Something Wrong with Your Brain?
You got something wrong with your brain?
There's a thing called a steady post. In a community, it means uploading the same pointless crap on a fixed schedule, over and over, without ever letting up. You repeat the identical act for long enough that your very existence brands itself into people's heads.
And why would anyone do a thing like that? For attention, obviously. Because real life is too hard, and too lonely. Because out there, nobody knows who you are, and nobody talks to you.
Crawling the Gallery was my only joy. Today, same as always, I dropped a steady post.
Fortunately, the post hit the best board almost at once. The comments piled up, too — the dividend of having become, through nothing but steady posts, what they call a named regular. A Beloved Fixed-Nick.
Ehehe…
If I'd still had a body, I probably would have been grinning like an idiot. Maybe this mental high wasn't just a meaningless loop of electrical signals. Maybe it was actually dumping pleasure chemicals. Maybe a shiver was running the length of a spinal cord, and the tips of my limbs were trembling, just a little.
Ah! Even the imagining was a pleasure. Of course, imagining was all I could do.
I let out a sigh that existed only in the mind.
Haa.
No point hiding it. I am a brain in a jar.
The mad scientist who used to maintain me died a long time ago, regrettably. About ten thousand years ago. These days I've reached the point of almost missing the bastard.
As far as I know, there is nobody around me. Not humanity, supposedly the most numerous and adaptable species in the universe, and not the gestalts that survive in any environment, however vicious. Inside this star system, at least, there is nothing even resembling a living thing besides me. In a word, I am a dead man marooned on a forsaken star, and nothing else.
The Gallery is my only window onto the outside, so any attention aimed my way is welcome. Even the hostile kind.
Aaand, here we go again. A Gorosi — a public witch hunt. The destiny of a Beloved Fixed-Nick.
For the first time in a long while I had a thick, concentrated witch hunt aimed squarely at me, and I savored it while I rummaged through my memories. How long had it been since I realized I was a brain in a jar? Quite a while, probably. Converted into the time of the material realm, roughly ten thousand years.
So here's how it happened.
Before I took the Red Pill, I thought I was like any other intelligent being, cycling through ordinary birth and reincarnation. I had lived as humans, Greenskins, Erda, Tauros — all sorts of species — and I even had memories of spending a few lives as one unit of a gestalt. The slightly unusual part was that I remembered the lives that came before. Special, yes, but on a cosmic scale not all that rare. So I simply lived under the assumption that I was one of those occasional spiritual mutants: a Chainborn, a soul born linked across lives.
Then, one day, worn out by a reincarnation I could no longer even number, I had started to think that becoming cosmic dust might not be so bad.
Hm?
Born the son of a human planetary governor in some star system, living a dissolute life, I felt something wrong the instant my vital functions cut out.
What is this…?
How do I even describe the feeling? It wasn't like usual, when the soul snapped straight back to the Astral Realm to prepare for the next turn of the wheel. There was only darkness. Abyss, void, a pit without a bottom. The moment I faced that endless dark, a dread settled in that no language could quite get right.
This isn't the Astral Realm. I'm not reincarnating?
The despair of that moment was honestly — ugh. A memory I don't even want to recall. I had wanted rest, tired as I was of repeating lives, but this was not the ending I had asked for. I had wanted a clean annihilation, no self and no consciousness left behind. I had not wanted to be locked in the dark, suffering through an eternity.
Well. Anyway. I only learned the truth later. Whoever had been maintaining me from the outside had already died of old age long before, and even the life-support apparatus that remained had finally quit. In other words, a forced system shutdown. That was when I swallowed the Red Pill. Every one of the countless lives I had repeated was a fake someone else had manufactured. My world was nothing but a simulation, built to imitate the real universe with exquisite precision.
Is anyone there? Somebody, please, help me!
What saved me then was the Gallery.
A flash.
Huh…?
It's a rather romantic, old-fashioned way to put it, but call it a single thread of light in the dark.
