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Research on the Thought always suffers from the same fundamental limitation: No one who has had it can describe it. Every patient’s recollection is different, yet clearly each of them points toward a single thing. It is not an image or word or even an emotion; it is something that can only be experienced internally.
Maybe that’s for the best. Because if it could be communicated...
Researchers on the Thought take medications to suppress dreaming, after several colleagues apparently succumbed to it in their sleep. During their waking hours they practice a strict thought discipline, training for an average of two years before they are allowed to access primary source descriptions of the Thought. They meditate, they learn self-hypnosis, they memorize long blocking passages to recite to themselves if the Thought threatens.
Which is great for them. Meanwhile, out in the world more people are having the Thought every year and no one knows why. Especially because most of the victims never met each other. Is the world changing in some way that inspires the Thought? Is our way of thinking changing in a way that predisposes us towards it? And is there anything we can do to stop it?
In the restricted-access labs, a chime sounds every ten minutes; it’s unknown how long the Thought takes to formulate, but the intent is to disrupt it if possible.
The chime sounded, and Val flinched, realizing how far she had drifted into her reading. This was medium hazard material, the written first-hand accounts of Thought patients. Low hazard was circumstantial information about patients, their biographies before the Thought and their symptoms afterward. High hazard was video or audio of Thought patients attempting to convey the Thought. Maximum hazard was the patients themselves.
In the special nursing homes for Thought patients, the staff wear sound-canceling headphones. Patients are only permitted to communicate with staff and visitors through a simple picture board of 64 squares. Mostly “toilet,” “change position,” “pain,” “cold,” “afraid,” that sort of thing.
The last time Val’s mother had been able to recognize her, her message had been “visitor love love visitor sleep love.” Like a gorilla. Val smiled as best she could, and kissed the forehead where her mother used to live, and walked away, the headphones roaring static in her ears, afraid to look back.
On the bus home, most of the commuters had on headphones or earplugs. People listened to music a lot these days, or podcasts. Didn’t talk much to strangers. There was an app that replicated the ten-minute chime from the lab, if you wanted to put your faith in that. The numbers were unclear, but there was a theory that the Thought struck more often in people who had time to let their thoughts wander. Solitary prisoners and night watchmen.
Then again, just as many of the patients had busy lives and never showed any outward inclination towards woolgathering. Val’s mother had hardly been a daydreamer; she had raised Val by herself while working as a bookkeeper for a construction firm. At home she was a woman of simple tastes, enjoying her sitcoms and her KC Barbecue sauce and her crochet. Nothing a million other people didn’t do. But then one night, Val got the call. Her mother hadn’t paid the rent on time, and the landlord had gone up to check on her.
Ambulances don’t even take you to a hospital anymore, if you’ve had the Thought. Family members will beg them to check for other possibilities, maybe it’s just a stroke, what if it’s a seizure—but they know they’re grasping at straws. EMTs have seen strokes, they’ve seen seizures. They can spot the Thought at twenty paces. Val was glad she hadn’t been there to see it happened, but she liked to tell herself the EMTs had been gentle when they put the required gag on her mother, that they’d apologized and told her it’s just policy, that the music they blasted in the ambulance on the way to the home was something her mother would have liked.
The chime sounded, and Val startled again. She had been miles from shore that time. Dangerous stuff. She felt less afraid every time it happened, and that was dangerous too.
Her eyes refocused on the paper in front of her, and she forced herself to read instead of think.
Did the Thought remind you of an image?” the survey asked, and in jagged, almost childish handwriting, an answer was written below:
like an arc of light blue and white light
Did the Thought remind you of a sound?
like the tines of a fork scraping on a plate
Did the Thought remind you of a smell or taste?
like dirty ice
Did the Thought remind you of a feeling?
like a needle numbing a tooth
Val took her own break then, breathing deeply, shifting her gaze pointedly to the blocking passage she kept open for these moments. It was a long, dry essay on sheep farming in the British Isles. Breeds of sheep commonly farmed in Scotland include the hardy Cheviot and the highly productive Texel. The feeling passed. She imagined petting a sheep, the wool soft and greasy under her hands, and pushing her fingers down through the fleece, against the warm smelly body of the sheep, and finding safety there.
