Hardwired

[Fairchild]

Chapter 10: Minds

He walked around a garden. The fabricated constellation looked as real as he wanted it to be -- almost like a lucid dream. He approached a tree and plucked a leaf from one of the lower branches. It looked unnatural. He focused and the leaf started gaining detail, the small veins running through the green tissue.

He pondered something that he'd only realised shortly before, and yet it fascinated him ever since. He knew -- obviously -- what his own mind looked like and how it worked. His imagination worked in a specific way, in a mindset rather similar to that of a scientist. He was able to think creatively, picture mental images vividly and accurately, without much effort. In this way, he concluded as he looked around the garden - a creation of his mind, no less - that his mind was almost like a cloud of aether, out of which he could create anything he wanted and he remembered.

But then, he thought, inevitably he spent a bit of time in Pincoya's head. And hers was wildly different. If his was a cloud of aether, hers was a network of strictly connected points of reference. He remembered that once, during his research for the constellation, he asked her to picture a ship. While his mind would likely just jump to, indeed, an image of a spaceship, hers connected all points of that mental network to do with ships. It was a mental image, as well, but of a much different kind.

They were both strange this way, learning about each other more than they ever could in any other way, knowing more than the most intimate of lovers.