Malcolm Bright

[Malcolm folds his hands on top of his notebook, on the desk, and leans forward a little.]

Kind of… but kind of not. If you imagine yourself doing something or even saying something inside your head, did you know that if you measured electrical activity in your muscles, you’d find that the muscle groups you’d use to actually do that thing are activated, just like if you were doing it? Your body doesn’t actually know it isn’t real. There’s just a time in childhood where you learn to internalize things at your discretion. If you watch a child younger than five? Everything is external. Maybe you’ve noticed. As you develop, you gain the skill to suppress the external presentation of that speech and those behaviours, but to your body they’re still real. Something the Barge does… is it drags those internal things outside of you, but in reality? You were only killing Cook in your head.