The Thought
Research on the Thought always suffers from the same fundamental limitation: No one who has had it can describe it. Every patient’s recollection is different, yet clearly each of them points toward a single thing. It is not an image or word or even an emotion; rather, it is something that can only be experienced internally.
Maybe that’s for the best.
Researchers on the Thought take medications to suppress dreams after several colleagues apparently succumbed to it during their sleep. During their waking hours, they practice a strict thought discipline, training for an average of two years before they are allowed to access primary source descriptions of the Thought. They meditate, they learn self-hypnosis, they memorize long blocking passages to recite to themselves if the Thought threatens.
Out in the world, more people are having the Thought every year and no one knows why, especially because most of the victims never met each other. Is the world changing in some way that inspires the Thought? Is our way of thinking changing in a way that predisposes us to it? And is there anything we can do to prevent it?
In the restricted-access labs, a chime sounds every ten minutes; it’s unknown how long the Thought takes to formulate, but the intent is to disrupt it if possible.
The chime sounded, and Jamie flinched, realizing how far she had drifted into her reading. The written first-hand accounts of Thought patients were medium hazard material. Low hazard material was circumstantial information about patients, their biographies prior, and their symptoms afterward. High hazard was video or audio of Thought patients attempting to convey the Thought. Maximum hazard was the patients themselves.
In the special nursing homes for Thought patients, all staff and visitors are required to wear noise-canceling headphones. Patients are only permitted to communicate through a simple picture board of 64 squares. Mostly “toilet”, “change position”, “cold”, “hungry”, that sort of thing.
The last time Jamie’s mother had been able to recognize her, her message had been “visitor love love visitor sleep love.” Like a gorilla. Jamie smiled as best as she could and kissed the forehead where her mother used to live and walked away, the headphones roaring static in her ears.
On the bus home, most of the commuters had on headphones or earplugs. People listened to music or podcasts. There was an app that replicated the ten-minute chime from the lab, if you wanted to put your faith in that. The numbers were unclear, but there was a theory that the Thought struck more often in people who had time to let their thoughts wander.
Then again, many of the patients had led busy lives and never showed any outward inclination towards being in cloud cuckoo land. Jamie’s mother had hardly been a daydreamer; she had raised Jamie by herself while also working as a bookkeeper for a construction firm. At home, she was a woman of simple tastes, enjoying her 00’s sitcoms, pie recipes, and crochet.
But then one night, Jamie got the call. Her mother had failed to pay the rent on time, and the landlord had gone up to check on her.
Ambulances don’t even take you to a hospital anymore if you’ve had the Thought. Family members will beg the EMTs to check for other possibilities. Is it a stroke? Maybe a seizure? But they’re just grasping at straws. EMTs have seen strokes and seizures. They can spot the Thought from a mile away. Jamie was glad she hadn’t been there to see it happen. She liked to tell herself the EMTs had been gentle when they put the required gag on her mother, that it was just policy, that the white noise they blasted on the radio on the way to the home was just there to relax her mother.
The chime sounded, and Jamie startled again. She had been completely engrossed that time; dangerous stuff. She felt less afraid every time it happened, and that was dangerous too.
Her eyes refocused on the paper in front of her, and she forced herself to read instead of think.
Did the Thought remind you of an image? the survey asked, and in jagged, almost childish handwriting, an answer was written below:
like an arc of light blue and white light
Did the Thought remind you of a sound?
like the tones of a fork scraping on a plate
Did the Thought remind you of a taste or smell?
like dirty snow
Did The Thought remind you of a feeling?
like a needle numbing a tooth
Jamie took her own break then, breathing deeply, shifting her gaze pointedly to the blocking passage she kept open for these moments. It was a long, dry essay on sheep farming in the British isles. Breeds of sheep commonly farmed in Scotland include the hardy Cheviot and the highly productive Texel. The feeling passed. She imagined petting a sheep, the wool soft under her hands, and pushing her fingers down through the fleece, against the warm body of the sheep, and finding safety there.
She still had a stack of surveys left to read. She was supposed to be taking notes on common features she found in the surveys, notes she could later distill down to low hazard material, and later, hopefully information that was safe enough to communicate to the public. Her thesis project was for Development of Public Service Announcements For Prevention of Cognitive Malignancy, and it was just an excuse to get to this material. Not that this was some deep, dark secret.
Not everyone had lost someone, but everyone was curious. None of them wanted to have the Thought — no one that reckless makes it through two years of meditation classes and psychological testing — but they all wanted to come close. They wanted to think about the Thought; to imagine what it was like to experience it without actually experiencing it.
Jamie noticed her thoughts wandering and immediately locked her eyes on her blocking paragraph.
Sheep in regions with endemic liver fluke should have preventative treatments three times a year.
Jamie opened another survey.
