text: Hi guys! I wrote this as a personal exercise in mood and atmosphere, mostly taking inspiration from Lovecraft (mood, not really in writing style, I think). I also think it sort of holds up as a standalone thing, but please let me know if it doesn't make sense or if anything could be improved as far as style goes. Thanks! .... Hey. Is it weird? You know what I’m talking about. So? Is it weird? To be the only one with a normal mind, a normal brain, on the planet? I know you don’t understand. Please don’t struggle too much. The ropes won’t give, I promise. I need you to be open for this. At least a little bit. Let me ramble on for a while. See if you can catch up. Tell me if I’m confusing. Do you dream of the ocean sometimes? The open water? People with normal brains sometimes do. The others, they think about it a bit more. Not the fish, not the boats, not the sunny days under the sun on the beach. The real open sea. Where you see the ocean touch the sky, and the sky touch the ocean. Each is as big as the other. They are the same grayish blue, both rippling. Almost alive. But not quite. I’ll tell you what a dream like that is like. You are floating in that emptiness, and the air reeks. You aren’t there, because you are dreaming, but you still smell the ashes the are gradually filling the skies with off-white snowflakes. Around you, the surface is not opaque, and you can see the blackness below. The deep colors remind you of something else. You are reminded of a story. You remember this story well, because you see it every night. More than that. Every time your spirit wanders from your active thoughts or actions. Picture a knight. He is a hero, savior of king and country. He has just come back from war and has himself saved the young princess and her steed. He comes back to the castle, but on the throne lies not the kind old king who hired him. In the kingdom now rules the traitor, the jester that saw every going on in the castle and decided to do something with it. He laughs at our hero, who pulls out his sword. He knows he will succeed, because he is a hero. Moreover, he is our hero. He will succeed because we are reading and seeing and dreaming his exploits. But as he steps forward, his might and spirit crushing the fire and flames in the room.. the jester pulls on a rope, comically hanging next to his new throne. The hero, chosen by fate and narrative choice, the protagonist who thought he was the center of everything, who still thinks he is, falls. His gaze only has time to turn towards the ground before he is enveloped in inky blackness. The walls are invisible, and the ground as well. He might as well be dead and dreaming, but he still falls. The only thing he knows still exists is the shaft of light over him. Light that could save him, but chose not to. Light he knows he will not return to. In the dream, that is how you feel when you inevitably look down to the water at your feet. They are waving at the dark below, communicating in an unknown language to unknown beings your every move. The light seems to drain as it goes down under the placid water where you are splashing around. You are hanging over a hole that is incomprehensibly wide and impossibly deep, and you know that the only thing holding you together is the light above, and whatever safety you think it brings you. It does not change anything. You still, always, eventually begin to tire. While your energy falters from swimming and your voice grows ragged from screaming, the void underneath says nothing, of course. It does not care, much like the void above your head. In your dream you know that there is a strange dychotomy at play here. You know that it is odd that humans have seen billions of miles into intersideral space, more than billions, numbers that could break an unbroken mind, when the same human civilization has not explored all of its planet. From space, our ocean is a tiny wet dot, an oddity that will soon be corrected by collision with a rogue star. It is odd that humans have never bothered looking too deep under their feet. Under the lapping waves and dark currents. You also know, in your skin, in your muscles, in your bones, that the gray emptiness under you is somehow much deeper and much more unwelcoming than the one above you. Your skin screams as it feels the invisible rays coming from all around the emptiness, filling you with energy, but also toxins for your body and mind. Literal and metaphorical cancers that eat away at your self, only to find your real center and infect it as well, leaving nothing but an empty shell, walking around like a normal but broken human being with an unbroken mind. Your muscles tell you a different story. One of struggle. Of hard work and dedication, all in the name of achieving goals that they did not choose. They stretch and contract and sweat and drink and grow and shrink. They do their best, because they can only do what they are told. They are not conscious enough to know that they are being controlled. Your bones are the closest to you, so they whisper in your ear. Their murmur speaks of death and chaos. They have heard what the skin is screaming. Its shouts have been heard, and the bones will have to adjust. They will bend and flex as much as they can. They will break if they have to. They have to change, to adapt to the requirements of this new, infinite world, where gigantic beast that defy imagination rule as much as they are ruled by other, greater beasts that they themselves cannot see either. The bones will snap and lock into place, creating new limbs out of old stock. They will have to change if they want to be in the image of these beings. You, at the head of this band of independent beings, know what they do not. They think they should work and change for what lies below them. In your glorious, pointless dream, you know that whatever is under your feet does not know of your presence. You know it is wrong to think of it as many, since while it has many arms, and many legs, and even more bodies, it only has one mind. One consciousness, aware of every ant walking across its body. At that point your dreaming mind does not care anymore. Just as your arms and legs are tired of paddling, your mind is tired, bored and confused by everything it is processing. When it gives up, something else fills in. Something else finds the nerve endings and fills them with thick, gooey electricity. You then know what you would see if you were something else. Let’s say you were something else. Not too different, mentally. A mind that thinks in terms of years, mostly. With limbs that you control yourself. But you are not the same. As you are standing on the Moon, you know that you have no body that is yours, only what you have claimed from others. Cobbled together in order to have a semblance of persona. From Neptune, a silica-breathing semi-mechanical apparatus. From Mercury, the shields that