The Martial Unity

Chapter 4586: An Explosion of Madness

As light signals surged through the crystalline brain, they spread across the lattice of prismic nodes, beaming across the brain in an endless cascade of connecting thoughts. The countless light pulses traveled from node to node, its paths guided by the prismic malleability that collectively was nothing short of consciousness itself, etched into the crystalline structure of the prismic nodes.

A higher order of information emerged from the system of countless light pulses zooming through the network of prisms.

It was integrated information.

And with integrated information came consciousness.

And with consciousness came phenomenology.

[What... what is this?]

Argenton’s first thoughts were purely holographic in nature. Although information was information regardless of what form it was stored in, be it prismic malleability or neuron plasticity, the phenomenology, that was the actual conscious experience associated with the integrated information changed rather drastically.

When his brain was still human in nature, his experience of the world was still similar to that of other human beings.

However, after he etched his consciousness into the lattice of prismic nodes in his crystalline brain, the fundamental nature of his conscious experience had shifted.

It was entirely of light.

As though the entire world and all of the memories he held, as though the very world around him that he experienced through his cybernetic experiences were all fundamentally holographic in nature.

When he opened his eyes, he found that his vision of the world hadn’t changed. Indeed, his crystalline brain’s experience of the visual world was still the same, a world built from light.

However, his experience of other senses had all completely changed.

Sounds weren’t... sounds in his experience.

They became... colors.

Colors unlike anything that Argenton had ever seen. As if there was a hidden layer on the visual spectrum he had simply never seen before. But it wasn’t just sound, either. His other senses, many of which were cybernetic, also... changed.

The information that his sensory modules conveyed hadn’t changed, but his fundamental conscious experience of them had.

Odors became olfactory images. .

Sounds became auditory colors.

The sensation of touch... was merely the kind of sensation one would experience if one saw two images overlap.

However, that was not the most shocking change.

The most shocking change was that the distinctions in the different layers of his phenomenology began to slowly erode. The barriers between hearing and seeing. And between seeing and feeling. And between feeling and smelling. Those phenomenological barriers between ontological layers of experience began to melt away, causing all of them to blend together.

Because he had designed the prismic nodes to never truly ’end’ a thought by terminating a light pulse, different phenomenological dimensions of his mind began overlapping. As though the world was unifying into some discordant, overlapping mess.

Yet, far from phenomenological uniformity, it amounted to little more than phenomenological continuity.

One thought never truly ended.

One experience never truly ended.

It was all one.

But just because it was one, didn’t mean it was uniform.

Argenton’s mouth opened to unleash a soul-wrenching roar of madness.

"AAARRRGHHHHHH!!!"

His cybernetic voice of agony reverberated across within the medical tube as he experienced a surge of sanity-eroding phenomenological continuity. Just the unfathomable phenomenological mash-up was enough to crush the soul of any sentient being.

It lasted for what felt like an eternity.

The psychological effect of the flow of time within his mind being different from that of the real world was amplified to the very extreme.

Each second became a thousand years.

The few moments after the initial boot-up were the worst. Thoughts, emotions, and experiences mixed with each other like streams of river gushing into an ocean, completely assimilating into a larger body.

His sanity and sense of self were this close to being completely erased, on the verge of such madness.

Then and only then did the boot-up process finally reach his memories.

Although the cybernetic brain’s structure had been designed to be as uniform as possible, there were still sections of the brain that were more responsible for memories than any other, similar to parts of the brain that had more to do with memories than others.

On the very verge of insanity, he remembered.

He remembered who he was.

He remembered his entire life.

Tekvores had the best memory out of any of the races, including the dwarves. He had perfect recall even before he became a pathwalker.

He remembered his life from the day he was born.

Tekvores were the only race among others who had industrialized the production of tekvores in birthing plants filled with artificial womb technology. Men and women in tekvorian society no longer bothered reproducing the organic way due to a continuous loss in normal human emotional experienced caused by partial mechanization.

Unlike the other paths, the initial barrier of entry into the Tekvore Path was actually quite low, causing most tekvores to have undergone at least a little bit of mechanization, including some rather heavy neural inlays that digitized some of the thinking process that caused a psychological distancing from baser human instincts such as the instinct of sexual reproduction.

They were the opposite of the giants in this regard.

However, the loss of baser human instincts led to a plummeting in fertility. There had actually been a point in the distant past where the tekvore population had plummeted shortly before the invention of artificial birthing wombs. Most people were born of such wombs.

Argenton was no different. He had been born in a birthing plant and had been placed in the state rearing program with billions of other kids, where they received education and training, as well as support with progress down the Techvore Path.

Argenton’s psychological deterioration paused as the surge of memories allowed him some relief from his own infinite schizophrenia.

He remembered his early life.

He remembered the mortal name he had long abandoned. He remembered the dorms he had grown up in. The other kids he had lived with. He remembered the intense competition that his childhood had been.

Because artificial reproduction plants disrupted natural selection, the evolutionary pressures for a lot of things had been disrupted, including the evolutionary thrust for socialization. Tekvores were socially distant by nature, which only further impeded natural human reproduction.

He never made friends growing up. He only overcame rivals.