Gestalt

The unfiltered, unfettered output of the reactor traveling into your spanner left little evidence your body had ever been anything but a cloud of its base elements. Those remaining in the room, their masks now filtering out the precipitating plume of your borrowed atoms, make their hurried way towards the exit, leaving you behind. [[Get their attention.]]

The room, now empty, smells of ozone and iron. Your toolbox lays open just feet from your vantage point. [[Whistle a tune.]] [[Look at yourself.|Nostalgia]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

Your hands and toes are not numb. They are not invisible. They have left you. [[...]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

The air around you softly ripples in the shape of music. [[~~Tap your foot.~~|Whistle a tune.]] [[Look at yourself.|Self]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

You sit, you watch, and you realize that you are now a tableau looking in on the real world. A painting looking back on the artist. Peeled off of space... [[Peeling.]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

And of all your human faculties that are gone[[...|Senses]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

...your breathing, crying, your ability to sing or say words, your sense of touch[[...|Mercy]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

...mercifully... you can still sleep. [[And so you do.|Sleep]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

You aren't sure what will wake you, or if anything even can, but that hardly seems to matter at this point. [[So you sleep.]]

You aren't sure if you will dream, or what you would dream if you did. You used to have sleep apnea, but you haven’t taken a breath since you got here. [[So just sleep.]]

{ (link: '...')[ <script>A.track('theme').fadeOut(6);</script> (goto: 'Sleep1') ] }

(unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ] Your view darts around the room, trying to notice anything it can[[...|Look around.]]

A quick moment of nostalgia washes over you, for a song, you think. You try to recreate the tune[[...|Whistle a tune.]] (unless: A.track('1' , 'theme').isPlaying())[ <script>A.track('theme').loop(true).play();</script> ]

[[...|Sleep2]]

[[...|Wake]]

You would wake up eventually, stirred by something you couldn't put your finger on, if you still had one. You can't have slept too long, at least not by these new standards. [[Stretch.|Surroundings]] [[Yawn.|Surroundings]] [[Look around.|Surroundings]]

At first, you wonder if you moved, and you feel excitement for the first time. But then as you take in your surroundings, you realize that based on the advances you see around you, for them, quite a lot of time has passed. [[Your excitement wanes.]]

You didn't move at all. The facility did[[...|Busy]]

The plant is less busy than it was a moment ago... You chalk that up to increased [[automation.|Auto]]

Your job is probably done by someone with a joystick now. You wait a while[[...|Time]]

You don't quite have a hang on time as you know it, yet, but it feels like it couldn't be more than a few days, or a week that go by. You aren't bothered by this[[...|Time2]]

In the same way you were not bored by length or depth before, the passing of time does not bother you now. Though after a while, you do begin to miss people[[...|People]]

You miss the people you knew in life, and the people you assume should be here, now. [[Look around|Around2]]

You begin trying to figure out what some of this new equipment you see does. Not for any particular reason, but as a [[challenge]] to yourself.

You recognize a lever, a hatch, a series of buttons that are, you think, [[your replacement.|No one]]

That's good, at least, you think. [[No one else has to die here.]]

But almost as if someone just over your blurry, distant shoulder was taunting you, after months[[...|Arrival]]

[[Someone]] finally enters the room...

You recognize their uniform: [[sanitation.]] In the years you slept, they hadn't changed that, at least.

And that adds up, you think, that no one had been down here until now. With all this automation, the only living souls here are probably to [[clean]] the place once every 6 months.

Making a slow circle around the complex, and when one side is finally cleaned, enough dust has accumulated on the other to warrant cleaning *it* again[[...|excitement2]]

You think that at least you had the exciting sort of job[[...|Microseconds]]

Following in the microseconds it takes you to ponder all of that, you notice that this person does not have the [[sanitation cart]] you are used to accompanying that uniform.

For a moment you wonder if they'd somehow managed to make mops obsolete[[...|Cleaning2]]

They don't appear to be cleaning in any recognizable way, though[[...|Not Why]]

You eventually conclude that that's not why they're here. They stay for a while, by their standards. Hours, you think[[...|Distraught]]

From their position across the room, slumped against a low wall, you can only make out the back of their head. Periodically, they glance down at something you can't quite make out from the angle they are sitting... but you [[feel]] them.

