"So, you want us to come with you."
"Yes. We are prepared to help you, Mattie, and Petrov escape the island, but in exchange, we want one thing."
Dimitri braced himself. "What?"
Number One stopped again. This time, the other seven moved closer, tightening the loose formation until all eight bodies formed a rough semicircle around Dimitri. Their different faces, their different builds and features, all carrying the same expression, that intense, yearning focus that he'd seen in the hallway that morning.
"We want to merge minds with you."
Dimitri stared at Number One. "You want what?"
"Not permanently," Number One said quickly, or as quickly as Dave ever said anything. "And it is not to control you. It would be temporary. We would merge with your consciousness and experience what you experience. Feel what you feel. We want to feel love." Number One said it with the directness of someone stating a scientific hypothesis. "Not to observe it. Not to analyze it from the outside. We want to feel it from the inside. Through you."
The request was so extraordinary, so intimate, and so terrifying that Dimitri's mind went blank for several seconds.
"You're asking to get inside my head."
"Yes."
"Inside my thoughts. My emotions. My most private?—"
"Yes."
He took a step back, not because he was afraid, but because he needed physical distance to think clearly. Dave'spresence, concentrated in eight bodies standing close, generated a pressure that wasn't quite compulsion but wasn't entirely neutral either. It was stifling.
"What would the merge involve? I mean practically. What happens to me?"
"It would be similar to what we experience constantly among ourselves. The eight minds that comprise Dave are in perpetual contact. Thoughts, sensations, and emotions flow between us without barriers. What we propose is to extend that network temporarily to include you."
"Would you have access to all my thoughts? All my memories?"
"We would experience everything you think about, but your current emotional state would be the strongest felt. Memories might surface as associations, but we would not actively search through them. Think of it as standing in the same room versus rifling through drawers."
"How long would it last?"
"As long as you allow it. You would retain the ability to terminate the merge at any point."
They had no way of knowing that. They'd never tried to separate, and Dimitri had a feeling that they wouldn't be able to do it even if they wanted to.
"And what would I experience?"
Number One tilted his head. "That is an interesting question. No one outside us Eight has ever participated in the merge. We believe you would experience a version of what we experience. The collective consciousness, the shared awareness, the sense of being part of something larger than an individual mind. It'squite extraordinary. As a scientist, you must be curious about that."
He was curious, but not enough to sacrifice himself on the altar of scientific research.
"You believe that I will experience what you experience and that I will be able to terminate the connection at will. But you don't know that for sure."
"We don't," Number One admitted. "No one has gone where we are asking you to go."
The scientist in Dimitri was intrigued. The hive mind was the most extraordinary neurological phenomenon in existence, a merged consciousness that no researcher had ever studied from the inside. The data alone would be invaluable. The understanding of how eight separate neural networks fused into a single coherent intelligence could revolutionize everything humanity knew about consciousness.
But Dimitri, the man who loved Mattie, who had learned through hard experience that people who wanted inside his head never had his best interests at heart, that man was screaming at him to say no.
"This is what you meant in the hallway," he said. "The work I haven't started yet. The work that matters."
"Yes."
"You want me to explore the merge from the inside. Not as a subject, but as a scientist. To experience and understand the collective consciousness in a way that no one ever has."
