(Rewritten) Ch. 139 – The Psychological Bullshit

"See, boy, the better ya understan' yerself, the kinder you are, usually. Kindness, as in, not compassion.

Compassion's no virtue, 's just blind acceptance. Be a trap, often. Excuse yer failings; 's good for babies and kids. Not for older ones, traps 'em with excuses.

Kindness is real, though. Can say no. It just tryna not break 'em noses with 'em noes."

– Aunt 'Auntie Care' Carroll, giving advice to her young shadow, July 2056

***

I breathed deeply as I nudged the recording of our battle backwards to the moment that I'd had Tynea spawn the sphere of water and foam, mulling about the odd anxiety connected to whatever happened in those split seconds.

It had to do with the Quanta, I knew. Using it, accessing it, whatever. The…traumatic stress reaction I'd experienced in the aftermath, before my nap, told me as much. But the Memory Seal pill had ground down the edges, turned splinters of volcanic glass into smooth pebbles.

I grinned to myself. Time to make marbles out of pebbles.

Gingerly, I let the recording play in slow-motion. I watched the model One variants strike the bubble of water, watched as the kinetic forces flash-boiled the water. Tynea built a buffer layer between myself and the boiling water. Then the foam cocoon had cracked and left one of my legs exposed beneath the knee.

A tiny fraction of the aliens' skeletons reached past all the water, steam and foam, and shredded my flesh from my bones.

I retched from the visuals and phantom shivers crawling up my spine. That anxiety grew a little more, and it called up faint memories of pain twisting with madness. But I didn't quite feel it. It was more like watching a train wreck on the news, than being there in person. Once more, I breathed in against the anxiety that sucked at my gut. Deep, all the way. The scent of Leah's soap filled my lungs. I let my diaphragm displace my intestines, until there was no space for dread anymore.

Then, I let it all go, and talked to Tynea.

"Hey, wanna help me figure this out?" I asked.

"Certainly, Tinea," she said. "How would you like to proceed?"

I smiled. She was asking, instead of telling me what to do. She'd clearly taken my complaints about self-determination seriously.

I nudged the sealed mental package that lay stored within the Quanta's memory. It wasn't very evenly shaped. I got the sense that it consisted of multiple different parts; some were very disorderly and chaotic, some were regimented and…machine-generated, I thought.

Its size was pretty uneven, too. The tidy parts had a certain lightness to them, like digesting them wouldn't tax me at all. I'd be able to look at them, absorb them, and then they'd be…meaningless. Gone with a breezy thought.

But the larger elements, they felt different. Not massive exactly—the Quanta could've stored the whole package a billion times over. More like…junk food, but a lot less fun, and probably a lot harder on my mental digestive tracts.

Like they might cause nightmares from absorbing all the emotions. Or something.

I nudged the package again.

"Can you tell me what's in there?"

"It contains the logs of your Quanta's actions while you were unconscious, and perhaps more importantly, it also contains the readings and several snapshots of the mental state that triggered the Quanta's emergency override."

"Snapshots?"

"The logs will show a variety of measurements of your brain activity, but those only tell half the picture. A schism had occurred. You'd gotten stuck halfway between the Quanta's logical awareness, where the pain would've just been of clinical importance and therefore non-traumatic; and your natural awareness, where your unusual conditioning would've let you weather the pain with practiced ease.

"These two processes interfered with each other, began to break your ego along two separate ways of being and merged the aspects of both into something truly awful: the time dilation of the Quanta combined with the heightened sensitivity through your conditioning, all without the pleasure that would normally protect you. You were being forced into a particularly harmful form of torture. The snapshots are real-time memories of those moments, so to say."

I shivered. That sounded exactly as bad as the half-remembered dread made me think it was.

"If I…played those snapshots," I asked slowly, carefully enunciating each syllable, "would I…experience that schism all over again?"

"Not quite. The Quanta has split the data into individual sets to disarm any possibility of a catastrophic repeat."

"I see. Those splits, how'd the Quanta decide where to put them?"

"They were selected for maximum coherence of each impression, and where necessary, further split into sub-impressions that do not exceed ten percent of the threshold at which your sanity collapsed."

"I'm not sure I understand. Coherence? Impressions? Threshold?"

"Coherence describes the accuracy of your perception—technically, controlled hallucination—of reality, as well as the orderliness of your brain activity. Insanity is literally a dysfunction of the brain that shifts your understanding of reality away from accuracy. That implies a decrease in coherence. Other abnormal conditions, such as uncontrolled synaptic firings during seizures, also reflect a loss of coherence."

"So, coherence just says how healthy my brain is physically, and that it's doing what it's supposed to do?"

"Essentially, yes."

"Gotcha. Continue, please."

"The impressions are the snapshot memories I already mentioned; and 'threshold' describes the point at which your coherence, that is, your perception of reality and synaptic activity, is so disturbed as to render you mentally unstable and unfit."

"And I'm guessing that my coherence naturally wanders a little, depending on the situation I'm in?"

"It certainly does. In battle, for example, you score unnaturally high on the accuracy of your hallucination of reality, while the orderliness of your synaptic patterns take a nosedive, which culminates in one of your involuntary orgasms when you're injured badly enough. It is fascinating to see how the loss of…self-control, let's call it, boosts your awareness of your surroundings."

I rolled my eyes a bit and sighed. "It's saved my life more than once. Many times, even. But I prefer to keep a clinical distance to those processes when I can."

