The Neuronet 1: Childhood

All you're about to read has actually happened. You're just a bit behind the times. Sentient life only really began with the neuronet: millions of brains all connected into a network where any perceptions could be shared. For many of us, for want of anything else to do, it had become our occupation to try to create the most desirable perceptions we could, through meditation or neurostimulation, so that we could then share them on the neuronet for anyone to experience.

We became known as psychonauts. Many of us had been for much longer, but had never become known as such until now. We were few and far between once, and we never dared dream that someday it would become as addictive as social networking once was.

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I was born just after telepathy began to be used, despite it being illegal as a violation of privacy "by proxy" of anyone the telepaths knew. Like many, my parents used it to record the consciousness of their child, sometimes even when it was unborn. The first sensation I had was that of a pulse spreading waves into my brain and back from its edges into themselves, growing into ever more complex fractals as they did. With each pulse they spread further through my nerves, until they resolved themselves into the sensation of my body, curled up inside another's.

For a long time, this was all I wanted to know, without ever having anything change, but when change isn't made, it just happens to us. When my world ended and opened into a great nothingness beyond, I still sought for the support the womb had given me. I understood the world only as a much larger womb that was there to support me, but it had many sides that my senses could not make sense of.

The same technology used for telepathy was also used for virtuality, and I began to use it from the very beginning of my life.  It changed my perceptions however I wanted them to be, allowing me to learn how to perceive the world in just a few weeks.

At first I didn't know the difference between the real and virtual because it didn't matter to me. When I was old enough to affect the world around me, I learned soon enough that I couldn't always affect my body's sensations in the virtual world or my mind's sensations in the real world. But it did change me in that I never saw existence as more than this, sensation, whether it behaves in order or chaos.

I grew up as a child of a polyamorous family. Eva and me, Riley, were Hector and Cora's, Aaron was Alexandra and Rob's and Alyssa was Lori and Erin's, but as children we felt as much the children of the rest of our family.

Having each other, our family had separated from society only to end up founding a new one: since we remained connected through the neuronet, it was only a matter of time before others would join us. As it grew, it would become the first cell of a commune that would multiply into one of the first arcologies. Today, you know each "Dunbar" cell as a circle of six geodomes containing seven hexagons per story, six private rooms around a central common room, with a total of up to 108 private rooms. Decades ago, there was just one such heptad of rooms as a hexafoil in the wilderness, and none of us was having any plans on ever being part of a society again.

Early one rainy morning we were all gathered in the common room, with the only light coming through the skylight ceiling. You'll get to know them later on, but not right now, as I want it to be in depths and not merely on the surface: let it be enough that they were all people that I loved very much. We know many people by their limits: if so, then I never knew them at all, for they were so open that they might as well not have been persons at all, just ever changing consciousnesses.

We lounged in a circle in airseats, and I lay on my side trying to make the semipermeable air pockets adjust to my body. The airseats were spaced at regular intervals from each other, so that the transmissions would be better synchronized between us. Like all rooms it was rather empty for all we used it for, as we used our neurocoms for almost everything, such as making the room look however we each wanted. We spent much time together trying to give it a design we’d all like, but we just kept changing it for ourselves anyway.

With the last house just done, we gathered in the common room more often lately, yet we never knew just what we were going to do. We would dream away in the net until we knew. The silence made it feel as if we were starting our morning slowly, but our minds were moving all over the world. Weren’t it for telepathy, the rest of the world might as well not have existed to us, and yet I didn't want to forget them either. It could take a long time before we ever speak, as we only needed to do so as a group, in which we could not yet telepath.

When I didn't know what to do, I asked the others one by one through telepathy, as if not to break the silence, but everyone else was thinking as much as I was of what to do as a group. A lot of the parents would've wanted to teach us, but it was so much easier to learn through the neuronet, far more than any of them could've taught us, that it had made us all into costudents.

At last it was I that said what I wanted us to do.

"We should telepath in group, all of us. I'm tired of going around you one by one to see what you think."

"Has that ever been done? People have tried that, but they always drown each other out."

"What if we'll be really, really quiet?"

"We could give it a try. Perhaps by the evening we'll be ready." So for the next hours we meditated to make as much space in our minds for each other as we could. But I could not contain my excitement and it would have been enough to take in all that space in itself. I couldn't wait for the evening to come, but by the end of the day, the grownups said, "We're not ready. Maybe tomorrow." This repeated day after day as we spent all our time preparing in the common room, until finally one day they said they would give it a try, though they told me not to get my hopes up.

"'When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet. Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.' Perhaps telepathy can be something like a prayer, for what gods are there but ourselves?"

I could believe that. At that age, they were like gods to me, but what I was to them I did not think of. Perhaps that moment was when we first became gods as we once thought of them, with the power to create new life, to become new life. It was then that we found our purpose, and that's how our religion began, though it would worship nothing or else all there is. Our home would be our temple, and the sky above us the best symbol we could've ever had.

As soon as we connect as a group, the range of differences between all of us added up to a spectrum that makes us see just how small our own part of it is, and at once I have the thought, whether it comes from me or someone else: how much wider is that range than any of us can see, or even any human, or even any animal?

The perceptions we have now are all very normal ones, that most of us have known for so long that we stopped being aware of them until now, as they were contrasted with each other. The grownups especially only seem to become really aware of how they feel at all just now. It's funny that they need someone else to become aware of themselves. Perhaps that's the difference between children and grownups.

