These kids obviously know more than they’re interested in letting on, but I’ll be damned if I can coax a word out of them, not a useful one anyway. Counting Hus, this makes six all up that have come from him … if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was breeding an army. Except that six really isn’t all that many if you think about it, (offset time! offset time!) and I doubt you could rely on them to find their own shoes let alone manage any kind of resistance.
Why are they all like this?
I’m not even sure I can describe it, not without breaking all the rules of sensibility, which I’m sure they’d all love to hear me say. This is the thing though: They’re all the same. Every one of them. They act the same, talk the same, work deeps with the same reckless disregard for their own souls and yet for all this … they are utterly unpredictable. At any minute of any day you just don’t know what they’re going to do next.
They’re mad of course, though in terms of help they’re all I’ve got right now. I can’t even begin to describe the stress I feel as a result of having to count on them, other than to say it has fatigued me far beyond my natural constitution. I feel like I’ve been awake for twenty-three hours a day. It’s like any second some new mania is going to come crashing through the pot-plants and put me through the wringer yet again and my only defence is vigilance. And then the world turns and time rolls on and in the end I’m destroyed by my vigilance.
So get rid of them, Trev! I know, I know. I think this all the time and yet every time I imagine the consequences all I can see is death or disaster. The fact of the matter is, every time one of these kids turns up we start throwing touchdowns, every damn time. I can’t do one hundredth of the things they can do — yes, they are insane, but by hell they’re efficient. So efficiency equals insanity, then … yep … that’s about exactly how much sense I’m making right now.
So I am a sacrifice. Christ that sounds pathetic, but my brain is at any length totalled. Listen to me! I’m being eaten alive by my own stress in order to poison that digital tyrannosaur filling up every last sector of the publics and even if I am in the least bit successful, what’s the end game anyway? Every time I do the math all I ever get is destruction and yet I’m forced to continually ask myself — is that all I’ve got? Well — that and this journal … still, if it wasn’t for this journal …
I started this journal to get things straight in my head, but the darn thing’s so long now that one end is sure to contradict the other. Which was exactly the problem in the first place! God damned memory. Memories are nebulous things, determined to resist the fate set aside for any regular factoid. Even when I commit the darn things to word I’m sure they try to move, just like the parasite tests back at the facility — you leave it for one day and the next day it’s different, changed. So we isolate the causes, then take sections for study and the section distorts itself in turn, as if trying to re-inflict its vitality. I remember Grey saying it was like solitary confinement, rifts appear through the brain like some sort of mercy and then … Calhoun.
** I just spent ten minutes trying to remember the exact details of Calhoun. I knew I should have done something even then, anything other than go along with it … but at the time it didn’t really seem salient.
Which is exactly what I said about my whole stupid journal anyway, one long line of words that mean one thing when I write them, another when I read them, and something else entirely to everyone else. You would think that there was at least one thing on this planet that would remain fixed, give us a bloody chance at understanding something … but no, no matter what I do, my access seems to become more random with each passing day.
It’s the parasite of course, I’ve devoted my life to freeing it and in return it has eaten me alive. It’s funny you know, it never feels like it at the time, it feels — just the opposite — as if I know so damned much that my brain has no choice but to purge. But then, how do I choose which things to forget?
Those times are always fuzzy anyway, but then, that’s age too isn’t it? Maybe … with everything I’ve seen I have my own doubts about age these days. But those memories are old, too — old and dusty — so old they feel like half-built theories rather than memories, but then, that’s time for you isn’t it? Backward and hunched over like me at my stupid pen and paper. I don’t know why I don’t just use the Gemini, it would be faster … what would it matter now anyway?