She still had a stack of surveys left to read. She was supposed to be taking notes on common features she found in the surveys, notes that she could later distill down to low hazard material and, hopefully, information that was safe enough to communicate to the public. Her thesis project was Development Of Public Service Announcements For Prevention Of Cognitive Malignancy, and it was just an excuse to get to this material. Not that this was some deep dark secret. Everyone in the lab was there for the same reason.
Not everyone had lost someone, but everyone was curious. None of them wanted to have the Thought, no one that reckless makes it through two years of meditation classes and sixteen hours of psychological testing, but they all wanted to come close. To think about the Thought, to imagine what it was like to experience it, without experiencing it. Tickling the dragon’s tail.
Sheep in regions with endemic liver fluke should have preventative treatments three times a year.
Val opened another survey.
Did the Thought remind you of an image?
silver fish scales very bright
Did the Thought remind you of a sound?
dentist drill
Another mention of teeth, Val marked down in her notes. It was a common theme in the accounts, along with references to metallicity and a sort of grating nails-on-chalkboard quality. But every survey respondent who was lucid enough to answer made it clear: the Thought wasn’t any of those things. It was just like those things. There weren’t any words for it but itself.
At the same time there was nothing special about it. It had no gravitational pull of its own, no viral apparatus. It didn’t feel any more involuntary than any other thought.
Working dogs are essential to sheep farming, even in the era of modern technology. The Border Collie is the most...
The first theory about the Thought was that it was a prion disease. Your neurons fired in a particular way that released a particular cascade of neurotransmitters that happened to cause an abnormal protein folding, which itself beget more protein misfoldings, which caused the neurological degeneration typical of Thought patients. Mad cow disease, no cow required.
But it wasn’t that. The brains of Thought victims, in biopsy and autopsy, were pristine. No spongiform holes, no neurofibrillary tangles, no lesions. The Thought was more insidious than that.
It didn’t damage the hardware of the brain, but the software. For every other subjective experience a person can have, there’s a mechanism for wiping it away. You touch wood and you feel the sensation; you stop touching it and you stop feeling it. You imagine a pink elephant; then you un-imagine it and it’s gone. Those circuits in your brain are freed up for something else now.
Except when you have the Thought, they aren’t.
The chime sounded, but Val refused to be thrown off track this time. She hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes, but that was fine, she hadn’t qualified for Medium Hazard just to be a stenographer, she was supposed to digest this material. She had her sheep, she had her techniques, she was still in control of her thoughts. She wasn’t spiraling towards the Thought, only making broad, safe circles around it.
Anyway.
Except when you have the Thought, they aren’t. Whatever neurons produce the Thought never reset themselves; they wear out their transmitting mechanisms within seconds, so the person isn’t continuously experiencing the Thought, but they remain locked in a self-contained loop, unable to perform any other functions.
The brain has a marvelous quality called plasticity; when one part is injured, other parts take over the function. Nerve pathways reroute themselves around a lesion and a stroke survivor relearns how to speak. If someone only had the Thought once, they would be fine. They might not even notice.
The problem is that once you know what the Thought is, you can’t stop yourself from thinking it again. As far as anyone knows, no one ever has. This is not some special neural quality of the Thought; it’s just how people are. Remember a few paragraphs up where you tried to un-imagine a pink elephant?
Don’t worry. The Thought is not a pink elephant. We know that much.
Once you know how to think the Thought, every time you remember the experience you think it again. And that locks up another bit of brain. And maybe now or the next time you start to feel a little funny, not ER-bad, a headache or a little trouble remembering the right words for... for things. And in horror you wonder if it was the Thought, and in that wondering you inevitably have the Thought again, and again, and it can progress quite rapidly from that point.
