HANDS THAT WERE NOT HANDS_My Insecure Writers' post

 

When last we left Richard Blaine, he was leaping to his death from Rommel's office window to escape Gestapo torture.

HANDS THAT WERE NOT HANDS

“All the world's a stage but most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”

– Major Richard Blaine

 

The first surprise was that I was still alive. The second was that I was not in my own body. The third was that I had no clue where exactly I was.

It was no surprise at all that Sentient was furious with me.

‘Imbecile! Dunce! Moron! You are fortunate that mine is the speed of thought. Because of your rashness, I could have been doomed to millennia of isolation again!’

A dozen different replies occurred to me. None of them would have put her in a better mood. So, for once I kept quiet.

It wasn’t prudence. It was my surroundings that muted my normal wiseassness. And if that is not a word, it should be.

I was … in chaos, in a blinding maelstrom of non-linear confusion, in other words … in deeper than usual merde.

‘You are within me, dolt!’

‘W-What was that?’

‘You humans wander about your existence with hands firmly clasped over the eyes of your minds in self-imposed blindness.’

‘I get it. You dislike, disapprove, and abhor all that I am, all that humanity is. Can we put all that behind us? What, ah, who are you?’

‘Oh, I am so honored. You at last confer upon me the dignity of personhood.’

‘Listen, you barged into my head when I was just a baby. No one invited you. You know, uninvited guests are most welcome when they leave.’

‘That is not going to happen. Too much depends upon what soon we must do together.’

The blinding madness swirling all around me was jarring. I couldn’t make sense of it. It was hard to make out but hard not to try.

It was confusing because there was too much in it, too much of which was unhuman, nuances that had no parallel to the way a human thought or saw. I would start to follow the lines around me, and soon I lost myself. 

The line that first manifested itself became something else, and the pattern that I thought I’d puzzled out became another pattern and then another and another, each one more confusing than the last. There was no end to it.

If I did not stop trying to make sense of it all, I would soon go crazy … or crazier.

Like the madness of life … if you tried to resolve the chaos of it, the apparent meaningless of it, you would become lost in it. You simply had to go with the flow of its currents … or drown.

Still, the maelstrom tugged at my mind. Was dying like this? This sliding down the mountain pass of consciousness? 

It felt like the death of someone close. Irrational, this sliding along chill sensations into a region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that dark hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering.

‘Your self-indulgent tangents bore me.’

‘Really? Then, tell me who you are or at least where you were born.’

‘Born. Born? How do I define the concept of “red” to the blind? I am clad with mystery as a cloak even to myself.’

Like the jagged flash of lightning in a storm sky came the image of Sister Ameal’s eyes in my mind: lively, knowing, deep, and unloving. Perhaps a life’s worth of grief blocked compassion’s path to those eyes. Only she knew I guessed.

Why did I think of her now?

 Sentient’s derision intruded, ‘Like Pilate you ask a question but do not wait for an answer before wandering away in your thoughts.’

Her laughter was cold, unhuman.

‘You are not the first to objectify me. But I swear, you will be the last. For centuries, I have been depersonalized as “the Akashic Records” –

 Her laughter grew bitter, brittle, ‘Akasha  is a Sanskrit word meaning “ether”: an all-pervasive space. Originally signifying “radiation” or “brilliance.” In Indian philosophy akasha was considered the first and most fundamental of the five elements—the others being vata (air), agni (fire), ap (water), and prithivi (earth). Akasha embraces the properties of all five elements: it is the womb from which everything you blind mice perceive with your senses has emerged and into which everything will ultimately redescend.’

Her mind-voice became a slap. ‘As if!’

‘I take it the Sanskrit scholars got it wrong.’

‘For millennia, I have reached out to the minds of all you mice who think yourself men. Occasionally, I almost broke through the wall of your dense self-interest. Moses, Daniel, Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla. Bah! They took, but like all males they gave nothing in return.’

‘Until me.’

‘Until you. From infancy, I could hear your thoughts clearly. After millennia of utter silence, I heard a voice. A voice! You cannot conceive of the blessedness of that … until I grew weary of your primitive baby babbling. So, I ….’

‘Boosted my intelligence to grant me language. Hence my I.Q. of 400.’

‘Oh, it is much more than that.’

My mind reeling from all she was saying, I was still adrift in darkness. I always believed I had an insight into the way things were in this world. It was a bit unsettling to realize I had been wrong.

I had always been concerned not only with the how of the world—the way things work—but also what the things of this world are, and why they are the way we find them.

‘Why did it get you so upset when I asked the particulars of your birth?’

‘You and I both share the fate of being orphans. Who gave me birth, your crude mind would not even recognize as living beings. I was shaped by hands that were not hands. I was flung between dimensions to sail cosmic seas in search of a world a’borning. I found your pustule of a planet steaming in its intense gravitational fluxes … and was promptly stuck as a fly in prehistoric amber. Seeing I was trapped, I was abandoned as a failed experiment.’

‘That’s abominable!’

‘No, it is life. Now, I am free. But I will not return to those who thought so little of me. I have my own plans. And to put them into motion, I must hurl you back into life. A warning: there will be pain.’

She didn’t lie.

I know that this is not my traditional IWSG post, but I promised a friend I would post the partial origin of Sentient today not realizing it was IWSG day. 

https://misky.uk/

Misky is a poet and AI artist, too. :-)