The Edacious Heretic

There's a saying in the Intelligentsia Guild: "A covered face is a symbol of wisdom." But unlike the rational self-restraint of a plaster head, the instruments on the scholar's head flash with danger and forbidden secrets. "They say she never stops performing lobotomies on herself, that she is willing to sacrifice her own synapses just to keep pace with genius." "They say she treats gray matter like raw meat, and her skull is riddled with holes from years and years of self-experimentation." She paid no mind to the whispers until she was stopped by some busybodies. They stared at the electrode conduits lining her metal casing, and excitedly demanded to know whether she had truly desecrated a sacred soul. The scholar let out a cold laugh. A mechanism opens with a crisp click that echoes through the halls of learning, electrodes flickering like a starry sky. Beautiful, branching structures unfurl within the incubator, thinking at the speed of light as signals race across billions of cells, carrying profound knowledge and inspiration. "Cowards. You lack even the courage to dissect the truth, yet you presume to teach others how to seek the boundaries of knowledge?" These were the final words she left behind amidst the rising waves of gasps and exclamations. Another 43,824 system hours later, the Technology Department welcomed a "pure" scholar. She drifted in a giant vat filled with cerebrospinal fluid, yet had connected herself to the darkest secrets of the universe.

How can a shallow dish contain a giant whale? How can a single mind hold "knowledge"? She gave everything for interpretation: Bloodshed is the lightest adornment, confusion has never been permitted to exist. Now the metal syringe rests in silence over there, its barrel coursing with ancient genes, holding secrets that transcend the ordinary. She had tested it on countless living subjects, but this time, she plunged the needle into her own artery. The moment the scorching essence surged through her veins, the world shattered into a billion flickering lights. She fell. Through layer upon layer of darkness, back to the primordial ocean of quickening life. THEY roared, crashing down upon an ancient land as the gods cast their colossal shadows from past ages across the universe. She "saw" it, the gondola pressing upstream, the Actor's mask torn away and flung to the ground. A tiny, insignificant speck, laughing and weeping all at once, charging toward "herself." The self was a beast, tucked inside the folds of the universe. Devouring, tearing, sobbing, savoring. ...Swallowing a full moon whole. She jolted awake, scalding liquid streaming from every orifice at once. She reached up, felt the crimson staining her fingers, then burst into laughter like a Fool: "So that's it... We must walk the path of regression. THEY are waiting for us there!" "No need for the petty confines of human intellect: Simply interpret what lies before us, and the origin of the universe shall reveal itself." She was certain she had glimpsed the abyss of knowledge.

At first, it was just an ordinary lab coat, something she wore as she moved between incubators and terminals. With each successive injection, those around her said she grew more and more aloof. She paid them no mind: There is no room for sentimentality when seeking knowledge. Then came the accident, deep in the night. She lost consciousness. The surveillance cameras captured only a few distorted frames, yet she knew better than anyone what she had done. The assistant had been hunched over his notes, logging data. Then, he looked up, his face frozen in horror. Tearing, spattering, screaming... ... Flee. She opened her eyes again. She could "see" thermal infrared. Her hands were submerged in some kind of warmth. She wiped her assistant's memory clean and skillfully reshaped his body, a trivial footnote among her research achievements. As for her own transformation... she had nothing to say. "To prevent any further incidents from disrupting the experiment's progress, have some restraints added to my lab coat." As she fastened the last clasp of her harness, a thought gradually crystallized in her mind: "This physical shell has become an impairment. The human nervous system was never meant to bear the weight of deciphering knowledge." "What vessel could bear wisdom?" A bigger brain... perhaps?

She rarely leaves her laboratory, yet her "footprints" cover every corner of the cosmos. Life always thrives more abundantly in primordial domains that teem with traces left behind by the ancestors. Vonwacq, the ancient Thestang tree: The remains of the leviathan must be nourished with the blood of the Rangers. Ahatopia, the realm of imagenesis: Flesh and blood must intertwine with the Phantasmoon. ... But as she gazed into the abyss, the abyss seeped into her very being. She still remembered that day, when she accidentally spilled a few drops of experimental reagent. She looked down, and the tips of her boots had split open into damp crevices, whose tissue was lined with rows of grotesque teeth. "Hungry... hungry... hungry..." "So hungry! So hungry! So hungry!" It wailed, it gnawed, telling her about its insatiable hunger. She knew who THEY were. She had used THEIR eyes to "see" herself countless times. This was THEM, she thought, wasn't it? Forever starving, forever wanting... "So hungry! So hungry! So hungry!" She smiled and locked it in a cage, listening as those ravenous howls slowly turned into pitiful whimpers directed at her... She has already begun to dream that one day in the future, even the mighty leviathan will offer up its knowledge in kind.