Young Science Fiction
I was thinking about this story over Spring Break; I hadn't thought about it in quite a few years. I finished writing it in my Sophmore year of high school, but I think I started it in like 8th grade. The word file says it was last modified in 2001. I guess that it's pretty much the coolest thing I've written to this point. So I was thinking I wanted to share it with you guys. Feel free not to read it--at this point, I feel little attachment to it. Reading it for me is like reading something by someone else for the second time.
I, for one, am a machine. When I joined the Forces, my entire psyche was uploaded into a computer imbedded in my head. My organic brain became as useless as my appendix.
Then the War came. The naturals, the organics, the humans, the animals, attacked us. They came with the ability to hack into our chips and wreak havoc on us from the inside. Our technicians were charged with developing a defense to their electronic infiltrations, but instead created a weapon: we could upload the data stored in our chips to the unused parts of their organic brain, freeing our mind from any physical container. The once-mighty Forces were whisked away into the spirit world. We could beam ourselves from one host to another, occupying the enemy’s minds, destroying them.
So here I am, fighting the First War of the Mind. I no longer own a body; I am a parasite that uploads itself into an organic mind, destroys its host, and moves on to the next victim. My physical body now floats in a tub of preservatives, waiting for me to return from the war.
The enemy mind is a bloodcurdlingly intricate place. Millions of crevasses that bottom out in the endless misery of the subconscious zigzag across the mindscape, waiting to swallow you. The mindscape itself fears and hates you, and you are constantly barraged with pure revulsion as you navigate it.
This is my life. I never get a rest from the incessant hate that defines my world. I am rejected by nature. I am constantly a murder, an intruder, and an enemy. I never sleep, and home has become the force that I fight.
I sometimes watch as my host engages in the act of hacking into chips and killing my own people. The mindscape is a prison then, and all I can do is watch the horror before I kill my host.
Yet, just as I am unable to prevent the destruction of my people, no one can stop me. That is what I love. I am unstoppable, invincible, all-powerful. I hold the fate of any organic in my very being.
I am pure chaos. When I reach a human’s cerebrum, I can re-arrange its neurotransmitters at will. It is plunged into hectic fury; the enemy begins sending the wrong messages along the wrong channels in their brain. It dies of confusion.
But first, I must battle the mindscape. I can only be uploaded into the depths of the hosts’ unconscious, from there, I must make my way to the active conscious.
I pick my way delicately through the swamp at my feet. I’ve boarded the human in a regrettable area; all I can see is acres upon acres of slime. There are no laws of physics in the mindscape, not down here, in the dark, untouched depths of the mind. Down here, everything stays the same; no human ever ventures down here, below even the unconscious. The slime stays below me because there’s no reason for it to move. The small disturbances my feet are making in the muck are probably its first disturbances ever.
I float up into the darkness above my head, so thick, I had assumed it was a solid roof. The darkness that envelops my head is so vacuous it was almost violent in its nothingness. This is the area of the human’s brain where nothing is allowed—this is the vast emptiness of all humans.
I spend eternity in this vast oblivion. I slow my thoughts to a stop and I allow the stillness to wash over me.
I am abruptly forced awake by a wall of guilt. I’ve finally come to the base of the unconscious. Every emotion that a human has comes from this guilt. It’s a sort of survivor’s guilt that a human can never bring itself to face. Down here, the human understands the absurdity of its existence; there is no real reason why it should exist. Therefore, it knows how lucky it is to exist. But the human doesn’t feel gratitude that it is alive, it feels guilt that it should live and nothing else does. This guilt controls the human in every way. When it is happy, either it has managed to remove itself from guilt or it has done something that it feels combats this guilt. When it is angry, it cannot control its guilt. But mostly what comes from this guilt is fear.
I rise up past the guilt and enter the thick layer of fear. This fear is born of a simple fact: there is no reason to exist, therefore there is no reason why the human should continue to exist. And so, the only thing it feels here is a generalized, petrifying fear.
The fear is paralyzing, impossible to resist. I fold in on myself, hiding from the terrified world around me. If I lose my focus and feel my surroundings for a moment, I will be unable to free myself from this net of horror. I am traveling through the prison that all humans live in.
