Video. | pre-intro | Broadcast Mind.
You're awake, eyes open, but this still has the feel of a dream. The lack of certainty about how you got here. The strange proportions of the room. The crushing sense of loneliness - not depressive but a fact. You keep probing the spaces where you should find them like a missing tooth. The taste of the atmosphere is all wrong, fresh and cold and unfiltered with a bouquet of the unknown at the back of your throat.
The haze over the room is of light in dust motes. Simultaneously you find yourself considering the principals of refraction and cataloguing the three most defensible areas of the room, the places that an enemy could ambush, and you're searching for a clue to tell you which way real is, and you're remembering the way the light caught in the dust around the atmosphere of an outer planet and gave it an etherial glow. For a moment, that makes you happy, caught in the memory, but the rest of the jumbled tangle of string that makes up you and people like you catches up.
You scramble backwards. Back to the corner, nothing could be here you couldn't see coming. Bare toes curling in the bedsheets, crisp linen, of the flax. The walls of the room seem to be closing in on you, plaster and brick, barely anything to them. And there's nothing, nothing past the small space you're trapped in, a galaxy of lights impossibly winked out.
When did your fingers tangle in your hair? There are words, but they don't belong to you and you can't hear them, popping like soap bubbles in the mirror-fractured air. Throat feels raw. Fearstink. You're not ready to lose it all again yet. (You will never be ready.)
Can't let them hear you coming. No more probing, it's crowded enough in your head right now without every gorram peeping Tom pinning back the flaps of your experiences and readying the scalpel. There's a device on the table next to you. You have a good pitcher's arm, and the window is just a million fragile grains of sand.
Smash.
The feed cuts out.
The haze over the room is of light in dust motes. Simultaneously you find yourself considering the principals of refraction and cataloguing the three most defensible areas of the room, the places that an enemy could ambush, and you're searching for a clue to tell you which way real is, and you're remembering the way the light caught in the dust around the atmosphere of an outer planet and gave it an etherial glow. For a moment, that makes you happy, caught in the memory, but the rest of the jumbled tangle of string that makes up you and people like you catches up.
You scramble backwards. Back to the corner, nothing could be here you couldn't see coming. Bare toes curling in the bedsheets, crisp linen, of the flax. The walls of the room seem to be closing in on you, plaster and brick, barely anything to them. And there's nothing, nothing past the small space you're trapped in, a galaxy of lights impossibly winked out.
When did your fingers tangle in your hair? There are words, but they don't belong to you and you can't hear them, popping like soap bubbles in the mirror-fractured air. Throat feels raw. Fearstink. You're not ready to lose it all again yet. (You will never be ready.)
Can't let them hear you coming. No more probing, it's crowded enough in your head right now without every gorram peeping Tom pinning back the flaps of your experiences and readying the scalpel. There's a device on the table next to you. You have a good pitcher's arm, and the window is just a million fragile grains of sand.
Smash.
The feed cuts out.