The visitor spoke in just a whisper, so soft and so low that she almost couldn’t hear it above the sound of the blood running its circuit through her ears. But it was always the same story, and after enough repetitions it carved deep grooves in the layers of her memory.
There’s no stopping it now, of course, and we’ll never be heroes, but there’s more to it than that. This is still a love story.
By the time of the Great Return, Heira has worked for the Commitment’s state-run television news organization for almost twenty-three years. Although listed merely as an “editor” and with only a single assigned responsibility, the level of respect accorded to her far exceeds that which could be expected merely from her relationship with the Overseer. Although unrecognized by the public, the deference paid to her, by everyone from the Commitment’s rank-and-file guards at traffic checkpoints and the station doors to the wives and husbands of top-ranking officials, hovers between obsequious and religious. Chalmers, the oldest of the television station’s guards and a veteran of the wars, sometimes even bows to her. It’s an unnecessary and extravagant gesture, but some ripple of acknowledgment follows in her wake as she enters each afternoon to prepare for the nightly broadcast.
Every night, that is, until the beginning of the Great Return. That night, for the first time in over a decade, Chalmers stops Heira to check her identification. Entering the open room of the broadcast set, too, she is greeted by the backs of a crowd. Gathered as if they were going to the gallows or arrayed for the firing squad, the newsroom’s crew stands before the bank of monitors. They gasp and gape in silence, a row of tombstones undulating in the siren strobe of the screens.
“It’s a rogue transmission,” Nelson, her producer, whispers as Heira joins the ranks.
“Do you think,” the anchor, Carol Denish, takes up the satellite of rumor, “I mean, it’s got to be an error, right?”
On the screen, Heira recognizes last night’s regularly broadcasted Corrective Executions. Once again Heira watches the old man led across the outdoor stage by soldiers in the Watch’s black uniform. She watches the young girl follow, prodded by rifle butt, and then the one-armed man with the shock of red hair. This was her work from last night, of course.
Or rather, it is not her work. Because, as the camera pans around from behind the imminent Corrections, Heira sees the difference. She sees their eyes.
The eyes which she had so painstakingly removed.
As the bullets punctuate their simple ellipses across the bodies and faces, the crowd before Heira hisses as the life drains from the eyes, the agony and the snuff of the spark unmasked. Heira, of course, has seen this—indeed, she is the one who must—but to the others this is new. The sterility and acceptability of the Corrective Executions, accomplished through Heira’s work of minimalist censorship—the application of a flat black bar across the eyes of the Corrections—has been undone and the assembled crowd, too, appears undone.
It takes Heira a moment to realize that Nelson and several of the others are openly weeping.
The screen flickers, goes dark, wakes again. It blinks out the 5-4-3-2 of the intro reel and starts the loop again, camera beginning behind the old man, the young girl, the one-armed man. There is the wet sound and sudden smell of vomit.
She turns and finds that behind her, a camera is rolling. The steady red eye of the recording light glares without blinking, watching the people watching the screen. Footage for tonight, she thinks.
She is about to leave for the editing bay, to begin redacting tonight’s footage of today’s Corrective Executions, when it happens.
“That’s enough,” Nelson yells, as the regurgitated execution ends and begins again for the third time that Heira has been here to see. “Cut the feed.” And somewhere beyond them, in the control room at the end of the producer’s radio signal, a switch is flipped. The renegade, naked feed is cut, swapped for the image from the camera recording the newsroom’s reaction.
And in the monitors at front, the new picture is within a picture within another. An infinite visual recursion of backs of heads staring into a screen showing the backs of heads staring into a screen, and so on at a slight angle so that each iteration magnifies the bend until it seems to twist away into the dark recess of the television.
To Heira this new vision is the true gateway to abomination. This infinite stretching, twisting tunnel into an abyss within the screen. It stirs a memory within her. A voice. A repetition.
Then the monitors are cut and everything goes flat and black.