Did the thought remind you of an image?
shiny fish scales reflecting sunset
Did the thought remind you of a sound?
dentist drill
Another mention of teeth, Jamie marked down in her notes. It was a common theme in the accounts, along with references to metal and a sort of grating, nails-on-chalkboard quality. But every survey respondent who was lucid enough to answer made it clear: the Thought wasn’t any of those things. It was only like those things. There weren’t any words to describe it but itself.
However, at the same time, there was nothing special about it. It had no gravitational pull of its own. It didn’t feel any more involuntary than any other thought.
Working dogs are essential to sheep farming, even in the era of modern technology. The Border Collie is the most…
The very first theory made about the Thought was that it was a prion disease. The Thought made your neurons fire in a particular way that released a particular cascade of neurotransmitters that happened to cause an abnormal protein folding, which itself beget more protein misfoldings, which caused the neurological degeneration typical of Thought patients.
But it wasn’t that. The brains of Thought victims after autopsy were pristine. No holes, no tangles, and no lesions. The Thought was more insidious than that.
It didn’t damage the hardware of a person’s brain like CJD or Alzheimer’s. Rather, it seemed to damage the software. For every other thought a person can have, there’s a mechanism for wiping it away. You touch something and feel the sensation; when you stop touching it, you stop feeling it. If you imagine a pink elephant, and then forget about it, it’s gone. The space in your brain is freed up to think about something else now.
Except when you have the Thought, they aren’t.
The chime sounded again, but Jamie refused to be thrown off track this time. She hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes, but that was fine. She hadn’t qualified for medium hazard duty just to be a stenographer, she was supposed to digest the material. She had her sheep and her meditation techniques. She was still in control of her thoughts. She wasn’t sliding into the Thought, just making broad circles around it.
Anyway.
Whatever neurons produce the Thought never reset themselves. But the brain has a marvelous quality called plasticity. When one part is injured, other parts take over the function. Nerve pathways reroute themselves around a lesion and a stroke survivor relearns to speak. If someone had the Thought only once, they might not even notice.
The problem is when you think the Thought once, then you think it again, and again, and again, until all space in your consciousness is taken up by the Thought, and you’re soon on the floor drooling and incontinent. You’re trapped in a loop. You can’t stop yourself from thinking it again. As far as anyone knows, no one ever has. Remember a few paragraphs up where we mentioned a pink elephant?
Don’t worry. The Thought is not a pink elephant. We know that much.
Once you know how to think the Thought, every time you remember the experience, you think it again. That locks up another bit of brain. By now or the next time, you start feeling a little funny. Not enough to go to the emergency room, but maybe a headache or forgetting the right words for… for things. In horror, you wonder if it was the Thought, and in that wondering, you inevitably have the Thought again, and again, and it can progress quite rapidly from that point.
Since it’s impossible for first-time Thought experiencers to be sure whether they had the Thought, no one knows the exact time from onset to death. The time from first symptoms to irreversible coma ranges from hours to months. There’s a theory that as the brain’s function degrades, it becomes less able to think the Thought, which helps in slowing the progression towards the end. Jamie’s mother had held on through a summer and the better part of autumn, though towards the end she could do almost nothing but move her eyes toward sounds. On Jamie’s last visit, she’d kneeled down by the bed and
chime
and whispered in her mother’s ear to think the Thought again, to summon it up from whatever memory remained within her and flood her mind with it and end all the suffering, no more bedsores just brightness and metal on teeth and
ruminant animals typically kept as livestock
the arc of the light bends toward the right, patients agree, blue-white in a curve like a backwards capital C across the whole field of vision and
Although the term “sheep” can apply to other species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticated sheep.
jamie hadn’t killed her mother, it was just words, who knew if the lady even comprehended—
even-toed ungulates
metal scraping on teeth. guitar strings strung between teeth
“McCaster, Jamie!” A hand came down and slammed onto the stack of paper in front of her. One of the other students in the room had noticed her drifting and an instant later, they were all around her, shouting her name.
“I’m fine!” she snapped. “Just because I’m a little quiet, doesn’t mean I’m in trouble!”
Brennan, the one whose hand was still blocking her surveys, looked Jamie in the eyes. “If one of us goes down, it’ll tank the whole program. Don’t do that to us.”
“I oughta tell it to you,” Jamie said, picking up her things. “Tell you everything I know and see if it maybe clicks for you.”
“Jesus, Jamie, don’t say that,” Brennan said. “You need to take a break. Go home, practice your exercises; everything you’re working on will be here tomorrow. Do as the instructions tell you.”
Jamie thought of where he could stick those instructions, but if she said where, she’d probably get moved out of the department, not to mention the fact that they weren’t very nice words to say. She silently filed all her papers in the correct hazard-labeled drawers before walking out of the lab. She even stopped herself from slamming the door on the way out.
