For Ian. From one fish in a tree to another.

Flash thought back to some of the wonderful things he had seen, and how those visions had changed him. He only had five or six ways of putting information into his brain. Sight was one of them. And every single thing he ever saw had changed him. Some had changed him a little bit, other things had changed him a lot. Sometimes he didn’t realize the significance of things until much later.

He found himself mentally returning to the hologram in the castle suite.

Everyone feels out of place in the world… in the universe at one time or another. Flash was no exception.

Things didn’t always come easy to Flash the way they seemed to for other people, and yet he persevered through difficulties to find himself looking back from this unique moment.

He was like a fish in a tree, not only because he often felt out of place, but also because he had risen above the expectations anyone had had for him.

Those fish he had seen swimming among the treetops looked right at home, the way he felt now.

In a similar way, everything Flash heard changed him. Every word, every beep and every click reverberated through his neurons, causing a reaction that changed him. Changed his brain. It added to the information that was HIM. Physically and mentally, he was changed forever.

The same was true of the rest of his senses. Touch, taste, smell and hearing. But there was more.

There was another sense that seemed to inform Flash. Perhaps it was the collective unconscious that was born into him. That unseen river of shared experience that ran deep, at the very core of his humanity.

Perhaps it was the ability to merge the tangible information transmitted from outside his body into his brain with his imagination. He didn’t just take in facts about the physical world and spit them back out the way they had been received.

Cold facts were interpreted. Pieced together.

Just as his brain was expanded ever so slightly by each new splinter of information, those electrical pulses had gone through the filter of him, to be enriched by everything else he knew and was.

Flash Meridian was not his body. His body was merely a vehicle for the invisible spirit that inhabited and animated it.

Just as Flash had parted ways with everyone he had known, other than Lem, who still shared the highway of life with him, he would one day part ways with this body that gave him the gift of physical senses to interpret the universe.