Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  'I hope you're getting this, Goss, because I can't even look at it.'

  You can see everything in the clipped instants between flashes. There are shining parcels wedged in the cruxes of branches and dangling from cords. There are tools and snake skeletons. There are casette-tape casings with what your zoom function tells you are rodent guts in the place of audio tape. There are oil paintings of human faces and human body parts, rendered with a technique referred to by art historians as photographic; but no photograph could make a human elbow look so gorgeous and disgusting at the same time – the body parts are almost appetizing.

  Most of what you see is metal. Stereo components and gun fittings.

  Surrounding what's left of the well is a dust bath. Its surface stirs like vapor from dry ice. Rising from this is a weird tower of heterogeneous components: stereo woofers, antennae. Barbie dolls like little totem figures strung on the cat's cradle of the Grid. The tower looks like a satellite receiver as might be envisaged by a Pink Floyd album-cover designer.

  Serge looks at this scene for a while without touching anything or venturing too near the dust bath.Then she goes into the live Grid again and stands there, looking silently at the dead zone.

  'I think it's just a freak-out,' Serge says after a while. 'Psychological warfare. It's just another game.'

  Arla answers her; Serge must have forgotten that she was there, because she startles at the sound and then looks resentful.

  'You saw the structure in the Grid. Lewis doesn't know what to make of it, does she?'

  'Yeah, so? It looks like some friggin lost temple of the Jungle Ungawungabungas,' says Serge. 'Place is ripe for a wanna-be alien archaeologist. That ain't what I'm here to be.'

  She turns away from the dead zone and starts moving back into the gleaming Grid lattice with a purposeful air. She's missed the real point of coming here; you swiftly send a message.

  Machine Front will probably tell you off for not informing them first.

  MAJOR LOOK IN THE WELL. THE MAX FACT LANDED HERE.

  Serge doesn't break stride. Gonzalez is following her, talking. 'The altered Grid isn't an ancient artifact. We both know that. It's been built more recently.'

  'Yeah? By who?'

  'Ah. The question you should ask isn't by whom, it's for whom?'

  'I got a war on here,' says Serge, swinging herself up off the foundation and into the Grid proper. You sense that she just wants to get away from the dead zone, and Gossamer's only too glad to lead her. After a while Serge stops and scratches the back of her neck. She's lost. You send her the camp coordinates, and she immediately sets off again, following your directions without acknowledging your presence. 'I'm gonna be needing a real good reason not to torch this whole sector.'

  'I can show you a reason.'

  Before Serge can retort, you both hear a voice. It comes from your dorsal side, behind Serge's back. It's a light voice; a young voice. But it doesn't speak with words. It makes an utterance derived from playgrounds and mental wards: long, guttural, with tongue waggling around ineffectually in mouth, and ending in spittle.

  By the time you locate the position of the speaker, the utterance has changed into something perfectly recognizable – familiar, even.

  It's a child, and she's laughing.

  'Don't run this time, Bonny,' Arla says softly.

  'I ain't got no intention of running. I already decided what I'm gonna do if you call up your baby goons again.' And out comes Serge's trusty spiderwhip.

  She peers down into the shadows that drape the well.

  'I know you're down there,' she says loudly. 'Come on and try to kill me. Come on! I'm not afraid of you turkeys.'

  Down below, the surface of the well stirs. Serge stiffens and you can see the muscles in her body coiling. You can smell her excitement.

  A head breaks the surface, then a body. Serge's hand tightens on the spiderwhip. She is going to release it any second now. The creature surges out of the well, moving from shadow into light, shaking its head and opening its eyes.

  But Serge doesn't do anything. With the swelling music has come augmented Grid-light. A clear ray now streams down on the golem, though Serge herself is in deep shadow. It reveals a small body belonging to a child no older than five or six. The child is a girl, with straight black hair and eyes elongated by epicanthical folds, and ears that stick out like a leprechaun's. She holds up a hand.

  It has six fingers.

  Serge staggers back as though struck.

  'Arla, you sonuvabitch,' Serge says. She's just clinging to her branch, trembling like a plucked piano wire. 'Nol'

  'You didn't get a good look at them before this, did you? Are you frightened?'

  Serge's trembling resolves into smooth, aggressive action. She whirls and lunges for Gonzalez, taking the other woman by surprise. She gets Gonzalez by the throat and presses her up against the bright webbing. The Grid is still playing its horrible symphony.

  'I see them all right, but what I'm seeing can't be right. It's just some nightmare shit.'

  Arla smiles.

  'Nightmares by definition aren't real.'

  'How did that thing get in the well?' Serge snarls. Her nails snap against the alloy of Arla's collar.

  'You know that I used to run the medical facility at X. Your very own Corporal Hendricks worked on my team in those days. We handled all kinds of problems. Including sexual-health matters.'

  'Go on.'

  'Paper waste and anything that might contain data useful to the Grid was incinerated within the compound at X, to prevent verbal and conceptual contamination. But sewage and the like was routed directly into the well. So were the contents of the biological waste-disposal system at the clinic.'

  'That's a nice thought.' Serge makes a face.