Since it’s impossible for one-time Thought experiencers to be certain whether they had the Thought, we don’t know the exact time from onset to death. The time from first symptoms to irreversible coma ranges from hours to months. There’s a theory that as the brain’s function degrades, it becomes less able to think the Thought, which helps slow the progression towards the end. Val’s mother had held on through a summer and the better part of autumn, though towards the end she could do almost nothing but move her eyes toward sounds. On Val’s last visit she had kneeled down by the bed and
chime
and whispered in her mother’s ear to think the Thought again, to summon it up from whatever memory remained her and flood her mind with it and end all the suffering, blank everything out, no more bedsores or boredom just brightness and metal on teeth and metal scraping on teeth and
sheep are
the arc of the light bends toward the right, patients agree, blue-white in a curve like a backwards capital C across the whole field of vision and
sheep are typically
Val hadn’t killed her mother, it was just words, who knew if she even understood
sheep are typically shorn in the
metal scraping between teeth
“VALERIE!” A hand came down into her thoughts and slammed onto the stack of papers in front of her. One of the other grad students in the room had seen her drifting and an instant later they were all around her, shouting her name, touching her.
“I’m fine!” Val snapped. “Just because someone’s quiet doesn’t mean they’re getting in trouble.”
Brendan, the one whose hand was still blocking her surveys, looked Val in the eyes. “Don’t lie, Val. If one of us goes down it’ll tank the whole program. Don’t do that to us.”
“I oughta tell it to you,” Val said, but she was picking up her things. “Tell you everything I know and see if maybe it clicks for you.”
“Jesus Christ, Val, don’t say that,” Brendan said. “You need to take a break. Go home, practice your exercises, everything you’re working on will be here tomorrow.”
Val thought of more things she could say to him, but if she didn’t say them she might keep her job, so she silently filed all her papers in the correct, hazard-labeled drawers before walking out of the lab. She even stopped herself from slamming the door on the way out.
In the hallway she tried to collect herself, leaning against the gloss-white cinderblock and doing the breath of fours, in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four, again and again while willing herself to think of nothing but numbers and breaths. This was stupid, what she was doing. If she made herself have the Thought it would be a waste. She would be just as unable to communicate it as everyone else. She would know, and die with the knowledge, and nothing would change.
The thing about psychological testing is, you can just lie. “Have you ever considered having the Thought intentionally?” Why, never, doctor, cross my heart and double pinky promise. I’m just here so what happened to my mother never happens to anyone else, ever. That’s a good reason, isn’t it? Now let me see those fucking documents so I can
So I can know.
When Val was ten years old, a squirrel got run over near her school bus stop. The other students made a big show of squealing and gagging at the corpse, but Val took a stick and flipped its soggy little body over to see the wounds better. She wasn’t a morbid child, it wasn’t the gruesomeness that drew her, only the burn of curiosity. Val didn’t like to not know things.
Even in the hallway, Val could still hear the chime. This time she let it wake her up. She put in her earbuds and the Ramones started in on “I Wanna Be Sedated,” fast and catchy enough to keep her mind busy. The playlist was infinite, the algorithm always finding another song, for safety reasons. Tomorrow she would apologize to Brendan, she would work on lower hazard material for a while.
Maybe the reason we keep hearing about people dying from the Thought, is that we keep hearing about people dying from the Thought.
On the bus, again, headphones everywhere. When there’s no pressing need to think anything in particular, there are two ways to make yourself Thought-proof; think nothing, or think everything. To think nothing takes intensive training and self-discipline, and it’s a fragile state, cracked the instant you become aware of it. The more accessible method is to simply fill your brain to capacity. If something is always beeping, always blinking, if you’re always listening to one thing and looking at another and flipping them the instant your mind does anything at all besides react—you’re safe.
The bus braked hard, enough to almost shake Val out of her seat, and she realized it was her stop.
Inside her apartment her mother was waiting for her in a blue porcelain urn on the bookshelf. Val had once cracked the seal on the urn to look inside, but there was nothing worth seeing in there. A heavy plastic bag full of gray powder and a stamped metal tag. The funeral home put in the tag to make sure they sent home the right person, because one bag of ashes looks like another. Then again, one bag of ashes is like another. Val’s mother hadn’t been a dusty little pile of calcium and phosphorus, anyway.
