still the most pressing issue is that cloud of electromagnetic energy, consciousness, that it's unfixed in the brain's field, makes so much possible, access to the rest, the time shift, and the template for the group with individual minds as synapses, the same cloud phenomenon, the same loose floating architecture that can speak and think and do all the dog and pony tricks, this is what children protect from the dull thud of adult inspection, the fragile, the most fragile of all things, it exists at the edge of abstraction, right at the edge of it, a little further and there's nothing there but theory and possibility, but it's as real as this, concrete thought and echo and language thrown at the blank screen
so imagine two of those in such close proximity there might not even be two of them. what that makes possible. they knew about it already, they used us, looked for us. it's rare, but not that rare, certain signs come up, and even then special tests show only so much, and like all those arcane memberships, there's the hunt and the hidden, something bigger than your own take on the game, and, always, the darkness and its gifts.