It's easier than we thought to be in telepathy as a group. Normally, two-way telepathy is very brief as the cycle quickly becomes too much to bear, and longer telepathy is usually very private. Now, we can simply switch our main focus from one person to another when we need to, passing on the energy like a wave from one to another so that we balanced each other.

Some of the children are sitting next to me, some on the other side of the room. At first we mostly telepath with the people next to us so that we can look at them as we do, turning right to left whenever we switch, and every time they feel a little different as they pass on each other's energy. It soon becomes so regular that I feel the need to break the pattern and focus on a child on the other side, and we both laughed as everyone else collides into each other. Now the others have to choose someone, at first not knowing who would be next.

It still takes so much focus that we soon stop being aware of thinking, something I find extremely funny for some reason (or perhaps because there was no reason). For the grownups this is quite confusing, but this only makes it all the funnier for me. We look at each other whenever telepathing, and at their questions about why I'm laughing, I only laughed harder.

After a while, we don't know if it is we who decided who to telepath with or if it is the other deciding to telepath with us. It feels more like something that happens than anyone's doing at all, like a wave that moves us to and from without ever asking us.

Our minds are an artwork now, a thought says from nowhere in particular, and it is what we will be working on. It is the first thought that arose between all of us, like a new self that takes on form, and it isn't even frightening because there is no one from whom we could be afraid, no one we can be afraid to lose: we've become someone new, and it is our creation. We have created new life: now, we have indeed become gods.

As we synchronize into one consciousness, we find ourselves in a trance in which we either can't move our bodies or don't want to. A new, androgynous body emerges in our imagination, like a diver from the waves.

"I am Proteus," the thought from nowhere says, "and I bring you the future."

For a long time it feels like we've left our bodies behind, and we are one in the body of Proteus, serving it as limbs the body. We slowly put one foot in front of another as we take step after step through the night, the only light coming from fires on the horizon. But as we walk through the wasteland, Proteus looks in front of us, seeming to know just where we're going, even though there is nothing there to be seen.

At last I hear someone moving. "What just happened?" Rob says after some time, but everyone just stares out in front of them, trying to process it for themselves.

"Why do you look sad?" I ask my father Hector next to me, seeing a brooding in his eyes. It's a look that I've often wondered at, a calm almost like resignation, but now it feels as if it's reached a deeper level, a presentiment, as if one of endings and beginnings.

He thinks about my question and then arches his eyebrows to match his blonde beard with a wrinkled forehead, which makes his thirty years seem even more ancient to me.

"Why does it rain?" He replies, and chuckles warmly with tight lips, crepuscular rays through the clouds. "Thank you," he says, and chuckles some more. He leans to my side and says, "Proteus was a god of the sea's change. If you would find them, they would tell you the future, but they could take on any form."

"Then how could you find him?"

"Not him. Them." He heaves a sigh. "For better or worse, nothing will ever be the same," he says, louder now for everyone to hear. "When the printing press was invented, it led to the Inquisition. When the radio was invented, it led to Fascism. When the Internet was invented, it led to the Arab Spring. Have we learned by now?"

Silence. When I look at the others, for a moment it seems like everyone's become unable to think for themselves. I think back of the bits of memories that came in from the others in the vision, about what war used to look like.

"What we discovered today," he goes on, "others soon will all over the world. At least we have the wisdom not to abuse it, but this is powerful, far more so than we ever dared dream. It's people like us that will have to guide humanity."

"That's the kind of rhetoric that leads us astray," Rob says, his dark gaze glowing more intensely than usual. "If everyone leaves it be, it'll be alright. Whatever happens, we can only let it happen and focus on our own little corner of the world."

Hector frowns."You're right, I didn't mean it that way. Anyway, you know you can't take me as serious as I sound. Otherwise even my asking when's dinner would have to be taken as a prophecy." He strokes the ponytailed hair that makes his lean face look even more streamlined.

"Well," Alexandra says, with her usual maturity, "I think we've got plenty to think about." Erin next to him huffs and rubs the sides of his nasal bridge with one hand. She smiles thinly at him. We're all exhausted, or perhaps just dizzy.

Yes, definitely dizzy, I think, as I get up with my usual eagerness to find myself staggering on my feet. Maybe I'm still half used to the body of an adult, the strange, ever shifting body of Proteus, even though I'd borrowed it for but a few seconds.

Where am I going, anyway? I don't feel like going back into my own house, as if I'm still sticking together to the others like a limb. I look around at the others, but they don't get up, not even the other children. Finally, when I stare at my mother Cora she does get up, and the others follow suit. The others start muttering, and I hear nervous laughter. And yet, I can't wait to do that again.

When the rain picks up, we take the excuse of watching the droplets stream over the skylight to huddle together in the middle of the room. The rain doesn't let down again until the evening, but when we can finally get outside as we've all been waiting to, none of us seem ready to, so we let our bots stimulate our muscles instead (which feels more like a massage than exercise). Afraid to lose the feeling we found today, we stay close together until we fall asleep.

In telepathy, I know that I'm just a flow of perceptions that I stole from elsewhere. So who I am may always be a mystery to you as long as you merely read the written form of this. Perhaps you think you're too old to learn to do more, but if you read this it means you're at least curious, so with any luck, I'll change your mind.