In the hallway she tried to collect herself, leaning against the glossy white tiles and doing box breaths. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four, willing herself to think of nothing but numbers and breaths. If she had really had the Thought, it would be a waste. She would be just as unable to communicate it as everyone else. She would know, and die with the knowledge, and nothing would change.
There in the hallway, she analyzed the experience she just had. Sure, it was quite visceral and all-consuming, but she likely was just empathizing with the concepts expressed by the Thought patients, right?
She stuffed those feelings deep down. She had to get back to her apartment. She had to take the bus.
…Where was her bus stop again? She felt disoriented. She was just nervous. Right.
Even when she neared the building’s exit, she could still hear the chime. This time she let it wake her up. She put in her earbuds and Marina Diamandis started on “How to be a Heartbreaker”, which was fast and catchy enough to keep her mind busy.
Rule number one, is that you've gotta have fun..
The playlist was infinite; the algorithm always finding another song for safety reasons. Tomorrow, she would apologize to Brennan and work on lower hazard material for a while.
Rule number two, just don't get attached to…
“Maybe the reason people keep dying from the Thought is that we keep hearing about people dying from the Thought,” she thought.
This is how to be a heartbreaker…
On the bus, there were headphones everywhere. When there’s no pressing need to think anything in particular, there are two ways to make yourself Thought-proof: to think nothing or to think everything. To think nothing takes intensive training and a monk-like level of self-discipline, and it’s a fragile state, cracked the instant you become aware of it. The more accessible method is to simply fill your brain to capacity. If something is always beeping, always blinking, if you’re always flitting from one thing to another and changing what you’re looking at the instant your mind does anything besides react — you’re safe.
The bus braked hard, enough to almost shake Jamie out of her seat, and here she realized it was her stop. She took off her headphones and rested them on top of her shoulders, around her neck.
Inside her apartment, her mother was waiting for her in a blue porcelain urn on the bookshelf. Jamie had once cracked the seal on the urn to look inside, but there was nothing worth seeing in there. There was a heavy plastic bag full of gray powder and a stamped metal tag. The cremators put in the tag to make sure they sent home the right person, because one bag of ashes looks like another. Then again, one bag of ashes is like another. Jamie’s mother hadn’t been a dusty little pile of calcium.
She had been sitcoms. Knitting. Bills paid and due. Petty office politics. Buying dollar store toys to leave as little surprises in Jamie’s backpack. She was feelings and memories; decisions and tastes. That was Jamie’s mother, who wasn’t in the urn. Jamie’s mother was her thoughts, and those thoughts were gone now. Trying to find her was like asking where the light goes when you turn off a lamp.
She crumpled onto her shitty couch. The cushions were well-worn from asses long gone. This was where she visited the cousin of death, or as some like to call it, sleep. This may seem a hastily constructed situation to sleep in, but believe me, it was better than her ex-boyfriend, Mike. He slept on a twin-size mattress without a bedframe. Moisture collected underneath it and it began molding.
One day, Jamie had had enough of her boyfriend’s slobbery. She decided to surprise him by cleaning it without his permission. Boy, did that work out well. He went ballistic, screaming in her face about how he could, quote unquote, “take care of himself”. Jamie, being an independent, 21st century woman, immediately cut the relationship off. She knew she deserved better.
She sighed. Her couch was still exceptionally shitty. Maybe she should buy a real bed. Grabbing her laptop from a nearby table, she mused upon the Thought’s origins. Not a single case had been reported until the 30’s, but by then, it was too late. Cases were popping up worldwide. By that point, it was impossible to trace where it all started.
Cases emerged, she speculated, in a sort of arc.
A reverse capital C reaching out from some distant land, infecting, infecting those throughout the country of patient zero. And these disease-ridden rats would make their way onto their cargo boats, or their cruise ships, and zoom out towards pristine territory; interacting with the locals there, in the manner as custom to human beings, a disease-ridden exchange of ideas strung, vibrating out between strings of throat-meat, a concert C, 261.63 Hz—
Headlights from an outside car flooded the open window. It was dark now. Was it really that long since she had come home?
—and she wondered, is this the Thought? she thought of the arctic sea, cold and unforgiving, and she thought of the thought, and she thought of the numerous cars that sped through the city streets. scrolling through her newsfeed, she often heard of numerous deaths from car accidents and such. she had the feeling that maybe the Thought wasn’t so scary after all; car accidents were much more common.
Imagine being dropped into the Arctic sea. No, scratch that— make it third person. A ballet dancer dropped from a great height into cold water, spinning on an invisible axis. The ballet dancer is dressed in a stereotypical pale pink leotard. Synchronized swimming while holding a toaster, still plugged-in.
Imagine a box with absolutely everything in the world.
Now open it.
That is the Thought.