Wandering Birds

When I wake up it takes me a while to remember where I am. In the darkness I could be anywhere, and imagine myself in various places before as I drift between dream and reality. The amnesia feels pleasant, full of possibility.

I have been staying with so many people I met on my way that I only remember when I feel fully awake that I am in the commune in Girona. After it was bought for public use through crowdfunding, it has become a popular stop for travelers from Europe and beyond into what has become considered by many the birthplace of anarchism. Me, I just came here wandering around. I lived in Barcelona, but after a falling out with my parents forced me to move out of the apartment they had rented for me, I decided to move from one commune to another trying to find out if there's anything to all the talk about it.

What I noticed is that the farther away I went from Barcelona, the more worthwhile my time in the communes became, on account of there being less of the pilgrims, most of them millennials, that came here from recently developed countries still in the throes of their nihilist era, looking for some sort of answer in their belated postmodern era, like adolescents in an identity crisis.

I look at one of them hugging his knees on his pad, staring into space. He doesn't seem to see me, perhaps because of the dreadlocks hanging before his eyes. They're still waiting for a revolution, too out of it to realize it has already happened. But they were expecting something extraordinary, an apocalypse as it were, for the heavens to burst open and God to show themself and separate good and evil. It does have something in common with creationism, the idea of creating something out of nothing rather than from what came before. But what really happened was that like all of us they were given a chance to find their values, and for those that did not take it, nothing happened.

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In the kitchen I find we're almost out of cereal, so I tell my computer to cut some. It says there isn’t any. That can’t be right. I walk up the stairs to the roof and open the trapdoor into the hydroponics greenhouse. Coming from the dark of the bedroom, my eyes take a while to adjust to the bright sunlight concentrated by the lenses and mirrors above me. The cereal plants have all already been harvested. I could swear I saw them here yesterday, but the only traces I see are the few grains next to the chute door.

When I see the electric cutter blade is still uncleaned, I walk back down again and into the kitchen, where I hear the sound of machines coming from the storage room. Inside I stumble into Carlos, one of the longest inhabitants of the commune. He's usually the one who takes care of things here, though he does not own it any more than the rest of us.

Carlos: "It'll be just a minute," he says, looking at the grain processing machines. "I'm sorry, I should've thought of this, but there were other things on my mind."

"What are you talking about? I told you before, you're no more responsible for this than the rest of us."

Carlos: "Yes, but if everyone thinks this way…"

"Then we'll learn for ourselves. Isn't that the point of anarchism? Now I'll know to think about this next time."

Carlos: "Maybe you're right. It's a bit early to argue for me."

"Right, then sleep in next time. Breakfast can wait anyway. What have you got here?" I ask, pointing at the machines.

Carlos: "Just oats. And flour, but there's still a little bit of bread."

"I guess I'll just take the bread and probably go."

Carlos: "Really? Why in such a hurry? Where are you going?"

"North, anywhere away from these hippies. What are they doing here anyway?"

Carlos: "Haven't you heard? A revolution."

"A revolution! It's nothing but an excuse to keep dreaming without doing anything about the real problems of our time. Even a way to come to terms with them, because they could always say of their problems that they will lead up to one. Governments couldn't have come up with a better opium for the masses if they tried."

He stays silent and checks the roasted cereal in the machines.

I know I should let it go. I'm just so frustrated with people that are just waiting for something to happen on account of others. That's why I left. My parents want me to believe they want freedom as much as I, but keep trying  to get me into a job with the already falling government to climb up in its hierarchy. They think now's the best time to be a politician, as politics is changing more than ever.

Admittedly, without the government having held the referendums the people petitioned for, it wouldn't have allowed crowdfunding as a deductible alternative to taxes for public services, not without a revolution. But by doing that it already handed over its power to the people, and over the past twenty years it's formed greater layers of organization until the government lost its power and became something merely nominal, like royalties in Europe: an evolutionary vestige, like the human tailbone… But I was born after all this. Maybe if I had lived in their time I would see it all differently, but there’s just nothing you can do with them. They never listen to anything that doesn’t agree with their group think. Might as well give up on them.”

Carlos: "Don't say that! That's you being weak. If you can't help people in their weakness, what in the world can you do for others at all?"

Just now the millennial I saw earlier comes in.

Carlos: "Jack! Come here. Tell him what you think about him, Lucas."

"Eh…" He grabs my arm and forces me to look at him. His eyes are already glazed over with marijuana, but I'm not sure if it's the marijuana or the dreadlocks that most bother me about him. I think of what a long way it has gone from the Indian brahmans who didn't care what they looked like to others, to those who turned their hair into dreadlocks just to fit in. Then I realize how brahmans must have eventually turned into a caste that people needed to fit into in the first place. Because of people like me, who shunned those that weren’t as enlightened as them.

"I didn’t mean it like that."

Carlos: "He thinks you're too weak to be helped, a hopeless case, the end, game over. You're ready to die, fit for the slaughter. Not just you, mind you, but your whole generation."

I look at Carlos. "What's gotten into you?" He looks apologetic. "I'm sorry, there's just been a lot of this kind of friction lately. I thought we'd be over this in our new world but it just never ends, it never ends. We could live in heaven and we'd still turn it into a hell." He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

Then I look back at Jack. But he's certainly achieved one thing. The glaze in his eyes is gone, and he's wide awake.

"Maybe you're right," he says. "Fit for the slaughter? Well we've always been treated like sheep. For thousands of years they taught us that's just what we are. It takes time to deal with the aftermath, Carl. We'll get there someday." He pats him on the back, seeming more worried about him than about himself, and walks out.

"Wait!" Carlos still says.

"Even if it’s too late for them, it’ll end with them. We’re different."

"Yeah, right," he says sarcastically. "You know what's been stressing me out so much?"

"I was wondering about that."

Carlos: "Well, the other night we had trouble here when these transhumanists were here, trying to win people over for their cause. We had to vote to send some people away, but by doing that we kind of picked sides already, and I'm worried about what that could mean to the commune. This could be coming back to me."

"So who had a problem with who?"

Carlos: "I don't even know how it started, but does it matter? What I do remember is that someone said of the other that if they're really so different perhaps they should exterminate them."

"They were just joking. Come on now, that's a thing of the past. " But I don't feel as sure as I sound. Doesn’t it always start with threats? In panarchist Europe no one would ever have to start a war, but what about the rest of the world?

"You really need to try something different. You’re getting stuck in a routine here, and that’s the surest way to get neurotic. I can hardly imagine what it must have done to people to do the same thing over and over every day of their lives like you did for years. Why don't you come with me? This place will be just fine without you. The rest will learn to take care of this place."

Carlos: "This place will become a mess."

"That's not true. We all helped clean up. And even if it does become a mess, then they'll be forced to clean up the mess eventually."

He stares out into space and mutters about some things he still has to take care of.

Carlos: "You know what? Alright, I'm coming with you."

"See, that's the difference between you and the millennials. You choose to change. You might be neurotic but you're not hopeless."

Carlos: "I've got to finish some things I started though."

"For God's sake, how can you find so many little things to do in a fully automated building? Just write it on a sign for the others."

Carlos: "Say what you want but I have to bag the cereals. Can't just leave them to rot."

"Can't take that long. I'll see you on the road."

Carlos: "You're heading north, right?"

"Right, you'll see where I am on my profile." I raise my hand as I walk out. When you can meet anyone anywhere, you hardly bother to say goodbye if at all.

I take a deep breath when I'm outside, enjoying the fresh air from the vertical gardens covering the buildings. The buildings have already covered some of the crops with plastic to form small greenhouses, including, of course, all of those on the roof. of the crops are already out of season and have been covered with plastic panes by the machines and a few electric cars whiz by. It must be rush hour. Of course that doesn't mean much when everyone is working from home, or from anywhere, in fact. Those that do make use of the roads are mostly those who travel.

A woman opens her window and extends a picker at a row of grapes below her sill, an old-fashioned tool with a pincer and scissor at the end. Usually people just use cutters now, but with these old little houses whose walls don't line up, it's not always worth the trouble installing one. I follow her movements with interest, squinting. The woman looks at me askant, then smiles a little in compensation and withdraws. I realize my frown probably makes me look a little creepy, but my eyes are still adjusting to the daylight.

I check the time. It's almost 300. In the new time scale most modern people use now, there are 864,00 hectaseconds: 400 is noon and 200 is early morning. Ever since all files were digitized, it was easy for anyone to adjust the time formats on all of them for themselves, which began a competition between different formats online. The 864 hectasec day soon won over the ten hour, 144-minute per hour day, but for the year, there were a lot of formats for a long time. Most of them were ideological, most of them based on some historical event, one of them on the publication of the Origin of Species, but eventually one that came on top was one that was neutral: the Annus Annorum or Year of the Year, based solely on the date of its own birth as if this was itself a historical event, as it involves the transcendence of ideology. To be neutral to all cultures, its New Year is simply the winter solstice, December the 21st, and when younger people stopped celebrating the old New Year, Christmas and the other Christian Holidays soon followed, replaced by the equinoxes and solstices. Some have seen it as a manifesto of nihilism, and indeed it was invented at the height of the nihilist era.

I hunch my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. I should've brought a pillow. It's one of the things that's not provided in the communes since they get lost or stolen quickly. I didn't really make any preparations for this trip at all. I'll probably need my inflatable clothing if I'm heading to the cold north, especially if I'm planning to sleep outside on my way as well. Once I have that I have everything: warm clothing if inflated, cool clothing if uninflated, and if zipped, a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, bivy bag and raincoat. If I'm really not turning back, if I'm really going to get out into the world, I'll need one. I tell my computer to get me one.

A signal on my mindcom lets me know that my inflatable have arrived by pneumatic tube at the nearest supermarket, asking me whether I want to collect it or if I want it delivered by drone. I choose the latter. A minute later it's there. The laminate is made of graphene oxide, which is both perfectly waterproof and perfectly breathable. As it can be inflated any amount needed, it can essentially allow me to survive in any weather conditions. I can go anywhere now. The whole world lies before me.

I attach it as a module to the outside of my zensuit, which can stimulate my nervous system in any way reality can, with artificial muscles which can tighten and relax to accelerate my movements when I'm exercising in reality, or decelerate them when I'm exercising in virtuality. Meanwhile, it allows everyone else to perceive me as in reality through their interface. Because it needs to be in direct contact with my skin to work, it has to be worn as underwear, even though it's not all that comfortable — a little like latex.

I tell my computer to mark me as a hitchhiker and walk down the road. I specify no destination other than the north. A few minutes later a slightly older man stops his car and picks me up. His tab says he's called Hugo.

"I heard from your profile you're an oneironaut," he says after we've talked for some time. His driving is very erratic and I find it hard to concentrate. The car's computer would override if we were ever in danger, but his maneuvers make my stomach lurch. "Then I just knew I had to pick you up. What kind of dreams did you have?"

"Well, I was in a dream cooperative for the past few years."

"Oh really, so you're actually a professional oneironaut! Have you done any research?"

"I'm not too focused on controlled studies. Any child can do that now, with all the tools for research being available online. And with people making almost all data about themselves public, you don't even need to do anything to do research in psychology. I'm mostly trying to uncover new data from deeper layers of my own unconscious, so that I can let my computer look for possible patterns in them so I can learn as I go. But I wouldn't call myself a researcher, since we're all pretty much 'researchers' now."

"I never see any patterns in my dreams. What do you see in yours?"

"Well… It's hard to explain really. It's not so much about what's going on in the dream as much as the feeling of the dream. You see, in a dream you're not just doing things as you would in the real world. Everything in the dream is really a symbol, it's part of your own mind, and interacting with it is interacting with your own mind. In the dream world everything is full of meaning, even the most mundane things."

"Such as?"

I looked around for examples. "This car drive might be a symbol of a death wish." I chuckle.

"You're not scared are you?" He suddenly turned the wheel around to one side and raised his hands as if in a roller coaster ride as the car made a turnabout and began to drive in circles in between the cars on both sides of the road. He laughed. The car dodged them all, but not without lurching side to side with as much violence as if we had already crashed. The car soon slowed down and after a few seconds he took the wheel back in hands.

I've blanched. I wasn't as familiar as him with the extent of reliability of the driver. "It was just an example. It might also be a symbol of something else, such as liberation. Sometimes there are symbols that mean the opposite of what you expect."

"It'll be over soon, actually." We drove onto the maglev highway, where all cars within the same lane automatically drove at the same speed. This made the cars like a train, so that except at an exit one couldn't drive the car.

"We had this crazy theory once which we wanted to test. We wanted to dig into the earth and fly into the sky to find the heaven and hell of our unconscious, to see what they'd look like, and more importantly, how we'd feel there. Not only that, but we wanted to talk to our own angels and demons, see what they had to say to us, and then, if possible, make them talk to each other."

"How did that go?"

"At first it didn't go so well. Perhaps it was that our unconscious was too influenced by stereotypes, but at any rate our demons displayed nothing but pure chaos and our angels nothing but pure order, bent on nothing but pure destruction and pure creation. Perhaps at their core that's what they are, but in their pure, extreme form, they were in such a raw form that they provided little material for analysis. Then I brought my angels and demons to the earth to see beyond their false surface, and the closer to Earth they came, the more human they became. Eventually, when they came close enough together, they became rather normal people, the difference between them being that one was left-brained and the other right-brained. The one thing that remained the same about them is that they did not get along, mostly on account of one being egoist and the other altruist. They could both do good to others and to themselves alike, but their approaches were different."

"So which won?"

"Heaven and hell forbid that either would win! They're nothing without each other. Eventually we actually managed to find a way to make them connect. The problem is that in doing so they eventually destroyed each other our, so that they had to separate again. All this was harder than it sounds, and took us years to find a way to do that."

I notice the change in landscape as we drive into the Pyrenees.

"Where are we going, anyway?"

"Well, if you wanted to go anywhere, you're surely on the right car. I'm following the superhighway all the way to Berlin."

"Through the Rhone-Rhine axis?"

"Of course. I don't know of any that go through the Alps. Montpelier, Lyon, Basel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin. Where are you going after that?"

"I don't know. Far away from here. Anywhere."

"You know, if you want to be anywhere, why don't you travel in virtuality?"

I look at him. "But I am. Didn't you see that on my profile?"

"Oh. No, it must have escaped me." There's an awkward silence for a moment, and he looks at me carefully, trying to see if I really am an avatar. I laugh, giving away that it was a joke.

"Oh, you think that's funny? How could I know the difference? But seriously, why don't you?"

"I don't know. I'll probably do a lot of my traveling in virtuality, but sometimes I just want to be there and feel I really am there."

"You have no idea what you're looking for do you?"

"How do you know I'm looking for something?"

"Why else would you leave everything behind?"

“I didn’t leave anything behind. I have everything I need with me. Why wouldn’t I leave?”

“That’s one way to look at it. I guess I’m growing old.” I look at him, then look him up. He’s not even thirty, barely a fifth through his current lifespan. A bit early to be old.

“We’re all old,” I say. “Most of us can’t even keep up with children. How can we ever catch up with them? They spent their entire lives in telepathy. Anyone who’s lived in the isolation we have is maimed for life. Still, it's one thing I'm resolved to try harder to do more."

“What?”

“Telepathy.”

“That’s easier said and done. Not many people want to open up like that to a stranger.”

“It hasn’t been easy for me to do it outside of my work team either, and even then not as much as I would like. I’m always the one insisting on shared dreaming. But if I need to I’ll do it with children. They’re far more open to that, probably just because they keep up with the times more than most of us.”

He raises his eyebrows. “People will talk,” he says.

With a sadness I realize how much of a divide there is between the youngest and oldest generations today, and how much it’s driven us apart. Borders are no longer formed along countries but along age groups. Children are turning into a higher species, all but leaving us behind, and perhaps there’s no way for me to become one of them. I often wish I was born as one of them.

“Let them talk,” I sigh. “Nowadays they can do what they want. And we can agree to keep a record of the telepathic sessions, so that they can’t make false accusations against me.”

“I have a better idea,” he says. “Here and there there have recently been some groups emerging that seem to be doing a pretty good job at, as you put it, keeping up with children. They’re transhumanist groups, but they call themselves transhuman, as they believe that telepathy is what distinguishes humans from transhumans and they communicate more through telepathy than anything else. I know one of them is in Berlin.”

“Why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

“It’s not too long ago that these groups began to emerge.”

“To be fair, it’s not that long ago that telepathy came on the market. So what do you mean with not too long ago? A few weeks?”

“More like, a few months"

It’s clear that this man already has another time frame than I do. “Then why didn’t I hear about this? Considering my interests, it should’ve been all over my feeds.”

“It’s not a very public project. In fact they want to avoid publicity as much as possible. They believe in a more peer-to-peer rather than peer-to-crowd approach.”

“Meaning I should’ve heard about it.”

“There’s not as many transhumanists among your circles as you would think. Usually there’s somewhere the chain stops. I only know about it because I happened to have a friend of a friend of a friend who knew the founder of the Berlin group.“

“That’s pretty private even by peer-to-peer standards.”

“That’s not all. They make you perform a test before you enter. They’re kind of elitist.”

“It sounds almost like a sect.” But on the other hand I could understand that this might’ve been the only way to prevent them from being inundated by today’s cosmopolitan society. There would be a lot of people who would like to be able to say that they were part of a “transhuman” group. But that’s exactly what I don’t trust about it: why do they need to call themselves that?

“I don’t know what it’s like. I only have hearsay.”

“Alright, I’ll take a look.” That’s probably the people they want to keep out. But I’m more serious about it than I betray.

“Will you come too?”

“No, I already have plans. But you know what, the meeting is only tonight, and I’m going to be early myself. Why don’t we visit some places on the way.  The Swiss Alps are only minutes out of our way."

I think about Carlos. He could use that to clear his mind, and according to his profile he likes mountaineering. He’s already following me in another car, and a little later it has shifted through the trains and attached to ours, the front of one and the back of the other opening up to each other to connect the two.

That day we end up hiking across the edge of a glacier. Most of our hike we have a view on the lake next to us, as well of the icebergs which used to be part of the glacier. Sensors on the soles of our boots tell us where we can move safely by superimposing a 3D-map of the glacier’s structure on our vision, color-coded for safety levels from green to red based on our computers’ projections of their flow. Several times we’re forced to take a detour because of a possibility of iceberg calving, and one time we actually see the place where we were detoured from subside. We’re now half a kilometer from the lake, and since we’re close to the far side, we decide not to turn back but move slightly up the glacier instead.

As the ice beneath our feet is very hydrophilic, the gecko surface on our boots sticks to their surface quite well. The entire surface of my suit has the same gecko surface, and as I see its adhesiveness demonstrated on the ice, I quickly become more confident and take the lead, up to a point where I actually just slightly use my suit to accelerate me, just to prove to myself that I can.

My computer can’t actually override my body’s movements as it could a car’s to avoid accidents, as they’re too complex for it too coordinate: it can only “resist or assist” the movements already in process. Nonetheless, I feel safe knowing that even if I’d somehow manage to fall into a crevasse (such as the one below the snow right in front of me now), I could easily save myself just by touching its walls. I try touching the ice below me with the glove parts, then with my knees and elbows. It automatically triggers water suction into the surface

“What are you doing?” Hugo says as he and Carlos catch up with me.

I suddenly feel mischievous and pretend to fall over, throwing all my weight on the snow in front of me. It collapses. As soon as I fall below the edge I hold on to the walls. My limbs tremble, but the suit holds regardless. The suit’s muscles tighten.

“Lucas!” Hugo shouts. But I hear Carlos scoff.

“You rascal!” he says as he bends over the edge. “I could tell from that look that you were up to mischief.”

“Let’s go down. The echo says it goes down into an ice cave at the edge.”

“Are you mad? A glacier is a river of ice. Up here it may be pretty solid, but the deeper you go the more fluid the river becomes.”

“This area is supposed to be quite stable the next few hours. Anyway, I can go alone and catch up later.”

He doesn’t immediately reply. When Carlos is about to say something, I interrupt him by withdrawing the water from the gecko and slip down the crevasse. Carlos soon comes behind in the bottom of the crevasse.

“Alright, so maybe I lied. Obviously it doesn’t quite lead all the way into the cave.”

Whatever he’s saying is drowned in the high-pitched sound of suit’s boots’ vibrations, as its  expands and contracts at a high frequency. As the suit’s nanodiamonds press against the ice walls, the ice liquefies and the water is pumped back out by the gecko, where it pools around my legs. Our hoods close in front of our heads, but shortly after the suit slowly lets us slide along the walls to our feet in the ice cave, and the hoods retract. I message Hugo that the coast is clear, but only after some convincing he slides down after us.

He looks at my flushed face.

“Hard to believe this is the boy I startled with a little joyriding,” he says.

“I don’t belong in a vehicle,” I say as I turn to look at the ice cave’s chipped walls, glistening in our suits’ glow. “I like to feel in control.” Walking further down we soon see a light at the end, where the cave emerges back into the lake. I propose diving to the other side of the lake, but my companions demur. Instead, while they sit by the side, I take a swim by myself. I use my suit as drysuit, though it can also reprogram itself into a wetsuit.

Carlos eventually tries the water for himself, and when Hugo is left by himself beneath the weight of the glacier, he soon follows. Once we are in the midst of the lake, the decision is easily made to swim to the other side instead of swimming back. None of us are really very sure about going back up the crevasse. It must have been a glacier river at some point, but had obviously caved in before we came here.

Once on the other side of the lake, we move down the mountain to a geodesic cabin on a hiking trail, which is also a tavern open for tourists. Two Chinese women in their thirties are there, and I notice that they’re trying to speak Russian with each other, evoking each other’s laughter as they try to pronounce the words their translator gives them.

We give each other a friendly greeting, to include each other as part of our social groups, but after the fatigue of our hike, don’t immediately begin to talk with each other. We lay back into the seats and look up at the cirrus clouds. We sink into the e-matter as it conforms to the shape of our bodies, making us feel almost like a fetus in a uterus. Tired as we are, they all but lull us to sleep.

After a brief, quiet rest, we serve ourselves some drinks. Remote as it is, there is no pneumatic tube, but Hugo is very particular on his old-fashioned tastes, and decides it’s worth it for him to run to the nearby highway to get some arak from a station, something which, using his suit, he says should not take him longer than five minutes.

Carlos considers going with him, as he feels like “stimracing” with him, but we decide on doing so all together afterwards on the trail. At first I’m not sure if I feel like it. The thick suit of artificial muscles doesn’t wick very well, and while I usually don’t mind being sweaty in the hot Mediterranean, I don’t feel like it suits the cold Alps, even if I could just inflate my suit so I wouldn’t actually be cold.

I’m trying to find out if there’s any way to increase the wicking of the suit without permanently compromising its haptic virtuality when one of the two women sitting on another table warmly greets me. I feel a little awkward when I realize I was looking in their general direction when I was surfing, so that from their viewpoint I could have been staring for all they knew, and it takes me a moment to greet them back.

“Hi,” I say. I take a quick glance over their tab. They’re sisters called Ning and Yi, who are near the end of their two-year-long journey of the Trans-Eurasian Trail, sometimes called the Trading Road Trail, a 20 gigameter hiking trail that travels continually through mountain ranges: the Khingan and Hengduan in China, the Himalayas in India and Nepal, the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, the Elburz in north-Iran, the Pontic mountains in north-Turkey, the Carpathians in the Balkan, the Alps, and the Appenines.

The hikers seem to think I’m still reading when they wait patiently through my speechlessness. Only when I drop my jaw, they become aware of it, and laugh in unison. I begin to utter several sounds, but no words I can think of do justice to  my astonishment.

The only possible explanation presents itself to me: “You were cheating, right?”

Their laugh suddenly makes way for a serious expression. Ning says, “No, we vowed to walk on our own power the whole way. Otherwise we might as well have gone by car. We wanted to take our time with each landscape to cultivate patience.”

“Well, surely you must’ve become buddhas by now! But I think you must be one of the few people to ever do that.”

“Most people cheat at some point, if  but they eventually realize that it was a mistake and give it up, usually once they’re in good form. It becomes a slippery slope to cheat whenever you’re tired or bored.”

“How long have you been on the way?” As I don’t want them to repeat their answers when Carlos and Hugo come back, I also ask, “Do you mind if I forward this conversation to my friends?” They’ve probably answered these questions a thousand times by now.

“Two years.“ They don’t answer on my other question, but it was mostly rhetorical. Almost everyone records their life nowadays, and the few people, mostly from older generations, that don’t want to be recorded are automatically censored.

“However do any of you make so much time free for that?”

“Almost all of us keep working on the trail. We’ve even met a few people who are spending their entire life on trails like this, since they can work and play from anywhere anyway in virtuality. Traveling doesn’t really interfere with our lives at home, if anything it’s the other way around. We’re much healthier than we’d be otherwise, so it makes us better at everything.”

“Most of our generation are living as cosmopolitans. People really had no idea when they said a hundred years ago that the world had become a village. But few people actually spend that long in the wilderness.”

“Why not, when you have civilization in your pocket?”

“Ah, yes, but you can say the same thing about nature.”

“You know it’s not the same. You have to feel like you’re really there, in the middle of nowhere.”

I look from NIng to Yi, who has so far remained silent. She has a far-away look in her eyes. I wonder how the two changed through their experience. They radiate a strength and calm I can’t quite describe.

“So where will you go next?” I ask.

“Well, the main trail goes from Beijing to Rome, but an alternate route begins at the Pacific Coast in Japan and ends at the Atlantic Coast in Spain. We started in Beijing, but we’re not sure where we’re going from here. We might go somewhere else entirely, such as the Hannibal trail. But we don’t know. So much is changing in these years, and we have to find a way to keep up.”

It sounds like that was why they undertook this journey in the first place, to reach some sort of Enlightenment. It’s unbelievable what some people do these days to try to reach beyond themselves, even as so many others hold on to themselves as much as ever.

Perhaps this is the kind of thing which, in Hugo’s words, I’m looking for. I’m about to ask them if there’s any chance I could come with them, when Carlos and Hugo return.

Carlos smiles broadly at them as he sits down next to them, but for a long time doesn’t know what to say. “2 years on the road!” he finally says simply as soon as they make eye contact. Carlos is himself unusually sedate for his age, and very much their antithesis. For some time they discuss whether it’s better to see much of one place or a little of some places. It ends on the note that we now have so much time in our life that it is possible to really get to know every place in the world.

Later that day, Carlos goes his own way for the rest of the day to visit some friends in Zurich, but promises to catch up with me the next day. Hugo and I resume our way to Berlin.

Once there, I’m glad to see Berlin again. In the past few years it’s become an ever more dynamic city. Having nothing of its past left that’s worth remembering, it’s one of those cities that’s most focused on the future, kind of like some American cities still do. Every time I see it there’s some new idea that’s being tried out in its city planning.

This time its people decided to install programmable platforms as roofbridges, which can extend in any direction to allow any number of pedestrians to cross from roof to roof. As this allows people to cross anywhere they want without having to build bridges everywhere which obstruct the view of the sky, this has led to far more people engaging in roofwalking.

The system’s application has spread to many cities, especially in Danmark where they are much appreciated by the parcouring community, for whom it not only made it easier to move from one parcouring spot to another but for whom it could also offer a safety net for bolder parcourers: if a parcourer fell short in trying to jump to a neighboring roof, the moving bridges would move down the walls of the building while extending below them, breaking their fall.

In Berln, however, it has spread across the entire city. In the center it has even gone so far as to extend many of its buildings to create a more level “second tier,” and for the first time USA citizens were actually jealous of the European row houses. The very term “second tier” is still controversial on account of the obstruction of light it used to involve. Until recently it was mostly used in China, and to the right it was a symbol of how excessive equality (that of neighboring roofs) actually leads to the worst forms of inequality.

The people of the Berlin city state took advantage of the unused space of the second tier to build gardens across entire blocks, making it look a little like a wood on top of a city from above. The roofs had been extended mostly with hydroponics farms, adding to the illusion. I couldn’t wait to walk on them and see the open sky on top of the city. I close the window in my mindcom, not sure if I hadn’t better asked Hugo about it and heard about his own personal experience with it, but it was just too easy to browse the net. If only it was as simple to browse people’s minds.

I think again about the meetup with the so-called transhumans and ask Hugo about it. He doesn’t know, but looks it up on his car’s screen. This time I shouldn’t have bothered him about it. Not that we could have an accident.

“Apparently it’s in a Kiosk of sorts in the New Berlin gardens, on the second tier.” I’m pleased to hear about this. “Nowadays a lot of the social events are on the second tier,” he adds.

He stops at an bracer elevator. “Have you ever ridden one of these?”

“Of course. Not often, but yes.”

“I’ll drop you off here then.”

I pause. “Do you want to come with?”

“No, I already have something to do tonight. But I’m sure our ways will cross again at some point. I’m quite itinerant myself.”

“Good! You’re not that old after all,” I joke. I look around. The sun is almost setting and wonder if I could see the sun setting.

“Just where are you going?”

“Just here in the center, but it’s on ground level, in our usual place.

“How quaint. Well, I guess that’s it then.” But I refuse to let this contact remain superficial like some millennial would. “But I don’t suppose you’re in a hurry?”

“Well, we arranged at eight.”

“That’s still half an hour. And she’ll have plenty of other pastimes if you’re fifteen minutes late,” I say, thinking of how I forgot he was even there while I was researching Berlin’s second tier.

“How do you know it’s a her?” He looks at me suspiciously, as if I might’ve hacked him. Now I know for sure I can’t leave it at this.

“Otherwise you’d ask her to come with us. Come on, the sun is going under in a few minutes.”

“I don’t know if she’d agree with me getting late. We Prussians are kind of more punctual than you Catalunyans.”

“You’re getting old.”

He falls silent. That got to him.

“Alright.”

I put my hands in the bracers, which tighten around my shoulders, elbows and wrists and pull me up. In a few seconds I’ve moved up the rail to the top of the building. I look around, and smile as I turn around and see the entire horizon from east to west. But the best part is the freshness of the air. Of course the cities are no longer polluted as they once were, but the air still runs a little bit stale without wind. Up here, I might as well be in the Alps.

The sun is still up, so I run. By the time Hugo is there, I’m already on the next building. I glance at the sun, which I can almost look at without getting too much of an afterimage.

“Hey!” he says.

I jump from building to building, then stand still on the other side to let him follow me by roofbridge AKA platform. By the time it’s extended, I’ve moved on to the next. But when we come to a particular building I move on before he can catch up. From a higher building I see his girlfriend is already there waiting for him. You don’t have to be a hacker to know your way around people. I send him a message:

“They say routine is the first symptom of aging.”

I continue on my way, to one of the lower roofs at the edge of the park. The colors of sunset add a sense of warmth to the park that the midday sun never could. But the best part comes when the sun is down and the stars come out. With such open view of the sky, the Berliners switched their smartroads’ main lights to infrared. Only the cars around pedestrians were lit up in visible light, so that there is far less light pollution than there would otherwise be. I never thought any Western city could be this close to nature.

And yet, there are plenty of people here, engaged in all kinds of activities provided by the different areas: aside from more regular events like receptions, there are plenty of places for airdancing and other maglev sports.

Nonetheless I’m thrilled when I see the light from the pavilion. The semispherical roof is retracted in wedges on the sides, leaving the seats in the central circle open to the sky. I hear laughing. The atmosphere sounds a lot more friendly than I imagined it. Toggling augmented reality for a moment, I see on the tag floating above them that I’m in the right place.

For a while I observe them in silence, trying to memorize their names from their tags. Only two out of five, Laura and Mikhail, actually describe themselves as transhumanists on their tags. Only Mikhail and Laura are in their twenties. Meri and Gero are still children, and Ada is in her late teens. Aside from Gero, none of them is from Germany: Mikhail is half Iranian and half Russian, Laura is from the Western States, Meri from Finland, and Ada from Sweden.

Meri and Ada, sitting opposite one another, seem close. They’re sitting around a coffee table, which is also a display. It’s raised where Laura and Mikhail are standing, browsing to cite research during their discussion. Gero, sitting next to Meri, doesn’t seem to say much, trying to listen in turns to one conversation and the other. Now and then Meri pokes him in the side and tries to make him talk. Meri looks playful, Gero serious, Ada a bit of both. Mikhail and Laura look more mature, a complex mixture of emotions.

When I approach, they hardly interrupt their conversations, as if I’d been there all along. “Hi!” Meri says, which the others echo in quick succession.

“So this is the transhumanist meeting?”

“The ‘transhuman’ meeting,” Meri says, laughing. I assume the appellation is at least as much whimsical as serious.

“We have a more nuanced definition of what a transhuman is here,” Mikhail says appeasingly. “We distinguish transhumans from humans by telepathy, just like humans are sometimes distinguished from other apes by speech. Once you no longer even need speech, what else does that make you, if not transhuman?”

“So if it’s so easy for you, why aren’t you in telepathy right now?”

“We were waiting for you,” Gero says. “Hugo let us know you’d come.”

“Excuses,” I say, smirking. The group that was discussing before falls silent. “You know I’m right,” I say, turning to them. “Maybe I’m the one who should test you,” I say, teasingly. “Speaking of which, what is this test?”

“Oh, it’s more a game than anything else,” Laura says. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. But it’s also kind of meant to keep people out that aren’t really ready for telepathy. Or just to show them that they’re not ready.”

“Alright. So what should I do?”

“Something you’ve probably wanted to do for a long time but never dared to,” Gero says. “Flying.”

“In real life,” Ada adds. “You have to feel like you are truly on the top of the world.”

“Isn’t that kinda dangerous?”

“Oh, come on,” Meri says. “You know the avionics been totally safe for years now. All that time you’ve had the opportunity, and yet you’ve never done it. Why is that?” She puts especial emphasis on “several years,” which for her is an unthinkable amount of time to wait.

“It’s not as much a test as a foretaste. If you don’t like flying, you won’t like telepathy,” Mikhail says. Gero pushes a raypack into my hands, an electrically propelled form of personal flight which works by ionizing air into plasma. I weigh it in my hands as I look it over, looking for a reprieve from actually putting it on. Its surprisingly light, considering that it has five engines, one for each limb and one for the torso.

“I just don’t see the point of it if you can have the same experience in virtuality,” I mumble. But what I said them before now applies to me: excuses. Even in my dreams I never succeeded in flying, which was my greatest handicap as an oneironaut. I always felt gravity pulling me back, which is supposed to mean I wanted it to do so. At the thought of flying I have to admit that I rather like the feeling of gravity holding me safely on the ground.

When I look up from the raypack, I see that the others are equipping theirs.

“It’s not the same experience,” Ada says. “It makes you feel exposed in a way that you have no control over, and that’s how telepathy feels.”

I look at the sky and for the first time pay attention to the people flying by. They flew by so fast that I hardly even noticed till now that they’re all children. That says a lot about how blinded I’ve become in my own mere twenty years. I see the glint of strength in their eyes, a strength that’s far beyond that of most adults. Then I look back at the other, still mostly adolescent members. Maybe it’s not that far-fetched to say they’re at least halfway transhuman. And even I feel like I’m already falling behind. I can’t let that happen.

With a renewed determination I equip the raypack. The straps are attached to a suit, and every inch of it is packed with cameras which register the distance from everything around me.

“Where will we fly to?” I ask.

“Ah, that’s the question isn’t it?” Laura says. “Isn’t that was frightens you most? Where do you go once you’re up there and you can go anywhere at all?” *

“How do I pass?”

“Think of it as a training. We could start small. At first you could use it to jump very high.” As it seems to me like they don’t really know what they’re doing, I think of it more as a game.

“I could do that. I did that to get here. I got into parcouring through hooverskating: since I could drop from almost any height onto a maglev road with my maglev boots, I quickly learned how to make larger leaps. I heard that in Copenhagen they actually have some maglev buildings for that purpose.”

“Well, flying is just like that. Usually you fly to go from place to place, not just to be in the open sky. Have you never thought ‘I wish I could just go there faster?’”

“Sometimes. I felt that way when hiking in the mountains. But that was before raypacks were even on the market.” In my dreams I usually use teleports, but that cheat doesn’t always work. Sometimes a transition is needed, as the mind can’t always just shift from one state to another.

That gives me an idea. But as I look at Mikhail he speaks first.

“We could go to the mountains."

"I've done plenty of leaping. It's kinda close to flying." Rockleaping, a sport derived from rockclimbing, uses robotic boots to make superhuman leaps from rock to rock, relying only on diamond-coated tips on the boots, gloves and braces to hold on. Unlike flying it's very dangerous, but it never felt like it because I knew what I was doing. It's included in the system software of my instincts.

“We could do that now,” Gero says. “The Giant Mountains are a mere 300 kilometers away. We could get there in half an hour by maglev.”

“If we’re going into the mountains we won’t be back before midnight though.”

“So? The moon will be out, and we can stay there for the night. We’re all equipped for it.” I noticed that everyone is wearing minimalistic allotropes like myself, probably graphene.

“Alright,” I say, in a sudden impulse, “Let’s do it.”

“We could go now. We can still talk in the train, anyway. We’ll divert anyone else that wants to come to our car.”

Ada and Meri get up with an enthusiasm I didn’t expect from them, considering how withdrawn they’ve been all evening. Another glance at their tab reveals why: they’re both into mountaineering. Meri’s own tab further says that they in fact often do so together. Both Meri and Gero’s tags share a lot more information to strangers than the older attendees, several hundreds of items. At first sight it seems like they keep only the most sensitive information hidden, such as their address.

“You wouldn’t think they had that much energy,” I say, as I watch them run in front of us laughing. They’ve already jumped off the edge of the building. A roofbridge extends below their feet, and they watch us from beyond the edge. As they look at us Meri jokes to Ada, who pokes her.

“Oh, they have a lot more than us,” Mikhail says. “Once you’re in telepathy with them you find that they have a lot more thoughts per second than any of us. That’s why they talk so little. By the time there’s an opening in the conversation to say one thought they’ve moved on to another.”

“It’s not like they’re self-conscious, either,” Gero says. “Sometimes I am, and I sometimes can’t stop talking because of it. It makes me want to explain myself and then explain the explanations. Like now.”

“Well, that’s just the way you are. You’re the neuroinformatician, after all.”

“I wouldn’t describe myself as such,” he says. “But that’s certainly one of the things I’ve been quite preoccupied with the last few months, perhaps to an excess. I have to admit it’s scary sometimes to be so intimate with the patterns of one’s own brain.” He shivers. “But I’m trying to take a break from that now.”

I’m pleased at the patience with which extraverts like Laura and Mikhail heard him out in the middle of the excitement. This turns out to be much less casual a group than I thought. On the contrary, it seems like they want to do everything they can to connect as deeply as possible with me and each other. I suppose part of me is still used to the old superficiality of modernism that still lingers here and there in our society, including in my family.