That night Proteus came to me in my dreams, staring at me with a hint of all emotions mixed in the shades of their Mona Lisa face, as if the faces of all who ever lived were superimposed within it. There was a peacefulness in that face as that of the gods, like a pharaoh, forever staring into infinity.

As I lay on my back, Proteus lays their hands on my chest and belly as on an altar, spreading a sensation both warm and cold through my body. The cold sinks, thinning the earth beneath me, and the heat rises, thickening the sky above me, until all becomes a liquid that keeps me afloat.

"Where am I going?"

"Nowhere. You're already there." All the stars in the universe flow past me like marine snow, and I feel how far away I am from home, and yet how I am always close, both to it and to anywhere else.

"This is your future," I hear the sexless voice. The stars grow smaller and larger like beating hearts, flaunting their planets like jewelry, or, looking closer, more like multicolored plummage. I realize some carry life, and I want to look closer, only to keep being sucked back and forth by the tides.

Now that I am the universe I have to be aware of it both from afar and up close, of everything from my rump to the nail on my little toe, but it doesn't fit into my mind. I can't do it alone, and as I look around for someone to turn to I see Proteus smile at me. As I'm drawn closer to their face, it expands like a galaxy into star clusters of billions of people, all curled up like fetuses in the womb — but my body is supine.

I feel my heart beat faster as I remember how fast it beat when I was born. I don't want to wake up, but I do, wet with sweat as if with amniotic fluid. I smile, feeling as if I've just had my second birth. If it is, then it's just the second of many.

In the morning, it turns out that we all had similar dreams about Proteus.

"Whose unconscious did this Proteus come from anyway?" Robert says.

"From all of us," Hector says. "The name came from me: Proteus, 'the first'. Each of their other attributes might've come from someone else," he hastens to add.

Robert looks at him askance. "You didn't slip us a program, did you? This all still feels like a prank. If it is one, it's in very bad taste."

"Read my mind," Hector says, arching his brows with a long blink.

"Alright," Robert says, and they interchange a long stare while they telepath.

"How does it feel for you?" Alexandra asks me.

("Alright, sorry," Robert mutters to Hector.)

"Me? Why?"

"You're a child. Didn't it… feel weird?"

"Does it feel weird for you to be a child again?"

"Why, we have been one before."

"I thought it was weird," says Aaron, Alexandra and Robert's son. "He… she… It has no, well, genitals. Or they're blurry."

"Everything's rather blurry about them," Alexandra says, cupping her palms over her eyes and rubbing her temples. "A bit like a ghost. It feels hard to believe that this thing was always there in our unconscious."

"It actually feels rather similar to my gestation," says Alyssa, Erin and Lori's daughter, being young enough to have had her own first perceptions recorded.

"Yeah," I say, "It's very strange. We weren't really a person yet. I don't just mean we had no personality. There was no center in which all everything came together. It was all just out there."

"Perhaps that's where it came from!" Robert says. "Proteus, 'the first'? A sexless being that can still change form and swims in brine? That was you… that was all of us before we were born. That explains why it's bald."

"They."

"It."

"Ze," Alexandra puts forward. Hector and Robert look at her. Lori snorts.

"Ze sounds appropriately exotic for an alien."

"Ze's not an alien."

"Ze will be if ze's true to zhir word."

"Am I the only one who thinks you sound like you're talking in a thick German accent?" Robert says.

"Why not call it 'we'?" Cora says. There's a long silence. "After all, it's made up of all of us, right? If we want to go ahead with this, we might as well get used to it."

Robert rubs his bristly scalp with both hands and puffs. "My mind can't handle this." Alexandra coughs nervously. "I need to take a walk. By the way, if this is what the future would look like, have you thought of what it would look like to do this while walking? We'd be marching."

"I don't know," Robert says, sounding like he's holding in his breath.

"I don't think we'll ever be in telepathy all the time," Hector says, "but when we aren't, we'll just keep part of each other inside us. Maybe we're just becoming each other's external memory, which we can search at any moment just as we do our own. The Internet is already becoming not so much a network between computers as one between brains, with computers as the routers."

Lori walks out, and we follow suit. "Fresh air!" she says, and we squint as the sunrise washes over us.

"Oh, the real world is still out there," Hector says. "I was having my doubts if we weren't going to be sucked into a vacuum once we'd open that door." We stagger outside.

"I'm not sure I'm not," Robert says. "I think I'm going to get a headache."

"Yeah, it feels like our brains are rearranging themselves," Hector says.

As he looks at the sunrise he stops in his tracks. "Oh my God," he breathes. "Is this how you see the world?" His voice barely doesn't break.

Lori looks back and smiles. "I don't think any of us have seen like this before," she says.

"No center…" he says to me, his face motionless. "But anywhere in an infinite universe is its center!"

Robert staggers on his feet, turns around and laughs.

"What?" I ask him. He throws his look into my face. "What?" he says. "What?" I repeat. "What what?" he says, and spins on one foot as he burst out into more laughter.

Hector and I exchange a look. "Robert's a bit confused," I say.

"Oh he's always been confused," he says. "We all are." His lips twitch once as he looks over the desert. It's all still sinking in.