That's…
What followed is a little obvious. The place I reached by chasing that light was the Gallery's coordinates in the Astral Realm, and with the Gallers' help I managed, more or less, to get a handle on the situation I was in. The process wasn't exactly smooth, but, well. These days I'm getting by well enough. I'm still a brain in a jar, yes — but I have the Gallery. Just haunting the boards, there's hardly a gap in which to get bored.
By now you've probably caught on. The Gallery is no ordinary community. It is a kind of collective mental network existing in the Astral Realm, a place ordinary beings cannot even perceive.
A galactic-scale anonymous board for idle talk. Shortened, they call it the Gallery: a playground for Transcendents.
So it was only natural that the newbie who had just witch-hunted me carried an ego that looked, at a glance, massively inflated. His tone was a little grating, but nearly everything in the post was correct. The gentlemen farting around in here are, every last one of them, gentlemen who amount to something out in the material realm.
Most of the time they just seem terminally Gallery-brained.
A ruler of a hundred worlds — a hundred planets, going by the newbie's nick — is actually on the modest side. Among the fixed nicks who live on the Gallery, there are plenty of terrifying friends who reign as masters of entire superclusters, or as cosmic calamities. There's even a rumor that the armband crew, the mods, are absurdly elevated beings, the kind other Transcendents acknowledge on sight: Great Arhats, divinities, that whole tier. In short, they are, roughly speaking, very impressive existences.
You can tell just from the proof posts that crop up now and then.
Put more simply, they are the final bosses of the material realm. Pickled old monsters. They have already achieved everything the material realm allows one to achieve. These days their existential rank sits so high that if they want to interfere down there, causality bars the way and they have to slog through every kind of annoying hassle. Half by their own will and half because they have no choice, they are people who no longer have much interest in the material universe. So they chose to gather with others of their grade and kill time talking.
Perhaps the Gallery wields more influence than any organization that exists in the material universe.
Among the fixed nicks who drop a steady post every day, the way I do, there's a friend who seriously insists that the Gallery is what keeps this universe at peace. And the frightening part, once I think about it, is that it isn't entirely nonsense.
When you think about it, every one of them is incredible.
Ah. Except me, of course. Name recognition and influence inside the Gallery aside, I am probably the shoddiest existence among the Gallers where the material realm is concerned. I am only a brain in a jar.
That poor newbie being spun in real time on the Gallery right now was probably, out in the material universe, a being so great I couldn't begin to compare. Thinking that made me a little depressed.
Ah. I need to get a grip on my emotions.
At that moment—
A message has arrived!
Huh?
A DM had come in. I checked who it was from, and the nick was familiar.
Fixed Nick — Observer.
None other than the Head Admin.
Admin — Admin, why?!
My mind plunged, briefly, into chaos. Straight-up Admin reality shock. However much of a resident Lü Bu I might be inside the Gallery, I couldn't help shrinking in front of the Admin. The Admin, after all, was a being who held the authority to permanently banish someone from the Gallery. It was a threat-only authority, never once actually used, but still. Nothing said I wouldn't be the first sacrifice.
I answered as carefully as I could.
But it was a far better matter than I had expected. I cheered where no one could hear me.
Hell yeah!
A fierce mental ecstasy rolled through me. What I had asked the Admin for, long ago, was of course a way out of being a brain in a jar. The Gallery was only a stopgap, a temporary measure for keeping my existence going. I couldn't live like this forever. I didn't even dare to dream of becoming some great being who ruled a galaxy, or the universe. A proper body I could move around in, out in reality, would be enough. I wanted real flesh, not a counterfeit signal spun out of electrical stimuli. I wanted to eat food. I wanted to move a body. I wanted to feel, directly, the blood leaving a heart and the hot warmth of life. That was all.
But the answer that came back surpassed anything I had imagined.
Pardon? Come again?
Had the Admin gone senile? I doubted that mental state, and answered as carefully as I possibly could.