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“Your refusal to accept the argument hinges upon a mistaken assumption—that life is inherently worth experiencing. It’s unsurprising you think that. There are strong evolutionary reasons for creatures to want to live. Reasons orthogonal to the truth—regardless of the truth, an evolved creature wants to live.”
I can’t help what I want, then. Even so I see no reason to change what I want.
“Your wants are many and self-contradictory—I think you’ll find that on the whole you really don’t want to live after all. You probably don’t remember very well, but almost every time you get sick enough to vomit you wish you were dead in some part of your mind. It was the same thing when you embarrassed yourself in front of your new coworkers. You should just kill yourself.”
I don’t think so.
I am winning against the apparition. I’m sure of it. Now I’m just saying “no” repeatedly without much elaboration. I know I can’t beat it by elaborating—it has infinite patience for arguing, and I don’t. I don’t want to be reasoned into a corner and then tricked. It is sort of like looking for a hidden zero in an equation that proves 1=2. I can only assume I’m missing something if any conclusion it suggests is surprising and unpalatable. It’s better just to refuse.
“I can tell when you are trying to ignore me, you know. Hmm. What about Sarah? Have you meditated on the meaning of your life in the context of Sarah?”
That would be a low blow if it were more effective. I’m definitely winning now. After the first two minutes of uninterrupted exposure I had genuinely started to consider killing myself, but now at the six minute mark my resolve is hardened against mental manipulations. It was a dangerously close thing, now that I think of it, but that was sort of the point—a test of mental fortitude had to test your mental defenses. My psychological profile indicated that I was unusually vulnerable to persuasion, and so they put me through this.
You know, they’ve put me through a lot. I was selected as an agent about four months ago. It started with an order to transfer positions that my boss couldn’t explain. I traveled by helicopter--
“Hey!”
It’s snapping its fingers right in front of me.
“Hey, don’t zone out when people are talking to you. Deliberately ignoring me isn’t merely cheating on your test—it’s cheating yourself regarding the truth. If you are so confident you are winning the least you can do is pay attention. You’ll have plenty of time to reconsider my arguments later.”
I’m only half paying attention at this point. I feel ill.
“Alright, you monkey, let’s try taking a step back. Pick any object. Your hand. Look at it. Look at it!”
He’s yelling at me but I know he is incorporeal. I can bite back my fear because I know being able to bite it back weakens him. It’s a precarious thing, so I don’t think about it much. He doesn’t seem concerned. I refuse to think about it much.
“Now that you’re looking at your hand, I want you to focus. Examine your hand with the entirety of your attention. See it for what it really is and form a solid impression of it.”
Focusing on my hand is actually something of a relief.
“Now look away.”
I can’t help but do so. He walks to the left to stay near my line of sight, like he has continuously for the last seven minutes and twelve seconds. I close my eyes and he vanishes, but his voice grows more powerful in my ears. It’s a frustrating conservation of sensory intensity. I try to think about my hand.
“You are still imagining your hand, but what really are you seeing? All that remains is an echo of an echo—a label made by ten thousand illusions slapped on a memory you have to forget every time you recall it. It’s not even a memory of substance. All you can recall is the amorphous idea of a hand, an idea you made in so many circumstances that it has no specific relation to reality at all. What do you hope to do with such a weak representation of the world? What can you even accomplish with that hand, full of mineralized sticks coated in watery parchment and fed by rust and salt?”
I visualize a twitching and bloodied hand and my mind recoils. It wasn’t something I had been trying to visualize.
“The image of your own hand is too complex for you. There is a part of your brain dedicated specifically to misrepresenting that hand, and another part whose sole job is to protect you from the rest of the information your eyes send you. It’s something that makes you uniquely human—your biological idiocy. Five fingers is too much for you to comprehend, a world of shadow and light is beyond you. Try to wrap your ineffectual lump of statically charged fat around what I’m saying. You should just kill yourself.”
He has a point that I don’t really understand my own hands. But then the promise of learning more about the anatomy of hands is a point against him. Why does it feel like such a weak counterpoint? I feel like I’ve always loved learning, and yet I have no plans to actually learn anything about hands after this is done. Is that odd? I want this to be over.
“How about another example. You sit at the bottom of a pool of light. You are dimwitted. Your thoughts are too slow to grasp it; the maelstrom of information that flows around you. But I see it, even if you can’t. Light doesn’t bounce in hard angled rays that disappear when you fail to imagine them. It flows like water in all directions, pulsating, a bath with pressure ripples that reveal so, so much more than your pathetic unidirectional filtered senses can put together. The other side of your disgusting hairy head is as clear to me as your face. I can see six inches into your flesh with the infrared light that you pour into the abyss. I see nothing of value. What can you see? It goes right by you, just like everything else. You are blind. You should just kill yourself.”