Rumors swirl like ticker tape through the newsroom and in the gurgle of whispers in the rest of the Capital District. Everyone has seen it. Everyone agrees on what it is. No one knows why or how, but theories range from wild to outlandish:
A political activist group with moles inside the state-run agencies, releasing unexpurgated footage of the nightly executions to foment rebellion.
A freak echo of the transmission signals, bouncing off of satellites and space debris in an ablation cascade of radio waves, the masking properties of the original stripped in the relay and returned to Earth without the necessary protections.
The blind ghosts of the bitter dead.
The old God and its wrath.
That night, as she lies in bed next to the District’s Overseer after a night of talking around the topic, Heira dreams of sitting in the editing bay and placing digital shrouds over the eyes of the old man, the young girl, the one-armed man. Then, feeling the oppressive weight of observation, she turns to find the pressing crowd behind her, gathered as if to watch a spider in a terrarium. There are Nelson and Carol, then the techs from Control, then the cameramen, but beyond them, where the peripheral lights dim, are people she does not recognize. Or that she does recognize, but whose names she never knew.
At the edge, a tiny figure scuttles into the tunnels between the observers’ legs. The gargle of grey static emanates from the crowd, the susurration of fingers pushing through sand.
On her screen, the Corrective footage has vanished, replaced by the back of her own straw-colored head gazing into the monitor, its screen a picture of a woman gazing into a monitor with an image of a woman gazing into a monitor. The details at the finest level are too small to see, but at the center is a black pinprick, a single pixel—perhaps—which stands out like a dark star. As she leans in, the picture wavers. All of the lines rise, but as of yet do not converge. The hole at the center winks at her and calls her name.
“This is, of course, a formality,” the inspector begins, pressing a red button on the machine that squats in the middle of the table. A recording light blinks on and there is a brief squall of feedback until the woman adjusts the dial. “But please, tell me about your work.”
For so long Heira has been above reproach that the interview—not interrogation, not for her, never—by one of the Commitment’s officers is a novelty. A secondhand tale told by others, but now Heira is in this barren room, staring into her own reflection in the two-way mirror behind the inspector, living out a story within her story.
Heira tells the woman in the green uniform—or, rather, confirms, since the Commitment knows almost everything—most of her story. How she worked for a television station before the wars and the Shift. How afterwards, when the Commitment and the Districts were devised, she was already living in what became the Capital. Heira waves away the years, as if they bullet out a plot to which everyone knows the ending. She was assigned the role of editor. She makes the nightly Corrective Executions safe for the mandatory public consumption, by removing the eyes. No, Heira doesn’t have anything to do with the data afterwards. No, she doesn’t know how the unredacted images were released.
“I mean no impudence,” the inspector says, her blue eyes flashing, “but did your appointment have anything to do with the Overseer?”
“Almost everything has to do with the Overseer,” Heira answers. “You’
d have to ask him,” she adds, knowing that the inspector will not.
The inspector ends the recording and signals to unseen compatriots behind the two-way mirror. As they both stand up and shake hands, however, in that moment before the door unlocks from the outside, the inspector leans in close. Her voice cracks slightly on inflection, worry wriggling through.
“How do you do it?”
It’s the one thing that everybody wants to ask, although few ever do. How can Heira be the one to look into the eyes of the dead and take them away? How is that, while the public can only watch the Corrective Executions every night without flinching so long as the eyes are covered, Heira can stare into each window of the soul as it closes on their behalf? How does this one person, any person, manage to eat the sins of the Commitment every night?
Refracted within this question is, another: “Why?”
“I’ve always known my calling,” Heira answers, squeezing the inspector’s hand. “What will come, will come.”
Although Heira is free of any suspicion, new protocols are still put in place. An armed guard delivers a thumb drive to Heira in a sealed manila envelope and she is locked alone in the editing bay to upload it on a dedicated laptop with no external plugs and the wireless connectivity removed with pliers.
