In Bubble Number One, people’s sensitivity is extremely heightened and extremely short-lived. It towers above you if you look at it, its peak completely out of sight. It also stands extremely thin, owing to the small time interval it lasts for. Despite having this kind of sensitivity to what happens around them, people continue to very mildly feel the effects of events long after they have occurred. It is unlikely, however, that people detect these feelings.
A baby born into Bubble Number One is overwhelmed when it opens its eyes. It feels an extreme sense of wonder, an extreme feeling of helplessness, and an extreme urge to say the word “bub”. Because of how sensitivity works in Bubble Number One, these feelings come and go again and again, in intervals of milliseconds. To avoid the consequences of this, doctors cover the baby’s eyes and ears with a piece of cloth. Whenever a doctor has forgotten to do this, consequences have included the baby experiencing an immense amount of confusion. Such confusion shapes the baby’s brain into a very pointy cone. Consequences have also included a drastic decrease in the baby’s sensitivity, so that instead of an extremely tall tower, the sensitivity takes the form of a very flat plateau.
Bee is a person who faced such a consequence of the lack of cloth covering. Bee’s sensitivity is flat. This means that Bee does not feel a lot. However, what she feels is long-lived, and will continue to exist beyond her death. Her interactions with other human beings are akin to a ball bouncing between the tip of a pencil and a wall. Whenever a person in Bubble Number One feels short-lived and extremely heightened anger at Bee, they are unable to forget it and keep feeling it again and again. This is because Bee reciprocates with long-lasting anger, which then makes them feel their sharply peaked anger again. And so the ball that is anger keeps bouncing between Bee’s and the other person’s sensitivity.
The same can be said of other emotions.
For this reason, Bee lives in a hut far away from all other human beings. She lives in a hut that lies exactly at the confluence of two mountains. To Bee, it looks like one mountain bumps into the other. She empathizes with the mountains, which means that she exists with a constant feeling of bumping into someone else. Such a feeling defines Bee’s gait. While walking, Bee comes to sudden stops every few seconds, as if she just bumped into someone. Since her emotions are very mild, this peculiarity is hard to notice.
The only other living presence in Bee’s hut is her cat Fish. It is hard to tell how the emotions of a cat in Bubble Number One works. In Bee’s presence, Fish’s activities include meowing, eating, sleeping and going for occasional walks around the hut. This is fairly normal for a cat born in this Bubble. Fish has never met any other human being residing in Bubble Number One. One of the emotions felt by Bee is a low hum of worry for Fish. Bee does not know how Fish will react to meeting other human beings. Another emotion felt by Bee is a low hum of curiosity about how Fish’s meeting with other human beings would go.
These two emotions reside on a racetrack. Bee’s actions are determined by the relative amount of these emotions. Ever since Fish was born, the low hum of worry has always been in the lead. When the worry is far ahead of the curiosity, Bee remembers to wake up before Fish each morning, making sure Fish does not wander far away to regions with human presence. She makes sure Fish is beside her when she sleeps.
