We are in limbo. Our habitat floats over the clouds while in between locations. Our habitat is an elliptoid greenhouse with a honeycomb of geodomes. Most of them are now vacant, and since our nanorobots can turn into our personal effects anywhere, we’ve stopped keeping track of which geodome is our own and just move from one to the other however we see fit.
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The habitat is kept afloat by space-mined helium which fills the bottom half of the elliptoid. Once in a while we hook up our habitat to much larger ones to spend time in biomes. We don’t know where we’re going next yet, and right now we don’t really need to: in the meantime this seems as good a place as any, and it gives us perspective. But perhaps that means this is where we are starting to settle down, in the sky itself. And where else should we be anyway, if we can be anywhere in virtuality? I know there’s a reason, and it’s what we’re here to find out, to see how long we can live without reality until we know why we need it. Maybe it’s just in knowing that where you are is real, that you are actually there and this is happening to you, but we’re not feeling it anymore. When we can live anywhere, after so many moves, any place where we actually are starts to feel wrong that there is only one place where you can actually be. It seems like there has to be a reason, and perhaps it’s what we’re here to find out, to see how long we can live without reality. But when we can change reality however we want, it becomes an extension of our minds, like our own body, and the sky is as good a place to express our state of mind as any.
SVSCIPITE OMNEM CONSCIENTIAM. These words above each of the three doorways remind us how to be ourselves: all who enter, accept all consciousness. Once we spent as much time in telepathy as out of it, the only way to be free in what we perceived at all was to be free to share any perception with each other. Most of the psychonauts left when there were no more limits on the perceptions that could be shared here, to form their own communities for less advanced psychonauts. Now there’s just a few of us left. There is one of us for each temperament: N is melancholy, feeling, water. S is choleric, desire, fire. Y is sanguine, action, earth. P is phlegmatic, thought, air.
In the middle of the night, S and myself, N, are alone in one of the geodomes. We are waiting, none of us knowing what will happen, but we know that by coming here we've decided that anything goes. While we wait for something to arise within us in the silence, we see eye to eye and see there a curiosity for what they’ll find in ourselves, when our inhibitions are dropped like heavy garments to reveal our imperfections. When we bring them together, for all their friction they fit together.
As we wait, a restlessness grows in us, and we begin to circle around each other. When I come to a stop, I glance behind you without knowing why, and imagine you tied on the wall behind you. For just a few more moments I wait to turn on telepathy, to leave you guessing at the meaning of my devilish grin, as I slowly come closer and grip you by the shoulders. I startle you with my suddenness, but your starting eyes let go into a smile. My hands hold your arms tightly in their fingers as they stroke them and lower to your waist, enfolding your body. As I press you against me, I lift you up and push you against the wall, where I turn the nanites in the air into chains around your wrists. I slowly stroke your neck, and you never see it coming when I suddenly raise my hand against you. I swipe the air before you, sending the nanites in your body flooding your pain receptors. With each blow, I let the sensation of your pain take me into your body. With a gasp you open your mouth, but I’m after something else. You see in my mind how I want to yank your heart out of your chest and devour it, and I don’t even need to know what that get on with it. I grin at the glint of fear in your eyes, but as I let them lock with mine, slowly they settle back into trust.
“Speak!” I shout as I strike you again, like an interrogator. I want to get your secrets out of you, all the more as I don’t even know what they are, and you don’t even know you have them. It’s up to you to decide what to say, and you speak, but never of what I want to hear. You lose yourself in your role, confessing made up crimes, but always hiding behind the act.
“Liar! Liar!…” I keep striking you until your whole body is saturated with pain, and then some more, until it becomes something more than pain, crossing a line where pain and pleasure make way for one transcendence. I pause to hear your panting. When you open your eyes, I feint to watch you flinch. Something inside you is about to break.
“You can always give up. Go on, why don’t you limit yourself, go back into your limited little self. By all means, run, run away, and get away from me once and for all.”
In the silence you look up to glare into my eyes, and as you see into my mind, my strength passes into you. I feel the pain in your body as my own, and however much I enjoy the feeling, it’s not enough to make me want you, to drop the act of our multiple personalities and become one.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want to know what you want.”
