Were some of you there when the four-children began to be born in 2100? Do you know what I mean? Those four-of-a-kind babes, born simultaneously from the same mother, fused together in body, and inseparable even in mind? Do you remember their post-natal wails as they tried to adjust to their personal society? Oh my God! Do you remember? Does any among you remember? Because no one else seems to remember and I don't know why - it's like the twelve-hour dreams of endless sterile beaches that appear to me, those days when the water can only ebb from me. Oh well, I'll try to tell you if only for my sake.
You know, we didn't really have the words to describe their physiology then and I don't think we do today. Where to start: Neither technically human nor a collective of humans? Both and neither? Either and or? E tetribus unum? E uno tetres? Anyway, whatever you thought of them, those children definitely had four emergent, interdependent minds and never quite spoke in a single voice. The two brain "hemispheres" of the four-children would beat to four different drums, so to speak, and four distinct sections could be isolated as containing one of them. The sections could be separated without *any* physical harm to any of the four sides - though of course something was lost with the disconnection, as it always is, and it turns out that any such separation (unlike with your standard human) utterly and permanently destroys the psychologies of all four identities. Those were sick experiments, but we just had to know what was going on, and that gave us a little better picture.
You know, we didn't really have the words to describe their physiology then and I don't think we do today. Where to start: Neither technically human nor a collective of humans? Both and neither? Either and or? E tetribus unum? E uno tetres? Anyway, whatever you thought of them, those children definitely had four emergent, interdependent minds and never quite spoke in a single voice. The two brain "hemispheres" of the four-children would beat to four different drums, so to speak, and four distinct sections could be isolated as containing one of them. The sections could be separated without *any* physical harm to any of the four sides - though of course something was lost with the disconnection, as it always is, and it turns out that any such separation (unlike with your standard human) utterly and permanently destroys the psychologies of all four identities. Those were sick experiments, but we just had to know what was going on, and that gave us a little better picture.
