Logs:The Illusion of Separation

The Illusion of Separation
Dramatis Personae Cerebro, Charles, DJ, Hive
In Absentia Dusk, Dawson, Tony, Skye, Matt	2023-09-06 << What in the fuck is that drivel. >>
Location <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - ICU
Like the greater city outside, hospitals never really sleep. Hive does, though, and has been for quite some time. Unlike previous weeks he's just sleeping, now, fuzzy and occasionally fitful (occasionally, via some outside assistance, less fitful than he would otherwise be.) His dreams have been growing considerably more restless recently and uncomfortable as he is that is likely a good sign -- through his mind run a world of dreams that are not his. A mother's anxious catnap at the side of her daughter's bed, nightmare visions of car crashes and tiny coffins running through her mind. Her young daughter, sleeping off her surgery and dreaming of cats whose hisses come in the sound of squealing brakes and who melt into pools of ice cream that run down into the gutter. Two doors down an older man's mind is revisiting his last failed marriage; one floor up a computer programmer (wide awake, furiously at work) is in an anxiety-spiral about getting fired if this round of chemotherapy interferes with her deadlines. There's a stirring that flits across Hive's mind, a quiet outward curling of roots that is soon pulling back in. Then questing out again, feeling first across the one mindlink that already exists, clinging aching-tight to it. The third time he reaches it is for Charles, a stretch of still-growing root that strains in the older man's direction in tired search for purchase. Until recently, Charles had been working from Hive's bedside -- though not, presumably, in any fear of being fired. But he's set the X-laptop aside in favor of a tablet from which he is reading aloud, "It was the logical direction of human evolution. Humanity had achieved what it had not through strength or claws or armor, not even through individual human intelligence, as impressive as that was." He pauses, perhaps at some stirring in Hive, or perhaps just steeling himself against the prose. "No, it was the ability of humans to coordinate, to work together, to produce ideas and solutions collectively that no individual mind ever could..." Now he's definitely attending psionically, his eyes losing focus an instant before he lowers the tablet. He adjusts his shields and meets Hive's straining with a rush of warmth. Light floods the forest in a soft, diffuse mist that gives off the distinct sense of a relieved breath out that had been held too long, whispering self(ves)-knowledge and illuminating labyrinthine paths of memory. << (you're/we're here) >> Somewhere within or without or between them -- but not them, yet -- another presence shimmers faint but fierce. Cerebro's greeting is less measured and coherent, a jumble of a million not-quite-selves too overwhelmed for a moment to interpret and synthesize the parts of his consciousness that process beyond psionic reach. Here but not-here, Hive's fierce clinging is met almost the instant it reaches out. The flood of feelings that pour back across the mental link are painful in their intensity, a frenetic mix of relief and love and guilt and joy too overwhelming to sort through right now. Around them the glimmering fairylights of Riverdale (still so-hopefully kept on faithfully each night) are blurring into the streetlamps of the city into the fluorescent hospital lights and then with the unerring sense of finding his way home DJ is there, dropping into a chair at the bedside and curling his hand warm through Hive's. That his eyes have blurred with tears as he presses his forehead to Hive's knuckles makes little difference; with barely a thought he's focusing Charles's eyes on Hive's face, drinking in this sight like he didn't just see the man hours before, and in the very-next-moment when he releases this reflexive hold it isn't with a sense of apology for the brief hijacking but one of profound gratitude. Between them and of them the outstretched roots are planting, sprouting, the tiny hidden flowers nestled inconspicuous among the leaves turning rarely seen petals towards that warmth. Hive's fingers curl in against DJ's, something inside him easing at the other man's presence. He's slow to crack his eyes open, mouth working soundlessly for a moment before he gives up on this venture, throat and lips both far too dry after this prolonged unconsciousness. The thoughts that come instead rise straight in the others' minds, and though connected as they are there's no need for the words to come whipcrack-sharp Hive is very considerately inflecting a certain level of sting into what should otherwise feel