Stuff100: Many Minds
Dec. 13th, 2011 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeMany Minds
Prompt: “Insides”
Summary: Everyone’s mind has a different flavor.
Notes: I’ve wanted to write this a while.
M.D. generally avoids being psychic with people. She doesn’t care what those sci-fi writers say. Her telepathy, at least, is not like talking, or like mystical oneness with the universe. It’s jarring, it leaves her body feeling like an ill-tailored sweater for a good fifteen minutes afterward, and it tears all the dearest illusions and secrets away. (The lesser ones can sneak by longer, because their owners tend to think about them less.) It’s nauseating. Even though it’s always by accident, she feels encrusted in grime whenever she does it.
But for some people, she’s been in and out of their heads enough that it’s okay. All parties involved know what they’re in for, and they let her in willingly, while she can enter without that nauseating twist in her gut that comes from violating the only truly private place an Earthling can guarantee. Though she’ll never admit it, it awes her that however full of trial, error, and accident her first psychic fumblings were, her friends are still willing to let her in. And not just at the superficial, river-of-thoughts-and-feeling level either, they let her into the deep internal landscapes.
Thomas’s is the most opaque to her, purely by virtue of English not being his first language. Unless he consciously thinks about it, his verbal thoughts are in Spanish, giving him some layer of thought she can’t read. (Not for much longer, though; she’s picking it up fast, with that kind of immersion.) His mind is all wide open spaces and wind through the grass, and it ripples in constant easy motion, like a slow dance, with emotions and memories influencing the step and glide. His mind is multi-sensory too, more than anyone else’s she’s been in, putting out and taking in information in every sense. She figures it’s from all the years in Treehouse, where smells and tastes regularly save you from bad fade or getting blasted by a fungus’s stench defenses. There’s less sexual detritus than anyone would expect; sure, the feelings are there, but only as a comfortable surface heat, warming things up under.
On the whole, Thomas’s mind is the most hospitable, because he’s the most relaxed about her being in his head. After all, he doesn’t have as many illusions as most people, and even if she did catch him in a major secret, she suspects he’d just shrug and smile and say, “You got me.”
Raige’s mind is wide open to her, embraces her the moment she arrives. His internal landscape is the least recognizable as such, because it’s all about the music. His soul expresses everything through washes of melody, rhythm, and timbre, songs she doesn’t know and can’t understand except by piggybacking on Raige’s brain. Outside it, music is a closed book to her, but inside, Raige’s mind turns it into its own emotional, intellectual world—though her brain still interprets the foreign data with washes of brilliant color. She doesn’t understand music, but she does understand song.
Raige doesn’t have a cruel bone in his body, and oddly, that makes his brain the hardest for her to take. It’s just too sweet, too overwhelmingly trusting and kind to handle for long. But in periodic doses, though…
And then there’s Biff, with his mental minefield of half-realized defenses and Things He Does Not Think About. A desolate, blackened war zone, completely inhospitable to anyone who doesn’t know its danger zones and blast radii. M.D. herself has caused at least a couple of them, but he just shrugs and says it keeps everyone else out. They never mention how he lets her in, because then he’d have to stop. Over the years, she knows the routes, how to dodge the raw spots and buried bombs, just like she knows how to read the rhythm and blues of Raige’s soul, and taste the basil tang of Thomas’s sense of humor.
Three minds, all open to her. And hers is open to them.
She doesn’t know what the guts of her own mind look like. Fishes not noticing water, after all. She never asks Raige, Thomas, or Biff what they see. Even if they all see the same thing (which she’s pretty sure they don’t), her head is probably more like Biff’s no man’s land than Thomas’s wide open spaces or Raige’s visual symphony, and she suspects they don’t mention the wreckage only out of politeness (or in Biff’s case, familiarity). But they’re still willing to wander the metaphorical hallways of her brain—following the paths of dendrites and axons, a ghost pattern of electrical activity overlaying her own in such a deliriously organized way that it gives the illusion of place and sensory input, when really it’s just their brains’ desperate attempt to interpret and organize alien information.
But that’s all reality is, in the end, random electrical signals jury-rigged into a semblance of order by a chunk of meat. It’s all the same in the end, as real as talk or taste or touch. Just garbled and overwhelmingly intense, because she’s got no innate talent for telepathy, and no one to teach her.
And that’s okay. Sure, she could probably bite down and lay down synaptic fences, reel everything in until she’s like Bobcat and only expresses only what she intends to. Or go Number One’s route, rig her internal walls so she can take the keys to other people’s internal doors without offering her own.
But telepathy is second nature to the both of them. It’s ordinary, a method of communication or a weapon, not an intimacy. And her telepathy is easy to control. All she has to do is bundle up (and how hard is that, she’s always so frogging cold) and all her brain signals stay in the correct order, unless someone actively works at grabbing her hands or touching her face. And that’s not acceptable with most strangers on Earth or Treehouse. The only times it happens with strangers by accident anymore is in a fight—and she doesn’t mind sharing the sensation of being punched in the face.
Nah. It’s not critical. So for now, she takes what she has, and shares the mildewed, cozy rooms of her soul with the people she cares about, and wanders their own back. And she’s thankful that she has somewhere to go.
