Fracture, superposition, iteration, regression.
Thoughts circled through the dark, empty mental space like fallen leaves lost in a whirlpool. Too many tangled thoughts could not be sorted out. Never before had Bruce felt so deeply the terror of his brain being beyond his control.
But he had brought this terror upon himself. He was trying to observe himself from another angle—or perhaps not merely one other angle, but countless angles that belonged to him, yet were not him.
It sounded almost mystical, but it was truly happening. Bruce found that he was far more accepting of cutting apart his own thoughts than he had imagined. Perhaps it was because he had once envisioned a fracture far grander than a few scattered fragments, and had wondered how Schiller's personalities had shattered like snowflakes.
What troubled him was not acceptance, but feasibility. He had been trying for who knew how long, yet he simply could not make two or more streams of thought appear within one brain, much less make them cooperate and coordinate with one another.
When he once again tried to separate out one perspective, Bruce found his thoughts becoming increasingly sluggish. It was as though he were dreaming when he saw another version of himself, but that did nothing to help. This sleepwalking state was unsuitable for rational thought.
He could never keep every perspective awake. Usually, one perspective would be engaged in logical reasoning while all the others sleepwalked, or else they repeated the first perspective's train of thought and performed meaningless verification. This was not what Bruce wanted.
Human thought was inherently limited. People could not see themselves from another person's perspective.
But, to some extent, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder could do that. Their other personalities could objectively evaluate another version of themselves. That objectivity was