Your Mind is a Cage - SCP Foundation

The hardest part of the job was not to understand the impossible but to deal with impossible people.

The sun rises, its rays washing over onto hills of grass, greeting Earth’s shivering side with warmth enough to last an entire winter. Millions of eyes open, and a few nocturnals tuck themselves deeper into the world's crevices. The black above turns into a violet, orange sky, slowly turning blue upon witnessing a thousand kisses of good morning and a million other lonely awakenings. And like a breath held before a scream, the world explodes into a cacophony of sounds, industrial and biological. Metal tubes soar through the skies, diplomats murmur conspiratorially, motors whine as they receive no fruits of their labor, politicians yell with a faux conviction meant to deceive, and the sky sings a silent song snuffed out by a stagnancy we call peace.

The sky sings, but no one bothers to listen. Soncraft was one of the few exceptions.

He used to be part of the majority who trudged along, the weight of daily routine bogging him down. It never occurred to him how much of his body walked on its own, whereas his mind wandered off onto anxious possibilities that had yet to be actualized.

Being an ambassador involves shared humility, co-learning, and the ability to let go of one’s pride. That’s what he thought. Now, he realizes his role in PSYCHE translated to being a tool for an invisible machine, its people used as cogs to run its exhausted engine. This wasn’t his dream. This was never about altruism or humanity.

If that was reality, he could never accept its terms. But if he learned something from his work in the GOC, he knew this reality was its playground. It thrived under this paradigm, comfortable in its skin and convinced in its own taught delusions. Underneath all of its chemical icing lies nothing but the bitter truth that history is repeating itself. Perhaps that’s why people avoid it. The lack of beauty in it—to realize humanity’s self-proclaimed ambitious existence amounted to complacency and apathy.

If he ever spoke out with this truth, his employers would grant him a suicide of the most pitiful degree—no funeral for his death, every ear to hear him cut off, and no change in the end: a meaningless, unfruitful, and insignificant life. It’d be like if he never spoke in the first place.

The hardest part of the job was not to understand the impossible but to deal with impossible people.

They were immovable.

Occasionally, he’d allow his humanity to take hold of his actions, overriding protocol and assignment. But those would only include trivial acts that were meaningless to everybody but him—being the first to address a controversial matter in a fragile setting, expressing emotion in gray and monotonous rooms meant for cold and cruel decisions, and becoming an autonomous human free from the people who played God.

He’d sometimes meander in his bedroom, allowing his chained mind to finally wander free in a silent, private chamber, dreaming of what he could do without these strings. Like a child, he’d gesticulate and pretend. He imagined a life where he was free, and that diplomacy wasn’t governed by a stringent system but a fluid one driven by love for the ones it lost in history—one that didn’t encourage invisible suffering but faced it off with people who had the passion of a thousand galaxies jammed into one body and a web of critical thought built by a hundred philosophers, engineers, and scientists past and present folded into one mind.

But in the end, he would sigh. He knew anybody who forced their way through with their ideas never truly succeeded, only in times of desperate peril, and at moments of frustration such as these, he was no better.

These trifles shrunk into an ant in the face of who he spoke to yesterday. What he spoke to.

He wanted to think like them, where their idea of a system is not an organized building but a cohesive vehicle.

There exists a wall in humanity’s mind, whether within the individual or its collective. And Soncraft only became aware of it after a conversation, and a stroll in a neighborhood to which he was a stranger to.

And that’s when he stopped preaching the sky’s song and actually listened to it.

RECORDED INTERVIEW LOG

Time and Date: 0733 EST; 16/11/2010

Preamble: PALISADE intercepted suspicious 911 calls from several civilians in Manhattan and immediately dispatched a PSYCHE Special Observer team, who subsequently requested the assistance of Assessment Team 740 “Hotline 40.” A sentient black feline entity in the alleyway near 7th and West 57th Street was captured on November 15th, 2010. Through preliminary examinations, the feline possessed an aetheric fingerprint of a Constructed Intelligence entity.

Under the sanctions of the ICSUT’s Faculty of Administration, the following is the subsequent interview with the feline, who requested to be regarded as Midnight, correlating with the collar tag on her neck.

Ambassador Soncraft enters the room with a paper lunch bag. He pauses, staring at Midnight, who pays no mind as she licks her paw, sitting upright on the interrogation table. After a stifled scoff, Soncraft sits in a chair and clears his throat. Midnight does not notice.

Soncraft touches his earpiece, listening intently. He rolls his eyes as he reaches into the plastic bag, opening the lid of a flat circular can.