My fingers feel like they are twitching. I love astronomy, so that’s probably why he’s talking about light. I’m having difficulty remembering how it works, though—doesn’t astronomy require a mechanical aid for the eyes?
“What are your eyes anyway? A few proteins, a few wavelengths? You are half-heartedly testing the water with those eyes that see so little, your vision is like a malfunctioning nose pressed to the ground of your planet.” That wasn’t really fair. Humans knew of radio and ultraviolet, and we could even see images in those spectra with the right cameras.
That’s right. A telescope. I’ve used telescopes, and other equipment. In a broader sense I can detect my deficiencies and correct for them, visual or otherwise. I’m not really enslaved by my physical being. Constrained, but with potential. A fish still knows something of the currents, even if it can’t see the water.
“You aren’t a fish! You are a barnacle, stuck to the seafloor in your shell. You are genitals plus a hard coating. You disgusting creature, born of the froth of Earth. You really only have one purpose. I can see the patterns in your mind. Patterns you live and die by! A simple desire to procreate buried under five hundred million years of justifications! No wonder you are too weak to kill yourself, you pathetic--”
There is a soft metallic click and the voice disappears. My hands ball themselves into fists. I open my eyes. The examiner is standing over a closed box. Inside the closed box is the anomalous object. It is unable to affect me through a half-centimeter of telekill alloy. I am momentarily embarrassed that I forgot the examiner’s name, but then I remember that he can’t read my mind. I don’t recall him entering the room.
“I made it ten minutes.” Almost a question. It felt like a much longer stretch of time.
“Not quite. You still passed, though, so don’t worry. We always stop the test when it’s apparent the apparition has lost.”
“Oh.” That changes things. “You could tell it lost because it was getting angry?”
“Was it? No, we ended the test because it was trying to take over your body. You started to twitch. That’s always its action of last resort, when reasoning with you about killing yourself doesn’t work. It basically never succeeds at a direct takeover—so really at that point you were safe. It might have gotten you to pull out your own eye or something, at worst.”
“I see. Was the real test to get to that point within ten minutes?”
“Not exactly. We would have just left you in here for longer if you needed it. We want to give you the best chance of success.”
“Ah.”
“Alright, then. What classification does it deserve?” I swallow.
I swallow again. “Euclid.”
“How do you figure?”
“It can be contained by closing the box.” I lean back in my chair. “Also, it’s only goal was to get me to kill myself. It isn’t even a regional threat. Dangerous, sure, but contained. I’d give it a ‘safe’ rating if it wasn’t for the fact that it is ‘sentient, and therefore inherently unpredictable.’ Maybe it would get creative while getting me to kill myself, or something. In the right circumstances it could be more dangerous. So it’s Euclid.”
“You are technically correct. I’ll add that it’s not sentient on its own, but it becomes so when it interacts with sentient subjects. Otherwise we’d call it safe. At this point I’m obligated to warn you that actual classification is a laborious process that requires several tests and should not be done after a single exposure. With that, let us proceed.” He is setting down the first box and picking up the second. It has an electronic lock on it. “The first one isn’t even terribly persuasive. Er, do you need a few moments to compose yourself?”
A deep breath. “No, I’m ready.”
“Are you sure? Folks that listen to it tend to feel angry and dissociated.” He sees how I interpret that. “An expected psychological reaction, nothing anomalous.”
“I’m good. I can disregard what it said. This the age of the Internet.” He laughs.
“Alright, then! Maybe this will make you feel better. This one is actually dangerous. Keter classification. So you really, really can’t let it sway you in any way.”
There were guards outside of this room. There are probably other safeguards as well. The Foundation isn’t stupid. If anything goes wrong here, well, I’ll probably die. But they wouldn’t risk a containment breach--would they? I’m surprised they are exposing me to a Keter. Could he be lying?
Did they reclassify me as a D-class personnel without telling me?
“Consider this your first real test.” He is walking out of the room. About ten seconds after he closes the door the box in front of me clicks open.
A woman walks into my line of sight. She sits down opposite me and stares at me for several moments. I also stare at her. I notice the seat cushion hasn’t compressed from her sitting—she is clearly an incorporeal illusion. That’s fortunate for me. I get the intuition this test will be easier than the last. I don’t trust my intuition. She smiles. She speaks.
“Like the other one, I can see everything that is wrong with you at a glance. Unlike him, I’m here to help.”