When we describe our dreams, it turns out that we all had the same one. We all went to sleep logged off. Did we log back on in our sleep, when waking up so briefly that we don't remember it? Overnight it seems to have become as instinctive a need as hitting snooze.

Many of us had never felt such need to be alone as that day, as if to find what was left of our existence and how much we had lost between ourselves. When all the pieces were accounted for, it turned out they were all still there, but the outlines by which we sketched them had defaced each other. Without them, we knew existence only as the infinitesimal present without past or future other than a drop into the unknown… and even the present we barely know, as a flux of sensations, flowing into each other as rapids into that unknown. Most of us stayed in their rooms the entire day.

The next morning, when we come to the common room, we don't know what we came there for: we come there to find out why we come there, as if to an oracle; for it's where we left most of our minds behind, or indeed where it came from.

Most of us sit down, but Erin can't seem to find a place where he wants to seat himself and keeps pacing around. He looks from one of us to the other, too fast for him to see anyone look back at him until he looks at me. He seems glad that someone see he's there in that very moment, as if not sure of it himself.

"I woke up as if I was going to die right then," Erin says suddenly, as if he could die before he's done saying it. For a long time falls silent, as if forgetting what he was going to say, "when I realized that there's nothing I know beyond this moment, not even if I'll be there to see any moment beyond this one, and I mean that. Think about it: we're not conscious of most of our mind, and only of all that's in the same brainwave. So what happens when the brainwave we're in passes? Perhaps our consciousness is only in our brain for a moment, and we would never know it, because the next consciousness we would just get all the memories of having been there before. Maybe I'm just visiting this brain like I visited yours, and for all I know, I was one of you before. If our brains sync their brain waves like our own brain cells do, for all we know our consciousness could remain in someone else without knowing it."

"I rather like that idea," Cora says. "If I'd switch with anyone, it'd be one of you… and I don't really care which of you. It'd sure make us treat each other better if we'd never know which of us we could be next. I don't think my consciousness can just disappear, though. Whatever it is, it has to go somewhere, because otherwise where did it come from?"

Erin swallows hard. He looks at her as if he's about to run over to her and hold her, but he doesn't. Instead he sits down again. They both close their eyes for a second, perhaps to do just that in telepathy. All this time and he still doesn't feel fine with showing affection with others around.

"For God's sake, Erin, just go to her, now!" I telepath to him, with such intensity that he starts at me. He sees from my memory that after what happened with Robert the day before, I can't bear this kind of closedness. I stare him down until he smiles and actually walks across the room to her. She gets up at once to hold him tight.

Somehow, he no longer feels anyone looking at him, even though everyone's too lost in thought to say anything, and convince him that no one else paid any attention to their intimacy; Hector and Cora are staring into space; Alexandra and Robert exchange a long look; and the children are all looking from one to another.

Hector's the first to speak. "We'll never know whether we're conscious for more than any one moment, since there's no way to observe consciousness from outside of it, and any consciousness other than that we have this moment is outside of our own. Either way, it seems like a good way to remind ourselves to be in the moment."

And for a long time, there is a silence. I'm not sure if I like the silence. I like to feel as if the grownups are always ahead of me, that they'll take care of where we're going for me. Now, I suddenly find myself a the same place in life as me, not ahead or behind, but now, and I realize I don't have anyone to rely on but who I am right now to find out what to do — but all I want right now is to escape myself.

I start to my feet. "Let's telepath, now!"I gasp. The others give me a long look. I turn to Phineas next to him and awkwardly hug his side. As Hector telepaths to me, I see his sudden thought at seeing me this way of how addictive telepathy can be, but does that have to be a bad thing? Living itself is addictive.

"You can't use telepathy to run away," he says. "It'll just always take you back into the moment."

"I don't need to run away, just somewhere!"

"Anywhere but here? When will you get there?"

I grab his face and stare into his eyes, trying to telepath with him, but he won't let me.

"You're all insane," I murmur, and walk out.

"So what can we do?" I say, as I'm holding the door, and turn around.

"Wait," Erin says to me, and when I look back I see the change in him.

"You're right. If everything's being made without us, to be conscious is all there's left for us to do, but consciousness is something we make too, just like anything else we ever made. We must make it our goal to seek out experiences we can share with each other, never keeping from doing whatever we want because we'll be doing it as much for each other as for ourselves. We'll become hunter-gatherers of peak experiences."

"That's what I'm talking about," I say. "But if we're going to do that, we can't hold anything back. We can't do this alone."

Rob sighs. "There are some experiences you can't deal with at your age," Rob says.

"Perhaps not," I say, "And neither can you. But Proteus can. We all have limits. The point is to overcome them."

They fall silent at my saying these things at how young I am, and I think they realize that Proteus is speaking through me, as an intermediary between us.

"Moments are all we have left," Lori says. "That's what the end of times really means. From now on, the only thing that will happen will be in our own consciousness. We should do whatever it takes to change, because if we don't, then nothing will change anymore at all. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to live forever I don't want every day to be the same." She looks at me. "I'm with you."

It sounds decisive enough, and yet it's followed by another long silence. I'm starting to see a pattern as it keeps recurring, and it feels dangerous, as if it's about to swallow us up in indifference. But no matter how clear it seems what we should do, the question remains how we begin. There are so many possibilities within reach, dancing before us like a shoal of sardines before a shark.

