Silence

There was a problem with my intent to spread the art of the brains across the Internet and thus into peoples' own brains: no one cared about what they had created. Yes, it was as if the world, at least in my mind, was ruled by the brains, but no one would experience what the brains had to say in a direct manner. More than being hated, I felt that the brains being ignored was intolerable. There was a horrible itch that needed to be scratched; until the brains were known and acknowledged, I could not rest.

There were various outlets for the brains, on archive.org and on Bandcamp they could be heard, with archive.org having the most extensive collection of brain-matter for the consumption of the public outside of undefinedlabelnoise.com, the site for "undefined label" itself. There was what I thought was a fairly impressive creation involving the brains as well: a distribution of the Linux operating system that was tailor-made for one to experience the art of the brains from a bootable ISO image file, so that the operating system could be booted on a virtual machine or from a flash drive if the ISO image file was burned to it.

Much time and learning had gone into the creation of the operating system, which was a modification of the community-maintained distribution Debian. I looked at how many people had viewed the page for the OS, and the number was six. I had no way of knowing how many had downloaded the ISO and experienced the operating system for themselves, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the number was zero.

Many things had been created, but they lacked an audience. The potential audience was billions, but I imagined that most people were too busy checking their social media accounts to care too much about the existence of the brains, or they simply did not care for noise music. There might have been a time when I would have felt scorn at people for their "ignorance" of the brains, but that was teenage stuff: I was beyond having an ego like that by this point.

It made me feel a little worthless to be ignored, but I knew that the potential amount of time that the brains could be remembered for their creations was very long. It was not inconceivable that they could be unearthed by some form of academia thousands of years in the future and put on some pedestal, studied, dissected, and celebrated. Who could know?

I looked at Crystalbrain and said, "You know, you probably don't give a damn but this is kind of important to me."

"My creations are important to me as well," said Crystalbrain.

"They are? I would have thought that only crack cocaine was important to you," I said.

"Nope, I really do care about the things I create, whether through my hand or through your hand. It gives me a kick to influence someone's mind. It's a bit of fun, but it's important that this kind of art is experienced," Crystalbrain said.

"Why is that? I mean, I agree with you, but what's your view?" I asked.

"The world needs to be made safe for drugs and sodomy," he replied.

"I mean, I don't disagree with you, but at least the drugs themselves aren't harmless," I said.

"They are for people like me," said Crystalbrain.

"What exactly do you mean?" I asked.

"I am a puppet, just as you are a puppet, and from the puppeteer I have nothing to fear, though you may," he said.

"I have something to fear?" I asked.

"There's always something to fear, for people like you," Crystalbrain said, then took a hit of crack and faded to black.