Heira reviews the footage—a woman with iron-grey hair who marches unbowed to the stage and receives a bullet to the temple. Her eyes are great and watery, but not weak.
A bald man, heavy with the weight of unhealthy habits and, from his gait, regrets. His hazel eyes twitch back and forth as if looking for a way out before the soldiers’ guns make quick work of him.
Two children—a boy and a girl—as unlike each other as night and day. Except, however, for the shape of their brows and the slope of their lids. Little holes bloom in their chests as the force drives them back into the drop cloth on the stage.
Who else would notice, she wonders, as she sets about cutting out the eyes with this clean and isolated machine. She crops them, checks them, runs the new program which does not just overlay the bars but punches them out of the digital data. She doesn’t know how it works, but Raymond from Control said that all the ones and zeroes—the binary blink of data—is purged. Nothing to trace back, nothing to undo. Impervious to the piracy.
Heira breaks the factory seal on a clean thumb drive and downloads the edited footage. She hands it off to the guard, who takes the precaution of smashing the original drive with the uncut eyes into a dozen pieces, which he grinds under his bootheel, leaving the wreckage in a heap on the floor.
The Corrective Executions air at 6:00 pm, as usual. By 7:00 pm the uncensored footage is being looped on the pirate channel. By 7:01 pm the Overseer is on the phone, screaming at the station manager, and by 7:14 pm the riot officers are in the street, quelling dissent with batons and fire hoses.
Rubber bullets by 8:20 pm, live fire by 9:00 pm.
Until the night shift finishes at 3:00 am and an armed escort takes her home, Heira sits at her desk, pointing a web camera at her monitor, swinging the Droste-effect tunnel of the picture in a picture across the screen, trying to find the end point. Through a tiny hole that opens and closes, she hears a voice so low that it’s almost a whisper.
The next day, the armed guard brings the data stick in and as soon as it is uploaded, Heira pulls it from the new, triple-locked laptop and smashes the stick into two dozen pieces on the top of her desk.
The armed guard blanches, but does not stop her as Heira sweeps the shards into her palm, then into her mouth. She swallows. The pieces cut going in and she knows they will cut going out, but that’s for tomorrow. Feeling the sick pulse in her stomach, she holds it down while she edits the day’s footage. Two women, green eyes. A man, dark brown.
At 6:00 pm the Corrective Executions air. By 6:37 pm the unaltered footage is on the rogue transmission. The Overseer does not call the station because the District is already under curfew and everyone out past the broadcast—with the exception of Heira and other authorized Commitment personnel with police escort—is executed under Operating Order 7.B(4).
This is the new standard procedure as the situation worsens over the coming days.
Heira wakes up and crawls out of bed, over to the television set on the dresser. She turns it on and the blue image flickers and bows, the screen itself flexing like the surface of a bubble before it settles. The image is, as she knew it would be, a shot from behind of her watching the screen, on which she is watching herself watching herself in ever-smaller iterations. She raises one hand and the wave of Heiras ripple as they follow suit. Perfectly aligned in the center of the screen is a dark hole, the screen on the screen on the screen, ad infinitum.
Static kisses the fingertip she places on the dot and there is a slight resistance as she wiggles it, working her finger into the minuscule hole in the membrane of the screen. It is tight, but gives way with enough pressure.
She watches as the rows upon rows of Heiras on the screen do the same, their fingers and arms aligning into a single flesh-colored shaft. Up to her knuckle already in the vortex of the screens within the screen, she works another finger in beside it. Inside, it is smooth, and it bends and gives. Beneath her fingertips, the canal of regressive images curls away from her, but she pushes harder. Her remaining fingers enter, then her thumb. Her forearm. The series of images stretch to accommodate her, wider and wider, as she turns to the side, thrusting shoulder deep into the hole in the center of the centers of the pictures. From the corner of her right eye against the screen, she can see the left side shown in the infinitely smaller repetitions. The look on the Heiras’ faces surprises her, their lip-bit determination and furrowed concentration.