But as I look at them I see that their indifference too is an experience, and that amid all the experiences I would seek out, this is the only one that I'm avoiding. Perhaps that's the kind of grownup experience that's so hard to deal with for me as a child.

I want to keep busy at all times, to always learn new things, but now I see that the way they feel now is something I want to learn about too. It reminds me of the way Proteus felt as he walked straight on through the fire: if I had such strength, together with my sensitivity as a child, I could do anything they could. It would give me superpowers.

I quietly walk back to my seat as I realize that in the state they're in, they're actually calm enough to be in telepathy all together. I realize how the first time, most of the focus was on me because I was the most excited. If I become as calm as they are, I could focus more on learning from them.

For a long time I look quietly from one to another, not daring to say a word as I realize just how confused they feel. It actually frightens me a little to see them this way. They look almost like they're catatonic, as if in a cocoon. Maybe my metamorphosis is easier than theirs, since at my age I haven't decided yet what to think of life. But they had, and now they've started all over with their whole lives. This is when we'll find the moments we're looking for.

I quietly open my mind and wait for the others to join me one by one. First the other children join, and then almost at the same time their parents followed, as if led by them rather than the other way around. When my sister Eva joins, her purity reminds me of my own infancy, and as she sees it pass between us, Alexandra lets the feeling flow from us into her as well, as easily as water into a vessel; pure, cleansing water, invigorating us with new life force until it feels like we are reborn as infants ourselves. For Alex especially, Eva's dominance in the telepathic field feels rejuvenating, and she radiates loving gratitude back to her. The variety the other children add gives it a rhythm, as if they were splashing in it to make waves, gently caressing us as they wash over us. I laugh with such happiness that tears well up in my eyes, and as the others see me laugh, they join us.

As they do, the field begins to complexify further, and the more it does, the more difficult it becomes for me to stay. At one point I leave the field, only to come back right after. It feels even harder now I left, and I'm determined not to leave again, no matter how it hurts. Everyone is much more themselves this time, as if a front has been cleared away to let everything else pour out, and it feels as if there is not enough room in my mind for my emotions to have any freedom of movement with so much information in their way: it immobilizes them, and that, I realize, is how they become so calm. But pulse after pulse, the infants' energy just flows through the information like an earthquake through rock, and it reminds me of how my consciousness first flowed through my flesh.

One after another, our unconscious minds come together as Proteus. Each makes up part of their world, which ever shifts from one place to another, first desert, then plain, then woodland, then forest, each drawing forth the next behind it, like colors on a soap bubble.

We watch the vortex whirl around us until it solidifies into a vivarium, with each biome in its own shell through which we see all the others, and beyond the last we see the desert that's really around us, and within it, other domes that each reflect all others. As it becomes more realistic, we realize that the inner shell looks much like our own home, and that this could really be built if there were any need: but why would we, if we can create anything we want within? But as the sky flashes bright and dark with each day that passes, I realize this is another vision of the future: we are not alone. We're the vanguard of a new society.

The world of Proteus is never at rest, always searching, as if trying to contain the entire universe within them, to rebuild it out of thoughts, reaching beyond time and space to connect from each to all, as a singularity into here and now. The universe is the material from which we'll create one construction within our consciousness. These ideas aren't coming from me. It's the first time I've been aware of these ideas on the future of humanity, and I'm certain that my hair stands on end with the sheer awe they inspire in me.

Where do we start in unifying all moments into one? It doesn't matter. From everywhere at once, or else from nowhere, and we will find the everywhere in the nowhere when we look around us and close our eyes.

We hang in the sky as if carried in the talons of a great raptor, ravished to some far off place. As I watch the people below, I pass through their minds in greeting. It does feel a little foraging, as if I'm picking edibles, each with its own flavor that offers some of the many nutrients I need. I wonder if this is how the gods feel toward us, and if they forage like we, or if they garden us. I'll never know, and perhaps that's part of the design: to leave me open to a sky full of mystery, that I might find my own way to the light.

For the longest time we don't know where or when we'll land. All the time we're flying, we take turns sharing our consciousness with one and then another, but whenever we do, it is as if there are no thoughts inside us at all. Of course there always are, but they're so elusive that we can't get a hold of them, and we forget them right after we think them. They're thoughts that haven't yet fully taken on form, as if our minds is trying to process more thought at once than it can. It feels as if we are all infants again, and everything is one whole we cannot resolve into parts. It's a if we're trying to take in the entirety of the universe at the same time, only to end up more dumbfounded each time.

The longer we fly, the more apparent it becomes that we're not going to be landing anytime soon, perhaps not until we need to. With nothing else we seem about to do, we add some turns to our flight. As we follow each other, we move around together as in a dance. Our flight grows more fun with complexity, until I wonder why we would ever want to walk again. Soon, we no longer feel like we have to know what's next. Now that we're fully in the moment, we are ready for change when we want it, but we no longer need it.

At last one of our swerves ends with our feet on the ground. I land on the roots of a giant tree that has fallen upside down into a gorge, beneath a waterfall where it widens into a valley. I'd have landed here even if the others would go on without me, but seeing that I've landed they follow suit. They try to land on the roots as well, but finding that there's not enough space they land instead on the cliff overlooking the valley. There's a strong wind coming up the cliff, and we take turns floating and watching the others do so. The artificial muscle fibers in the suit allow it to change in form, and we let it turn into a wingsuit.

