fallslikesnow

"Are you listening to me?" said the sheriff. "Are you under their influence still?" "I'm fine," said Jon. "Still woozy from what they hit me with. "And what was that exactly?" Jon had the sense that he was negotiating with a composite entity, the figures riding the sherrif (human and AI) communicating with each other through back-channels and summing themselves in the blank face before him. And he was going to have to negotiate, he now realized. There would be little trust for anyone touched by the Tessellation, let alone someone who had been as unstable as Jon had been. On an impulse he decided to not use his implants to control his easily read physical responses and then lie. He would tell the truth. "They did something to my memory. Made it larger, more inter-connected. Like the memory surgery we do only orders of magnitude more refined." He decided not to mention the fact that the Tessellation had implied that he had

Jon briefly lost himself in the new labyrinths of his mind - all these pristine empty spaces aching to be filled, this theater of memory with a stage recently expanded to the size of a river plain. How could he ever integrate this shimmering structure with the hovel he had previously inhabited? Then, of a sudden, his aimless search, a seamless flow through a multidimensional phase space of remembrance, came to a halt. In what he visualized as a room of blue tinted glass atop a high tower was an object that must have come at the same time as the structure itself. It was, of course, a torus of off-white plates floating in mid-air. Without thinking he reached out with hands made of pure desire and touched it. The new memory unpacked itself, rolling over his psyche with smells and tastes designed to root it deep within him. It fell upon him in an instant but his nervous system, scrambling to keep up, presented it's contents linearly, as though experienced by the tick of the clo

It was as though his mind, a familiar, run-down house, stuffed with miscellaneous bric-a-brac, had suddenly revealed itself to have rooms, entire wings, of which he had been unaware. Doors appeared where none had been before, windows that had previously opened on the gentle hills of the body now showed dusty warehouse spaces. What made it awful, unbearable, was the emptiness of the rooms. For a moment he saw himself wandering these places, overcome by an urge to weep as the rush of blood in his ears reverberated, layered upon itself to produce a mighty roar. He felt his consciousness grind to a halt, unable to process such a sudden vastening. *** He woke, minutes later, lying on the ground with blood streaming from his nose. The bush robot, fully expanded into a shimmering cloud a meter and a half across, was beside his head and producing a strange warbling cry. There was no sign of the Tessellation artifact. "Do not attempt to move. You have been subject to an unmediated Tes