.