natural: << What in the fuck is that drivel. >> Charles evinces no offense at sharing his view, and does not look away after regaining control of his -- still also DJ's, really -- eyes. When Hive opens his eyes, the mist in the forest glows brighter, though now it is fairly plain Charles is carefully regulating how much brighter. Carefully, too, he folds Cerebro into them and opens the part of his labyrinth -- corridors in space age glass and steel -- where long ago he helped a still-organic Cere digitize his mind. But at Hive's prickly demand, of all things, the tension eases more fully from him and the mist burns away into clear sunlight. << Crux, by Ramez Naam. >> Charles appends to this the cover and the blurb for the book without looking down at his screen. << The main character is presently hiding from the CIA in a Thai monastery, where his hivemind drug is helping Buddhist monks...how did he put it? >> He still doesn't touch the tablet, but leafs back through the pages of the ebook in his memory. << Ah, yes. Lift the veil of maya, the illusion of separation. >> Cere probably would have interrupted this summary if he weren't so busy putting himself back together. But now he unfurls, as vast and alien as he had been minuscule and alien before, his gemlike facets playing various scenes from the book, rendered into live action. << Excuse you, that's award-winning postcyberpunk drivel. Show some respect. >> He huffs, not actually very indignant. << I bet Charles you'd wake up before he finished the trilogy. >> Charles did not take that bet, but he isn't protesting. "What the fuck does that even mean." It's DJ's voice but it's got a touch of Hive's mongrel accent and more than a touch of his irascible cadence. DJ himself is blipping away after this, returning in the next moment with a small cup of water. He scoops his arm carefully under the other man's head to prop it up enough for a few very small sips. << You scoff but you have no idea the boundless imagination this guy has, >> DJ is continuing to annotate over and alongside Cerebro and Charles, filling in this time the opening scene of the most recent book as the protagonist simply marvels at the wonders the mindlink drug can create -- for example, a group of musicians playing together in harmony. "I mean," he says aloud, "he's probably got a little bit more taking it easy to do, I bet you could finish the trilogy while he's really here to appreciate it." "What the fuck," Hive manages to croak with his own voice this time, and he's mostly trying to picture a barbershop quartet entirely composed of his smoker's-scratchy and largely tuneless tenor. "We're starting," is as far as he gets before he once more gives up on vocal speech, a silent prompt pulling DJ's hands back so he can take another careful sip. << -- a band. I'mm'a make up for lack of musical skill with the magic of unity. >> In his band, Cere is on synthesizer. This is as far as he's gotten towards assigning instruments, but he has assigned this one quite firmly. "I can in theory play the flute, but I've not done so in many years." Charles reflects that perhaps that is in fact desirable in this particular ensemble. "And I'm entirely willing to start over from the first book, if it might aid in your recovery," he offers mildly. << Cere has read them all and might furnish you some content warnings, and no solely for hideous prose or fetishization of Buddhism. >> << He's really fond of "veil of maya, the illusion of separation". I think he got it from a book some white guy wrote about how Eastern Mysticism is actually science dressed up with superstition. >> As Cere's simulated Nexus film fades away, his facets become the sky above the banyan forest, an abstract stained glass dome reminiscent of the Danger Room's. << But there is an uploaded person in this book and the next, so... >> His conceptual shrug is not as nonchalant as he meant it -- he doesn't like admitting he likes the books, but they know that without any such admission. << I can synthesize as badly as the worst of you, >> comes out autotuned, in their minds. "In any event, I think it wise to take your time in recovery." Charles hesitates, starting to shift some labyrinth wall or another, but stops that, too. The light in them fluctuates with his worry. "You have been unconscious for six weeks. Your brain -- and your mind -- will need more work, to be sure, but your body as well." "I can't play anything," DJ offers cheerfully, "I'm calling bass." He's kind of idly wondering if that's even possible with one arm, but then discarding this thought as a non-issue in the matter of their Hypothetical Crappy Band. "Think our genre is getting all over the place, though." His tone is light but there's a quiet ache that's