Mnesium 2
Exile
By Remy Zins
Copyright 2015 Remy Zins
Cover image: Neural Pathways by geralt available as of 08/02/2015 on Pixabay used under CC0 Public Domain.
What happened previously: a psychiatrist visits his most important patient, seemingly suffering from some rare type of autistic condition, while all kinds of strange phenomena take place, including a complete disturbance of deep space objects. It turns out his patient is a member of a collective entity that mentally unites those who share the same condition. Finally, he broadcasts a telepathic message explaining that all human beings will be shifted to another type of reality monitored by the Collective, and invited to become members of it, if they want to.
“But who is this 'One' you talk about, Damien?” The sequence of phonemes was unrecognizable, but the layout of the concepts they had represented appeared with enough clarity, in spite of this memory's timeworn state. Bribes of melodies played on a strange instrument, rather refreshing in fact, brightened up the rest of this blend of heterogeneous impressions. Anxiety, surprise, vertigo, fear. But a certain relief as well.
“This is a world wide telepathic broadcast,” he managed to discern. Difficult to be any more pompous. The big head, that's really not from yesterday, uh? he thought.
- Jason, please, spare us your sarcasm.
The thought presented itself to his mind just as any other, but it didn't come from inside. A rather commonplace phenomenon in a collective entity within which individuals had the possibility of connecting their psychic experience in a live stream. He could have tried to trace the exact source of this telepathic message, but he had no reason to make this effort. Anyway, it was obviously enough to think in order to answer this interlocutor.
- Eh, leave me alone. Nobody asked you to come breathe down on my neck, so if my reflexions dissatisfy your little mental ease, no-one will stop you from going take a hike.
Jason knew that this attitude would sooner or later bring him trouble. But he couldn't refrain from rebuffing such you brain constipated couch potatoes when he had an opportunity. He activated his mental firewall, which caused the disconnection of all his followers at once. He was allowed to do that from time to time, but never for very long.
He applied his mind again to the contents of the memory unit he had come here to examine. Its state of natural deterioration indicated it dated back to several cycles of the Collective's climaxes and anticlimaxes. Laboriously, he retrieved one last sentence he could not make any sense of before concluding he wouldn't extract anything more conclusive from this unit. He severed the connection by removing his hand from the membrane. The cell he had just scanned looked slightly invigorated, which, as an ancient memories lover, made him give a hint of a smile. He surveyed the rest of the wall, in search of another cell sporting one of the specific shades of green he was looking for. But this alveolus didn't show anything unusual, apart from the ubiquitous affluence of decaying units, whose worrying number multiplied every day.
- Pleasure is happiness. Let no one prevent me from enjoying whatever I want whenever I want it.
The thought had imposed itself to him. It was one of those annoying buzzes which disrupted the network ever more frequently. That one squarely passed through his firewall. This meant it had a viral component and indicated a criminal origin. Jason concentrated on the underlying psychic impressions to identify a signature he then used to elaborate a ping he sent to the entire Collective. He got response from a colleague's subconscious who was busy being massaged, and added him right away to his black list of occasional spammers. He sent another series of pings on the network to get a topography of this buzz' replications in real time. Judging by the number of affected members of the Collective, this meme was having a broad success.
- Happiness is only real when shared.
The altruist antidote-slogan, contrived ad hoc in a hurry by the department in charge, arrived once again too late. At this stage, a large number of psychologically vulnerable members of the Collective had already suffered in their deep subconscious a damage that would be difficult to repair. The only answer the system could bring to it was an intensification of heterocentric propaganda. This kind of egotist attacks aiming at destabilizing the Collective's cohesion by exacerbating its members' individualist impulses was becoming ever more frequent. Rumor had it for that matter that they came from outside.
Leaving this train of thought behind him, Jason resumed his navigation in a marine mammal fashion, with a simple undulation of the spine. As he came out from the cavity, the perspective on the symbolic space that appeared in front of him would have had enough to baffle a neophyte: on one side, the multitude of contiguous alveoli accommodating the fields of kindred memories; on the other side, a network of fractal passageways opening on expanses that seemed to stretch to infinity.
- Truth and harmony are like the two wings of a bird: they must be of equal size and equal strength.
Jason had to make a substantial effort to control his irritation over this new interruption. Negative emotions were outlawed within the Collective, and giving in to them could lead all the way to exile. He decided to rather examine the message. This time it wasn't a meme, but a pure viral attack. However, unlike the usual buzzes, this message gave actual food for thought. Dreading another interruption, he waited for the antidote-slogan for some time, but nothing came. The department probably wasn't able to react quickly on such a theme.
So Jason refocused once again on his task. He put his fingers in his mouth, to reach for a seed in a pocket he had inside the cheek. He embedded it in the interstice that separated two cells of the wall. The Collective had authorized him to leave his own markers at the entrance of the areas he had already explored. Obtaining its approval had been all the more easy that he was probably the only one spending his free time in this way. Most of his fellowmen, once their labor was over, if they didn't get themselves projected into relaxation spaces, preferred a live connection with the experience of someone they found interesting. No one else than the recollection clerks ventured in these deep layers of the memory index. He would catch sight of their silhouette from time to time, busy scanning the walls, more akin to the shape of a tadpole than that of a mermaid.
