ArchivedLogs:Every You, Every Me

Every You, Every Me
Dramatis Personae Hive, Minder
In Absentia	2015-07-16 << No. No, it -- hardly matters. >>
Location Brains
A woman stands on the George Washington bridge, staring glassy-eyed down the gleaming stretch of pre-dawn Hudson. She's dressed up as for a party, in a chic red dress with a bow across the empire waistline, though she has toed off the matching pumps. Hands braced on the railing, she closes her eyes and leans into the wind. A fragment of a thought not her own surfaces in her mind unbidden, bobs about for a moment, and vanishes before she has a chance to wonder why she would ever think such a thing. Somewhere in the growing mesh of minds into which she has recently folded, the other pieces of that thought emerge in sequence, and the whole of it echoes faintly in her subconscious. << Why are you doing this? >> Where her thoughts end and Hive's thoughts begins is hard to distinguish, at this juncture. Where most of New York's thoughts end and Hive's thoughts begin is hard to distinguish, by now, truth be told, his mind(s) grown vast and diffuse and spread far through (and beyond) the state by now, mental tendrils reaching-seeking-questing. When answer comes it comes echoed in those same minds -- rising, again, as if their own and yet not quite. Echoed back in a quiet chorus, sometimes word and sometimes only concept: << (why) >> << are >> << (we) >> -- it trails off there. For a time, at least, as the network continues its balloning outward path. But repeats again: << (why) >> << are >> << (we) >> << (why) >> << are >> << (we) >> << (why) >> << are >> << (we) >> A beachcomber in Nassau sits down on a driftwood log and unwraps his lunch of bagel and cream cheese. The holes in his sling satchel have outpaced his attempts at patching, and he rubs the fingers of his free hand idly along the edges of the largest tear. << I >> he thinks. Half a mile down the beach a middle-aged woman on the porch of her beachfront vacation home thinks, << recognize>>. Her husband in the kitchen thinks, << you >>. The driver of a Lexus on the highway thinks, << now >>. Drifting back up through the beachcomber's thoughts as his fingers trace against the fabric: << Now? >> And into the woman's mind washes: << Before >>. In the kitchen, in her husband's mind surfaces, << you >>. And down on the highway, the Lexus's driver has an uncertain muddled, << (didn't/couldn't)? >> Though the thoughts came through them, the minds on that stretch of beach contain no trace of the consciousness from which those thoughts originated. Clear on the other end of the area Hive's network now encompasses, another message surfaces through a series of evening joggers on the streets of Buffalo, << You were too small. I had only observed you like this. >> A wordless awareness of scale ripples through the entire network. The network is still growing -- and the more it grows the /faster/ it grows, spiraling out and out and out. Grasping-reaching-searching; there's something underneath the spreading tide of mindlink that feels hungry, gnawing, hollow-ache. << You had observed us -- ? >> Hive reaches for this thought, turns it over, bats it back questioningly. << (from where)/(where are you) >> A wave of amusement bubbles through Hive's network. Not every single person in it, but perhaps every fifth or sixth one, experiences a brief flash of mirth. Divided among a team of construction weary workers in Jersey, << I /was/ you, as I am now. >> From a small knot of faithful gathered for morning mass in a tiny church, << Where, indeed, are /you/? It hardly matters at this point, does it? >> There are sense-memories that flood back in response to this question. A porch in front of the beach. A traffic jam. A small Vietnamese restaurant in the Lower East Side. A coffeeshop full of grumbly malcontented people. A park full of children splashing in a sprinkler-fountain. An office with A/C blasting far too high. And somewhere cluttered together with the tide of /where/ there is just -- a vast yawning uncertainty. Everywhere. Nowhere. These answers come back in tandem. And are soon followed by actual words, soft and somehow distant, summoned up through the same cluster of churchgoers. << No. No, it -- hardly matters. >> A string ensemble in Hartford is warming up. Their bows move in harmony, and the thin, whimsical melody from their instruments fills the small recital hall. The thought that arises amongst them has a kind of fluid synergy: << I have you to thank for awakening me during the zombie outbreak, actually. >> There's a