She had been sitcoms. Barbecue sauce. Bills owed and due. Petty office politics. Buying dollar store toys to leave as little surprises in Val’s school bag. She was ideas and feelings and memories, she was decisions and tastes and secrets. That was Val’s mother, who wasn’t in the urn.
Val’s mother was her thoughts, and those thoughts were gone now. Trying to find them was like asking where the light goes when you turn off a lamp.
But there was one piece of her mother that could come back. If Val had the Thought she would know she was experiencing exactly what her mother had, and in that way, her mother would be alive again. Everyone who had ever had the Thought was alive again in everyone else who had it. It may often happen that two people have the same thought in the same way, but for no other thought is there such certainty.
Val took her sleeping pill, though it was only afternoon. She had to take it before she could convince herself not to. She sat on her bed and started her exercises. The breath of fours. The candle focus. The recitation of blocking passages. She let herself be there, in that little bedroom with her feet dangling not quite to the floor, and in no other time and place.
And then the anger flushed back into her, anger that she had not only lost her mother but she had lost her self, that if she couldn’t think anything she wanted then what was she? She wasn’t Val, she was her fucking meditation instructor! She was a book about sheep! She was an endless stream of podcasts and playlists and mattress ads that could never, ever stop unless she was blank or sedated or dead.
Val closed her eyes and pushed her fists into her thighs and set herself free. She imagined the arc of light, blue-white-silver and swept to the right side of her vision. She imagined steel wires between her teeth, sawing back and forth and the sound that would make. The vibration in her skull. A guitar string in her mouth, being plucked. And at the center of all those sensory details the thing that was not sensation. A piss shiver of the mind.
Val opened her eyes, and nothing had changed. She didn’t feel any different. But of course, she wouldn’t. Not from just once.
Many people had tried to survive the Thought, especially when it was new. Medication and meditation did nothing, surgeons found nothing to remove. There was a brief period of hope, when electroconvulsive therapy seemed to push sufferers’ symptoms back, to wipe the Thought from their mind. By flooding the circuits of the brain with pure electricity, the loops could be broken, the nerves restored to service. And if the memory of the Thought could be wiped away, a cure was possible.
Possible, but never achieved. Patients relapsed from their cures while they were still in the recovery room. The electricity worked, it reset the neurons and wiped away weeks or months of the patients’ lives, but the memory of the Thought wasn’t an event, but a skill. You never forget how to ride a bike.
Val still felt fine, and then she had that feeling again, that same metallic shivering, the accidental bite on a spoon. And then again. Those were accidents but the fourth time she willed it. If she was dying it should be fast. The nurses estimated her mother had spent three days on the floor before being found. Her urine was brown from her body eating its own muscles. Val didn’t want that for herself. She wanted to see the light and feel the sharpness in her teeth and she would do it again and again until nothing hurt.
Her phone rang, and she answered it. “Hey, Val, it’s Brendan,” the voice on the other end said. “Things got a little out of hand today and I just want you to know, I’m not going to get you in trouble or anything. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Thanks,” Val said. Her voice sounded normal. “I’m alright. I appreciate you looking out for me.”
“You take care,” Brendan said, and he sounded like he meant it.
“I will,” Val said, and she meant it, too.
Her mind was still clear. Her voice hadn’t slurred. Whatever she had just gone through, wasn’t the Thought. Just some silly little imagination game. She’d been fooling herself. She was fine. She was safe. She’d knocked on Death’s door and gotten the wrong address.
When she hung up, Val started to cry. It wasn’t relief that she hadn’t had the real Thought. It was grief that she couldn’t. Her mother was gone, all those people were gone, and she couldn’t join them even for the cost of her life. She would never, ever, truly know what it was to be them. She could not bring them back in herself. She was alone in her apartment, and in her skull.