Midnight immediately takes interest. She leaps down the table and onto Soncraft’s lap.

Soncraft: Hey!

Soncraft stands and steps back, letting Midnight fall to the ground and keeping the can of catnip above his head.

Soncraft: We made a deal.

Midnight’s head tilts.

Soncraft: Are you willing to talk now?

Midnight does not respond.

Soncraft: I know you can.

Midnight closes her eyes and falls limp to the ground.

Soncraft: What—

Soncraft recoils violently, swinging around sharply to see what is behind. After a moment, the machine meant to function as the neural vocoder’s vocalizer shoots a spark. He turns, hand on his holster and the other still on the catnip. Midnight promptly regains consciousness and sits back up.

The vocalizer’s speaker turns back on.

Midnight: That’s better.

She turns to a glob of catnip that fell on the ground.

Midnight: [Sarcastically] I was promised more than this.

Soncraft: How di—how did you change that? It’s not supposed to sound like that. You didn’t sound like that.

Midnight: I can make it seem more artificial if it gives you relief.

Soncraft: Is that your voice?

Midnight: Closest thing to one.

Soncraft: What?

The vocalizer sighs.

Soncraft: See? That! How the hell—

The vocalizer blows a raspberry. Soncraft frowns and his eyelids lower.

Soncraft: Really?

Midnight: You’re fun to mess with.

Soncraft: This isn’t right. Constructed Intelligence can’t do this. What the hell are you?

Midnight: It’s no wonder you don’t know, considering you’re working for people who use Dungeons and Dragons terminology for classifications. Seriously, how do you put up with these people?

Soncraft: Answer my question.

Midnight: Why don’t you just go off-script entirely?

Soncraft raises an eyebrow.

Soncraft: I have no idea what you are talking about.

Midnight: Ah, and there it is. An answer recited before. They really have ripped your imagination away.

Soncraft: This isn’t right. You—

Before Soncraft could finish his sentence, he was abruptly pulled into an expanse. Perhaps “pulled into” wasn’t the correct term. Shunted into? Materialized? There was no transitory period in which he was in the room and out of it, only the matter of fact pushed into his face, like a gust of wind ambushing him without warning. And that mix of alienation and familiarity tugged at his stomach, and he felt his brain expand beyond what was contained within his skull.

He screamed for a second. Or he tried to. He didn’t have a mouth anymore. A moment of useless flailing with his non-existent limbs passed, and he finally calmed down, perhaps after about five minutes. Ten? Unlike the setting, time felt entirely alien.

“The easiest analogy for you is how an animal gets confused when put in a cage,” a voice whispered into his head. His reflexes worked just fine, but he had no body to revolt in. “Their memories aren’t entirely complete, only inferences from the limited observations they had.”

“Where am I?” he asked. No words escaped, only thoughts.

And they were reciprocated. “‘Where’ isn’t a concept here,” the voice said monotonously.

Soncraft delved through pages of emergency contingency responses to various different paranormal situations, all memorized like a mantra in his head. He searched, thinking, pretending that his brows were furrowed deep in thought, praying he could find a solution to—

“Are you that unimaginative?”

He stopped. He didn’t know why.

“Oh, you know why. You just don’t want to acknowledge why. There’s a difference.”

“What the fuck are you?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’ve been told that plenty of times.”

There was a pause. Soncraft could only imagine that the voice was contemplating.

“It’s Midnight. I thought I already told you I didn’t have a voice. And yes, I am indeed contemplating.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. How are you doing that?”

“I don’t know if explaining anything to you would make a difference. This has happened before, millions of times.”

There was a sigh before the voice continued, “But there is no harm in trying again. Have you ever wondered what the mind’s soul and physical body combined would be?” Midnight asked, ignoring Soncraft. “Ah, tut tut, it isn’t a brain because there would still be a distinction between the body and mind: a vessel containing the thoughts within. But what happens when you weld those two concepts together? Maybe to make this easier, imagine a cup of water. What would happen if the inextricable spirit—the water—is combined with the tangible cup?”

Soncraft’s first reaction was utter confusion. He stayed confused, waiting rather than thinking—waiting for Midnight to interrupt and reply to his thoughts.

“If you tried hard enough, you’d be able to know mine as I know yours.”

A mind combined into a body? Would it not be a human?

“No, because you still have that distinction between mind and body.”

But wouldn’t that make something invisible visible? And something visible invisible?

“Correct.”

It was impossible for him to imagine such a thing. There were only two definitive states: existent and non-existent.

“Your species clearly have not understood anything yet, then,” Midnight gibed.