"I understand. I shall temper my curiosity."

"Good. Now…if I grasped the implications well enough, the impressions don't show the schism itself, just individual, uh, sides of it? The package is safe to unpack?"

"That is exactly the case. Once you've proceeded to decompress the bundle, you'll find that the Quanta structured everything along a timeline for ease of exploration."

And so, after a proper snuggle against Leah's chest, I commanded the Quanta to finally cut the knot.

A…chain of brains unfolded itself, like a geometric hologram. It turned into a virtual slideshow of my brain's shifting activity, of trees of lightning tracing synaptic patterns frozen in time.

The moment I thought about finding the starting frame, the mental carousel spun and injected the very first cluster of information into my consciousness, like a flash of realization. It spread through me like ripples on the surface of a pond, and in no time at all, Sonde was there and poking at me.

She was burning with curiosity. The bright flare of it, the sheer sense of existence she radiated caught me by surprise. I realized I'd kind of forgotten about her after my nap.

She'd changed. Where first she was a construct of algorithms designed to wander virtual archives like a spider, she'd turned into an abstract sponge, full of super-binary machinery acting like organs. Organs that generated motivation, interest, and curiosity. More bits that were busy manipulating and digesting…logic puzzles? I couldn't keep up with what she was doing, even though she was using my brain to do it with. She'd gotten smart, and it felt like there was an awareness, a being, that faced me, not just hyper-complex sets of math.

That awareness felt familiar, too, like it was made from pieces of me. But it wasn't me. It wasn't a doll made from my cognitive flesh, but rather a…child of my brain.

Huh.

When I tracked where she'd come from, I ran into a little blank space in my mind that I couldn't access. It had neat delineations and it felt very…dense. And now that I'd noticed I couldn't unnotice. But it barely took up any space in the Quanta, though it consumed more computational capacity than was reasonable for its size.

Huh…

I wasn't quite sure what to think. It sat there peacefully and radiated a sense of being someone else's belongings. It didn't threaten me. I was pretty sure I could force access, but the idea rubbed me the wrong way, since the blank felt like…the very concept of privacy. A specific type of privacy different from an adult's every day privacy.

The thing's name lay on the tip of my tongue, but I lacked context to define it. Leah was still snoring. I had a feeling she'd know if I asked her. There'd be a squeeze and a giggle and she'd make me feel all sorts of adorably innocent as she answered my questions.

Sonde was still poking at me, but since my mind had been elsewhere and failed to satisfy her curiosity, she yoinked herself around and hopped at the closest frame of the unpacked carousel with all the energy of a playful kitten.

Quick as thought I jerked forward, driven by worry about Sonde's well-being taking damage from the horror that had destabilized me. But as fast as my reaction might have been, Sonde was incomparably faster.

Her amorphous cloud of a body unfolded like a multi-tool. Thousands of sets of algorithms extended themselves from Sonde's newly exposed innards and went to work, made contact with the data and manipulated it. It smelled of math, very complex math.

With an alacrity that I couldn't even hope to match, she'd not just gone through the one frame, but all of them. Then she began sorting with smooth efficiency, and realigned, reformed all the data into something a lot more complex than a timeline, but also…scarily intuitive.

She created an impromptu simulation of what had happened to me. A holistic model of the would-be schism in my consciousness, a representation of my emotional agony and the physical stress my brain had experienced during the episode.

And I realized that Sonde took no harm from being exposed to these dangerous memory snapshots even as she combined them again; that in fact, she appeared entirely unfazed. I forced myself to relax and appreciated the simple fact that this kind of thing was apparently exactly what she'd grown herself to do. Handle information, including hazardous information, and process it into something more useful.

It only made sense, considering that she'd spent the hours since her conception going through everything I knew, including memories of my childhood and everything I'd suffered. It kind of made me curious to know what she was doing behind that privacy screen thing.

Well, I told myself, beating back the curiosity. You'll know when you know.

I hated invasions of my personal spaces, but Sonde's very existence was a result of my own decision. Quantized me had created her. So, even though she'd set up a blind inside my brain, I couldn't just push into her privacy, especially since she was basically made from me. It wouldn't have surprised me to find that she shared certain sensibilities.

And she still had a lot of growing to do, too.

She felt like a hyper-intelligent dog, maybe. Or a kitty-cat. Or a spider. Or…something, anyway. Somebody who would benefit greatly from not having her boundaries violated during her growth.

She'd reconstructed the schism, but she'd done it in a way that I could study it like an object, instead of being forced to relive it bit by bit. There was a small hole in the model, right at the start. It introduced uncertainties, possible errors, and Sonde poked at me again with her curiosity and a touch of impatience. She wanted the piece I held to integrate it.

I decided I'd just give it to her, considering she appeared perfectly fine. The poke of curiosity turned into tickles of satisfaction that surprised a giggle from me, even as Sonde yoinked the mix of logs and impressions to add it to her work of art.

And it really was art. There was an elegance to the system she'd built, something that wasn't pure machine logic.

Something that truly felt like a product of virtual crossed with organic life.

Looks like I'm a mommy already, I thought wryly. Holy fuck. What do I do now?

Somehow this particular discovery was very different from what I'd pictured it'd be like. For once, I didn't find myself rattled by hormones.

I snorted.

Maybe good old confusion was the secret to true stoicism.

***