“Aren’t you a bit young for such heavy subjects?” I ask him. He looks mildly offended. “I mean, isn’t being young about exploring everything the world has to offer?”

“It’s not that I didn’t do anything else. But it totally changes the way you look at the world and yourself, and it can be a bit much sometimes.”

We walk over the edge of the building, and the platform extends below our feet. As it descends, Gero walks toward the edge of the platform, which extends before him. He pays no attention. He seems to be looking up at the buildings, as if to get a good angle on the view.

“Can you do that while it’s going down?” I ask.

“You can, but it’s kind of considered bad form by flyers, Gero.” Laura said this sentence loud enough for him to hear. Hearing his name, Gero starts as if he awakens from a trance.

“Oh, yes, I walked rather far. There’s an interesting group of flyers there I was trying to see outlined against the sky.”

At the bottom shortens again, drawing Gero back to the edge of the road. A 6-seat car has already stopped before us. It has a phoenix symbol on the side.

“Hi, Achim! Is this your car?” Mikhail asks the middle-aged man in the front seat, no doubt having noticed the symbol on the exterior.

“No, I’m borrowing it myself, from the co-op.”

“Is it true that these cars can fly?” Meri asks from the other row of seats.

“Fly is a big word,” he says. “They can hover on their own power for a while if necessary, but rarely have the chance to do so.”

“Like our Valkyries in Scandinavia,” Meri says.

“Why is there a phoenix icon on the back?” I wasn’t sure if this was subjective enough a question to ask, but in Catalunya, if we aren’t sure we usually ask. It’s not a good starter, perhaps, but I want to get it off my mind first.

“It’s an existentialist metaphor. Germany was particularly hard hit by the nihilist era in the 20s, as you can probably tell if you’re familiar with its later cyberpunk scene. There’s a quote from Nietzsche that goes ‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?' So one of the earliest large-scale cooperatives in Berlin in the late nihilist era used a phoenix as its icon. Of course there’s no city that it suits better.”

“Sorry, I guess that was probably more of a search question.”

“Oh, no problem.” Meri was reminiscing with Ada about their flights over the fjords, comparing Chile’s to Norway’s.

I’m about to ask where he’s going, but not wanting to repeat the same mistake I check his tab first. I’m relieved that he’s hidden that information, so that I can ask him.

“Where are you going?” As I’m asking this, suddenly the realization strikes me how important telepathy is to youngsters like Gero and Meri, since they don’t seem to hide any information at all. But that’s also why it’s so hard for their elders: we’re used to hiding information. But once we no longer feel like we have anything to hide, what use is it to talk?

I wonder if perhaps that’s why we hide anything, just so that we can feel like we are involving ourselves, our egos, in sharing it. What does it mean to the next generation to connect with someone if they have no ego, nothing that makes up their self but public information? What are we if not our secrets?

Achim looks at me questioningly, having seen the change in my face. “Are you alright?” he seems about to ask. I realize that I’ve been so astonished by this thought that I haven’t been listening to Achim’s answer, and that I wished the conversation had gone this way instead, because I really want to talk about this. If we’d been in telepathy that would’ve happened. Should I be polite and go on with the small talk or tell him what was on my mind?

“Sorry?” I say. “I got distracted. What were you saying? Just a sec, let me read that.” Our sensors save everything except about people who don’t consent. I’m reading the transcript because it’s faster.

Achim was saying he’s going to see his lover in Slovakia, and asked me if that would still be considered a long-distance relationship today. They’ve known each other for years, but only since recently see each other almost daily. I feel awkward at not having missed something so personal, of all things, something which is normal for my age to talk about right after meeting but was no doubt very hard for someone his age to get used to, so I do what anyone my age does when they feel awkward: I laugh, not nervously but heartily.

Now Achim looks really confused, and a little upset, but the situation is so silly, that when I try to think of how to explain it I laugh even harder. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I sure wish I was in telepathy now so I could explain what came over me.

“I just had this very strange thought. It’s unrelated, though. I’ll tell you about it later. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” So many words, so little said, and Achim isn’t even convinced of their truth.

I try to put all my sincerity in my expression as I go on. “So how did it work out?”

“How did what work out?”

“Well, you said you’ve known each other for many years. I suppose it must have been difficult for both of you before the maglev roads were laid. So what did you do?”

“Oh, is that’s what was funny?” He began laughing himself, taking the situation in perspective from the panorama of his years. “Yes, as you can imagine it was an absurd situation.” He still thinks I was mocking him. I resolve to tell him what I was thinking.

“Not at all,” I interject seriously.

“We tried to live together,” he resumes, “but it didn’t work out for either of us. We both have a rich social life and couldn’t leave our friends behind. We tried open relationships, but we never found anyone with which it felt so natural to be with as each other. It’s testimony to how right we are for each other that it survived all those years. I guess deep down we knew it was but a matter of time before we’d be united, with virtuality advancing as it did. We’d never thought we’d be together in reality before that, though.”

“But with suits you don’t necessarily even need to go anywhere.”

“Yes, but that’s only been for a few years. Haven’t really got used to the idea yet.”

“Only a few years! That’s a lifetime!”

“To you it is. It must have been, what, a quarter of your life ago that they came out? For me it’s less than a tenth.”

“That’s still a lot.”

“We have time.”

“I don’t know about that. I have the feeling evolution really has turned into a race. I keep wondering if the transhumans won’t just leave us behind, like we left the chimpanzees behind.”

There’s silence for some moments, during which we look over the hilly landscape. Without overproduction, most of the farmlands have been reforested, dotted here and there with clusters of geodomes in the distance, all covered entirely with herbs and flowers and moss, and a few with actual produce. Meri point at them, asking if he’d ever want to live there.

“I may be old, but not that old. And I have many friends in the city.”

“Old?” she says with a sneer. "Ada spent months in a glass geodome in Finnmark, with only the stars and aurora as sources of light. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“Or else it would have to be one of these, close to the highway,” Achim says, trying to keep the conversation linear. ”But even then it’s already less casual than if you can just go to a friend’s home in a few minutes. I remember what it was like twenty years ago to live at the edge of the city. I guess it would be like that now.”

I no longer feel like I can talk about my epiphany at the moment anymore, and yet I feel it’s extremely important to prepare myself. Conversations in groups move so quickly that things like these sometimes get buried underneath superficiality. That’s why socializing in larger groups is no longer fashionable.

It’s unlike me to be so thoughtful, but the thought of telepathy, or rather its philosophical implications, give me the chills. I don’t have time to dwell, however. We’re passing Magdeburg, and mere minutes later, we’re in the mountains. It takes as many minutes for it to take us on a gravel road to a mountain top.

As I move out the car, my heart is already throbbing. The night makes it seem all the more dreamlike. It’s a good moment for my reality check. But I can still breathe when I pinch my nose. I get a feeling I’ve often had while in a lucid dream, a fear of losing touch with reality.

“So what are you doing here a this hour?” I still hear Achim ask from the car. Then he glances at our backs with an understanding look. We are all still wearing the raypack, the e-matter of the seats having adapted to their shape. If I pass, I might

“Oh we don’t mind. We’re not cold,” Meri said, being used to worse, when you’d have to choose between freezing your lips and talking through a mask. Our graphene markedly inflated when we got the car, trapping air like down in the tiny molecular pockets in their interior.

“Aren’t you afraid something will happen, and no one will find you?”

“Night vision’s good tonight,” Mikhail says, gesturing at the gibbous moon, which brings the rocky crests below to light. The plan is to leap from one peak to another. Looking in the distance, it’s hard to believe that I am supposed to cross such distances in mere moments. I feel the blood surge into my throat, and the throbbing of my heart turns into a racing. My breathing feels hot in my nose. I feel suddenly acutely aware of my whole body, in a way that reminds me of psychedelic experiences. I understand suddenly how flight can indeed be an analogy for telepathy, as an ultimate form of transcending the limits of one’s self, albeit physically rather than mentally.

Mikhail gives me a jovial slap on the shoulder. “Are you ready?” But there is no excuse not to be, no preparations left to make. In this world, almost as soon as we want to do something we get it right over with, with no obstacles to put it off, and all we have to do is hold on tight through the future shock of our mind’s sound barrier. In a world where everything is possible, it is only ourselves that hold us back from achieving anything we want.

I try not to think too much and just do it, but something holds me back, as if I’m about to jump into a great depth, except that the depth is that of the sky above. I take another look at the sky, opening up into the galaxy above, and with a wave of vertigo think of what the universe would be like if only for a moment there was no gravity.

But looking at the stars calls forth another thought in me: someday even the distance between the stars might become as negligible as that between countries now, and for a moment I close my eyes and imagine myself flying not just through these mountains, but beyond them, leaving them far below me in the atmosphere. But when I open my eyes the stars are still unreachable. I’ve thought far enough to come to some new limits I can grasp at, and they make it easier for me to face the limitless, if only by reminding me of their undesirability. As I succeed in reorienting myself from a new, wider perspective, I look much smaller from it, and I no longer take myself so serious.

I check my diadem to make sure it sits tight on my cranium. The raypack will still work without it, but like most electronics, the raypack is controlled primarily by my brain, though also secondarily through my suit. I experimentally float a few inches of the ground, rotating this way and that, and already have trouble to restrain myself from flailing around for hold. But little by little I start to make larger movements in the air. Using the brain input, it feels as if I’m just floating, but using my suit, it feels as if I’m actually flying of my own power, as if in microgravity.

I look at a level piece of land nearby on the same hill and target it in my computer. It feels as if I am but acting in a dream when I give my raypack a thrust and begin to climb into the sky. Keeping my look up at the sky for courage, for a moment I don’t realize just how far I’m going. Then at the height of my short flight, as I am about to descend I recover from my dissociation and flail my arms around for grasp, but the raypack slows me down as I approach the ground.

Looking around, I see the others land around me. The children skip towards me in little leaps. “If I tag you, you’ll have to follow me all the way to the stratosphere!” Meri says. It takes some moments for me to process this, so she slows down as she is about to tag me. I recoil.

“You’d better run,” Gero says, “or she’ll swoop down on you like a vulture for half an hour trying to get you to play along before she gives up.”

“You bet I will. Tell you what, I’ll give you another chance,” she says. “I’ll race you to the top,” she points at a nearby mountain. “I’ll land every time you land. But if I make it to the top first I’ll frighten you awake all night until you come after me.”

Again I fail to find a reply, and she doesn’t give me much time to protest and floats into position.

“Come on, slowpoke.” I think of how ironic it is to be taught to fly from a child, and for a moment I feel like I’m the real child here, held upright by his arms as he takes his first steps. Except that I’m allowed no respite between my first steps and my first footrace.

Again I take a careful look at where I want to go next, as I where about to make a leap from a high diving board for the first time. A few times when I’m about to fly I brace myself on one leg as if to make a little runup, when I stop short as I realize I cannot, in fact, fly, and a jump is therefore unnecessary. On the third time I become so impatient I suddenly shoot much higher into the air than before, and by the time I land halfway up the mountain, I am painting and feel as if I am sprinting. Two smaller leaps further I’m on top of the mountain and look back, but Meri merely shoots overhead and says, “I did mean that mountain over there!”

The others fly in front of me over the moonlit plateau when I realize I’ve landed on a crest of the actual mountain she’d pointed at. I have no time left to lose and fly after them. I actually make some headway on them when I realize I’m actually flying rather than just making measured leaps, and that I have nowhere set to land. I panic and begin to descend when I realize there are too many rocks beneath me to land at this speed, and I stop descending. Then, for the first time, I actually feel that my trajectory isn’t curved back to earth as every trajectory I’ve ever taken in my life, that it is, in fact, unaffected by it. I am detached from gravity, from the whole earth itself. If my breath wasn’t taken away I’d feel an urge to laugh.

I’m racing after the others as fast as I can now. The engine is so silent that I can’t hear it over the sound of the wind. I tell my suit, which is made out of e-matter, to form cuffs over my ears, and suddenly it becomes relatively quiet. For a moment I think I actually hear a bird fluttering from its perch.

I’m close enough to the others to see that they’re looking back at me. They’re slowing down. When I come close, Mikhail points at a spot in front of them. “You’d better catch up, if you want to be left alone.”

I look at the dot. “She’s too far away.” Mikhail shrugs. I stay with the rest of the group and feel much safer for it, even though they’d be able to help me from anywhere else. Even if the override somehow failed I could allow them control my suit if something went wrong.

When we make it to the top of the mountain, Meri looks at us with arms akimbo. Dead branches are floating into a pile, carried my e-matter drones. “I win,” she says to me. When we’ve landed, the pile catches fire. For a while Ada, Meri and Mikahil hum into the fire, forging a hologram above the fire into fractal art with the vibrations of their voice.

I move over to her and tag her. “Tag. There, you happy now?”

“That’s not me,” her voice says, but her lips stay sealed. The voice comes from above. I look up and start. She’s rapidly flying right at me with no signs of stopping, only to barrel roll right past me at the last moment. I scream.

“You haven’t seen the last of that,” Mikhail says with a smirk. “She’ll go on and on until you follow her to the stratosphere.”

“Wait, that was just a figure of speech, right?”

He slowly shakes his head. I groan. “Get that smirk of your face,” I say to him.

Laura moves over to where Meri’s model was just a while earlier and bends down to pick up a ball with an e-matter symbol on it. After a second she drops it again, and it expands into the form of a woman. Their lips are moving, but their voices are muted.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “I’m sleeping in Budapest tonight.”

“You’re exchanging houses again?” Mikhail asks.

“Yes, and this woman seems particularly interesting. She’s an artist and has covered the insides of her house entirely in abstract e-matter designs.”

“How many exchanges are you away from your own home again?”

“Well, it’s interesting. I’ve seen mountains before, but every house is an expression of a different personality. She has a long flight ahead of her, so I’ll have plenty of time to get to know her tonight.”

Meri makes another swoop for me. “Heaven and hell!” I curse.

Mikhail laughs. “Say, wasn’t her personality type introverted? And yours and Laura’s extraverted? You wouldn’t think so.”

“You believe in that kind of thing?”

“Don’t you? You did make that public on your profile.”

“I put it on ‘extraverted’ when I feel like it. It changes the way people interact with me. People aren’t that simple. Not only do they change often, but sometimes we can have opposite qualities in a number of ways. For example,” He looks at the sky. “What do you think she’s thinking right now?”

“She seems cheerful.”

“Sure she is, but I’d say she’s also anxious. You can have different feelings at the same time.”

“Anxiety and cheerfulness are both aspects of excitement, though, so they’re not really so different.”

“Would you fly into space just out of excitement, though? No, she might seem shallow right now, but by moving back and forth between us and the vacuum like a comet, she wants to find expression of some deeper side of her, a duality between utter loneliness and utter togetherness.”

“I have to go,” Laura says. She and Mikhail talk some more, but I’m lost in thought. I think about how Ada spent six months in isolation in the far north and look at her. She meets my look with such deep peace in her eyes that it stirs me. I quickly look away lest she’d notice, then realize that if I am to ever try telepathy I can’t keep any secrets. I will myself to look back at her, and see a smile has appeared on her lips. The sense of belonging in her expression passes onto me, and it makes me feel dizzy. I never noticed it before because she stayed on the background all evening. She doesn’t seem to mind, but I look away anyway, realizing only now that I don’t want to involve someone like myself in another’s life. And I realize that while my body may have been freed today, my mind is still as much bound by gravity as ever.

Meri swoops by again, almost making me fall into the fire. I curse. “Doesn’t she ever get tired? And does she really go all the way to the stratosphere and back in that time?”

“Much farther. She’s probably been all over the Bohemian massif by now. And no, she doesn’t get tired. When you’re used to it it doesn’t require any energy at all. With the override there’s no danger she has to focus on avoiding, after all.”

We say goodbye to Laura. It becomes silent for a while after this, and we gaze into the fire. It’s not actually needed for warmth, but it’s cosy nonetheless.

“So about this telepathy…” I begin, when I pick up my train of thoughts again.

“We’re ready when you are,” Mikhail says simply.

“So we’re doing a group telepathy, then?”

“You can do as you please, but it’s by far easiest way to start because it doesn’t go as deep. Being in telepathy doesn’t mean you can necessarily share everything with them as you do with yourself. It takes a bit of work. Even we can’t always do it with everyone, even though we’re trained at it.”

“Before we do this, I want to agree that we record this.”

“Why?”

I weigh my words for a while, then realize there’s no point in beating around the bush and I might as well be honest now. “I’m concerned about being accused of sexual harassment.”

“We give you our consent. That’s proof enough.”

“That’s not sexual consent, though.”

“In telepathy the law isn’t really clear what’s sexual and not: just being aware of someone else’s body could be seen as sexual. Besides, trying not to think of something is the surest way to ascertain you’ll think about it. Either way we could charge you if we really wanted to. You’ll just have to trust us. But it doesn’t have to be now.”

“Or you could start with someone who does give you sexual consent,” Ada sends to me. When I ascertain her lips aren’t moving, my eyes meet hers, but I don't know what to make of her Mona Lisa expression.

“We could just gain your trust by doing one-way telepathy first,” Gero says.

“Sure. Mikhail, I’d prefer to do this with you. We seem about the most similar people here, so it should be easiest.”

“I’m not very comfortable with that,” Mikhail says. No surprise, since he's clearly more of an extravert. “When I let someone know what I'm thinking I also want to know what they’re thinking about it.”

“Based on similarity, that would make me the next option,” Gero says.

“Well…”

“Don’t underestimate me because I’m young. I have accumulated more experiences than any human in the world, so much so that your own will hardly affect me more than the reminiscences of an old man. I am not just a child. In my mind I have taken on the form of hundreds of beings, men, women, animals. I’ve become everyone.”

I’m rather taken aback by his intensity. If there was a doubt on my mind about his neurosis, it’s gone now. “That’s why I’d rather not be on the receiving end right away.”

“You’re definitely the veteran among us in terms of telepathy, Gero, but I think it would be easier for Lucas to begin with receiving rather than transmitting. Alright, then, I suppose it’s easiest if I transmit. Are you ready?"

I move into a kneeling position. I take a deep breath. “I think so. I’ll lower my brainwave frequencies once we’ve begun.”

“Then do it now.” I do so. Closing my eyes, I become suddenly more aware of my body, and realize full telepathy would probably create some sexual tension with any gender, age or orientation. Some brain areas can be filtered out, but because of how all thought processes connect different brain areas, it severely limits the process. Online chatting is basically a form of telepathy too, since it transmits words only, but it’s never actually called that. As soon as it doesn’t involve the entire brain, it’s no longer telepathy but brain-computer interface.

When I become suddenly aware of having a second body, I feel dizzy, as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. My awareness shifts from one body to the other, making me feel like I’m swung back and forth. It doesn’t actually give me motion sickness, but it makes me feel lightheaded. I realize I’m fighting the process, and try to stop doing so and give in to becoming Mikhail, feeling myself sitting cross-legged before the fire.

At first he thinks he’s not thinking about much in particular, just focusing on his breath. Mikhail’s mood feels more stable than my own, and he is meditating on this sense of stability, trying to radiate it to myself. He seems to know better than I that this was what I need at this point in my life. Now he’s thinking of how I might think that he might think that I lack stability, and might not want him to go to the trouble of trying to give me stability. He refuses to go down this train of thought any further. In two-way telepathy he would, just to let it run out until we both get tired of it. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t try to think of what I’m thinking, but he can’t help but think more about others than himself. Perhaps he’s an extravert after all, he thinks. It feels awkward for him, more so than telepathy with others, as he doesn’t know what to do with himself on his own, though he used to be more of an introvert before he found this group. That’s why he doesn’t like to transmit one-way telepathy, even though perhaps it’s good for him, to keep balance. So he lowers his brainwave frequency further and tries to focus on himself, reaching into himself to find out just what it is that at this moment makes him who he is, until his awareness become made up more of feelings than thoughts. There is a sobriety about his personality, wont to takes things as they come. The deeper he reaches into himself, the more neutral the stuff of his mind becomes.

At first I don’t feel so very different as to feel confused: being at least somewhat similar to someone definitely makes it easier. But the process of becoming someone else is enough to make me forget myself. In the first moment what feels strange is not so much the way his mind feels as the feeling that I have always been him, and that who I really am is just a stranger.

It makes me feel dissociated from myself, as if I’m just another container for my consciousness. And as of now, that body over there just as well might be, for it is released from it, free to move anywhere across the world, just as free as my body in flight. I realize suddenly how small I am to the rest of the universe, how much there is to experience that I never could, not if I had the time of a hundred lifetimes.

As I look at the fire from his perspective, I see how even the same things feel different from another’s angle. The way his eyes tries to follow the flames, of how they move from one flame to another, is different from mine, in a way I realize is reflected throughout his mind. The content of his consciousness is not so different from mine, but its form is very different. It fits into different patterns, in a way that reminds me of architecture. His mind supports much the same basic structure as mine, but is sharper somehow, more geometrical — that’s the only way I can describe it. It turns in measured angles, in a way that reminds me somehow of arabesque.

I feel how in my own mind everything is vague by comparison, and as I focus again on my own mind it connects to Mikhail’s, and in an epiphany I become aware of faults in my own way of perception and learn from his. His patterns of perception spread through my own like a plume of a new ingredient dissolving in an alchemical brew, spitting fumes, changing its color, texture, consistency, taste, odor, bringing it closer to completion. The flow of new information burns its way into my brain, twisting new pathways this way and that in ways that tilt my world until it turns upside down, making me feel lightheaded.

I’d closed my eyes for a while and now, just moments later, opened them again with a start. My head is swimming as I feel my limits fall away like the walls of a cage. It makes me feel as if I’m under the influence of a drug, and I immediately know I’m addicted. I want more. There’s billions of more minds to explore. I feel a need to make more space in my mind, to allow the greatest mind to fit in its confines.

“I can’t wait until we share a session as a group.”

“That’s kind of difficult, to synchronize so many streams of consciousness like that,” Gero says. “It can be done, but it requires some experience with telepathic meditation. Otherwise we’d just dissociate from each other, so that we might as well not be in telepathy at all. Even with just two people it can be hard to sustain. In fact, we already dissociate from part of ourselves, and being in telepathy with the wrong person can actually make that worse if you’re not ready. That’s why it’s so important to learn to meditate, though, like learning any skill, but that can itself be done much faster through telepathy.”

He says all this almost too fast for me to take in. Listening at the way Gero talks, I wonder how anyone could ever synchronize their minds to his frantic speed or even want to. But when I see the way the others look at him I realize the warmth in their eyes isn’t just pity; it’s genuine, as if he plays a central role in their group. Maybe his volatile mind actually catalyzes the reaction between theirs, like shamans used overstimulation through rapid dance and music to induce a trance.

“So who did you learn it from?”

“Ada was the first,” Meri’s voice says, emerging behind them with her perennial smile.

“Oh, so you’ve given up, have you?” I say. “I’m not going to space with you.”

“No, my nanobattery actually ran out.” The others laugh. Mikhail tuts and seem about to raise concerns, but she cuts her short. “I’ve been spying on you from the underbrush for some time.”

“We know that,” Mikhail says. “You gave us your location, didn’t you?" He winked at her. "We’ll let you use some of our energy.”

“I don’t need that,” she says, while hugging herself against the cold. “We have the fire.”

“Come here,” Mikhail says, taking a cable from his cuff, but she’s already run over to Ada instead. While they wait for her batteries to recharge, they have an arm wrestle, but Meri cheats and uses her suit’s power.

“So did you all learn from Ada?”

“I didn’t,” Gero says. “I learned it by myself.”

“How does that work?”

“I actually started with animals, first with less sentient animals and then building up to ravens.”

“That’s why we call him the Raven,” Mikhail says.

“Isn’t that a violation of animal rights?”

Gero looks offended. “What do you mean by that?”

“He was receiving only,” Ada says. “It’s almost impossible to send to an animal.”

“No one else wanted to have telepathy with me,” bowing his head.

“It’s been hard for us to find someone too,” Mikhail says. “Though it tends to be much easier for children.”

“How long does it takes to learn?”

"The faster you can find yourself, the sooner you can do the same with someone else." She says this as if one has a new self in telepathy , shared between them and, well, oneself. I can't wait to find out what it would be like. If the whole is more than the sum of the parts, two-way telepathy must reach something greater than both persons together, perhaps greater than personhood itself.

“I learnt when I visited Ada in her geodome in Finnmark,” Meri says. “She’d have stayed there forever if it wasn’t for me, and turned into a snowman.” Now I understand why Ada was the first to teach everyone. She reminds me of the prophets that withdrew into the desert before returning with their epiphanies. But she doesn’t seem like the kind to try to overturn the world, knowing that the world is a sphere. But just looking in her eyes I see such insight in them that every question I ever asked myself draws me towards them, as if knowing the answer to lie beyond them.

“What’s the best way to find yourself?” I ask her.

“That's different for everyone. But for starters, giving up everything that isn’t part of who you are. You’re on the right track: you’ve already given up your home.” Even without telepathy, she seems to know that I was indeed not thinking of going back. But then, it’s not that uncommon.

“What else can I give up?”

“Your humanity,” she says. “Once you no longer see yourself as part of the human species, you can become part of something greater, of everything and nothing.”

“Is that what you did in your geodome?”

“I was trying to find out who I really was when I had no identity anymore. But I wouldn’t start with that. It's what I did afterwards."

“But before that you did swim there,” Meri says.

“She what?”

“Yes she did. She swam with dolphins.”

“You did? What, did you want to give up your habitat too?"

“Yes," she says simply, and when I just give her a blank stare, "Sometimes I even slept floating in the water. It felt like being rocked to sleep.”

"I never thought of using the suit’s inflation for that purpose."

"In a way our suits really make us more than human," Mikhail says. "If there were any reason to do so, we'd make it part of our body, but why would we, when we can do just as much without doing that? We are, essentially, cyborgs."

“Must have taken a lot of power to keep you warm," I say, with some concern that she ran out at some point. I can't imagine how cold the Norwegian Sea has to be at whatever time of the year.

“Yes. I had a solar kite follow me all the way. I also didn't quite always swim entirely on my own power, even though I wasn't in a hurry. Most of the time not much was going on except for the moving of one wave after another, up and down and up and down. It was a meditation in its own right."

"How long were you meditating in all?"

"About half a year." She laughs when she sees me arch my eyebrows. "I really needed it. I had a very busy life before that."

"I couldn't do nothing for so long."

"What would you do, if you could do anything else?"

I think for a while. I realize I have a lot more options than I ever gave any thought.

I chuckle. "Good question if we can really do anything. We don't really do as much as we should, do we?"

"Like flying to the stratosphere."

I suddenly realize how many opportunities I'm missing out on. Am I clinging to my limitations as a human being? I can't let that happen.

"You know what? Let's all go." I suddenly resolutely get up.

"Alright," Mikhail says. Meri takes off first, giving the cue for all the others to follow, and leaving me with no choice but to do the same. For a moment I stay behind, watching them go out of sight. It feels so abrupt to just fly so high, as if I'm wasting something that's too good for the moment. But if not now, then when? Perhaps it just feels too good for me, as if I'm touching something that's sacred, something that would overwhelm me with too much ecstasy, so much that it would turn back into agony. At that moment I look down again and see that Ada has stayed behind last, smiling at me. My heart skips a beat. Then she's off.

If I didn't feel sure about myself before, I do now. So what if it overwhelms me? One more time I remind myself that I need to do nothing to control my flight, and I shoot forth into the sky, trying to think of nothing else but overtaking the others. Once I get there and have nothing to focus on, I'll probably panic, but I try not to think about that now. I feel the wind shake me ever so slightly back and forth through my flight. It's not frightening, in fact the sensation gives me something solid to hold on to as I'm staring into the emptiness of the abyss above. For a few moments nothing happens other than my flying through the sky, not even a particular thought occurs to me, and I just cannot imagine how Ada could have spent six months doing nothing but stare at the sky, this black nothingness interspersed only with tiny extraneous lights from the past. The things she does frighten me, but she intrigues me all the more for it.

But I just can't look down until I've caught up with her, and only then I slow down. When I look at her, and she looks back, the world rises above her, and the sunlight that set a quarter of an hour earlier reveals her enigmatic smile. I'm not sure which is causing the wave of vertigo, but it makes me laugh. When her smile widens my belly twists into a knot, and I speed up towards the others. They're still going much faster than I. If they know this is frightening for me, they don't seem to care — unless they care to frighten me? I'm forced to speed up, and my helmet, usually folded at the nape, extends around my head. A few pockets in the back and side of my suit have inflated with oxygen.

The faster I go, the more the suit has to keep me from moving, so that my body stays in the right position to stay on my course and away from the others'. As I start to breathe faster, I wonder for a moment if I'm going to hyperventilate, but then I remember that my suit will just add carbon dioxide to my air anyway, so that I can't get a panic attack anyway. I stay calmer than I thought I would, but none the less excited for it.

"Where are we going?" I send. I'm seeing their trajectory is going towards a high-altitude balloon hotel.

"We were just about to ask. It's a really nice place. Each room is also a restaurant, and all the rooms are made of e-matter screens, we can make it look however we want. We can even make it entirely transparent, as if we're still floating in space. There's no visitors now, so we could even use the main room."

I'm actually looking forward to something solid to stand on. "If it's all the same for you, I'd prefer if you'd make it look transparent just for you. We all have our own mindcom, but we'll have only one room."

"It won't be the same. If you don't want it transparent we'll just pick something else… But there it is."

It takes a while before I can see any details that distinguish it from the stars around it, and another while before I see the actual hotel beneath the balloon.

"Looks pretty small."

"It doesn't get many visitors, strange as it sounds."

I wouldn't be too sure about going here by myself either. It's one thing to take a shuttle to space now and then, another to actually take a raypack here. No one else is inside, so we take the dining hall for ourselves and can use the e-matter of the entire hotel. The dining hall in the center is circular, and the room around it form a shell around it. The hall is empty, as the chairs and tables are e-matter retracted into the floor. Instead of using them, we sit down cross-legged in the center and let the floor soften. When I veto making the entire hotel transparent, we settle on a compromise and make it translucent, letting the blue-on-orange sunset reflect in the edges of the walls. To better appreciate the kaleidoscope, we don't turn on any light.

"It looks interesting like this too," Meri says, looking over the layout of the empty building. "Like a ghost's house."

"This does give me a taste of what it was like in your geodome," I say to Ada, as the loneliness of the place gets through to me. It makes me feel empty inside, and I realize that I haven't eaten anything since morning. I really don't know what I feel like eating, so I quickly tell the cooker to put together all the nutrients my body is most lacking right now. The others follow suit, though except for Ada they take more time in choosing the form the meal is to take on.

"It's not the same. The point of my being there was that once winter came and I had only some energy left, until the sun came up again there was no going back. I was going to enter into the deepest layers of my unconscious to find out what was there." The utter silence that follows in the skylodge makes it sounds like a ghost story, and it sure feels like one to me. But it's always been nightmares that interested me most of all dreams, because they come from those corners of my mind that are still undiscovered, a wilderness.

"So you're a psychonaut like me. I myself am an oneironaut, in particular." I briefly glimpse over her research and see that she's published the full brain record of her entire six months of meditations. If I wanted to I could simply download her memories, and I make a note to myself to at least download the ones with the highest dopamine ratings. It's rare for people to be so open. People usually handpick the thoughts they want others to see.

"Oh, so you're actually already quite an advanced meditator!" Mikhail says. "You might actually do pretty well in full telepathy already."

"Hey, maybe we could share a dream!" Ada says, her face lighting up. "We're pretty much doing the same thing already anyway."

I feel the rush of blood in my belly again. I don't know how to reply.

"It's also kind of what I'm doing," Gero says, "except I look closer than either of you."

"I'm doing that with animals," Meri says. "Seeing what perceptions fit in what species' brains and why."

Mikhail feels our eyes on him when he doesn't speak. "Oh… for me it's always been subjects with mathematics, ranging from physics to economics. But a theme that's been recurring often is multifractal systems."

"Oh, I've had a question about fractals in  for the longest time…" Gero asks Mikhail, and they're soon exchanging research notes. Meri and Ada soon join in. I learn a lot from their discussion, but having nothing to add I feel rather useless. When it gets increasingly abstract, Gero interrupts: "Actually, it would be better if we continued this in telepathy." He looks at me. "It'll take much less time."

"No, never mind. It's getting late anyway," Mikhail says. "You can download the memories from my account."

"You know what? I'll download them too." I've never liked the idea of downloading raw memories from someone's brain, since other memories come with it as well, but it can take a while before knowledge from the latest research gets processed into a form that can be downloaded seamlessly into one's brain.

"Yeah, in telepathy you'll be absorbing parts of the other person's mind into your own anyway," Mikhail says, seeing my anxiety.

"Don't worry, Ada says. "If you know who you are, you won't lose it. And if you don't know who you are, then you can't lose yourself because you already have."

"But who am I?"

"Consciousness," Ada says. "In all its forms. The only danger of losing yourself when downloading someone's memories is if they'd convince you to repress some part of your consciousness."

"I know. And I guess as someone whose life work it has been to uncover repressed feelings, I should be safe. But this is the first time I've ever downloaded memories from, well, strangers."

"Whose would you rather have?" Mikhail asks.

"Ada's," I say, with such immediacy that Meri giggles. "Obviously," I add. Indeed, when we make the transfer it is almost seamless. This doesn't mean I can instantly assimilate the memories, but once we talk about it quickly feels as if I'd always known these things. Ada's mind is so neutral that I hardly notice a difference between Ada's memories and my own except for the pattern by which she memorizes. Usually bits of opinion are transferred with memories by accident, and while these are usually rejected by the host mind, it slows down the process of assimilation. Once I've assimilated the memories, I understand a lot more about where they are in their research, and, since we're all studying the same subject on some level, my own.

"Instant knowledge," I say with a chuckle.

"Telepathy really is the solution to all our problems," Mikhail says. "It's already ended world poverty, but still I don't think the full extent of its potential hasn't dawned on us yet."

"It's amazing it took so long for people to buy into it," Gero says. "The proof of concept had been there for decades. If everyone had worked together as much as they did for the space race, it would've been a matter of years."

"Maybe it takes telepathy to work together the way we do," Meri says. A silence falls, and I know they're all waiting for me.

"Speaking of which, I don't think I can delay this any longer. Let's do it. Let's start with a shared dream, since that's what I'm used to."

"So sensory only," Meri says, ever so slightly sounding disappointed.

"Yes."

"That's actually something we're not quite used to," Mikhail says with a smile. Ada chuckles. "We might actually be the ones learning from you. In a dream state you actually reveal far more of yourself."

"I think it's a great idea," Gero says. "we won't feel so self-conscious that way."

"For you it's easy," Mikhail says. "You're in altered states all the time." I see on Gero's account that he's published hundreds of different altered states he's tried by adjusting his neurotransmitters in each brain area to particular settings, each available for download. Now I understand why he seems so odd. Virtual drugs may have safeguards against neurotoxicity, but the experiences still change one's personality. He's probably a much better person than I am, but I don't understand the much wider range of emotions he feels. But now I understand him, I feel a lot more respect for him. 

"Well, anyway, I'm tired." For the second time this hour the sun has set. Ada is already lying on her side.

"Yeah, let's go," Mikhail says, seemingly oblivious to the irony. We all lie down in the floor, which softens at the touch. I close my eyes, and at my command my brain instantly enters into the dream state. The noise in my head morphs into the plants of a jungle. I skip through the underbrush without knowing where I'm going, brushing aside the foliage without a care in the world until suddenly, when I sweep away one frond, in a clearing Ada appears before me stark naked. My hear stops. I cast my eyes down, but to my relief I am not naked myself, which means that even in dreams, I'm still inhibited.

Ada, meanwhile, lays herself bare to all the tangle of life around her. The forest becomes alive around her, seeming to move in- and outward with her breath, causing the forest floor to pulse with sunlight. As she comes closer the leaves and branches twist and turn around her with the same uncontainable emotion as her body. Tendrils caress her limbs as they seek for hold to grow, only to let her slip through them and yet, continue to curl around where her body has been.

"Beware," I say, as she curves around me in turn. "I'm toxic. You should be more careful in the jungle." My suit turns yellow and black like a dart frog's.

"So I am," she says, and taking my head in her hands kisses me, seeming to suck the poison out of my head like a vampire, leaving me helpless like a dead husk to her intoxicating touch.

I wake up with a strangely empty feeling, as if paralyzed by Ada's bite. Ada has woken up too.

"Did you dream what I dreamt?" I ask.

"No," she says. When I wonder how she knows what I dreamt before I've sent her anything, I realize this is a false awakening, and I still have no idea if the Ada I saw in my dream is any more real than the Ada I see now. I could find out using my braincom, since it can activate certain brain areas to allow me to read it in my sleep, but as soon as I think of doing so, a vibration shakes the skyhouse, and from the glow outside I see that we're falling. I realize I'm terrified of finding out.

"You need to calm down if you want to—"

The crash cuts her off, and I'm left to wonder what I do want.

In the next dream, I find myself walking along a snowy ridge, Ada at my side. We're both clad in thick down jackets. We're smiling at each other.

"You seem a lot more at ease here."

I check her tab. She's real.

"I can't hurt you here." I can only protect her here, I think, and remember suddenly that I don't need to talk and she can read all my thoughts.

"Protect me from what? Thoughts can never hurt me," she says. She giggles and runs off the edge of the ridge, slipping from my grasp. I follow her, but when I grab her I trip, and we fall down the slope, calling an avalanche down upon us. She squeals with laughter, but then I feel my bones break and wake up. Ada wakes up more slowly, even though she felt the same pain I felt.

"Shush, it's just a thought," she sends to me.

"Where did that memory come from?" I ask. She doesn't speak, and sends that I should be quiet, so the others don't wake up.

"A good friend of mine died in an avalanche," she sends. "I wanted to feel what she experienced as she died. She thought of me right as she died. There was such beauty in the love she put in that thought. So I played those last memories again and again, in spite of the pain, until I got quite used to it. But it was her last moments of consciousness that really got to me. She hurt so much in those last moments, and yet she still desire to live on, to hang on to those last moments of life, even if all she could feel was pain. Maybe that's when I realized that pain is just another experience, just like pleasure, if anything, more intense. I think that's what made so many people kill themselves back in those days, but for me, it was the beginning of a new life, and it's when I began my meditations."

I feel ever more in awe of her, and I'm all too glad to let her know that. She smiles at me. I want to give her a hug, but she whispers "Come," and goes right back to sleep.

I follow suit, and find myself at the foot of the mountains and the edge of the forest, between ice and fire, and she wraps her body around my down jacket.

"You feel nice and warm," she says. The down jacket turns into a black panther fur.

We close our eyes, and I feel her body from within, the sensation of how my hips stroke her inner thighs.

