Who Lives Inside Your Head

On the seventh day Hiero arrived, and everything got considerably worse.

In a particular sense: nothing broke, nothing exploded, nobody was hurt (physically). It just got uncomfortable. Like when you’re sitting in a warm bath and someone opens the door, and cold air drifts in from the hallway, and you realize the bath isn’t a room. That beyond it—there’s a world. And it isn’t warm.

Hiero opened the door.

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He appeared at breakfast, without warning or a knock (nobody knocks at the Academy — either tradition, or provocation, or the doors here work differently than in the world I grew up in). He just walked in — tall, Black, wearing something I’d describe as “an expensive tracksuit, if expensive tracksuits were custom-tailored for people who look like they could kill you with a smile.” Bald. Broad-shouldered. Wide grin — and one detail that snagged in my peripheral vision: he blinked half a second slower than a normal person. Notice it once — you can never unsee it.

First thing I noticed: he filled the room. Perceptually (the room was already big — or seemed big — folded space, remember). When he walked in, everyone else became background. As if a stage footlight had been switched on in the room and pointed at him alone, and the rest of the light dimmed by half. Wei Lin next to him looked like a shadow. Because Wei Lin is silence, and Hiero is an orchestra. Loud, brass, hitting you right in the solar plexus.

Second thing I noticed: Artyom’s knuckles had gone white. He’d clenched his fists and didn’t unclench them the entire time Hiero was in the room. Professional reaction: the body identified a threat before the brain could classify it. (The body is smarter than the brain when it comes to survival. The brain thinks. The body — knows. The brain deliberates whether to be afraid. The body is already afraid and calculating an exit trajectory. This is roughly why scientists are bad in fights: they give the brain too much of a vote.)

— Good morning, — said Hiero. Voice—deep, velvety, with a slight accent that could have been French or could have been something else entirely. — I see you’ve already been fed. Wonderful. Hungry people think poorly. And you’ll need to think a lot today.

He sat down. To the side, next to Kira (the head of the table was Wei Lin’s seat). Kira edged away slightly. Involuntarily. The way you pull back from fire: because it might be hot.

— My name is Hiero, — he said. — I’m a mentor. From the other ones, — he nodded at Wei Lin, who sat silently drinking tea (naturally). — Let’s put it this way: if Wei Lin teaches you to see, I teach you about what looks back.

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Here I need to pause and talk about fear. Not the kind where you’re scared (that’s simple: adrenaline, racing pulse, urge to run). But the kind where you’re fascinated and scared at the same time. That’s an entirely different feeling. It’s like standing on the edge of a rooftop: your legs shake, your head spins, but you don’t leave. Because the view is incredible. Because from the edge you can see things you can’t see from the ground.

Hiero triggered that. Vertigo. The sensation of the edge.

And — this is important — he knew it. And used it. Just as silence was Wei Lin’s working tool, Hiero’s was charm. Not the kind charming people have — the kind fire has: beautiful, warm, and if you get too close, it’ll burn you alive.

— Today we’re going to talk about parasites, — he said. Smiling. — Not tapeworms. The ones in your head.

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— I’m going to ask you a question, — Hiero began. — A simple one. Who thinks your thoughts?

Silence. I expected answers like “I do,” but nobody spoke. Because the question smelled like a trap. And we—five bugs—had lived in this world long enough to not step on obvious traps. (Non-obvious ones were a different story. Non-obvious ones we stepped on regularly and with enthusiasm.)

— You think—“me,” — Hiero continued. — Every one of you is certain of the same thing: everything in your head—thoughts, anxiety, irritation, fear, anger, joy—belongs personally to you. Personal property, private territory, a private collection in which each of you is the sole curator.

He stood up and paced slowly along the table, like a predator with nowhere to hurry.

— And now I’m going to tell you something unpleasant. Ready?

Nobody answered. (See above: trap.)

— Roughly sixty to seventy percent of your thoughts—aren’t yours.

A long pause.

— Excuse me? — I said.

— Sixty to seventy percent. Rough estimate, but the order of magnitude is correct. Out of every ten thoughts you consider your own, six or seven are other people’s: borrowed from your neighbors, installed via advertising, downloaded from the news feed, if you like, — and running in the background like apps on your phone that you don’t remember installing, but which are still draining your battery.

At this point any normal person would say: “Bullshit.” Or: “Prove it.” Or—more likely—stand up and leave, because “sixty to seventy percent of your thoughts aren’t yours” is an invitation to paranoia.

But we weren’t normal. (We were bugs. In a suburban space that doesn’t obey Euclidean geometry. After a week in which we’d broken glasses with intention and teleported them by rewriting causal links. “Normal” ended somewhere around chapter two.)

— Explain, — said Artyom. Clipped. Military.

— Gladly. — Hiero—for the first time in the conversation—reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. Pulled out a notebook. Battered, leather-bound. The same shape and size as Zoya’s notebook, the one sitting in my backpack by the door. That connection—not a coincidence—flashed through my mind. But I didn’t dare ask.

He opened the notebook. Flipped through. Stopped.

— Fifteenth edition of the catalog, — he said. — Not yet translated into Russian. Your species could use it, if it survives. I’ll read selectively. The most common strains.

And he began—in a flat, professional voice, the way the medical narrator at the end of a commercial reads the list of side effects: monotonous, even, with no intonation given any weight.

— Parasite number three. Fear of being late. Symptom: checking your phone every seven minutes. Carrier: three hundred and eighty million people. Date of discovery: early twentieth century. Transmission vector: railway timetables. Side effect: chronic cortisol elevation. Treatment: throwing away your watch.

(Kira—flinched. Not literally, but I saw—on the fourth floor—her causal field contract by a fraction. Carrier. Like all of us.)