Like a sense you forgot you had, you [[*feel*|feel2]] them.

After a while, though, their sadness fades to kind of a [[hollow peace.]]

Not quite a hopelessness. But an acceptance[[...|Acceptance]]

And as this dawns on them, they feel closer than ever. Touching you, almost, but not quite[[...|OH I KNOW WHAT IT IS SHIT SHIT SHIT]]

And then the object they are holding becomes clearer as they stand, close their eyes, and hold it to their temple[[...|Left]]

Something you have come to understand as sound fills the room. And the presence you felt within the man comes [[crashing]] into you.

And you *understand* it. Two overlapping points, you *understand* each [[other.]] <script>A.track('2').play();</script>

You don't know the presence's name because a name is just a word, and you are something [[beyond that.]]

Communication not by way of glyphs drawn onto paper or pounded into clay. Not like poetry, song, sign, or [[symbol]].

The two datums you once symbolized are now [[one|not yourself]].

You are not you anymore, if you ever were in the first place[[...|the other]]

And the presence you felt crashing into you is not what it was a moment ago, either[[...|something new]]

You are [[something new.|resentment, lack thereof]]

There is no resentment within [[you.]]

You don't feel as if you've had something stripped from you... ...because how could you remember being any [[different]]?

Even though you are now a meld of two different lives, you feel no dissonance because of that fact. Instead, even though you lack a body or the depth necessary to possess one, you feel like you are now a degree closer to what you imagine a [[representative sample]] of humanity would be.

A gestalt. The [[gestalt]].

A gestalt like no other can claim to be, because limited as it is now, yours is a perfect one. You decide that should anyone or anything ever ask what to call you, you will tell it, [["My name is Gestalt."]]

You aren't sure what voice you would or could say it in, or how it would know to address a question to you, but it's good to think of these things, you think. You think for [[a while]], actually, getting newly acquainted with old ideas and memories.

You think for so long that if you had the capacity for it, you would almost say you felt tired. And so with more fodder for dreams you know you won't have, you decide to [[sleep|sleep3]].

Again, not knowing what will wake you, or when, but you [[sleep|sleep4]].

[[...|still sleepin]] <script>A.track('theme3').fadeOut(4);</script>

[[...|sleeping, still]]

[[...|slumber continues]]

[[.]]

[[..]]

[[...|dot dot dot]]

Not so much that you don't recognize your surroundings, though. You can see the sky for the first time, through the holes in the ceiling above you, and the ceilings above it[[...|DIRT]]

And you can see the dirt and the mud for the first time, through the cracks in the levels below you. You don't recognize any of this destruction as being from any kind of blast or fire[[...|DEDUCTIVE REASONING]]

There would be much less of the structure left if that were the case. You recognize it as [[decay]].

Slow, steady decay. It appears to have been decommissioned before it was [[abandoned]].

Good, you think. No one else had to die [[here.]]

You are not sure what roused you, but you are thankful for it. Because with the holes in the ceiling and the soil down below, you find yourself watching [[plants grow]] for the first time.

You used to garden, you think, though you aren't sure which half of you. You find that as you slept, you homogenized more than you ever thought possible[[...|skyyyy]]

Through your narrow view of the outside, you finally get a more solid view of time. You can see the rise and fall of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, the ebb and flow of passing clouds[[...|days go by]]

Your perception of the time passing by seems more elastic now. As brown rust and green plants take up more and more of your surroundings, you wonder [[what happened]].

As perfect as your knowledge of yourself is, you still can't see past this room, or what remains of it. You conclude that something happened to cause an [[abandonment]] of this place, and likely the area around it.

You think that you would have seen some sign of life by now if that weren't the case. You think you will sleep, and hope that when you wake, your vision will be less [[obstructed]], and your understanding bettered.

But for the first time, you cannot. As you approach what you would describe as exhaustion in a being with the capacity for it, you cannot [[sleep|lucid]].

