Individuation (Part 1)

Did I just have the universe's dream? The one I'm being woken from? A faint chiming beyond the water's surface, pulls me closer, closer up; until I'm breaking through, gasping for air.

"Hey buddy, still remember me?" The voice is familiar, but the memory is distant. Caller profile says John Smith out of Phoenix, but I know no one by that name. The call's running through an archaic permutation of cyphers. Military.

     "I'm sorry, man. Memory's a little hazy at four AM … Smith?"

     "Ten years is a long time. I forgive you, Tomas."

     "Jonathan?" Jonathan Sidereal, the trance rock star, put away 10 years ago for fomenting a revolt amongst the Intros, or at least that's what they charged him with.

     "C'est moi."

     "You're out then?" We were friends, but not extremely close. And he was an Extro.

     "Aye, out, and with a favor to ask. You owe me, right?"

     "I do, but … how secure is this connection, Jonathan?" I was never brought to court, even though I'd unwittingly assisted him.

     "Very. Gotta keep it short, though. Listen, there's just this one thing. I'm going to give something to you, right now, for safe keeping …"

The song stuck in my head, an unlicensed--and likely surreptitious--thought; and, perhaps worse, not my own. He'd done it to me again.

     "When they scan you, if they ask, just say it's yours."

     

Here in the avenues of self

It's time to admit

The pain you've endured

Is not just yours

...

His words, now mine. But they don't make much sense to me.

Jonathan's release is big news. He's giving back-to-back interviews and then flashy live performances of his new single, written while in prison: I Can Feel My Heart Break. It's not the one stuck in my head.

     The pundits all spew uncharacteristically empathetic commentary, how they can understand Sidereal's dark turn. There's growing public speculation that he's turned Intro, that perhaps he's not quite reformed, which results in the Meyers-Briggs Council essentially forcing him to retest during a celebrity episode of What's My Type? He comes out as he always has: ENTJ. Safely, simply, "one of them".

Weeks pass otherwise uneventfully. My days to work and back become a blur, ferried, along with everyone else, in the endless, tireless cavalcades of self-drives. Contact with Intros is avoided like the plague, so I normally have a whole car to myself.

"Zajic," says my manager, a short, muscular man, slightly balding, with a London accent. "You're wanted in Health Services." And he gives me this queer look.

     Health Services is located in what's colloquially known as the Dungeon, the basement level of IntransiCorp's San Francisco sky-rise. "What did they want of me?" I asked him. And yet he wouldn't say.

     When an Intro walks into an elevator, a little red I pops up on the status screens. If there are any Extros on board when you get in, they'll be pushing the button for the next floor. It's a casual, eventual, pseudo-compassionate segregation.

     

"An INFJ, still." Cassandra, yes that was her name. A nurse I hadn't seen in Health Services before was now removing the scan-nets from my supine body, her long black ponytail slipping over her right shoulder to fall lithely across my exposed skin. "You have a beautiful mind." She was smiling with her brown eyes, yet her mouth remained solemnly poised.

     "That'll be all, Cassandra." The gruff voice I recognized as that of the lead Psychiatrist, Dr. Tiberius Cook, who had taken me on as a kind of personal project when I first started as an entry-level programmer at IntransiCorp.

     "As you wish, doctor." She turned abruptly, without looking at either of us, and white-shoe padded silently, elegantly out of the room.

     "She is something, isn't she?" Cook says, following her lasciviously with his gaze.

     "Yes, quite," I respond, sitting up, buttoning my shirt.

     "ENFP. Transferred from the London office last week. Lucky me. Anyway, Tomas, something new has come up in your scan. I've been asked to talk to you about it, the song?"

     "Uh, yes. My new song."

     "You're writing music now?" He scribbles anxiously onto his tablet. "Since when?"

     "Since two weeks ago, it just … came to me."

     Cook's face takes on a sternness, a seriousness that doesn't wear well. He leans in to whisper, "Tomas, you worry me, these lyrics do. I hope you realize this represents a severe regression in our progress. It's as if we're having to start over from scratch." He looked nearly crestfallen. "I've assured the Council this is a non-issue, you're a recalcitrant INFJ after all. They'll just have to understand."

So the Council knows about the song. Whose dream am I having now?