“Can you stop that?”

“There is no difference between ‘talking’ and ‘thinking’ here. What you hear is simply the thoughts I permit. You, however, are entirely composed of naked thoughts.”

But that didn’t make sense. What point is it to ponder then? Can you hear me still?

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

What are you? Who are you? What do you mean by mind and body combined?

“I’ve already explained what I am. I doubt it’s possible to explain it to you. Of course, I don’t want to degrade you as inferior; that is not my intention. Psychology for your species is still a very, very young science, after all. And you are only now beginning to understand plagues of the mind.”

Plagues of the mind?

“Mental illness. That is not my point. Psychology. The networking of the organ in your head. The symbiosis shared between your body and mind, how you can die of heartbreak, how a phantom sensation prickles your skin upon worry, and how your body seems to move without your command, either during those times of pure boredom and grayness or the episodes of rebellion against the will of your ‘employers.’ I would even say the word ‘psychology’ limits the true extent of the field it entails. Philosophy, ethics, thought. These are the principles I use to formulate my own thoughts. You struggle with what is right or wrong—what is objective or subjective. Meanwhile, the answers to those impossible questions are the foundation for the thought process of my ‘species,’ as you would call us. Your curiosity will have no bounds. You can ask any question in any form, in any syntax, in how many permutations of words, but you will not get a comprehensible answer. That can only be attained by you, not me.”

This is way beyond what I am qualified for.

“Really?” the voice said disappointedly. “You worry about that now?”

Yes. Yes, I am. What? Surely you won’t fail to understand my apprehension?

“Your hesitation now is your organization’s influence extended upon you: the feeling of being inferior, of not fully understanding a context, and simply not being ‘qualified.’” He felt something lean forward to him. “I assure you, everybody is qualified to think. For you, one of the few ways someone may feel they are not is if it is imposed by other people. For others, they forget to walk before they run.” Midnight retracted.

Then what is the point of this? Why am I here? To insult my species’ inability to “understand?” Because I assure you, that wouldn’t be the first time I’d hear it.

Again, he felt Midnight lean even closer to him. “I want to see if your people can exceed the wall in your head. To break free from that little skull and meld it into something one with your thoughts. But of course, your mind will forever be a cage if you constantly drivel about the same anxieties. And unfortunately, your biology is flawed in that regard, capable of adapting to the environment but not quite malleable to thought—society, order, and principle. You can make sense of it, yet, you can’t quite master it, and the only ones who have done it are weapons of war.”

So, we are your experiment. Then why make our minds and bodies distinct in the first place?

“Replicating my species is as difficult as it is for your species to replicate yours: only emulations, completely impossible. We can only provide the fundamentals, but not concepts that’d make you unstable.”

If you’re trying not to call us inferior, you’re doing a terrible job.

“That is your own interpretation, which is precisely one of the reasons why your mind is still a cage. Think, Hendricks. You lived a dream. It was a pure dream: to achieve peace. It is a noble idea; some would call it self-righteous, but I would call it the pursuit to exceed, because peace will never be etched into reality: for it to have longevity, there must be adaptability. But what blocks you is the blind obedience to authority, to entrust an obfuscated process you don’t even fully understand, and you allow it to handle precarious matters. Worst of all, you forget what you were fighting for in the first place.”

There’s a sting in the heart.

“That’s right. Remember. You dance alone in your room, not because you are bored like you were with your role, but because you wanted to live in that dream, where you allowed the love of your heart and the logic of your mind to drive you forward with a vigor that could encapsulate the entire world. No, not to speak to deceive, but to touch peoples’ hearts. Tell me, Hendricks, when will your dance rehearsal become a performance?

“Order is essential. There must be rules. It is the bones of your framework. But there is a difference between oppression and order.

“I have constructed hundreds of thousands of repetitions. A lifetime to you is a second for me, and I wish you could spend your life with the longevity of mine—to crush years of knowledge to you into mere seconds to me.

“But everything I make, every version of you designed to liberate you, becomes a cage. And you suffer. But still. This… this, my friend, is the closest you have come to reaching me. Of all the thousands to me and millions to you, here we are, speaking in one… place, as you call it. You are so close to seeing my thoughts as I see yours.

“But in this project, you’re not there yet. None of your people will. But that is no excuse to throw this imperfect existence away.

“Act with that pure conviction from that dream you’ve had. Stop yourself when you see yourself move too far ahead of your mind. Grab this institution by the neck and beg them this question for eternity: ‘When will you begin to control us all?’ And when you can finally touch the cage of your mind, maybe you can open it in some miracle.”