Fear presses on me as if I were at the bottom of an ocean of iron. It surrounds me so thoroughly that I cannot help but experience it myself. I become claustrophobic. I strain against the immense force around me, only to find that I am entirely imprisoned by it.
The human nearly has me captive when I feel the fear around me transform into blind hate. Still in the depths of the unconscious, the human is learning to transform its overwhelming guilt into anger, but he still doesn’t have a target. The anger is intense, untamed rage.
I traverse this area of the mindscape without fear. The human is too distracted with hate to threaten me. I move boldly, wishing to limit the time I spend on this victim. Further ahead, the mountains of the shallow unconscious loom. The shallow unconscious is the lowest level of consciousness that humans interact with. It is a vast mountain range, whose peaks sometimes reach high enough to form islands in the conscious. It is here that the fear and anger of the lower levels begin to solidify into thoughts.
I find myself at the base of a massive peak. Unthinkingly, I begin to ascend. The ground I walk on is frail and papery. It is a mosaic of dark colors, with an occasional outburst of bright emotion. The colors meander aimlessly under my feet, until there is a sudden eruption, which disturbs the fabric of the unconscious so much that it often knocks me off my feet. Sometimes there are geysers of passion that charge through the ground and explode in a painfully bright display.
I pick my way gingerly over the sea of emotion, wary of the dangers of the mindscape. Often the enemy senses my presence at this stage, and throws his mindscape into violent disarray. I grow tense and begin to creep even more lightly over the mountain.
It is impossible to discern where the unconscious ends, but soon the atmosphere of the mindscape becomes less erratic and more calculated. I begin to see information about the human. It is obviously fighting the same war I am—it hacks into the Forces chips at a furious rate and corrupting their systems. Base rarely sends me to kill an organic that is not fighting The War.
I summit the mountain. I look around me at the mindscape of my next victim. The human’s mind sprawls out in front of me; it is for me to invent. It is for me to train, to imprison, and eventually to kill. I can wander about the mind at will until I can map out the best contortions to force it into death.
Every time I invade a host fighting against us, I am shocked by how much easier The War is for them than it is for us. They sit in front of a screen all day and watch data scroll across it. Yet we must sacrifice our lives to defeat them; we must surrender any earthly existence to live entirely in their world of fear, while they lounge in chairs just meters away from their homes.
It is working on hacking the chip of one of our soldiers, so I settle down to watch the death of one of my compatriots, while I lay the groundwork for my hosts’ death. I move up to the area of the mind where optical information is processed. I can see the world through his eyes. I find myself staring at the screen on which the data of the victim is displayed. It always disturbs me that the entire personality of someone like me can be seen in the green symbols that I find myself staring at.
A sudden wave of nausea sweeps over me. The numbers on the screen—the numbers on the screen—they could be mine. I peered closer. The top of the screen proudly displayed the message “Success in entry of Andreas Vilkland, Mind Soldier. Please wait to proceed with data corruption.” Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andreas Vilkland
The human has not started to kill me yet. I instinctively begin to tear at its brain. But suddenly, an immobilizing idea is born out of my fear. If I could re-arrange a human brain, couldn’t I just immobilize it until I could kill it?
I fling myself into the messy web of neurotransmitters. I can see the chemicals being spat out to axons into dendrites. I can see the electricity of nerve impulses spark smoothly down axons. I can see calcium leap in and out of channels like pistons in an engine.
In frenzy, I set about ripping up the structure of the nerves. I blindly tear at the myelin around the cells, hoping to slow my murder. Then I begin breaking synaptic connections wildly, plugging in some ends of the cells at random. I feel like a child being called upon to diffuse a bomb.
Every second I brace myself for a confused death when the human would succeed before I do. Each change I make in the fabric of the mindscape seems more ineffectual than the last.
Finally, I have a makeshift block, and the human’s hands freeze above its keyboard. As I feel a wave of relief pass over me, it occurs to me that, with just a few more changes, I could control my host. I could have a real body. The thought fills me with anticipation.
After endlessly unraveling and rebuilding of the mindscape, I have control of the human. I have linked myself with the fabric of the mindscape, so I can input my commands and they will be executed. I am like a sixth sense in my host’s head; it can sense me now just as he would see a picture. Except that now, it must obey me.
I feel a sudden rush of power. I am now a god in this mindscape that almost killed me.
