Trojans

~ 1 ~

In my pursuit of escaping reality, I might have gone too far. Building castles of glass, sand, and expired memories. Erecting walls between my sensitive self and them all. Trying to lose a tail, I've lost my whole skin and am about to lose my body. Now, completely naked—peeled—I wish I had a second chance to start things over. But I signed that contract, and it's too late to change anything now. They told me it would take some time. Two–three weeks at maximum. I was patient. I was savoring my last moments of being me and, at the same time, foretasting the new me I was about to become, the me who wouldn't be me anymore. But now, when it is starting to happen, I feel so damn scared. Why did I—

—wait, who am I?

~ 0 ~

Where should I start? No matter how hard I try to focus on the task at hand, I keep losing the thread. I need to share a secret. A burden. Something that doesn't let me sleep at night, gnawing my consciousness and conscience. Shit! I think I killed a man. Not intentionally, not literally, but still...

At a certain point during my university studies, I developed severe stage fright. It is really ironic as before that, my friends and I used to jam in a garage I'd inherited from my parents, making some real noise, echoing Ramstein or Merilyn Manson or—well, you get the picture; disregarding annoyed neighbors, and baffled passers-by (whose fault was that the garage was located right in the middle of one of the busiest streets in the town?). We organized concerts for cats and dogs, the homeless, all the lost souls, and damn wasps that happened to take a fancy to the garage and built a nest in the roof space. I was playing either lead or bass; M. was beating up drums; finally, K. was playing rhythm, and also he was the vocalist in our small trio band. One day, we discovered hardcore punk, metalcore, and post-hardcore for ourselves. K. learned to produce freaking cool extreme vocals—all these screams and growls and even polyphonic splittings. I can't tell how many times he choked on his larynx or damaged his vocal cords—back then, there still did not exist all these helpful Youtube tutorials that could teach you anything free of charge and with low to no risk of hurting yourself. But eventually, we got there. And the damn wasps had to move elsewhere.

So, despite my rich on-stage experience, one day, I woke up to get completely numb in front of my groupmates; they indifferently stared at me; the projector threw a bluishly tinted laptop screen reflection on the wall in front of which I stood, confused, lost, empty. The letters on the wall read: 'Reverse engineering of a Thought.'

I should start speaking. Why are you embarrassing yourself? But the words stuck in my chest. The neuronal pathways rewired themselves, I no longer had access to my prepared-in-advance speech; the only signals that my brain kept sending were of self-pity, despair, and fear. This never happened to me before. I froze. I could not even move my limbs. My eyeballs, the only organ that still could function properly, traced left to right and right to left. My groupmates sat motionless with blank expressions on their faces; the professor stood in the posture of an about-to-start-preaching priest, his mouth half-open, his eyes drilling my nose. I wanted to sneeze but couldn't.

I never started and never finished my presentation. But nobody ever noticed that. This bizarre incident weirdly dissipated into nothingness; maybe it even never happened in real life. But from that day on, I have severe performance anxiety. I quit the university. I left my home. I try to avoid crowded places as much as I can.

What is our consciousness but a tangle of unstructured thoughts and emotions? I know many people who believe they are self-contained, highly intelligent, interesting individuals. They do charity and then boast this at every corner; they go traveling just to make a bunch of fancy pictures for their social media; they read only well-advertised bestsellers and claim to be erudite. But no one can blame them for this. Their minds are designed in such a way. Their thoughts push them to do things they do. But where do these thoughts come from? What should be born first: thought or emotion?

This question bothers me for years. The problem is that my own emotions are always suppressed. They're somewhere here, within the jungle of my mind, but out of reach; they stay at a level close to the limit of detection. I feel things as if they are being sieved through an extremely narrow band-pass filter. I am rational. But why the people around are not? I'm scared of their impulsiveness. The other day, I was taking a walk in a park close to my current abode. As I was passing by a playground where local children swarmed and buzzed with their high-pitched voices, I noticed two kids pushing a horse spring rider with all the force they had, at the same time shouting something unintelligible, and leaping around the horse, and flapping their hands as if they were at a medieval witch execution ceremony. A third kid was sitting on the horse, pale as mercilessly starched bed sheets, his hands clutching the ears of the wooden equine. The kid obviously was terribly scared by the wild incessant pendulum-like movements his body was forced to repeat after the horse. The two little devils kept laughing, mumbling some gibberish and pushing the spring rider. I should have interfered, but so should their parents, who were standing a few meters away from the unfolding dramedy and emotionally discussing yesterday's news. I hurriedly escaped the scene. Children can be very cruel sometimes. They are driven by emotions. But at least one can easily read them.

I constantly feel like I'm being watched. Observed. Assessed. Yes, the only emotion that is rooted deep inside my gut is fear, close to paranoia. But is fear even an emotion? I can picture so many fragments of my life in my head, yet all of them are so disconnected, sketchy, and grotesque. Are these really my memories?