lingering as he settles back, holds Hive's hand again tight; somewhere beneath it there's a rapid churn of anxieties that he's trying hard to keep from clawing free again, swirling around a different Hive entirely, a swarm of Sentinels; swirling around a jagged psionic tearing that ripped through their bond here; swirling around myriad raids that he didn't even go on but are clanging for space in his head now. He doesn't voice any of these things. What he does say, with a small amused twitch of his lips at Cere's assessment of the author, is, "Well, Buddhism is really more of a philosophy than a religion." "Hhhng," Hive is groaning even before DJ finishes this last sentence, and reflexively he starts to reach for the pillow behind his head. He very quickly aborts this impulse, though, some combination of deep muscle enervation and a strong reluctance to let go of DJ's hand -- instead it's Charles who leans forward to pluck one of the pillows from behind Hive and chuck it at DJ's head. << You can't be bass anyway >> comes after this, and he's picturing Dusk's cheerful but terrible attempts at learning the instrument over the years. "Dusk's a shitty --" But here this cuts off; somewhere across his shared awareness there is context filling itself in to drain color from the image in his head of Dusk perched on Geekhaus's couch, carefully strumming the latest of Many cheap bass guitars. "-- oh," he whispers, very small. The light that suffuse them concentrates briefly around DJ's quicksilver anxieties. It does not try to dismiss them and certainly isn't fast enough to address them individually, but serves as a buffer that yields easily to conscious thought but slows the unconscious spiraling. Charles drops his face into one palm, a gesture extensively practiced. Beneath the great tree his light gathers into the form of a much, much younger Charles -- with a full head of dark brown hair, standing on his own two feet, wearing a garish orange-and-red aloha shirt and khaki bermuda shorts -- who professes, almost in time with DJ's nearly identical statement, "See, Buddhism is really more of a philosophy than a religion." The Chinese woman he's attempting to enlighten does not look in the least impressed. He releases his not insignificant embarrassment along with the memory which, when it dissolves back into light, has more substance and weight to it -- not so very unlike the buffer he'd offered DJ. This change spreads through the light in the forest which lies soft and heavy now like a blanket of faintly glowing fog that steadies and comforts, that knows and holds their grief. His own anger he keeps banked, not hidden from them but out of the way in a forge that looks suspiciously like Magneto's workshop, lifted out of Freaktown and neatly tucked at the base of his tower. No such subtle control on Cerebro's part -- or parts. He's losing cohesion again, facets coming unmoored to drift amongst and through and beyond them, hissing with the analog static of emotions he can barely identify much less process, but which are happening to him nevertheless. DJ could easily dodge, almost does dodge, but with a ripple of amusement equal parts Hive's you-deserve-this and his own, he checks the instinct to bat the pillow away. Just catches it, after it thwaps against his head, and he's almost about to return it to Hive when instead he's thinking of Dusk, trying not to think of Dusk, futile though he knows it is to try and keep anything from Hive like this. There's a cascade of memories that follows, all in an overlapping rush. Some are his -- an entirely different Ryan Holloway filling out college applications in a shared Xavier's dorm; the protective slam of his wing into the path of an oncoming Prometheus guard; the sharp tailoring of his groomsman suit the day of their wedding, half wasted given he missed half the ceremony hooking up with one of Polaris's bridesmaids; the despair underneath the cheery bravado in his mind as he hastily severs their mindlink with a (<< whoooops don't wait tabletop on me tonight -->>) just before a half-dozen Mark Vs close in on him. Some are definitely not, a far more familiar Dusk hefting their couch singlehandledly up through the fire escape window to avoid having to wrangle it around the Lofts stairs; teeth bared fierce and bloody in the Fight Club basement; looking far too small curled into a ball on his side on Ian's empty bed; wing curled gentle around the trembling shoulders of a young labrat sobbing on the phone with parents who do not want them back. In the end he swallows and says nothing, the swiftwinged flutter of his concern and love, darting between the other three, is a fidgety counterpoint to the gentle care with which he lifts Hive's head and returns the