"I don't want to make you feel like I'm using you," I say.

"We can't misunderstand each other. We feel what the other feels. All you do for me you do for yourself." The thought seems to come out of both our minds. Our thoughts run into each other like twining fingers. She locks her eyes on mine as I stroke her nose with mine. The boundaries between us melt like the horizon between earth and sky into a mirage. The world spins as it falls away, until we are all that exists and there is no up and down, only you and I.

In the kitchen I find we're almost out of cereal, so I tell my computer to cut some. It says there isn’t any. That can’t be right. I walk up the stairs to the roof and open the trapdoor into the hydroponics greenhouse. Coming from the dark of the bedroom, my eyes take a while to adjust to the bright sunlight concentrated by the lenses and mirrors above me. The cereal plants have all already been harvested. I could swear I saw them here yesterday, but the only traces I see are the few grains next to the chute door.

When I see the electric cutter blade is still uncleaned, I walk back down again and into the kitchen, where I hear the sound of machines coming from the storage room. Inside I stumble into Carlos, one of the longest inhabitants of the commune. He's usually the one who takes care of things here, though he does not own it any more than the rest of us.

Carlos: "It'll be just a minute," he says, looking at the grain processing machines. "I'm sorry, I should've thought of this, but there were other things on my mind."

"What are you talking about? I told you before, you're no more responsible for this than the rest of us."

Carlos: "Yes, but if everyone thinks this way…"

"Then we'll learn for ourselves. Isn't that the point of anarchism? Now I'll know to think about this next time."

Carlos: "Maybe you're right. It's a bit early to argue for me."

"Right, then sleep in next time. Breakfast can wait anyway. What have you got here?" I ask, pointing at the machines.

Carlos: "Just oats. And flour, but there's still a little bit of bread."

"I guess I'll just take the bread and probably go."

Carlos: "Really? Why in such a hurry? Where are you going?"

"North, anywhere away from these hippies. What are they doing here anyway?"

Carlos: "Haven't you heard? A revolution."

"A revolution! It's nothing but an excuse to keep dreaming without doing anything about the real problems of our time. Even a way to come to terms with them, because they could always say of their problems that they will lead up to one. Governments couldn't have come up with a better opium for the masses if they tried."

He stays silent and checks the roasted cereal in the machines.

I know I should let it go. I'm just so frustrated with people that are just waiting for something to happen on account of others. That's why I left. My parents want me to believe they want freedom as much as I, but keep trying  to get me into a job with the already falling government to climb up in its hierarchy. They think now's the best time to be a politician, as politics is changing more than ever.

Admittedly, without the government having held the referendums the people petitioned for, it wouldn't have allowed crowdfunding as a deductible alternative to taxes for public services, not without a revolution. But by doing that it already handed over its power to the people, and over the past twenty years it's formed greater layers of organization until the government lost its power and became something merely nominal, like royalties in Europe: an evolutionary vestige, like the human tailbone… But I was born after all this. Maybe if I had lived in their time I would see it all differently, but there’s just nothing you can do with them. They never listen to anything that doesn’t agree with their group think. Might as well give up on them.”

Carlos: "Don't say that! That's you being weak. If you can't help people in their weakness, what in the world can you do for others at all?"

Just now the millennial I saw earlier comes in.

Carlos: "Jack! Come here. Tell him what you think about him, Lucas."

"Eh…" He grabs my arm and forces me to look at him. His eyes are already glazed over with marijuana, but I'm not sure if it's the marijuana or the dreadlocks that most bother me about him. I think of what a long way it has gone from the Indian brahmans who didn't care what they looked like to others, to those who turned their hair into dreadlocks just to fit in. Then I realize how brahmans must have eventually turned into a caste that people needed to fit into in the first place. Because of people like me, who shunned those that weren’t as enlightened as them.

"I didn’t mean it like that."

Carlos: "He thinks you're too weak to be helped, a hopeless case, the end, game over. You're ready to die, fit for the slaughter. Not just you, mind you, but your whole generation."

I look at Carlos. "What's gotten into you?" He looks apologetic. "I'm sorry, there's just been a lot of this kind of friction lately. I thought we'd be over this in our new world but it just never ends, it never ends. We could live in heaven and we'd still turn it into a hell." He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

Then I look back at Jack. But he's certainly achieved one thing. The glaze in his eyes is gone, and he's wide awake.

"Maybe you're right," he says. "Fit for the slaughter? Well we've always been treated like sheep. For thousands of years they taught us that's just what we are. It takes time to deal with the aftermath, Carl. We'll get there someday." He pats him on the back, seeming more worried about him than about himself, and walks out.

"Wait!" Carlos still says.

"Even if it’s too late for them, it’ll end with them. We’re different."

"Yeah, right," he says sarcastically. "You know what's been stressing me out so much?"

"I was wondering about that."

Carlos: "Well, the other night we had trouble here when these transhumanists were here, trying to win people over for their cause. We had to vote to send some people away, but by doing that we kind of picked sides already, and I'm worried about what that could mean to the commune. This could be coming back to me."

"So who had a problem with who?"

Carlos: "I don't even know how it started, but does it matter? What I do remember is that someone said of the other that if they're really so different perhaps they should exterminate them."

"They were just joking. Come on now, that's a thing of the past. " But I don't feel as sure as I sound. Doesn’t it always start with threats? In panarchist Europe no one would ever have to start a war, but what about the rest of the world?

"You really need to try something different. You’re getting stuck in a routine here, and that’s the surest way to get neurotic. I can hardly imagine what it must have done to people to do the same thing over and over every day of their lives like you did for years. Why don't you come with me? This place will be just fine without you. The rest will learn to take care of this place."

Carlos: "This place will become a mess."

"That's not true. We all helped clean up. And even if it does become a mess, then they'll be forced to clean up the mess eventually."

He stares out into space and mutters about some things he still has to take care of.

Carlos: "You know what? Alright, I'm coming with you."

"See, that's the difference between you and the millennials. You choose to change. You might be neurotic but you're not hopeless."

Carlos: "I've got to finish some things I started though."

"For God's sake, how can you find so many little things to do in a fully automated building? Just write it on a sign for the others."

Carlos: "Say what you want but I have to bag the cereals. Can't just leave them to rot."

"Can't take that long. I'll see you on the road."

Carlos: "You're heading north, right?"

"Right, you'll see where I am on my profile." I raise my hand as I walk out. When you can meet anyone anywhere, you hardly bother to say goodbye if at all.

I take a deep breath when I'm outside, enjoying the fresh air from the vertical gardens covering the buildings. The buildings have already covered some of the crops with plastic to form small greenhouses, including, of course, all of those on the roof. of the crops are already out of season and have been covered with plastic panes by the machines and a few electric cars whiz by. It must be rush hour. Of course that doesn't mean much when everyone is working from home, or from anywhere, in fact. Those that do make use of the roads are mostly those who travel.

A woman opens her window and extends a picker at a row of grapes below her sill, an old-fashioned tool with a pincer and scissor at the end. Usually people just use cutters now, but with these old little houses whose walls don't line up, it's not always worth the trouble installing one. I follow her movements with interest, squinting. The woman looks at me askant, then smiles a little in compensation and withdraws. I realize my frown probably makes me look a little creepy, but my eyes are still adjusting to the daylight.

I check the time. It's almost 300. In the new time scale most modern people use now, there are 864,00 hectaseconds: 400 is noon and 200 is early morning. Ever since all files were digitized, it was easy for anyone to adjust the time formats on all of them for themselves, which began a competition between different formats online. The 864 hectasec day soon won over the ten hour, 144-minute per hour day, but for the year, there were a lot of formats for a long time. Most of them were ideological, most of them based on some historical event, one of them on the publication of the Origin of Species, but eventually one that came on top was one that was neutral: the Annus Annorum or Year of the Year, based solely on the date of its own birth as if this was itself a historical event, as it involves the transcendence of ideology. To be neutral to all cultures, its New Year is simply the winter solstice, December the 21st, and when younger people stopped celebrating the old New Year, Christmas and the other Christian Holidays soon followed, replaced by the equinoxes and solstices. Some have seen it as a manifesto of nihilism, and indeed it was invented at the height of the nihilist era.

I hunch my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. I should've brought a pillow. It's one of the things that's not provided in the communes since they get lost or stolen quickly. I didn't really make any preparations for this trip at all. I'll probably need my inflatable clothing if I'm heading to the cold north, especially if I'm planning to sleep outside on my way as well. Once I have that I have everything: warm clothing if inflated, cool clothing if uninflated, and if zipped, a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, bivy bag and raincoat. If I'm really not turning back, if I'm really going to get out into the world, I'll need one. I tell my computer to get me one.

A signal on my mindcom lets me know that my inflatable have arrived by pneumatic tube at the nearest supermarket, asking me whether I want to collect it or if I want it delivered by drone. I choose the latter. A minute later it's there. The laminate is made of graphene oxide, which is both perfectly waterproof and perfectly breathable. As it can be inflated any amount needed, it can essentially allow me to survive in any weather conditions. I can go anywhere now. The whole world lies before me.

I attach it as a module to the outside of my zensuit, which can stimulate my nervous system in any way reality can, with artificial muscles which can tighten and relax to accelerate my movements when I'm exercising in reality, or decelerate them when I'm exercising in virtuality. Meanwhile, it allows everyone else to perceive me as in reality through their interface. Because it needs to be in direct contact with my skin to work, it has to be worn as underwear, even though it's not all that comfortable — a little like latex.

I tell my computer to mark me as a hitchhiker and walk down the road. I specify no destination other than the north. A few minutes later a slightly older man stops his car and picks me up. His tab says he's called Hugo.

"I heard from your profile you're an oneironaut," he says after we've talked for some time. His driving is very erratic and I find it hard to concentrate. The car's computer would override if we were ever in danger, but his maneuvers make my stomach lurch. "Then I just knew I had to pick you up. What kind of dreams did you have?"

"Well, I was in a dream cooperative for the past few years."

"Oh really, so you're actually a professional oneironaut! Have you done any research?"

"I'm not too focused on controlled studies. Any child can do that now, with all the tools for research being available online. And with people making almost all data about themselves public, you don't even need to do anything to do research in psychology. I'm mostly trying to uncover new data from deeper layers of my own unconscious, so that I can let my computer look for possible patterns in them so I can learn as I go. But I wouldn't call myself a researcher, since we're all pretty much 'researchers' now."

"I never see any patterns in my dreams. What do you see in yours?"

"Well… It's hard to explain really. It's not so much about what's going on in the dream as much as the feeling of the dream. You see, in a dream you're not just doing things as you would in the real world. Everything in the dream is really a symbol, it's part of your own mind, and interacting with it is interacting with your own mind. In the dream world everything is full of meaning, even the most mundane things."

"Such as?"

I looked around for examples. "This car drive might be a symbol of a death wish." I chuckle.

"You're not scared are you?" He suddenly turned the wheel around to one side and raised his hands as if in a roller coaster ride as the car made a turnabout and began to drive in circles in between the cars on both sides of the road. He laughed. The car dodged them all, but not without lurching side to side with as much violence as if we had already crashed. The car soon slowed down and after a few seconds he took the wheel back in hands.

I've blanched. I wasn't as familiar as him with the extent of reliability of the driver. "It was just an example. It might also be a symbol of something else, such as liberation. Sometimes there are symbols that mean the opposite of what you expect."

"It'll be over soon, actually." We drove onto the maglev highway, where all cars within the same lane automatically drove at the same speed. This made the cars like a train, so that except at an exit one couldn't drive the car.

"We had this crazy theory once which we wanted to test. We wanted to dig into the earth and fly into the sky to find the heaven and hell of our unconscious, to see what they'd look like, and more importantly, how we'd feel there. Not only that, but we wanted to talk to our own angels and demons, see what they had to say to us, and then, if possible, make them talk to each other."

"How did that go?"

"At first it didn't go so well. Perhaps it was that our unconscious was too influenced by stereotypes, but at any rate our demons displayed nothing but pure chaos and our angels nothing but pure order, bent on nothing but pure destruction and pure creation. Perhaps at their core that's what they are, but in their pure, extreme form, they were in such a raw form that they provided little material for analysis. Then I brought my angels and demons to the earth to see beyond their false surface, and the closer to Earth they came, the more human they became. Eventually, when they came close enough together, they became rather normal people, the difference between them being that one was left-brained and the other right-brained. The one thing that remained the same about them is that they did not get along, mostly on account of one being egoist and the other altruist. They could both do good to others and to themselves alike, but their approaches were different."

"So which won?"

"Heaven and hell forbid that either would win! They're nothing without each other. Eventually we actually managed to find a way to make them connect. The problem is that in doing so they eventually destroyed each other our, so that they had to separate again. All this was harder than it sounds, and took us years to find a way to do that."

I notice the change in landscape as we drive into the Pyrenees.

"Where are we going, anyway?"

"Well, if you wanted to go anywhere, you're surely on the right car. I'm following the superhighway all the way to Berlin."

"Through the Rhone-Rhine axis?"

"Of course. I don't know of any that go through the Alps. Montpelier, Lyon, Basel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin. Where are you going after that?"

"I don't know. Far away from here. Anywhere."

"You know, if you want to be anywhere, why don't you travel in virtuality?"

I look at him. "But I am. Didn't you see that on my profile?"

"Oh. No, it must have escaped me." There's an awkward silence for a moment, and he looks at me carefully, trying to see if I really am an avatar. I laugh, giving away that it was a joke.

"Oh, you think that's funny? How could I know the difference? But seriously, why don't you?"

"I don't know. I'll probably do a lot of my traveling in virtuality, but sometimes I just want to be there and feel I really am there."

"You have no idea what you're looking for do you?"

"How do you know I'm looking for something?"

"Why else would you leave everything behind?"

“I didn’t leave anything behind. I have everything I need with me. Why wouldn’t I leave?”

“That’s one way to look at it. I guess I’m growing old.” I look at him, then look him up. He’s not even thirty, barely a fifth through his current lifespan. A bit early to be old.

“We’re all old,” I say. “Most of us can’t even keep up with children. How can we ever catch up with them? They spent their entire lives in telepathy. Anyone who’s lived in the isolation we have is maimed for life. Still, it's one thing I'm resolved to try harder to do more."

“What?”

“Telepathy.”

“That’s easier said and done. Not many people want to open up like that to a stranger.”

“It hasn’t been easy for me to do it outside of my work team either, and even then not as much as I would like. I’m always the one insisting on shared dreaming. But if I need to I’ll do it with children. They’re far more open to that, probably just because they keep up with the times more than most of us.”

He raises his eyebrows. “People will talk,” he says.

With a sadness I realize how much of a divide there is between the youngest and oldest generations today, and how much it’s driven us apart. Borders are no longer formed along countries but along age groups. Children are turning into a higher species, all but leaving us behind, and perhaps there’s no way for me to become one of them. I often wish I was born as one of them.

“Let them talk,” I sigh. “Nowadays they can do what they want. And we can agree to keep a record of the telepathic sessions, so that they can’t make false accusations against me.”

“I have a better idea,” he says. “Here and there there have recently been some groups emerging that seem to be doing a pretty good job at, as you put it, keeping up with children. They’re transhumanist groups, but they call themselves transhuman, as they believe that telepathy is what distinguishes humans from transhumans and they communicate more through telepathy than anything else. I know one of them is in Berlin.”

“Why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

“It’s not too long ago that these groups began to emerge.”

“To be fair, it’s not that long ago that telepathy came on the market. So what do you mean with not too long ago? A few weeks?”

“More like, a few months"

It’s clear that this man already has another time frame than I do. “Then why didn’t I hear about this? Considering my interests, it should’ve been all over my feeds.”

“It’s not a very public project. In fact they want to avoid publicity as much as possible. They believe in a more peer-to-peer rather than peer-to-crowd approach.”

“Meaning I should’ve heard about it.”

“There’s not as many transhumanists among your circles as you would think. Usually there’s somewhere the chain stops. I only know about it because I happened to have a friend of a friend of a friend who knew the founder of the Berlin group.“

“That’s pretty private even by peer-to-peer standards.”

“That’s not all. They make you perform a test before you enter. They’re kind of elitist.”

“It sounds almost like a sect.” But on the other hand I could understand that this might’ve been the only way to prevent them from being inundated by today’s cosmopolitan society. There would be a lot of people who would like to be able to say that they were part of a “transhuman” group. But that’s exactly what I don’t trust about it: why do they need to call themselves that?

“I don’t know what it’s like. I only have hearsay.”

“Alright, I’ll take a look.” That’s probably the people they want to keep out. But I’m more serious about it than I betray.

“Will you come too?”

“No, I already have plans. But you know what, the meeting is only tonight, and I’m going to be early myself. Why don’t we visit some places on the way.  The Swiss Alps are only minutes out of our way."

I think about Carlos. He could use that to clear his mind, and according to his profile he likes mountaineering. He’s already following me in another car, and a little later it has shifted through the trains and attached to ours, the front of one and the back of the other opening up to each other to connect the two.

That day we end up hiking across the edge of a glacier. Most of our hike we have a view on the lake next to us, as well of the icebergs which used to be part of the glacier. Sensors on the soles of our boots tell us where we can move safely by superimposing a 3D-map of the glacier’s structure on our vision, color-coded for safety levels from green to red based on our computers’ projections of their flow. Several times we’re forced to take a detour because of a possibility of iceberg calving, and one time we actually see the place where we were detoured from subside. We’re now half a kilometer from the lake, and since we’re close to the far side, we decide not to turn back but move slightly up the glacier instead.

As the ice beneath our feet is very hydrophilic, the gecko surface on our boots sticks to their surface quite well. The entire surface of my suit has the same gecko surface, and as I see its adhesiveness demonstrated on the ice, I quickly become more confident and take the lead, up to a point where I actually just slightly use my suit to accelerate me, just to prove to myself that I can.

My computer can’t actually override my body’s movements as it could a car’s to avoid accidents, as they’re too complex for it too coordinate: it can only “resist or assist” the movements already in process. Nonetheless, I feel safe knowing that even if I’d somehow manage to fall into a crevasse (such as the one below the snow right in front of me now), I could easily save myself just by touching its walls. I try touching the ice below me with the glove parts, then with my knees and elbows. It automatically triggers water suction into the surface

“What are you doing?” Hugo says as he and Carlos catch up with me.

I suddenly feel mischievous and pretend to fall over, throwing all my weight on the snow in front of me. It collapses. As soon as I fall below the edge I hold on to the walls. My limbs tremble, but the suit holds regardless. The suit’s muscles tighten.

“Lucas!” Hugo shouts. But I hear Carlos scoff.

“You rascal!” he says as he bends over the edge. “I could tell from that look that you were up to mischief.”

“Let’s go down. The echo says it goes down into an ice cave at the edge.”

“Are you mad? A glacier is a river of ice. Up here it may be pretty solid, but the deeper you go the more fluid the river becomes.”

“This area is supposed to be quite stable the next few hours. Anyway, I can go alone and catch up later.”

He doesn’t immediately reply. When Carlos is about to say something, I interrupt him by withdrawing the water from the gecko and slip down the crevasse. Carlos soon comes behind in the bottom of the crevasse.

“Alright, so maybe I lied. Obviously it doesn’t quite lead all the way into the cave.”

Whatever he’s saying is drowned in the high-pitched sound of suit’s boots’ vibrations, as its  expands and contracts at a high frequency. As the suit’s nanodiamonds press against the ice walls, the ice liquefies and the water is pumped back out by the gecko, where it pools around my legs. Our hoods close in front of our heads, but shortly after the suit slowly lets us slide along the walls to our feet in the ice cave, and the hoods retract. I message Hugo that the coast is clear, but only after some convincing he slides down after us.

He looks at my flushed face.

“Hard to believe this is the boy I startled with a little joyriding,” he says.

“I don’t belong in a vehicle,” I say as I turn to look at the ice cave’s chipped walls, glistening in our suits’ glow. “I like to feel in control.” Walking further down we soon see a light at the end, where the cave emerges back into the lake. I propose diving to the other side of the lake, but my companions demur. Instead, while they sit by the side, I take a swim by myself. I use my suit as drysuit, though it can also reprogram itself into a wetsuit.

Carlos eventually tries the water for himself, and when Hugo is left by himself beneath the weight of the glacier, he soon follows. Once we are in the midst of the lake, the decision is easily made to swim to the other side instead of swimming back. None of us are really very sure about going back up the crevasse. It must have been a glacier river at some point, but had obviously caved in before we came here.

Once on the other side of the lake, we move down the mountain to a geodesic cabin on a hiking trail, which is also a tavern open for tourists. Two Chinese women in their thirties are there, and I notice that they’re trying to speak Russian with each other, evoking each other’s laughter as they try to pronounce the words their translator gives them.

We give each other a friendly greeting, to include each other as part of our social groups, but after the fatigue of our hike, don’t immediately begin to talk with each other. We lay back into the seats and look up at the cirrus clouds. We sink into the e-matter as it conforms to the shape of our bodies, making us feel almost like a fetus in a uterus. Tired as we are, they all but lull us to sleep.

After a brief, quiet rest, we serve ourselves some drinks. Remote as it is, there is no pneumatic tube, but Hugo is very particular on his old-fashioned tastes, and decides it’s worth it for him to run to the nearby highway to get some arak from a station, something which, using his suit, he says should not take him longer than five minutes.

Carlos considers going with him, as he feels like “stimracing” with him, but we decide on doing so all together afterwards on the trail. At first I’m not sure if I feel like it. The thick suit of artificial muscles doesn’t wick very well, and while I usually don’t mind being sweaty in the hot Mediterranean, I don’t feel like it suits the cold Alps, even if I could just inflate my suit so I wouldn’t actually be cold.

I’m trying to find out if there’s any way to increase the wicking of the suit without permanently compromising its haptic virtuality when one of the two women sitting on another table warmly greets me. I feel a little awkward when I realize I was looking in their general direction when I was surfing, so that from their viewpoint I could have been staring for all they knew, and it takes me a moment to greet them back.

“Hi,” I say. I take a quick glance over their tab. They’re sisters called Ning and Yi, who are near the end of their two-year-long journey of the Trans-Eurasian Trail, sometimes called the Trading Road Trail, a 20 gigameter hiking trail that travels continually through mountain ranges: the Khingan and Hengduan in China, the Himalayas in India and Nepal, the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, the Elburz in north-Iran, the Pontic mountains in north-Turkey, the Carpathians in the Balkan, the Alps, and the Appenines.

The hikers seem to think I’m still reading when they wait patiently through my speechlessness. Only when I drop my jaw, they become aware of it, and laugh in unison. I begin to utter several sounds, but no words I can think of do justice to  my astonishment.

The only possible explanation presents itself to me: “You were cheating, right?”

Their laugh suddenly makes way for a serious expression. Ning says, “No, we vowed to walk on our own power the whole way. Otherwise we might as well have gone by car. We wanted to take our time with each landscape to cultivate patience.”

“Well, surely you must’ve become buddhas by now! But I think you must be one of the few people to ever do that.”

“Most people cheat at some point, if  but they eventually realize that it was a mistake and give it up, usually once they’re in good form. It becomes a slippery slope to cheat whenever you’re tired or bored.”

“How long have you been on the way?” As I don’t want them to repeat their answers when Carlos and Hugo come back, I also ask, “Do you mind if I forward this conversation to my friends?” They’ve probably answered these questions a thousand times by now.

“Two years.“ They don’t answer on my other question, but it was mostly rhetorical. Almost everyone records their life nowadays, and the few people, mostly from older generations, that don’t want to be recorded are automatically censored.

“However do any of you make so much time free for that?”

“Almost all of us keep working on the trail. We’ve even met a few people who are spending their entire life on trails like this, since they can work and play from anywhere anyway in virtuality. Traveling doesn’t really interfere with our lives at home, if anything it’s the other way around. We’re much healthier than we’d be otherwise, so it makes us better at everything.”

“Most of our generation are living as cosmopolitans. People really had no idea when they said a hundred years ago that the world had become a village. But few people actually spend that long in the wilderness.”

“Why not, when you have civilization in your pocket?”

“Ah, yes, but you can say the same thing about nature.”

“You know it’s not the same. You have to feel like you’re really there, in the middle of nowhere.”

I look from NIng to Yi, who has so far remained silent. She has a far-away look in her eyes. I wonder how the two changed through their experience. They radiate a strength and calm I can’t quite describe.

“So where will you go next?” I ask.

“Well, the main trail goes from Beijing to Rome, but an alternate route begins at the Pacific Coast in Japan and ends at the Atlantic Coast in Spain. We started in Beijing, but we’re not sure where we’re going from here. We might go somewhere else entirely, such as the Hannibal trail. But we don’t know. So much is changing in these years, and we have to find a way to keep up.”

It sounds like that was why they undertook this journey in the first place, to reach some sort of Enlightenment. It’s unbelievable what some people do these days to try to reach beyond themselves, even as so many others hold on to themselves as much as ever.

Perhaps this is the kind of thing which, in Hugo’s words, I’m looking for. I’m about to ask them if there’s any chance I could come with them, when Carlos and Hugo return.

Carlos smiles broadly at them as he sits down next to them, but for a long time doesn’t know what to say. “2 years on the road!” he finally says simply as soon as they make eye contact. Carlos is himself unusually sedate for his age, and very much their antithesis. For some time they discuss whether it’s better to see much of one place or a little of some places. It ends on the note that we now have so much time in our life that it is possible to really get to know every place in the world.

Later that day, Carlos goes his own way for the rest of the day to visit some friends in Zurich, but promises to catch up with me the next day. Hugo and I resume our way to Berlin.

Once there, I’m glad to see Berlin again. In the past few years it’s become an ever more dynamic city. Having nothing of its past left that’s worth remembering, it’s one of those cities that’s most focused on the future, kind of like some American cities still do. Every time I see it there’s some new idea that’s being tried out in its city planning.

This time its people decided to install programmable platforms as roofbridges, which can extend in any direction to allow any number of pedestrians to cross from roof to roof. As this allows people to cross anywhere they want without having to build bridges everywhere which obstruct the view of the sky, this has led to far more people engaging in roofwalking.

The system’s application has spread to many cities, especially in Danmark where they are much appreciated by the parcouring community, for whom it not only made it easier to move from one parcouring spot to another but for whom it could also offer a safety net for bolder parcourers: if a parcourer fell short in trying to jump to a neighboring roof, the moving bridges would move down the walls of the building while extending below them, breaking their fall.

In Berln, however, it has spread across the entire city. In the center it has even gone so far as to extend many of its buildings to create a more level “second tier,” and for the first time USA citizens were actually jealous of the European row houses. The very term “second tier” is still controversial on account of the obstruction of light it used to involve. Until recently it was mostly used in China, and to the right it was a symbol of how excessive equality (that of neighboring roofs) actually leads to the worst forms of inequality.

The people of the Berlin city state took advantage of the unused space of the second tier to build gardens across entire blocks, making it look a little like a wood on top of a city from above. The roofs had been extended mostly with hydroponics farms, adding to the illusion. I couldn’t wait to walk on them and see the open sky on top of the city. I close the window in my mindcom, not sure if I hadn’t better asked Hugo about it and heard about his own personal experience with it, but it was just too easy to browse the net. If only it was as simple to browse people’s minds.

I think again about the meetup with the so-called transhumans and ask Hugo about it. He doesn’t know, but looks it up on his car’s screen. This time I shouldn’t have bothered him about it. Not that we could have an accident.

“Apparently it’s in a Kiosk of sorts in the New Berlin gardens, on the second tier.” I’m pleased to hear about this. “Nowadays a lot of the social events are on the second tier,” he adds.

He stops at an bracer elevator. “Have you ever ridden one of these?”

“Of course. Not often, but yes.”

“I’ll drop you off here then.”

I pause. “Do you want to come with?”

“No, I already have something to do tonight. But I’m sure our ways will cross again at some point. I’m quite itinerant myself.”

“Good! You’re not that old after all,” I joke. I look around. The sun is almost setting and wonder if I could see the sun setting.

“Just where are you going?”

“Just here in the center, but it’s on ground level, in our usual place.

“How quaint. Well, I guess that’s it then.” But I refuse to let this contact remain superficial like some millennial would. “But I don’t suppose you’re in a hurry?”

“Well, we arranged at eight.”

“That’s still half an hour. And she’ll have plenty of other pastimes if you’re fifteen minutes late,” I say, thinking of how I forgot he was even there while I was researching Berlin’s second tier.

“How do you know it’s a her?” He looks at me suspiciously, as if I might’ve hacked him. Now I know for sure I can’t leave it at this.

“Otherwise you’d ask her to come with us. Come on, the sun is going under in a few minutes.”

“I don’t know if she’d agree with me getting late. We Prussians are kind of more punctual than you Catalunyans.”

“You’re getting old.”

He falls silent. That got to him.

“Alright.”

I put my hands in the bracers, which tighten around my shoulders, elbows and wrists and pull me up. In a few seconds I’ve moved up the rail to the top of the building. I look around, and smile as I turn around and see the entire horizon from east to west. But the best part is the freshness of the air. Of course the cities are no longer polluted as they once were, but the air still runs a little bit stale without wind. Up here, I might as well be in the Alps.

The sun is still up, so I run. By the time Hugo is there, I’m already on the next building. I glance at the sun, which I can almost look at without getting too much of an afterimage.

“Hey!” he says.

I jump from building to building, then stand still on the other side to let him follow me by roofbridge AKA platform. By the time it’s extended, I’ve moved on to the next. But when we come to a particular building I move on before he can catch up. From a higher building I see his girlfriend is already there waiting for him. You don’t have to be a hacker to know your way around people. I send him a message:

“They say routine is the first symptom of aging.”

I continue on my way, to one of the lower roofs at the edge of the park. The colors of sunset add a sense of warmth to the park that the midday sun never could. But the best part comes when the sun is down and the stars come out. With such open view of the sky, the Berliners switched their smartroads’ main lights to infrared. Only the cars around pedestrians were lit up in visible light, so that there is far less light pollution than there would otherwise be. I never thought any Western city could be this close to nature.

And yet, there are plenty of people here, engaged in all kinds of activities provided by the different areas: aside from more regular events like receptions, there are plenty of places for airdancing and other maglev sports.

Nonetheless I’m thrilled when I see the light from the pavilion. The semispherical roof is retracted in wedges on the sides, leaving the seats in the central circle open to the sky. I hear laughing. The atmosphere sounds a lot more friendly than I imagined it. Toggling augmented reality for a moment, I see on the tag floating above them that I’m in the right place.

For a while I observe them in silence, trying to memorize their names from their tags. Only two out of five, Laura and Mikhail, actually describe themselves as transhumanists on their tags. Only Mikhail and Laura are in their twenties. Meri and Gero are still children, and Ada is in her late teens. Aside from Gero, none of them is from Germany: Mikhail is half Iranian and half Russian, Laura is from the Western States, Meri from Finland, and Ada from Sweden.

Meri and Ada, sitting opposite one another, seem close. They’re sitting around a coffee table, which is also a display. It’s raised where Laura and Mikhail are standing, browsing to cite research during their discussion. Gero, sitting next to Meri, doesn’t seem to say much, trying to listen in turns to one conversation and the other. Now and then Meri pokes him in the side and tries to make him talk. Meri looks playful, Gero serious, Ada a bit of both. Mikhail and Laura look more mature, a complex mixture of emotions.

When I approach, they hardly interrupt their conversations, as if I’d been there all along. “Hi!” Meri says, which the others echo in quick succession.

“So this is the transhumanist meeting?”

“The ‘transhuman’ meeting,” Meri says, laughing. I assume the appellation is at least as much whimsical as serious.

“We have a more nuanced definition of what a transhuman is here,” Mikhail says appeasingly. “We distinguish transhumans from humans by telepathy, just like humans are sometimes distinguished from other apes by speech. Once you no longer even need speech, what else does that make you, if not transhuman?”

“So if it’s so easy for you, why aren’t you in telepathy right now?”

“We were waiting for you,” Gero says. “Hugo let us know you’d come.”

“Excuses,” I say, smirking. The group that was discussing before falls silent. “You know I’m right,” I say, turning to them. “Maybe I’m the one who should test you,” I say, teasingly. “Speaking of which, what is this test?”

“Oh, it’s more a game than anything else,” Laura says. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. But it’s also kind of meant to keep people out that aren’t really ready for telepathy. Or just to show them that they’re not ready.”

“Alright. So what should I do?”

“Something you’ve probably wanted to do for a long time but never dared to,” Gero says. “Flying.”

“In real life,” Ada adds. “You have to feel like you are truly on the top of the world.”

“Isn’t that kinda dangerous?”

“Oh, come on,” Meri says. “You know the avionics been totally safe for years now. All that time you’ve had the opportunity, and yet you’ve never done it. Why is that?” She puts especial emphasis on “several years,” which for her is an unthinkable amount of time to wait.

“It’s not as much a test as a foretaste. If you don’t like flying, you won’t like telepathy,” Mikhail says. Gero pushes a raypack into my hands, an electrically propelled form of personal flight which works by ionizing air into plasma. I weigh it in my hands as I look it over, looking for a reprieve from actually putting it on. Its surprisingly light, considering that it has five engines, one for each limb and one for the torso.

“I just don’t see the point of it if you can have the same experience in virtuality,” I mumble. But what I said them before now applies to me: excuses. Even in my dreams I never succeeded in flying, which was my greatest handicap as an oneironaut. I always felt gravity pulling me back, which is supposed to mean I wanted it to do so. At the thought of flying I have to admit that I rather like the feeling of gravity holding me safely on the ground.

When I look up from the raypack, I see that the others are equipping theirs.

“It’s not the same experience,” Ada says. “It makes you feel exposed in a way that you have no control over, and that’s how telepathy feels.”

I look at the sky and for the first time pay attention to the people flying by. They flew by so fast that I hardly even noticed till now that they’re all children. That says a lot about how blinded I’ve become in my own mere twenty years. I see the glint of strength in their eyes, a strength that’s far beyond that of most adults. Then I look back at the other, still mostly adolescent members. Maybe it’s not that far-fetched to say they’re at least halfway transhuman. And even I feel like I’m already falling behind. I can’t let that happen.

With a renewed determination I equip the raypack. The straps are attached to a suit, and every inch of it is packed with cameras which register the distance from everything around me.

“Where will we fly to?” I ask.

“Ah, that’s the question isn’t it?” Laura says. “Isn’t that was frightens you most? Where do you go once you’re up there and you can go anywhere at all?” *

“How do I pass?”

“Think of it as a training. We could start small. At first you could use it to jump very high.” As it seems to me like they don’t really know what they’re doing, I think of it more as a game.

“I could do that. I did that to get here. I got into parcouring through hooverskating: since I could drop from almost any height onto a maglev road with my maglev boots, I quickly learned how to make larger leaps. I heard that in Copenhagen they actually have some maglev buildings for that purpose.”

“Well, flying is just like that. Usually you fly to go from place to place, not just to be in the open sky. Have you never thought ‘I wish I could just go there faster?’”

“Sometimes. I felt that way when hiking in the mountains. But that was before raypacks were even on the market.” In my dreams I usually use teleports, but that cheat doesn’t always work. Sometimes a transition is needed, as the mind can’t always just shift from one state to another.

That gives me an idea. But as I look at Mikhail he speaks first.

“We could go to the mountains."

"I've done plenty of leaping. It's kinda close to flying." Rockleaping, a sport derived from rockclimbing, uses robotic boots to make superhuman leaps from rock to rock, relying only on diamond-coated tips on the boots, gloves and braces to hold on. Unlike flying it's very dangerous, but it never felt like it because I knew what I was doing. It's included in the system software of my instincts.

“We could do that now,” Gero says. “The Giant Mountains are a mere 300 kilometers away. We could get there in half an hour by maglev.”

“If we’re going into the mountains we won’t be back before midnight though.”

“So? The moon will be out, and we can stay there for the night. We’re all equipped for it.” I noticed that everyone is wearing minimalistic allotropes like myself, probably graphene.

“Alright,” I say, in a sudden impulse, “Let’s do it.”

“We could go now. We can still talk in the train, anyway. We’ll divert anyone else that wants to come to our car.”

Ada and Meri get up with an enthusiasm I didn’t expect from them, considering how withdrawn they’ve been all evening. Another glance at their tab reveals why: they’re both into mountaineering. Meri’s own tab further says that they in fact often do so together. Both Meri and Gero’s tags share a lot more information to strangers than the older attendees, several hundreds of items. At first sight it seems like they keep only the most sensitive information hidden, such as their address.

“You wouldn’t think they had that much energy,” I say, as I watch them run in front of us laughing. They’ve already jumped off the edge of the building. A roofbridge extends below their feet, and they watch us from beyond the edge. As they look at us Meri jokes to Ada, who pokes her.

“Oh, they have a lot more than us,” Mikhail says. “Once you’re in telepathy with them you find that they have a lot more thoughts per second than any of us. That’s why they talk so little. By the time there’s an opening in the conversation to say one thought they’ve moved on to another.”

“It’s not like they’re self-conscious, either,” Gero says. “Sometimes I am, and I sometimes can’t stop talking because of it. It makes me want to explain myself and then explain the explanations. Like now.”

“Well, that’s just the way you are. You’re the neuroinformatician, after all.”

“I wouldn’t describe myself as such,” he says. “But that’s certainly one of the things I’ve been quite preoccupied with the last few months, perhaps to an excess. I have to admit it’s scary sometimes to be so intimate with the patterns of one’s own brain.” He shivers. “But I’m trying to take a break from that now.”

I’m pleased at the patience with which extraverts like Laura and Mikhail heard him out in the middle of the excitement. This turns out to be much less casual a group than I thought. On the contrary, it seems like they want to do everything they can to connect as deeply as possible with me and each other. I suppose part of me is still used to the old superficiality of modernism that still lingers here and there in our society, including in my family.

“Aren’t you a bit young for such heavy subjects?” I ask him. He looks mildly offended. “I mean, isn’t being young about exploring everything the world has to offer?”

“It’s not that I didn’t do anything else. But it totally changes the way you look at the world and yourself, and it can be a bit much sometimes.”

We walk over the edge of the building, and the platform extends below our feet. As it descends, Gero walks toward the edge of the platform, which extends before him. He pays no attention. He seems to be looking up at the buildings, as if to get a good angle on the view.

“Can you do that while it’s going down?” I ask.

“You can, but it’s kind of considered bad form by flyers, Gero.” Laura said this sentence loud enough for him to hear. Hearing his name, Gero starts as if he awakens from a trance.

“Oh, yes, I walked rather far. There’s an interesting group of flyers there I was trying to see outlined against the sky.”

At the bottom shortens again, drawing Gero back to the edge of the road. A 6-seat car has already stopped before us. It has a phoenix symbol on the side.

“Hi, Achim! Is this your car?” Mikhail asks the middle-aged man in the front seat, no doubt having noticed the symbol on the exterior.

