Packet
Type: The wanderer’s term for an ordinary embodied human consciousness — a “packet” of mind bound to a single brain and lifespan.
Summary
The word The First Wanderer (and, later, Evie) uses for every mind that isn’t a Wanderer. A packet is:
- Bounded: it lives inside exactly one brain and dies with it.
- Opaque from outside: a wanderer entering a packet experiences its “surface” longings first, then its self-image, then — beneath both — its real will.
- Layered: the wanderer describes at least three strata (conscious aims, self-regard, deep drive) in every packet he inspects.
- Nameable: the wanderer adopts his packets’ names as his own. His first packet Earnest gives him the name Earnest, which Evie throws back at him as the execution line.
Packets are also the wanderer’s moral blind spot. He reasons that because political systems “are self-correcting,” the evil his packet K. Pasternak does as Marquis is not his problem. Evie disagrees — this is exactly the disagreement that kills them both.
Appearances
- Ch. 03 — For Every Dove a Bullet: Central vocabulary of the story.
Related
- Wanderer, The First Wanderer, Evie
- Winston Earnest, Henry Berkhamsted, Jenny Dunne, Mitchley Chang, K. Pasternak — the first wanderer’s five named packets.
- Mentalic Ontology — the theory that says a packet and a wanderer are the same kind of thing, just with different durability.
Open questions
- Are packets aware when a wanderer is driving? Berkhamsted and Earnest both dimly notice. Whether this is a spectrum or a threshold is unstated.