Or
Why Wesley Fucked the Robot

Once again I am forced by fate to pick up the feathered quill of my pen and explain the tarnished and weathered thoughts that have spilt from my brain.

Some of you will be curious as to the title of the piece. The first and proper name of the discourse – The Aberrant Manifest – is the name of the phenomena which I have come here to declare. The secondary title, or Why Wesley Fucked the Robot, is anecdotal in nature, but helps to define primarily why I have come to think about the phenomena in question.

I suppose I shall begin with the anecdote, for I find it is easier now upon writing that I explain what the theory is before I go about writing about the phenomena I’ve begun to discover.

Wesley was one of my D&D characters for JP’s campaign. That, actually, wasn’t his real name. His real name was Marek Jannsen. But that, too, wasn’t his real name. Wesley/Marek was really Agent Prism, a psychic spy trained to pose as different people and gahter information. He was a phantom. As part of the phantom training, his real identity (Marek Jannsen) was killed off, and he was left with a code name (Prism) and a mission (to aid the Dominion by impersonating others.) He had no friends, no family, and no real life. He was actually what he was trained to be – a phantom. So you might say his view of what is “real” is skewed. Reality for Prism was an immediate thing, there were no layers of complexity because he himself wasn’t really real either. His friends all knew him as Wesley, his bioanthropologist cover identity. But Wesley wasn’t real – no more real than anything else in Prism’s life. It was all just an illusion – a very real, very tangible illusion.

One of the people he associated with wasn’t a real person at all. She was a robot (who by fortune of design was made to look like every man’s fantasy woman) – actually a replicant, a robot meant to look and pass for human (if you’ve seen Blade Runner, you know what I mean.) She was beautiful, but had the personality of a brick wall. Well, maybe a very intelligent, and sometimes inadvertently funny, brick wall, but a brick wall nontheless. Prism immediately liked her. And this is the Aberrant Manifest.

The truth of the aberrant manifest has to do with one’s conception of reality. It’s a philosophical argument as much as it is a psychological one. What is reality? I posit that reality is simple a collection of perceptions – data measured and recieved by various receptors and analyzed to make up a complete and tangible whole. So what does it matter what the reality behind one’s preconceptions is? What is truth if not what we think it is?

Hence, why Wesley slept with the robot. They were rooming together – he was the only party member who was (A) single and (B) able to stand her company for extended periods of time. Over time, their discussions turned more personal, and she eventually asked if they could attempt coupling, if you will. He did, and well, that was the end of it. She never spoke of it again (I found out after Prism died that it was because she just didn’t know how a relationship needed to work, so she didn’t really know what hte next step should be) and Prism didn’t ask. It was just the way he was. Nothing was any realer – or any less real – than anything else.

And that is the Aberrant Manifest. Prism ended up naming his ship the Aberrant Manifest, because that was his world – simply an aberrant manifestation of reality. In part, I suppose, it was a commemoration of his relationship with the robot, simply an aberrant manifest.

And that is what brings me here today. That is the truth of the aberrant manifest. At the time I thought it was merely something that would be interesting to the story, that he had fits of delusion, where he could switch on to a different sort of reality.

Except… well… if that’s the case then I’m going delusional too. Worse off, I’ve been insane for at least four years. I’ll explain.

Lately I’ve been having… that’s not the right way to start this. For the past four months there have been periods of time where things are… different. I can pretend that certain realities are different and that I feel differently about certain matters. I had originally thought this to be a recent development caused by… shall we say recent experiences.

Except last week while at home I picked up one of my old observational journals. And flipping through it I found an essay I had written four years ago, detailing precisely the precise things I was going through now. The triggers were similar, the situations were similar. Even the damn players were similar. And it… well, it scared me frankly. Because in the essay I identified it for what it truly was.

Not the aberrant manifests. That is merely a title, a name for a previously unnamed phenomena. But what it was, in a more… tactical sense of the word.

And now I find myself at a confluence of destiny, about to be swallowed up by a stream of reality and the only thing I have to show for it is an aberrant manifestation of reality.

Am I crazy, or does anyone else know what I’m talking about?