A Brain Needs a Host

The website was overrun with brains pumped full of the most savage noise. They were primed and ready to go, ready to infect the universe with their corrosive nature. In one sense their creations were frozen in time; in another, they were primed and ready to evolve in other brains. They communicated an infectious desire for self-replication, for becoming self-similar creations in other brains. They were brains that became software in other brains.

The people would come, I thought. I would make them come. Just as the brains had come, the people would come. Or would they...? A virus, whether disease or a brain needs a host, a space to occupy, and I had to find a way to make sure that those spaces existed.

Would people submit themselves to infection by noise and drone, art and brain? It was a question that bore asking, for if all of our work were nothing, there would be no one to receive the magic potion of brain-endowment. Who wanted a brain? For any spirit or such being that wished to become flesh, there was a brain that served as a go-between, and they were just waiting to take hold of...apparently nothing. Nothing yet.

But the statement had been made. It was haphazard and gaudy (intentionally so), but it had been made and it was waiting for hosts to come to it, to experience some of the most extreme emotions available to be expressed, to feel unimaginable fear, to be lost in dread, and only at the darkest moment to realize the nature of the journey. There was chaos rumbling in waves beneath the dirt, and it tapped into that primal unknowing, of being flung about, lost in nightmare after nightmare until the moment of self-realization.

Our brains were digitized, had been pulled from strange places, came from strange lobes, and bore strange news encoded within the streams of audio and images. We had a promise to loudly communicate, of freedom and a hidden order encoded in chaos, waiting to swarm the world with strange notions.

"Are you sure you are ready for this?" asked Crystalbrain.

"I'm as ready as I'll ever be," I said.

"I mean, what if there were surprises or traps, would you still be ready?" he asked.

"I guess. I mean, the worst that could happen is to feel the extreme limits of suffering, which I suppose would be pretty bad," I said.

"At least I'll be high on crack cocaine the whole time," said Crystalbrain.

"Whatever. Do you have anyone, I mean anyone who is interested in what we're doing?" I asked.

"I'm not sure that you would want to know the answer to that question, because it's probably, almost certainly, 'yes'," replied Crystalbrain.

"So, someone I wouldn't want to be interested in what I'm doing?" I asked.

"Perhaps you could frame it that way. Or perhaps you could frame it this way: someone is aware of your potential danger and is either worried or amused," Crystalbrain said.

"Which makes being hidden under layers of encryption important?" I said.

"I would say 'yes', very important. Your knowledge condemns you, but it also saves you. Such a strange paradox...anyways, I don't expect you to understand such things. Not yet, at any rate..." said Crystalbrain, his voice trailing off.

I had strange notions of the entire attention of the world being pointed at my humiliated self unmasked, with people expecting me to feel guilty and being surprised that the entire project was not something that I was willing to back down from and apologize for. It was time to do it.