Like some force outside yourself is keeping you lucid. And so you [[wait]].

Rolling the narrow clouds and sun by, days at a time. You [[wait|waeght]].

Until eventually the rain stops, the plants die, and the mud hardens and cracks. The structure around you is even more decayed, and you have been forced to watch it rot by an insomnia you [[cannot explain]].

Like someone over your ever-distant shoulder is reaching around and holding your eyes and your mind open. Until eventually, through the bones of the facility, [[someone comes]].

You feel them before you see them, and they feel different. They feel scared, and tired, and desperate, and something removed from yourself and the [[people]] you once knew.

But they feel human. Despite your differences, they are [[still human]] the way you are human.

They are not moving through the facility particularly quickly, you note, but they do seem to be lazily making their way [[toward you]]. You feel excitement for the second time.

By the time they approach you, it is almost as if they have slowed to a crawl. It is not until the crest the nearest pile of bent metal that you realize [[they have]].

And you recognize pain. Not the sort of [[pain]] the part of you who used to be a janitor felt, either.

You recognize this pain as distinctly physical. And you aren't sure if the nature of this pain makes it more clear to you, or if you are simply getting better at picking things up, but you can feel it more strongly than you felt the pain of the last person to [[approach]] you like this.

Following the instant it takes you to realize all of this, they make their way down the face of the pile, blood-soaked hand clutching their side, head drenched in sweat, and they sit, panting, just across from you. If you had hands, you could [[reach out]] and touch them.

You recognize them as a girl, probably not much older than you used to be, and rather sunburned. It takes you a moment, partially because of the blood, and partially because you would never have expected it, but sticking out of this girl's bloodied side is the shaft of [[an arrow]].

If you had the ability, you might have reeled. [[What happened]] outside?

Her bloody garments do not look like any machine-woven fabric you had ever seen. They seem [[hand-made]].

If you had eyes, you think you would be crying. As you sit, unable to provide aid or comfort to the hurt person sitting right in front of you, not knowing you are there, you feel her begin to get [[closer]] to you.

As you sit there and ponder what happened to the world while you slept, she gets closer. Her head hangs, her breathing slows, and she gets [[closer|almost touching]]. <script>A.track('theme4').fadeOut(4);</script>

Until finally her hand falls from the arrow shaft, and she collides with you. Somehow more intense and complete than last time, you [[understand]] who this person is now.

But thankfully, mercifully, you find yourself able to sleep again, and as your only refuge, you do. You know you will not have nightmares because you can not, but you still fear for them. And for the third time, you [[sleep|slumb]].

[[...|slep]]

[[...|slap]]

[[.|slop]]

[[..|slump]]

[[...|WAEK]]

Waking up, wishing you felt some kind of refreshment, you notice that you can see more now than you ever could before. Your surroundings are [[entirely different]]. Flatter, and clearer. <script>A.track('theme5').loop(true).play();</script>

You did not move, but rather the land did. The moon is out, and it seems smaller than you remember, though it still casts enough light for you to see the buds in the soil. The ground you sit above is tilled, and the soil is dotted with [[small plants]].

All of you is relieved that the rains seem to have returned, but one part in particular bursts with a pleasure you have not felt before, and you recognize it as the wounded girl. Upon waking, you find your sense of time is sharper than ever before, and you know that centuries have passed. Though there are only fields for as far as you can see, you expect that to change soon, and you feel anticipation at getting to see [[people again]].

You notice too for the first time that your vision does not seem to be impeded by things like depth or distance. Only what stands in the way of your view. After a time, the plants begin to grow, and the [[people begin to come]].

They are slender, taller, and generally more elongated than the people you remember, though you still recognize them as human. You sense the incorruptible spark in them that tells you we survived. You note to yourself that if you ever find yourself in a body again, you should breathe a sigh of [[relief]].

The days go by, and you start to detect a seasonal change as the people come each day and, little by little, strip the brown dirt of its plants. Days are shorter and the people you see have on more clothing than they originally did. Eventually [[they stop]] coming at all.

