Using each box, I was finding, presented a unique sensation. There was the mind-numbing sense of awareness my box created, which I had learned to stifle. Colin’s teleportation had had thoroughly flooded me with questions, forcing me to center myself within my physical form. Stonewall’s presented the same problem.
My thoughts –no, my consciousness– redoubled, expanding within me. I didn’t have more ideas, more questions, per se, but they became louder, each exerting a greater influence on my psyche. I was wildly hungry, tired, pained– as I tried to avoid losing myself in each individual impulse, my body’s needs fell away. I was entirely mental, to an extent I didn’t appreciate, and couldn’t contain.
As a child, I had hated my body, had regarded it as solely my brain’s conveyor. Useless. I had thought that I would be more effective as a brain in a tank. I was rapidly discovering, alone with my thoughts, that I had been wrong; I could not hold them in without fidgeting, without writing, without–
Without externalizing them. It wasn’t that I hadn’t understood the appeal of Stonewall’s box –it vastly increased efficiency of physical action– but I hadn’t fully appreciated its addictive potential, the power of the urge I now felt to reach out, to be freed from my own conscience. Around me, I could feel Alex, Colin, Rowan, and Grant glimpsing the same sliver of Stonewall’s decision-making process. He had been corrupted –as we all had, some extent– by whichever higher power had singled him out to receive this ability.
That fact changed my feelings on the matter at hand. It didn’t change what we had to do.
I gave in to some fraction of the morass of feelings the box incurred, fighting through the fray of pulls toward each person immediately proximal to me. As long as he posed a threat, I didn’t care about Stonewall’s justifications. I slipped into his memories like a skipped rock entering frigid water.
It felt like it, anyway; a shiver ran through me, followed by a certain sensation of settling, of sinking. Of calm, preceded by the frenetic movement I had experienced moments before. Then, I was there. In Stonewall’s mind. I noted to myself, as I began to scrutinize its architecture, that the nickname had become less and less appropriate.
“Hey,” I said to no one but the sudden space around me. “Let’s study you.”
As much as I had disliked my body, distrusted my mind, I had always wanted to pull others’ thoughts apart, to find what made them the way they were. As long as I was floating in this vague sense of timelessness, this isolation-tank-approximation, I would make the most of it. I figured I had enough time to play Steve Irwin. So I looked around.
My surroundings refused to mirror the interior of a biology textbook; they were a twisted parody of the model I had been taught, of neurons, of a scattered web of dendrites and myelin, resembling it only in the largest generalities of structure. Where I had expected there to be darkness, interspersed by clusters of electric transmission, it was the opposite. I was floating through a section of shadowy void, the only one in eyesight. Stonewall’s brain, wherever I looked, was glowing with a dim yet firm brightness, as if it were held six inches from a Times Square billboard.
Maybe he had been chosen for his hyperactive mind, maybe my mental model of a brain’s interior needed correction. It was an interesting problem to ponder, but it was still theoretical. I needed to do something, and I pushed a little harder, attempted to exert the urgency I felt in some concrete effect. Stonewall’s brain brightened further, began to color red, then washed into blue. I saw the bright ripple broaden into the distance, through the semi-transparent mush on all sides. Perhaps I could follow it, but I would need to see it first, locate its trailing edge.
I tried to raise my leg, but it remained motionless. I can’t run.
Not only that, I discovered that I couldn’t move. My body remained stiff as I attempted to strain out of this paralysis. Twist my head around, twitch my finger, jerk my arm: nothing functioned. I reminded myself, as I began to panic, that it was usable. In fact, it was easily usable. Stonewall had had the box for perhaps a month. I had used my box’s expanded potential for less time, even if it wasn’t quite analogous, and Alex had used Gerard’s box with efficacy, if not ease, since she had picked it up hours ago.
There had to be some trick I wasn’t understanding, some method–
Then, I realized it. I had been giving myself too much time to luxuriate in the unfamiliar environment, to overthink it. The only impact I had had was when I had leaned into intuition, attempted to brute-force it. I again called to mind the memory of Colin’s box.
Similar movement systems, maybe.
No, that didn’t make sense; the powers were contradictory. That had been fully physical, requiring exceptional effort.
Maybe, I thought, this takes less concentration.
Then, I was flying.
If flying was falling with style, I wasn’t, not quite, but I figured “floating with flair” counted. So I was flying, my limbs slowly thawing as I drifted, rotating away from the pocket of dark space I had landed in on my arrival. I had been more right than I could have known when I had imagined Stonewall’s brain as a soft, warped substance, lit up with a texture reminiscent of Times Square advertisements. As I leaned backwards, drifted farther away from my starting spot, I could see a picture coming into focus. Farther back, and I saw more, each beginning to move and shift, encompassing a specific moment.
These were Stonewall’s memories. They weren’t laid out in a grid –his hippocampus was no flat surface– and yet there was an order to them, a tessaract-ish organization of topic and time which was, all at once, visible. I looked out at the radioactive-mashed-potatoes web of Stonewall’s mind, and I saw his whole life play out in front of me.
Writings Of Orion 