Thursday 19th May

Before I describe the experience I should just like to reassure those few remaining skeptics that I am to all intents and purposes still Janek Smith.  I am not sure what personality changes I may have or indeed will experience, but these were hardly unexpected.  My memories are all still there, complete and ordered, however an unexpected development is that they are much more detailed than before.  I not only have the complete memories, in audio-visual replay mode, but am able to recall sensory perceptions such as smell and touch.  As I am drifting off to sleep I particularly like to recall the soft stroking of my mother’s finger encouraging and caressing my infant face, as I nuzzle her extremely large and chewable nipple.  The milk, sweet and sticky and warm comes out in little gushes when I contract my infant gums and hits the back of my throat forcing me to swallow, which is particularly pleasing.  I have no choice but to obey the instinct to swallow even though I now realise I could just spit the liquid out my baby self obediently swallows.  It is strangely un-erotic and yet comforting at the same time.  I seem to have regained the ability to replay whole memories in only a second or two, even recalling whole mundane work-days processing numbers – I see them all, every number I ever processed, scrolling vertically before my eyes.  More recent memories, especially of my temporary foray into the outside world are clear as a bell, reliving them I feel every blow on my weak body, the pain and the shock as clear as the moment it happened.  I can now see clearly the individual faces of those irresponsible Polis who beat and urinated on me so shamelessly.  I will be transferring these images as soon as my second conjoining has been completed and expect that swift and corrective action will follow shortly.

I am also able to recall exactly all the details of that evil bastard Skinner.  I will not rest until Justice is brought to prevail upon him and his coterie of sick friends.  If these ‘special’ people have been allowed to ‘transgress’ and to violate the bodies of innocent, or even as I may have been, not completely innocent, lower echelons, then there is a serious flaw in the whole strata system.  I will be filing a report shortly when I have gathered all the data needed.

The day of the conjoining was different from those that preceded it.  There was no gym, no puzzles to solve, no counseling.  It was all weightless pod.  For what seemed like days, but may have been only a few hours I was weightlessly drifting, gradually clearing my mind of everything.  Slowly the empty space in my brain expanded until it and the weightless expanse of the gently turning colour-swooning g-pod were one and the same.  I think I lost consciousness at some point as the next thing I remember was being laid down on what resembled some old magnetic field resonance imaging machine.  The lights were dimmed and only a soft glow from a distant control desk held my vague attention.

Suddenly a quiet whooshing noise invaded my ears, rising gradually to a loud but not unpleasant crescendo.  Then white light invaded my closed eyelids and filled up my whole being; I felt the light and the noise right down to my toes, my fingertips tingled and even my spine felt invigorated.  In fact I had a great feeling of elation.  This rose to a pitch where I felt I might explode with the feeling of ecstasy. My mind was overloading on light and noise, I automatically closed down all thought.  That is all remember, as even my memory of the actual conjoining stops at this point.

I came to,( waking slowly as out of a thick glutinous lake, dark and cold) sometime later and it felt as if I had just woken from the most perfect and prolonged sleep.  A feeling of utter contentment flowed over me.  I knew that I had done the right thing.  I could barely raise my arm and had almost no sensation in my lower body but I still knew that I had done the right thing.  I closed my eyes and smiled myself back to sleep.  And still, days later I like to sleep.  In sleep nothing matters except re-running memories, or trawling through some data-files from my Hypercom twin.  These appear to my rational mind as boxes, shiny white plastic boxes which are scattered somewhat casually around my brain.  I really must start filing them soon, but I am too busy both reliving in hypercolour-holo mode my own memories and the new ‘memories’ I have gained in the conjoining.

So, you see, in the end it was completely painless and ecstatic; nothing to be frightened of at all.