“No, I’m borrowing it myself, from the co-op.”

“Is it true that these cars can fly?” Meri asks from the other row of seats.

“Fly is a big word,” he says. “They can hover on their own power for a while if necessary, but rarely have the chance to do so.”

“Like our Valkyries in Scandinavia,” Meri says.

“Why is there a phoenix icon on the back?” I wasn’t sure if this was subjective enough a question to ask, but in Catalunya, if we aren’t sure we usually ask. It’s not a good starter, perhaps, but I want to get it off my mind first.

“It’s an existentialist metaphor. Germany was particularly hard hit by the nihilist era in the 20s, as you can probably tell if you’re familiar with its later cyberpunk scene. There’s a quote from Nietzsche that goes ‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?' So one of the earliest large-scale cooperatives in Berlin in the late nihilist era used a phoenix as its icon. Of course there’s no city that it suits better.”

“Sorry, I guess that was probably more of a search question.”

“Oh, no problem.” Meri was reminiscing with Ada about their flights over the fjords, comparing Chile’s to Norway’s.

I’m about to ask where he’s going, but not wanting to repeat the same mistake I check his tab first. I’m relieved that he’s hidden that information, so that I can ask him.

“Where are you going?” As I’m asking this, suddenly the realization strikes me how important telepathy is to youngsters like Gero and Meri, since they don’t seem to hide any information at all. But that’s also why it’s so hard for their elders: we’re used to hiding information. But once we no longer feel like we have anything to hide, what use is it to talk?

I wonder if perhaps that’s why we hide anything, just so that we can feel like we are involving ourselves, our egos, in sharing it. What does it mean to the next generation to connect with someone if they have no ego, nothing that makes up their self but public information? What are we if not our secrets?

Achim looks at me questioningly, having seen the change in my face. “Are you alright?” he seems about to ask. I realize that I’ve been so astonished by this thought that I haven’t been listening to Achim’s answer, and that I wished the conversation had gone this way instead, because I really want to talk about this. If we’d been in telepathy that would’ve happened. Should I be polite and go on with the small talk or tell him what was on my mind?

“Sorry?” I say. “I got distracted. What were you saying? Just a sec, let me read that.” Our sensors save everything except about people who don’t consent. I’m reading the transcript because it’s faster.

Achim was saying he’s going to see his lover in Slovakia, and asked me if that would still be considered a long-distance relationship today. They’ve known each other for years, but only since recently see each other almost daily. I feel awkward at not having missed something so personal, of all things, something which is normal for my age to talk about right after meeting but was no doubt very hard for someone his age to get used to, so I do what anyone my age does when they feel awkward: I laugh, not nervously but heartily.

Now Achim looks really confused, and a little upset, but the situation is so silly, that when I try to think of how to explain it I laugh even harder. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I sure wish I was in telepathy now so I could explain what came over me.

“I just had this very strange thought. It’s unrelated, though. I’ll tell you about it later. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” So many words, so little said, and Achim isn’t even convinced of their truth.

I try to put all my sincerity in my expression as I go on. “So how did it work out?”

“How did what work out?”

“Well, you said you’ve known each other for many years. I suppose it must have been difficult for both of you before the maglev roads were laid. So what did you do?”

“Oh, is that’s what was funny?” He began laughing himself, taking the situation in perspective from the panorama of his years. “Yes, as you can imagine it was an absurd situation.” He still thinks I was mocking him. I resolve to tell him what I was thinking.

“Not at all,” I interject seriously.

“We tried to live together,” he resumes, “but it didn’t work out for either of us. We both have a rich social life and couldn’t leave our friends behind. We tried open relationships, but we never found anyone with which it felt so natural to be with as each other. It’s testimony to how right we are for each other that it survived all those years. I guess deep down we knew it was but a matter of time before we’d be united, with virtuality advancing as it did. We’d never thought we’d be together in reality before that, though.”

“But with suits you don’t necessarily even need to go anywhere.”

“Yes, but that’s only been for a few years. Haven’t really got used to the idea yet.”

“Only a few years! That’s a lifetime!”

“To you it is. It must have been, what, a quarter of your life ago that they came out? For me it’s less than a tenth.”

“That’s still a lot.”

“We have time.”

“I don’t know about that. I have the feeling evolution really has turned into a race. I keep wondering if the transhumans won’t just leave us behind, like we left the chimpanzees behind.”

There’s silence for some moments, during which we look over the hilly landscape. Without overproduction, most of the farmlands have been reforested, dotted here and there with clusters of geodomes in the distance, all covered entirely with herbs and flowers and moss, and a few with actual produce. Meri point at them, asking if he’d ever want to live there.

“I may be old, but not that old. And I have many friends in the city.”

“Old?” she says with a sneer. "Ada spent months in a glass geodome in Finnmark, with only the stars and aurora as sources of light. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“Or else it would have to be one of these, close to the highway,” Achim says, trying to keep the conversation linear. ”But even then it’s already less casual than if you can just go to a friend’s home in a few minutes. I remember what it was like twenty years ago to live at the edge of the city. I guess it would be like that now.”

I no longer feel like I can talk about my epiphany at the moment anymore, and yet I feel it’s extremely important to prepare myself. Conversations in groups move so quickly that things like these sometimes get buried underneath superficiality. That’s why socializing in larger groups is no longer fashionable.

It’s unlike me to be so thoughtful, but the thought of telepathy, or rather its philosophical implications, give me the chills. I don’t have time to dwell, however. We’re passing Magdeburg, and mere minutes later, we’re in the mountains. It takes as many minutes for it to take us on a gravel road to a mountain top.

As I move out the car, my heart is already throbbing. The night makes it seem all the more dreamlike. It’s a good moment for my reality check. But I can still breathe when I pinch my nose. I get a feeling I’ve often had while in a lucid dream, a fear of losing touch with reality.

“So what are you doing here a this hour?” I still hear Achim ask from the car. Then he glances at our backs with an understanding look. We are all still wearing the raypack, the e-matter of the seats having adapted to their shape. If I pass, I might

“Oh we don’t mind. We’re not cold,” Meri said, being used to worse, when you’d have to choose between freezing your lips and talking through a mask. Our graphene markedly inflated when we got the car, trapping air like down in the tiny molecular pockets in their interior.

“Aren’t you afraid something will happen, and no one will find you?”

“Night vision’s good tonight,” Mikhail says, gesturing at the gibbous moon, which brings the rocky crests below to light. The plan is to leap from one peak to another. Looking in the distance, it’s hard to believe that I am supposed to cross such distances in mere moments. I feel the blood surge into my throat, and the throbbing of my heart turns into a racing. My breathing feels hot in my nose. I feel suddenly acutely aware of my whole body, in a way that reminds me of psychedelic experiences. I understand suddenly how flight can indeed be an analogy for telepathy, as an ultimate form of transcending the limits of one’s self, albeit physically rather than mentally.

Mikhail gives me a jovial slap on the shoulder. “Are you ready?” But there is no excuse not to be, no preparations left to make. In this world, almost as soon as we want to do something we get it right over with, with no obstacles to put it off, and all we have to do is hold on tight through the future shock of our mind’s sound barrier. In a world where everything is possible, it is only ourselves that hold us back from achieving anything we want.

I try not to think too much and just do it, but something holds me back, as if I’m about to jump into a great depth, except that the depth is that of the sky above. I take another look at the sky, opening up into the galaxy above, and with a wave of vertigo think of what the universe would be like if only for a moment there was no gravity.

But looking at the stars calls forth another thought in me: someday even the distance between the stars might become as negligible as that between countries now, and for a moment I close my eyes and imagine myself flying not just through these mountains, but beyond them, leaving them far below me in the atmosphere. But when I open my eyes the stars are still unreachable. I’ve thought far enough to come to some new limits I can grasp at, and they make it easier for me to face the limitless, if only by reminding me of their undesirability. As I succeed in reorienting myself from a new, wider perspective, I look much smaller from it, and I no longer take myself so serious.

I check my diadem to make sure it sits tight on my cranium. The raypack will still work without it, but like most electronics, the raypack is controlled primarily by my brain, though also secondarily through my suit. I experimentally float a few inches of the ground, rotating this way and that, and already have trouble to restrain myself from flailing around for hold. But little by little I start to make larger movements in the air. Using the brain input, it feels as if I’m just floating, but using my suit, it feels as if I’m actually flying of my own power, as if in microgravity.

I look at a level piece of land nearby on the same hill and target it in my computer. It feels as if I am but acting in a dream when I give my raypack a thrust and begin to climb into the sky. Keeping my look up at the sky for courage, for a moment I don’t realize just how far I’m going. Then at the height of my short flight, as I am about to descend I recover from my dissociation and flail my arms around for grasp, but the raypack slows me down as I approach the ground.

Looking around, I see the others land around me. The children skip towards me in little leaps. “If I tag you, you’ll have to follow me all the way to the stratosphere!” Meri says. It takes some moments for me to process this, so she slows down as she is about to tag me. I recoil.

“You’d better run,” Gero says, “or she’ll swoop down on you like a vulture for half an hour trying to get you to play along before she gives up.”

“You bet I will. Tell you what, I’ll give you another chance,” she says. “I’ll race you to the top,” she points at a nearby mountain. “I’ll land every time you land. But if I make it to the top first I’ll frighten you awake all night until you come after me.”

Again I fail to find a reply, and she doesn’t give me much time to protest and floats into position.

“Come on, slowpoke.” I think of how ironic it is to be taught to fly from a child, and for a moment I feel like I’m the real child here, held upright by his arms as he takes his first steps. Except that I’m allowed no respite between my first steps and my first footrace.

Again I take a careful look at where I want to go next, as I where about to make a leap from a high diving board for the first time. A few times when I’m about to fly I brace myself on one leg as if to make a little runup, when I stop short as I realize I cannot, in fact, fly, and a jump is therefore unnecessary. On the third time I become so impatient I suddenly shoot much higher into the air than before, and by the time I land halfway up the mountain, I am painting and feel as if I am sprinting. Two smaller leaps further I’m on top of the mountain and look back, but Meri merely shoots overhead and says, “I did mean that mountain over there!”

The others fly in front of me over the moonlit plateau when I realize I’ve landed on a crest of the actual mountain she’d pointed at. I have no time left to lose and fly after them. I actually make some headway on them when I realize I’m actually flying rather than just making measured leaps, and that I have nowhere set to land. I panic and begin to descend when I realize there are too many rocks beneath me to land at this speed, and I stop descending. Then, for the first time, I actually feel that my trajectory isn’t curved back to earth as every trajectory I’ve ever taken in my life, that it is, in fact, unaffected by it. I am detached from gravity, from the whole earth itself. If my breath wasn’t taken away I’d feel an urge to laugh.

I’m racing after the others as fast as I can now. The engine is so silent that I can’t hear it over the sound of the wind. I tell my suit, which is made out of e-matter, to form cuffs over my ears, and suddenly it becomes relatively quiet. For a moment I think I actually hear a bird fluttering from its perch.

I’m close enough to the others to see that they’re looking back at me. They’re slowing down. When I come close, Mikhail points at a spot in front of them. “You’d better catch up, if you want to be left alone.”

I look at the dot. “She’s too far away.” Mikhail shrugs. I stay with the rest of the group and feel much safer for it, even though they’d be able to help me from anywhere else. Even if the override somehow failed I could allow them control my suit if something went wrong.

When we make it to the top of the mountain, Meri looks at us with arms akimbo. Dead branches are floating into a pile, carried my e-matter drones. “I win,” she says to me. When we’ve landed, the pile catches fire. For a while Ada, Meri and Mikahil hum into the fire, forging a hologram above the fire into fractal art with the vibrations of their voice.

I move over to her and tag her. “Tag. There, you happy now?”

“That’s not me,” her voice says, but her lips stay sealed. The voice comes from above. I look up and start. She’s rapidly flying right at me with no signs of stopping, only to barrel roll right past me at the last moment. I scream.

“You haven’t seen the last of that,” Mikhail says with a smirk. “She’ll go on and on until you follow her to the stratosphere.”

“Wait, that was just a figure of speech, right?”

He slowly shakes his head. I groan. “Get that smirk of your face,” I say to him.

Laura moves over to where Meri’s model was just a while earlier and bends down to pick up a ball with an e-matter symbol on it. After a second she drops it again, and it expands into the form of a woman. Their lips are moving, but their voices are muted.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “I’m sleeping in Budapest tonight.”

“You’re exchanging houses again?” Mikhail asks.

“Yes, and this woman seems particularly interesting. She’s an artist and has covered the insides of her house entirely in abstract e-matter designs.”

“How many exchanges are you away from your own home again?”

“Well, it’s interesting. I’ve seen mountains before, but every house is an expression of a different personality. She has a long flight ahead of her, so I’ll have plenty of time to get to know her tonight.”

Meri makes another swoop for me. “Heaven and hell!” I curse.

Mikhail laughs. “Say, wasn’t her personality type introverted? And yours and Laura’s extraverted? You wouldn’t think so.”

“You believe in that kind of thing?”

“Don’t you? You did make that public on your profile.”

“I put it on ‘extraverted’ when I feel like it. It changes the way people interact with me. People aren’t that simple. Not only do they change often, but sometimes we can have opposite qualities in a number of ways. For example,” He looks at the sky. “What do you think she’s thinking right now?”

“She seems cheerful.”

“Sure she is, but I’d say she’s also anxious. You can have different feelings at the same time.”

“Anxiety and cheerfulness are both aspects of excitement, though, so they’re not really so different.”

“Would you fly into space just out of excitement, though? No, she might seem shallow right now, but by moving back and forth between us and the vacuum like a comet, she wants to find expression of some deeper side of her, a duality between utter loneliness and utter togetherness.”

“I have to go,” Laura says. She and Mikhail talk some more, but I’m lost in thought. I think about how Ada spent six months in isolation in the far north and look at her. She meets my look with such deep peace in her eyes that it stirs me. I quickly look away lest she’d notice, then realize that if I am to ever try telepathy I can’t keep any secrets. I will myself to look back at her, and see a smile has appeared on her lips. The sense of belonging in her expression passes onto me, and it makes me feel dizzy. I never noticed it before because she stayed on the background all evening. She doesn’t seem to mind, but I look away anyway, realizing only now that I don’t want to involve someone like myself in another’s life. And I realize that while my body may have been freed today, my mind is still as much bound by gravity as ever.

Meri swoops by again, almost making me fall into the fire. I curse. “Doesn’t she ever get tired? And does she really go all the way to the stratosphere and back in that time?”

“Much farther. She’s probably been all over the Bohemian massif by now. And no, she doesn’t get tired. When you’re used to it it doesn’t require any energy at all. With the override there’s no danger she has to focus on avoiding, after all.”

We say goodbye to Laura. It becomes silent for a while after this, and we gaze into the fire. It’s not actually needed for warmth, but it’s cosy nonetheless.

“So about this telepathy…” I begin, when I pick up my train of thoughts again.

“We’re ready when you are,” Mikhail says simply.

“So we’re doing a group telepathy, then?”

“You can do as you please, but it’s by far easiest way to start because it doesn’t go as deep. Being in telepathy doesn’t mean you can necessarily share everything with them as you do with yourself. It takes a bit of work. Even we can’t always do it with everyone, even though we’re trained at it.”

“Before we do this, I want to agree that we record this.”

“Why?”

I weigh my words for a while, then realize there’s no point in beating around the bush and I might as well be honest now. “I’m concerned about being accused of sexual harassment.”

“We give you our consent. That’s proof enough.”

“That’s not sexual consent, though.”

“In telepathy the law isn’t really clear what’s sexual and not: just being aware of someone else’s body could be seen as sexual. Besides, trying not to think of something is the surest way to ascertain you’ll think about it. Either way we could charge you if we really wanted to. You’ll just have to trust us. But it doesn’t have to be now.”

“Or you could start with someone who does give you sexual consent,” Ada sends to me. When I ascertain her lips aren’t moving, my eyes meet hers, but I don't know what to make of her Mona Lisa expression.

“We could just gain your trust by doing one-way telepathy first,” Gero says.

“Sure. Mikhail, I’d prefer to do this with you. We seem about the most similar people here, so it should be easiest.”

“I’m not very comfortable with that,” Mikhail says. No surprise, since he's clearly more of an extravert. “When I let someone know what I'm thinking I also want to know what they’re thinking about it.”

“Based on similarity, that would make me the next option,” Gero says.

“Well…”

“Don’t underestimate me because I’m young. I have accumulated more experiences than any human in the world, so much so that your own will hardly affect me more than the reminiscences of an old man. I am not just a child. In my mind I have taken on the form of hundreds of beings, men, women, animals. I’ve become everyone.”

I’m rather taken aback by his intensity. If there was a doubt on my mind about his neurosis, it’s gone now. “That’s why I’d rather not be on the receiving end right away.”

“You’re definitely the veteran among us in terms of telepathy, Gero, but I think it would be easier for Lucas to begin with receiving rather than transmitting. Alright, then, I suppose it’s easiest if I transmit. Are you ready?"

I move into a kneeling position. I take a deep breath. “I think so. I’ll lower my brainwave frequencies once we’ve begun.”

“Then do it now.” I do so. Closing my eyes, I become suddenly more aware of my body, and realize full telepathy would probably create some sexual tension with any gender, age or orientation. Some brain areas can be filtered out, but because of how all thought processes connect different brain areas, it severely limits the process. Online chatting is basically a form of telepathy too, since it transmits words only, but it’s never actually called that. As soon as it doesn’t involve the entire brain, it’s no longer telepathy but brain-computer interface.

When I become suddenly aware of having a second body, I feel dizzy, as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. My awareness shifts from one body to the other, making me feel like I’m swung back and forth. It doesn’t actually give me motion sickness, but it makes me feel lightheaded. I realize I’m fighting the process, and try to stop doing so and give in to becoming Mikhail, feeling myself sitting cross-legged before the fire.

At first he thinks he’s not thinking about much in particular, just focusing on his breath. Mikhail’s mood feels more stable than my own, and he is meditating on this sense of stability, trying to radiate it to myself. He seems to know better than I that this was what I need at this point in my life. Now he’s thinking of how I might think that he might think that I lack stability, and might not want him to go to the trouble of trying to give me stability. He refuses to go down this train of thought any further. In two-way telepathy he would, just to let it run out until we both get tired of it. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t try to think of what I’m thinking, but he can’t help but think more about others than himself. Perhaps he’s an extravert after all, he thinks. It feels awkward for him, more so than telepathy with others, as he doesn’t know what to do with himself on his own, though he used to be more of an introvert before he found this group. That’s why he doesn’t like to transmit one-way telepathy, even though perhaps it’s good for him, to keep balance. So he lowers his brainwave frequency further and tries to focus on himself, reaching into himself to find out just what it is that at this moment makes him who he is, until his awareness become made up more of feelings than thoughts. There is a sobriety about his personality, wont to takes things as they come. The deeper he reaches into himself, the more neutral the stuff of his mind becomes.

At first I don’t feel so very different as to feel confused: being at least somewhat similar to someone definitely makes it easier. But the process of becoming someone else is enough to make me forget myself. In the first moment what feels strange is not so much the way his mind feels as the feeling that I have always been him, and that who I really am is just a stranger.

It makes me feel dissociated from myself, as if I’m just another container for my consciousness. And as of now, that body over there just as well might be, for it is released from it, free to move anywhere across the world, just as free as my body in flight. I realize suddenly how small I am to the rest of the universe, how much there is to experience that I never could, not if I had the time of a hundred lifetimes.

As I look at the fire from his perspective, I see how even the same things feel different from another’s angle. The way his eyes tries to follow the flames, of how they move from one flame to another, is different from mine, in a way I realize is reflected throughout his mind. The content of his consciousness is not so different from mine, but its form is very different. It fits into different patterns, in a way that reminds me of architecture. His mind supports much the same basic structure as mine, but is sharper somehow, more geometrical — that’s the only way I can describe it. It turns in measured angles, in a way that reminds me somehow of arabesque.

I feel how in my own mind everything is vague by comparison, and as I focus again on my own mind it connects to Mikhail’s, and in an epiphany I become aware of faults in my own way of perception and learn from his. His patterns of perception spread through my own like a plume of a new ingredient dissolving in an alchemical brew, spitting fumes, changing its color, texture, consistency, taste, odor, bringing it closer to completion. The flow of new information burns its way into my brain, twisting new pathways this way and that in ways that tilt my world until it turns upside down, making me feel lightheaded.

I’d closed my eyes for a while and now, just moments later, opened them again with a start. My head is swimming as I feel my limits fall away like the walls of a cage. It makes me feel as if I’m under the influence of a drug, and I immediately know I’m addicted. I want more. There’s billions of more minds to explore. I feel a need to make more space in my mind, to allow the greatest mind to fit in its confines.

“I can’t wait until we share a session as a group.”

“That’s kind of difficult, to synchronize so many streams of consciousness like that,” Gero says. “It can be done, but it requires some experience with telepathic meditation. Otherwise we’d just dissociate from each other, so that we might as well not be in telepathy at all. Even with just two people it can be hard to sustain. In fact, we already dissociate from part of ourselves, and being in telepathy with the wrong person can actually make that worse if you’re not ready. That’s why it’s so important to learn to meditate, though, like learning any skill, but that can itself be done much faster through telepathy.”

He says all this almost too fast for me to take in. Listening at the way Gero talks, I wonder how anyone could ever synchronize their minds to his frantic speed or even want to. But when I see the way the others look at him I realize the warmth in their eyes isn’t just pity; it’s genuine, as if he plays a central role in their group. Maybe his volatile mind actually catalyzes the reaction between theirs, like shamans used overstimulation through rapid dance and music to induce a trance.

“So who did you learn it from?”

“Ada was the first,” Meri’s voice says, emerging behind them with her perennial smile.

“Oh, so you’ve given up, have you?” I say. “I’m not going to space with you.”

“No, my nanobattery actually ran out.” The others laugh. Mikhail tuts and seem about to raise concerns, but she cuts her short. “I’ve been spying on you from the underbrush for some time.”

“We know that,” Mikhail says. “You gave us your location, didn’t you?" He winked at her. "We’ll let you use some of our energy.”

“I don’t need that,” she says, while hugging herself against the cold. “We have the fire.”

“Come here,” Mikhail says, taking a cable from his cuff, but she’s already run over to Ada instead. While they wait for her batteries to recharge, they have an arm wrestle, but Meri cheats and uses her suit’s power.

“So did you all learn from Ada?”

“I didn’t,” Gero says. “I learned it by myself.”

“How does that work?”

“I actually started with animals, first with less sentient animals and then building up to ravens.”

“That’s why we call him the Raven,” Mikhail says.

“Isn’t that a violation of animal rights?”

Gero looks offended. “What do you mean by that?”

“He was receiving only,” Ada says. “It’s almost impossible to send to an animal.”

“No one else wanted to have telepathy with me,” bowing his head.

“It’s been hard for us to find someone too,” Mikhail says. “Though it tends to be much easier for children.”

“How long does it takes to learn?”

"The faster you can find yourself, the sooner you can do the same with someone else." She says this as if one has a new self in telepathy , shared between them and, well, oneself. I can't wait to find out what it would be like. If the whole is more than the sum of the parts, two-way telepathy must reach something greater than both persons together, perhaps greater than personhood itself.

“I learnt when I visited Ada in her geodome in Finnmark,” Meri says. “She’d have stayed there forever if it wasn’t for me, and turned into a snowman.” Now I understand why Ada was the first to teach everyone. She reminds me of the prophets that withdrew into the desert before returning with their epiphanies. But she doesn’t seem like the kind to try to overturn the world, knowing that the world is a sphere. But just looking in her eyes I see such insight in them that every question I ever asked myself draws me towards them, as if knowing the answer to lie beyond them.

“What’s the best way to find yourself?” I ask her.

“That's different for everyone. But for starters, giving up everything that isn’t part of who you are. You’re on the right track: you’ve already given up your home.” Even without telepathy, she seems to know that I was indeed not thinking of going back. But then, it’s not that uncommon.

“What else can I give up?”

“Your humanity,” she says. “Once you no longer see yourself as part of the human species, you can become part of something greater, of everything and nothing.”

“Is that what you did in your geodome?”

“I was trying to find out who I really was when I had no identity anymore. But I wouldn’t start with that. It's what I did afterwards."

“But before that you did swim there,” Meri says.

“She what?”

“Yes she did. She swam with dolphins.”

“You did? What, did you want to give up your habitat too?"

“Yes," she says simply, and when I just give her a blank stare, "Sometimes I even slept floating in the water. It felt like being rocked to sleep.”

"I never thought of using the suit’s inflation for that purpose."

"In a way our suits really make us more than human," Mikhail says. "If there were any reason to do so, we'd make it part of our body, but why would we, when we can do just as much without doing that? We are, essentially, cyborgs."

“Must have taken a lot of power to keep you warm," I say, with some concern that she ran out at some point. I can't imagine how cold the Norwegian Sea has to be at whatever time of the year.

“Yes. I had a solar kite follow me all the way. I also didn't quite always swim entirely on my own power, even though I wasn't in a hurry. Most of the time not much was going on except for the moving of one wave after another, up and down and up and down. It was a meditation in its own right."

"How long were you meditating in all?"

"About half a year." She laughs when she sees me arch my eyebrows. "I really needed it. I had a very busy life before that."

"I couldn't do nothing for so long."

"What would you do, if you could do anything else?"

I think for a while. I realize I have a lot more options than I ever gave any thought.

I chuckle. "Good question if we can really do anything. We don't really do as much as we should, do we?"

"Like flying to the stratosphere."

I suddenly realize how many opportunities I'm missing out on. Am I clinging to my limitations as a human being? I can't let that happen.

"You know what? Let's all go." I suddenly resolutely get up.

"Alright," Mikhail says. Meri takes off first, giving the cue for all the others to follow, and leaving me with no choice but to do the same. For a moment I stay behind, watching them go out of sight. It feels so abrupt to just fly so high, as if I'm wasting something that's too good for the moment. But if not now, then when? Perhaps it just feels too good for me, as if I'm touching something that's sacred, something that would overwhelm me with too much ecstasy, so much that it would turn back into agony. At that moment I look down again and see that Ada has stayed behind last, smiling at me. My heart skips a beat. Then she's off.

If I didn't feel sure about myself before, I do now. So what if it overwhelms me? One more time I remind myself that I need to do nothing to control my flight, and I shoot forth into the sky, trying to think of nothing else but overtaking the others. Once I get there and have nothing to focus on, I'll probably panic, but I try not to think about that now. I feel the wind shake me ever so slightly back and forth through my flight. It's not frightening, in fact the sensation gives me something solid to hold on to as I'm staring into the emptiness of the abyss above. For a few moments nothing happens other than my flying through the sky, not even a particular thought occurs to me, and I just cannot imagine how Ada could have spent six months doing nothing but stare at the sky, this black nothingness interspersed only with tiny extraneous lights from the past. The things she does frighten me, but she intrigues me all the more for it.

But I just can't look down until I've caught up with her, and only then I slow down. When I look at her, and she looks back, the world rises above her, and the sunlight that set a quarter of an hour earlier reveals her enigmatic smile. I'm not sure which is causing the wave of vertigo, but it makes me laugh. When her smile widens my belly twists into a knot, and I speed up towards the others. They're still going much faster than I. If they know this is frightening for me, they don't seem to care — unless they care to frighten me? I'm forced to speed up, and my helmet, usually folded at the nape, extends around my head. A few pockets in the back and side of my suit have inflated with oxygen.

The faster I go, the more the suit has to keep me from moving, so that my body stays in the right position to stay on my course and away from the others'. As I start to breathe faster, I wonder for a moment if I'm going to hyperventilate, but then I remember that my suit will just add carbon dioxide to my air anyway, so that I can't get a panic attack anyway. I stay calmer than I thought I would, but none the less excited for it.

"Where are we going?" I send to Mikhail. I've already seen they're going to a high-altitude balloon hotel, but I'd like to know more about it.

"It's a really nice place. Each room is also a restaurant, and all the rooms are made of e-matter screens, so we can make it look however we want. We can even make it entirely transparent, as if we're still floating in space."

I'm actually looking forward to something solid to stand on. "If it's all the same for you, I'd prefer if you'd make it look transparent just for you. We all have our own mindcom, but we'll have only one room."

"It won't be the same. If you don't want it transparent we'll just pick something else… But there it is."

It takes a while before I can see any details that distinguish it from the stars around it, and another while before I see the actual hotel beneath the balloon.

"Looks pretty small."

"It doesn't get many visitors, strange as it sounds."

I wouldn't be too sure about going here by myself either. It's one thing to take a shuttle to space now and then, another to actually take a raypack here. No one else is inside, so we take the dining hall for ourselves and can use the e-matter of the entire hotel. The dining hall in the center is circular, and the room around it form a shell around it. The hall is empty, as the chairs and tables are e-matter retracted into the floor. Instead of using them, we sit down cross-legged in the center and let the floor soften. When I veto making the entire hotel transparent, we settle on a compromise and make it translucent, letting the blue-on-orange sunset reflect in the edges of the walls. To better appreciate the kaleidoscope, we don't turn on any light.

"It looks interesting like this too," Meri says, looking over the layout of the empty building. "Like a ghost's house."

"This does give me a taste of what it was like in your geodome," I say to Ada, as the loneliness of the place gets through to me. It makes me feel empty inside, and I realize that I haven't eaten anything since morning. I really don't know what I feel like eating, so I quickly tell the cooker to put together all the nutrients my body is most lacking right now. The others follow suit, though except for Ada they take more time in choosing the form the meal is to take on.

"It's not the same. The point of my being there was that once winter came and I had only some energy left, until the sun came up again there was no going back. I was going to enter into the deepest layers of my unconscious to find out what was there." The utter silence that follows in the skylodge makes it sounds like a ghost story, and it sure feels like one to me. But it's always been nightmares that interested me most of all dreams, because they come from those corners of my mind that are still undiscovered, a wilderness.

"So you're a psychonaut like me. I myself am an oneironaut, in particular." I briefly glimpse over her research and see that she's published the full brain record of her entire six months of meditations. If I wanted to I could simply download her memories, and I make a note to myself to at least download the ones with the highest dopamine ratings. It's rare for people to be so open. People usually handpick the thoughts they want others to see.

"Oh, so you're actually already quite an advanced meditator!" Mikhail says. "You might actually do pretty well in full telepathy already."

"Hey, maybe we could share a dream!" Ada says, her face lighting up. "We're pretty much doing the same thing already anyway."

I feel the rush of blood in my belly again. I don't know how to reply.

"It's also kind of what I'm doing," Gero says, "except I look closer than either of you."

"I'm doing that with animals," Meri says. "Seeing what perceptions fit in what species' brains and why."

Mikhail feels our eyes on him when he doesn't speak. "Oh… for me it's always been subjects with mathematics, ranging from physics to economics. But a theme that's been recurring often is multifractal systems."

"Oh, I've had a question about fractals in  for the longest time…" Gero asks Mikhail, and they're soon exchanging research notes. Meri and Ada soon join in. I learn a lot from their discussion, but having nothing to add I feel rather useless. When it gets increasingly abstract, Gero interrupts: "Actually, it would be better if we continued this in telepathy." He looks at me. "It'll take much less time."

"No, never mind. It's getting late anyway," Mikhail says. "You can download the memories from my account."

"You know what? I'll download them too." I've never liked the idea of downloading raw memories from someone's brain, since other memories come with it as well, but it can take a while before knowledge from the latest research gets processed into a form that can be downloaded seamlessly into one's brain.

"Yeah, in telepathy you'll be absorbing parts of the other person's mind into your own anyway," Mikhail says, seeing my anxiety.

"Don't worry, Ada says. "If you know who you are, you won't lose it. And if you don't know who you are, then you can't lose yourself because you already have."

"But who am I?"

"Consciousness," Ada says. "In all its forms. The only danger of losing yourself when downloading someone's memories is if they'd convince you to repress some part of your consciousness."

"I know. And I guess as someone whose life work it has been to uncover repressed feelings, I should be safe. But this is the first time I've ever downloaded memories from, well, strangers."

"Whose would you rather have?" Mikhail asks.

"Ada's," I say, with such immediacy that Meri giggles. "Obviously," I add. Indeed, when we make the transfer it is almost seamless. This doesn't mean I can instantly assimilate the memories, but once we talk about it quickly feels as if I'd always known these things. Ada's mind is so neutral that I hardly notice a difference between Ada's memories and my own except for the pattern by which she memorizes. Usually bits of opinion are transferred with memories by accident, and while these are usually rejected by the host mind, it slows down the process of assimilation. Once I've assimilated the memories, I understand a lot more about where they are in their research, and, since we're all studying the same subject on some level, my own.

"Instant knowledge," I say with a chuckle.

"Telepathy really is the solution to all our problems," Mikhail says. "It's already ended world poverty, but still I don't think the full extent of its potential hasn't dawned on us yet."

"It's amazing it took so long for people to buy into it," Gero says. "The proof of concept had been there for decades. If everyone had worked together as much as they did for the space race, it would've been a matter of years."

"Maybe it takes telepathy to work together the way we do," Meri says. A silence falls, and I know they're all waiting for me.

"Speaking of which, I don't think I can delay this any longer. Let's do it. Let's start with a shared dream, since that's what I'm used to."

"So sensory only," Meri says, ever so slightly sounding disappointed.

"Yes."

"That's actually something we're not quite used to," Mikhail says with a smile. Ada chuckles. "We might actually be the ones learning from you. In a dream state you actually reveal far more of yourself."

"I think it's a great idea," Gero says. "we won't feel so self-conscious that way."

"For you it's easy," Mikhail says. "You're in altered states all the time." I see on Gero's account that he's published hundreds of different altered states he's tried by adjusting his neurotransmitters in each brain area to particular settings, each available for download. Now I understand why he seems so odd. Virtual drugs may have safeguards against neurotoxicity, but the experiences still change one's personality. He's probably a much better person than I am, but I don't understand the much wider range of emotions he feels. But now I understand him, I feel a lot more respect for him. 

"Well, anyway, I'm tired." For the second time this hour the sun has set. Ada is already lying on her side.

"Yeah, let's go," Mikhail says, seemingly oblivious to the irony. We all lie down in the floor, which softens at the touch. I close my eyes, and at my command my brain instantly enters into the dream state. The noise in my head morphs into the plants of a jungle. I skip through the underbrush without knowing where I'm going, brushing aside the foliage without a care in the world until suddenly, when I sweep away one frond, in a clearing Ada appears before me stark naked. My hear stops. I cast my eyes down, but to my relief I am not naked myself, which means that even in dreams, I'm still inhibited.

Ada, meanwhile, lays herself bare to all the tangle of life around her. The forest becomes alive around her, seeming to move in- and outward with her breath, causing the forest floor to pulse with sunlight. As she comes closer the leaves and branches twist and turn around her with the same uncontainable emotion as her body. Tendrils caress her limbs as they seek for hold to grow, only to let her slip through them and yet, continue to curl around where her body has been.

"Beware," I say, as she curves around me in turn. "I'm toxic. You should be more careful in the jungle." My suit turns yellow and black like a dart frog's.

"So I am," she says, and taking my head in her hands kisses me, seeming to suck the poison out of my head like a vampire, leaving me helpless like a dead husk to her intoxicating touch.

I wake up with a strangely empty feeling, as if paralyzed by Ada's bite. Ada has woken up too.

"Did you dream what I dreamt?" I ask.

"No," she says. When I wonder how she knows what I dreamt before I've sent her anything, I realize this is a false awakening, and I still have no idea if the Ada I saw in my dream is any more real than the Ada I see now. I could find out using my braincom, since it can activate certain brain areas to allow me to read it in my sleep, but as soon as I think of doing so, a vibration shakes the skyhouse, and from the glow outside I see that we're falling. I realize I'm terrified of finding out.

"You need to calm down if you want to—"

The crash cuts her off, and I'm left to wonder what I do want.

In the next dream, I find myself walking along a snowy ridge, Ada at my side. We're both clad in thick down jackets. We're smiling at each other.

"You seem a lot more at ease here."

I check her tab. She's real.

"I can't hurt you here." I can only protect her here, I think, and remember suddenly that I don't need to talk and she can read all my thoughts.

"Protect me from what? Thoughts can never hurt me," she says. She giggles and runs off the edge of the ridge, slipping from my grasp. I follow her, but when I grab her I trip, and we fall down the slope, calling an avalanche down upon us. She squeals with laughter, but then I feel my bones break and wake up. Ada wakes up more slowly, even though she felt the same pain I felt.

"Shush, it's just a thought," she sends to me.

"Where did that memory come from?" I ask. She doesn't speak, and sends that I should be quiet, so the others don't wake up.

"A good friend of mine died in an avalanche," she sends. "I wanted to feel what she experienced as she died. She thought of me right as she died. There was such beauty in the love she put in that thought. So I played those last memories again and again, in spite of the pain, until I got quite used to it. But it was her last moments of consciousness that really got to me. She hurt so much in those last moments, and yet she still desire to live on, to hang on to those last moments of life, even if all she could feel was pain. Maybe that's when I realized that pain is just another experience, just like pleasure, if anything, more intense. I think that's what made so many people kill themselves back in those days, but for me, it was the beginning of a new life, and it's when I began my meditations."

I feel ever more in awe of her, and I'm all too glad to let her know that. She smiles at me. I want to give her a hug, but she whispers "Come," and goes right back to sleep.

I follow suit, and find myself at the foot of the mountains and the edge of the forest, between ice and fire, and she wraps her body around my down jacket.

"You feel nice and warm," she says. The down jacket turns into a black panther fur.

We close our eyes, and I feel her body from within, the sensation of how my hips stroke her inner thighs.

"I don't want to make you feel like I'm using you," I say.

"We can't misunderstand each other. We feel what the other feels. All you do for me you do for yourself." The thought seems to come out of both our minds. Our thoughts run into each other like twining fingers. She locks her eyes on mine as I stroke her nose with mine. The boundaries between us melt like the horizon between earth and sky into a mirage. The world spins as it falls away, until we are all that exists and there is no up and down, only you and I.

In the kitchen I find we're almost out of cereal, so I tell my computer to cut some. It says there isn’t any. That can’t be right. I walk up the stairs to the roof and open the trapdoor into the hydroponics greenhouse. Coming from the dark of the bedroom, my eyes take a while to adjust to the bright sunlight concentrated by the lenses and mirrors above me. The cereal plants have all already been harvested. I could swear I saw them here yesterday, but the only traces I see are the few grains next to the chute door.

When I see the electric knife is still uncleaned, I walk back down again and into the kitchen, where I hear the sound of machines coming from the storage room. Inside I stumble into Carlos, one of the longest inhabitants of the commune. He's usually the one who takes care of things here, though he does not own it any more than the rest of us.