When I float in the wind, I pretend to suddenly fall as I swoop down into the valley, where I flutter from rock to rock back up the stream. The stream is overgrown by trees, so that I have to jump in between the branches. The fallen tree has its branches tented into the stream, and I climb among them, never having to fear falling since I can fly. Perched among the branches I look into the woods. The stream turns into a delta among the boulders, over which the trees spread their branches at some distance from each other. I try to find my way from the branches of one to the next while using flight as little as possible.

Squirrels begin to flee before me, but I send my nanorobots into them to stop one of them by telepathy. When it trusts me as one of their own, I let it come near me. I reach out my hand to it, but it's not sure what to make of it, until out of force of habit, it climbs over it towards my neck as if it were a branch, tickling my face with its tail. I begin to move through its body, but at how fast it races across the branches — like an ion over dendrites — I soon become unsteady, and my human body falls off its branch. Scrambling back on, I copy the way it moves into my own brain. It's not the same with this body, but I'm still climbing much faster than I did before.

If I climb outwards I soon run out of branches strong enough to carry me anyway, so I climb upwards until I'm back with the others at the cliff. Meanwhile the sun is beginning to set, and we don't seem about to leave for the night. We sit around where the tree had outgrown the thin soil on the rocks.

"It's beautiful here," Cora says, smiling at how we ended up here. "We'd never have found a place like this if we'd looked for it. Even 'emergent gardens' don't get this complex, not even the GMO ones. I wonder how many places like this we overlooked because we were too busy looking for a destination. But this isn't a destination, and we don't know what will happen from here. That's what makes it exciting."

But I'm not one to think life without telepathy exciting for long. When I look over the woods, it's to let it inspire me with how at peace it is with just being what it is. Could our minds stand together like the trees do, and let our branches grow among each other without either evading or invading each other?

"I have an idea," I say, leaping to the cliff with a little ion thrust. "Let's play a game. We all team up in pairs, and whoever stays in telepathy longest wins."

They all look at each other, except Lori, who looks straight at me, and I know I'm going to team up with her. I realize the others looked at each other to choose who they wanted to team up with to. Usually telepathy takes brief pauses, even if it's only for a few seconds, as the back-and-forth makes our consciousness more intense up to a point that it becomes unbearable. The longest anyone's been in telepathy with even a single other person is just a few minutes. But I wonder what would happen if we'd try to bear it anyway. The intensity seems to build up to some sort of climax. Would we break through some sort of resistance inside us? What would be next?

We're sitting in two rows opposite each other, staring each other in the eyes as we prepare ourselves for our race. We made a rule that none of us could choose their family, as that would be cheating. It would be too easy for the couples, though for us children it wouldn't matter as much, since we're not that much closer to our parents than to our uncles and aunts. I'm sitting opposite Lori.

"Remember," she says to me, "as long as you don't break the connection, anything that happens is alright, and we are in acceptance of each other. If we just let all our perceptions come together, they will find a balance on their own. We always have to go through a period of conflict in which we alternate between extremes of submission and dominance before we know how to reach each other in the middle. Are you ready?"

I smile at her solicitude, but I think I can deal with it better than any of us. But when she begins to telepath with me, I know what she meant by what she said, and I realize how much I have to learn. Such depth the grownups have experienced in their relationships, but it goes far deeper than anything I've known even in telepathy. It will overwhelm me no matter what, and I'm humbled by the realization.

As Lori remembers how overwhelmed she herself used to be, her mind takes on a sense of stability that I've never felt before, like that of the trees I contemplated earlier. I reach out to hold on to that stability like a monkey onto a tree, swinging her branches with laughter. I feel like I'm still exploring the woods, except these woods are far more interesting. As I climb through her mind I feel the resistance of her trunks amid the yieldingness of her crowns, and I know what she meant by reaching each other in the middle.

But I grow restless and suddenly realize I can't stay here and be like the trees. I open my eyes to see her buddha's face, and wonder how much she identifies with the trees under which we're meditating. She opens her eyes questioningly, and I close my eyes again too late to keep her, and me through her, from seeing that glint in my eyes. When I close my eyes I find myself in the woods again, and I realize it's because we're in the woods: her imagination has become the same as reality because it's grown on it for so long, and it's grown so much longer than mine that it more than overcomes mine.

I find myself trapped in just one world even when I close my eyes, all the other worlds that used to be there to hide me away gone. As I wonder how to get out of this image, for a moment the thought enters my mind of burning down the woods she's grown over so many years. Once the thought is there it's too late to stop it. I can't help but feel a warm glow within me at the thought, and as I look down I see that a fire has spilled beneath me as if from an incontinent oil lamp. The forest shimmers in the heat until it goes up in smoke, and in the smoke I see all kinds of creatures fly away from the fire, seeking their way back into my worlds. But they're all just worlds like this one, Lori thinks to me, and if any of them were real I'd want to get away from them just as well: wherever I'd be, I'd always want to get away from where I am, always on the run, and I can't keep it up for my whole life.

Then where should we be? Anywhere and nowhere, but wherever it is will be wherever we are now. But does it matter if it's real or not? No. Then let's just see what happens, I conclude, and we keep flying through the smoke. The smoke turns into a cloud, and we break in and out of it to see the land below ever the same one and yet ever changed.