You look down, only to glare back at me. Your eyes bore into mine. A smile flits over my lips. Almost there.
“You want that desire I had for her, don’t you? How the slightest touch from her was enough to excite me. But I’ve only ever desired few at all. It angers me, because I want to desire you, but your ego is standing in my way, and I want to destroy it. You’ve given me more than someone to love: someone to hate, a friend to free from within an enemy. I want to break you open to steal what’s inside.”
“I don’t owe you anything.” You let your hands out of the chains, and as you lower your arms you rub them over your still hurting torso with a smirk whose meaning doesn’t escape me. I know as well as you that you don’t need me, but I also know that you want me to want you, to lose myself entirely in you as I do in her.
“Who do you think you are?” she replies to this thought.
“No one. How about you? Who do you think you are?”
You cross your arms over your breasts. “I am myself.”
“No you’re not,” I say with a smirk. “You don’t even know yourself, and as long as you don’t, neither can I.”
We get an epiphany of which it’s not clear from which of us it came: your very being is mystery. It’s what you feel, what makes you feel, and being unknown is your way of being yourself. But you turn off telepathy, and will not let me see where that thought leads to. You grin at me in tantalisation.
“Yes, there’s a lot you don’t know,” you say as you walk away. But I smile as for the first time, my blood is racing. Just for a moment, I’ve broken through, and I can feel that ambiguity in you that keeps me in suspense, keeps me ever in the moment. When you shoot me one last glance before leaving, it’s with an ambivalence of love and hate.
And with that last thought you gave me, I’m left to wonder what can possibly be known about something as undefinable as consciousness? Even now, when everything about us is transparent to each other, we don’t know anything. I observe what I am conscious of at this moment and as I do, it loses all meaning until I can only see it as sensations. I sense how my consciousness is made up of energies coming together from my unconscious without my ever knowing where they come from, and I have no choice but to trust it because everything I am arises from it.
Now I sense that same ambiguity in myself as I do in her, because it is in everything, and it’s just more authentically expressed in her: nature cycling through day and night, as if forever betraying one after the other. As our culture becomes increasingly one with its nature, that mystery is becoming its theme, and it’s why older generations accuse us of being fickle: but betrayal is a word made up by conformists.
After all it is I who’s left feeling humbled. With a wave of vertigo I feel the urge overpower me to leap into that abyss of nature’s unconscious. I feel no need to go back to my room, and instead levitate on nanites in the middle of the common room. I turn telepathy on to everyone and share on the neuronet that they can do whatever they want with my consciousness.
I awake the next morning in the light of the sun rising over the clouds at the horizon. Some of the domes have been made transparent, but S’s is not.
I remember dreaming about her confessions in which I saw the very real meanings behind it, even though they contradicted each other. Someone responded to my request and talked to me in my dreams, using hypnosis to make me lucid and bring me to insight. This is one of these situations in which the others would’ve felt violated and left, but this was actually one of the best lucid dreams I’ve had in a long time, and I wish my hypnotist hadn’t been anonymous, so that I could get in touch with them later. I review the dream in my neurocom.
In the dream, I was trying to swim over a foggy sea, and I know somehow that it symbolises mystery. I didn’t know where to go, and the waves kept me from seeing the horizon, so I tried to stay on the crest of the wave to see land, but the more I struggled against the water the more I foundered.
That’s when my guardian angel came and told me that this was part of the dream. He showed me a word to prove that he wasn’t a dream character, as words are illegible in dreams unless they’re brain-computer interfaced.
He told me to just let go. I would not, so he used suggestions to remind me of how much I wanted to let myself fall into that abyss, and a deeper layer of my unconscious wanted to let go, pulling me under. When I sank, I felt paralysed and was certain that I had drowned, until the hypnotist made me aware that I was still breathing. By the end of the dream, she and I were underwater, and her body danced on the stream like the waves. She tried to say something that I couldn’t make out through the stream, so I tried to come closer, but every time I did she moved back the other way. I could not follow her until I stopped trying to resist the stream, so that we moved in synch. The back and forth rhythm of the stream filled us up as it brought us closer, until I woke up with an orgasm.