The days continue to dwindle, the soil grows hard and grey. You recognize it as winter. And perhaps the slowest you have ever taken time before was during a [[snowstorm]] that came in the following months.

You did not see much snow when you were alive, and you decide to catch up now. The ground seems to get closer to you as the storm goes on, and you feel a longing for the cold. The biting numbness in your [[fingertips]].

The breath that stings your throat. Eventually the snow passes, you spend less time faced with the shrunken moon, and the soil regains some of its saturation. Eventually the same [[workers]] you saw before come to repopulate the fields, this time dressed in shorter, thinner garb.

You sense that spring has come, and reflect on the fact that one of you used to have allergies, though you are not sure which. Workers with wooden tools and sacks of seeds work over the land, and eventually make their way near your post. You notice that they seem to work in [[pairs]].

And though their language is meaningless to you, you get the impression that the pairs are not arbitrary. You feel the same thing in all of them, on some level. Distant as they are to you, and as alien as their speech is, [[you feel it]].

The same human feeling in all of them: Contempt. You realize that these teams are decided by some system that operates off of [[contempt]].

You aren't sure why, and you almost didn't notice. But these people hate each other. [[Why?]]

Your capacity for feeling the living is not quite sharp enough to probe for specifics, but you can tell that the reason is different for almost all of them. You're not sure if it is a contempt born out of their pairing or if it is their contempt that caused the pairing in the first place. Perhaps it is the device of some cruel sharecropper to keep their workers pitted [[against each other]].

Or a way of resolving differences between two individuals. You know that no matter what, it is cruel. And as happy as you are to be near people again, you grow to [[resent]] your surroundings.

Again you try to sleep, hating what you have found yourself in the midst of. But you are kept awake. For the first time, you feel [[anger]].

Anger at your inability to escape through sleep. So you sit. And you begin to take measures to ensure that you do not become a jaded [[observer]].

Taking stock of all the things that matter and mattered to you. Incorporating old things in new ways. You do this for a time, the ground below slowly filling back up with crops, and the soil being made loose again by crude wooden tools[[...|S O M E T H I N G]]

Until one day your musings are interrupted by something you have not felt before. Something far away. If you had a nose, you might say that it [[offended]] your sense of smell.

And as it gets closer it only gets more pungent. You notice it coming from a working pair. Or rather [[one of the pair]].

As the summer nears and the field fills up, fewer teams seem to be sent out each day, until you notice only this one today. You wonder if the foreboding is loneliness, then. But you have felt [[loneliness]] before, in the janitor, in the wounded girl, and even in yourself.

What you sense is distinctly un-human: One of these people intends to murder the other. This realization comes crashing down on you in the instant before it occurs, and you want to yell out in [[warning]] with the mouth you do not have. <script>A.track('theme5').fadeOut(4);</script>

You sit unable to help as the terrible feeling grows and the other individual seems to get closer to you in a way you are now familiar with as a closeness to death. You do not sense in them a fear, or even a particularly strong dislike for their murderous partner. They do not know this is about to happen, and when it is over, they will not know why it happened[[...|bout to do it to em]]

And for a moment, the murderer standing in front of you, beginning to use his murder weapon to dig a shallow hole, stumbles. Stumbles, and looks inexplicably in your direction, though nothing obvious prompted him to do so, and he mutters something in shock. Its exact meaning escapes you, as the man who just found himself part of you has not quite yet emparted this language onto you, but you understand his tone. The tone of a person who has not just seen a ghost, but created one, and is afraid of it[[...|oh shit he scared]]

He abandons his tool and abandons his digging and begins running. You sense that it is not in any particular direction other than away. His elongated legs and his supernatural sense of dread carry him away quicker than any human you have ever seen. And your murderer is [[gone|away]].

Though it is completely within your power to do so, you find the idea of looking at your body disgusting. As if you have extracted the incorruptible spark and now what remains lays defiled. You want for nothing more now than to sleep. You know it will not be a troubled sleep, because you cannot dream, and something about that fact scares you, but you [[sleep|disgusting]] anyway.