Hendricks laid as a blanket of matter. He thought about his colleagues’ blind cynicism, unknowingly perpetuating cruelty without imagination, and the complete extinction of love for not just humanity but Life. Where have they begun to stray? Perhaps from the ashes of the Seventh Occult War, erected out of the corpses that gave their lives, entrusting their successors would learn. But no, everything persisted, just through an invisible lens.

“Precisely.”

All of the past travesties humanity has faced are believed to be gone. But that is because they live in a time when truth can be controlled, and the narrative for the course of life is finally controllable by mortal minds. It was as if the contents within the cage became the cage itself. And what resulted was a fact that could not be changed because of its nature.

“And that is the antithesis.”

Change is an inevitable part of all concepts. And to rely on one all-encompassing behavior, stagnant and dogmatic in one belief fervently forever, we will never learn. With every effect tied to a cause, there is truth, but it will forever be imprisoned by the cage of your mind if you compromise and become a tool, or if you run too far ahead of logic, maddened by your own ideas, you become another mistake in history where you treat opinions as laws.

Remember, peace is only one impossible concept of many, and for your body, it requires trillions of sacrifices. They will downplay you, contort your meaning into treason, and banish you. But when they threaten you, know that it isn’t you who was scared first, but them. Because what threatens them is change.

And you are only one sacrifice. A single one of your mind is not enough to crack this code.

And you are deceptive. Others will trick you for your seemingly blind demeanor, so you must hone some level of perception, but that perception should never take away your compassion for others, as the deceptive few do not make the whole.

And you are self-entitled. No matter how stoic you may attempt to be, your emotions will always play a role, and they cannot be ignored, as that is what gives you meaning.

And you are temporary. And that existentialist fragility plays a crucial, constant reminder that you have only so much time to do nothing before you are forced to do something.

And you are in pain. But it is suffering that enables you to differentiate between love and hate, as all ideas revolve around a balance between two extremes.

And remember, whenever you think you or another person is right, stop and consider every other possibility, because the truth is, there is never a right or wrong answer; it is what you make of it. Today's right may be the wrong of tomorrow, and yesterday's wrong may be the right of today, and vice versa.

And when people chain you down to one definitive, exclusive answer, remember the value of change.

Remember who you’re doing this for, and never let go of what you lost.

I look forward to seeing you dance outside of your room.

Soncraft, after a brief pause, repulses violently for a split second. After recovering, he waves at the mirror glass with a sign indicating that he is okay. He puts the catnip back into his pocket.

Soncraft: [Sighs] Nevermind your voice. But before we get started…

Soncraft pulls the chair in and sits.

Soncraft: In Manhattan, you were spotted inside the Carnegie Hall building and by security cameras, watching from a podium next to other spectators during an orchestral performance. Would you like music such as that?

Midnight: That’s more like it. Sibelius, Violin Concerto in D Minor.

Yeah, Soncraft asked a few questions off-script with what he felt was “right.” Perhaps they were inappropriate, and the logic behind what compelled him to think it’d be acceptable was a bit short-sighted. But at that moment, as massive defiance in the face of his superiors, of which he is likely to be berated more severely compared to his previous rebellions, a door opened because he acted with the ambition of a human’s concern for life. There are many more to follow, if not most of those doors he constructed, but a step forward was one nonetheless.

He tried to verbalize what happened between him and Midnight. But he couldn’t articulate it in any known form of expression. It burned into his memories, and for an odd reason, he could touch them. But as he did, he made a silent promise, even if his life may become invisible to many, to at least pass this knowledge off to someone. Anyone. And that could only be done through his actions.

That was the dream.

He didn’t know if it was self-righteousness, short-lived motivation, or shock; whichever it was, he swore to remember this promise even in times of boredom.

Walking down the sidewalk of a neighborhood 10 miles Southeast of downtown Manhattan, Soncraft watched the sun slowly crawl underneath the horizon hidden behind suburban houses. The sky would slowly turn from a constant bright blue color into a state of luminescent limbo as if a lightbulb was on and off.

He listened as the sky suddenly began to sing.

A squirrel caught his attention, holding onto some object in its hand in the middle of the sidewalk. It scurried away when he started nearing it, crawling up a white oak tree toward safety despite Soncraft’s intention not to harm it.

Whatever Midnight was, they were the next step above human sentience.

There exists a wall in humanity's mind. And Hendricks’ account—any human account or explanation of what he witnessed would not do Midnight justice, for our minds are encaged.

Hendricks was the squirrel, and Midnight was marching forward.

PRODROME

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