Then she twists and, with some effort, forces her head into the puckering hole, wiggling her other arm in beside it. There is nothing to see, a complete absence of light, but still she wriggles in deeper, feeling her way through the crevices as she kicks in fully, inching deeper and deeper. Waves of contractions in the muscular walls press her into herself and pull her deeper inside.
Still, Heira forces her way.
After what may be hours or centuries or seconds, there is a faint pinhole of illumination. She pushes onward, arms extended until her fingers pop free, protruding out into a warm and humid port of air. She pulls and pulls, sliding arms—and head—out into a vast space and tumbling down the slick walls to the moist floor in the sweltering darkness. Above her, dim and blinking stars hang like bats from the roof of the abyss.
Heira cannot say what it is that she sees, but the very walls and floors of the cavern seem alive. In the days after, her imagination drafts and redrafts the horror: A great blind Worm rolling in the swollen womb beneath the center of human consciousness. A Mole God in its lair, tunneling out into the realms of possibility, waiting to emerge into the light and devour the sun. A limbless Crone, lost in the abscesses between space and time, and grown impossibly huge and pale and boneless, thatches of straw-colored hair above empty eye pits that glisten red as rare meat. But these terrible things pale beside the Great Voice that begins to speak.
“If I were to choose an Apostle,” the Great Voice speaks, its words rolling through the dark organ of its lair, “I would choose you. You are the witness and do not flinch. Others have lost their sense, but you are immune, whether by nature or by practice. Yes, if there was one, it would be you; it has always been you.
“But I have no need for conversion and I have no need for further witnesses. You have served well, but what more could you offer me out there?”
As her eyes grow accustomed to the faint glow of the corpulent stars and the pinched illumination from the edges of other tunnels, Heira can make out movements around her. Pale and spindle-boned, woman-shaped things crawl like tapeworms from other tunnels and skitter around the edges of her sight before burrowing headfirst into new pathways. High above them, the luminescent globes flicker and blink the
ir dim light. The air smells raw and internal, the scent of a wound that will never heal and never fester.
Through the closer tunnels, the gouges in the gargantuan pustule’s lining, Heira catches flashes of other places and other times. A reflection of herself in her own eyes, in the two-way mirror of the interview room, just over the fearful inspector’s shoulder. The glass picture frame in a bedroom, glaring over two postcoital bodies in the bed below, to stare into the glossy, empty reflection of a dead television.
A silhouette sitting at the foot of a bed, whispering to a little girl pretending to be asleep. The phalanx of shadows between the mirror on the wall and the mirror by the closet bows on and on, out of her sight, looping on into another infinity. Maybe even back into this chamber.
Reeling in the dampness, constricted in the belly of the abyss, Heira begins to hyperventilate. As if sensing her agitation, the ground roils and trembles, contractions squeeze and heave. The pale figures on the periphery scatter like maggots, back into the meat and the lights above her shudder, and then begin to fall.
And then Heira realizes they are not lights. They are eyes. Angry, sad, confused, flickering in a panoply of colors, they swarm around her, propelled by their fluttering lids like moths’ wings. Their wet, heavy blinking is the sound of hundreds and thousands of mouths, and their butterfly kisses are thick and viscous, sopping with fur-like lashes. As they bite, rubbing their lids against her skin to pull and grasp, she screams. The cavern spasms, forcing her into one of the open furrows, expelling her from the Great Voice’s audience with pulsations, while the disembodied eyes nip at her bare soles. As the skin of the walls close around her mouth, Heira cannot move, cannot breathe, and can no longer scream.
Darkness on all sides, in all aspects.
Then it starts again.
“Someone at the end of the tunnel,” the Great Voice says, “is writing your story. Someone is always telling it again and again.
Borderlands 6 Page 20