Rome. It's close to midnight, or maybe already a bit after midnight. The empty narrow street is shrouded in dim melancholic light emanating from lanterns. On both sides of the road, there rise gloomy, almost blind walls. Occasionally, a few barred or boarded-up windows would shyly peep at me, surprised and as if posing a question: what did you forget here at this late hour? Finally, I (or was I not alone?) entered a more friendly-looking neighborhood. The street still was very narrow, but at least, on both sides of me, I could now see squat tenements with white and yellow windows shining here and there above my head. Suddenly, I saw a group of people in front of us (we just turned a corner and literally almost bumped into them). They turned out to be a group of Chinese tourists. They welcomed us with words: "It's not allowed... shooting." I couldn't catch the whole phrase, but what I heard was just enough to get nervous. I looked around and noticed ominous flashes of dazzling blue lights further down the street. Police? Ambulance?

One of the Chinese girls then gave some more detailed explanations. Turned out, they were shooting a film one block away from where we were forced to stop. The street was temporally closed. Some documentary, I was told. About horses.

Another episode, this time from my early childhood, resurfaced in my head. I was staying at my grandparents' place for the summer. One day, we went swimming in a river nearby the village. The river was narrow and quite shallow and was surrounded by vast expanses of green, juicy meadows and variegated fields of wildflowers. Local farmers used to bring their cows and horses to the meadows. We left our clothes on the riverbank and jumped into the water. I still can remember how cold and refreshing it was. Then suddenly I heard a strange noise. My grandpa started quietly laughing, pointing his finger in the direction where we had left our clothes. I looked over there and saw a young white horse munching on my T-shirt. The animal looked really happy; I can swear it was staring back at me, and when our eye contact was established, it winked at me. I couldn't understand why my grandpa was laughing; I was terrified. Although the horse was beautiful, its vulgar and almost human manners creeped me out. I started crying inconsolably, like a baby. After all, technically, I was a baby, maybe just a little bit older than a toddler.

Why do I keep recalling all these strange incidents? And why every single moment of my life I can remember so vividly is associated with horses? It's been exactly one year, 95 days, 12 hours, and 26 minutes since something weird started happening to me. I tried different sorts of therapies. I tried yoga. Now I'm trying to write things down. But it's not possible to make any sense of these unstructured reminiscences. I don't consider the option of consulting with a psychologist. I don't trust people.

And then, there's this intrusive thought: I killed a man. Where did it come from? What's going on in my head? Fuck.

I've been staying in this town for almost one year. It feels safe here. Quiet. People here don't ask questions. I earn quite enough money for a living by working online for one engineering company. Actually, I'm able to save more than half of my salary every month. And the work does not take much time at all. My employer says I finish all the projects I'm given 12 times faster than anybody else at the firm. But he doesn't ask questions about how I do it. Even if he did, I wouldn't be able to answer them. I'm just good with numbers.

So, I have a lot of time for thinking. My favorite past-time now is to take a metro at my station—which happens to be the terminal station—and to ride all the way down to the opposite side of the town. People around me enter and leave. I keep sitting and observing them. I came up with this challenging exercise for my imagination: I picture them all completely naked; then I peel their skin and dispose of their nerves and all the organs until only shiny polished skeletons are left. Now all of them look the same. Their skulls have no emotions. Their movements are defined by the architecture of their bone and connective tissues. So simple and so complex! And now I'm not at all afraid of them. I'm one of them. I am a human.

~ -1 ~

No! It was just a nightmare! I should just forget it. Nothing happened. I'm me. I'm as human as they all are. Made of flesh, blood, and bones. I cut my finger. Warm, crimson liquid started to trickle from the incision.

I was sauntering around the town with no specific purpose in mind. That was a mistake. I took a turn, then another. I haven't been to this part of the town. It looked pretty. Then I approached a roundabout. If I didn't look up and just kept observing my shoes, it wouldn't have happened. But this part of the town was new to me. I was curious; I was exploring the area.

I comb the urban landscape with my eyes. I see a viaduct. And then I see them. Horses.

Trojans.

I recalled the name. What is it? How is it related to me? To who I am? I think it is something I don't want to remember, my brain struggling to not let me get a grip of it. But does it mean that I'm separate from my brain? aren't we together in this? Now, there is a whole battle inside of me. Trojans. It's the name of a secret project launched by a group of AI engineers who call themselves W. Did I volunteer? Volunteered to do what?

### ### ###

Note to the Reader:

I just wonder if I gave enough information here for you to make sense of the story. Please, let me know. I started with a picture of wooden horses I took a while ago and was coming up with the story plot rather slowly. The idea was taking its shape step by step and started to be clear to me only by the very end—when I was about to leave the story unfinished. Obviously, it's still unfinished. But the idea, the message I wanted to convey is all here.