Carlos: "It'll be just a minute," he says, looking at the grain processing machines. "I'm sorry, I should've thought of this, but there were other things on my mind."

"What are you talking about? I told you before, you're no more responsible for this than the rest of us."

Carlos: "Yes, but if everyone thinks this way…"

"Then we'll learn for ourselves. Isn't that the point of anarchism? Now I'll know to think about this next time."

Carlos: "Maybe you're right. It's a bit early to argue for me."

"Right, then sleep in next time. Breakfast can wait anyway. What have you got here?" I ask, pointing at the machines.

Carlos: "Just oats. And flour, but there's still a little bit of bread."

"I guess I'll just take the bread and probably go."

Carlos: "Really? Why in such a hurry? Where are you going?"

"North, anywhere away from these hippies. What are they doing here anyway?"

Carlos: "Haven't you heard? A revolution."

"A revolution! It's nothing but an excuse to keep dreaming without doing anything about the real problems of our time. Even a way to come to terms with them, because they could always say of their problems that they will lead up to one. Governments couldn't have come up with a better opium for the masses if they tried."

He stays silent and checks the roasted cereal in the machines.

I know I should let it go. I'm just so frustrated with people that are just waiting for something to happen on account of others. That's why I left. My parents want me to believe they want freedom as much as I, but keep trying  to get me into a job with the already falling government to climb up in its hierarchy. They think now's the best time to be a politician, as politics is changing more than ever.

Admittedly, without the government having held the referendums the people petitioned for, it wouldn't have allowed crowdfunding as a deductible alternative to taxes for public services, not without a revolution. But by doing that it already handed over its power to the people, and over the past twenty years it's formed greater layers of organization until the government lost its power and became something merely nominal, like royalties in Europe: an evolutionary vestige, like the human tailbone… But I was born after all this. Maybe if I had lived in their time I would see it all differently, but there’s just nothing you can do with them. They never listen to anything that doesn’t agree with their group think. Might as well give up on them.”

Carlos: "Don't say that! That's you being weak. If you can't help people in their weakness, what in the world can you do for others at all? We were before where they are now, and that's proof enough that there is hope for them."

Just now the millennial I saw earlier comes in.

Carlos: "Tell him what you think about him, Lucas."

"Eh…" He grabs my arm and forces me to look at him. His eyes are already glazed over with marijuana, but I'm not sure if it's the marijuana or the dreadlocks that most bother me about him. I think of what a long way it has gone from the Indian brahmans who didn't care what they looked like to others, to those who turned their hair into dreadlocks just to fit in. Then I realize how brahmans must have eventually turned into a caste that people needed to fit into in the first place. Because of people like me, who shunned those that weren’t as enlightened as them.

"I didn’t mean it like that."

Carlos: "He thinks you're too weak to be helped, a hopeless case, the end, game over. You're ready to die, fit for the slaughter. Not just you, mind you, but your whole generation."

I look at Carlos. "What's gotten into you?" He looks apologetic. "I'm sorry, there's just been a lot of this kind of friction lately. I thought we'd be over this in our new world but it just never ends, it never ends. We could live in heaven and we'd still turn it into a hell." He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

Then I look back at him. But he's certainly achieved one thing. The glaze in his eyes is gone, and he's wide awake.

"Maybe you're right," he says. "Fit for the slaughter? Well we've always been treated like sheep. For thousands of years they taught us that's just what we are. It takes time to deal with the aftermath, Carl. We'll get there someday." He pats him on the back, seeming more worried about him than about himself, and walks out.

"Wait!" Carlos still says.

"Even if it’s too late for them, it’ll end with them. We’re different."

"Yeah, right," he says sarcastically. "You know what's been stressing me out so much?"

"I was wondering about that."

Carlos: "Well, the other night we had trouble here when these transhumanists were here, trying to win people over for their cause. We had to vote to send some people away, but by doing that we kind of picked sides already, and I'm worried about what that could mean to the commune. This could be coming back to me."

"So who had a problem with who?"

Carlos: "I don't even know how it started, but does it matter? What I do remember is that someone said of the other that if they're really so different perhaps they should exterminate them."

"They were just joking. Come on now, that's a thing of the past. " But I don't feel as sure as I sound. Doesn’t it always start with threats? In panarchist Europe no one would ever have to start a war, but what about the rest of the world?

"You really need to try something different. You’re getting stuck in a routine here, and that’s the surest way to get neurotic. I can hardly imagine what it must have done to people to do the same thing over and over every day of their lives like you did for years. Why don't you come with me? This place will be just fine without you. The rest will learn to take care of this place."

Carlos: "This place will become a mess."

"That's not true. We all helped clean up. And even if it does become a mess, then they'll be forced to clean up the mess eventually."

He stares out into space and mutters about some things he still has to take care of.

Carlos: "You know what? Alright, I'm coming with you."

"See, that's the difference between you and the millennials. You choose to change. You might be neurotic but you're not hopeless."

Carlos: "I've got to finish some things I started though."

"For God's sake, how can you find so many little things to do in a fully automated building? Just write it on a sign for the others."

Carlos: "Say what you want but I have to bag the cereals. Can't just leave them to rot."

"Can't take that long. I'll see you on the road."

Carlos: "You're heading north, right?"

"Right, you'll see where I am on my profile." I raise my hand as I walk out. When you can meet anyone anywhere, you hardly bother to say goodbye if at all.

I take a deep breath when I'm outside, enjoying the fresh air from the vertical gardens covering the buildings. The buildings have already covered some of the crops with plastic to form small greenhouses, including, of course, all of those on the roof. of the crops are already out of season and have been covered with plastic panes by the machines and a few electric cars whiz by. It must be rush hour. Of course that doesn't mean much when everyone is working from home, or from anywhere, in fact. Those that do make use of the roads are mostly those who travel.

A woman opens her window and extends a picker at a row of grapes below her sill, an old-fashioned tool with a pincer and scissor at the end. Usually people just use cutters now, but with these old little houses whose walls don't line up, it's not always worth the trouble installing one. I follow her movements with interest, squinting. The woman looks at me askant, then smiles a little in compensation and withdraws. I realize my frown probably makes me look a little creepy, but my eyes are still adjusting to the daylight.

I check the time. It's almost 300. In the new time scale most modern people use now, there are 864,00 hectaseconds: 400 is noon and 200 is early morning. Ever since all files were digitized, it was easy for anyone to adjust the time formats on all of them for themselves, which began a competition between different formats online. The 864 hectasec day soon won over the ten hour, 144-minute per hour day, but for the year, there were a lot of formats for a long time, and this gives some idea of just how anarchic our society is, that even entire new timelines can be put forward by anyone. Most of them were ideological, most of them based on some historical event, one of them on the publication of the Origin of Species, but eventually one that came on top was one that was neutral: the Annus Annorum or Year of the Year, based solely on the date of its own birth as if this was itself a historical event, as it involves the transcendence of ideology. To be neutral to all cultures, its New Year is simply the winter solstice, December the 21st, and when younger people stopped celebrating the old New Year, Christmas and the other Christian Holidays soon followed, replaced by the equinoxes and solstices. Some have seen it as a manifesto of nihilism, and indeed it was invented at the height of the nihilist era.

I hunch my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. I should've brought a pillow. It's one of the things that's not provided in the communes since they get lost or stolen quickly. I didn't really make any preparations for this trip at all. I'll probably need my inflatable clothing if I'm heading to the cold north, especially if I'm planning to sleep outside on my way as well. Once I have that I have everything: warm clothing if inflated, cool clothing if uninflated, and if zipped, a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, bivy bag and raincoat. If I'm really not turning back, if I'm really going to get out into the world, I'll need one. I tell my computer to get me one.

A signal on my mindcom lets me know that my inflatable has arrived by pneumatic tube at the nearest supermarket, asking me whether I want to collect it or if I want it delivered by quadrotor. I choose the latter. A minute later it's there. The laminate is made of graphene oxide, which is both perfectly waterproof and perfectly breathable. As it can be inflated any amount needed, it can essentially allow me to survive in any weather conditions. I can go anywhere now. The whole world lies before me.

I tell my computer to mark me as a hitchhiker and walk down the road. I specify no destination other than the north. A few minutes later a slightly older man stops his car and picks me up. His tab says he's called Hugo.

"Hi Hugo."

"Hi. I heard from your profile you're an oneironaut," he says after we've talked for some time. His driving is very erratic and I find it hard to concentrate. The car's computer would override if we were ever in danger, but his maneuvers make my stomach lurch. "Then I just knew I had to pick you up. What kind of dreams did you have?"

"Well, I was in a dream cooperative for the past few years."

"Oh really, so you're actually a professional oneironaut! Have you done any research?"

"I'm not too focused on controlled studies. Any child can do that now, with all the tools for research being available online. And with people making almost all data about themselves public, you don't even need to do anything to do research in psychology. I'm mostly trying to uncover new data from deeper layers of my own unconscious, so that I can let my computer look for possible patterns in them so I can learn as I go. But I wouldn't call myself a researcher, since we're all pretty much 'researchers' now."

"I never see any patterns in my dreams. What do you see in yours?"

"Well… It's hard to explain really. It's not so much about what's going on in the dream as much as the feeling of the dream. You see, in a dream you're not just doing things as you would in the real world. Everything in the dream is really a symbol, it's part of your own mind, and interacting with it is interacting with your own mind. In the dream world everything is full of meaning, even the most mundane things."

"Such as?"

I looked around for examples. "This car drive might be a symbol of a death wish." I chuckle.

"You're not scared are you?" He suddenly turned the wheel around to one side and raised his hands as if in a roller coaster ride as the car made a turnabout and began to drive in circles in between the cars on both sides of the road. He laughed. The car dodged them all, but not without lurching side to side with as much violence as if we had already crashed. The car soon slowed down and after a few seconds he took the wheel back in hands.

I've blanched. I wasn't as familiar as him with the extent of reliability of the driver. "It was just an example. It might also be a symbol of something else, such as liberation. Sometimes there are symbols that mean the opposite of what you expect."

"It'll be over soon, actually." We drove onto the maglev highway, where all cars within the same lane automatically drove at the same speed. This made the cars like a train, so that except at an exit one couldn't drive the car.

"We had this crazy theory once which we wanted to test. We wanted to dig into the earth and fly into the sky to find the heaven and hell of our unconscious, to see what they'd look like, and more importantly, how we'd feel there. Not only that, but we wanted to talk to our own angels and demons, see what they had to say to us, and then, if possible, make them talk to each other."

"How did that go?"

"At first it didn't go so well. Perhaps it was that our unconscious was too influenced by stereotypes, but at any rate our demons displayed nothing but pure chaos and our angels nothing but pure order, bent on nothing but pure destruction and pure creation. Perhaps at their core that's what they are, but in their pure, extreme form, they were in such a raw form that they provided little material for analysis. Then I brought my angels and demons to the earth to see beyond their false surface, and the closer to Earth they came, the more human they became. Eventually, when they came close enough together, they became rather normal people, the difference between them being that one was left-brained and the other right-brained. The one thing that remained the same about them is that they did not get along, mostly on account of one being egoist and the other altruist. They could both do good to others and to themselves alike, but their approaches were different."

"So which won?"

"Heaven and hell forbid that either would win! They're nothing without each other. Eventually we actually managed to find a way to make them connect. The problem is that in doing so they eventually destroyed each other our, so that they had to separate again. All this was harder than it sounds, and took us years to find a way to do that."

I notice the change in landscape as we drive into the Pyrenees.

"Where are we going, anyway?"

"Well, if you wanted to go anywhere, you're surely on the right car. I'm following the superhighway all the way to Berlin."

"Through the Rhone-Rhine axis?"

"Of course. I don't know of any that go through the Alps. Montpelier, Lyon, Basel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin. Where are you going after that?"

"I don't know. Far away from here. Anywhere."

"You know, if you want to be anywhere, why don't you travel in virtuality?"

I look at him. "But I am. Didn't you see that on my profile?"

"Oh. No, it must have escaped me." There's an awkward silence for a moment, and he looks at me carefully, trying to see if I really am an avatar. I laugh, giving away that it was a joke.

"Oh, you think that's funny? How could I know the difference? But seriously, why don't you?"

"I don't know. I'll probably do a lot of my traveling in virtuality, but sometimes I just want to be there and feel I really am there. Sometimes I even feel like not taking any electronics with me so that I can be nowhere else." As always, I’m wearing my suit, in spite of the hot weather. It can stimulate my nervous system in any way reality can, including exercise by resisting my movements, with artificial muscles which can tighten and relax, which can also be used to actually accelerate my movements. Through suspension from a portable frame, it could even make me move without actually going anywhere. Meanwhile, everyone else who had turned on virtuality could perceive me as in reality through their interface.

He snorts. "You have no idea what you're looking for are you?"

"How do you know I'm looking for something."

"Why else would you leave everything behind?"

“I didn’t leave anything behind. I have everything I need with me. Why wouldn’t I leave?”

“That’s one way to look at it. I guess I’m growing old.” I look at him, then look him up. He’s not even thirty, barely a fifth through his current lifespan. A bit early to be old.

“We’re all old,” I say. “Most of us can’t even keep up with children. How can we ever catch up with them? They spent their entire lives in telepathy. Anyone who’s lived in the isolation we have is maimed for life. Still, it's one thing I'm resolved to try harder to do more."

“What?”

“Telepathy.”

“That’s easier said and done. Not many people want to open up like that to a stranger.”

“It hasn’t been easy for me to do it outside of my work team either, and even then not as much as I would like. I’m always the one insisting on shared dreaming. But if I need to I’ll do it with children. They’re far more open to that, probably just because they keep up with the times more than most of us.”

He raises his eyebrows. “People will talk,” he says.

With a sadness I realize how much of a divide there is between the youngest and oldest generations today, and how much it’s driven us apart. Borders are no longer formed along countries but along age groups. Children are turning into a higher species, all but leaving us behind, and perhaps there’s no way for me to become one of them. I often wish I was born as one of them.

“Let them talk,” I sigh. “Nowadays they can do what they want. And we can agree to keep a record of the telepathic sessions, so that they can’t make false accusations against me.”

“I have a better idea,” he says. “Here and there there have recently been some groups emerging that seem to be doing a pretty good job at, as you put it, keeping up with children. They’re transhumanist groups, but they call themselves transhuman, as they believe that telepathy is what distinguishes humans from transhumans and they communicate more through telepathy than anything else. I know one of them is in Berlin.”

“Why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

“It’s not too long ago that these groups began to emerge.”

“To be fair, it’s not that long ago that telepathy came on the market. So what do you mean with not too long ago? A few weeks?”

“More like, a few months"

It’s clear that this man already has another time frame than I do. “Then why didn’t I hear about this? Considering my interests, it should’ve been all over my feeds.”

“It’s not a very public project. In fact they want to avoid publicity as much as possible. They believe in a more peer-to-peer rather than peer-to-crowd approach.”

“Meaning I should’ve heard about it.”

“There’s not as many transhumanists among your circles as you would think. Usually there’s somewhere the chain stops. I only know about it because I happened to have a friend of a friend of a friend who knew the founder of the Berlin group.“

“That’s pretty private even by peer-to-peer standards.”

“That’s not all. They make you perform a test before you enter. They’re kind of elitist.”

“It sounds almost like a sect.” But on the other hand I could understand that this might’ve been the only way to prevent them from being inundated by today’s cosmopolitan society. There would be a lot of people who would like to be able to say that they were part of a “transhuman” group. But that’s exactly what I don’t trust about it: why do they need to call themselves that?

“I don’t know what it’s like. I only have hearsay.”

“Alright, I’ll take a look.” That’s probably the people they want to keep out. But I’m more serious about it than I betray.

“Will you come too?”

“No, I already have plans. But you know what, the meeting is only tonight, and I’m going to be early myself. Why don’t we visit some places on the way.  The Swiss Alps are only minutes out of our way."

I think about Carlos. He could use that to clear his mind, and according to his profile he likes mountaineering. He’s already following me in another car, and a little later it has shifted through the trains and attached to ours, the front of one and the back of the other opening up to each other to connect the two.

That day we end up hiking across the edge of a glacier. Most of our hike we have a view on the lake next to us, as well of the icebergs which used to be part of the glacier. Sensors on the soles of our boots tell us where we can move safely by superimposing a 3D-map of the glacier’s structure on our vision, color-coded for safety levels from green to red based on our computers’ projections of their flow. Several times we’re forced to take a detour because of a possibility of iceberg calving, and one time we actually see the place where we were detoured from subside. We’re now half a kilometer from the lake, and since we’re close to the far side, we decide not to turn back but move slightly up the glacier instead.

As the ice beneath our feet is very hydrophilic, the gecko surface on our boots, which uses capillary force, sticks to their surface quite well. The entire surface of my suit has the same gecko surface, and as I see its adhesiveness demonstrated on the ice, I quickly become more confident and take the lead, up to a point where I actually just slightly use my suit to accelerate me, just to prove to myself that I can.

My computer can’t actually override my body’s movements as it could a car’s to avoid accidents, as they’re too complex for it too coordinate: it can only “resist or assist” the movements already in process. Nonetheless, I feel safe knowing that even if I’d somehow manage to fall into a crevasse (such as the one below the snow right in front of me now), I could easily save myself just by touching its walls. I try touching the ice below me with the glove parts, then with my knees and elbows. It automatically triggers water suction into the surface.

“What are you doing?” Hugo says as he and Carlos catch up with me.

I suddenly feel mischievous and pretend to fall over, throwing all my weight on the snow in front of me. It collapses. As soon as I fall below the edge I hold on to the walls. My limbs tremble, but the graphene suit holds regardless. The suit’s muscles tighten.

“Lucas!” Hugo shouts. But I hear Carlos scoff.

“You rascal!” he says as he bends over the edge. “I could tell from that look that you were up to mischief.”

“Let’s go down. The echo says it goes down into an ice cave at the edge.”

“Are you mad? A glacier is a river of ice. Up here it may be pretty solid, but the deeper you go the more fluid the river becomes.”

“This area is supposed to be quite stable the next few hours. Anyway, I can go alone and catch up later.”

He doesn’t immediately reply. When Carlos is about to say something, I interrupt him by withdrawing the water from the gecko and slip down the crevasse. Carlos soon comes behind in the bottom of the crevasse.

“Alright, so maybe I lied. Obviously it doesn’t quite lead all the way into the cave.”

Whatever he’s saying is drowned in the high-pitched sound of suit’s boots’ vibrations, as its  expands and contracts at a high frequency. As the suit’s nanodiamonds press against the ice walls, the ice liquefies and the water is pumped back out by the gecko, where it pools around my legs. Our hoods close in front of our heads, but shortly after the suit slowly lets us slide along the walls to our feet in the ice cave, and the hoods retract. I message Hugo that the coast is clear, but only after some convincing he slides down after us.

He looks at my flushed face.

“Hard to believe this is the boy I startled with a little joyriding,” he says.

“I don’t belong in a vehicle,” I say as I turn to look at the ice cave’s chipped walls, glistening in our suits’ glow. “I like to feel in control.” Walking further down we soon see a light at the end, where the cave emerges back into the lake. I propose diving to the other side of the lake, but my companions demur. Instead, while they sit by the side, I take a swim by myself. I use my suit as drysuit, though it can also reprogram itself into a wetsuit.

Carlos eventually tries the water for himself, and when Hugo is left by himself beneath the weight of the glacier, he soon follows. Once we are in the midst of the lake, the decision is easily made to swim to the other side instead of swimming back. None of us are really very sure about going back up the crevasse. It must have been a glacier river at some point, but had obviously caved in before we came here.

Once on the other side of the lake, we move down the mountain to a geodesic cabin on a hiking trail, which is also a tavern open for tourists. Two Chinese women in their thirties are there, and I notice that they’re trying to speak Russian with each other, evoking each other’s laughter as they try to pronounce the words their translator gives them.

We give each other a friendly greeting, to include each other as part of our social groups, but after the fatigue of our hike, don’t immediately begin to talk with each other. We lay back into the seats and look up at the cirrus clouds. We sink into the e-matter as it conforms to the shape of our bodies, making us feel almost like a fetus in a uterus. Tired as we are, they all but lull us to sleep.

After a brief, quiet rest, we serve ourselves some drinks. Remote as it is, there is no pneumatic tube, but Hugo is very particular on his old-fashioned tastes, and decides it’s worth it for him to run to the nearby highway to get some arak from a station, something which, using his suit, he says should not take him longer than five minutes.

Carlos considers going with him, as he feels like “stimracing” with him, but we decide on doing so all together afterwards on the trail. At first I’m not sure if I feel like it. The thick suit of artificial muscles doesn’t wick very well, and while I usually don’t mind being sweaty in the hot Mediterranean, I don’t feel like it suits the cold Alps, even if I could just inflate my suit so I wouldn’t actually be cold.

I’m trying to find out if there’s any way to increase the wicking of the suit without permanently compromising its haptic virtuality when one of the two women sitting on another table warmly greets me. I feel a little awkward when I realize I was looking in their general direction when I was surfing, so that from their viewpoint I could have been staring for all they knew, and it takes me a moment to greet them back.

“Hi,” I say. I take a quick glance over their tab. They’re sisters called Ning and Yi, who are near the end of their two-year-long journey of the Trans-Eurasian Trail, sometimes called the Trading Road Trail, a 20 gigameter hiking trail that travels continually through mountain ranges: the Khingan and Hengduan in China, the Himalayas in India and Nepal, the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, the Elburz in north-Iran, the Pontic mountains in north-Turkey, the Carpathians in the Balkan, the Alps, and the Appenines.

The hikers seem to think I’m still reading when they wait patiently through my speechlessness. Only when I drop my jaw, they become aware of it, and laugh in unison. I begin to utter several sounds, but no words I can think of do justice to  my astonishment.

The only possible explanation presents itself to me: “You were cheating, right?”

Their laugh suddenly makes way for a serious expression. Ning says, “No, we vowed to walk on our own power the whole way. Otherwise we might as well have gone by car. We wanted to take our time with each landscape to cultivate patience.”

“Well, surely you must’ve become buddhas by now! But I think you must be one of the few people to ever do that.”

“Most people cheat at some point, if  but they eventually realize that it was a mistake and give it up, usually once they’re in good form. It becomes a slippery slope to cheat whenever you’re tired or bored.”

“How long have you been on the way?” As I don’t want them to repeat their answers when Carlos and Hugo come back, I also ask, “Do you mind if I forward this conversation to my friends?” They’ve probably answered these questions a thousand times by now.

“Two years.“ They don’t answer on my other question, but it was mostly rhetorical. Almost everyone records their life nowadays, and the few people, mostly from older generations, that don’t want to be recorded are automatically censored.

“However do any of you make so much time free for that?”

“Almost all of us keep working on the trail. We’ve even met a few people who are spending their entire life on trails like this, since they can work and play from anywhere anyway in virtuality. Traveling doesn’t really interfere with our lives at home, if anything it’s the other way around. We’re much healthier than we’d be otherwise, so it makes us better at everything.”

“Most of our generation are living as cosmopolitans. People really had no idea when they said a hundred years ago that the world had become a village. But few people actually spend that long in the wilderness.”

“Why not, when you have civilization in your pocket?”

“Ah, yes, but you can say the same thing about nature.”

“You know it’s not the same. You have to feel like you’re really there, in the middle of nowhere.”

I look from NIng to Yi, who has so far remained silent. She has a far-away look in her eyes. I wonder how the two changed through their experience. They radiate a strength and calm I can’t quite describe.

“So where will you go next?” I ask.

“Well, the main trail goes from Beijing to Rome, but an alternate route begins at the Pacific Coast in Japan and ends at the Atlantic Coast in Spain. We started in Beijing, but we’re not sure where we’re going from here. We might go somewhere else entirely, such as the Hannibal trail. But we don’t know. So much is changing in these years, and we have to find a way to keep up.”

It sounds like that was why they undertook this journey in the first place, to reach some sort of Enlightenment. It’s unbelievable what some people do these days to try to reach beyond themselves, even as so many others hold on to themselves as much as ever.

Perhaps this is the kind of thing which, in Hugo’s words, I’m looking for. I’m about to ask them if there’s any chance I could come with them, when Carlos and Hugo return.

Carlos smiles broadly at them as he sits down next to them, but for a long time doesn’t know what to say. “2 years on the road!” he finally says simply as soon as they make eye contact. Carlos is himself unusually sedate for his age, and very much their antithesis. For some time they discuss whether it’s better to see much of one place or a little of some places. It ends on the note that we now have so much time in our life that it is possible to really get to know every place in the world.

Later that day, Carlos goes his own way for the rest of the day to visit some friends in Zurich, but promises to catch up with me the next day. Hugo and I resume our way to Berlin.

Once there, I’m glad to see Berlin again. In the past few years it’s become an ever more dynamic city. Having nothing of its past left that’s worth remembering, it’s one of those cities that’s most focused on the future, kind of like some American cities still do. Every time I see it there’s some new idea that’s being tried out in its city planning.

This time its people decided to install programmable platforms as roofbridges, which can extend in any direction to allow any number of pedestrians to cross from roof to roof. As this allows people to cross anywhere they want without having to build bridges everywhere which obstruct the view of the sky, this has led to far more people engaging in roofwalking.

The system’s application has spread to many cities, especially in Danmark where they are much appreciated by the parcouring community, for whom it not only made it easier to move from one parcouring spot to another but for whom it could also offer a safety net for bolder parcourers: if a parcourer fell short in trying to jump to a neighboring roof, the moving bridges would move down the walls of the building while extending below them, breaking their fall.

In Berln, however, it has spread across the entire city. In the center it has even gone so far as to extend many of its buildings to create a more level “second tier,” and for the first time USA citizens were actually jealous of the European row houses. The very term “second tier” is still controversial on account of the obstruction of light it used to involve. Until recently it was mostly used in China, and to the right it was a symbol of how excessive equality (that of neighboring roofs) actually leads to the worst forms of inequality.

The people of the Berlin city state took advantage of the unused space of the second tier to build gardens across entire blocks, making it look a little like a wood on top of a city from above. The roofs had been extended mostly with hydroponics farms, adding to the illusion. I couldn’t wait to walk on them and see the open sky on top of the city. I close the window in my mindcom, not sure if I hadn’t better asked Hugo about it and heard about his own personal experience with it, but it was just too easy to browse the net. If only it was as simple to browse people’s minds.

I think again about the meetup with the so-called transhumans and ask Hugo about it. He doesn’t know, but looks it up on his car’s screen. This time I shouldn’t have bothered him about it. Not that we could have an accident.

“Apparently it’s in a Kiosk of sorts in the New Berlin gardens, on the second tier.” I’m pleased to hear about this. “Nowadays a lot of the social events are on the second tier,” he adds.

He stops at an bracer elevator. “Have you ever ridden one of these?”

“Of course. Not often, but yes.”

“I’ll drop you off here then.”

I pause. “Do you want to come with?”

“No, I already have something to do tonight. But I’m sure our ways will cross again at some point. I’m quite itinerant myself.”

“Good! You’re not that old after all,” I joke. I look around. The sun is almost setting and wonder if I could see the sun setting.

“Just where are you going?”

“Just here in the center, but it’s on ground level, in our usual place.

“How quaint. Well, I guess that’s it then.” But I refuse to let this contact remain superficial like some millennial would. “But I don’t suppose you’re in a hurry?”

“Well, we arranged at eight.”

“That’s still half an hour. And she’ll have plenty of other pastimes if you’re fifteen minutes late,” I say, thinking of how I forgot he was even there while I was researching Berlin’s second tier.

“How do you know it’s a her?” He looks at me suspiciously, as if I might’ve hacked him. Now I know for sure I can’t leave it at this.

“Otherwise you’d ask her to come with us. Come on, the sun is going under in a few minutes.”

“I don’t know if she’d agree with me getting late. We Prussians are kind of more punctual than you Catalunyans.”

“You’re getting old.”

He falls silent. That got to him.

“Alright.”

I put my hands in the bracers, which tighten around my shoulders, elbows and wrists and pull me up. In a few seconds I’ve moved up the rail to the top of the building. I look around, and smile as I turn around and see the entire horizon from east to west. But the best part is the freshness of the air. Of course the cities are no longer polluted as they once were, but the air still runs a little bit stale without wind. Up here, I might as well be in the Alps.

The sun is still up, so I run. By the time Hugo is there, I’m already on the next building. I glance at the sun, which I can almost look at without getting too much of an afterimage.

“Hey!” he says.

I jump from building to building, then stand still on the other side to let him follow me by roofbridge AKA platform. By the time it’s extended, I’ve moved on to the next. But when we come to a particular building I move on before he can catch up. From a higher building I see his girlfriend is already there waiting for him. You don’t have to be a hacker to know your way around people. I send him a message:

“They say routine is the first symptom of aging.”

I continue on my way, to one of the lower roofs at the edge of the park. The colors of sunset add a sense of warmth to the park that the midday sun never could. But the best part comes when the sun is down and the stars come out. With such open view of the sky, the Berliners switched their smartroads’ main lights to infrared. Only the cars around pedestrians were lit up in visible light, so that there is far less light pollution than there would otherwise be. I never thought any Western city could be this close to nature.

And yet, there are plenty of people here, engaged in all kinds of activities provided by the different areas: aside from more regular events like receptions, there are plenty of places for airdancing and other maglev sports.

Nonetheless I’m thrilled when I see the light from the pavilion. The semispherical roof is retracted in wedges on the sides, leaving the seats in the central circle open to the sky. I hear laughing. The atmosphere sounds a lot more friendly than I imagined it. Toggling augmented reality for a moment, I see on the tag floating above them that I’m in the right place.

For a while I observe them in silence, trying to memorize their names from their tags. Only two out of five, Laura and Mikhail, actually describe themselves as transhumanists on their tags. Only Mikhail and Laura are in their twenties. Meri and Gero are still children, and Ada is in her late teens. Aside from Gero, none of them is from Germany: Mikhail is half Iranian and half Russian, Laura is from the Western States, Meri from Finland, and Ada from Sweden.

Meri and Ada, sitting opposite one another, seem close. They’re sitting around a coffee table, which is also a display. It’s raised where Laura and Mikhail are standing, browsing to cite research during their discussion. Gero, sitting next to Meri, doesn’t seem to say much, trying to listen in turns to one conversation and the other. Now and then Meri pokes him in the side and tries to make him talk. Meri looks playful, Gero serious, Ada a bit of both. Mikhail and Laura look more mature, a complex mixture of emotions.

When I approach, they hardly interrupt their conversations, as if I’d been there all along. “Hi!” Meri says, which the others echo in quick succession.

“So this is the transhumanist meeting?”

“The ‘transhuman’ meeting,” Meri says, laughing. I assume the appellation is at least as much whimsical as serious.

“We have a more nuanced definition of what a transhuman is here,” Mikhail says appeasingly. “We distinguish transhumans from humans by telepathy, just like humans are sometimes distinguished from other apes by speech. Once you no longer even need speech, what else does that make you, if not transhuman?”

“So if it’s so easy for you, why aren’t you in telepathy right now?”

“We were waiting for you,” Gero says. “Hugo let us know you’d come.”

“Excuses,” I say, smirking. The group that was discussing before falls silent. “You know I’m right,” I say, turning to them. “Maybe I’m the one who should test you,” I say, teasingly. “Speaking of which, what is this test?”

“Oh, it’s more a game than anything else,” Laura says. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. But it’s also kind of meant to keep people out that aren’t really ready for telepathy. Or just to show them that they’re not ready.”

“Alright. So what should I do?”

“Something you’ve probably wanted to do for a long time but never dared to,” Gero says. “Flying.”

“In real life,” Ada adds. “You have to feel like you are truly on the top of the world.”

“Isn’t that kinda dangerous?”

“Oh, come on,” Meri says. “You know the avionics been totally safe for years now. All that time you’ve had the opportunity, and yet you’ve never done it. Why is that?” She puts especial emphasis on “several years,” which for her is an unthinkable amount of time to wait.

“It’s not as much a test as a foretaste. If you don’t like flying, you won’t like telepathy,” Mikhail says. Gero pushes a raypack into my hands, an electrically propelled form of personal flight which works by ionizing air into plasma. I weigh it in my hands as I look it over, looking for a reprieve from actually putting it on. Its surprisingly light, considering that it has five engines, one for each limb and one for the torso.

“I just don’t see the point of it if you can have the same experience in virtuality,” I mumble. But what I said them before now applies to me: excuses. Even in my dreams I never succeeded in flying, which was my greatest handicap as an oneironaut. I always felt gravity pulling me back, which is supposed to mean I wanted it to do so. At the thought of flying I have to admit that I rather like the feeling of gravity holding me safely on the ground.

When I look up from the raypack, I see that the others are equipping theirs.

“It’s not the same experience,” Ada says. “It makes you feel exposed in a way that you have no control over, and that’s how telepathy feels.”

I look at the sky and for the first time pay attention to the people flying by. They flew by so fast that I hardly even noticed till now that they’re all children. That says a lot about how blinded I’ve become in my own mere twenty years. I see the glint of strength in their eyes, a strength that’s far beyond that of most adults. Then I look back at the other, still mostly adolescent members. Maybe it’s not that far-fetched to say they’re at least halfway transhuman. And even I feel like I’m already falling behind. I can’t let that happen.

With a renewed determination I equip the raypack. The straps are attached to a suit, and every inch of it is packed with cameras which register the distance from everything around me.

“Where will we fly to?” I ask.

“Ah, that’s the question isn’t it?” Laura says. “Isn’t that was frightens you most? Where do you go once you’re up there and you can go anywhere at all?” *

“How do I pass?”

“Think of it as a training. We could start small. At first you could use it to jump very high.” As it seems to me like they don’t really know what they’re doing, I think of it more as a game.

“I could do that. I did that to get here. I got into parcouring through hooverskating: since I could drop from almost any height onto a maglev road with my maglev boots, I quickly learned how to make larger leaps. I heard that in Copenhagen they actually have some maglev buildings for that purpose.”

“Well, flying is just like that. Usually you fly to go from place to place, not just to be in the open sky. Have you never thought ‘I wish I could just go there faster?’”

“Sometimes. I felt that way when hiking in the mountains. But that was before raypacks were even on the market.” In my dreams I usually use teleports, but that cheat doesn’t always work. Sometimes a transition is needed, as the mind can’t always just shift from one state to another.

That gives me an idea. But as I look at Mikhail he speaks first.

“We could go to the mountains."

"I've done plenty of leaping. It's kinda close to flying." Rockleaping, a sport derived from rockclimbing, uses robotic boots to make superhuman leaps from rock to rock, relying only on diamond-coated tips on the boots, gloves and braces to hold on. Unlike flying it's very dangerous, but it never felt like it because I knew what I was doing. It's included in the system software of my instincts.

“We could do that now,” Gero says. “The Giant Mountains are a mere 300 kilometers away. We could get there in half an hour by maglev.”

“If we’re going into the mountains we won’t be back before midnight though.”

“So? The moon will be out, and we can stay there for the night. We’re all equipped for it.” I noticed that everyone is wearing minimalistic allotropes like myself, probably graphene.

“Alright,” I say, in a sudden impulse, “Let’s do it.”

“We could go now. We can still talk in the train, anyway. We’ll divert anyone else that wants to come to our car.”

Ada and Meri get up with an enthusiasm I didn’t expect from them, considering how withdrawn they’ve been all evening. Another glance at their tab reveals why: they’re both into mountaineering. Meri’s own tab further says that they in fact often do so together. Both Meri and Gero’s tags share a lot more information to strangers than the older attendees, several hundreds of items. At first sight it seems like they keep only the most sensitive information hidden, such as their address.

“You wouldn’t think they had that much energy,” I say, as I watch them run in front of us laughing. They’ve already jumped off the edge of the building. A roofbridge extends below their feet, and they watch us from beyond the edge. As they look at us Meri jokes to Ada, who pokes her.

“Oh, they have a lot more than us,” Mikhail says. “Once you’re in telepathy with them you find that they have a lot more thoughts per second than any of us. That’s why they talk so little. By the time there’s an opening in the conversation to say one thought they’ve moved on to another.”

“It’s not like they’re self-conscious, either,” Gero says. “Sometimes I am, and I sometimes can’t stop talking because of it. It makes me want to explain myself and then explain the explanations. Like now.”

“Well, that’s just the way you are. You’re the neuroinformatician, after all.”

“I wouldn’t describe myself as such,” he says. “But that’s certainly one of the things I’ve been quite preoccupied with the last few months, perhaps to an excess. I have to admit it’s scary sometimes to be so intimate with the patterns of one’s own brain.” He shivers. “But I’m trying to take a break from that now.”

I’m pleased at the patience with which extraverts like Laura and Mikhail heard him out in the middle of the excitement. This turns out to be much less casual a group than I thought. On the contrary, it seems like they want to do everything they can to connect as deeply as possible with me and each other. I suppose part of me is still used to the old superficiality of modernism that still lingers here and there in our society, including in my family.

“Aren’t you a bit young for such heavy subjects?” I ask him. He looks mildly offended. “I mean, isn’t being young about exploring everything the world has to offer?”

“It’s not that I didn’t do anything else. But it totally changes the way you look at the world and yourself, and it can be a bit much sometimes.”

We walk over the edge of the building, and the platform extends below our feet. As it descends, Gero walks toward the edge of the platform, which extends before him. He pays no attention. He seems to be looking up at the buildings, as if to get a good angle on the view.

“Can you do that while it’s going down?” I ask.

“You can, but it’s kind of considered bad form by flyers, Gero.” Laura said this sentence loud enough for him to hear. Hearing his name, Gero starts as if he awakens from a trance.

“Oh, yes, I walked rather far. There’s an interesting group of flyers there I was trying to see outlined against the sky.”

At the bottom shortens again, drawing Gero back to the edge of the road. A 6-seat car has already stopped before us. It has a phoenix symbol on the side.

“Hi, Achim! Is this your car?” Mikhail asks the middle-aged man in the front seat, no doubt having noticed the symbol on the exterior.

“No, I’m borrowing it myself, from the co-op.”

“Is it true that these cars can fly?” Meri asks from the other row of seats.

“Fly is a big word,” he says. “They can hover on their own power for a while if necessary, but rarely have the chance to do so.”

“Like our Valkyries in Scandinavia,” Meri says.

“Why is there a phoenix icon on the back?” I wasn’t sure if this was subjective enough a question to ask, but in Catalunya, if we aren’t sure we usually ask. It’s not a good starter, perhaps, but I want to get it off my mind first.

“It’s an existentialist metaphor. Germany was particularly hard hit by the nihilist era in the 20s, as you can probably tell if you’re familiar with its later cyberpunk scene. There’s a quote from Nietzsche that goes ‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?' So one of the earliest large-scale cooperatives in Berlin in the late nihilist era used a phoenix as its icon. Of course there’s no city that it suits better.”

