by Heather West » Mon Feb 12, 2018 7:51 pm
Having Ashlie's chassis to assist with processing this flood of information is tremendously helpful. Trying to do this through her phone or laptop would probably be a bit too daunting. It's still a lot, but going about it systematically prevents her from getting overwhelmed immediately and makes it seem doable. Spatial information first, it's something her brain is equipped to handle to some degree. Coordinates slowly resolve into a mental image, crude but she needs a reference, a framework to place all this data into. Looking towards the edges of it is disorienting and where the dimensional folding is strongest, so she turns her attention away from that. She can feel her focus sweep over the data and where it falls wireframes pull together from the noise, forming buildings, trees, birds, roads, clouds, sand, water. Once it leaves her immediate attention it dissolves back into raw data, a mad scrambled noise around the island of sense and logic. The more she lets her gaze pass over everything the more she gets a general idea of what this is. A city by the beach. And among it are... holes in the data, moving around. Grouped together in twos, threes, sometimes more.
As she's taking all of this in she's beginning to realize that she's no longer sure where she is. She has no body in this sea of data, her spatial awareness is gone, replaced by all of this. She's everywhere and nowhere, the only reference is where she turns her attention and without a body to relate it to it's very easy to just drift and jump around. A slip in her mental focus and she's in a completely different place in the data. Panic begins to creep in around the edges and with the panic comes the slipping, the lack of focus. She's spinning now, grasping at the whirlwind of locations around her. When you can see and be everywhere at once then where are you really? Human minds aren't designed to handle this amount of information, they need a point of reference to maintain a sense of self. An idea of who you are. A body, a place in the world. Here there is nothing but the endless spatial room unfolding in front of her. She is the data and the data is her. What in this being observing everything, trying to take in so many things and places at once, is still 'Natalie'? What part of all this is her? The only coordinates her brain is meant to process is what defines her body and it's location in the world, but now this is all there is. It's so much, but this must be her then. That's the thought her mind latches on to, the only conclusion it's capable of drawing. This is her. This whole city with it's impossible edge that stretches and folds into infinite space...
But before she can follow that thought all the way through to it's conclusion she suddenly hears a voice. Quiet, tiny, but insistent. Humming an almost ethereal music that demands attention. But not hers... this song isn't directed at her, it can't find purchase in her mind. It's resonating with Ashlie's body. The lens she's viewing all of this through. Reminding her of it's existence as the song defines it's edges and the intricate circuits inside of it. Suddenly she's anchored again, finds her footing in all of this. She's not all of this, she's just observing it through the receiver in Ashlie's body. She's in a holding cell in the Point and next to her Heather has jumped up, her hands on each side of Ashlie's head and humming to herself as her eyes flare bright yellow.
"It almost swallowed you whole..." she says quietly, scared but with a determination that seems a little beyond her age.