Isus of Gale, son of that…woman, bastard brother to Yaan and possibly Lemmy. An unlikely spiritual symbol with chronic depression, Isus was not meant for this life and went with the weather.
Friend of Peanut, albeit a new-found religious evangelist, Yaan is the brother of Isus, son of…that woman. It is suspected his father is one of the guards, but which one, may be anyone’s guess.
Peanut aka “Balls brain” is our protagonist. He sometimes wakes up in strange places. Peanut loves the outdoors and volunteered for TeRaCo’s Green Futures initiative, during TAP’s infancy, prior to his condition’s deterioration.
Bronnikov is cunning, curious and often smarter than he appears. It is unknown what parts, if any of his stories are true – as he never allows to be contested. Prone to aggressive tics, he was granted participation in the TAP program by a hair-width.
narrated by Peanut
I climbed into bed and strapped the belt across my waist. Anything can happen at night, especially if another electrical brainstorm happens. I stared unfocused into the bottom of the bunk above me, and eventually my leg jerked.
Suddenly, we were at the dig, and Kevin was talking.
He is frail because he is young, because he not only has the capacity, but routine duty to change. No hard exoskeleton can set and form, little adaptation can occur in his environment. In an unpredictable environment, he was born into his doom. He is a ticking timebomb.
But it was merely by Earth standard that we were misconfigured. Whether by our experience on earth or experimental conditioning, power we were carved this way by our own plasticity, to adapt to an absurd situation. Only in the madhouse, do they train you to says please and thank you. In the mad house your ultimate goal as an individual is self destruction, because it is the one thing they most wish to prevent, yet one that can be prevented the least. In the madhouse the nurse bends over for you to glare at her cleavage when you piss yourself and she lovingly changes your pants. In the madhouse you are prevented from reading books from Outside, for it may then make you bring in unpredictable ideas and make management difficult. It fragments and dilutes our disorders and uncalibrates us from our clean and compartmentalised diagnoses, giving the doctors more names to make up for types like you.
In the madhouse sit all the failed calibrations, whether they ended up there by lab design or by evolution trying something new for once. We were being told it wasn’t our fault – but in a way it is our fault, as I do not know who else may have done something wrong. I didn’t even know what the word fault meant anyway.
narrated by Peanut
So I woke up in the middle of the floor again and there was an argument in the dorm. I could only hear blurred grunts which eventually crystallized into more solid nonsense, albeit now nonsense by context. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Kevin. In his glasses I saw my reflection and on it was something which resembled a classic cartoon dick and balls, sprawled right across my forehead. One ball per lobe and the penis bit was going down my nose. Good morning to you all as well. Nothing like starting the day on the floor in the middle of the bathroom like that – marker scribble on my head, dick still in my hand about to take a piss…and my shoes were missing.
Kevin looked down at me again and shuffled back to the sleeping quarters to get changed. And from there, it looks like the others had all woken up:
“In the end – if you meet a madman, who tells you where you are – do you believe him?”
Your feet drag you along to nowhere in particular, plastic eyes are staring forward, unfocused. A diagnosis so liberating in its fatalism; you hear the guards coming at you from both sides, yet your head is too tired to crane left and right to look.