I don’t want my new prize to be destroyed; the humans around me must not know what has happened.
I tack myself onto his optical nerve again. I force him to bend over the screen that still displays my information. Manipulating him is clumsy, so I try not to force him to any big movements.
Everything besides my name on the screen seems to be in a code. I force my host to translate the code to me in its mind.
I begin to listen, for lack of anything else to do, to the contents of my data file. He starts by telling me everything I know: that I hate organics, that I am in the Invasion forces, that I miss my parents. Everything about my life down to the minutest detail.
Then it stops conveying information in words to me. I am confused, but soon I feel the mindscape beginning to pulse with emotion. It is just as easy for it to communicate in emotions as in words.
The emotions seem strange, yet familiar. I begin to puzzle out what I am feeling. At first, it seems jumbled and nonsensical. I think that the human might haves stopped translating right. I find myself disturbed deeply; I seem to be receiving segments of some dark, angry sentiments.
Then I am frozen by the worst realization of my life. My entire psyche was uploaded onto my chip, then onto this data file. The data that I am composed of originates in an organic mind. My data file is no different from a human mind. I have the same overwhelming guilt as a human. I fear death, just like a human. I fight because I have nothing else to do with that fear than turn it to anger.
My mindscape is just as stupidly craven as any human mindscape, just digitized. Worse, even, because I spend my life festering in their fear and hate.
The War is just human against electronic human. Neither side is better than the other. All those years I spent hating all that is organic I spent hating myself.
I begin to loathe myself for all the lives I have ended in the name of war. I am a murderer. And I have just sacrificed another life to save my own.
I must free my host. Perhaps he will see that I am his equal. He will spare me. He must be able to see what I can see; it’s so blindingly obvious.
I dive back into the fabric of the mindscape to undo the damage I have done. I carefully rearrange the human’s nerves. My new understanding forces me to be tediously careful in my task. I spend hours carefully mending the fabric.
Finally, my task is complete. I rush up to the human’s consciousness to plead my case.
I am so infatuated with my noble mission of peace that I don’t realize that the human has returned to work. Its fingers fly over the keyboard.
I recognize too late that I haven’t left myself a means to communicate with him. The familiar tide of fear sweeps over me, as I comprehend that I have just committed suicide.
I dart frantically over the mindscape, trying to make my presence felt. I begin to become confused; the mindscape twists and contorts itself around me. I flail against the fabric, scratching for an escape.
I lose control of myself, and I find myself tumbling through the layers of the mindscape. I tumble down the steep slopes of the unconscious to the great hate, down to the great fear. My own fear matches the fear of the human. I struggle against the pressure of the mindscape.
I fall through the thick fear into the immense void. My hope is sucked out by the emptiness, and I resign myself to certain death. I remember my family; the last time I saw them was when I joined the forces when I was twelve. A wave of desolate depression tumbles over me. I feel empty.
I land in the sickening much where I first entered my host. I lie there, soaking in the sewer of the mindscape, awaiting certain death.
I lie a long time. My surroundings become hazy, and I feel tired.
Finally, I hear a voice. “Private, what’s taking so long in there?” Base is calling me. “Mission failed, sir.”
The First War of the Mind
The sickening sea of the enemy’s mind laps against my legs like the hands of so many ghosts trying to pull me down into the shadowy mosaic that I stand in up to my knees. A mindscape is the most brutal, twisted theater of battle any war was ever fought. Can we count ourselves human anymore?I, for one, am a machine. When I joined the Forces, my entire psyche was uploaded into a computer imbedded in my head. My organic brain became as useless as my appendix.
Then the War came. The naturals, the organics, the humans, the animals, attacked us. They came with the ability to hack into our chips and wreak havoc on us from the inside. Our technicians were charged with developing a defense to their electronic infiltrations, but instead created a weapon: we could upload the data stored in our chips to the unused parts of their organic brain, freeing our mind from any physical container. The once-mighty Forces were whisked away into the spirit world. We could beam ourselves from one host to another, occupying the enemy’s minds, destroying them.
So here I am, fighting the First War of the Mind. I no longer own a body; I am a parasite that uploads itself into an organic mind, destroys its host, and moves on to the next victim. My physical body now floats in a tub of preservatives, waiting for me to return from the war.