Prompt: “Insides”
Summary: Everyone’s mind has a different flavor.
Notes: I’ve wanted to write this a while.
M.D. generally avoids being psychic with people. She doesn’t care what those sci-fi writers say. Her telepathy, at least, is not like talking, or like mystical oneness with the universe. It’s jarring, it leaves her body feeling like an ill-tailored sweater for a good fifteen minutes afterward, and it tears all the dearest illusions and secrets away. (The lesser ones can sneak by longer, because their owners tend to think about them less.) It’s nauseating. Even though it’s always by accident, she feels encrusted in grime whenever she does it.
But for some people, she’s been in and out of their heads enough that it’s okay. All parties involved know what they’re in for, and they let her in willingly, while she can enter without that nauseating twist in her gut that comes from violating the only truly private place an Earthling can guarantee. Though she’ll never admit it, it awes her that however full of trial, error, and accident her first psychic fumblings were, her friends are still willing to let her in. And not just at the superficial, river-of-thoughts-and-feeling level either, they let her into the deep internal landscapes.
Thomas’s is the most opaque to her, purely by virtue of English not being his first language. Unless he consciously thinks about it, his verbal thoughts are in Spanish, giving him some layer of thought she can’t read. (Not for much longer, though; she’s picking it up fast, with that kind of immersion.) His mind is all wide open spaces and wind through the grass, and it ripples in constant easy motion, like a slow dance, with emotions and memories influencing the step and glide. His mind is multi-sensory too, more than anyone else’s she’s been in, putting out and taking in information in every sense. She figures it’s from all the years in Treehouse, where smells and tastes regularly save you from bad fade or getting blasted by a fungus’s stench defenses. There’s less sexual detritus than anyone would expect; sure, the feelings are there, but only as a comfortable surface heat, warming things up under.
On the whole, Thomas’s mind is the most hospitable, because he’s the most relaxed about her being in his head. After all, he doesn’t have as many illusions as most people, and even if she did catch him in a major secret, she suspects he’d just shrug and smile and say, “You got me.”
Raige’s mind is wide open to her, embraces her the moment she arrives. His internal landscape is the least recognizable as such, because it’s all about the music. His soul expresses everything through washes of melody, rhythm, and timbre, songs she doesn’t know and can’t understand except by piggybacking on Raige’s brain. Outside it, music is a closed book to her, but inside, Raige’s mind turns it into its own emotional, intellectual world—though her brain still interprets the foreign data with washes of brilliant color. She doesn’t understand music, but she does understand song.
Raige doesn’t have a cruel bone in his body, and oddly, that makes his brain the hardest for her to take. It’s just too sweet, too overwhelmingly trusting and kind to handle for long. But in periodic doses, though…
And then there’s Biff, with his mental minefield of half-realized defenses and Things He Does Not Think About. A desolate, blackened war zone, completely inhospitable to anyone who doesn’t know its danger zones and blast radii. M.D. herself has caused at least a couple of them, but he just shrugs and says it keeps everyone else out. They never mention how he lets her in, because then he’d have to stop. Over the years, she knows the routes, how to dodge the raw spots and buried bombs, just like she knows how to read the rhythm and blues of Raige’s soul, and taste the basil tang of Thomas’s sense of humor.
Three minds, all open to her. And hers is open to them.
She doesn’t know what the guts of her own mind look like. Fishes not noticing water, after all. She never asks Raige, Thomas, or Biff what they see. Even if they all see the same thing (which she’s pretty sure they don’t), her head is probably more like Biff’s no man’s land than Thomas’s wide open spaces or Raige’s visual symphony, and she suspects they don’t mention the wreckage only out of politeness (or in Biff’s case, familiarity). But they’re still willing to wander the metaphorical hallways of her brain—following the paths of dendrites and axons, a ghost pattern of electrical activity overlaying her own in such a deliriously organized way that it gives the illusion of place and sensory input, when really it’s just their brains’ desperate attempt to interpret and organize alien information.
But that’s all reality is, in the end, random electrical signals jury-rigged into a semblance of order by a chunk of meat. It’s all the same in the end, as real as talk or taste or touch. Just garbled and overwhelmingly intense, because she’s got no innate talent for telepathy, and no one to teach her.
And that’s okay. Sure, she could probably bite down and lay down synaptic fences, reel everything in until she’s like Bobcat and only expresses only what she intends to. Or go Number One’s route, rig her internal walls so she can take the keys to other people’s internal doors without offering her own.
But telepathy is second nature to the both of them. It’s ordinary, a method of communication or a weapon, not an intimacy. And her telepathy is easy to control. All she has to do is bundle up (and how hard is that, she’s always so frogging cold) and all her brain signals stay in the correct order, unless someone actively works at grabbing her hands or touching her face. And that’s not acceptable with most strangers on Earth or Treehouse. The only times it happens with strangers by accident anymore is in a fight—and she doesn’t mind sharing the sensation of being punched in the face.
Nah. It’s not critical. So for now, she takes what she has, and shares the mildewed, cozy rooms of her soul with the people she cares about, and wanders their own back. And she’s thankful that she has somewhere to go.