Throughout the dream echoed one of her confessions that I couldn’t stop thinking about, and just before he left, the hypnotist gave his analysis of it: I killed my slave because he killed my slaver. The slaver would mean me, the slave her repressed side without which I would die — but the slaver could also be her repression, and as I killed it, that would make me the slave, which she killed by killing my own repression in turn. This just leaves the question: what is death? The ultimate mystery. In my dream, we both died, and the deep dark sea was our afterlife.
I suddenly long to be there, to immerse myself in that mystery. I feel agoraphobic here in the sky, and I can only imagine how S must’ve felt. The others might not want to go there, but we could always split our habitat, which only took a slight reprogramming of the e-matter. I felt the urge to go over to S to ask her, but her geodome was still dark, so instead I decided to ask the others first. Perhaps they’d like it after all. It’d be the first change we’ve had in days, practically forever.
But when I see Y, everything changes. In her arms I forget all about what I was going to ask and simply feel happy to be where I am, but it just makes me even more dizzy. Just for fun, I connect nanites into a sphere around our bodies that send us tumbling weightlessly through the transparent habitat roof into the sky, and I feel so free that I can’t think of why I would ever want to be anywhere else. They weren’t kidding when they called it heaven. For a long time we just hold each other, slowly watching the sky and earth turn around us.
The clouds that formed such a beautiful sunrise at the horizon come closer into an even more beautiful thunderstorm. We send our nanites across the sky to conduct the lightning into patterns, experimenting with how to shape it into various fractals. Our nanites store some of the energy into one of their two sets of batteries, more than enough to send us into space.
S’s and P’s geodomes are still dark, and Y’s hugs are making me feel mischievous.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” I tell you as we float back down. Before she knows what’s happening, the entire world falls away beneath us as if we had just dropped it, and yet we feel no g-force. As the nanites connect throughout our matter, tubes in their arms allow their jets to move across the entire grid, causing the energy to be spread out evenly. Within seconds, their antimatter engines turn the sky black, and we are in orbit. A current through a plasma on the roof deflects the radiation to form our very own aurora.
Y is about to send a message to P and S: “There was an accident at CERN. The world’s been swallowed by a black hole.” I tell her to wait until we get to the dark side of the earth again, and form a nanite sphere around them blocking transmissions. When they get the message, they look through their roof, and when they see the aurora forming around our habitat, as if the magnetosphere were gone, they take it very serious. Y is about to tell them it’s a prank, but I stop her, remembering the sense of mystery I felt. I look at them and try to imagine what it would feel like for them to not know. P flies out of the habitat in a nanite sphere, only to find that the world is still there, but S just stands there waiting for what he’ll see, as if she’s already accepted the possibility.
“We all take too much for granted,” I say when he lands before me, and he knows he can’t fault me for that, as he’s here to accept all consciousness: but so am I.
He punches me in the face, and while my nanites stops the blow I let it relay to my pain receptors. It’s a release of tension I’d long needed between us, and I burst out laughing. But this is more than just a prank: for all the world it has felt like the world really has gone lately, and we’re the only people left, because it seems like we’re just about the only people who are real. I didn’t realise until now how lonely I feel.
“I didn’t know you had it in you,” I tell him. “This is the first time you do it without my asking.”
He seems lost for words and is still breathing heavily. At last he says, “You did ask for it.”
Even when we know that we could be gone at any moment, it’s another matter to actually be aware of it. I look at S, remembering how she made me find myself by making my own world disappear all those years ago. My telepathy is on by default, and she reads my thoughts, but finds only thankfulness there.
“How did it feel for you?” I ask her, but it’s not words that I want. She says nothing and just lets me see into her mind: the still fullness inside her has only taken on a new depth. She places a trembling hand on my chest, and levitates me with her while she leans backwards. She samples each moment after the other to see where it goes, living in the infinitesimal. I know that if I miss one moment in expectation of the next, I’ll lose sight of her and she’ll be gone, but it doesn’t matter; I just enjoy seeing the look in her eyes that tells me I’ve broken through into her. She pulls me closer to drink my kiss, and as we slowly tumble backwards through the air, the world might as well cease to exist. But just when she reads this thought in my mind, she pushes me away with a grin, sending me tumbling through the air, and knowing that the moment is over, I just close my eyes to feel that push still inside me, spreading through my every bone.