“Sorry, I guess that was probably more of a search question.”

“Oh, no problem.” Meri was reminiscing with Ada about their flights over the fjords, comparing Chile’s to Norway’s.

I’m about to ask where he’s going, but not wanting to repeat the same mistake I check his tab first. I’m relieved that he’s hidden that information, so that I can ask him.

“Where are you going?” As I’m asking this, suddenly the realization strikes me how important telepathy is to youngsters like Gero and Meri, since they don’t seem to hide any information at all. But that’s also why it’s so hard for their elders: we’re used to hiding information. But once we no longer feel like we have anything to hide, what use is it to talk?

I wonder if perhaps that’s why we hide anything, just so that we can feel like we are involving ourselves, our egos, in sharing it. What does it mean to the next generation to connect with someone if they have no ego, nothing that makes up their self but public information? What are we if not our secrets?

Achim looks at me questioningly, having seen the change in my face. “Are you alright?” he seems about to ask. I realize that I’ve been so astonished by this thought that I haven’t been listening to Achim’s answer, and that I wished the conversation had gone this way instead, because I really want to talk about this. If we’d been in telepathy that would’ve happened. Should I be polite and go on with the small talk or tell him what was on my mind?

“Sorry?” I say. “I got distracted. What were you saying? Just a sec, let me read that.” Our sensors save everything except about people who don’t consent. I’m reading the transcript because it’s faster.

Achim was saying he’s going to see his lover in Slovakia, and asked me if that would still be considered a long-distance relationship today. They’ve known each other for years, but only since recently see each other almost daily. I feel awkward at not having missed something so personal, of all things, something which is normal for my age to talk about right after meeting but was no doubt very hard for someone his age to get used to, so I do what anyone my age does when they feel awkward: I laugh, not nervously but heartily.

Now Achim looks really confused, and a little upset, but the situation is so silly, that when I try to think of how to explain it I laugh even harder. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I sure wish I was in telepathy now so I could explain what came over me.

“I just had this very strange thought. It’s unrelated, though. I’ll tell you about it later. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” So many words, so little said, and Achim isn’t even convinced of their truth.

I try to put all my sincerity in my expression as I go on. “So how did it work out?”

“How did what work out?”

“Well, you said you’ve known each other for many years. I suppose it must have been difficult for both of you before the maglev roads were laid. So what did you do?”

“Oh, is that’s what was funny?” He began laughing himself, taking the situation in perspective from the panorama of his years. “Yes, as you can imagine it was an absurd situation.” He still thinks I was mocking him. I resolve to tell him what I was thinking.

“Not at all,” I interject seriously.

“We tried to live together,” he resumes, “but it didn’t work out for either of us. We both have a rich social life and couldn’t leave our friends behind. We tried open relationships, but we never found anyone with which it felt so natural to be with as each other. It’s testimony to how right we are for each other that it survived all those years. I guess deep down we knew it was but a matter of time before we’d be united, with virtuality advancing as it did. We’d never thought we’d be together in reality before that, though.”

“But with suits you don’t necessarily even need to go anywhere.”

“Yes, but that’s only been for a few years. Haven’t really got used to the idea yet.”

“Only a few years! That’s a lifetime!”

“To you it is. It must have been, what, a quarter of your life ago that they came out? For me it’s less than a tenth.”

“That’s still a lot.”

“We have time.”

“I don’t know about that. I have the feeling evolution really has turned into a race. I keep wondering if the transhumans won’t just leave us behind, like we left the chimpanzees behind.”

There’s silence for some moments, during which we look over the hilly landscape. Without overproduction, most of the farmlands have been reforested, dotted here and there with clusters of geodomes in the distance, all covered entirely with herbs and flowers and moss, and a few with actual produce. Meri point at them, asking if he’d ever want to live there.

“I may be old, but not that old. And I have many friends in the city.”

“Old?” she says with a sneer. "Ada spent months in a glass geodome in Finnmark, with only the stars and aurora as sources of light. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“Or else it would have to be one of these, close to the highway,” Achim says, trying to keep the conversation linear. ”But even then it’s already less casual than if you can just go to a friend’s home in a few minutes. I remember what it was like twenty years ago to live at the edge of the city. I guess it would be like that now.”

I no longer feel like I can talk about my epiphany at the moment anymore, and yet I feel it’s extremely important to prepare myself. Conversations in groups move so quickly that things like these sometimes get buried underneath superficiality. That’s why socializing in larger groups is no longer fashionable.

It’s unlike me to be so thoughtful, but the thought of telepathy, or rather its philosophical implications, give me the chills. I don’t have time to dwell, however. We’re passing Magdeburg, and mere minutes later, we’re in the mountains. It takes as many minutes for it to take us on a gravel road to a mountain top.

As I move out the car, my heart is already throbbing. The night makes it seem all the more dreamlike. It’s a good moment for my reality check. But I can still breathe when I pinch my nose. I get a feeling I’ve often had while in a lucid dream, a fear of losing touch with reality.

“So what are you doing here a this hour?” I still hear Achim ask from the car. Then he glances at our backs with an understanding look. We are all still wearing the raypack, the e-matter of the seats having adapted to their shape. If I pass, I might

“Oh we don’t mind. We’re not cold,” Meri said, being used to worse, when you’d have to choose between freezing your lips and talking through a mask. Our graphene markedly inflated when we got the car, trapping air like down in the tiny molecular pockets in their interior.

“Aren’t you afraid something will happen, and no one will find you?”

“Night vision’s good tonight,” Mikhail says, gesturing at the gibbous moon, which brings the rocky crests below to light. The plan is to leap from one peak to another. Looking in the distance, it’s hard to believe that I am supposed to cross such distances in mere moments. I feel the blood surge into my throat, and the throbbing of my heart turns into a racing. My breathing feels hot in my nose. I feel suddenly acutely aware of my whole body, in a way that reminds me of psychedelic experiences. I understand suddenly how flight can indeed be an analogy for telepathy, as an ultimate form of transcending the limits of one’s self, albeit physically rather than mentally.

Mikhail gives me a jovial slap on the shoulder. “Are you ready?” But there is no excuse not to be, no preparations left to make. In this world, almost as soon as we want to do something we get it right over with, with no obstacles to put it off, and all we have to do is hold on tight through the future shock of our mind’s sound barrier. In a world where everything is possible, it is only ourselves that hold us back from achieving anything we want.

I try not to think too much and just do it, but something holds me back, as if I’m about to jump into a great depth, except that the depth is that of the sky above. I take another look at the sky, opening up into the galaxy above, and with a wave of vertigo think of what the universe would be like if only for a moment there was no gravity.

But looking at the stars calls forth another thought in me: someday even the distance between the stars might become as negligible as that between countries now, and for a moment I close my eyes and imagine myself flying not just through these mountains, but beyond them, leaving them far below me in the atmosphere. But when I open my eyes the stars are still unreachable. I’ve thought far enough to come to some new limits I can grasp at, and they make it easier for me to face the limitless, if only by reminding me of their undesirability. As I succeed in reorienting myself from a new, wider perspective, I look much smaller from it, and I no longer take myself so serious.

I check my diadem to make sure it sits tight on my cranium. The raypack will still work without it, but like most electronics, the raypack is controlled primarily by my brain, though also secondarily through my suit. I experimentally float a few inches of the ground, rotating this way and that, and already have trouble to restrain myself from flailing around for hold. But little by little I start to make larger movements in the air. Using the brain input, it feels as if I’m just floating, but using my suit, it feels as if I’m actually flying of my own power, as if in microgravity.

I look at a level piece of land nearby on the same hill and target it in my computer. It feels as if I am but acting in a dream when I give my raypack a thrust and begin to climb into the sky. Keeping my look up at the sky for courage, for a moment I don’t realize just how far I’m going. Then at the height of my short flight, as I am about to descend I recover from my dissociation and flail my arms around for grasp, but the raypack slows me down as I approach the ground.

Looking around, I see the others land around me. The children skip towards me in little leaps. “If I tag you, you’ll have to follow me all the way to the stratosphere!” Meri says. It takes some moments for me to process this, so she slows down as she is about to tag me. I recoil.

“You’d better run,” Gero says, “or she’ll swoop down on you like a vulture for half an hour trying to get you to play along before she gives up.”

“You bet I will. Tell you what, I’ll give you another chance,” she says. “I’ll race you to the top,” she points at a nearby mountain. “I’ll land every time you land. But if I make it to the top first I’ll frighten you awake all night until you come after me.”

Again I fail to find a reply, and she doesn’t give me much time to protest and floats into position.

“Come on, slowpoke.” I think of how ironic it is to be taught to fly from a child, and for a moment I feel like I’m the real child here, held upright by his arms as he takes his first steps. Except that I’m allowed no respite between my first steps and my first footrace.

Again I take a careful look at where I want to go next, as I where about to make a leap from a high diving board for the first time. A few times when I’m about to fly I brace myself on one leg as if to make a little runup, when I stop short as I realize I cannot, in fact, fly, and a jump is therefore unnecessary. On the third time I become so impatient I suddenly shoot much higher into the air than before, and by the time I land halfway up the mountain, I am painting and feel as if I am sprinting. Two smaller leaps further I’m on top of the mountain and look back, but Meri merely shoots overhead and says, “I did mean that mountain over there!”

The others fly in front of me over the moonlit plateau when I realize I’ve landed on a crest of the actual mountain she’d pointed at. I have no time left to lose and fly after them. I actually make some headway on them when I realize I’m actually flying rather than just making measured leaps, and that I have nowhere set to land. I panic and begin to descend when I realize there are too many rocks beneath me to land at this speed, and I stop descending. Then, for the first time, I actually feel that my trajectory isn’t curved back to earth as every trajectory I’ve ever taken in my life, that it is, in fact, unaffected by it. I am detached from gravity, from the whole earth itself. If my breath wasn’t taken away I’d feel an urge to laugh.

I’m racing after the others as fast as I can now. The engine is so silent that I can’t hear it over the sound of the wind. I tell my suit, which is made out of e-matter, to form cuffs over my ears, and suddenly it becomes relatively quiet. For a moment I think I actually hear a bird fluttering from its perch.

I’m close enough to the others to see that they’re looking back at me. They’re slowing down. When I come close, Mikhail points at a spot in front of them. “You’d better catch up, if you want to be left alone.”

I look at the dot. “She’s too far away.” Mikhail shrugs. I stay with the rest of the group and feel much safer for it, even though they’d be able to help me from anywhere else. Even if the override somehow failed I could allow them control my suit if something went wrong.

When we make it to the top of the mountain, Meri looks at us with arms akimbo. Dead branches are floating into a pile, carried my e-matter drones. “I win,” she says to me. When we’ve landed, the pile catches fire. For a while Ada, Meri and Mikahil hum into the fire, forging a hologram above the fire into fractal art with the vibrations of their voice.

I move over to her and tag her. “Tag. There, you happy now?”

“That’s not me,” her voice says, but her lips stay sealed. The voice comes from above. I look up and start. She’s rapidly flying right at me with no signs of stopping, only to barrel roll right past me at the last moment. I scream.

“You haven’t seen the last of that,” Mikhail says with a smirk. “She’ll go on and on until you follow her to the stratosphere.”

“Wait, that was just a figure of speech, right?”

He slowly shakes his head. I groan. “Get that smirk of your face,” I say to him.

Laura moves over to where Meri’s model was just a while earlier and bends down to pick up a ball with an e-matter symbol on it. After a second she drops it again, and it expands into the form of a woman. Their lips are moving, but their voices are muted.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “I’m sleeping in Budapest tonight.”

“You’re exchanging houses again?” Mikhail asks.

“Yes, and this woman seems particularly interesting. She’s an artist and has covered the insides of her house entirely in abstract e-matter designs.”

“How many exchanges are you away from your own home again?”

“Well, it’s interesting. I’ve seen mountains before, but every house is an expression of a different personality. She has a long flight ahead of her, so I’ll have plenty of time to get to know her tonight.”

Meri makes another swoop for me. “Heaven and hell!” I curse.

Mikhail laughs. “Say, wasn’t her personality type introverted? And yours and Laura’s extraverted? You wouldn’t think so.”

“You believe in that kind of thing?”

“Don’t you? You did make that public on your profile.”

“I put it on ‘extraverted’ when I feel like it. It changes the way people interact with me. People aren’t that simple. Not only do they change often, but sometimes we can have opposite qualities in a number of ways. For example,” He looks at the sky. “What do you think she’s thinking right now?”

“She seems cheerful.”

“Sure she is, but I’d say she’s also anxious. You can have different feelings at the same time.”

“Anxiety and cheerfulness are both aspects of excitement, though, so they’re not really so different.”

“Would you fly into space just out of excitement, though? No, she might seem shallow right now, but by moving back and forth between us and the vacuum like a comet, she wants to find expression of some deeper side of her, a duality between utter loneliness and utter togetherness.”

“I have to go,” Laura says. She and Mikhail talk some more, but I’m lost in thought. I think about how Ada spent six months in isolation in the far north and look at her. She meets my look with such deep peace in her eyes that it stirs me. I quickly look away lest she’d notice, then realize that if I am to ever try telepathy I can’t keep any secrets. I will myself to look back at her, and see a smile has appeared on her lips. The sense of belonging in her expression passes onto me, and it makes me feel dizzy. I never noticed it before because she stayed on the background all evening. She doesn’t seem to mind, but I look away anyway, realizing only now that I don’t want to involve someone like myself in another’s life. And I realize that while my body may have been freed today, my mind is still as much bound by gravity as ever.

Meri swoops by again, almost making me fall into the fire. I curse. “Doesn’t she ever get tired? And does she really go all the way to the stratosphere and back in that time?”

“Much farther. She’s probably been all over the Bohemian massif by now. And no, she doesn’t get tired. When you’re used to it it doesn’t require any energy at all. With the override there’s no danger she has to focus on avoiding, after all.”

We say goodbye to Laura. It becomes silent for a while after this, and we gaze into the fire. It’s not actually needed for warmth, but it’s cosy nonetheless.

“So about this telepathy…” I begin, when I pick up my train of thoughts again.

“We’re ready when you are,” Mikhail says simply.

“So we’re doing a group telepathy, then?”

“You can do as you please, but it’s by far easiest way to start because it doesn’t go as deep. Being in telepathy doesn’t mean you can necessarily share everything with them as you do with yourself. It takes a bit of work. Even we can’t always do it with everyone, even though we’re trained at it.”

“Before we do this, I want to agree that we record this.”

“Why?”

I weigh my words for a while, then realize there’s no point in beating around the bush and I might as well be honest now. “I’m concerned about being accused of sexual harassment.”

“We give you our consent. That’s proof enough.”

“That’s not sexual consent, though.”

“In telepathy the law isn’t really clear what’s sexual and not: just being aware of someone else’s body could be seen as sexual. Besides, trying not to think of something is the surest way to ascertain you’ll think about it. Either way we could charge you if we really wanted to. You’ll just have to trust us. But it doesn’t have to be now.”

“Or you could start with someone who does give you sexual consent,” Ada sends to me. When I ascertain her lips aren’t moving, my eyes meet hers, but I don't know what to make of her Mona Lisa expression.

“We could just gain your trust by doing one-way telepathy first,” Gero says.

“Sure. Mikhail, I’d prefer to do this with you. We seem about the most similar people here, so it should be easiest.”

“I’m not very comfortable with that,” Mikhail says. No surprise, since he's clearly more of an extravert. “When I let someone know what I'm thinking I also want to know what they’re thinking about it.”

“Based on similarity, that would make me the next option,” Gero says.

“Well…”

“Don’t underestimate me because I’m young. I have accumulated more experiences than any human in the world, so much so that your own will hardly affect me more than the reminiscences of an old man. I am not just a child. In my mind I have taken on the form of hundreds of beings, men, women, animals. I’ve become everyone.”

I’m rather taken aback by his intensity. If there was a doubt on my mind about his neurosis, it’s gone now. “That’s why I’d rather not be on the receiving end right away.”

“You’re definitely the veteran among us in terms of telepathy, Gero, but I think it would be easier for Lucas to begin with receiving rather than transmitting. Alright, then, I suppose it’s easiest if I transmit. Are you ready?"

I move into a kneeling position. I take a deep breath. “I think so. I’ll lower my brainwave frequencies once we’ve begun.”

“Then do it now.” I do so. Closing my eyes, I become suddenly more aware of my body, and realize full telepathy would probably create some sexual tension with any gender, age or orientation. Some brain areas can be filtered out, but because of how all thought processes connect different brain areas, it severely limits the process. Online chatting is basically a form of telepathy too, since it transmits words only, but it’s never actually called that. As soon as it doesn’t involve the entire brain, it’s no longer telepathy but brain-computer interface.

When I become suddenly aware of having a second body, I feel dizzy, as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. My awareness shifts from one body to the other, making me feel like I’m swung back and forth. It doesn’t actually give me motion sickness, but it makes me feel lightheaded. I realize I’m fighting the process, and try to stop doing so and give in to becoming Mikhail, feeling myself sitting cross-legged before the fire.

At first he thinks he’s not thinking about much in particular, just focusing on his breath. Mikhail’s mood feels more stable than my own, and he is meditating on this sense of stability, trying to radiate it to myself. He seems to know better than I that this was what I need at this point in my life. Now he’s thinking of how I might think that he might think that I lack stability, and might not want him to go to the trouble of trying to give me stability. He refuses to go down this train of thought any further. In two-way telepathy he would, just to let it run out until we both get tired of it. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t try to think of what I’m thinking, but he can’t help but think more about others than himself. Perhaps he’s an extravert after all, he thinks. It feels awkward for him, more so than telepathy with others, as he doesn’t know what to do with himself on his own, though he used to be more of an introvert before he found this group. That’s why he doesn’t like to transmit one-way telepathy, even though perhaps it’s good for him, to keep balance. So he lowers his brainwave frequency further and tries to focus on himself, reaching into himself to find out just what it is that at this moment makes him who he is, until his awareness become made up more of feelings than thoughts. There is a sobriety about his personality, wont to takes things as they come. The deeper he reaches into himself, the more neutral the stuff of his mind becomes.

At first I don’t feel so very different as to feel confused: being at least somewhat similar to someone definitely makes it easier. But the process of becoming someone else is enough to make me forget myself. In the first moment what feels strange is not so much the way his mind feels as the feeling that I have always been him, and that who I really am is just a stranger.

It makes me feel dissociated from myself, as if I’m just another container for my consciousness. And as of now, that body over there just as well might be, for it is released from it, free to move anywhere across the world, just as free as my body in flight. I realize suddenly how small I am to the rest of the universe, how much there is to experience that I never could, not if I had the time of a hundred lifetimes.

As I look at the fire from his perspective, I see how even the same things feel different from another’s angle. The way his eyes tries to follow the flames, of how they move from one flame to another, is different from mine, in a way I realize is reflected throughout his mind. The content of his consciousness is not so different from mine, but its form is very different. It fits into different patterns, in a way that reminds me of architecture. His mind supports much the same basic structure as mine, but is sharper somehow, more geometrical — that’s the only way I can describe it. It turns in measured angles, in a way that reminds me somehow of arabesque.

I feel how in my own mind everything is vague by comparison, and as I focus again on my own mind it connects to Mikhail’s, and in an epiphany I become aware of faults in my own way of perception and learn from his. His patterns of perception spread through my own like a plume of a new ingredient dissolving in an alchemical brew, spitting fumes, changing its color, texture, consistency, taste, odor, bringing it closer to completion. The flow of new information burns its way into my brain, twisting new pathways this way and that in ways that tilt my world until it turns upside down, making me feel lightheaded.

I’d closed my eyes for a while and now, just moments later, opened them again with a start. My head is swimming as I feel my limits fall away like the walls of a cage. It makes me feel as if I’m under the influence of a drug, and I immediately know I’m addicted. I want more. There’s billions of more minds to explore. I feel a need to make more space in my mind, to allow the greatest mind to fit in its confines.

“I can’t wait until we share a session as a group.”

“That’s kind of difficult, to synchronize so many streams of consciousness like that,” Gero says. “It can be done, but it requires some experience with telepathic meditation. Otherwise we’d just dissociate from each other, so that we might as well not be in telepathy at all. Even with just two people it can be hard to sustain. In fact, we already dissociate from part of ourselves, and being in telepathy with the wrong person can actually make that worse if you’re not ready. That’s why it’s so important to learn to meditate, though, like learning any skill, but that can itself be done much faster through telepathy.”

He says all this almost too fast for me to take in. Listening at the way Gero talks, I wonder how anyone could ever synchronize their minds to his frantic speed or even want to. But when I see the way the others look at him I realize the warmth in their eyes isn’t just pity; it’s genuine, as if he plays a central role in their group. Maybe his volatile mind actually catalyzes the reaction between theirs, like shamans used overstimulation through rapid dance and music to induce a trance.

“So who did you learn it from?”

“Ada was the first,” Meri’s voice says, emerging behind them with her perennial smile.

“Oh, so you’ve given up, have you?” I say. “I’m not going to space with you.”

“No, my nanobattery actually ran out.” The others laugh. Mikhail tuts and seem about to raise concerns, but she cuts her short. “I’ve been spying on you from the underbrush for some time.”

“We know that,” Mikhail says. “You gave us your location, didn’t you?" He winked at her. "We’ll let you use some of our energy.”

“I don’t need that,” she says, while hugging herself against the cold. “We have the fire.”

“Come here,” Mikhail says, taking a cable from his cuff, but she’s already run over to Ada instead. While they wait for her batteries to recharge, they have an arm wrestle, but Meri cheats and uses her suit’s power.

“So did you all learn from Ada?”

“I didn’t,” Gero says. “I learned it by myself.”

“How does that work?”

“I actually started with animals, first with less sentient animals and then building up to ravens.”

“That’s why we call him the Raven,” Mikhail says.

“Isn’t that a violation of animal rights?”

Gero looks offended. “What do you mean by that?”

“He was receiving only,” Ada says. “It’s almost impossible to send to an animal.”

“No one else wanted to have telepathy with me,” bowing his head.

“It’s been hard for us to find someone too,” Mikhail says. “Though it tends to be much easier for children.”

“How long does it takes to learn?”

"The faster you can find yourself, the sooner you can do the same with someone else." She says this as if one has a new self in telepathy , shared between them and, well, oneself. I can't wait to find out what it would be like. If the whole is more than the sum of the parts, two-way telepathy must reach something greater than both persons together, perhaps greater than personhood itself.

“I learnt when I visited Ada in her geodome in Finnmark,” Meri says. “She’d have stayed there forever if it wasn’t for me, and turned into a snowman.” Now I understand why Ada was the first to teach everyone. She reminds me of the prophets that withdrew into the desert before returning with their epiphanies. But she doesn’t seem like the kind to try to overturn the world, knowing that the world is a sphere. But just looking in her eyes I see such insight in them that every question I ever asked myself draws me towards them, as if knowing the answer to lie beyond them.

“What’s the best way to find yourself?” I ask her.

“That's different for everyone. But for starters, giving up everything that isn’t part of who you are. You’re on the right track: you’ve already given up your home.” Even without telepathy, she seems to know that I was indeed not thinking of going back. But then, it’s not that uncommon.

“What else can I give up?”

“Your humanity,” she says. “Once you no longer see yourself as part of the human species, you can become part of something greater, of everything and nothing.”

“Is that what you did in your geodome?”

“I was trying to find out who I really was when I had no identity anymore. But I wouldn’t start with that. It's what I did afterwards."

“But before that you did swim there,” Meri says.

“She what?”

“Yes she did. She swam with dolphins.”

“You did? What, did you want to give up your habitat too?"

“Yes," she says simply, and when I just give her a blank stare, "Sometimes I even slept floating in the water. It felt like being rocked to sleep.”

"I never thought of using the suit’s inflation for that purpose."

"In a way our suits really make us more than human," Mikhail says. "If there were any reason to do so, we'd make it part of our body, but why would we, when we can do just as much without doing that? We are, essentially, cyborgs."

“Must have taken a lot of power to keep you warm," I say, with some concern that she ran out at some point. I can't imagine how cold the Norwegian Sea has to be at whatever time of the year.

“Yes. I had a solar kite follow me all the way. I also didn't quite always swim entirely on my own power, even though I wasn't in a hurry. Most of the time not much was going on except for the moving of one wave after another, up and down and up and down. It was a meditation in its own right."

"How long were you meditating in all?"

"About half a year." She laughs when she sees me arch my eyebrows. "I really needed it. I had a very busy life before that."

"I couldn't do nothing for so long."

"What would you do, if you could do anything else?"

I think for a while. I realize I have a lot more options than I ever gave any thought.

I chuckle. "Good question if we can really do anything. We don't really do as much as we should, do we?"

"Like flying to the stratosphere."

I suddenly realize how many opportunities I'm missing out on. Am I clinging to my limitations as a human being? I can't let that happen.

"You know what? Let's all go." I suddenly resolutely get up.

"Alright," Mikhail says. Meri takes off first, giving the cue for all the others to follow, and leaving me with no choice but to do the same. For a moment I stay behind, watching them go out of sight. It feels so abrupt to just fly so high, as if I'm wasting something that's too good for the moment. But if not now, then when? Perhaps it just feels too good for me, as if I'm touching something that's sacred, something that would overwhelm me with too much ecstasy, so much that it would turn back into agony. At that moment I look down again and see that Ada has stayed behind last, smiling at me. My heart skips a beat. Then she's off.

If I didn't feel sure about myself before, I do now. So what if it overwhelms me? One more time I remind myself that I need to do nothing to control my flight, and I shoot forth into the sky, trying to think of nothing else but overtaking the others. Once I get there and have nothing to focus on, I'll probably panic, but I try not to think about that now. I feel the wind shake me ever so slightly back and forth through my flight. It's not frightening, in fact the sensation gives me something solid to hold on to as I'm staring into the emptiness of the abyss above. For a few moments nothing happens other than my flying through the sky, not even a particular thought occurs to me, and I just cannot imagine how Ada could have spent six months doing nothing but stare at the sky, this black nothingness interspersed only with tiny extraneous lights from the past. The things she does frighten me, but she intrigues me all the more for it.

But I just can't look down until I've caught up with her, and only then I slow down. When I look at her, and she looks back, the world rises above her, and the sunlight that set a quarter of an hour earlier reveals her enigmatic smile. I'm not sure which is causing the wave of vertigo, but it makes me laugh. When her smile widens my belly twists into a knot, and I speed up towards the others. They're still going much faster than I. If they know this is frightening for me, they don't seem to care — unless they care to frighten me? I'm forced to speed up, and my helmet, usually folded at the nape, extends around my head. A few pockets in the back and side of my suit have inflated with oxygen.

The faster I go, the more the suit has to keep me from moving, so that my body stays in the right position to stay on my course and away from the others'. As I start to breathe faster, I wonder for a moment if I'm going to hyperventilate, but then I remember that my suit will just add carbon dioxide to my air anyway, so that I can't get a panic attack anyway. I stay calmer than I thought I would, but none the less excited for it.

"Where are we going?" I send to Mikhail. I've already seen they're going to a high-altitude balloon hotel, but I'd like to know more about it.

"It's a really nice place. Each room is also a restaurant, and all the rooms are made of e-matter screens, so we can make it look however we want. We can even make it entirely transparent, as if we're still floating in space."

I'm actually looking forward to something solid to stand on. "If it's all the same for you, I'd prefer if you'd make it look transparent just for you. We all have our own mindcom, but we'll have only one room."

"It won't be the same. If you don't want it transparent we'll just pick something else… But there it is."

It takes a while before I can see any details that distinguish it from the stars around it, and another while before I see the actual hotel beneath the balloon.

"Looks pretty small."

"It doesn't get many visitors, strange as it sounds."

I wouldn't be too sure about going here by myself either. It's one thing to take a shuttle to space now and then, another to actually take a raypack here. No one else is inside, so we take the main hall for ourselves without having to keep our voices down for anyone else. Once we've sat down cross-legged in the center, the floor softens. When I veto making the entire  transparent, we settle on a compromise and make it translucent, letting the blue-on-orange sunset reflect in the edges of the walls. To better appreciate the kaleidoscope, we don't turn on any light.

"It looks interesting like this too," Meri says, looking over the layout of the empty building. "Like a ghost's house."

"This does give me a taste of what it was like in your geodome," I say to Ada, as the loneliness of the place got through to me.

"It's not the same. The point of my being there was that once winter came and I had only some energy left, until the sun came up again there was no going back. I was going to enter into the deepest layers of my unconscious to find out what was there." The utter silence that follows in the skylodge makes it sounds like a ghost story, and it sure feels like one to me. But it's always been nightmares that interested me most of all dreams, because they come from those corners of my mind that are still undiscovered, a wilderness.

"So you're a psychonaut like me. I myself am an oneironaut, in particular." I briefly glimpse over her research and see that she's published the full brain record of her entire six months of meditations. If I wanted to I could simply download her memories, and I make a note to myself to at least download the ones with the highest dopamine ratings. It's rare for people to be so open. People usually handpick the thoughts they want others to see.

"Oh, so you're actually already quite an advanced meditator!" Mikhail says. "You might actually do pretty well in full telepathy already."

"Hey, maybe we could share a dream!" Ada says, her face lighting up. "We're pretty much doing the same thing already anyway."

I feel the rush of blood in my belly again. I don't know how to reply.

"It's also kind of what I'm doing," Gero says, "except I look closer than either of you."

"I'm doing that with animals," Meri says. "Seeing what perceptions fit in what species' brains and why. But mostly I telepath with the mentally ill to treat them.

Mikhail feels our eyes on him when he doesn't speak. "Oh… for me it's always been subjects with mathematics, ranging from physics to economics. But a theme that's been recurring often is multifractal systems."

"Oh, I've had a question about fractals in  for the longest time…" Gero asks Mikhail, and they're soon exchanging research notes. Meri and Ada soon join in. I learn a lot from their discussion, but having nothing to add I feel rather useless. When it gets increasingly abstract, Gero interrupts: "Actually, it would be better if we continued this in telepathy." He looks at me. "It'll take much less time."

"No, never mind. It's getting late anyway," Mikhail says. "You can download the memories from my account."

"You know what? I'll download them too." I've never liked the idea of downloading raw memories from someone's brain, since other memories come with it as well, but it can take a while before knowledge from the latest research gets processed into a form that can be downloaded seamlessly into one's brain.

"Yeah, in telepathy you'll be absorbing parts of the other person's mind into your own anyway," Mikhail says, seeing my anxiety.

"Don't worry, Ada says. "If you know who you are, you won't lose it. And if you don't know who you are, then you can't lose yourself because you already have."

"But who am I?"

"Consciousness," Ada says. "In all its forms. The only danger of losing yourself when downloading someone's memories is if they'd convince you to repress some part of your consciousness."

"I know. And I guess as someone whose life work it has been to uncover repressed feelings, I should be safe. But this is the first time I've ever downloaded memories from, well, strangers."

"Whose would you rather have?" Mikhail asks.

"Ada's," I say, with such immediacy that Meri giggles. "Obviously," I add. Indeed, when we make the transfer it is almost seamless. This doesn't mean I can instantly assimilate the memories, but once we talk about it quickly feels as if I'd always known these things. Ada's mind is so neutral that I hardly notice a difference between Ada's memories and my own except for the pattern by which she memorizes. Usually bits of opinion are transferred with memories by accident, and while these are usually rejected by the host mind, it slows down the process of assimilation. Once I've assimilated the memories, I understand a lot more about where they are in their research, and, since we're all studying the same subject on some level, my own.

"Instant knowledge," I say with a chuckle.

"Telepathy really is the solution to all our problems," Mikhail says. "It's already ended world poverty, but still I don't think the full extent of its potential hasn't dawned on us yet."

"It's amazing it took so long for people to buy into it," Gero says. "The proof of concept had been there for decades. If everyone had worked together as much as they did for the space race, it would've been a matter of years."

"Maybe it takes telepathy to work together the way we do," Meri says. A silence falls, and I know they're all waiting for me.

"Speaking of which, I don't think I can delay this any longer. Let's do it. Let's start with a shared dream, since that's what I'm used to."

"So sensory only," Meri says, ever so slightly sounding disappointed.

"Yes."

"That's actually something we're not quite used to," Mikhail says with a smile. Ada chuckles. "We might actually be the ones learning from you. In a dream state you actually reveal far more of yourself."

"I think it's a great idea," Gero says. "we won't feel so self-conscious that way."

"For you it's easy," Mikhail says. "You're in altered states all the time." I see on Gero's account that he's published hundreds of different altered states he's tried by adjusting his neurotransmitters in each brain area to particular settings, each available for download. Now I understand why he seems so odd. Virtual drugs may have safeguards against neurotoxicity, but the experiences still change one's personality. He's probably a much better person than I am, but I don't understand the much wider range of emotions he feels. But now I understand him, I feel a lot more respect for him. 

"Well, anyway, I'm tired." For the second time this hour the sun has set. Ada is already lying on her side.

"Yeah, let's go," Mikhail says, seemingly oblivious to the irony. We all lie down in the floor, which softens at the touch. I close my eyes, and at my command my brain instantly enters into the dream state. The noise in my head morphs into the plants of a jungle. I skip through the underbrush without knowing where I'm going, brushing aside the foliage without a care in the world until suddenly, when I sweep away one frond, in a clearing Ada appears before me stark naked. My hear stops. I cast my eyes down, but to my relief I am not naked myself, which means that even in dreams, I'm still inhibited.

Ada, meanwhile, lays herself bare to all the tangle of life around her. The forest becomes alive around her, seeming to move in- and outward with her breath, causing the forest floor to pulse with sunlight. As she comes closer the leaves and branches twist and turn around her with the same uncontainable emotion as her body. Tendrils caress her limbs as they seek for hold to grow, only to let her slip through them and yet, continue to curl around where her body has been.

"Beware," I say, as she curves around me in turn. "I'm toxic. You should be more careful in the jungle." My suit turns yellow and black like a dart frog's.

"So I am," she says, and taking my head in her hands kisses me, seeming to suck the poison out of my head like a vampire, leaving me helpless like a dead husk to her intoxicating touch.

I wake up with a strangely empty feeling, as if paralyzed by Ada's bite. Ada has woken up too.

"Did you dream what I dreamt?" I ask.

"No," she says. When I wonder how she knows what I dreamt before I've sent her anything, I realize this is a false awakening, and I still have no idea if the Ada I saw in my dream is any more real than the Ada I see now. I could find out using my braincom, since it can activate certain brain areas to allow me to read it in my sleep, but as soon as I think of doing so, a vibration shakes the skyhouse, and from the glow outside I see that we're falling. I realize I'm terrified of finding out.

"You need to calm down if you want to—"

The crash cuts her off, and I'm left to wonder what I do want.

In the next dream, I find myself walking along a snowy ridge, Ada at my side. We're both clad in thick down jackets. We're smiling at each other.

"You seem a lot more at ease here."

I check her tab. She's real.

"I can't hurt you here." I can only protect her here, I think, and remember suddenly that I don't need to talk and she can read all my thoughts.

"Protect me from what? Thoughts can never hurt me," she says. She giggles and runs off the edge of the ridge, slipping from my grasp. I follow her, but when I grab her I trip, and we fall down the slope, calling an avalanche down upon us. She squeals with laughter, but then I feel my bones break and wake up. Ada wakes up more slowly, even though she felt the same pain I felt.

"Shush, it's just a thought," she sends to me.

"Where did that memory come from?" I ask. She doesn't speak, and sends that I should be quiet, so the others don't wake up.

"A good friend of mine died in an avalanche," she sends. "I wanted to feel what she experienced as she died. She thought of me right as she died. There was such beauty in the love she put in that thought. So I played those last memories again and again, in spite of the pain, until I got quite used to it. But it was her last moments of consciousness that really got to me. She hurt so much in those last moments, and yet she still desire to live on, to hang on to those last moments of life, even if all she could feel was pain. Maybe that's when I realized that pain is just another experience, just like pleasure, if anything, more intense. I think that's what made so many people kill themselves back in those days, but for me, it was the beginning of a new life, and it's when I began my meditations."

I feel ever more in awe of her, and I'm all too glad to let her know that. She smiles at me. I want to give her a hug, but she whispers "Come," and goes right back to sleep.

I follow suit, and find myself at the foot of the mountains and the edge of the forest, between ice and fire, and she wraps her body around my down jacket.

"You feel nice and warm," she says. The down jacket turns into a black panther fur.

We close our eyes, and I feel her body from within, the sensation of how my hips stroke her inner thighs.

"I don't want to make you feel like I'm using you," I say.

"We can't misunderstand each other. We feel what the other feels. All you do for me you do for yourself." The thought seems to come out of both our minds. Our thoughts run into each other like twining fingers. She locks her eyes on mine as I stroke her nose with mine. The boundaries between us melt like the horizon between earth and sky into a mirage. The world spins as it falls away, until we are all that exists and there is no up and down, only you and I.

In the kitchen I find we're almost out of cereal, so I tell my computer to cut some. It says there isn’t any. That can’t be right. I walk up the stairs to the roof and open the trapdoor into the hydroponics greenhouse. Coming from the dark of the bedroom, my eyes take a while to adjust to the bright sunlight concentrated by the lenses and mirrors above me. The cereal plants have all already been harvested. I could swear I saw them here yesterday, but the only traces I see are the few grains next to the chute door.

When I see the electric knife is still uncleaned, I walk back down again and into the kitchen, where I hear the sound of machines coming from the storage room. Inside I stumble into Carlos, one of the longest inhabitants of the commune. He's usually the one who takes care of things here, though he does not own it any more than the rest of us.

Carlos: "It'll be just a minute," he says, looking at the grain processing machines. "I'm sorry, I should've thought of this, but there were other things on my mind."

"What are you talking about? I told you before, you're no more responsible for this than the rest of us."

Carlos: "Yes, but if everyone thinks this way…"

"Then we'll learn for ourselves. Isn't that the point of anarchism? Now I'll know to think about this next time."

Carlos: "Maybe you're right. It's a bit early to argue for me."

"Right, then sleep in next time. Breakfast can wait anyway. What have you got here?" I ask, pointing at the machines.

Carlos: "Just oats. And flour, but there's still a little bit of bread."

"I guess I'll just take the bread and probably go."

Carlos: "Really? Why in such a hurry? Where are you going?"

"North, anywhere away from these hippies. What are they doing here anyway?"

Carlos: "Haven't you heard? A revolution."

"A revolution! It's nothing but an excuse to keep dreaming without doing anything about the real problems of our time. Even a way to come to terms with them, because they could always say of their problems that they will lead up to one. Governments couldn't have come up with a better opium for the masses if they tried."

He stays silent and checks the roasted cereal in the machines.

