etters
Energy swirled around the book: what secrets were trapped between those dense pen marks? Histories bled through its thin pages when held to the light. He studied it in secret and carried it in a hidden baseshirt pocket against his skin.
Before he’d begun to split from the Mind, he could lose himself in the thrum of daily life like you could lose yourself in a team-player lucid: 1-up, gold coin, powerup! Once he recognized all the little dopamine rushes as external, as from the Mind, things started to unravel.
A cold, rational part of himself began to crawl above deck from the underside of his consciousness. But in the perfect surface of things, there was no entrance for the strange sense of incompleteness that he’d begun to feel.
He began peeling at the edges of things, asking the Mindnet’s query daemon for histories and contexts, and trying to strip away the metemotions that prompted him to feel a certain way with each answer. He wanted to understand how people used to think and feel, before the Mind. But he never felt like the answers he got were satisfactory.
And the dreams were like a spell that settled over him in the mornings. If he let himself drift away, he would sink deeper and deeper into the world that the Mind wove for him, processing, happy with who he was becoming, his own constellations dimming.
It was only when the dreams were further from his mind that he could remember… something. An unanswered question. A propriopercieved pain in a limb he’d never had. A flesh memory of a world beneath the world where another version of him saw and felt something entirely different.
And then the spell seemed more cobweb than magic: wrapped tight to muffle his kicks, while the spider’s fangs soothed him with venom, hot blood run through cold veins.
Isaac knew from pictures on the Mindnet that the secret to books lay in the study of their pages, with the eyes scanning back and forth. He knew their pages contained knowledge in a symbolic form, that somehow the black shapes represented spoken words. He knew this intellectually, but Isaac had never known any form of stored knowledge but the picto that was decoded without conscious thought.
His curiosity deepened, and Isaac took to sleeping with the book under his pillow, close to his natural Mind. He reached out to it as he would to a classmate, but found no interface, no consciousness—nothing. Less than nothing: not even a door to a room with nothing in it.
He tested it, thinking to gain, at the least, a prompt of some kind from it. His failure was confusing, and he kept querying the empty psychic space where the book’s Mind should be, probing deeper into the nothing.
He found, deep in a drawer, a pen—of the same color as the pen which had previously marked its pages. He opened the book to a blank page, marking it, tracing the previous page’s notes, but the nothing remained nothing.
He stared at the marks and pictured himself tiny, a climber scaling a letter by rope and pickaxe, the white a snowy mountain deep that threatened to devour him. He would throw a grappling hook up to the top of the “H” and it would catch on the serif’s edge, and he would pull himself up and sleep in the bed it made between the sturdy supports, sheltered from the nothing.
He tried many things, none of which produced the least response. It was in desperation that he decided to ask the query daemon, knowing that this effort would increase the Mind’s awareness of his quest.
Of course, the most difficult questions to answer are those that are incorrectly framed, like, “Where is my book’s prompt?” but Isaac persisted.
The query daemon was less than cooperative, answering in oblique ways, and the Mind itself pushed back against his thoughts, causing brain fog, sleep, or revulsion in its attempt to muffle the dopamine flooding the seeking part of his neuroanatomy and reintegrate his conscious desire in dreams. But the Mind-spider in his occipital lobe had only reached his brainstem and was not yet master of the executive in the prefrontal cortex.
He started dreaming the rage dreams, struggling in sleep against a faceless thing that shifted continually in order to press him into the gray dream like a smothering pillow. In this state, his brain was useless as a mindnode, unable to process the Mindstream.
At first, he didn’t connect the dreams and the fog to the Mind. Isaac had never before held a forbidden thing in his mind with such intensity. Some thoughts were more difficult to think, some actions more difficult to take. But the book was different from so many other things because it was a single, persistent desire.
He would work through his school exercises, firing queries off to the daemon and absorbing the answers. And he bided his time, looking for an excuse to rabbit-trail without warning into some small entrance into the subject of literacy, using his moments of alertness before the Mind deflected or slowed him to elucidate some small bit of knowledge.
In the everyday, Isaac, like most of his peers, could not differentiate between native emotions and those arising from the Mind. But as he pressed on, the Mind’s resistance to his desire grew. He began to split. He had become continually aware of the outline of the Mind, moving against the backdrop of his own self.
The process of differentiation was not like the discovery of an alien presence, but more like the revolt of a well-loved and much-needed organ, as if the stomach were to betray the mouth and close off the esophagus, smuggling in its own foods through a hole contrived in the belly button.
As he pressed forward, his emotions were a riot of dark colors. Weeping for grief, he would find himself panicking, finally moving towards lust to burn the book. But when he seized it with fire in his mind and looked at it, the shape triggered something else. His rational brain would come online, and he would become crafty like a chimp hiding a treat. He deluded himself into treating it as his panicking child, which triggered his care center and drained away his rage. The Mind would retreat as though exhausted and, though exhausted himself, he pressed on.
Many nights, Isaac succumbed to sleep, awakening frustrated but ironically well-rested in the morning. His rage welled, acidic, in his gut, at war with this alien force rooted in his brainstem. His body felt the toll of neural deficiencies as the Mind drove down dopamine production to combat the natural stimulus of the seeking system. His body tired of the struggle for control.
But even as he learned to distinguish himself from the incarnation of society’s will within him, the Mind became increasingly cunning, shifting focus to obfuscate its presence. Isaac began to mistrust himself, repressing urges to win small battles toward his larger victory. He weighed all emotions and feelings against his reason and goals, starving the Mind of its influence over his decisions. At least he knew that the dreamwalker couldn’t suborn his pre-frontal cortex: this part of rational Mind is offline in dreams.
There are people who never experience such a world-wrecking will. When opposed, they cease to press against the gradually thickening resistance that makes up the borders of their world. Then there are those who throw themselves against resistance to the brink of their own destruction, moving toward pain with a masochistic disregard for personal consequence.
And so in time, though long struggle, he cleared some of the fog surrounding the book.
His first breakthrough was to understand that the book was a dumb thing: more like an object than a data repository. There was no secret mechanism for gaining a prompt. It was dead as a kleenex.
If that was true, he must seek a decoder for the words on the page, an index that he could could use in a translator function. But again, he was confounded. How could he run the book’s data through a translator function without the Mind first translating it into data? He felt a heaviness at this thought. Without the Mind plucking data from his stream, categorizing it, and rendering it pipe-able to other apps; he was utterly without tools.
And so it was a blind quest: querying for knowledge whose name he couldn’t know. But he had a method. He would query related topics and then leap to adjacent mindnodes, diving into their thoughtstream and enjoying a brief flash of clarity before the stream went murky and dark. Much of what he found was thoughts in words, which were useless to him. But finally, he stumbled across a single image that caused him to recognize all the shapes he’d pored over in darkness.
It flashed across the screen before the Mind pushed him back. It was of two people reading a book together. And all of a sudden it came together for him.
The data-index was other people! A reader! He would need to find a reader. How obvious! He was overcome with joy that danced and recursed like a mandelbrot, chasing the fog of the the Mind’s negativity from the dark corners of his personal mind. He would find a reader who would teach him how to read. Why had it not occurred to him before? But where on this minddamned earth would he find a reader?