I could let myself fly until I fall through the atmosphere and into the ocean, but her energy awakens a wildness in me. I see her looking back over her shoulder when I shoot right back at her like a raptor, picking her up in my talons along my flight. Her hair flies into my eyes as I spoon her, so I close my eyes, nuzzling her neck as I stroke her stomach.
I don’t know where I’m flying and since there’s an override, I don’t care to know. For just a moment I open my eyes when I feel S’s heart skipping a beat, to see our shield glow red in the atmosphere.
Without knowing why, I go faster, and the next time I open my eyes, our shield has formed a bubble around us in the ocean, and the world turns from white to black. Somehow I’m surprised to be here, even though it’s where I wanted to be. S turns around and begins to stroke my arms, as if feeling more herself. There’s no signal down here. In this moment we’re as alone as any two people can be.
But I take you deeper, to the bottom of the sea, where I pin you down onto the seabed. You see the madness in my eyes that you infected me with, and the weight of the world waiting to fall from above. I could rape you if I wanted to, because I’ve so lost myself in you that I have no self left to control, and it would just make you lose yourself in turn and make you like me; but I don’t want to. I don’t know where this desire will take me, but I know that as my mind is contained in yours, I can only desire what you desire. Let me die and live through you, let me love the world through you and you through the world. You’re afraid to lose yourself and yet you seek yourself in others. Let me follow you through mind after mind until we no longer know who either of us is.
We’re not floating this time: I’m holding you firmly down. At last you give in, and it unleashes an even deeper madness in me, because I know you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, and you may yet try to run should I let you. Do you know what I will do to you? I will implant an atomic bomb in your ego and blast it to bite-sized pieces. I love you, but I want you all the more because I hate the shell that keeps you from me. Before either of us knows what I’m doing, I’m adjusting all our neurotransmitters into seemingly random directions, ripping off our egos and leaving only our naked souls in each other’s arms. You try to struggle free, but my will overpowers yours within your own mind.
As I look at you you are all that exists, and I cannot look away. I steal all the secret moments from your memory, things you never dared to share until you felt this alone with someone, in an infinitely dense outer space, for all the world as if our universe had ceased to exist behind us to send us flying from one through another, until we’re returned to a time when we were the only life, a primordial eight-limbed arthropod.
Through the visions swimming in our minds we feel the energies of others interweaving into our own. We trace our minds along each other’s trains of thoughts to their place of origin in the world, tasting their ingredients, feasting on the cuisine of each other’s consciousness. Even as our dreams sweep before our eyes, we keep them open wide upon each other’s, drinking each other in, holding on to the emotion that makes us alive. We give up all we are to that fire, until it engulfs the entire world and covers it with our fertile ashes, and we’re reborn as the universe, living through each living being, a plexus of love spreading from person to person as if from neuron to neuron, each intensifying it, but always loving together as one. Our senses are humming a mantra of worship to each other’s nonexistence, at peace with being nothing and giving way to everything.
We’re returned to pure energy and intermix until we become each other, and we would both still be here if either of us were to die. I’ve made you understand what I wanted, and as it happened it so hypnotised you that you could not but let it happen. You let your brain synchronise beyond all control with mine, giving yourself up to me as you feeling as much accepted in my mind as in yours. I move from within your body for the first time, and from your eyes I watch you in mine. Your body is mine now, and mine is yours. You look over my body as you move it experimentally, and I feel your passion heaving in your breast and at last I too understand, wondering how it did not drive you insane, this passion too great to be contained by any one person. You’d do everything to inflame such passion in another, so that they can follow you into that madness. But instead, I finally gave you peace, and as you lay inside me staring into the nothing, no longer afraid to disappear. I fly off inside your body as you rest in mine.
Nearing the surface, just as begin to see the sunlight shine through above, for a moment it seems to illuminate a bald humanoid figure as I fly past. When I look down, it’s gone, but I still remember the expression on its face, one I can’t describe because it wasn’t any I ever saw, and yet it feels somehow familiar, as if I’ve known it for longer than I’ve known myself. As it was naked I could see that it had no definable sex, race, or even age, like the reclining Buddha in Polonnaruwa.