I know I should let it go. I'm just so frustrated with people that are just waiting for something to happen on account of others. That's why I left. My parents want me to believe they want freedom as much as I, but keep trying  to get me into a job with the already falling government to climb up in its hierarchy. They think now's the best time to be a politician, as politics is changing more than ever.

Admittedly, without the government having held the referendums the people petitioned for, it wouldn't have allowed crowdfunding as a deductible alternative to taxes for public services, not without a revolution. But by doing that it already handed over its power to the people, and over the past twenty years it's formed greater layers of organization until the government lost its power and became something merely nominal, like royalties in Europe: an evolutionary vestige, like the human tailbone… But I was born after all this. Maybe if I had lived in their time I would see it all differently, but there’s just nothing you can do with them. They never listen to anything that doesn’t agree with their group think. Might as well give up on them.”

Carlos: "Don't say that! That's you being weak. If you can't help people in their weakness, what in the world can you do for others at all?"

Just now the millennial I saw earlier comes in.

Carlos: "Jack! Come here. Tell him what you think about him, Lucas."

"Eh…" He grabs my arm and forces me to look at him. His eyes are already glazed over with marijuana, but I'm not sure if it's the marijuana or the dreadlocks that most bother me about him. I think of what a long way it has gone from the Indian brahmans who didn't care what they looked like to others, to those who turned their hair into dreadlocks just to fit in. Then I realize how brahmans must have eventually turned into a caste that people needed to fit into in the first place. Because of people like me, who shunned those that weren’t as enlightened as them.

"I didn’t mean it like that."

Carlos: "He thinks you're too weak to be helped, a hopeless case, the end, game over. You're ready to die, fit for the slaughter. Not just you, mind you, but your whole generation."

I look at Carlos. "What's gotten into you?" He looks apologetic. "I'm sorry, there's just been a lot of this kind of friction lately. I thought we'd be over this in our new world but it just never ends, it never ends. We could live in heaven and we'd still turn it into a hell." He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

Then I look back at Jack. But he's certainly achieved one thing. The glaze in his eyes is gone, and he's wide awake.

"Maybe you're right," he says. "Fit for the slaughter? Well we've always been treated like sheep. For thousands of years they taught us that's just what we are. It takes time to deal with the aftermath, Carl. We'll get there someday." He pats him on the back, seeming more worried about him than about himself, and walks out.

"Wait!" Carlos still says.

"Even if it’s too late for them, it’ll end with them. We’re different."

"Yeah, right," he says sarcastically. "You know what's been stressing me out so much?"

"I was wondering about that."

Carlos: "Well, the other night we had trouble here when these transhumanists were here, trying to win people over for their cause. We had to vote to send some people away, but by doing that we kind of picked sides already, and I'm worried about what that could mean to the commune. This could be coming back to me."

"So who had a problem with who?"

Carlos: "I don't even know how it started, but does it matter? What I do remember is that someone said of the other that if they're really so different perhaps they should exterminate them."

"They were just joking. Come on now, that's a thing of the past. " But I don't feel as sure as I sound. Doesn’t it always start with threats? In panarchist Europe no one would ever have to start a war, but what about the rest of the world?

"You really need to try something different. You’re getting stuck in a routine here, and that’s the surest way to get neurotic. I can hardly imagine what it must have done to people to do the same thing over and over every day of their lives like you did for years. Why don't you come with me? This place will be just fine without you. The rest will learn to take care of this place."

Carlos: "This place will become a mess."

"That's not true. We all helped clean up. And even if it does become a mess, then they'll be forced to clean up the mess eventually."

He stares out into space and mutters about some things he still has to take care of.

Carlos: "You know what? Alright, I'm coming with you."

"See, that's the difference between you and the millennials. You choose to change. You might be neurotic but you're not hopeless."

Carlos: "I've got to finish some things I started though."

"For God's sake, how can you find so many little things to do in a fully automated building? Just write it on a sign for the others."

Carlos: "Say what you want but I have to bag the cereals. Can't just leave them to rot."

"Can't take that long. I'll see you on the road."

Carlos: "You're heading north, right?"

"Right, you'll see where I am on my profile." I raise my hand as I walk out. When you can meet anyone anywhere, you hardly bother to say goodbye if at all.

I take a deep breath when I'm outside, enjoying the fresh air from the vertical gardens covering the buildings. The buildings have already covered some of the crops with plastic to form small greenhouses, including, of course, all of those on the roof. of the crops are already out of season and have been covered with plastic panes by the machines and a few electric cars whiz by. It must be rush hour. Of course that doesn't mean much when everyone is working from home, or from anywhere, in fact. Those that do make use of the roads are mostly those who travel.

A woman opens her window and extends a picker at a row of grapes below her sill, an old-fashioned tool with a pincer and scissor at the end. Usually people just use cutters now, but with these old little houses whose walls don't line up, it's not always worth the trouble installing one. I follow her movements with interest, squinting. The woman looks at me askant, then smiles a little in compensation and withdraws. I realize my frown probably makes me look a little creepy, but my eyes are still adjusting to the daylight.

I hunch my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. I should've brought a pillow. It's one of the things that's not provided in the communes since they get lost or stolen quickly. I didn't really make any preparations for this trip at all. I'll probably need my inflatable clothing if I'm heading to the cold north, especially if I'm planning to sleep outside on my way as well. Once I have that I have everything: warm clothing if inflated, cool clothing if uninflated, and if zipped, a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, bivy bag and raincoat. If I'm really not turning back, if I'm really going to get out into the world, I'll need one. I tell my computer to get me one.

A signal on my mindcom lets me know that my inflatable has arrived by pneumatic tube at the nearest supermarket, asking me whether I want to collect it or if I want it delivered by quadrotor. I choose the latter. A minute later it's there. The laminate is made of graphene oxide, which is both perfectly waterproof and perfectly breathable. As it can be inflated any amount needed, it can essentially allow me to survive in any weather conditions. I can go anywhere now. The whole world lies before me.

I tell my computer to mark me as a hitchhiker and walk down the road. I specify no destination other than the north. A few minutes later a slightly older man stops his car and picks me up. His tab says he's called Hugo.

"Hi Hugo."

"Hi. I heard from your profile you're an oneironaut," he says after we've talked for some time. His driving is very erratic and I find it hard to concentrate. The car's computer would override if we were ever in danger, but his maneuvers make my stomach lurch. "Then I just knew I had to pick you up. What kind of dreams did you have?"

"Well, I was in a dream cooperative for the past few years."

"Oh really, so you're actually a professional oneironaut! Have you done any research?"

"I'm not too focused on controlled studies. Any child can do that now, with all the tools for research being available online. And with people making almost all data about themselves public, you don't even need to do anything to do research in psychology. I'm mostly trying to uncover new data from deeper layers of my own unconscious, so that I can let my computer look for possible patterns in them so I can learn as I go. But I wouldn't call myself a researcher, since we're all pretty much 'researchers' now."

"I never see any patterns in my dreams. What do you see in yours?"

"Well… It's hard to explain really. It's not so much about what's going on in the dream as much as the feeling of the dream. You see, in a dream you're not just doing things as you would in the real world. Everything in the dream is really a symbol, it's part of your own mind, and interacting with it is interacting with your own mind. In the dream world everything is full of meaning, even the most mundane things."

"Such as?"

I looked around for examples. "This car drive might be a symbol of a death wish." I chuckle.

"You're not scared are you?" He suddenly turned the wheel around to one side and raised his hands as if in a roller coaster ride as the car made a turnabout and began to drive in circles in between the cars on both sides of the road. He laughed. The car dodged them all, but not without lurching side to side with as much violence as if we had already crashed. The car soon slowed down and after a few seconds he took the wheel back in hands.

I've blanched. I wasn't as familiar as him with the extent of reliability of the driver. "It was just an example. It might also be a symbol of something else, such as liberation. Sometimes there are symbols that mean the opposite of what you expect."

"It'll be over soon, actually." We drove onto the maglev highway, where all cars within the same lane automatically drove at the same speed. This made the cars like a train, so that except at an exit one couldn't drive the car.

"We had this crazy theory once which we wanted to test. We wanted to dig into the earth and fly into the sky to find the heaven and hell of our unconscious, to see what they'd look like, and more importantly, how we'd feel there. Not only that, but we wanted to talk to our own angels and demons, see what they had to say to us, and then, if possible, make them talk to each other."

"How did that go?"

"At first it didn't go so well. Perhaps it was that our unconscious was too influenced by stereotypes, but at any rate our demons displayed nothing but pure chaos and our angels nothing but pure order, bent on nothing but pure destruction and pure creation. Perhaps at their core that's what they are, but in their pure, extreme form, they were in such a raw form that they provided little material for analysis. Then I brought my angels and demons to the earth to see beyond their false surface, and the closer to Earth they came, the more human they became. Eventually, when they came close enough together, they became rather normal people, the difference between them being that one was left-brained and the other right-brained. The one thing that remained the same about them is that they did not get along, mostly on account of one being egoist and the other altruist. They could both do good to others and to themselves alike, but their approaches were different."

"So which won?"

"Heaven and hell forbid that either would win! They're nothing without each other. Eventually we actually managed to find a way to make them connect. The problem is that in doing so they eventually destroyed each other our, so that they had to separate again. All this was harder than it sounds, and took us years to find a way to do that."

I notice the change in landscape as we drive into the Pyrenees.

"Where are we going, anyway?"

"Well, if you wanted to go anywhere, you're surely on the right car. I'm following the superhighway all the way to Berlin."

"Through the Rhone-Rhine axis?"

"Of course. I don't know of any that go through the Alps. Montpelier, Lyon, Basel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin. Where are you going after that?"

"I don't know. Far away from here. Anywhere."

"You know, if you want to be anywhere, why don't you travel in virtuality?"

I look at him. "But I am. Didn't you see that on my profile?"

"Oh. No, it must have escaped me." There's an awkward silence for a moment, and he looks at me carefully, trying to see if I really am an avatar. I laugh, giving away that it was a joke.

"Oh, you think that's funny? How could I know the difference? But seriously, why don't you?"

"I don't know. I'll probably do a lot of my traveling in virtuality, but sometimes I just want to be there and feel I really am there. Sometimes I even feel like not taking any electronics with me so that I can be nowhere else." As always, I’m wearing my suit, in spite of the hot weather. It can stimulate my nervous system in any way reality can, including exercise by resisting my movements, with artificial muscles which can tighten and relax, which can also be used to actually accelerate my movements. Through suspension from a portable frame, it could even make me move without actually going anywhere. Meanwhile, everyone else who had turned on virtuality could perceive me as in reality through their interface.

He snorts. "You have no idea what you're looking for are you?"

"How do you know I'm looking for something."

"Why else would you leave everything behind?"

“I didn’t leave anything behind. I have everything I need with me. Why wouldn’t I leave?”

“That’s one way to look at it. I guess I’m growing old.” I look at him, then look him up. He’s not even thirty, barely a fifth through his current lifespan. A bit early to be old.

“We’re all old,” I say. “Most of us can’t even keep up with children. How can we ever catch up with them? They spent their entire lives in telepathy. Anyone who’s lived in the isolation we have is maimed for life. Still, it's one thing I'm resolved to try harder to do more."

“What?”

“Telepathy.”

“That’s easier said and done. Not many people want to open up like that to a stranger.”

“It hasn’t been easy for me to do it outside of my work team either, and even then not as much as I would like. I’m always the one insisting on shared dreaming. But if I need to I’ll do it with children. They’re far more open to that, probably just because they keep up with the times more than most of us.”

He raises his eyebrows. “People will talk,” he says.

With a sadness I realize how much of a divide there is between the youngest and oldest generations today, and how much it’s driven us apart. Borders are no longer formed along countries but along age groups. Children are turning into a higher species, all but leaving us behind, and perhaps there’s no way for me to become one of them. I often wish I was born as one of them.

“Let them talk,” I sigh. “Nowadays they can do what they want. And we can agree to keep a record of the telepathic sessions, so that they can’t make false accusations against me.”

“I have a better idea,” he says. “Here and there there have recently been some groups emerging that seem to be doing a pretty good job at, as you put it, keeping up with children. They’re transhumanist groups, but they call themselves transhuman, as they believe that telepathy is what distinguishes humans from transhumans and they communicate more through telepathy than anything else. I know one of them is in Berlin.”

“Why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

“It’s not too long ago that these groups began to emerge.”

“To be fair, it’s not that long ago that telepathy came on the market. So what do you mean with not too long ago? A few weeks?”

“More like, a few months"

It’s clear that this man already has another time frame than I do. “Then why didn’t I hear about this? Considering my interests, it should’ve been all over my feeds.”

“It’s not a very public project. In fact they want to avoid publicity as much as possible. They believe in a more peer-to-peer rather than peer-to-crowd approach.”

“Meaning I should’ve heard about it.”

“There’s not as many transhumanists among your circles as you would think. Usually there’s somewhere the chain stops. I only know about it because I happened to have a friend of a friend of a friend who knew the founder of the Berlin group.“

“That’s pretty private even by peer-to-peer standards.”

“That’s not all. They make you perform a test before you enter. They’re kind of elitist.”

“It sounds almost like a sect.” But on the other hand I could understand that this might’ve been the only way to prevent them from being inundated by today’s cosmopolitan society. There would be a lot of people who would like to be able to say that they were part of a “transhuman” group. But that’s exactly what I don’t trust about it: why do they need to call themselves that?

“I don’t know what it’s like. I only have hearsay.”

“Alright, I’ll take a look.” That’s probably the people they want to keep out. But I’m more serious about it than I betray.

“Will you come too?”

“No, I already have plans. But you know what, the meeting is only tonight, and I’m going to be early myself. Why don’t we visit some places on the way.  The Swiss Alps are only minutes out of our way."

I think about Carlos. He could use that to clear his mind, and according to his profile he likes mountaineering. He’s already following me in another car, and a little later it has shifted through the trains and attached to ours, the front of one and the back of the other opening up to each other to connect the two.

That day we end up hiking across the edge of a glacier. Most of our hike we have a view on the lake next to us, as well of the icebergs which used to be part of the glacier. Sensors on the soles of our boots tell us where we can move safely by superimposing a 3D-map of the glacier’s structure on our vision, color-coded for safety levels from green to red based on our computers’ projections of their flow. Several times we’re forced to take a detour because of a possibility of iceberg calving, and one time we actually see the place where we were detoured from subside. We’re now half a kilometer from the lake, and since we’re close to the far side, we decide not to turn back but move slightly up the glacier instead.

As the ice beneath our feet is very hydrophilic, the gecko surface on our boots, which uses capillary force, sticks to their surface quite well. The entire surface of my suit has the same gecko surface, and as I see its adhesiveness demonstrated on the ice, I quickly become more confident and take the lead, up to a point where I actually just slightly use my suit to accelerate me, just to prove to myself that I can.

My computer can’t actually override my body’s movements as it could a car’s to avoid accidents, as they’re too complex for it too coordinate: it can only “resist or assist” the movements already in process. Nonetheless, I feel safe knowing that even if I’d somehow manage to fall into a crevasse (such as the one below the snow right in front of me now), I could easily save myself just by touching its walls. I try touching the ice below me with the glove parts, then with my knees and elbows. It automatically triggers water suction into the surface.

“What are you doing?” Hugo says as he and Carlos catch up with me.

I suddenly feel mischievous and pretend to fall over, throwing all my weight on the snow in front of me. It collapses. As soon as I fall below the edge I hold on to the walls. My limbs tremble, but the graphene suit holds regardless. The suit’s muscles tighten.

“Lucas!” Hugo shouts. But I hear Carlos scoff.

“You rascal!” he says as he bends over the edge. “I could tell from that look that you were up to mischief.”

“Let’s go down. The echo says it goes down into an ice cave at the edge.”

“Are you mad? A glacier is a river of ice. Up here it may be pretty solid, but the deeper you go the more fluid the river becomes.”

“This area is supposed to be quite stable the next few hours. Anyway, I can go alone and catch up later.”

He doesn’t immediately reply. When Carlos is about to say something, I interrupt him by withdrawing the water from the gecko and slip down the crevasse. Carlos soon comes behind in the bottom of the crevasse.

“Alright, so maybe I lied. Obviously it doesn’t quite lead all the way into the cave.”

Whatever he’s saying is drowned in the high-pitched sound of suit’s boots’ vibrations, as its  expands and contracts at a high frequency. As the suit’s nanodiamonds press against the ice walls, the ice liquefies and the water is pumped back out by the gecko, where it pools around my legs. Our hoods close in front of our heads, but shortly after the suit slowly lets us slide along the walls to our feet in the ice cave, and the hoods retract. I message Hugo that the coast is clear, but only after some convincing he slides down after us.

He looks at my flushed face.

“Hard to believe this is the boy I startled with a little joyriding,” he says.

“I don’t belong in a vehicle,” I say as I turn to look at the ice cave’s chipped walls, glistening in our suits’ glow. “I like to feel in control.” Walking further down we soon see a light at the end, where the cave emerges back into the lake. I propose diving to the other side of the lake, but my companions demur. Instead, while they sit by the side, I take a swim by myself. I use my suit as drysuit, though it can also reprogram itself into a wetsuit.

Carlos eventually tries the water for himself, and when Hugo is left by himself beneath the weight of the glacier, he soon follows. Once we are in the midst of the lake, the decision is easily made to swim to the other side instead of swimming back. None of us are really very sure about going back up the crevasse. It must have been a glacier river at some point, but had obviously caved in before we came here.

Once on the other side of the lake, we move down the mountain to a geodesic cabin on a hiking trail, which is also a tavern open for tourists. Two Chinese women in their thirties are there, and I notice that they’re trying to speak Russian with each other, evoking each other’s laughter as they try to pronounce the words their translator gives them.

We give each other a friendly greeting, to include each other as part of our social groups, but after the fatigue of our hike, don’t immediately begin to talk with each other. We lay back into the seats and look up at the cirrus clouds. We sink into the e-matter as it conforms to the shape of our bodies, making us feel almost like a fetus in a uterus. Tired as we are, they all but lull us to sleep.

After a brief, quiet rest, we serve ourselves some drinks. Remote as it is, there is no pneumatic tube, but Hugo is very particular on his old-fashioned tastes, and decides it’s worth it for him to run to the nearby highway to get some arak from a station, something which, using his suit, he says should not take him longer than five minutes.

Carlos considers going with him, as he feels like “stimracing” with him, but we decide on doing so all together afterwards on the trail. At first I’m not sure if I feel like it. The thick suit of artificial muscles doesn’t wick very well, and while I usually don’t mind being sweaty in the hot Mediterranean, I don’t feel like it suits the cold Alps, even if I could just inflate my suit so I wouldn’t actually be cold.

I’m trying to find out if there’s any way to increase the wicking of the suit without permanently compromising its haptic virtuality when one of the two women sitting on another table warmly greets me. I feel a little awkward when I realize I was looking in their general direction when I was surfing, so that from their viewpoint I could have been staring for all they knew, and it takes me a moment to greet them back.

“Hi,” I say. I take a quick glance over their tab. They’re sisters called Ning and Yi, who are near the end of their two-year-long journey of the Trans-Eurasian Trail, sometimes called the Trading Road Trail, a 20 gigameter hiking trail that travels continually through mountain ranges: the Khingan and Hengduan in China, the Himalayas in India and Nepal, the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, the Elburz in north-Iran, the Pontic mountains in north-Turkey, the Carpathians in the Balkan, the Alps, and the Appenines.

The hikers seem to think I’m still reading when they wait patiently through my speechlessness. Only when I drop my jaw, they become aware of it, and laugh in unison. I begin to utter several sounds, but no words I can think of do justice to  my astonishment.

The only possible explanation presents itself to me: “You were cheating, right?”

Their laugh suddenly makes way for a serious expression. Ning says, “No, we vowed to walk on our own power the whole way. Otherwise we might as well have gone by car. We wanted to take our time with each landscape to cultivate patience.”

“Well, surely you must’ve become buddhas by now! But I think you must be one of the few people to ever do that.”

“Most people cheat at some point, if  but they eventually realize that it was a mistake and give it up, usually once they’re in good form. It becomes a slippery slope to cheat whenever you’re tired or bored.”

“How long have you been on the way?” As I don’t want them to repeat their answers when Carlos and Hugo come back, I also ask, “Do you mind if I forward this conversation to my friends?” They’ve probably answered these questions a thousand times by now.

“Two years.“ They don’t answer on my other question, but it was mostly rhetorical. Almost everyone records their life nowadays, and the few people, mostly from older generations, that don’t want to be recorded are automatically censored.

“However do any of you make so much time free for that?”

“Almost all of us keep working on the trail. We’ve even met a few people who are spending their entire life on trails like this, since they can work and play from anywhere anyway in virtuality. Traveling doesn’t really interfere with our lives at home, if anything it’s the other way around. We’re much healthier than we’d be otherwise, so it makes us better at everything.”

“Most of our generation are living as cosmopolitans. People really had no idea when they said a hundred years ago that the world had become a village. But few people actually spend that long in the wilderness.”

“Why not, when you have civilization in your pocket?”

“Ah, yes, but you can say the same thing about nature.”

“You know it’s not the same. You have to feel like you’re really there, in the middle of nowhere.”

I look from NIng to Yi, who has so far remained silent. She has a far-away look in her eyes. I wonder how the two changed through their experience. They radiate a strength and calm I can’t quite describe.

“So where will you go next?” I ask.

“Well, the main trail goes from Beijing to Rome, but an alternate route begins at the Pacific Coast in Japan and ends at the Atlantic Coast in Spain. We started in Beijing, but we’re not sure where we’re going from here. We might go somewhere else entirely, such as the Hannibal trail. But we don’t know. So much is changing in these years, and we have to find a way to keep up.”

It sounds like that was why they undertook this journey in the first place, to reach some sort of Enlightenment. It’s unbelievable what some people do these days to try to reach beyond themselves, even as so many others hold on to themselves as much as ever.

Perhaps this is the kind of thing which, in Hugo’s words, I’m looking for. I’m about to ask them if there’s any chance I could come with them, when Carlos and Hugo return.

Carlos smiles broadly at them as he sits down next to them, but for a long time doesn’t know what to say. “2 years on the road!” he finally says simply as soon as they make eye contact. Carlos is himself unusually sedate for his age, and very much their antithesis. For some time they discuss whether it’s better to see much of one place or a little of some places. It ends on the note that we now have so much time in our life that it is possible to really get to know every place in the world.

Later that day, Carlos goes his own way for the rest of the day to visit some friends in Zurich, but promises to catch up with me the next day. Hugo and I resume our way to Berlin.

Once there, I’m glad to see Berlin again. In the past few years it’s become an ever more dynamic city. Having nothing of its past left that’s worth remembering, it’s one of those cities that’s most focused on the future, kind of like some American cities still do. Every time I see it there’s some new idea that’s being tried out in its city planning.

This time its people decided to install programmable platforms as roofbridges, which can extend in any direction to allow any number of pedestrians to cross from roof to roof. As this allows people to cross anywhere they want without having to build bridges everywhere which obstruct the view of the sky, this has led to far more people engaging in roofwalking.

The system’s application has spread to many cities, especially in Danmark where they are much appreciated by the parcouring community, for whom it not only made it easier to move from one parcouring spot to another but for whom it could also offer a safety net for bolder parcourers: if a parcourer fell short in trying to jump to a neighboring roof, the moving bridges would move down the walls of the building while extending below them, breaking their fall.

In Berln, however, it has spread across the entire city. In the center it has even gone so far as to extend many of its buildings to create a more level “second tier,” and for the first time USA citizens were actually jealous of the European row houses. The very term “second tier” is still controversial on account of the obstruction of light it used to involve. Until recently it was mostly used in China, and to the right it was a symbol of how excessive equality (that of neighboring roofs) actually leads to the worst forms of inequality.

The people of the Berlin city state took advantage of the unused space of the second tier to build gardens across entire blocks, making it look a little like a wood on top of a city from above. The roofs had been extended mostly with hydroponics farms, adding to the illusion. I couldn’t wait to walk on them and see the open sky on top of the city. I close the window in my mindcom, not sure if I hadn’t better asked Hugo about it and heard about his own personal experience with it, but it was just too easy to browse the net. If only it was as simple to browse people’s minds.

I think again about the meetup with the so-called transhumans and ask Hugo about it. He doesn’t know, but looks it up on his car’s screen. This time I shouldn’t have bothered him about it. Not that we could have an accident.

“Apparently it’s in a Kiosk of sorts in the New Berlin gardens, on the second tier.” I’m pleased to hear about this. “Nowadays a lot of the social events are on the second tier,” he adds.

He stops at an bracer elevator. “Have you ever ridden one of these?”

“Of course. Not often, but yes.”

“I’ll drop you off here then.”

I pause. “Do you want to come with?”

“No, I already have something to do tonight. But I’m sure our ways will cross again at some point. I’m quite itinerant myself.”

“Good! You’re not that old after all,” I joke. I look around. The sun is almost setting and wonder if I could see the sun setting.

“Just where are you going?”

“Just here in the center, but it’s on ground level, in our usual place.

“How quaint. Well, I guess that’s it then.” But I refuse to let this contact remain superficial like some millennial would. “But I don’t suppose you’re in a hurry?”

“Well, we arranged at eight.”

“That’s still half an hour. And she’ll have plenty of other pastimes if you’re fifteen minutes late,” I say, thinking of how I forgot he was even there while I was researching Berlin’s second tier.

“How do you know it’s a her?” He looks at me suspiciously, as if I might’ve hacked him. Now I know for sure I can’t leave it at this.

“Otherwise you’d ask her to come with us. Come on, the sun is going under in a few minutes.”

“I don’t know if she’d agree with me getting late. We Prussians are kind of more punctual than you Catalunyans.”

“You’re getting old.”

He falls silent. That got to him.

“Alright.”

I put my hands in the bracers, which tighten around my shoulders, elbows and wrists and pull me up. In a few seconds I’ve moved up the rail to the top of the building. I look around, and smile as I turn around and see the entire horizon from east to west. But the best part is the freshness of the air. Of course the cities are no longer polluted as they once were, but the air still runs a little bit stale without wind. Up here, I might as well be in the Alps.

The sun is still up, so I run. By the time Hugo is there, I’m already on the next building. I glance at the sun, which I can almost look at without getting too much of an afterimage.

“Hey!” he says.

I jump from building to building, then stand still on the other side to let him follow me by roofbridge AKA platform. By the time it’s extended, I’ve moved on to the next. But when we come to a particular building I move on before he can catch up. From a higher building I see his girlfriend is already there waiting for him. You don’t have to be a hacker to know your way around people. I send him a message:

“They say routine is the first symptom of aging.”

I continue on my way, to one of the lower roofs at the edge of the park. The colors of sunset add a sense of warmth to the park that the midday sun never could. But the best part comes when the sun is down and the stars come out. With such open view of the sky, the Berliners switched their smartroads’ main lights to infrared. Only the cars around pedestrians were lit up in visible light, so that there is far less light pollution than there would otherwise be. I never thought any Western city could be this close to nature.

And yet, there are plenty of people here, engaged in all kinds of activities provided by the different areas: aside from more regular events like receptions, there are plenty of places for airdancing and other maglev sports.

Nonetheless I’m thrilled when I see the light from the pavilion. The semispherical roof is retracted in wedges on the sides, leaving the seats in the central circle open to the sky. I hear laughing. The atmosphere sounds a lot more friendly than I imagined it. Toggling augmented reality for a moment, I see on the tag floating above them that I’m in the right place.

For a while I observe them in silence, trying to memorize their names from their tags. Only two out of five, Laura and Mikhail, actually describe themselves as transhumanists on their tags. Only Mikhail and Laura are in their twenties. Meri and Gero are still children, and Ada is in her late teens. Aside from Gero, none of them is from Germany: Mikhail is half Iranian and half Russian, Laura is from the Western States, Meri from Finland, and Ada from Sweden.

Meri and Ada, sitting opposite one another, seem close. They’re sitting around a coffee table, which is also a display. It’s raised where Laura and Mikhail are standing, browsing to cite research during their discussion. Gero, sitting next to Meri, doesn’t seem to say much, trying to listen in turns to one conversation and the other. Now and then Meri pokes him in the side and tries to make him talk. Meri looks playful, Gero serious, Ada a bit of both. Mikhail and Laura look more mature, a complex mixture of emotions.

When I approach, they hardly interrupt their conversations, as if I’d been there all along. “Hi!” Meri says, which the others echo in quick succession.

“So this is the transhumanist meeting?”

“The ‘transhuman’ meeting,” Meri says, laughing. I assume the appellation is at least as much whimsical as serious.

“We have a more nuanced definition of what a transhuman is here,” Mikhail says appeasingly. “We distinguish transhumans from humans by telepathy, just like humans are sometimes distinguished from other apes by speech. Once you no longer even need speech, what else does that make you, if not transhuman?”

“So if it’s so easy for you, why aren’t you in telepathy right now?”

“We were waiting for you,” Gero says. “Hugo let us know you’d come.”

“Excuses,” I say, smirking. The group that was discussing before falls silent. “You know I’m right,” I say, turning to them. “Maybe I’m the one who should test you,” I say, teasingly. “Speaking of which, what is this test?”

“Oh, it’s more a game than anything else,” Laura says. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. But it’s also kind of meant to keep people out that aren’t really ready for telepathy. Or just to show them that they’re not ready.”

“Alright. So what should I do?”

“Something you’ve probably wanted to do for a long time but never dared to,” Gero says. “Flying.”

“In real life,” Ada adds. “You have to feel like you are truly on the top of the world.”

“Isn’t that kinda dangerous?”

“Oh, come on,” Meri says. “You know the avionics been totally safe for years now. All that time you’ve had the opportunity, and yet you’ve never done it. Why is that?” She puts especial emphasis on “several years,” which for her is an unthinkable amount of time to wait.

“It’s not as much a test as a foretaste. If you don’t like flying, you won’t like telepathy,” Mikhail says. Gero pushes a raypack into my hands, an electrically propelled form of personal flight which works by ionizing air into plasma. I weigh it in my hands as I look it over, looking for a reprieve from actually putting it on. Its surprisingly light, considering that it has five engines, one for each limb and one for the torso.

“I just don’t see the point of it if you can have the same experience in virtuality,” I mumble. But what I said them before now applies to me: excuses. Even in my dreams I never succeeded in flying, which was my greatest handicap as an oneironaut. I always felt gravity pulling me back, which is supposed to mean I wanted it to do so. At the thought of flying I have to admit that I rather like the feeling of gravity holding me safely on the ground.

When I look up from the raypack, I see that the others are equipping theirs.

“It’s not the same experience,” Ada says. “It makes you feel exposed in a way that you have no control over, and that’s how telepathy feels.”

I look at the sky and for the first time pay attention to the people flying by. They flew by so fast that I hardly even noticed till now that they’re all children. That says a lot about how blinded I’ve become in my own mere twenty years. I see the glint of strength in their eyes, a strength that’s far beyond that of most adults. Then I look back at the other, still mostly adolescent members. Maybe it’s not that far-fetched to say they’re at least halfway transhuman. And even I feel like I’m already falling behind. I can’t let that happen.

With a renewed determination I equip the raypack. The straps are attached to a suit, and every inch of it is packed with cameras which register the distance from everything around me.

“Where will we fly to?” I ask.

“Ah, that’s the question isn’t it?” Laura says. “Isn’t that was frightens you most? Where do you go once you’re up there and you can go anywhere at all?” *

“How do I pass?”

“Think of it as a training. We could start small. At first you could use it to jump very high.” As it seems to me like they don’t really know what they’re doing, I think of it more as a game.

“I could do that. I did that to get here. I got into parcouring through hooverskating: since I could drop from almost any height onto a maglev road with my maglev boots, I quickly learned how to make larger leaps. I heard that in Copenhagen they actually have some maglev buildings for that purpose.”

“Well, flying is just like that. Usually you fly to go from place to place, not just to be in the open sky. Have you never thought ‘I wish I could just go there faster?’”

“Sometimes. I felt that way when hiking in the mountains. But that was before raypacks were even on the market.” In my dreams I usually use teleports, but that cheat doesn’t always work. Sometimes a transition is needed, as the mind can’t always just shift from one state to another.

That gives me an idea. But as I look at Mikhail he speaks first.

“We could go to the mountains."

"I've done plenty of leaping. It's kinda close to flying." Rockleaping, a sport derived from rockclimbing, uses robotic boots to make superhuman leaps from rock to rock, relying only on diamond-coated tips on the boots, gloves and braces to hold on. Unlike flying it's very dangerous, but it never felt like it because I knew what I was doing. It's included in the system software of my instincts.

“We could do that now,” Gero says. “The Giant Mountains are a mere 300 kilometers away. We could get there in half an hour by maglev.”

“If we’re going into the mountains we won’t be back before midnight though.”

“So? The moon will be out, and we can stay there for the night. We’re all equipped for it.” I noticed that everyone is wearing minimalistic allotropes like myself, probably graphene.

“Alright,” I say, in a sudden impulse, “Let’s do it.”

“We could go now. We can still talk in the train, anyway. We’ll divert anyone else that wants to come to our car.”

Ada and Meri get up with an enthusiasm I didn’t expect from them, considering how withdrawn they’ve been all evening. Another glance at their tab reveals why: they’re both into mountaineering. Meri’s own tab further says that they in fact often do so together. Both Meri and Gero’s tags share a lot more information to strangers than the older attendees, several hundreds of items. At first sight it seems like they keep only the most sensitive information hidden, such as their address.

“You wouldn’t think they had that much energy,” I say, as I watch them run in front of us laughing. They’ve already jumped off the edge of the building. A roofbridge extends below their feet, and they watch us from beyond the edge. As they look at us Meri jokes to Ada, who pokes her.

“Oh, they have a lot more than us,” Mikhail says. “Once you’re in telepathy with them you find that they have a lot more thoughts per second than any of us. That’s why they talk so little. By the time there’s an opening in the conversation to say one thought they’ve moved on to another.”

“It’s not like they’re self-conscious, either,” Gero says. “Sometimes I am, and I sometimes can’t stop talking because of it. It makes me want to explain myself and then explain the explanations. Like now.”

“Well, that’s just the way you are. You’re the neuroinformatician, after all.”

“I wouldn’t describe myself as such,” he says. “But that’s certainly one of the things I’ve been quite preoccupied with the last few months, perhaps to an excess. I have to admit it’s scary sometimes to be so intimate with the patterns of one’s own brain.” He shivers. “But I’m trying to take a break from that now.”

I’m pleased at the patience with which extraverts like Laura and Mikhail heard him out in the middle of the excitement. This turns out to be much less casual a group than I thought. On the contrary, it seems like they want to do everything they can to connect as deeply as possible with me and each other. I suppose part of me is still used to the old superficiality of modernism that still lingers here and there in our society, including in my family.

“Aren’t you a bit young for such heavy subjects?” I ask him. He looks mildly offended. “I mean, isn’t being young about exploring everything the world has to offer?”

“It’s not that I didn’t do anything else. But it totally changes the way you look at the world and yourself, and it can be a bit much sometimes.”

We walk over the edge of the building, and the platform extends below our feet. As it descends, Gero walks toward the edge of the platform, which extends before him. He pays no attention. He seems to be looking up at the buildings, as if to get a good angle on the view.

“Can you do that while it’s going down?” I ask.

“You can, but it’s kind of considered bad form by flyers, Gero.” Laura said this sentence loud enough for him to hear. Hearing his name, Gero starts as if he awakens from a trance.

“Oh, yes, I walked rather far. There’s an interesting group of flyers there I was trying to see outlined against the sky.”

At the bottom shortens again, drawing Gero back to the edge of the road. A 6-seat car has already stopped before us. It has a phoenix symbol on the side.

“Hi, Achim! Is this your car?” Mikhail asks the middle-aged man in the front seat, no doubt having noticed the symbol on the exterior.

“No, I’m borrowing it myself, from the co-op.”

“Is it true that these cars can fly?” Meri asks from the other row of seats.

“Fly is a big word,” he says. “They can hover on their own power for a while if necessary, but rarely have the chance to do so.”

“Like our Valkyries in Scandinavia,” Meri says.

“Why is there a phoenix icon on the back?” I wasn’t sure if this was subjective enough a question to ask, but in Catalunya, if we aren’t sure we usually ask. It’s not a good starter, perhaps, but I want to get it off my mind first.

“It’s an existentialist metaphor. Germany was particularly hard hit by the nihilist era in the 20s, as you can probably tell if you’re familiar with its later cyberpunk scene. There’s a quote from Nietzsche that goes ‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?' So one of the earliest large-scale cooperatives in Berlin in the late nihilist era used a phoenix as its icon. Of course there’s no city that it suits better.”

“Sorry, I guess that was probably more of a search question.”

“Oh, no problem.” Meri was reminiscing with Ada about their flights over the fjords, comparing Chile’s to Norway’s.

I’m about to ask where he’s going, but not wanting to repeat the same mistake I check his tab first. I’m relieved that he’s hidden that information, so that I can ask him.

“Where are you going?” As I’m asking this, suddenly the realization strikes me how important telepathy is to youngsters like Gero and Meri, since they don’t seem to hide any information at all. But that’s also why it’s so hard for their elders: we’re used to hiding information. But once we no longer feel like we have anything to hide, what use is it to talk?

I wonder if perhaps that’s why we hide anything, just so that we can feel like we are involving ourselves, our egos, in sharing it. What does it mean to the next generation to connect with someone if they have no ego, nothing that makes up their self but public information? What are we if not our secrets?

Achim looks at me questioningly, having seen the change in my face. “Are you alright?” he seems about to ask. I realize that I’ve been so astonished by this thought that I haven’t been listening to Achim’s answer, and that I wished the conversation had gone this way instead, because I really want to talk about this. If we’d been in telepathy that would’ve happened. Should I be polite and go on with the small talk or tell him what was on my mind?

“Sorry?” I say. “I got distracted. What were you saying? Just a sec, let me read that.” Our sensors save everything except about people who don’t consent. I’m reading the transcript because it’s faster.

Achim was saying he’s going to see his lover in Slovakia, and asked me if that would still be considered a long-distance relationship today. They’ve known each other for years, but only since recently see each other almost daily. I feel awkward at not having missed something so personal, of all things, something which is normal for my age to talk about right after meeting but was no doubt very hard for someone his age to get used to, so I do what anyone my age does when they feel awkward: I laugh, not nervously but heartily.

Now Achim looks really confused, and a little upset, but the situation is so silly, that when I try to think of how to explain it I laugh even harder. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I sure wish I was in telepathy now so I could explain what came over me.

“I just had this very strange thought. It’s unrelated, though. I’ll tell you about it later. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” So many words, so little said, and Achim isn’t even convinced of their truth.

I try to put all my sincerity in my expression as I go on. “So how did it work out?”

