A Question

Dot walked along the abandoned beach.  The sand was a deep black and the waters were calm and Caribbean blue.  The small waves lapped the shore and reached her feet every once and awhile.  She had been here for what seemed to be days.  Her pet lagged behind her, stopping every once and awhile to investigate some movement in the palm trees and then running to catch up. Listening to... She noticed a man walking toward her in the distance.  She knew immediately that it was her roommate.  She had been ignoring him.  He wore a charcoal grey pin-stripe suit and pin-on tie and sunglasses that were thin and stylized just like him. It was hardly attire for the beach, though he was barefoot. She was deeply annoyed with him being there and he knew it.  It seemed that he had gone to the extreme of actually coming to get her himself, even though he knew the dangers. A giant squid's arm arose from the deep waters, it was longer than a freighter dock....

With the sheer power of his connected mind, he could create societies out of thin air with a following larger than any media organization from ages past and all the while never moving a muscle.  He could consort with great minds both living and deceased and defy the limits of mere organic thinking.  He was the Hybrid Man.  He could come and go, walking freely among new, very real worlds of thought and concept.  His existence was not limited to the physical world alone, but expanded and unbound, allowing him free dominion over the cyber utopia that was the Outernet.  He never doubted, was never puzzled or left impotent, he never even once asked a single question consciously.  He was a superhuman; a super-intelligence.  His thoughts were actions and his results were always instantaneous. The primitive humans he never knew were said to use only 10 - 20% of their brains, but his cerebral usage was not even on the same scale as these long dead barbarians....

Listen to this track while reading: For the first time in his 24 years of life, Buck was confused.  It was a flood.  His brain was working at full capacity to decipher the meaning of this "thing" that suddenly invaded his thoughts.  His high-pink hair began to stand up on-end and translucent beads of sweat began to form at the base of his scalp.  The sudden panic of disconnectedness gripped him so fully that he almost returned the contents of his stomach all over the dinner table.  It was all he could do to hold his face in a manner that didn't express utter bewilderment. That thing which had crept its way in, slowly infecting his conscious thought was more than just a knowledgepoint. It was empty and devoid of knowledge. It was as if all of what he knew started to lose any semblance of meaning. As his brain struggled to understand and his mind raced, he only generated more and more of these empty knoweledgepoints.  Soon, he couldn't help it.  ...