maskormenace | oo1 ✖ video

[ There's a careful sort of fumbling with the communicator, the kind that comes from someone unused to at least using settings such as video. It's more of a performance, after all, and if you're going to the trouble there's something to be said for presentation. It's set across from him, as one might record a video diary or a confession.

Abel Gideon is wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his hands resting atop each other, fingers to wrist. ]

Now, I think by now we're all accustomed to a little inconvenience. Many of us intimately familiar, even... but regardless of history here we all are. Not that I would suggest there's anything right or wrong about that, either. Who am I to say? Just is. Here we all are... foreign visitors, lost to a strange new land.

Me, I can't complain. By a certain point in your life you come to realize the scarcity of true... opportunity. That and clarity. So. To get to the point... I think people get manipulated in two major kinds of ways.

[ He holds up two fingers in the world's laziest mockery of a peace sign, though it almost seems an unconscious motion for how much he acknowledges any movement occurred. ]

There's the kind where they give you answers. And there's the kind where they keep answers from you. Now the two may overlap, probably will -- usually do -- but motive may often lay inherit in what the ratio is. Not knowing that it's hard to really know what to trust. That's what I think.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Is it?

I can't imagine that you created yourself from nothing.

Didn't say I did. But once you're created it's your reaction to the world that fills in all the details... well. I believe.

So it's the world you think is passive, then?

I think neither we or the world can be solely one or the other.

Mmm.

If you say so.

[ Beat. ]

If identity were only ever a mirror, then what they ask of us now may become an immutable aspect of one's "self." As long as we remember it.

You mean to do what they ask, even when you know they'll manipulate you?

I don't mean to anything... yet. Haven't decided one way or the other. Whether or not they are manipulating us... trying to, doesn't mean they're the only ones.

It's the same for me. At least, for now.

[ #undecided freeloader life ]

But, even though you are right, it's for certain that some of our number will be quick to manipulate them.

[ #identity crisis life, what's the difference right ]

Plenty to manipulate if one was the sort. After all -- nothing yet to lose.

[ #trudat ]

Mmmm. Nothing we haven't lost before, anyway.

Do you speak of freedom, or something else?

That, and everything else. I know I've lost everything important, at one time or another; the same's true for most people I know. That's the nature of this kind of existence.

Ah... I disagree. At least that the experience is unique to this existence over all. Because this kind of existence allows for certain freedoms that those who had already lost everything from the start may otherwise never see.