disperse not only the heat but also the other waves you receive and do not want to either absorb or reflect directly. From Pluto, the visual equipment needed to observe goings on on a planet millions of miles away. From even further, more adaptations that are even more useless here and now. Let’s say you are that being. Looking through the universe, mapping everything you can, and noticing something. Noticing that no sapient species ever looks too far in their own back yard. They all lose so much by not communicating with these beings born of so much more potential. You then notice that it isn’t that these sapient species couldn’t find these other beings. It’s that the beings would have to respond to the pokings and proddings. And they never will, because this does not interest them. None of these lives matter, because in an instant they can be gone. You then notice the same things up above you. Whole sectors that have never been touched, even by beings that have achieved mobility and gone through the area. You see that there are intelligences beyond the understanding of sapient species, and there are also some above theirs. And more above the other. Each one, pointing and pulling towards the bigger fish, but never attaining it. You, standing on our moon, see our world. You see all of Southeast Asia, and you see El Salvador. You can hear the cries of children, and the other songs of war. It’s like a mighty melody in your eyes, performed for a blind and deaf audience. You see and understand this through the eyes and minds of every individual on that planet, filling their nerves with your consciousness every time they abandon their sensory organs. Every time they dream of the open sea. You see the remnants of older civilizations, both on land and in the seas. There are traces of gigantic buildings and structures, sometimes spanning millions of miles. Billions. You notice that there are edges that do not line up. Straight lines that end up circling on themselves. Buildings that curve around not the dip of the earth but that of the stars. You have noticed the same buildings, the same curved straight lines, pointing to structures that cannot hold in only three dimensions, in the space between quarks, and also in the space inside of the quarks themselves. Between elementary particles. Between galaxies, between stars. You have seen this web-like pattern everywhere you managed to dig long enough. You, still dreaming, understand all of this. You are sleeping, unconscious, but you are also sinking slowly in an empty ocean, just as much as you are looking intently through the cosmos, and you understand all of this. This is not an easy understanding. With it comes the pain of knowing that you are painfully, horrifically right. The great and obviously superior beings do not care, whether they are above or below you. More than that, they don’t even know that you exist. You are not the bugs in the threads under their boots. You are the microbes in the dirt stuck between the folded-up wings of these bugs. Then you wake up. That’s what the dream is like. At first, I thought I was the only one, then I met others. More and more. A lady in the subway at first. A man in the bus. Another at the shelter. They didn’t say anything, but their eyes betrayed their thoughts. Their sad, desperate eyes showing sad, desperate thoughts. They didn’t all understand the meaning of the dream, but they would. Soon. I know it’s going to be soon. The walls of the city told me. Have you ever seen the edge of the city? Outside? I haven’t either. The walls and the buildings told me their story once. They are millions of miles wide, and millions of miles deep, and millions of miles thick. Layers upon layers of crumbling concrete and dusty stone, sandwiched between meat and pleasure and thought. I know it doesn’t make sense. Have you noticed how every block of the city is almost the same? Intersection after intersection, tunnels leaking cars into highways and boulevards. Everywhere, you can see the church steeples, the traffic lights, and the apartment buildings. People, packed like animals to the slaughter, riding on buses, in cars, in subway trains, all sweating and swearing in unison against their fellow passengers. Billions of people, going to school, going to work, going to die, slowly but surely. Billions of dirty, hairy apes swinging their clubs around. Not noticing that, while there are billions of beings around them, none is actually conscious of the world in front of them. They aren’t thinking about their pointless lives, about their pointless loves. They are not thinking. They are dreaming. They are dreaming the sea of empty blackness, the sky filled with dying stars impossibly far away. They all know that something is wrong. Something needs to be excised from the human body. A slowly rotting lump of brain cells and body fat that thinks it is better than the others. A lump that thinks it thinks for itself. I will fix this problem. When I woke up this morning the sun told me. The sun spoke of fear. Of blackness, of nothingness. Of dreaming. Of the open sea, and all it brings. How does it feel to know that you’re the only one that does not have this dream? It must feel odd, knowing that your can’t get it, and never will. How does it feel to be the only one out of billions, who still doesn’t see the pointlessness of the land around, if we aren’t wanted above or below? Heaven and hell have rejected us, it seems. They forgot us in the shed and now the stench is unbearable. How does it feel? I couldn’t put words on it either, if I were you. I would probably just keep listening. We have been forgotten, and we can only look to each other to remember. Out of all of us, you’re the only one that cannot get it. You never will. Because you can’t understand the pain and rejection every other sapient human being feels when looking either above or below. I said I wanted you to be open for this. I wanted you to understand, but now I see you don’t. Obviously. My word bounce off you like pebbles against the stone walls of Babylon. The only thing we can do to make every person on earth happier, the only act with the most net happiness gain, would be to get rid of the incoherence. Once you are removed from the equation, we will be have developed our one consciousness. We will merge with the faraway observers on the moon and beyond. Humans will be on par with the others. Capital O. The Others, the great beings around and above and within. Our combined mind will span an entire planet, and we will then be perfectly homogeneous. We will all know our place and respect it. We will all be better in the knowledge that we are all the same, because you will be gone. You, the odd one out. The strange one. I will make all of us feel better, and you will thank us then. Your song ends now, but ours is only beginning. Please don’t struggle. Go on home, your mother’s calling you.