- Jason, sorry to interrupt your little old memories chase, but we have a level three emergency. We remind you that in accordance with your contract with the Collective, you must in such a case make yourself available immediately. Please prepare to receive the file.
- Thank you so much, my dear, Jason thought. You are as charming as a butcher's chopper. And indeed you're right, it's not like if I was interrupted every thirty seconds.
He pushed his thumb between his eyebrows, as if pressing a button, and the whole symbolic space shut down from his mind. He got back to his normal body - a head, a bust, two harms and two legs - sitting in his armchair, in the subdued atmosphere of his vast living room. He had two or three minutes in front of him. Just enough for what Theo had asked him. He found his friend on the network at his usual location.
- Okay, Theo, he thought, get going quickly, I don't have a lot of time.
Theo was one of the Collective's dreamers-creators. He had acquired through training the rare skill of having a conversation while dreaming-creating environments for his fellowmen.
- It's ready, you can go, he answered mentally.
Jason went to the other side of the room to open the shutter. The sunlight contrasted sharply with the twilight of his apartment and induced a slight pain in his eyes. He squinted. Some bees bustled about the flowers sitting in a tub suspended to the balcony. A few stories down, an avenue seething with busy people. Before him stretched the sea of roofs so characteristic of Paris, over which
stood the Eiffel tower. On his left, he recognized in the distance the Tower bridge. Why was he not surprised? On the other side, a plethora of bad taste light displays beyond which took pride of place a disproportionate building showcasing its name in obnoxiously large letters: “Caesar's palace.”
Pure nonsense.
- And you dare calling this a vintage reconstruction? he thought. Listen, I already told you, it's ridiculous. I don't want to have anything to do with this. l quit.
- Then at least, make me a file with everything you know, Theo thought.
- You can do it yourself, I grant you full access to my memories, don't I?
- But it's too long, I don't have the time, I only have a few days left before the festival.
- Well, I don't have time to waste either, mind you. If it's to ignore my advice at the end of the day, you can very well do it on your own.
Jason turned around to go back to his armchair, but suddenly, all he had in his field of vision was an anarchy of kaleidoscopic details, as if he was forced to see the world through a broken looking glass. The walls merged with the ground and the ceiling. It was impossible to distinguish anything.
- Come on, Theo, it's not funny, he thought.
Theo giggled mentally.
- I'll stop if you promise me you'll make a file with all you know about Paris.
- Don't push it, Theo, I have an emergency I need to take care of, and I should get the data any time now.
- Well, don't forget I am the one controlling your environment here, and you owe me one.
- Alright, jackass, you won. But after that you'll stand on your own feet, okay?
- No problemo.
- Now come on, put everything back in order.
- But you'll do it right after you come back, are we okay?
- Yeah whatever, come on.
The familiar environment of his apartment reappeared. Jason fell down in his armchair. Moments later, the operational file presented itself to his mind. It was a continuous flow of concepts and sense impressions whose rate was in his control. The subject was an exiled. A former member of the Collective who had been expelled and forced to live fallen, in the peripheral domain of influence, with misfits and individuals facing their end of life.
- Where about is the subject? How do I connect to him? he asked mentally.
- Show a little self-restraint, for goodness' sake, someone thought. Start with perusing the facts mentioned in the file.
- Oh, really? And you really think I can't discern your little xenophobic ulterior thoughts? That's right, I am one of those wetbacks who ignore the good savoir-vivre. Well, it's too bad you native people are such scaredy cats who are too scared to step out from their comfort zone, because you will always need unbred boors like me to get their hands dirty.
The guy disconnected and activated his psychic firewall. He had asked for it. Jason accelerated the flow until he got to the information he was looking for. The subject was a former researcher. He had found a number of answers deemed interesting to rather difficult ethical and epistemological problems. While combing through the data, Jason learned the subject had even partly laid the foundations of the work he was doing himself on a day to day basis for the Bureau of Contradictions, relating to the resolution of philosophical divergences.
Even so, this researcher had gradually fallen out of favor for persisting with formulating deviationist theories questioning the absolute preponderance of the cohesion factor within the Collective. Broadly speaking, he claimed that the decision had to be made to temporarily weaken unanimity among the members if certain non-consensual evolutions in the search for truth turned out to be judicious. He had finally been exiled in the peripheral domain of influence where he had been living ever since, under high psychic surveillance.
The rest of the file revealed that he had just been identified as the person behind the viral attack which had taken place just of few minutes earlier, the one that compared the ideal relationship between truth and harmony with a bird's wings. After that, his mind had become completely silent, as if he had activated a mental firewall through which no expert was able to pass. This was what had triggered the level three emergency. The penalty in this case was a definitive banishment of the subject. In other words, his expulsion out of the Collective's sphere of reality. But before that, it was hoped that he could provide information about the origin of the egotist attacks that exhausted the Collective, in such times when exiles had become dangerously more numerous than new arrivals.