Think. You know who you are. You know where you've been and why you've been there. It isn't that hard, not for you. If anyone can do it, it's you.
My name is Jonathan Mantell. I'm 25 years old. I used to live in… I don't think any of that that matters, because now… I'm here. My work on the collective subconciousness of humanity has betrayed me, and because of that, I've become trapped in an extratypical space known as the Headspace. As a result of my breakthrough, my former employment believes me dead, and I've taken the name Sehnsucht when contacting former colleagues to hide my tracks. I have to remember something, anything about myself, or I'll lose it to the walls. They siphon, like a vacuum, pulling things away from you and deeper into the collective mental resources of humanity. And you don't like sharing, do you, Jonathan?
I didn't want to share this project. At Heimwehmut Industries, several people of equivalent rank fought me for this assignment. Several people of equivalent rank lost. Several seemed 'suddenly discouraged', and one was caught with illicit materials, both physically and on company hard drives they swore were not obtained by them. It's certainly a shame what happened, but I think it was well worth it, given the salary and prominence of the position I obtained after doing what needed to be done. Equivalent exchange, if you will. Even now, it's getting harder and harder to share. What I once thought I was exploiting for the benefit of my company, I am now exploiting my company for the benefit of. Here, in this place, the natural order is reflective of your thoughts and decisions. Something I could only attempt to enforce in a typical world was given freely by my new home, and I have to find out how to exploit it.
Early in the development of my studies, I lost a set of 10 lab grown infants seemingly overnight. In a bid to comprehend the innate psychic connections between humans, I needed a way to test for some potential connections until now undetected between people, something immutable by the senses and undetectable by contemporary technology. I donated a sample of my DNA, and the Biological Resources division in turn supplied me with 20 receptacles, born in my image. As a control, 10 were set aside to learn and grow alongside one another as typical, or, to be clear, as typical as a set of 10 identical children could grow alongside one another in a lab environment. The other 10 were never removed from their birthing pods, and were kept in close proximity to one another in a completely lightproof, soundproof, temperature controlled environment.
I was at home when the system began registering spikes in synaptic activity, blissfully unaware while dreaming in a world I thought I'd never see. Automatic detection systems caught the anomalies' data, but the infrared cameras had not begun to record, as no movement was ever detected inside the chambers. Without Hoffman, my understudy, I would never have believed the children weren't stolen in the night. As it turned out, the data showed nothing significant when examining the alpha waves of any one unit. I poured over that night's information for the better part of a week. I didn't sleep or eat, unless you count the subdued gnawing of fingertips and the taste of blood that comes with it. Then, one day… it clicked. I aggregated all the data, the equations of best fit to the waveforms, and examined the change over time.
In the beginning, each isolated mind was scattered, behaving erratically. Then, pods 4 and 7 synchronized for the briefest of moments, 0.34~ seconds. A minute later, again, this time for over a second. A minute after that, 4, 5, and 7. This continued, for one minute and fourty three seconds before the disappearance of all 10 infants. At this point, during that one minute and forty three seconds, the peaks and valleys, albeit not the amplitude thereof, matched to the microsecond. This trend in data stabilized the amplitudes slowly over time until each of the sets of alpha waves were perfectly in sync, at which point… the data stopped being collected. The neural interfaces once suspended in amniotic fluid hung limply in a cavity, the mass sensors sending alarm signals, signifying that something was terribly wrong.
Science made these children, and I cannot take credit for their mere existence such as a parent could for their own children. On the contrary, even the gestation I took no part in. I did not hold these facsimiles of myself in a womb, nor did I feed them from my flesh. And yet, sitting here, looking at them here, in this place… there is no doubt that my process is what truly birthed them. What can birth without gestating? Create with no materials, and manufacture with no factory? That would make me…
It's been too long. I have to reassert myself in this place, or risk losing my mental faculties to the hum of the lights…
Think. You know who you are. You know where you've been and why you've been there. It isn't that hard, not for you. If anyone can do it, it's you.
My name is Sehnsucht. I've been in this place for 10 weeks. I used to live in a world of facts and science. But now… I'm here. My work on the collective subconciousness of humanity had betrayed me, and because of that, I had become trapped in an extratypical space known as the Headspace. As a result of my breakthrough, I created life where there had been none before, and proved myself a god. Even so, I have to remember something, anything about myself, or I'll lose it to the walls. They siphon, like a vacuum, pulling things away from you and deeper into the collective mental resources of humanity. And you don't like sharing, do you, Sehnsucht?
No. I think… I think I'd much rather take that which I deserve for myself.