The enemy mind is a bloodcurdlingly intricate place. Millions of crevasses that bottom out in the endless misery of the subconscious zigzag across the mindscape, waiting to swallow you. The mindscape itself fears and hates you, and you are constantly barraged with pure revulsion as you navigate it.
This is my life. I never get a rest from the incessant hate that defines my world. I am rejected by nature. I am constantly a murder, an intruder, and an enemy. I never sleep, and home has become the force that I fight.
I sometimes watch as my host engages in the act of hacking into chips and killing my own people. The mindscape is a prison then, and all I can do is watch the horror before I kill my host.
Yet, just as I am unable to prevent the destruction of my people, no one can stop me. That is what I love. I am unstoppable, invincible, all-powerful. I hold the fate of any organic in my very being.
I am pure chaos. When I reach a human’s cerebrum, I can re-arrange its neurotransmitters at will. It is plunged into hectic fury; the enemy begins sending the wrong messages along the wrong channels in their brain. It dies of confusion.
But first, I must battle the mindscape. I can only be uploaded into the depths of the hosts’ unconscious, from there, I must make my way to the active conscious.
I pick my way delicately through the swamp at my feet. I’ve boarded the human in a regrettable area; all I can see is acres upon acres of slime. There are no laws of physics in the mindscape, not down here, in the dark, untouched depths of the mind. Down here, everything stays the same; no human ever ventures down here, below even the unconscious. The slime stays below me because there’s no reason for it to move. The small disturbances my feet are making in the muck are probably its first disturbances ever.
I float up into the darkness above my head, so thick, I had assumed it was a solid roof. The darkness that envelops my head is so vacuous it was almost violent in its nothingness. This is the area of the human’s brain where nothing is allowed—this is the vast emptiness of all humans.
I spend eternity in this vast oblivion. I slow my thoughts to a stop and I allow the stillness to wash over me.
I am abruptly forced awake by a wall of guilt. I’ve finally come to the base of the unconscious. Every emotion that a human has comes from this guilt. It’s a sort of survivor’s guilt that a human can never bring itself to face. Down here, the human understands the absurdity of its existence; there is no real reason why it should exist. Therefore, it knows how lucky it is to exist. But the human doesn’t feel gratitude that it is alive, it feels guilt that it should live and nothing else does. This guilt controls the human in every way. When it is happy, either it has managed to remove itself from guilt or it has done something that it feels combats this guilt. When it is angry, it cannot control its guilt. But mostly what comes from this guilt is fear.
I rise up past the guilt and enter the thick layer of fear. This fear is born of a simple fact: there is no reason to exist, therefore there is no reason why the human should continue to exist. And so, the only thing it feels here is a generalized, petrifying fear.
The fear is paralyzing, impossible to resist. I fold in on myself, hiding from the terrified world around me. If I lose my focus and feel my surroundings for a moment, I will be unable to free myself from this net of horror. I am traveling through the prison that all humans live in.
Fear presses on me as if I were at the bottom of an ocean of iron. It surrounds me so thoroughly that I cannot help but experience it myself. I become claustrophobic. I strain against the immense force around me, only to find that I am entirely imprisoned by it.
The human nearly has me captive when I feel the fear around me transform into blind hate. Still in the depths of the unconscious, the human is learning to transform its overwhelming guilt into anger, but he still doesn’t have a target. The anger is intense, untamed rage.
I traverse this area of the mindscape without fear. The human is too distracted with hate to threaten me. I move boldly, wishing to limit the time I spend on this victim. Further ahead, the mountains of the shallow unconscious loom. The shallow unconscious is the lowest level of consciousness that humans interact with. It is a vast mountain range, whose peaks sometimes reach high enough to form islands in the conscious. It is here that the fear and anger of the lower levels begin to solidify into thoughts.
I find myself at the base of a massive peak. Unthinkingly, I begin to ascend. The ground I walk on is frail and papery. It is a mosaic of dark colors, with an occasional outburst of bright emotion. The colors meander aimlessly under my feet, until there is a sudden eruption, which disturbs the fabric of the unconscious so much that it often knocks me off my feet. Sometimes there are geysers of passion that charge through the ground and explode in a painfully bright display.
