Look at me.
Placid. Even affectionate.
I don't know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)... but I could handle the new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I'd passed through the center of müshor and was coming out the other side.
At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a peacock's tail. I didn't have long to ponder the question—too many distracting fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened to seize on as a life preserver.
I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.
At the end of müshor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a pummeling-hard work out.
But different. Transformed.
Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul. More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast pathways routed through your brain.
Here's the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.
As simple as that. As devastating too.
That's why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning petty or abusing its power.
When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part of me. Unfiltered. I can't skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the universe. I can't discard facts I'd prefer not to know. They're all incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.
Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.
I can't pretend new data doesn't exist—it's already changed me. It's molded my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I can't even want to ignore the input, because it's already there.
No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.
And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I couldn't dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn't look away. Which is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn't/won't/can't look away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics like the clap. Someone who doesn't just call a spade a spade, but who sees the damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe with the right tax incentives.
It's not virtue or saintliness; it's just the way my new brain works. Of course, there are still thresholds—I'm not mesmerized by every speck of dust that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection that reaches my ear.
But... I no longer ignore the obvious. I'm mentally, physically, incapable of that. Selective inattention is for sissies.
I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.
A member of the Vigil.
THE PEACOCK'S TAIL
The Vigil left me two weeks free after müshor. Recovery time. Rearrangement time. A chance to clear the decks.
I no longer needed the electronic nurse perched over me, but data tumor was still a possibility. A white-knuckled looming terror if the truth be told. And data tumor was just the messiest way I could stop being me; there were other more subtle ways the link-seed could wipe out the Faye Smallwood I'd known. Facts and memes infecting my unprotected brain. Long-loved perceptions swept away, erased by casual input... because I deep-down believed I was
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