2HousePlague

I think that's always the same answer for everybody -- the worst one is the BEST one that's OVER.

This was one was REALLY SMART, and her morality was all her own.

I wrote this about her brain:


Brain Report: No. M-7

Subject: B****, S****** L***
Subject Gender: Female
Estimated IQ: 165-180
Subject Age During Experience: 34
Category: Romantic



The evident mechanism of her thinking did not evoke pictures of an anatomically normal brain. Instead of the usual materia gris (with all its lobes and hemispheres, corpuses and meatuses), her smallish and pretty skull seemed rather to house a creature of altogether inscrutable alienness.

I have no picture of my own brain. That is an impossible perspective. But the thoughts of others usually appear to me as flashes of light, as tiny "pops" happening all over the surface and interior of their brains. The greater or lesser intelligence of a brain is visible in the overall "liveliness" of the activity (the frequency and extensiveness of the flashing), and by the presence of eccentric and interesting sequences of flashing, which mark the unlikely paths of truly exotic thoughts.

Like none other in my experience, this subject's brain was of an order which seemed to refute and refuse any anatomically deconstructive scrutiny, and, more startlingly, suggested even the obsolescence of such an approach. The only "symbolic picture" of her mind I could see was both beautiful and terrifying, strange and emminently seductive.

Instead of a normal brain's pulpy grey mass, the inside of Ms. B****'s skull was, in my mind's eye, home to a strange plant-like florification, which extended from the top-most end of the spinal stalk.

"Plant-like" is merely a gross approximation of its physical appearance. For this was no inanimate palm frond, though it was branched and articulated to resemble one. The frond inside her skull was in perpetual, oscillating movement. And after appreciating this phenomenon for only a short while, I realized any comparisons to plant-life had become descriptively useless.

Alive, it rather seemed a creature from unfathomable oceanic depths, an unknown Echinoderm from pre-history (genus Gorgonocephalus), or a fabulous fore-glimpse of Evolution's future.

In the creature's movements, there was a way to divine something of the workings of her mind. For it was very much like a basket starfish, "blooming" events of contraction and expansion all over its body, which would then die-out in ever-smaller circles, within the clutchings of ever-smaller tentacles.

Stimulation came into her brain just as plankton comes to a hungry basket starfish, seeming to drift or shoot in from all directions, to be ferociously embraced and devoured. My words would fall into that writhing mass. And I could see them being so captured and consumed. At times, a fragment I had given would be taken hungrily within, only to be liltingly caressed for days by the smallest and most dexterous of her fibers. At times, my offering was rather like a fine dust I had blown over her, occasioning a blissful shudder which passed in waves over her entire body. At times, I simply sat and watched how this fantastic creature digested its food and distributed nourishment throughout its secret systems.

There seemed to be an ever-inward progression to this process of "consumptive knowing". It was fantastically busy, but in-fed by the cosmos' own musical pulses -- quite a marvel to behold! A machine enclosing a perpetual cataclysm of data.

I could see captured fragments of information being worn smaller and smaller by the worrying of the primary tentacles, only to be passed as smaller and smaller bits to ever-finer sub-tentacles. Grains of sand so became atoms, which in turn became sub-atomic particles, to be handed over to the next smaller size of tentacle, and disappear!

All of this seemed to have the capacity to go on forever. As if the fruits of her analysis and contemplation could never be exhausted. The more closely I inspected her, the more intricate she became. Every increase in the magnification of my lens exposed a deeper, more hidden, more indecipherable level of activity, along with the terrifying knowledge that I could go deeper still.

There is a way to see, even the simplest of things, very deeply. There is a way to apprehend phenomena, given to an almost apocalyptic tendency to destroy one surface, only to reveal yet another surface, and another...

It was this apparently limitless capacity to give attention, and to ceaselessly reap the benefits of that attention, which led me to describe the most salient quality of S***** B****'s intellect thusly:

She has "... infinite fractal curlicues of understanding."


j-

__________________
tada!