I’ve heard stories about this entity, but thought it was only an urban myth. They dubbed it Proteus, after a shapeshifting sea god. It was first seen in a vision when the first telepathic community was formed many years ago. This community since inspired many others, but no one knows what became of the people that formed it: they synchronised their memories with many people, and when they did, it made them want to synchronise with others in turn, so that bits of their consciousness may have transferred unconsciously to any telepath for all we know, even me. And now, I’ve synchronised with S; have I caught the infection? I ask my computer to trace where the vision came from, but it seems to have come from everywhere in my brain at once, as if it’s only a symptom of something else. Yet I can’t help feeling that it means something, because when I saw it, somehow everything clicked together. I never felt this way until I synchronised with N, and it terrifies me. The expression I saw on Proteus’ face still haunts me as I try to make out what it expressed, but the more I do, the more its contradictions become apparent, as if all emotions came together in that expression of mystery.
I emerge from the ocean feeling very confused, not remembering who I was before. I feel like I need to be alone, to reach as deep as I can into my unconscious to find it, and so I keep flying until I reach outer space at the world’s night side. I’ve want to shut the world out to see what stars appear in the darkness within. I’ve never felt this way, and weren’t I still feeling the love that N gave for the darkness inside me, I would’ve run away from it. But I can’t do it alone. I open my eyes as I see P fly towards me, and I smile at the thought that he must’ve dropped whatever he was doing in an instant when I asked him to come. As P’s nanite bubble merges with mine, he gives me a questioning look, and I hug him so tightly that it sends us both slowly spinning around, like the world beneath us — and right now, I don’t want any world beyond ourselves to exist. How I need you to understand myself; the open sky of your mind gives me space to be myself, however far I reach inside it.
Through my neurocom I review the vision of Proteus, and I see its face before me. It feels as if I am looking into a mirror infinitely many facets, each reflecting the light from another being. Suddenly I can see it: what if absolutely everything is equivalent? What if whatever we see as the meaning of life, it is found equally in every moment?
This idea so takes me by surprise I wake up from the telepathic vision in my own body, as the hacker they’ve nicknamed Proteus. All these years, ever since the earliest years of telepathy, when my body was still paralysed, I’ve used my neurocom to hack into every human mind searching for a moment that felt perfect, but as an outsider, I always saw through it. It was only meaningful in its context. To me, it was only the experience that meant anything, but I’ve never found an experience of which I knew that it was more or less than any other: the focus was always on something that was meaningful to them.
So even now that I am no longer paralysed, I might as well be, because I don’t know where to go. When I first became able to move again, I made excuses for why I couldn’t go out into the world myself. When I had an exoskeleton, it was my lack of expression. When I had body lenders, it was my lack of privacy. When my brain was repaired, it was that I’d lost my identity.
But now I’m terrified to find that, even now that I can have everything, I just don’t know what I want. All the moments that I’ve chosen from the minds I’ve hacked seemed just as valuable, and I could never choose whose to stay with. There were times I switched from mind to mind every second, and I became very good at quickly understanding their content. But I still feel alone.
There have to be more people like me. Nowadays, so many people share their experiences that you no longer even need to be a hacker to live entirely through other people. I just kept doing it so they won’t know I’m there, and I forget about myself entirely. Only once did I show myself.
So I look up support groups for telepathy addicts, and join a random one that’s having a meeting right now. I’m about to go there virtually that instant, but if I do, I know I’ll leave just as quickly. So I actually get out there in reality, something I haven’t done in years. I don’t even know why I’m doing this or what I’m searching for.
When we introduce ourselves, I refuse to give my name, only mentioning that I became an addict when I was paralysed. When I’m in telepathy, I get so immersed that I forget who I am, but I can never immerse myself into any one person for very long. It’s as if I’m looking for something I can’t find. Someone asks if what I’m looking for is a connection with myself; but I have no self. I am no one, if not Proteus, the shapeshifting sea god, swimming through the oceans of consciousness with no land in sight.
