Sometimes you notice the pain, sometimes you don't. You try and tell yourself that you're doing pretty well for someone who just fell out of the sky, and you are, but when you're writing in your journal, the wrongness of what's happening in your body comes back into focus, and there is nothing you can do except weather the shock until it burns into the background.
Even more worrying than the way your body feels is the way your brain is changing. You've always been a wordy person, but you find yourself drifting away from sentences and focusing on pure concepts. You look at the handcuff on your wrist, and instead of the words you need to describe it, your brain offers only sensation. The stretch of the sleeve cuff on your middle school sweatshirt. One of those finger traps they give out as ticket prizes at arcades. Like anyone else, your brain has always worked in associations, but now you have to fight the impulse to think //only// of associations, and it kind of makes you feel like an animal.
While the cuff keeps you in place, it doesn't hurt, which is weird because it's stuck on there like a magnet. You can lay on it without cutting off your circulation.
[[The floor feels pretty comfortable right about now...]]
...
[[...]]
It's the sound of the door closing that stirs you.
One of the LATERALs - that's how you think of them now - is just done taking care of the room. Turning off lights just by [[looking at them]], doing something with the [[blood tank]] that involves tentacle-touching, and, finally, closing the door.
[[I try to think at it.]] | [[I try to go back to sleep.]]
Or is it aiming its ear at them?
The eyes on the tripods don't move - let alone the Martians themselves. They're just little beads set into depressed discs of flesh. Is "look" even the right term?
You feel that it might be. Or at least, it's just as important as looking. The Martians structure their lives around this ear sense.
[[But is there even a Martian in there?|...]]
What you felt today... it just doesn't match up with the blood tank in the corner. Would something capable of injecting another creature's blood into its veins without consent be capable of the kind of good-faith communication you saw earlier?
It has to be, right? You aren't hallucinating any of this, and if you are you're too far gone to worry about which parts you're hallucinating. They have a tank of blood. The Martians on Earth use blood. It's probably not human blood, but it //could// be human blood. A vampire is a vampire. You can't be cautious enough.
But still...
This is the enemy, the alien race that's tearing your planet up... and yet this doesn't feel like their home. You're certain that you weren't guided here. This isn't a prison, or it's not a well-equipped one anyway, and it's certainly not a military base. It's a weird little camp you weren't supposed to find. This place is a //mess//. What is the room you're being kept in even used for? It's like that one room in your first childhood house back in Warsaw where your father just stuffed all the shit your family didn't have any other place for.
The hate you felt radiating off that colossal tripod back on Earth, above the Catskills... [[it just doesn't live here|...]].
You look right at the [[Lateral]] and try to conjure up an image. No, an //idea// - just the raw idea of some kind of greeting or notification. In computer language it'd be called a "ping."
And just like that, the Lateral swivels around to face you. Based on the shape of its eyes, this is the same one you spoke with earlier. You swear you can feel a kind of recognition, and your arm hair stands up.
[[Should I get out my sticker book?]]
But it's too late. You can't control your curiosity. You know you're giving off some background thought radiation, and the [[Lateral|Laterall]] swivels around to face you.
[[I try to think at it.|think2]] | [["AAAGH!"]]
Do we need to play this capitalization game? It's an important concept, "lateral," but as the idea of a thought-language becomes less alien to you, it's becoming a proper noun [[in your head|I try to think at it.]].
Do we need to play this capitalization game? It's an important concept, "lateral," but as the idea of a thought-language becomes less alien to you, it's becoming a proper noun [[in your head|I try to go back to sleep.]].
You look right at the Lateral and try to conjure up an image. No, an //idea// - just the raw idea of some kind of greeting or notification. In computer language it'd be called a "ping." What else are you supposed to say?
Based on the shape of its eyes, this is the same one you spoke with earlier. You swear you can feel a kind of recognition, and your arm hair stands up.
[[Should I get out my sticker book?]]
You expect some reaction. Alarm, maybe, or anger. Even some thought-form equivalent of laughter. But the Lateral just stares at you.
[[I guess I have to think at it.|think2]]
You think about it, but you should probably save that for the diary. Might be kind of an unnecessary burden to try and find a way to incorporate the sticker book right now.
[[So I'm just being lazy, is what you're saying.]]
Someone might be being lazy. You know, who can even say on this bizarre alien world.
[[What?]]
Never mind.
So. No sticker book, there's a Lateral right in front of you, you've got its attention.
[[I hold up my stupid wrist cuff.]]
You hold out your right arm and point to the metal band on your wrist. It's linked with a line of the same stretchy material to a weird pipe jutting out at an odd angle from the floor.
With your [[left hand]] you slowly try to [[remove the cuff]].
Your left ring finger is still broken. At least, it's swollen and hurts like hell if you lay on it by accident.
