On the third day of mushor, third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip. Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches, stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, "Stop, leave me be, let me rest!"… my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I couldn’t feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet’s core, filling my thoughts, my world.

And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me. Look at me.

Placid. Even affectionate.

I don’t know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)… but I could handle the new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I’d passed through the center of mushor and was coming out the other side.

At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a peacock’s tail. I didn’t have long to ponder the question — too many distracting fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened to seize on as a life preserver.

I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.

At the end of mushor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a pummeling-hard work out.

But different. Transformed.

Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul. More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast pathways routed through your brain.

Here’s the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.

As simple as that. As devastating too.

That’s why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning petty or abusing its power.

When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part of me. Unfiltered. I can’t skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the universe. I can’t discard facts I’d prefer not to know. They’re all incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.

Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.

I can’t pretend new data doesn’t exist — it’s already changed me. It’s molded my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I can’t even want to ignore the input, because it’s already there.

No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.

And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I couldn’t dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn’t look away. Which is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn’t/won’t/can’t look away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics like the clap. Someone who doesn’t just call a spade a spade, but who sees the damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe with the right tax incentives.

It’s not virtue or saintliness; it’s just the way my new brain works. Of course, there are still thresholds — I’m not mesmerized by every speck of dust that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection that reaches my ear.

But… I no longer ignore the obvious. I’m mentally, physically, incapable of that. Selective inattention is for sissies.

I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.

A member of the Vigil.

THE PEACOCK’S TAIL

The Vigil left me two weeks free after mushor. Recovery time. Rearrangement time. A chance to clear the decks.

I no longer needed the electronic nurse perched over me, but data tumor was still a possibility. A white-knuckled looming terror if the truth be told. And data tumor was just the messiest way I could stop being me; there were other more subtle ways the link-seed could wipe out the Faye Smallwood I’d known. Facts and memes infecting my unprotected brain. Long-loved perceptions swept away, erased by casual input… because I deep-down believed I was so full of crap, when pure truths started coming in, not a drop of the old Faye would be able to stand up for itself. Of course, I’d fretted over the same dreads before getting the link-seed… but my old brain could repress the fear, pretend things wouldn’t be so bad. I could watch the doc-chip of that data-tumor victim spewing blood out his eyes, and I could say, "He must have been a weak-willed mook." Ignoring that the dead man had slaved through the same Vigil training I had, and passed the same tests to prove he was ready for a link-seed.

But now that I’d gone through mushor… my altered brain had lost the knack of shying away from uncomfortable truths. And I was scared, scared, scared.

The day I came back from the Proving Center, Angle’s son Shaw asked me to do a trick — to show off what the new Mom-Faye could do, tell what the weather was like right now in Comfort Bight. (The biggest city on Demoth, ten thousand klicks to the southwest, sprawled around the mouth of the only major river running through the Ragged Desert.)

Shaw was just curious, an eight-year-old boy making a let’s-see request… but I broke down in flash-flood tears. I didn’t want to let anything into my brain unsupervised, even a simple "Force one sandstorm, toxicity B, expected duration two hours…"

Uh-oh.

The weather report had seeped in from the world-soul without me consciously asking for it. My bout of the weeps got swallowed by cold, cold terror.

I couldn’t control the seed. Data tumor coming up.

But nothing dramatic happened. Not this time, I thought after a full minute of waiting. Maybe the next.

That night I got out my scalpel — the one I’d used when I cut off my freckles all that time ago. In the angry dark days of my teens and twenties, I’d sometimes just rest the blade against my skin, or trace little patterns… very lightly, more of a game than serious intent. I lost points if I actually drew blood.

It’d been years since I last took out the knife. I’d pulled myself together, hadn’t I? There was nothing driving me to hurt myself now. And if I was scared to shivers about data tumor, surely I could find a more comforting talisman to hold than razor-sharp steel. Something I could sleep with under my pillow and not worry about accidentally nicking a vein.

I sat naked on the edge of my bed and slowly laid the back of the blade onto my bare thigh — not the sharp side, just the back. That was all right, wasn’t it? That was only goofing around.

A link-seed means you can’t lie to yourself.

I found my eyes filling with tears as I thought, "It was supposed to be all better now. I’ve fixed everything, I’ve passed mushor, I shouldn’t still be crazy."

Gradually, the cold scalpel warmed to the heat of my skin. After a while, I couldn’t feel it anymore — light, thin metal, matching my body temperature… as if it still knew the trick of becoming part of me, after all these years.