He didn't know how much time had passed. He didn't know what had happened. All he knew was that, suddenly, something was drastically wrong. He tried to figure out what it was, what had brought his barely functioning, overwhelmed mind to such a level of concern, but he couldn't figure it out. Couldn't identify it. He was surrounded by a overwhelming flood of sensation and information, so much that even the effort to try and discard some of it seemed impossible under the strain of maintaining his sanity. He could see the night sky, a brick wall, the inside of a bird's guts, which were trying to dissolve him but utterly failing, a car, a passing person, a flickering street lamp, a phone line that seemed to stretch out into infinity beyond him. He could feel the ground, so many different grounds, all at the same time, rough and smooth, greasy and oily, dry, waxy, spongy, damp with morning dew. He could hear the wild whistling of wind through the alley, something digging through a garbage can, the frantic beating of Andy's heart, a car rumbling past, someone's sprinklers, and the drip of water as the excess ran down the street and into the sewer.
He would have thought it would have sorted itself out by now. He remembered those talks about the mind from high school, how the human brain naturally dismissed things that became unimportant as time went on. But, hadn't he just said that? He wasn't a human mind anymore. He thought he'd adjust, thought it would get easy. Maye he had miscalculated. Maybe it simply wasn't possible to process that much information, and only pick out the important things.
Andy's heart. It shouldn't sound like that, should it? Heart beats were supposed to be low and smooth, constant, rhythmic. This was wild, unruly, desperate. What was... What was going on?
He didn't know. He could no longer even pick out which part of himself was within Andy, let alone tell what was going on there. Yet Andy was in danger. He knew that much. There was no telling whether it was an internal or external danger, but Andy was in danger. He found it almost impossible to believe that Altman's people had found him, not when he was stumbling around, so randomly drunk. But that didn't mean that someone or something else couldn't find him. That would be just like Andy, to get himself in trouble when he was in a situation where he should have been perfectly safe. Just like him.
But what... what would happen now? He needed Andy. After so long alone, so much time thinking that there was nothing left in him other than things that could destroy, could wound, he'd found Andy. He'd protected Andy. He'd healed the gunshot wound in his side, and dedicated his existence to removing the threat to Andy's...
No. Andy was bait. Just bait. That was it. But his bait would do him no good if Andy was in the hospital, or somehow otherwise incapacitated. Then it would be too easy for the wrong people to get close.
He couldn't bear the thought that something might happen to Andy.
Desperately, he tried to gather enough of his will to destroy some of the pieces out there. If there were fewer, he'd be able to pinpoint... but no. He couldn't tell which piece was which, and what if he accidentally destroyed the one inside Andy? Then there was no way he'd be able to save his friend. He couldn't risk it.
Desperately, incoherently, he tried to sort through the fragments of himself, find the right one, turn some of them off temporary, anything to make it easier for him to get his mind back to Andy. But he couldn't. He couldn't do it. Just like that first moment, when he'd shed his body, when he'd known he was different, and that he could use that, but it had never, ever done anything the way he had wanted, and the scientists had plucked and pulled and pushed and hurt until finally he'd just snapped.
Andy's heart rate, already dangerously fast, skyrocketed further. There was no time. He had to do something. He reached out, desperate, pushing, further...
It felt like his mind ripped in two. He remembered the first time he'd been punched when he'd joined the marines. The man hadn't held back at all, and he had been left, crumpled on the ground, puking. This was like that, only much, much more visceral. But the tearing didn't stop there. Each half ripped again, and then each quarter ripped again, and again and again and again. Thousands of fragments, millions of fragments, billions of fragments, so many fragments that it was impossible to put number to them, ripping down smaller and smaller towards infinity, until each was nothing but a pinprick of thought in an eternal void.
And then, they began to weave back together.
It was not like it had been before. Then, his mind had been a complete, unified whole, seamless and pure. Now, though, each of those seemingly infinite pinpricks of thought stayed unique, but they wove back together to create a whole. It was like cells in a body, atoms in a molecule. It was a mind that mirrored the foundations of nature.
He had long ago been forced to release the notion that he had a single body to define his identity. He had clung to that notion for a time, even once he had shed that first body he had called his own for 22 years. He couldn't imagine himself still being himself without a single body to define his identity. That notion had been violently ripped away when the scientists had destroyed that body they had tormented so much, and he had grown another from that scrap of himself he'd left behind before beginning his escape. He had comforted himself with the knowledge that his identity was still intact. Even when he had multiple bodies all working actively, one had always been the "true" him.
Now, even that notion was ripped away. Those points of consciousness that had woven back together into a mind had scattered to every fragment of himself he had left, wherever it might be. And each and every single one of them was him. Not just in essence, because he could grab it or control it. But because he resided there. Each one made sense, each one was independent yet, at the same time, part of a unified whole. He could make some simpler, leaving them with nothing but a trace of his identity to mark their existence, he could make some so complex that they far exceeded the intelligence he had before, when he was all one mind. When he was still limited to the human concept of mind. Each one was him. All were him.
And him? What did that make him?
"Jack?"
Jack? Jack? Was he still Jack? Jack no longer had a body to call his own. Jack no longer even still had a mind to call his own. Could such a thing still be called Jack?
Yes. It could. Jack couldn't say why he knew that. He knew it in the same way he knew where each piece of himself was, knew it in the way he knew how to move those fragments, how to construct and destroy each piece at his whim. It wasn't something that was truly known, but was something that was felt, was understood, to be true and right. He was still Jack. He no longer knew what defined him as Jack, but maybe, just maybe, no definition was needed. Maybe that attempt to define it had been holding him back all along. Maybe if he had figured that out sooner, he wouldn't have needed to endure those three months of torment. Maybe, if he had figured that out sooner, he would have been able to return home, unbroken and free of twists and marring.
But there was no point in looking back. All he could do was move forward. Right now, Andy was in trouble.