I pick my way gingerly over the sea of emotion, wary of the dangers of the mindscape. Often the enemy senses my presence at this stage, and throws his mindscape into violent disarray. I grow tense and begin to creep even more lightly over the mountain.
It is impossible to discern where the unconscious ends, but soon the atmosphere of the mindscape becomes less erratic and more calculated. I begin to see information about the human. It is obviously fighting the same war I am—it hacks into the Forces chips at a furious rate and corrupting their systems. Base rarely sends me to kill an organic that is not fighting The War.
I summit the mountain. I look around me at the mindscape of my next victim. The human’s mind sprawls out in front of me; it is for me to invent. It is for me to train, to imprison, and eventually to kill. I can wander about the mind at will until I can map out the best contortions to force it into death.
Every time I invade a host fighting against us, I am shocked by how much easier The War is for them than it is for us. They sit in front of a screen all day and watch data scroll across it. Yet we must sacrifice our lives to defeat them; we must surrender any earthly existence to live entirely in their world of fear, while they lounge in chairs just meters away from their homes.
It is working on hacking the chip of one of our soldiers, so I settle down to watch the death of one of my compatriots, while I lay the groundwork for my hosts’ death. I move up to the area of the mind where optical information is processed. I can see the world through his eyes. I find myself staring at the screen on which the data of the victim is displayed. It always disturbs me that the entire personality of someone like me can be seen in the green symbols that I find myself staring at.
A sudden wave of nausea sweeps over me. The numbers on the screen—the numbers on the screen—they could be mine. I peered closer. The top of the screen proudly displayed the message “Success in entry of Andreas Vilkland, Mind Soldier. Please wait to proceed with data corruption.” Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andreas Vilkland
The human has not started to kill me yet. I instinctively begin to tear at its brain. But suddenly, an immobilizing idea is born out of my fear. If I could re-arrange a human brain, couldn’t I just immobilize it until I could kill it?
I fling myself into the messy web of neurotransmitters. I can see the chemicals being spat out to axons into dendrites. I can see the electricity of nerve impulses spark smoothly down axons. I can see calcium leap in and out of channels like pistons in an engine.
In frenzy, I set about ripping up the structure of the nerves. I blindly tear at the myelin around the cells, hoping to slow my murder. Then I begin breaking synaptic connections wildly, plugging in some ends of the cells at random. I feel like a child being called upon to diffuse a bomb.
Every second I brace myself for a confused death when the human would succeed before I do. Each change I make in the fabric of the mindscape seems more ineffectual than the last.
Finally, I have a makeshift block, and the human’s hands freeze above its keyboard. As I feel a wave of relief pass over me, it occurs to me that, with just a few more changes, I could control my host. I could have a real body. The thought fills me with anticipation.
After endlessly unraveling and rebuilding of the mindscape, I have control of the human. I have linked myself with the fabric of the mindscape, so I can input my commands and they will be executed. I am like a sixth sense in my host’s head; it can sense me now just as he would see a picture. Except that now, it must obey me.
I feel a sudden rush of power. I am now a god in this mindscape that almost killed me.
I don’t want my new prize to be destroyed; the humans around me must not know what has happened.
I tack myself onto his optical nerve again. I force him to bend over the screen that still displays my information. Manipulating him is clumsy, so I try not to force him to any big movements.
Everything besides my name on the screen seems to be in a code. I force my host to translate the code to me in its mind.
I begin to listen, for lack of anything else to do, to the contents of my data file. He starts by telling me everything I know: that I hate organics, that I am in the Invasion forces, that I miss my parents. Everything about my life down to the minutest detail.
Then it stops conveying information in words to me. I am confused, but soon I feel the mindscape beginning to pulse with emotion. It is just as easy for it to communicate in emotions as in words.
The emotions seem strange, yet familiar. I begin to puzzle out what I am feeling. At first, it seems jumbled and nonsensical. I think that the human might haves stopped translating right. I find myself disturbed deeply; I seem to be receiving segments of some dark, angry sentiments.
Then I am frozen by the worst realization of my life. My entire psyche was uploaded onto my chip, then onto this data file. The data that I am composed of originates in an organic mind. My data file is no different from a human mind. I have the same overwhelming guilt as a human. I fear death, just like a human. I fight because I have nothing else to do with that fear than turn it to anger.
