Jon briefly lost himself in the new labyrinths of his mind - all these pristine empty spaces aching to be filled, this theater of memory with a stage recently expanded to the size of a river plain.
How could he ever integrate this shimmering structure with the hovel he had previously inhabited?
Then, of a sudden, his aimless search, a seamless flow through a multidimensional phase space of remembrance, came to a halt.
In what he visualized as a room of blue tinted glass atop a high tower was an object that must have come at the same time as the structure itself.
It was, of course, a torus of off-white plates floating in mid-air. Without thinking he reached out with hands made of pure desire and touched it.
The new memory unpacked itself, rolling over his psyche with smells and tastes designed to root it deep within him. It fell upon him in an instant but his nervous system, scrambling to keep up, presented it's contents linearly, as though experienced by the tick of the clock of the soul.
"You found us!" came that light, sexless voice.
"Our gift did not break you as we feared it might. For us it is easy, for we are continuous, but you, you are discontinuous."
The last word was delivered in a tone of such despair that Jon shuddered.
"If we teach you to flow cleanly, to blissfully inter-penetrate, then move on unchanged, to give up your addiction to the discrete, then perhaps we will not have to destroy you. Would that not be a pleasant outcome?"
The alien memory, complete and isolate, stood high above the placid emptiness of Jon's new mnemonic territory, like a childhood nightmare unconnected to anything before or after.
He took the fear and exhilaration he felt, wrapped them around the room of blue-tinted glass and returned to the present.
Comments