Chapter Text
I am not afraid of death, Miles writes in his head, eyes widened as he looks into the face of decomposition. About to be killed dead, and his fucking mind snaps back to its traditional narrative style, as though he isn’t going to putrefy in Mount Massive. As though he’ll get the chance to put these thoughts down on paper someday. As though he isn’t stepping through rotting corpses right now, heels wet with humanlike fluids and clumps of skinrot.
Knowledge is not a thing. It’s a shape:
A trail of synaptic pathways, somas and axons and dendrites reaching for other bodies. Knowledge is the path carved out by neurotrophic factor in my gray matter.
When I’m under the ground, the spores will eat me, and all the knowledge I’ve acquired will be absorbed into the earth. Somewhere, if I’m lucky, maybe a fungal mass will grow in the same configuration as one of my neural connections, its body reaching for the truth.
I am not afraid of death, he tries to reassure himself. There are no individual people. (Just masses. Under my feet).
Humanity occurs over and over, the same way, across billions of bodies. The songs we play today reach for the literature we wrote centuries ago. They map onto each other. We are reoccurring / I am excessive / I will not be pruned. I will happen a million more time. I have happened a million times.
But when Miles does get out, he never ends up writing any of this down. He barely even speaks of the memories from Mount Massive.
In the asylum, with death stretched across every tile, his heart beat frantically with terror despite the words being recorded by his head. He did not regard his demise as flippantly as he tried to persuade himself.
In that time, Miles would have sold every square inch of his humanity just to stay alive.
And Waylon… well, Waylon would have bought it all.