Variables – Discovery and Observation
We knew. We understood, understand. More now than before, we comprehend the race which walks on two legs and calls this planet home. We knew, know, more of pain and loss and feeling and doubt. We know more through our new vessel the strange sensations which these beings call feelings, feelings of a strange thing called love. Love for the offspring she...we had taken as our own when our hands shot down those that had produced them. Love for the tired man whose child moved in the womb of the pilot, love as one human might love a sibling or parent. Love, which once pumped through our vessel's painstakingly crafted network of veins, our veins, strongest and purest and most oddly complex of all.
Love for a being those in our consciousness knew, know, well. Love for a man called Thurston, child of the one who sought to understand us as we seek to understand this planet. Renton, son of Adroc whose mind dwells within us, floods our thinking and knowing. We want to know more of this Renton. She, we, felt and breathed and lived and knew for his sake. We want to envelop him, welcome him into our mind and see and feel and know as he does. This our vessel feels and thus we feel.
We are whole again, building and learning and knowing, and yet resistance exists still in our creation. This one called Eureka, once apart from us and now complete, struggles against us. We struggle against ourselves-no. No, she is still separate from we. She belongs to him and us and yet only him, this human who was and is and never truly was human. We want to know why, we want to know...
What is this? A touch, a memory, a feeling. A piece of our vessel we do not understand, do not know. This is not the Thurston child, for love does not accompany this image, this being that dwells in her, our mind.
What is this? She seems and feels to be of us, yet we did not create her. Reaching out, we can touch a piece of her, a shred of her mind that yearns to understand and know as we yearn, as we know.
What is this? She bears our mark, our hunger for knowledge for completeness. But she is not of us, fabricated not by our hands but by those of the beings of this place they call Earth.
What are you? We want to know...
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Anemone cradled her aching head in her hands, careful to breathe evenly lest she wake Dominic who slept peacefully beside her. He had not slept this deeply for days, always meeting with Holland and the Thurston boy and the others and pain, the pain, why was it back? Was the whole ordeal not truly over? Dewey was dead. The horrible collar he had bestowed on her was gone, as were the drugs, the nightmares, and TheEND. Why, then, was she here, curled in a shivering ball and clutching her head and whimpering as she had so many nights before they came to save her? She had told Dominic she was better, she had seen a chance for happiness despite all the horrors that had come before. Why now when it was all supposed to be over?
The splitting pain drove her to kick the tangled sheets from her legs and shamble over to the window. Anemone pressed her forehead against the glass and slowly tucked her knees under her chin. With every fiber of her being, organic and manufactured, she willed the pain away. She didn't need the drugs. Dominic deserved to sleep for once and, however much he loved her, he wouldn't stop the aching. What Anemone squeezed her eyes shut and inwardly sobbed as another wave of agony passed through her body. The hard surface of the glass felt like an anchor amid the waves of pain wracking her skull are you What and tethered her to the window though her body longed to writhe on the floor. She didn't do this anymore, she was stronger, better, for Dominic's sake are you? We want to know...
"It hurts," she hissed, feeling her dry tongue scrape the roof of her mouth. The aching worsened we understand pain we know Dominic stirred behind her, dimly aware in his dreaming mind that her body had left the bed What are you?Flashing lights across the water do not understand Dominic's steady breathing across the room We want to know Every sense heightened, sounds and smells that didn't belong in this room. We...no she could feel an environment starkly different from the one her skin identified as solid and here.
What are you? We do not remember you do not understand are you of us? What are you, we want to know...
Anemone forced open her clamped lids to see not the cool dark of the harbor but the unearthly hues of a mind, a world, vastly unlike her own, yet not wholly unfamiliar. Vague hints of what may be grassy fields flickered, half-formed, across her vision. In the center of it all stood a figure in white, wearing an expression of shared curiosity and confusion. Anemone, vision blurry from the searing pain in her head and feeling vaguely as if her mind was occupied by someone other than herself, managed only to rasp one word.
"Eureka?"