My mindscape is just as stupidly craven as any human mindscape, just digitized. Worse, even, because I spend my life festering in their fear and hate.
The War is just human against electronic human. Neither side is better than the other. All those years I spent hating all that is organic I spent hating myself.
I begin to loathe myself for all the lives I have ended in the name of war. I am a murderer. And I have just sacrificed another life to save my own.
I must free my host. Perhaps he will see that I am his equal. He will spare me. He must be able to see what I can see; it’s so blindingly obvious.
I dive back into the fabric of the mindscape to undo the damage I have done. I carefully rearrange the human’s nerves. My new understanding forces me to be tediously careful in my task. I spend hours carefully mending the fabric.
Finally, my task is complete. I rush up to the human’s consciousness to plead my case.
I am so infatuated with my noble mission of peace that I don’t realize that the human has returned to work. Its fingers fly over the keyboard.
I recognize too late that I haven’t left myself a means to communicate with him. The familiar tide of fear sweeps over me, as I comprehend that I have just committed suicide.
I dart frantically over the mindscape, trying to make my presence felt. I begin to become confused; the mindscape twists and contorts itself around me. I flail against the fabric, scratching for an escape.
I lose control of myself, and I find myself tumbling through the layers of the mindscape. I tumble down the steep slopes of the unconscious to the great hate, down to the great fear. My own fear matches the fear of the human. I struggle against the pressure of the mindscape.
I fall through the thick fear into the immense void. My hope is sucked out by the emptiness, and I resign myself to certain death. I remember my family; the last time I saw them was when I joined the forces when I was twelve. A wave of desolate depression tumbles over me. I feel empty.
I land in the sickening much where I first entered my host. I lie there, soaking in the sewer of the mindscape, awaiting certain death.
I lie a long time. My surroundings become hazy, and I feel tired.
Finally, I hear a voice. “Private, what’s taking so long in there?” Base is calling me. “Mission failed, sir.”
posted by Jed at 12:20 PM
7 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
I like. I'm mostly confused by what you mean by an unconscious... I like the idea of a mindscape, of entering and moving through the spatial and geographic mind, but the mapping here is a little strange. I didn't know anything about the technical terms (real or made up?). I like the idea of guilt. It's amazing how like Nietzsche you think without having read him. It just goes to show that his ideas are bigger than his name.
I like how deeply subjective this writing is. As with any writing of this style, there are points of tremendous insight and points of dubious meaning. I like when you talk about a 'great fear' and a 'great hate' towards the end. You get this strange and ominous Hindi death-god tone. But the story is, at times, melodramatic. I like that you have found a way to enter and explore the human mind, but it's tough to follow your cartography, and the story sometimes slips into an almost soap-opera self pity -- perhaps you're going for this, showing this futuristic nano-parasite in all its 'human weakness.' It's just that he/she begins to seem pathetic, which I think might not be the feeling you want us to feel.
this is pretty freaking awesome for something from high school.
I love this. Sci-fi is the way to go. I love the idea of a war being fought in some kind of mental cyberspace - the cyberhumans are like computer viruses, infesting our minds and driving us mad. Remember the golden age of virtual reality? The movie Hackers? The Lawnmower Man?? also, Andreas Vilkland is a sweet name.
I've always thought that guilt is the driving force behind all of us, in exactly the way you explained it:
"Down here, the human understands the absurdity of its existence; there is no real reason why it should exist. Therefore, it knows how lucky it is to exist. But the human doesn’t feel gratitude that it is alive, it feels guilt that it should live and nothing else does."
by the way, you also had an excellent command of neuroscience when you were a teenager, jed.
speaking of parasites! (and
scrolling green symbols):
http://www.bogleech.com/bio-para.html
Thanks guys. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Maybe sometime I'll write an adult version. I think he begins badass and ends pathetic because that's pretty much how I was feeling at that point. Although if I asked my high school self if my writing represented any aspect of my mood or emotion, I would have vehemently denied it. If there are terms which I confuse or just throw around like "unconcious" it's probably because I didn't really understand them, and was simply counting on the larger culture around them to define them for me. Anyway, kinda fun I thought, thanks for giving it a read.
happy birthday, pinkey.
also, that's a helluva fuckin cool parasite.
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