They know me as the one who hears the voices. Who they are, I don't know. I had a list of names once. The names elude me, but their personalities remain. And their obsessions.
Why did they all have obsessions? Over the tiniest things? One loved scissors. His invisible friends had scissors too, he said. I found him one day on the ground in a red puddle; he had evidently tried to cut his friends out of his head.
Another always carried around his sketchbook and pencils, creating animalistic machines from another age. "Pretty colors", he would always murmur. "TIME TO DRAW!" he would screech at the top of his lungs. Eventually his pencils ran dry, so he started using his fingers. When his fingers ran dry, he had nothing left, so he shriveled up behind the metal mask that helped him breathe this stagnant air.
There were two brothers. One smelled of onions and carried a blue karma candle with him, always keeping it lit. Even when the wax puddled and spilled over its holder, burning his hands, he showed no pain and would continually flick his lighter against the base, trying to find the stub of string that had long faded into ash.
The other never felt the need to look up from the ground. Holding a small metal cube in his hand, his eyes always moved from side to side, and he would tap his fingers against his head, pressing the buttons that were never there. He said he was scanning the ground for something. I hope he found it.
Yet another man carried an eraser and paper with him. He scribbled constant lines in pen and pencil, writing what looked to be straight computer code. Then he would erase it all. "Categories...categories...and what edits to be made!" he would shout, yell, and ask. Eventually he took the short way out and drove the pens and pencils into his head. Tried to tap into the real code that would "fix everything", he said. "Project Karma will come to light!" he would chant. If it ever did, I haven't seen it.
All of these people, and sadly, countless more, used to be members of a great council, from what I can recall. And of course, the council was put together to facilitate the greatest project of all humanity.
Humanity. How to define the word?
As my native government had three branches, so the project has three arms.
And of course, they had to come up with supposedly great names for these. Respectively:-Imagination, the fuel for the fire. Hidden in crevasses and tunnels. Leading to other-worlds. Dreams. Nightmares.
-Knowledge, the fire itself that sparked the Plan. The beautiful harmony of realities. Layers.
-Time, the logs that kept the fire burning. The gridwork, the axes, the framework, the basis, the reference points.
All this I gathered from the council. Then one man came along and meddled in their affairs. Just look what happened as a result.-Hypnos. The elusive third, the entity to cease to exist in the realm of doing, and to enter the world of pure thinking. The Birds of Somnus will guide your thoughts, but do not let them drag you too far down.
-Shiva. Ask, and he will answer. Unless he finds the answers are in an interest for others greater than the ones who asked in the first place.
-Thoth. A map for all of man's work. Stringing together the events of the past and future. But as we know, tight strings have the most violent effects when cut, or knotted.
I absorbed all of it, and held it in.
They called me a "madman" in their attempts to teach me. I may as well be. That's another thing people don't understand about madness. I'm not the only source of it. It's in all the colleagues I lost, all the edges I have visited. The experiences are the keys to unlock my sanity. It's no one person's "fault".
And what does it lead to? Me, curled up in this little cot. Me, tying bandages around security cameras. Me, trying to dig out golden nuggets from cliffsides to bash against rusted locks. Me, deciding on a suitable replacement for the chalk that is now thrown against these tired walls in neat little lines.
I wish I had more chalk. More chalk and a ladder. Or at least, longer arms. So I can grasp the bottom of the ledge above me and hurl myself out into...whatever is outside.
Forget councils and structure of machines. I prefer to flirt with the comfort of the eternal nothingness.
But...of course, I almost forget! If someone is to cross here, I should leave them something! I must give them all that I have. The papers I have collected, from places that no human soul has touched. Maybe someone can pick up where I have left off.
Transcript 1/32 wrote:
- I think when he decided to go back he once again misunderstood the size of the Subnet. As he has done for years now. It's hard to really grasp how much work has been performed ever since the Subnet was discovered. How much time mutations had to take place.
-So he's going to be in there for a while?
-Yes.
-For how long?
-Until he's done.
-What if he doesn't come back?
-Then he's not done.