“How did what work out?”

“Well, you said you’ve known each other for many years. I suppose it must have been difficult for both of you before the maglev roads were laid. So what did you do?”

“Oh, is that’s what was funny?” He began laughing himself, taking the situation in perspective from the panorama of his years. “Yes, as you can imagine it was an absurd situation.” He still thinks I was mocking him. I resolve to tell him what I was thinking.

“Not at all,” I interject seriously.

“We tried to live together,” he resumes, “but it didn’t work out for either of us. We both have a rich social life and couldn’t leave our friends behind. We tried open relationships, but we never found anyone with which it felt so natural to be with as each other. It’s testimony to how right we are for each other that it survived all those years. I guess deep down we knew it was but a matter of time before we’d be united, with virtuality advancing as it did. We’d never thought we’d be together in reality before that, though.”

“But with suits you don’t necessarily even need to go anywhere.”

“Yes, but that’s only been for a few years. Haven’t really got used to the idea yet.”

“Only a few years! That’s a lifetime!”

“To you it is. It must have been, what, a quarter of your life ago that they came out? For me it’s less than a tenth.”

“That’s still a lot.”

“We have time.”

“I don’t know about that. I have the feeling evolution really has turned into a race. I keep wondering if the transhumans won’t just leave us behind, like we left the chimpanzees behind.”

There’s silence for a moment. Achim looks around at the hilly landscape, dotted here and there with clusters of geodomes in the distance, all covered entirely with herbs and flowers and mass, and a few with actual produce. Meri point at them, asking if he’d ever want to live there.

“I may be old, but not that old. And I have many friends in the city.”

“Old?” she says with a sneer. “It doesn’t have to be permanent! You think the only people who seek loneliness are people who are living out their lives?” “Live out one’s life” is a euphemism for waiting to die, something people too worn out to be convinced to extend their lives do before actively or passively committing suicide.

“Ada spent months in a glass geodome in Finnmark, with only the stars and aurora as sources of light. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“Or else it would have to be one of these, close to the highway,” Achim says, trying to keep the conversation linear. ”But even then it’s already less casual than if you can just go to a friend’s home in a few minutes. I remember what it was like twenty years ago to live at the edge of the city. I guess it would be like that now.”

I no longer feel like I can talk about my epiphany at the moment anymore, and yet I feel it’s extremely important to prepare myself. Conversations in groups move so quickly that things like these sometimes get buried underneath superficiality. That’s why socializing in larger groups is no longer fashionable.

It’s unlike me to be so thoughtful, but the thought of telepathy, or rather its philosophical implications, give me the chills. I don’t have time to dwell, however. We’re passing Magdeburg, and mere minutes later, we’re in the mountains. It takes as many minutes for it to take us on a gravel road to a mountain top.

As I move out the car, my heart is already throbbing. The night makes it seem all the more dreamlike. It’s a good moment for my reality check. But I can still breathe when I pinch my nose. I get a feeling I’ve often had while in a lucid dream, a fear of losing touch with reality.

“So what are you doing here a this hour?” I still hear Achim ask from the car. Then he glances at our backs with an understanding look. We are all still wearing the raypack, the e-matter of the seats having adapted to their shape. If I pass, I might

“Oh we don’t mind. We’re not cold,” Meri said, being used to worse, when you’d have to choose between freezing your lips and talking through a mask. Our graphene markedly inflated when we got the car, trapping air like down in the tiny molecular pockets in their interior.

“Aren’t you afraid something will happen, and no one will find you?”

“Night vision’s good tonight,” Mikhail says, gesturing at the gibbous moon, which brings the rocky crests below to light. The plan is to leap from one peak to another. Looking in the distance, it’s hard to believe that I am supposed to cross such distances in mere moments. I feel the blood surge into my throat, and the throbbing of my heart turns into a racing. My breathing feels hot in my nose. I feel suddenly acutely aware of my whole body, in a way that reminds me of psychedelic experiences. I understand suddenly how flight can indeed be an analogy for telepathy, as an ultimate form of transcending the limits of one’s self, albeit physically rather than mentally.

Mikhail gives me a jovial slap on the shoulder. “Are you ready?” But there is no excuse not to be, no preparations left to make. In this world, almost as soon as we want to do something we get it right over with, with no obstacles to put it off, and all we have to do is hold on tight through the future shock of our mind’s sound barrier. In a world where everything is possible, it is only ourselves that hold us back from achieving anything we want.

I try not to think too much and just do it, but something holds me back, as if I’m about to jump into a great depth, except that the depth is that of the sky above. I take another look at the sky, opening up into the galaxy above, and with a wave of vertigo think of what the universe would be like if only for a moment there was no gravity.

But looking at the stars calls forth another thought in me: someday even the distance between the stars might become as negligible as that between countries now, and for a moment I close my eyes and imagine myself flying not just through these mountains, but beyond them, leaving them far below me in the atmosphere. But when I open my eyes the stars are still unreachable. I’ve thought far enough to come to some new limits I can grasp at, and they make it easier for me to face the limitless, if only by reminding me of their undesirability. As I succeed in reorienting myself from a new, wider perspective, I look much smaller from it, and I no longer take myself so serious.

I check my diadem to make sure it sits tight on my cranium. The raypack will still work without it, but like most electronics, the raypack is controlled primarily by my brain, though also secondarily through my suit. I experimentally float a few inches of the ground, rotating this way and that, and already have trouble to restrain myself from flailing around for hold. But little by little I start to make larger movements in the air. Using the brain input, it feels as if I’m just floating, but using my suit, it feels as if I’m actually flying of my own power, as if in microgravity.

I look at a level piece of land nearby on the same hill and target it in my computer. It feels as if I am but acting in a dream when I give my raypack a thrust and begin to climb into the sky. Keeping my look up at the sky for courage, for a moment I don’t realize just how far I’m going. Then at the height of my short flight, as I am about to descend I recover from my dissociation and flail my arms around for grasp, but the raypack slows me down as I approach the ground.

Looking around, I see the others land around me. The children skip towards me in little leaps. “If I tag you, you’ll have to follow me all the way to the stratosphere!” Meri says. It takes some moments for me to process this, so she slows down as she is about to tag me. I recoil.

“You’d better run,” Gero says, “or she’ll swoop down on you like a vulture for half an hour trying to get you to play along before she gives up.”

“You bet I will. Tell you what, I’ll give you another chance,” she says. “I’ll race you to the top,” she points at a nearby mountain. “I’ll land every time you land. But if I make it to the top first I’ll frighten you awake all night until you come after me.”

Again I fail to find a reply, and she doesn’t give me much time to protest and floats into position.

“Come on, slowpoke.” I think of how ironic it is to be taught to fly from a child, and for a moment I feel like I’m the real child here, held upright by his arms as he takes his first steps. Except that I’m allowed no respite between my first steps and my first footrace.

Again I take a careful look at where I want to go next, as I where about to make a leap from a high diving board for the first time. A few times when I’m about to fly I brace myself on one leg as if to make a little runup, when I stop short as I realize I cannot, in fact, fly, and a jump is therefore unnecessary. On the third time I become so impatient I suddenly shoot much higher into the air than before, and by the time I land halfway up the mountain, I am painting and feel as if I am sprinting. Two smaller leaps further I’m on top of the mountain and look back, but Meri merely shoots overhead and says, “I did mean that mountain over there!”

The others fly in front of me over the moonlit plateau when I realize I’ve landed on a crest of the actual mountain she’d pointed at. I have no time left to lose and fly after them. I actually make some headway on them when I realize I’m actually flying rather than just making measured leaps, and that I have nowhere set to land. I panic and begin to descend when I realize there are too many rocks beneath me to land at this speed, and I stop descending. Then, for the first time, I actually feel that my trajectory isn’t curved back to earth as every trajectory I’ve ever taken in my life, that it is, in fact, unaffected by it. I am detached from gravity, from the whole earth itself. If my breath wasn’t taken away I’d feel an urge to laugh.

I’m racing after the others as fast as I can now. The engine is so silent that I can’t hear it over the sound of the wind. I tell my suit, which is made out of e-matter, to form cuffs over my ears, and suddenly it becomes relatively quiet. For a moment I think I actually hear a bird fluttering from its perch.

I’m close enough to the others to see that they’re looking back at me. They’re slowing down. When I come close, Mikhail points at a spot in front of them. “You’d better catch up, if you want to be left alone.”

I look at the dot. “She’s too far away.” Mikhail shrugs. I stay with the rest of the group and feel much safer for it, even though they’d be able to help me from anywhere else. Even if the override somehow failed I could allow them control my suit if something went wrong.

When we make it to the top of the mountain, Meri looks at us with arms akimbo. Dead branches are floating into a pile, carried my e-matter drones. “I win,” she says to me. When we’ve landed, the pile catches fire.

I move over to her and tag her. “Tag. There, you happy now?”

“That’s not me,” her voice says, but her lips stay sealed. The voice comes from above. I look up and start. She’s rapidly flying right at me with no signs of stopping, only to barrel roll right past me at the last moment. I scream.

“You haven’t seen the last of that,” Mikhail says with a smirk. “She’ll go on and on until you follow her to the stratosphere.”

“Wait, that was just a figure of speech, right?”

He slowly shakes his head. I groan. “Get that smirk of your face,” I say to him.

Laura moves over to where Meri’s model was just a while earlier and bends down to pick up a ball with an e-matter symbol on it. After a second she drops it again, and it expands into the form of a woman. Their lips are moving, but their voices are muted.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “I’m sleeping in Budapest tonight.”

“You’re exchanging houses again?” Mikhail asks.

“Yes, and this woman seems particularly interesting. She’s an artist and has covered the insides of her house entirely in abstract e-matter designs.”

“How many exchanges are you away from your own home again?”

“Well, it’s interesting. I’ve seen mountains before, but every house is an expression of a different personality. She has a long flight ahead of her, so I’ll have plenty of time to get to know her tonight.”

Meri makes another swoop for me. “Heaven and hell!” I curse.

Mikhail laughs. “Say, wasn’t her personality type introverted? And yours and Laura’s extraverted? You wouldn’t think so.”

“You believe in that kind of thing?”

“Don’t you? You did make that public on your profile.”

“I put it on ‘extraverted’ when I feel like it. It changes the way people interact with me. Pople aren’t that simple. Not only do they change often, but sometimes we can have opposite qualities in a number of ways. For example,” He looks at the sky. “What do you think she’s thinking right now?”

“She seems cheerful.”

“Sure she is, but I’d say she’s also anxious. You can have different feelings at the same time.”

“Anxiety and cheerfulness are both aspects of excitement, though, so they’re not really so different.”

“Would you fly into space just out of excitement, though? No, she might seem shallow right now, but by moving back and forth between us and the vacuum like a comet, she wants to find expression of some deeper side of her, a duality between utter loneliness and utter togetherness.”

“I have to go,” Laura says. She and Mikhail talk some more, but I’m lost in thought. I think about how Ada spent six months in isolation in the far north and look at her. She meets my look with such deep peace in her eyes that it stirs me. I quickly look away lest she’d notice, then realize that if I am to ever try telepathy I can’t keep any secrets. I will myself to look back at her, and see a smile has appeared on her lips. The sense of belonging in her expression passes onto me, and it makes me feel dizzy. I never noticed it before because she stayed on the background all evening. She doesn’t seem to mind, but I look away anyway, realizing only now that I don’t want to involve someone like myself in another’s life. And I realize that while my body may have been freed today, my mind is still as much bound by gravity as ever.

Meri swoops by again, almost making me fall into the fire. I curse. “Doesn’t she ever get tired? And does she really go all the way to the stratosphere and back in that time?”

“Much farther. She’s probably been all over the Bohemian massif by now. And no, she doesn’t get tired. When you’re used to it it doesn’t require any energy at all. With the override there’s no danger she has to focus on avoiding, after all.”

We say goodbye to Laura. It becomes silent for a while after this, and we gaze into the fire. It’s not actually needed for warmth, but it’s cosy nonetheless.

“So about this telepathy…” I begin, when I pick up my train of thoughts again.

“We’re ready when you are,” Mikhail says simply.

“So we’re doing a group telepathy, then?”

“You can do as you please, but it’s by far easiest way to start because it doesn’t go as deep. Being in telepathy doesn’t mean you can necessarily share everything with them as you do with yourself. It takes a bit of work. Even we can’t always do it with everyone, even though we’re trained at it.”

“Before we do this, I want to agree that we record this.”

“Why?”

I weigh my words for a while, then realize there’s no point in beating around the bush and I might as well be honest now. “I’m concerned about being accused of sexual harassment.”

“We give you our consent. That’s proof enough.”

“That’s not sexual consent, though.”

“In telepathy the law isn’t really clear what’s sexual and not: just being aware of someone else’s body could be seen as sexual. Besides, trying not to think of something is the surest way to ascertain you’ll think about it. Either way we could charge you if we really wanted to. You’ll just have to trust us. But it doesn’t have to be now.”

“Or you could start with someone who does give you sexual consent,” Ada sends to me. When I ascertain her lips aren’t moving, my eyes meet hers, but I don't know what to make of her Mona Lisa expression.

“We could just gain your trust by doing one-way telepathy first,” Gero says.

“Sure. Mikhail, I’d prefer to do this with you. We seem about the most similar people here, so it should be easiest.”

“I’m not very comfortable with that,” Mikhail says. No surprise, since he's clearly more of an extravert. “When I let someone know what I'm thinking I also want to know what they’re thinking about it.”

“Based on similarity, that would make me the next option,” Gero says.

“Well…”

“Don’t underestimate me because I’m young. I have accumulated more experiences than any human in the world, so much so that your own will hardly affect me more than the reminiscences of an old man. I am not just a child. In my mind I have taken on the form of hundreds of beings, men, women, animals. I’ve become everyone.”

I’m rather taken aback by his intensity. If there was a doubt on my mind about his neurosis, it’s gone now. “That’s why I’d rather not be on the receiving end right away.”

“You’re definitely the veteran among us in terms of telepathy, Gero, but I think it would be easier for Lucas to begin with receiving rather than transmitting. Alright, then, I suppose it’s easiest if I transmit. Are you ready?"

I move into a kneeling position. I take a deep breath. “I think so. I’ll lower my brainwave frequencies once we’ve begun.”

“Then do it now.” I do so. Closing my eyes, I become suddenly more aware of my body, and realize full telepathy would probably create some sexual tension with any gender, age or orientation. Some brain areas can be filtered out, but because of how all thought processes connect different brain areas, it severely limits the process. Online chatting is basically a form of telepathy too, since it transmits words only, but it’s never actually called that. As soon as it doesn’t involve the entire brain, it’s no longer telepathy but brain-computer interface.

When I become suddenly aware of having a second body, I feel dizzy, as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. My awareness shifts from one body to the other, making me feel like I’m swung back and forth. It doesn’t actually give me motion sickness, but it makes me feel lightheaded. I realize I’m fighting the process, and try to stop doing so and give in to becoming Mikhail, feeling myself sitting cross-legged before the fire.

At first he thinks he’s not thinking about much in particular, just focusing on his breath. Mikhail’s mood feels more stable than my own, and he is meditating on this sense of stability, trying to radiate it to myself. He seems to know better than I that this was what I need at this point in my life. Now he’s thinking of how I might think that he might think that I lack stability, and might not want him to go to the trouble of trying to give me stability. He refuses to go down this train of thought any further. In two-way telepathy he would, just to let it run out until we both get tired of it. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t try to think of what I’m thinking, but he can’t help but think more about others than himself. Perhaps he’s an extravert after all, he thinks. It feels awkward for him, more so than telepathy with others, as he doesn’t know what to do with himself on his own, though he used to be more of an introvert before he found this group. That’s why he doesn’t like to transmit one-way telepathy, even though perhaps it’s good for him, to keep balance. So he lowers his brainwave frequency further and tries to focus on himself, reaching into himself to find out just what it is that at this moment makes him who he is, until his awareness become made up more of feelings than thoughts. There is a sobriety about his personality, wont to takes things as they come. The deeper he reaches into himself, the more neutral the stuff of his mind becomes.

At first I don’t feel so very different as to feel confused: being at least somewhat similar to someone definitely makes it easier. But the process of becoming someone else is enough to make me forget myself. In the first moment what feels strange is not so much the way his mind feels as the feeling that I have always been him, and that who I really am is just a stranger.

It makes me feel dissociated from myself, as if I’m just another container for my consciousness. And as of now, that body over there just as well might be, for it is released from it, free to move anywhere across the world, just as free as my body in flight. I realize suddenly how small I am to the rest of the universe, how much there is to experience that I never could, not if I had the time of a hundred lifetimes.

As I look at the fire from his perspective, I see how even the same things feel different from another’s angle. The way his eyes tries to follow the flames, of how they move from one flame to another, is different from mine, in a way I realize is reflected throughout his mind. The content of his consciousness is not so different from mine, but its form is very different. It fits into different patterns, in a way that reminds me of architecture. His mind supports much the same basic structure as mine, but is sharper somehow, more geometrical — that’s the only way I can describe it. It turns in measured angles, in a way that reminds me somehow of arabesque.

I feel how in my own mind everything is vague by comparison, and as I focus again on my own mind it connects to Mikhail’s, and in an epiphany I become aware of faults in my own way of perception and learn from his. His patterns of perception spread through my own like a plume of a new ingredient dissolving in an alchemical brew, spitting fumes, changing its color, texture, consistency, taste, odor, bringing it closer to completion. The flow of new information burns its way into my brain, twisting new pathways this way and that in ways that tilt my world until it turns upside down, making me feel lightheaded.

I’d closed my eyes for a while and now, just moments later, opened them again with a start. My head is swimming as I feel my limits fall away like the walls of a cage. It makes me feel as if I’m under the influence of a drug, and I immediately know I’m addicted. I want more. There’s billions of more minds to explore. I feel a need to make more space in my mind, to allow the greatest mind to fit in its confines.

“I can’t wait until we share a session as a group.”

“That’s kind of difficult, to synchronize so many streams of consciousness like that,” Gero says. “It can be done, but it requires some experience with telepathic meditation. Otherwise we’d just dissociate from each other, so that we might as well not be in telepathy at all. Even with just two people it can be hard to sustain. In fact, we already dissociate from part of ourselves, and being in telepathy with the wrong person can actually make that worse if you’re not ready. That’s why it’s so important to learn to meditate, though, like learning any skill, but that can itself be done much faster through telepathy.”

He says all this almost too fast for me to take in. Listening at the way Gero talks, I wonder how anyone could ever synchronize their minds to his frantic speed or even want to. But when I see the way the others look at him I realize the warmth in their eyes isn’t just pity; it’s genuine, as if he plays a central role in their group. Maybe his volatile mind actually catalyzes the reaction between theirs, like shamans used overstimulation through rapid dance and music to induce a trance.

“So who did you learn it from?”

“Ada was the first,” Meri’s voice says, emerging behind them with her perennial smile.

“Oh, so you’ve given up, have you?” I say. “I’m not going to space with you.”

“No, my nanobattery actually ran out.” The others laugh. Mikhail tuts and seem about to raise concerns, but she cuts her short. “I’ve been spying on you from the underbrush for some time.”

“We know that,” Mikhail says. “You gave us your location, didn’t you?" He winked at her. "We’ll let you use some of our energy.”

“I don’t need that,” she says, while hugging herself against the cold. “We have the fire.”

“Come here,” Mikhail says, taking a cable from his cuff, but she’s already run over to Ada instead. While they wait for her batteries to recharge, they have an arm wrestle, but Meri cheats and uses her suit’s power.

“So did you all learn from Ada?”

“I didn’t,” Gero says. “I learned it by myself.”

“How does that work?”

“I actually started with animals, first with less sentient animals and then building up to ravens.”

“That’s why we call him the Raven,” Mikhail says.

“Isn’t that a violation of animal rights?”

Gero looks offended. “What do you mean by that?”

“He was receiving only,” Ada says. “It’s almost impossible to send to an animal.”

“No one else wanted to have telepathy with me,” bowing his head.

“It’s been hard for us to find someone too,” Mikhail says. “Though it tends to be much easier for children.”

“How long does it takes to learn?”

"The faster you can find yourself, the sooner you can do the same with someone else." She says this as if one has a new self in telepathy , shared between them and, well, oneself. I can't wait to find out what it would be like. If the whole is more than the sum of the parts, two-way telepathy must reach something greater than both persons together, perhaps greater than personhood itself.

“I learnt when I visited Ada in her geodome in Finnmark,” Meri says. “She’d have stayed there forever if it wasn’t for me, and turned into a snowman.” Now I understand why Ada was the first to teach everyone. She reminds me of the prophets that withdrew into the desert before returning with their epiphanies. But she doesn’t seem like the kind to try to overturn the world, knowing that the world is a sphere. But just looking in her eyes I see such insight in them that every question I ever asked myself draws me towards them, as if knowing the answer to lie beyond them.

“What’s the best way to find yourself?” I ask her.

“That's different for everyone. But for starters, giving up everything that isn’t part of who you are. You’re on the right track: you’ve already given up your home.” Even without telepathy, she seems to know that I was indeed not thinking of going back. But then, it’s not that uncommon.

“What else can I give up?”

“Your humanity,” she says. “Once you no longer see yourself as part of the human species, you can become part of something greater, of everything and nothing.”

“Is that what you did in your geodome?”

“I was trying to find out who I really was when I had no identity anymore. But I wouldn’t start with that. It's what I did afterwards."

“But before that you did swim there,” Meri says.

“She what?”

“Yes she did. She swam with dolphins.”

“You did? What, did you want to give up your habitat too?"

“Yes," she says simply, and when I just give her a blank stare, "Sometimes I even slept floating in the water. It felt like being rocked to sleep.”

"I never thought of using the suit’s inflation for that purpose."

"In a way our suits really make us more than human," Mikhail says. "If there were any reason to do so, we'd make it part of our body, but why would we, when we can do just as much without doing that? We are, essentially, cyborgs."

“Must have taken a lot of power to keep you warm," I say, with some concern that she ran out at some point. I can't imagine how cold the Norwegian Sea has to be at whatever time of the year.

“Yes. I had a solar kite follow me all the way. I also didn't quite always swim entirely on my own power, even though I wasn't in a hurry. Most of the time not much was going on except for the moving of one wave after another, up and down and up and down. It was a meditation in its own right."

"How long were you meditating in all?"

"About half a year." She laughs when she sees me arch my eyebrows. "I really needed it. I had a very busy life before that."

"I couldn't do nothing for so long."

"What would you do, if you could do anything else?"

I think for a while. I realize I have a lot more options than I ever gave any thought.

I chuckle. "Good question if we can really do anything. We don't really do as much as we should, do we?"

"Like flying to the stratosphere."

I suddenly realize how many opportunities I'm missing out on. Am I clinging to my limitations as a human being? I can't let that happen.

"You know what? Let's all go." I suddenly resolutely get up.

"Alright," Mikhail says. Meri takes off first, giving the cue for all the others to follow, and leaving me with no choice but to do the same. For a moment I stay behind, watching them go out of sight. It feels so abrupt to just fly so high, as if I'm wasting something that's too good for the moment. But if not now, then when? Perhaps it just feels too good for me, as if I'm touching something that's sacred, something that would overwhelm me with too much ecstasy, so much that it would turn back into agony. At that moment I look down again and see that Ada has stayed behind last, smiling at me. My heart skips a beat. Then she's off.

If I didn't feel sure about myself before, I do now. So what if it overwhelms me? One more time I remind myself that I need to do nothing to control my flight, and I shoot forth into the sky, trying to think of nothing else but overtaking the others. Once I get there and have nothing to focus on, I'll probably panic, but I try not to think about that now. I feel the wind shake me ever so slightly back and forth through my flight. It's not frightening, in fact the sensation gives me something solid to hold on to as I'm staring into the emptiness of the abyss above. For a few moments nothing happens other than my flying through the sky, not even a particular thought occurs to me, and I just cannot imagine how Ada could have spent six months doing nothing but stare at the sky, this black nothingness interspersed only with tiny extraneous lights from the past. The things she does frighten me, but she intrigues me all the more for it.

But I just can't look down until I've caught up with her, and only then I slow down. When I look at her, and she looks back, the world rises above her, and the sunlight that set a quarter of an hour earlier reveals her enigmatic smile. I'm not sure which is causing the wave of vertigo, but it makes me laugh. When her smile widens my belly twists into a knot, and I speed up towards the others. They're still going much faster than I. If they know this is frightening for me, they don't seem to care — unless they care to frighten me? I'm forced to speed up, and my helmet, usually folded at the nape, extends around my head. A few pockets in the back and side of my suit have inflated with oxygen.

The faster I go, the more the suit has to keep me from moving, so that my body stays in the right position to stay on my course and away from the others'. As I start to breathe faster, I wonder for a moment if I'm going to hyperventilate, but then I remember that my suit will just add carbon dioxide to my air anyway, so that I can't get a panic attack anyway. I stay calmer than I thought I would, but none the less excited for it.

"Where are we going?" I send to Mikhail. I've already seen they're going to a high-altitude balloon hotel, but I'd like to know more about it.

"It's a really nice place. Each room is also a restaurant, and all the rooms are made of e-matter screens, so we can make it look however we want. We can even make it entirely transparent, as if we're still floating in space."

I'm actually looking forward to something solid to stand on. "If it's all the same for you, I'd prefer if you'd make it look transparent just for you. We all have our own mindcom, but we'll have only one room."

"It won't be the same. If you don't want it transparent we'll just pick something else… But there it is."

It takes a while before I can see any details that distinguish it from the stars around it, and another while before I see the actual hotel beneath the balloon.

"Looks pretty small."

"It doesn't get many visitors, strange as it sounds."

I wouldn't be too sure about going here by myself either. It's one thing to take a shuttle to space now and then, another to actually take a raypack here. No one else is inside, so we take the main hall for ourselves without having to keep our voices down for anyone else. Once we've sat down cross-legged in the center, the floor softens. When I veto making the entire  transparent, we settle on a compromise and make it translucent, letting the blue-on-orange sunset reflect in the edges of the walls. To better appreciate the kaleidoscope, we don't turn on any light.

"It looks interesting like this too," Meri says, looking over the layout of the empty building. "Like a ghost's house."

"This does give me a taste of what it was like in your geodome," I say to Ada, as the loneliness of the place got through to me.

"It's not the same. The point of my being there was that once winter came and I had only some energy left, until the sun came up again there was no going back. I was going to enter into the deepest layers of my unconscious to find out what was there." The utter silence that follows in the skylodge makes it sounds like a ghost story, and it sure feels like one to me. But it's always been nightmares that interested me most of all dreams, because they come from those corners of my mind that are still undiscovered, a wilderness.

"So you're a psychonaut like me. I myself am an oneironaut, in particular." I briefly glimpse over her research and see that she's published the full brain record of her entire six months of meditations. If I wanted to I could simply download her memories, and I make a note to myself to at least download the ones with the highest dopamine ratings. It's rare for people to be so open. People usually handpick the thoughts they want others to see.

"Oh, so you're actually already quite an advanced meditator!" Mikhail says. "You might actually do pretty well in full telepathy already."

"Hey, maybe we could share a dream!" Ada says, her face lighting up. "We're pretty much doing the same thing already anyway."

I feel the rush of blood in my belly again. I don't know how to reply.

"It's also kind of what I'm doing," Gero says, "except I look closer than either of you."

"I'm doing that with animals," Meri says. "Seeing what perceptions fit in what species' brains and why."

Mikhail feels our eyes on him when he doesn't speak. "Oh… for me it's always been subjects with mathematics, ranging from physics to economics. But a theme that's been recurring often is multifractal systems."

"Oh, I've had a question about fractals in  for the longest time…" Gero asks Mikhail, and they're soon exchanging research notes. Meri and Ada soon join in. I learn a lot from their discussion, but having nothing to add I feel rather useless. When it gets increasingly abstract, Gero interrupts: "Actually, it would be better if we continued this in telepathy." He looks at me. "It'll take much less time."

"No, never mind. It's getting late anyway," Mikhail says. "You can download the memories from my account."

"You know what? I'll download them too." I've never liked the idea of downloading raw memories from someone's brain, since other memories come with it as well, but it can take a while before knowledge from the latest research gets processed into a form that can be downloaded seamlessly into one's brain.

"Yeah, in telepathy you'll be absorbing parts of the other person's mind into your own anyway," Mikhail says, seeing my anxiety.

"Don't worry, Ada says. "If you know who you are, you won't lose it. And if you don't know who you are, then you can't lose yourself because you already have."

"But who am I?"

"Consciousness," Ada says. "In all its forms. The only danger of losing yourself when downloading someone's memories is if they'd convince you to repress some part of your consciousness."

"I know. And I guess as someone whose life work it has been to uncover repressed feelings, I should be safe. But this is the first time I've ever downloaded memories from, well, strangers."

"Whose would you rather have?" Mikhail asks.

"Ada's," I say, with such immediacy that Meri giggles. "Obviously," I add. Indeed, when we make the transfer it is almost seamless. This doesn't mean I can instantly assimilate the memories, but once we talk about it quickly feels as if I'd always known these things. Ada's mind is so neutral that I hardly notice a difference between Ada's memories and my own except for the pattern by which she memorizes. Usually bits of opinion are transferred with memories by accident, and while these are usually rejected by the host mind, it slows down the process of assimilation. Once I've assimilated the memories, I understand a lot more about where they are in their research, and, since we're all studying the same subject on some level, my own.

"Instant knowledge," I say with a chuckle.

"Telepathy really is the solution to all our problems," Mikhail says. "It's already ended world poverty, but still I don't think the full extent of its potential hasn't dawned on us yet."

"It's amazing it took so long for people to buy into it," Gero says. "The proof of concept had been there for decades. If everyone had worked together as much as they did for the space race, it would've been a matter of years."

"Maybe it takes telepathy to work together the way we do," Meri says. A silence falls, and I know they're all waiting for me.

"Speaking of which, I don't think I can delay this any longer. Let's do it. Let's start with a shared dream, since that's what I'm used to."

"So sensory only," Meri says, ever so slightly sounding disappointed.

"Yes."

"That's actually something we're not quite used to," Mikhail says with a smile. Ada chuckles. "We might actually be the ones learning from you. In a dream state you actually reveal far more of yourself."

"I think it's a great idea," Gero says. "we won't feel so self-conscious that way."

"For you it's easy," Mikhail says. "You're in altered states all the time." I see on Gero's account that he's published hundreds of different altered states he's tried by adjusting his neurotransmitters in each brain area to particular settings, each available for download. Now I understand why he seems so odd. Virtual drugs may have safeguards against neurotoxicity, but the experiences still change one's personality. He's probably a much better person than I am, but I don't understand the much wider range of emotions he feels. But now I understand him, I feel a lot more respect for him. 

"Well, anyway, I'm tired." For the second time this hour the sun has set. Ada is already lying on her side.

"Yeah, let's go," Mikhail says, seemingly oblivious to the irony. We all lie down in the floor, which softens at the touch. I close my eyes, and at my command my brain instantly enters into the dream state. The noise in my head morphs into the plants of a jungle. I skip through the underbrush without knowing where I'm going, brushing aside the foliage without a care in the world until suddenly, when I sweep away one frond, in a clearing Ada appears before me stark naked. My hear stops. I cast my eyes down, but to my relief I am not naked myself, which means that even in dreams, I'm still inhibited.

Ada, meanwhile, lays herself bare to all the tangle of life around her. The forest becomes alive around her, seeming to move in- and outward with her breath, causing the forest floor to pulse with sunlight. As she comes closer the leaves and branches twist and turn around her with the same uncontainable emotion as her body. Tendrils caress her limbs as they seek for hold to grow, only to let her slip through them and yet, continue to curl around where her body has been.

"Beware," I say, as she curves around me in turn. "I'm toxic. You should be more careful in the jungle." My suit turns yellow and black like a dart frog's.

"So I am," she says, and taking my head in her hands kisses me, seeming to suck the poison out of my head like a vampire, leaving me helpless like a dead husk to her intoxicating touch.

I wake up with a strangely empty feeling, as if paralyzed by Ada's bite. Ada has woken up too.

"Did you dream what I dreamt?" I ask.

"No," she says. When I wonder how she knows what I dreamt before I've sent her anything, I realize this is a false awakening, and I still have no idea if the Ada I saw in my dream is any more real than the Ada I see now. I could find out using my braincom, since it can activate certain brain areas to allow me to read it in my sleep, but as soon as I think of doing so, a vibration shakes the skyhouse, and from the glow outside I see that we're falling. I realize I'm terrified of finding out.

"You need to calm down if you want to—"

The crash cuts her off, and I'm left to wonder what I do want.

In the next dream, I find myself walking along a snowy ridge, Ada at my side. We're both clad in thick down jackets. We're smiling at each other.

"You seem a lot more at ease here."

I check her tab. She's real.

"I can't hurt you here." I can only protect her here, I think, and remember suddenly that I don't need to talk and she can read all my thoughts.

"Protect me from what? Thoughts can never hurt me," she says. She giggles and runs off the edge of the ridge, slipping from my grasp. I follow her, but when I grab her I trip, and we fall down the slope, calling an avalanche down upon us. She squeals with laughter, but then I feel my bones break and wake up. Ada wakes up more slowly, even though she felt the same pain I felt.

"Shush, it's just a thought," she sends to me.

"Where did that memory come from?" I ask. She doesn't speak, and sends that I should be quiet, so the others don't wake up.

"A good friend of mine died in an avalanche," she sends. "I wanted to feel what she experienced as she died. She thought of me right as she died. There was such beauty in the love she put in that thought. So I played those last memories again and again, in spite of the pain, until I got quite used to it. But it was her last moments of consciousness that really got to me. She hurt so much in those last moments, and yet she still desire to live on, to hang on to those last moments of life, even if all she could feel was pain. Maybe that's when I realized that pain is just another experience, just like pleasure, if anything, more intense. I think that's what made so many people kill themselves back in those days, but for me, it was the beginning of a new life, and it's when I began my meditations."

I feel ever more in awe of her, and I'm all too glad to let her know that. She smiles at me. I want to give her a hug, but she whispers "Come," and goes right back to sleep.

I follow suit, and find myself at the foot of the mountains and the edge of the forest, between ice and fire, and she wraps her body around my down jacket.

"You feel nice and warm," she says. The down jacket turns into a black panther fur.

We close our eyes, and I feel her body from within, the sensation of how my hips stroke her inner thighs.

"I don't want to make you feel like I'm using you," I say.

"We can't misunderstand each other. We feel what the other feels. All you do for me you do for yourself." The thought seems to come out of both our minds. Our thoughts run into each other like twining fingers. She locks her eyes on mine as I stroke her nose with mine. The boundaries between us melt like the horizon between earth and sky into a mirage. The world spins as it falls away, until we are all that exists and there is no up and down, only you and I.

We move out onto the outer platform just as for just a few moments, the sunrise turns the atmosphere into a yellow band. I take one last look beside me at the people that I met yesterday. We've handed around some spare foglets, and as we drop them, they turn into four avatars of each of us, one by the side of each. I close my eyes as I try switching my senses into each of my avatars, seeing each of the others in turn beside me. It would be far easier to just switch into others' senses through telepathy if we were ready for it, but we created an entirely new body rather than share our own. We were going to look for other people to teach telepathy to, but are we really even ready for it ourselves? I guess avatars are less distracting when we are doing other things.

We'll keep each other's avatars with us for as long as we can, but it's hard to be in several places at once, and all too easy to turn them off and forget turning them on again. If they'd been any other people, I wouldn't have known if among all the other people we meet every day, our connection would be strong enough to keep us together. When we found each of us wanted to go to another part of the world, we knew that we would go just there. We can move around the world to see each other again in a matter of hours anyway, but once we're in different continents we're likely to remain drawn into our travels there.

We never know what's going to happen, not even what's going to happen within us. We became drawn to each other only for some reason to rebound against each other, like a supernova, and perhaps that's how it's meant to be, so that we can give life to new stars. Creation leads to destruction, destruction to creation, and that's why even today, the future will always be a mystery.

As it orbits, the balloon takes each of us in turn to our stop around the world: Mikhail, to family in Tehran, Gero to Florence, Ada and Meri to South Africa, and I'm still not sure, but was thinking of East-Asia. Ada suggested that if I can't make up my mind, I should just set my flightpath to a random destination and see where chance takes me. I'm not so much searching myself as something beyond myself, and what's farther beyond myself than the other end of the Old World?

One by one we scatter across the winds like seeds. Mikhail dives backwards as he waves at us, then turns about like a diver on his way down before steadying himself to accelerate. Gero gets sick at the sight of it, and when it's his turn a half an hour later, he flies straight down like a falcon. Looking down, for a moment I think I see a faint glow around his shield, but he's already too far to see. It's unbelievable how well the raypacks work up here. There's almost no air here to ionize, but as density goes down it's stored and accelerated through more cycles to higher speeds.

"Well, this is us," Ada says mere minutes later. I look at her and understand: "Of course… same longitude."

She gives me a hug, and Meri, as always never caring about boundaries, joins in. Her body yanks at me as she, and I almost drop with her, but I stop myself. All that happened last night was only a dream, and we can dream again, but dreams are always in flux. I wish I was the one that could drop even if it wasn't with her, so that I could convert the pain, because falling is very much how this feels. I pace around the circular platform around the hotel and wait, watching the world shift around me beneath. I feel very restless to be out here all alone.
Over the Pacific Ocean, I decide I can wait no longer and I'll fly the rest of the way. But when I'm amidst space with nothing else around me, I feel a panic come over me. I turn around and turn back to the balloon, where there's at least something near me. I enter the hotel, only to set the walls transparent. The memories of last night feel stronger than it seems they should. Do I need her that much? No, it must just be the loneliness of this place that's getting to me.

I could ask her avatar to be here right now, and she would understand, but I find that I don't want to, and that, knowing that I can make it stop any moment, I actually somehow like this loneliness. I step out of the hotel again, and with a few thrusts let myself drift out from the platform. Soon it's out of sight, and for a hundred kilometers around there is nothing but sky. I enter into a trance, becoming as empty inside as it is outside. I think of how Ada must've been in a state like this for months. I didn't see at the time how she could do that, but now I can see how it would be hard to stop. Now that I feel so at one with myself, I can't do anything just to distract myself from who I am: it has to come from my innermost instincts, or it will not take form before evaporating in the vacuum.

I still don't know where I'm going, or what lies on the other side of this emptiness. For now I'm just floating in space. The foglet shield, which uses plasma and magnetic shielding to deflect radiation, is so efficient that I could stay here for quite some time. This actually wouldn't be a bad time to go into virtuality, since I don't need to set up my portable frame here to be able to move without going anywhere. I close my eyes and let my mind drift, and decide that wherever my mind takes me is where I'll be going.