pillow to its place. The rapid flit of memory flutters through them but in Hive is answered only by one static image, the empty living room of the crappy apartment he's clung on to all these years, as bare and devoid of personality as it was just before they all first moved in. The grief that is twisting in him, the guilt, the rage, tremor out along the mental bonds between them until quite abruptly he pulls all his outflung roots back in, shoves down the other questions -- Are the kids okay? Where is our team? Who else did we lose? Why the fuck did you wake me up -- that want to rise. Singular once more, he just fixes his gaze hard on the ceiling. "Oh." Charles flinches -- though not at the abrupt unhiving, probably -- and looks past the others momentarily, lips compressing. The warmth of his telepathic aura still envelops the others, determined and steadfast but not insistent. "The children are --" He almost says "safe", then sets his jaw and corrects himself, "-- returned. I had rather if you could learn the rest in your own time while you recover, but some of it..." He doesn't glance at DJ, but the brief worried shift of psionic attention is plainly a request for his input. "...might be a lot to stumble across unawares." DJ does flinch at the abrupt unhiving, his mind reflexively grasping at the emptiness but coming up with nothing. It's Hive's own voice that echoes in his mind at that last unspoken question, << I'd tear this world inside out and yours too to bring him back if I could >> and << I was scared >> and then it's Tony Stark's, of all people, << Your Borg Queen never wakes up, sounds like it won't even be your call. >> and then it's Cerebro's, << (they needed to know) >> and then it's his-but-not-his, << (what am I) >> ringing terrified and fractured in some other shared mindspace. He leans back in his chair, cheeks sucking inward and teeth worrying at the habitually chewed-up skin there. He's flitting past his first line of thought (in your own time is a luxury for people who aren't at war) and his next (-- are we at war, he shouldn't have to be) to alight quite unsteadily on: "Lying here imagining what the answers might be probably -- would be a lot, too." Hive's eyes scrunch as he tries without the benefit of conjoined thought, now, to fit the snips of thought he overhears into some kind of coherent picture. Predictably this results in a runaway train of nightmare, wild conjecture as to how many others are dead or back in the labs. Around him there are untethered psionic roots quivering in hungry search and for just a moment his control slips; the great effort he's making to keep them reined in falters, and with one heavy thrust DJ's perspective realigns itself to a familiar we. Just a moment, though, before he yanks back once more. Then again, at DJ's speeds a moment is all it takes for the nightmares align themselves to a more accurate picture of reality, to sort the dead from the living, to place his teammates somewhere approximately more apt in a map of grief and trauma, to give context to -- -- his eyes open again and hitch on DJ for a long and silent moment, in which Charles and Cerebro at least can feel the fresh rending along old psionic scars. His fingers curl down tight into his sheets and there's a brief stretch in which he stops breathing, stops thinking, stops anything much past an unvoiced and unformed anguish. His words come soft and cracking when he finds his voice again. "I'm -- sorry. I think I need..." This just trails off, some absurd and almost amused thought of being alone jarring up against the inherent futility of that, for him. Instead he just shakes his head, ending in an apologetic: "You should go." Charles closes his eyes as if that would stop the revelation that he had been most worried about reaching Hive in his present state. Cerebro, only distantly sensible now as Charles's passenger, strains helplessly for Hive from somewhere in and behind the warmth of his aura, glittering with distress. "I'm leaving the tablet here in case you want it," Charles says, "and Skye offered bring up your devices once you're awake." His brows crinkle with what is probably worry but which does not show in his steady warmth. "You needn't tell anyone yet if you don't wish it, but the hospital might call Matthieu unless you request otherwise." He slips the lotus seed mala from his own wrist and sets it down on the bed beside Hive's hand. "I'll be back tomorrow." With a gentle press of his mind to DJ/Flicker's, he guides his chair out into the unquiet corridor. "Hive --" DJ starts, but after this there's just a loss, rifling through many options and coming up with none. He leans forward to press a gentle kiss to Hive's forehead, and trails Charles out in silence.