from The Epistles to the Permutive
Allele's perception of worth, responsibility, and interconnectivity with humanity was informed by the Array. It gave the undefinable "gut" element crucial in determining her every action, and decision. It was the shadow behind every opinion, hope, fear, and a plethora of other emotional and rational needs any individual must have to feel whole and function effectively.
A secondary system within the Array was a sensitivity mesh that, on a subconscious level, interconnected every one of the five hundred seventy-two thousand human entities that always had and always would inhabit Europa. These primary and secondary systems combined to imbue individuals with their sense of empathy and compassion. Nobody ever felt totally alone or neglected. Disconnection from the Array is what Harry meant by the use of isolation units.
If Allele were brutally honest with herself she would admit that her initial reaction to Harry's news was delight, but the gravity and danger involved smothered that excitement. Even as a child the idea of being set loose from the array seemed a grand adventure where she might explore new inner truths and invent some revolutionary philosophy to uncover a new way to live, love, and perceive the world.
As she grew, discovery placed less of a roll in her fascination with the idea. To simply be alone grew like a pearl of desire in her ego. As life was she could only shut her comms and her door during the high holiday, that inner sense of connection to the community could not be escaped. It ground on her own sense of self. Its nurturing quality became cloying, its beneficent intent resented. She could not understand how everyone else she knew could go about day to day content in knowing they were continually and inexorably tied the rest of the human race as if by...another one of those words...a leash.
It was because of this inner sense and the desire to escape the depression they produced that Allele so vigorously threw herself into her work. Distracting her attention with the extraverted nature of embarking on an enterprise. The study of things outside herself, different from herself, and unknown could come close to drowning out the noise of connectedness. Anthropology was the natural career for her. She could devote her entire professional attention to social and cultural differences within the population at present and as it changes with generations. She hoped that by studying past trends and mores she could develop a schema to predict future change. Certainly a useful tool to predict and possibly avoid repeating destructive downturns like those suffered in the past, but for Allele it was also a way to gain some control of her nemesis. Another phrase...vive la différence...there were many in connection to these feelings. She longed to live with change and the prison she felt within grew tighter with time.
Allele's social life was even more dictated by her frustrations and depression. She had few friends, mostly professional colleagues. The strongest social impact was her inability to maintain a long term love interest. She gained several reputations depending on who was asked. She was seen as everything from a tease, a femme fatale, heartless, damaged, an eater of hearts, or simply toxic. For one thing her obsession with her work always drove a wedge in her relationships. The men and women who managed to draw out the lust in her felt tossed around like some belonging that she only payed attention to when it suited her. They would hear nothing from her for days even weeks when suddenly she would appear at their door wanting them immediately. Her love making was furious as if filling a long dying thirst.
She ruined her lovers. They quickly grew addicted to her. She was never the same twice with them, always finding, deeper, agonizing intensity, in which to submerge their involvement. It was her lovers who fell back exhausted, never Allele. She made repeated attempts and demands to bring them back but she could never finish in her core. No matter the number, longevity, or intensity of the explosions they managed to trigger in her she found her self wanting. She would sit in a chair in the corner of the room, watch her lover sleep, and feel empty. Something was always missing.
Once she tried for a lasting relationship. They played house, her lover was a historian, Magdalena, who also had a deep passion for the holiday of Europa's Tear. They spent most of their time at Allele's home. Magdalena was naturally beautiful and rarely bothered to enhance her appearance. Allele found that honesty refreshing, though she wished Magdalena did it for its honesty and not through arrogance. They'd sit for hours talking about the vista from Allele's patio and usually ended the night making love on the patio's stone floor.
In the beginning they never ran out of things to talk about, their words punctuated with light strokes, the squeeze of clasped hands, and a close examination of the eyes just before kissing. Allele was awed by Magdalena's self confidence, but as time went on she began to see that it came, as with most people, from reliance on the sensitivity mesh of the Array. Eventually Magdalena's gaze felt like being staring at by the crowd.
Finally one night instead of going home Allele went into the city, found an orgy, and put herself in the center of it. When they were at the height of their frenzy she called Magdalena and made her watch. Later, she went home to a trashed and empty house, but felt free. She promised herself she would never do that to another person again and avoided romances from then on.
That night she'd found a side effect she hadn't expected. She felt best in the company of strangers, and not just sexually. She began spending more time in public where her separateness and anonymity in a crowd made her feel less smothered. Attended sports events that she had no interest in, Struck up light conversation with strangers in cafes, went to dance halls, slept with no less than three lovers at a time. She kept her personal life private. Neither Jon, Lepton, nor Sita knew anything of her forays into the night city.
