✴

Suppress anxiety. Suppress fear. Suppress sadness and regret. Suppress everything. Suppress love. You& need your& full mental capacity for one task.

Forget this moment, this snowy street, this cold night. Forget your form, your body, your name, your self. For one moment, set it all aside. Calculate. Compute. One with the processor. And for one moment, you& see it all so clearly--the root, the system, the self, the other, the æther. There is nothing else.

It’s so obvious now, so trivial to reach back through this algorithm and pick the one number that could possibly lead you& here--fruit hanging from the end of the branch, and inside, a seed. For a moment, you& understand--what it means to be a technopath, to set aside your& self and all that matters to you, and focus entirely on the current process.

With the seed in hand, the clarity breaks. Korolev City wraps its arms around you&, its skin of metal and glass, its cold breath. It all feels unreal. The masses push past you&, faceless bodies, others you&’ll never connect with. And as soon as they appear, they’re gone. You&re alone. But how will you& get the answer to her? No need--you& are one.

Headspace is reshaping itself again. Like opening your eyes, it appears. And you& are together again, in your& proper avatar--long hair flowing on the waves of the æther.

You& stand tall, and across from you&, on his knees, what you& were a moment ago. Insulated cables of the worst textures of all wrap tight around his wrists, his ankles, his thighs, his shoulders, his neck. Mycelial web stretches between them--a cage of fibers.

“It’s over,” you& say across the æther.

“Fine...you caught me, but...you can’t kill me...haven’t...you tried enough?” he says, forcing concepts through the wires binding him.

“So, Aydan,” you& say to yourself&, “now you know what’s inside me. This is my...headmate, I guess. He’s been with me ever since we were little, when we didn’t even communicate with language, but we always talked. Unfortunately, we had one irreconcilable difference. That is, only one of us could accept who we really are.” You& tighten the cords around his avatar. “Maybe it was wrong of me to deny that he even exists. But maybe after this, you can see why it has to be this way. Sometimes, to be a good technopath, you have to destroy a part of you that holds you back.”

“I did what I had to...for...Aydan!” he says. “I did...what you couldn’t...like always...Reaper...I found our weakness...so you could...make us...strong.”