A Swim In Grey Cells

[Images 0]

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.

- Emerson Pugh

 

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Have you ever had someone crack open your skull and take a look at everything inside? At all the electrical impulses zipping around, at all the thoughts bubbling up in your brain, at all the memories floating on top of it all like fog? No? Well that’s how Victor Images felt when a Vulcan security officer mind-melded with him.

 

It wasn’t painful, not in any normal sense, if anything there was a sense of extreme numbness with intermittent flashes of shock. It was almost like a surgery, the doctor reflected afterwards as he sat alone again in his cell. The outer layers had been peeled away and everything within had been revealed to carefully move through. Now he felt dazed, like stepping out of a boiling hot steam room into a misty shower of cold water and even then, that metaphor didn’t begin to describe it.

 

At first Victor had tried to fight, tried to keep V’Ran out of certain memories he knew the Vulcan would touch on, his painful experiences back on Kambana 6 for instance, but every attempt to resist hurt and it was just easier to let the officer probe.

 

There was something so strange about letting someone dip inside your brain. Betazoids had read his mind dozens of times but compared to this, Victor knew they weren’t even in it up to their toes. He had researched plenty of times on empathic behaviour and knew what occurred physically and mentally but never in his life had he known what it actually felt like. Nothing could have prepared him for it.

 

Something else was peculiar as well. During the meld, Victor had seen pictures, heard sounds, recognized tastes, felt sensations and breathed in scents that he knew were not from his own past. He knew that it was common for the target of a mind-meld to gain some insight into the thoughts of the person doing it but everything he had got was jumbled, confused, and incomprehensible. It was like getting a billion movies, cutting one frame and one sound-bite at random from each one and then playing them in no-particular order.

 

Victor, leaned back against the cell wall and contemplated. The dizziness was wearing off and he began to think clearer. Now that he had gone through with this bizarre experience and Lieutenant V’Ran had gone away to file his report, there was a chance his innocence was proven and he could soon get back to sickbay.

Edited July 6, 2005 by Images