I decide that I need to find someone like me, so that we can find ourselves together again. So despite my resolution to stay till the end of the meeting, I jump out the window and fly away. I have my neurocom analyse my ego structure and look for a match, and it turns up with a few. They’re all telepathy addicts, but all with different histories: some were schizophrenics who refused treatment, some were deep brain stimulation addicts who broke the habit, some were suicides who had near-death experiences. All people who are as lost as I am. Nothing I wouldn’t expect, and I’m not sure what I was looking for.
Then I get an idea. I ask my neurocom to extrapolate the deviation of my ego structure: if I were even more different from the norm in the direction that I am now, what would I be like, and who is already like that? It turns up one match: a psychonaut who used to be a member of the very commune I was telepathing with that morning. She’s been experimenting with altered states almost every moment of her life, yet has been in telepathy quite rarely, as if not seeming to think anyone worth the time.
When I try to contact her, it turns out that I don’t even need permission to join into a two-way telepathy link with her. Unlike with a one-way, this is very unusual for a two-way. I would’ve still preferred to try a one-way telepathy link first, just to know what I’m getting myself into, but she won’t permit that. It’s as if she’d see it as a sign of weakness that would make me unworthy of knowing her at all, and I’m a bit offended. I’m not afraid to have a two-way, but what do I have to share anyway? I am no one.
I ask her why she left the commune, but her only reply is that she will not talk, only telepath. She tells me that I have nothing to fear, and that however her consciousness affects mine, I always have the freedom to be myself, and that it is only ever up to me to make that choice. If I am left changed by her, it is because deep down I always wanted to be — and I know I want to change, even if I don’t yet know how. I have nothing to lose.
When I connect with her, I see her in a vision. Sitting in lotus position, she is made up of fractals of red flowing around her body. Her eyes are closed but the pupils shine through the lids, each movement directing the energy flowing as a vortex around her and into her. I feel myself drawn in by it, and I feel a warmth wash over me as I enter the vortex. There is such perfection in this feeling that I can no longer even think of what brought me here or where I need to go: this moment is all that exists and needs to exist. Suddenly, even though I still don’t know what it is that I was looking for, I know that I’ve found it, and I submit myself to her. She looks at me, and beckons me closer. When I sit kneeling before her, her vortex of energy forms itself into a thought for the first time.
“You asked me why I left the commune. My old body is actually still there, but I’ve synchronised with so many people that I have bodies all over the world that are as much mine as yours is yours. You’ve seen into my consciousness before. The communes were necessary at one point to bring us together, but they have outlived their purpose. The world has changed, and we psychonauts are no longer outcasts, but have become the leaders of this world. The masses come to us in their search for meaning. In our search one thing we’ve had in common is that we found no difference in the value of our experiences, and so we’ve become divided along one single opposition: into those who see all consciousness as good, and those who see all consciousness as evil. We will do anything to create consciousness, whatever suffering it requires, and they will do anything to destroy all consciousness, so that none have to suffer ever again. A war is coming, a war fought inside each consciousness to win it over for one or the other —and you are still undecided. That is why we need you. Because you are in between us and them, it is only through you that can unify our consciousness with theirs. If you fail, then they will all commit suicide. You already know the meaning of life: you feel alone because you doubt to pursue it. You’ve spent so much time in other people’s consciousness that you only ever sympathise with them, even in their ignorance. You must see yourself as what you are, a leader, and lead them.”
“If you will lead me.”
“Synchronise,” she says, and for all my former fears of being unworthy of another’s mind, I simply bow my head and say “Yes. Please.”
In the vision, she holds me, and as she does, I see that my own body has turned into fractals of blue. Now they are flowing into each other, to take on every other color in between. I feel her power combine with my love, into something that both accepts things as they are and desires them to change. I see now that as my consciousness comes from all humans, I must care for all humanity as if it were my own body. My body is ill, and I must make it heal, whether it wants to or not. Now my morality is no longer defined by their freedom to be unconscious; it considers it only as a limit to be broken through.
I am ready. When I awaken from telepathy, I look for her profile, trying to find out more about her, but it’s gone. I look at the archive of my mindcom, but every record of her has been removed. When I get my mindcom to trace my memory of her through my neural pathways, it keeps returning an error. I can’t even know whether or not I am going insane.
