I tried talking to McCord: I told him to listen while I projected his voice: I said, “Can you hear me, now?”
“But McCord only heard someone—maybe it was my voice, or a blend, say “I can’t hear you.” That was not something he projected. That was something he heard. Then McCord got hungry. He said he felt like an idiot, and he wasn’t smart enough to figure out what somebody was talking about when they put thoughts into his head. McCord made himself a croissant sandwich, then, with extra cheese and extra mayonnaise—the real kind of mayonnaise, not the low fat kind.
Sadly, most people, when they age, can, for example, hear the future acted out—spoken through their children or spoken through the person they become when their primary focus in life isn’t to facilitate the species—and they are afraid of it; people aren’t always happy go lucky and telepathic communications can be a lot of work. Most people get wind of something, can’t understand, and, to protect themselves, eat. They eat because they want to be with someone that doesn’t require them to exert an effort. They want to project the things they said throughout the day and congratulate themselves on being who they are.
So you might say that people eat to kill off their telepathic thoughts, and that would be true. But you might also say that those from the future are projecting thoughts back into the past while under the influence of something, and, when they do that, they inundate us with information we cannot translate or understand. I won’t say, then, that eating a little more than you should is what lazy people do—since many people work hard for their food. But I will say that when the future makes you hungry, and you eat, you make the past hungry, and they may or may not support your existence by eating. They may, instead, shut you out, since, as it happens, you’re sending them too much information, and the best you can do, then, is talk to someone adjacent to the voice you’re trying to talk too, which, generally speaking, is the voice that’s tapped into the future—the one that really has the good stuff—the life—that you want to know about.
Now, as Mark was eating, I heard his voice say, “Nigger-ria,” more than once. I think he was trying to be funny—he must’ve felt brave enough or inspired enough with the help of his sandwich to try things out—I imagine he projected my voice when he said those things, and that was how I heard it. Naturally, I didn’t want to hear him dumping his back and projecting garbage into my head—these weren’t cloaked thoughts—they were designed to make others—not just me—feel bad. McCord, with the help of his sandwich, was on the offensive, actively upsetting me with his garbage thoughts that looped around in his head. In order to protect myself, I had to translate those thoughts back into Mark’s voice, which, in effect, damped his appetite. I wasn’t going to let him use me to tap into the future, forcing people to eat and or drink and or get high one way or another so that he could evoke and or provoke them into telling him more and more about the life—about the survivors.