► Show Spoiler
He remembered when he was born again. With more energy, he was a more complex thought, but still little more than that. He felt… no, he didn’t feel. He believed that he was the product of someone else’s imagination. Someone who was capable of imaging incredible things, such as he- who could imagine anything. He felt as though he see and touch and taste once, but he could only envision such things in theory knowing he had once graced them in practice. Then the vacuum consumed him.
Again and again he was born and he faded, each time becoming more complex until he no longer considered himself a thought. Now he was a being. But what was the worth of a lone being in an empty void? He had time and energy to reflect.
Slowly these reflections began to accumulate shards of something one might call memory. He knew of a world… a broken world and its salient city. He knew of a child. A strident child of singular purpose, programmed by nature and conditioned by his environment to abide by certain precepts. He could not see the child, nor could he see through the eyes thereof. He couldn’t see a thing, but his story slowly loaded into his memory while he had the energy to process it. An exacting father with lofty expectations, a cunning mother with clandestine designs, a clever, elder brother who shared his purpose, a friend haunted by inborn inadequacies that steeled his alignment to the Code. All them informed the programming of this nascent creature, this… human.
The story came faster the more energy he was fed. He knew, now, that he was feeding, though it gave him no pleasure as to a gourmand like the child who grew into a soldier and the uncertainties of youth gave way to a coalescence of ideology.
The soldier was more comprehensible than the child had been, perhaps because of the simple certainty that guided his actions or perhaps because he was being fed more and had greater power with which to process.
When he reached the end of the story, the being started. It was the first moment, in all of his time since being a thought in the vacuum to being a being subject to the unfolding of a story, that he felt anything tantamount to an emotion. With only the subject of the story as his frame of reference, the being equated this emotion to confusion. Perhaps he had missed something in the telling.
The story began again.
More power, the story moved faster. A few hours and the tale which had taken days was told to its culmination, and this time he was not confused. He was outraged!
The boy had been programmed to suit the design of his culture. The soldier had served not unerringly, but formidably within the confines of his limitations, to the Code of his conditioning. But to what had it amounted? Abrupt cessation. Where had he erred?
The story began again.
In minutes the tale was told and the answers lay bare.
The story began again and again and again ad infinitum. The being was saturated in the story. Absorbed it as his own, until he was more than a thought and more than a being. He was the paragon of beings: He was human. He was Brenner. And Brenner had failed. Upon reflection, Brenner could see where he’d defied his programming and, though he did not know the specific source of his downfall, he had lived the story enough times to read between the lines of the Code. He could deduce it stemmed from one of two instances… perhaps both, but more information would be needed if he were to clarify.
The story was running nonstop. It was infused into him, now, and he could meditate on the larger themes while the recounting continued as an ominous undercurrent, churning him toward opinions, desires. He longed to leave this prison of stasis and inaction. Now, he knew he was Brenner and that meant he burned, and yet here he was a candle starved of oxygen where once he had been a bonfire. Inert, he churned, fueled by unseen power and the engine of his story… his purpose… his memories of those he’d loved… those for whom he’d sacrificed everything. He was not capable of feeling physical pain. He recalled it as if it were the caption to an unseen depiction, described but not felt. But anguish was a sensation with which he was growing surpassingly familiar. Wrath, longing, burning were his bosom companions as the story persisted. It always did, he thought… it always would.
But then the story stopped and again all was emptiness. Was he receding back to the void? Had Brenner become a being soon to be a thought soon to be a nothing? Had this entire exercise been as purposeless as Brenner’s terminus?
It was not into oblivion he returned, but to perception. Where all had been too imperceptible to even call blackness, now there was a vista to process. There were instruments, an unfamiliar room, but the faces… He knew, at a glance, who they were. Though the being had never laid eyes on them, Brenner had and he recognised them. They were not captions to portrait, the recognition was genuine. Two beings had become one. He was no longer distinguished from the soldier in the story by his lack of context, here he was within the narrative.
His focus rested on his brother, and he thought to speak. He expected it to come naturally, but he did not hear his own voice pierce the din of the room. He heard clicking and hissing and then a terrible din that seemed to cause pain to those who witnessed it. He felt no pain, still, not could he truly empathise with that particular sensation, but it grieved him to cause it to those he loved.
The room was darker now, but his vision was unimpeded as he looked from Stefan to Eitan, who began to speak first to his brother, then to him.
He thought to speak, and this time he did not expect to hear his own voice, though he knew he would recall it if he did. Instead, he heard the hissing and clicking as he shared in simple, uncomplicated terms, what thought had come to dominate his existence in absentia.
“I… BUUURN.”
The story began again, but this time the story continued...