First it's night, then day, until the days and nights fast forward into a flashing of black and white in which we can see nothing and everything. I realize we're in a loop, because our offset frequencies are both at the same time trying to catch up with each other, only to go faster and faster.

It happens rarely in telepathy, rarely enough that many of us neglect to install an override, but the results are always unpredictable. We try to think of what to do, whether we should stop it or not, but soon I can no longer think at all. If I could, I would realize that we're having a seizure. When the others see that we've fallen over, they try to wake us up but can't. Not knowing what's happening, they join us. It lessens the seizure, but not before spreading it to the others.

All our thoughts explode and crystallize into an amorphous obsidian, and when the vapors have dissipated, we see that it has fused us together, as one entity with many bodies, just as our bodies each have many fingers. As an entire body arises from one cell, the entire universe arises from this one moment, all information compressed as fractals into one consciousness. The closer we look into them, the further they unfold, and so we roll on and on in the mystery.

When we come around the next morning, we all start to sit up at the same time and look at each other. As we do, we realize that we really don't know each other that well, and since we can only really see ourselves through each other, we don't even know ourselves that well either. It feels as if our own bodies are those of strangers from another world.

The telepathy was left on all night. I remember having strange dreams between us, each made of the pieces of so many dreams that they're impossible to recollect. We never knew who we were in the dream, or if we were anyone at all. It feels like something changed about us last night, and we're not sure if it's good or bad.

Whatever it is, we feel like we can't get enough of it. We can't keep our minds from turning on and on around the circle of brains, making it look as if the world is turning around us. Without knowing why, the night before we'd sat down next to the people most like us, so that it feels as if our body is changing step by step from one extreme to another and back. 

Trying to remember who we are, we each in turn think our names to ourselves like a mantra, but none of them sound as if they have any meaning to us, and so we try it again and again until the names seem to run into each other into one name without beginning or end.

I smile, and the smile passes on like a wave around the circle. I'm curious what else I can make the others do this way, so I begin to move and with everyone letting it happen, I feel the movement in each of their bodies. One after the other we get up and stretch, but as everyone stretches differently we slightly lose our balance as we switch from one to the next. We find our balance before losing it again, and before we know what's happening we've begun a dance, a dance that flows like a wave of energy through different particles. The dance speeds up until at last we all fall to our knees and slow down to get back up, then to speed up again and so on. At last we fall into a group hug in the center, and as we hold each other by the back we no longer feel the skin between us, making our bodies feel like the ten arms of some greater being.

After a whole night of being in telepathy, we should probably turn telepathy off to get back to ourselves, but we're afraid to find out what will happen if we do, as if we're not sure which of us we're going to be once we turn telepathy of. No one's ever been this far into telepathy before.

As we each kneel into child's pose like the petals of a flower, no more thoughts pass between us, as if the current between us blows them out before they can form. We don't know how long we stay in this state, but at some point it feels like we could stay in it forever, and we know it's time to turn it off.

When we do, I find that I am still who I remember being before. In fact, I feel more myself than I ever have, as if the contrast with the others has made me aware of who I am for the first time. It's as if I looked too close to see a pattern and now all of a sudden I've got it: I'm an explorer, not just because I am a child but because it's who I am.

"I think it's safe to say that all of us have won." The others chuckle. It's hard to believe how easy it was to stay in telepathy even after an entire night. It feels as if we've played through the game of our lives as humans and moved on to another, life as something more than human.

For a long time we merely stare at each other, feeling each other's energies within ourselves like an exotic meal in our stomachs. We've returned the telepathy to just a trickle now, feeling neither the need to lose each other nor to lose ourselves. The rhythm of waves flowing between us has subsided to one of ripples in the background, as discreet as our heartbeat. We feel how we only need wait for the tides to decide when to pull us together or apart.

With each tide, Proteus more and more takes on form, becoming an ever greater part of who we are. By now, we feel almost as familiar with the greater being between us as we do with ourselves, even though we've known it only so briefly: it's as if through it, we know ourselves for the first time, as if it gave some lost part of us that was always there its place, part of us that most define who we are: our connectors, just as those on a cell's membrane are what most define its purpose in the tissue. Now the tissue that was just an embryo has become fully grown. In time it, too, will reproduce as we connect through it with others.

The others seem to think that they've found their home here among each other, but I realize that it's only a matter of time before Proteus will make us feel like strangers within our own home — for if we are just one of many, what is a home but just another of many places we could be? Proteus is the shapeshifter: it'll never be content to have any one shape, and as soon as it has achieved one it must change again. We will always be hungry to assimilate more minds into ourselves, until it becomes a need as basic as food. To forego it would be to decay back into atoms.

The others still seem to enjoy the belonging they've found in each other, but I know that I must be the one to break it: I am the explorer, and so it's what I must do. Amidst their meditation, I go on the neuronet, making sure to keep it silent for them, and publishing the entire past week. The others have already given their consent when the thought passed between us.

Around the world, the neuronet will show the right users parts that it knows they'll like, and by the end of today, others will take our example to publish their group telepathy sessions as well. By tomorrow, the world will not be the same.

