Peanuts & Bologna Studios

He didn’t have a name.
He didn’t know what a name was.

He only knew motion—the slow, meandering crawl of the glass tank that carried him across endless golden dunes. A serpent-shaped trail stretched behind him, carved not in sand, but in shimmering plasma residue—his signature in a world that had never signed him into existence.

The desert was quiet. The stars above: endless.
And inside the tank, he grew.

His limbs were long, soft, and pale-green, stitched with veins that glowed faintly like constellations just under the skin. His spine curled perpetually inward, fetal and fragile, as if waiting for a birth that would never come. He didn’t know how long he’d been traveling—only that he always had been.

Sometimes, he looked through the transparent barrier surrounding him and saw dunes rise and fall like sleeping giants. He did not know where he was going, nor who had built the machine that carried him. But the hum of the engine was as familiar as his own heartbeat.

Occasionally, he would feel it: a flicker in his mind, like someone else’s thought brushing against his own.

A memory?
A command?
A ghost?

He had no answers—only the path behind him, glowing faintly in the moonlight like a scar on the skin of the world.

No one had ever followed it.

No one had ever come.

He often wondered if he was alone, or if he was being watched from above. The galaxies swirled in purples and golds beyond his reach, mocking him with their ancient light. His tank was both cradle and coffin, sanctuary and prison.

Sometimes he would press his hand to the glass. Not to escape—he didn’t know what “escape” was—but to feel something, anything, beyond his own breath fogging the inside of his world.

And always, the same question returned, circling through his thoughts like the winding trail he left behind:

What is this life?

He did not know if there was a beginning.
He could not imagine an end.
But still, he moved forward—drawn by something deep and unknowable, as if the answer was just one more mile ahead.

He stands alone in the desert’s golden expanse, the warm wind stirring ripples across the dunes. Inside his cockpit, the quiet hum of his machine is the only sound—until his notices something unexpected: two fresh sets of footprints, unfamiliar, etched in the sand before him. He leans forward, shading his brow, heart tightening. Those aren’t mine. They weren’t made by my machine.

The twin trails don’t split in opposite directions—they run parallel, fading as they stretch toward the horizon. Their subtle curves suggest a winding path that disappears beyond a distant dune. He flips on his scanners—no heat signatures, no radio signals—only the silent evidence of footsteps, even as the trails thin into the wind-swept sand. He studies the footprints again—their spacing, the slight tilt in each print. Why two? Why here? He feels the pull of curiosity tugging at his resolve.

Machine hum rising, he nudges forward, angling toward where the tracks vanish. Each inch forward is a question. Each breath of hot desert air whispers possibility. The footprints may fade, but their call only grows louder.

He presses on into the dunes, into the unknown. Unseen, unheard, the destination awaits. And in that shifting silence, the next chapter of his journey—and the truth behind those tracks—beckons.