here were other scenes of family intimacy, snippets of memory that limned a happy family life. As the metemotions pulled at him, he felt a compulsion to betray the thread of his own happy childhood woven there. What part of those emotions were of he and his family, and what part were of the Mind?
Even as the happy picts spun their metemotional cocoon, he moved from the natural emotions of a son toward his parents into the dark neural core of his own rebellion. He was no child, and he would become no mindslave.
His father’s voice was husky with emotion when they returned to their bodies, “See, son, it’s just like you.” And the three of them hugged and felt together, and he knew they thought everything was going to be all right.
But it wasn’t. Isaac went back to his room, pulled the covers over his head, and felt the empty fullness of unspent tears dulled by the Mind.
Isaac’s narrative was not his parents. His dad had been a part of creating the damned squid with its tentacles all through him that pulsed and fed off the collective consciousness.
They had misstepped into a grand narrative of right and wrong, projecting the quiet struggle to be good into the totalitarian realm of politics.
And by the time his parents had doubted, by the time they saw that the firmness with which they treated their own desires could not be codified for others, all they had left to plant in him were their doubts and apprehensions. Whose seed had twined deep subversive roots: the neural substrate of his revolt.