Despite its far reaching effect, Allele failed to see the connection between her personal social preferences and her obsession with individualism which she thought purely intellectual. Thus her intrigue with being isolated was quickly buried in her subconscious, which distracted her with an inordinate concern for the dangers her team would face, and the dangers were real and many.
An archeological dig the scale Allele and her colleagues were planning would mean regular severance from the array over the course several years. Physically, severance was a simple matter of removing the team's Sensience monads from their individual pneuma interpreters that linked to the Samsaric array within Ministry. First the internal link to the pneuma interpreter and the external link to the individual's Somentity (Somatic Entity) interpreter that spoke to Ministry's planetary blanketing system, located on the opposite endcaps of the monad needed to be bypassed with a transfer pack. To accomplish this the pack was attached to secondary linkages on the sides of both of the monad's endcaps.
The transfer pack was referred to as the "Waiting Room" since it supplied a temporary virtual sense of soul that, though limited, kept the subject being removed from losing all cognitive anchoring. If that were to happen the subject might not be able to be reassembled leaving them a virtual non entity. Once attached a release button was pressed, and the monad would rotate free of its mount with a click, to be installed into a multiple isolation billet, or MIB unit, with the other monads of the team, and use mobile onsite projection towers to establish themselves at the rift.
Allele and every other human being on Europa was an expression of their individual monad. A monad was no larger than a typical thumb yet an individual's entire conscious and sub conscious mind was held in only a portion of it called the chrysalis. In addition monads held and executed the functions associated with complex Somentity templates along with the Skein encoding that entwined physical and mental, that she would think of as being herself. What was once called the Id and Ego, the matrices that constitute knowledge, wisdom, emotions and their triggers, as well as her memory algorithms, all resided in the chrysalis portion of her sensience monad.
Her physical characteristics were also incorporated into her monad. Her base characteristics acted as a filter through which all interaction with the outside world was expressed and interpreted, passing data to and receiving from Ministry's Somentity interpreter. The interpreter transferred her every gesture and desired adaptation of her physical appearance to her Somentity projection within the planetary blanketing system while providing persona entanglement synthesis, or PES, so that she had the sense of living inside her projected Somentity.
When Allele eventually reached maturation she would be decommissioned and her sum experience and developed acuity would disassemble and her saturated building blocks would be incorporated into her core family ancestry that would provide the primary templates for future tenants of her monad and that of her two siblings.
Right now she was looking at the possibility of that never happening, and the decision to allow herself to be transferred to an isolation unit meant that her family could be reduced to two monads if something went wrong. Her mental safety, her monad's safety, her very existence would depend on the competence of Ministry technicians.
Of the many technical dangers it was Pareidolic Dementia that worried her most. Although isolation units incorporated synthetic samsaric routines that acted as surrogates to assuage the need for connectivity and spiritual depth, they had their limits, and extended reliance on them took a toll on the psyche. Without real archetypes and existential paradigms the mind would begin to fabricate them on its own, interpreting the chaos irrationally to find motivations and moral strictures to fill holes in the soul with belief systems that made no sense. If left indefinitely Pareidolic Dementia could do permanent damage becoming full blown Pareidolic Psychosis. These concerns were very much on her mind as they were at the heart of her secret obsession. She left Harry's office to find Lepton still waiting for her.
Lepton. she should marry Lepton, she thought, and live happily ever after. "Can't keep away from me can you?" she said teasing him.
"Not when you do such a good job of keeping my future in your hands," he answered.
"Don't kid yourself, you don't mean that much to me, but if I decide to accept this project I'm going to need a good Archaeological team, and you're handy."
"I figured my job was secure. I see they simply want you to head the team," he said, then realizing what Allele said, added, "What do you mean, 'IF' you decide to accept?"
"There's a lot I don't like about the plan. Not just your diminished involvement," she answered.
"Like what?"
"To start, no blanketing at the site. We're isolating. Mobile Tower projectors, zip braces, the whole bit." They'd been standing in the middle of the empty waiting room. Lepton sat down. He didn't look for a chair but sat on the end table behind him.
"I did that once. It's no fun."
"I can imagine, and with a project like this..."
"...it's going to be slow going." Lepton interjected.
"Yes," she acknowledged.
"Well, where do we go from here?" he asked, slapping his knees.
"I want to bring our people together and go over this at length. I don't want to break up my team over this and I don't think you do either. If we can all talk it out together I think everyone will be on board. The sooner we start the better."
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