[[Good thing it's just your ring finger.|I hold up my stupid wrist cuff.]]
You tug at the metal but it just clings tighter. The more you tug on it the more it constricts you.
[[I know this one! Instead of pulling it I push on it.]]
As if you haven't tried that before. You can make the metal collapse on itself a bit, but it doesn't loosen its grip on your wrist.
The Lateral sees what you're doing and finally raises a tentacle in alarm. It grips your left wrist, gentle but firm, and pulls your hand away from the cuff.
Before you can offer any kind of challenge, the ear on its head swivels toward you, and [[a memory bubbles up to the surface...]]
Your brother's appendix burst when he was five. Both your parents thought he just had a stomach bug, and so did the doctors, for a couple days. On the third day, when his crying had turned to exhaustion and your mother was able to get the thermometer in his mouth long enough to learn he was pushing 107, they rushed him to the hospital - leaving you alone with the housekeeper to wonder [[if he was dead]].
When you saw him the next day he was hooked up to an IV. You asked your mother why they would put a needle in his arm. "It's keeping him alive," she answered. It wasn't the most comforting thing to hear at the [[age of seven]], but knowing he [[was]] alive was better than nothing.
The Lateral's thought brings that concept to the front of your mind. All that messy baggage follows it and lingers in the shallows, but it's that IV, those words...
[["It's keeping me alive."]]
//Not yet. Not quite. Not for a few more years.
His little bones are still out there. Who remembers them but you now? You and your father, wherever he is?
At least the Martians have wiped that slate clean for you, huh? At least. At least. [[At least.|a memory bubbles up to the surface...]]//
//Other words that aren't comforting to hear at the age of seven include "go on" and "make the jump." Even less comforting to hear from your big sister, who you trust.
Mom always looked at you differently after that, although there's no way she could have known. Did Mom hear those words, half-formed, in a dream? Did she see your lips form the syllables? [[Did she know what you were?|a memory bubbles up to the surface...]]//
//[[Was alive.]]//
//[[Was.|a memory bubbles up to the surface...]]//
That feeling of recognition fills the air, and you're not sure if it's coming from you or the Lateral or both.
You reach out again in your thoughts to the Lateral, trying to think of a way to convey the idea of freedom or movement around, but this time it's different. This time something changes, and now you are the one drawing memories to the surface.
[[Memories from another brain.]]
//You think of threes.
You think// in //threes.
You're back in the [[holding bay]]...//
//The walls are so cold. They are opaque but there is a fuzzy something beyond them. You feel the rejection of your form, the numbness of your eyes, the cruelty of your body.
And then there is the feeling of one like you. And another, and another, and some of them have heard a song. They are singing about it now, the history of blood, the history of your form.
They are telling you what you used to be. They are telling you what the people who made you used to be. They are saying that [[there is one among you who might be able to help.]]//
//Somewhere in that history - the history imposed - the authors of that history tried to make themselves stronger. And in order to do that, for some stupid, amazing reason, they turned to the ones like you. The ones they had beaten down and reduced, hated and destroyed, hurt and rejected in so very many ways.
And they failed, because when they tried to help themselves they always failed. Because they had reduced themselves, too, in the rush to make themselves more like who they told themselves they were. They had reduced themselves until all they could do was hurt.
But in the accident of their hurt, in the chaos of their hate, when all those little mistakes added up... they would sometimes [[slip.]]//
You feel like you slipped into a train of thought you weren't trying to access. Like the Lateral had been unprepared for your sudden understanding of its thoughts and had let its mind wander. But now you're gaining your grip again, and the [[thought you receive]] is more guided, more relevant...
//Walking-
Walking around... that sense of control which was given back to you after it was taken away so long ago, long before you were born... [[the feeling of that]]...
The ''feeling'' of that...//
You look before and after that feeling and zero in, grip the thought like a plant and uproot it. The feeling of recognition grows stronger. This time it's definitely coming from the Lateral, and it's mingled with a kind of raw shock, with alternating waves of interest and... fear? A kind of dull echo of what you felt when you caught your dad reading your diary and he saw what you wrote about the way Carrie's shirt looked and how it made you feel weird.
If you were wading through the shallows of this new way of thinking before, you've just been pulled all the way under.
Slowly the Lateral lets go of your left wrist and maneuvers its tentacle to the (link: "cuff")[IV]. It flashes you a quick thought, something that manifests as the idea of lunch period in middle school. Temporary. Have to go back. You nod, and you feel the Lateral remember something (link: "Moreau")[the free one among them] thought a long time ago - a shorthand affirmative signal they established when they were first building this place.
For the first time, you are not confused. You are on common ground, and the air around you buzzes.
Still hovering over your cuff, the Lateral holds out a different tentacle just as it did before.
[[I take it.]]
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<h1>End of Vignette 2</h1>
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