My heart is beating faster than the others' now, and as I see the others one by one look at me I realize they can sense that something's going on. They ask me, and I don't hold back. Their feelings are mixed about it, and having just come from feelings of euphoria, they don't like the feeling. I tell them how they told me in passing that I could do it, but of course I already knew that they meant we should do it together later. I can't answer them what came over me that I had to do it so suddenly, but I only know that when I saw the next limit over the settling dust, I couldn't wait to break it.

An anxiety has set upon the group as they tried to think of what's to come next now. It shows how they aren't ready for what's to come, and that's just why I had to do it, or we never would be. Once having achieved that peace, it would be all too easy never to change again. But I freed them from that by adding their complement, and that's why it's far easier to find our balance when we are many.

"What are you afraid of?" I ask. I see the adults' faces brood over my question.

"You haven't seen what the world used to be like," Alyssa says.

And I wish I had. I try to take the memories out of her, but for the first time, she holds back. I look at her, but she keeps her eyes down. This is the first time I see what the thing they call repression looks like. The concept was entirely alien to me, and it's so terrible that I don't know what else could possibly be even worse, let alone so much worse as to make one do such a thing. Her mind feels cut off from itself at the point in time where she came here from the city, like a severed limb. But that's what was so terrible about society, Alyssa thinks to me: everything was cut off from each other, and as this thought crosses her mind, it takes on the form of the streets, cutting their way through time and space, into smaller and smaller fragments.

She felt it as one of those fragments, broken apart from everything that has its place in her consciousness, but from outside of it, I can only see it as one whole. It's just made up of cells like our organism is, and if it's less complex than our own, we've both still got such a long way to go that our differences don't matter as much as our similarities: we're both still wonders of nature, and at this thought my wonder passes onto her, compensating her fear. I'm not afraid of the memory because I know it can't hurt us anymore, but for me this is the only time I've ever seen what suffering is like, and it's so strange that I can't look away: but when I look closely it no longer looks like suffering. Before she knows what's happening to her, the repression that took hold of her for so long is gone, and the memory's become just another experience in the spectrum of her mind.

This is how easy it is to help each other. In telepathy, truth always wins, and change can only happen towards greater complexity. They won't stand a chance against us, no more than any number of prey against their predators, and by consuming them we'll turn them into more of our own. We are each a mere molecule, waiting to be absorbed into something that will bring us to life.

Some years later when I come of age, I undergo my first full transfer, with three friends I met on the neuronet — the only people I found that wanted telepathy with a stranger. None of us cared what we were going to find in each other's minds: we were each ravenous for any new kinds of perceptions we could find, and if they did too, that was enough reason for us to like each other.

By now my family is so used to how changeable I am that it will take them a while to notice that I've become someone else. Even all our minds together have become too small to contain me, and now that telepathy became more common, I no longer have to depend on them. However much I've loved them, I feel no regret to leave them without telling anything. There are so many others that need to be loved, many of which never are. When I come back, it will be to bring others with me and extend our family.

It would only be years later that warnings would be issued that full transfers exist, but somehow we knew what we were doing. There is no way not to know what's happening during the process, as we could feel that we were approaching some point of no return in which not only all bounds between us fell away, but the very distinction between us. During a full transfer, several brains become as synchronized with each other as they are with themselves, so that when telepathy is stopped, it's more or less random which of the brains one goes on to become conscious of: with four people, there's a 75% chance that one becomes one of the others. In the process, most of the information has to be transferred to the other brain, which takes a long time to process: with the technology we had back then, it took us about a month of being in telepathy.

At the time I didn't know just how much time was passing because we'd lost all sense of time, but we'd expected it would take us a long time, which is why we'd hidden away in an old cabin to go on life support. The degree of neuromodulation we needed was so high that we couldn't do anything else anyway. Our minds were gestating for our rebirth.

As we process each other's memories as dreams, our personalities spread through them, each revealing how else we could've reacted to them. When they all come together, it feels as if they form the solution to a riddle, which trying to solve we'd gotten stuck on one approach. We're all very many-sided people, and yet we fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

When the synchrony is complete, we know that something significant had happened, even if no one had yet come up with the term "full transfer", and so we called it our fusion. When we break the connection, I find that I am Yi, although I don't remember who I was before. Or rather, I remember always having been him, but I also remember having been everyone else. Now and then we connect again for a moment, as if we're not quite used to being just ourselves anymore, and the first few times we do so we find that we're still thinking about the same things.

We share so much of our minds now that, but for our bodies, we might as well not be different people at all. Since our nanobots keep a date on any new memories we get, it would be very easy to keep fully synchronized, but that takes time. For now, it's time to part, so that we can find new perceptions to share. At some point we come so close that we no longer have anything to connect: connection takes a balance between distance and closeness. And so we each go our own way to find new perceptions to connect. There is no need for goodbyes: we take each other with us.
I must've known from the first time that I did it that telepathy is what I would do with my life. Once I reached my limits with my equals, all that was left for me to achieve was with those beyond my limits. While some spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama, published their neurographs, I soon found that their state of mind was not the goal I strove towards. Their consciousness is very simple, and it's easy to sustain their state of mind through telepathy if I so desire: where I desire difficulty is where they'd say I go wrong. Their simplicity taught me how to accept higher levels of complexity, but it was elsewhere that I would have to look for that complexity itself: of all places, it would be among schizophrenics. When I offered my help in mental hospitals, my rejection came as no surprise, so when I came back later, it was as a feigned patient.