Are we supposed to post it right in this thread? I'll do that for now, and move it if I misunderstood.
Not that I feel the need to disclaim (though clearly, I do), I did write this specifically for the thread, just now. I don't think it's bad, but it's not "important" to me, so no worries if you don't like it. If you do, awesome, but you know. Whatever. I like what Kloriel said about amateur Frankenstein. That's a good way to look at this thread.
And this is super short (800 words) but I'm terrible at lengthy stuff.
Seeing
Closing your eyes is a lot like seeing, in the dark. Your mind wraps its arms around the nothingness—respects it, accepts its terms. Do that, and you can see; keep your eyes open, and the darkness will keep taking…
My mind has been slowly emptying itself for years.
If I signed up for this, I’m sure I thought it would be easy. I can handle hallucinations. I can handle isolation. I don’t need people. The mosquitoes were fine, if they were real, but the spaces between them were tough. I couldn’t figure out where they went, so I ran around the room sweeping the walls and the floor with my hands. I slid my bed around the room so I could reach every inch of the ceiling, jumping and swiping, and trying not to kill them, checking under the toilet and between the sheets. I don’t know how long I spent doing that. But eventually, they would start up again. Just when I’d forgotten about them, I’d hear that intelligent buzzing cloud, feel it on my face, in my lungs. Tiny things that bit and itched. I wouldn’t call it irritating, but you would. Some people are afraid of bugs, and I can’t see that. Maybe I used to, but…
I wasn’t scared until they stopped completely.
I never got
scared until I couldn’t remember what they sounded like. Not that I forgot—forgetting is hard—but I
couldn’t remember. Would it make more sense if I said that I wasn’t able to think clearly? But that wouldn’t be exactly true. I could think clearly; I just didn’t
want to anymore. My mind was shutting down. It still is. I guess that means they were never real in the first place, but what did that matter? They were real enough.
I read that a girl was locked in a nuclear bunker for 48 hours with no light, and near the end she felt like someone was always in the room with her, standing silently at a distance, sliding around the walls when she got too close. She said he had a pointed fedora with no face, and a trench coat. He was the color of darkness, an unnecessary camouflage. Straight out of a detective cartoon. She knew he was all in her head, but he was “real enough,” and she was scared. She panicked, started banging her head on the bunker wall to give herself an option—fear or pain. She gave herself a concussion, but they found her less than two hours later.
They asked her, when she had recovered, what she thinks she would have done if they hadn’t found her. She said she would have killed herself, that she couldn’t have taken it much longer.
I can tell you what really happens.
The panic subsides. That’s when the honeymoon begins; that’s when you start sweeping the walls, looking for the little toy mouse, the symphony orchestra, the cloud of mosquitoes—whatever it is that was driving you crazy—now it’s your lifeline. Stimulation is stimulation, and it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, because for all you know you could be dead already. Yeah, that thought comes early.
At first I was worried I would forget how to stimulate my mind, but like I said, forgetting is hard. Remembering is harder. The mental energy it takes to create thoughts without new material to occupy them is exponential. The energy it takes to remember how I got here is far out of reach. I’ve lost the will and the concern to find out, to dig that deep into my memory—which is still there, but useless to me.
They feed me with a click, periodically. I don’t know how often I eat, for obvious reasons. There’s a hatch on the wall that opens with a sound—always the same meal arranged in the exact same way, every grain of rice in the same spot. For a while it would change, when the mosquitoes were around. Then, I got feasts through the hatch. Lobster and sushi and sirloin wrapped in bacon. That stopped when the mosquitoes disappeared, and now the tray is never crooked.
You think that I want to leave, but I can’t remember what’s waiting for me out there. I have enough left to know that there’s more than darkness, and the words I use when I can think of something to say came from somewhere, but that thought—the one about being dead—doesn’t scare me so much anymore.
Here, I’m God. In every sense of the word. There is nothing I want, and nothing I cannot do. You think that I want to leave, and you may be right. I can’t remember if I want to leave. I still miss the mosquitoes, sometimes. But even a god must mourn his creations.