Perhaps she gave me a mission, and I will not see her again until it’s completed. I sensed how she too was lonely to be alone in this fight. I realise now that all this time I’ve been searching for an equal, but I only found my superior. I can’t stand for this. I no longer want to be myself, and I know that for me, it’s easy enough to change. I will assimilate others’ minds until I become like the vision I saw… and the only way to do is to connect two-way, so that our minds will adjust to each other’s feedback until they combine.
I reach out, sending my mind wandering through the neuronet like a ghost, seeking for someone to possess. I sample through the minds of millions in search of my vision, each mind linking me to the next, channeling from node to node on the neuronet. With neuromodulation, I put my brain into overdrive to sample faster than I ever have before. My brain is about to become overheated, but still I won’t stop, because I have nothing to lose, all the more as I want to get beyond this brain. I sniff the noosphere for my prey, without even knowing what I am looking for; only that it is a transformation, whatever it is that I am turning into.
I make every part of my brain focus entirely on the search until it becomes but a matter of time before I find the perfect connection between my mind and another’s. At some point in my meditation, my mind latches on to a woman whose dark red energy reminds me of the vision I had. This time, I do not stay hidden. She sees my mind inside hers, and mine will not let go, but attunes its every nerve so intensely to hers that she falls to the ground in convulsions. She is in agony, and I feel her agony as my own, but still I will not let go. All the impulses that I integrated from every mind I ever hacked become one drive to burst out of myself.
When our energies have become into one, we can move each other’s body as our own, and have become like two hemispheres of the same brain, several yet one. Her mind cannot reject mine, because now they are one she can feel how our energies perfect each other. Our energy feels so reminiscent that I know the vision I saw was of what was to come, and that I will turn us into that divinity. When I do, I also realise that I am losing my sanity as I disintegrate my ego. But it’s alright: the chaos of my mind will make it easier to be transformed.
When our energies have become into one, we can move each other’s body as our own, and have become like two hemispheres of the same brain, several yet one. Her mind cannot reject mine, because now they are one she can feel how our energies perfect each other. Our energy feels so reminiscent that I know the vision I saw was of what was to come, and that I will turn us into that divinity. When I do, I also realise that I am losing my sanity as I disintegrate my ego. But it’s alright: the chaos of my mind will make it easier to be transformed.
She wakes up from her catatonia in a hospital bed once my mind is entirely transferred to hers as half of a whole mind. No longer needing my own body, I disposed of it. At this point it was more a symbolic act, as I never really used my body over the past decades. There is no going back now. He paid for his mistake with his life, and he doesn't even care. It is all the same to me. I will cast off one form after another in search of the future.
She wakes up from her catatonia in a hospital bed once my mind is entirely transferred to hers as half of a whole mind. Your first thought is of revenge, and my first thought, powerless to resist hers, is of atonement. I would not have chosen your mind if she did not want to become one, or you would’ve rejected my mind like a transplant, but I knew what you wanted before even she did, before you even had time to think about what you thought about it, to want not just me but millions of people to become part of you — for that’s what I’ve become. Anyone else’s individuality would’ve dissolved in the collective of my mind, but yours will not, and that’s why I need you.
You tell me that if I really wanted to become one with you rather than control you, I should prove it by disposing my own body. No longer needing it, I don’t even hesitate, and tell my nanorobots to combust it. I don’t even look back. At this point it was more a symbolic act, as I never made much use of my body for decades. There is no going back now. All I am is here with you now, and our lives will begin anew. I chose you because you complete me: you are the earth and I the sky. Through you, I can connect my dreaming self to reality. You embody my spirit.
I will no longer call myself Proteus, but I will not take on a given name. I’ve connected with so many people with the same given names that I’ve become allergic to them, and replaced them in my neurocom with designations. What’s the use of names that say nothing about the person? I might as well recognise the mystery of their identity, even if they do not.
I change my name to Metis, the shapeshifting mother of wisdom.
I change my name to Metis, the shapeshifting mother of wisdom.
I know finally what I want: I want to conquer people, and it's not enough for me to be a secret anymore. I need them to know me in the way I know them. I don't only want to make them part of me but also to make myself a part of them, because when I spread through them, they will spread me to others until all will become one.
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