tightness that ripples across the vast network of minds. Clenching. Stiffening. Faint memory-echoes of the smell of rot and the clawing ache of hunger and the sounds of screaming drift soft and distant through the world in ghosting ripples. << Thank. >> The clenching doesn't ease. << If we woke you during that, forgive us. >> The stench of rot is joined (ghostly, distant, here, as well) by the feel of rending flesh and the sound of gunfire. << But we didn't know -- >> The harmony of the string ensemble is faltering. << It was always only us. >> Disjointed. A little off-kilter. << Who are you? >> Two young men, one quite dark-skinned and one pale but sun-burnt, are sharing a large, messy sandwich at the foot of a skyscraper in downtown Baltimore. A large, scruffy brown mutt lies sprawled at their feet, threadbare leash tied to one of their backpacks. An exceptionally tall woman in a suit slows as she passes. << It wasn't pleasant, >> the thought ricochets through them, then spirals out into nearby pedestrians and motorists, << but neither was my condition beforehand. You set me free, if unintentionally. You had a lot on your plate. >> Then, from a handful of children big and small, splashing in a DC fountain under the blazing sun, << Call me Minder. And yourselves? >> A chorus of names bounces back, pinballing through a cascade of minds. Beneath this, though, only a sense of confusion. << We don't -- >> The trail of thought is lost, tapering off with this word (where it drifts up, solitary, in the mind of a young girl chasing her wayward puppy where it has escaped a gap in the fence in her backyard in Tennessee.) The sense of confusion does not resolve so much as disperse, fading away to melt into the sea of other identities, replaced instead with new thought: << -- What is your condition now? >> << Me? >> That entire thought comes out through the mind of a Toronto street artist surveying her newest work, a fractured monochrome nightmare of cramped angles. << I travel, >> this comes from the other side of the city, a teen waking from a nap. The elusive telepathic presence seems to vanish altogether. When it returns, speaks with a single voice, neutral and genderless and without apparent source, << Though it's not usually this easy. If you mean my body...I can persuade next of kin to keep it plugged in. >> << No. We mean -- >> But here the words falter again, replaced instead by a struggling. Reaching. A grasping for some sort of sense of identity, trying to pull a /whole/ out of the widespread net being cast over the world. << We mean -- /who/ -- (who) -- who -- who -- (who) -- >> It is echoed, repeated, bounced from a man lazily not-really-tending a fishing pole on a dinghy in Oklahoma to a toddler ineffectually waddling after fireflies in Virginia; from a girl tapping her feet along with the plucking of her guitar strings on a fire escape in Chicago to a youth raptly absorbed in a copy of /The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle/ on their bed in Louisiana, spiraling on and on and on -- And then stopping. Just quiet, washing less like silence and more like a soft static white-noise, nondescript and formless across the sea of identities to obscure any /feel/ of the mind that connects them. The suggestion of a sigh washes through a few dozen scattered minds in Hive's network. << You are many minds operating together, if not all in the same capacity. >> The message skips like a stone back toward New York. << I am a part of you. There's no need to go searching. >> At last, Minder's strange, impersonal voice sounds in Hive's brain, housed in his catatonic body, lying in bed precisely where Flicker left him. << I am here. >> In the dark of Hive's room there is silence. No stirring from his body -- and for quite some time no stirring from his mind, either. But gradually there's a relaxation, an unclenching like a breath slowly being released. Across miles and rivers and highways and mountains, the fringes of his mental reach stop unfurling, halted in their expansion. << Stay here. >> Phrased as an imperative, perhaps, but in tone his voice is just tired, small, a pleading note to it. In a private wing of an Albany hospital, the pulse rate of a certain comatose patient increases fractionally. The nurse watching that monitor has instructions to note any change in the patient's condition, but he decides not to record this particular one, after all. In the basement of Geekhaus, Hive hardly looks much better than comatose. But the thought that rises in his mind rings confident and lucid. << I will if you will. >>