You resolve to sleep as long as possible. Your deaths and four different lives, you decide you have seen enough, and felt enough. Mercifully, you are [[able to sleep]]. And this time, something about the passage of time pervades even your closed, absent eyes.

Though you do not know it, you will sleep until the end. The time when all that is left to die is time itself. Until after a time that is ancient by even your own dimensionless standards, you awake. And you awake to something that defies your [[expectations]], if you had bothered to have any in your mad rush for unconsciousness.

You wake up to light. Bright, white, and all-enveloping. You feel hot. Not so much in the way you remember hot, but more like the [[presence]] of hot.

If you could imagine a Platonic hot, then you think that is what is surrounding you. It does not burn your absentee flesh, but it is hot. Your sense of time now keen, you know that you laid dormant for eons. Your sense for what is human now stretches through the cosmos and through the waves of time, yet it senses [[nothing]].

For the first time, you feel regret. Regret, as you realize that in a fit of hate and jadedness for what is human, you slept through the end of that humanity, and now you are all that remains of it. You, a single point made up of four different samplings, pulled out of time and stuck together into something purely human, are all that there is. You, and a [[pervasive burning]].

You reach down into yourself and find swirling the essence of your first existence. One of your existences contributes the word "instar" to what you find, though you are not sure which. And you change your previous resolve slightly. Now, should you ever find someone asking, and yourself with a way to answer, you will tell them "I am [[Gestalt]], and I am made up of four human instars."

But this seems sillier to you now than it did last time, since there is no one left to formulate a question about your identity aside from yourself. You probe your first instar for an answer, as it was best educated in life, and you realize that if you truly slept as long as you sense you have, that the pervasive, pure white light you find yourself in would in fact be the mantle of the sun, having now swallowed the Earth, it encapsulates you. You feel a weight on what might have been a chest as it sinks in that you are all that is left. You are the last remaining [[sample]] of all you held dear.

And you curse yourself for not being able to cry. Or pound your fist. Or stamp your foot. You are so wrapped up in an anger that you cannot manifest, that it takes you several moments to notice that the enveloping heat you have found yourself in is [[getting hotter]].

And for the first time, you sense a presence much like your own. Not strictly human. But also not monstrous or offensive. As the heat continues to grow, you swirl with curiosity, and another anticipation, all tinged with fear and [[excitement]].

As the heat begins to feel absolute, your new keen sense of time tells you that something else is pushing and pulling you along now. That for the first time, your experience of time is not all your own. Hardly leaving you time to process your newfound lack of control, a second surprise takes you. You feel a [[closeness]].

The presence of something else. Not in the way you have felt it three times previous, but the closeness of something more like yourself. The heat is immense now, yet you still cannot feel it, and something calls to you. Non-human, but not inhospitable[[...|Non-human]]

In fact, you sense that despite its strangeness to you, and your strangeness to it, it cares for you. It is... happy. Happy you are here, but also unimaginably [[sorrowful]].

And then you explode. <script>A.track('Moth').play();</script> All the comfort you can muster in your last moments as a perfect sampling of human experience being imparted on this other presence. You explode. And in this eruption, you [[punch through]] to something you have been cut off from.

You feel a physical presence, and you are suspicious of it until you realize it is your own. Feeling something more than yourself, and even more than the 4 lives within you, you look down at your hands. You breathe air into your lungs, blink your eyes, and sigh. And you say your name [[out loud]] to no one in particular.

And it strikes you all at once that the hot, white light you knew just a moment ago has been replaced with an inky dark. And inside of you, you find an emotion that is not quite human. But that you recognize as being key to humanity, regardless: [[A desire to blot out that darkness.]]

A desire to shape with your rediscovered hands something to walk across the darkness. Something in the image of yourselves. So you do. [[And in doing so, feel nostalgia again.]]

And longing, and grief, and optimism, and along with all the human experiences you have collected, you pour them into something new. And upon setting it free, and setting the darkness ablaze with light, you too, begin to burn. You look down and find no longer hands, but belts of asteroids. No longer legs, but fields of protoplanetary dust. Your torso is now a grouping of comets just beginning to encircle a new star. And you begin to burn.

Volume 50

Mute

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