  Gonzalez shrugs. 'lt's a matter of practicality. As you know, the well has never shown any reaction to human bodily fluids or tissues in isolation, only to actual corpses, and these need to be fairly intact from a structural point of view in order for the well to make golems out of them. Considering that we had no other way of disposing of waste, the well was the logical dumping ground for inert materials.'

  'Inert materials.' Serge says it with an edge sharpened by irony. She is shaking her head back and forth.

  'Yeah. Now, in certain cases involving reproductive health, we used special sealed containers to hold waste. Just to be safe. But there was a seal malfunction in the lab, and some of the materials leaked into the well.'

  'Materials.' Again: the dead voice. You've never heard Serge like this before. She looks on the verge of tears.

  'During the crossover period, when the majority of the male forces were being replaced by female soldiers, my staff recorded terminations of seventeen pregnancies, most of them in the very early stages.'

  Serge's face is on fast-twitch. You can hear her panting.

  'I don't believe this. I don't believe what I'm hearing. Are there others, then? Other children?'

  Arla shrugs. 'Maybe. But I don't think so. Even the Grid has limits. Thirteen of the terminations were performed very early. Only four happened after twelve weeks – and I think it's one of those that we're looking at.'

  'But that can't be right.' Serge has a fervent air, and she shakes Gonzalez as she says it, as if the force of her conviction can make her words true. 'That was only four years ago. These kids are older than that'

  'I never actually said it was four years.'

  'These kids are older than that,' repeats Serge.

  'How did you know it was four?'

  'You know how I know,' says Serge. 'Quit playing me like I'm a dumb bunny.'

  Suddenly she lets go of Arla, who stumbles and goes down on her butt on the foundation. The children scatter into the Grid like spiders.

  Serge's teeth are chattering.

  'What the hell are they, Gonzalez? They can't be human. If you know what's going on, you better tell me right now.'

  'I don't know what they are. But I know what they a
ren't.They can't be picked up by scanners while they're alive, so you're right: they're not human.They aren't golems, either. Because they also don't disintegrate on death. They can die, for real.'

  'How do you know this? What evidence have you got?'

  'I know they can die because I killed one of them,' Gonzalez says softly. The way she says it somehow manages to make her sound graceful, even saintly.

  You want to go home.

  'When the raid started, I shot one of them off the perimeter fence, and then I went to check for damages and I found it lying there. It was still alive. I took it inside. I'm a doctor. I know a living thing when I see it. I know a human being when I see her – even if the cameras don't. I put her in quarantine and tried to medicate her, but she died. I couldn't allocate surgical resources because we were under golem attack. I told MF what I'd found, and I sent the body back to X. Hours later, MF launched a Maximum missile. It was supposed to wipe out the surface of the camp but leave the mines intact so that the logic bullets could be recovered afterward. MF would then come in and take care of any remaining golems. It was our worst-case-scenario plan. We would all die: we knew that. But at least we wouldn't be killed and dragged into the well by golems.'

  'But the missile never hit, doc. It was a misfire.'

  'It wasn't a misfire. They pulled it down outside the perimeter. The well grabbed it and it didn't explode, but little by little it killed the Grid all the same. You can see the destruction gradually working its way towards the mine.'

  'Who pulled it down? MF?'

  'They did.These children. Your children.' She pauses. Serge has not flinched. Gonzalez adds, 'They pulled it into the well. With that apparatus you were looking at.'

  Serge turns back toward the dead zone and the impossible quasi-machine tower made of body parts and stereo components. 'They built that!'

  'They appear to have a great deal of mechanical aptitude. I've watched them.'

  As the two of them are talking, the children flit among the Grid's branches with monkey grace. Again you notice a curious disjointed aspect to their movement. They look like badly spliced film. Serge must be able to see them in the periphery of her vision, but she doesn't let herself be distracted.

  'Why don't Machine Front know about this?'

  'Because I didn't tell them,' answers Arla.

  'You f%*king traitor. You're crazy, all right – crazy like a coyote. No wonder you're still alive. You're on their side. You're helping the golems.'

  'Hey, what do you want from me, Captain? I took a physician's oath long before I came here. When I told Machine Front I had a specimen of a human born in the Grid, they didn't change their tactics to take that fact into account. Instead, they went even more hard-ass and tried to blow up everybody in the mines.'

  'Yet you said yourself it was a worst-case scenario . . .'

  'You just don't get it, do you? Everything is alive here. Everything. The Grid is nothing less than miraculous. Our orders are bulls*%t.'

  'That's not for you to say.' Serge is swinging her head from side to side like a bull getting ready to charge. 'You don't know enough to make that judgment.'

  'I don't have to be able to lay an egg to know when one's rotten.'

  'What do you mean by that, Major?'

  'I mean what kind of crazy s*%t it is!' Gonzalez's neighborhood accent comes shining through. Her voice rises to a squeak. 'Mining for logic bullets. Fighting with the indigenes. Taking samples of organic molecules for study. What about understanding the Grid? Nobody's trying to do that.'

  'It's too soon. There are stages, steps to be taken.'

  'Baloney. You don't just march in and invade. That's where all our civilization went wrong. Just watch StarTrek.'

  'StarTrek, Jesus Christ, Arla . . .'

  'This thing is smart,' Arla says, slapping the Grid with her palm like she's complimenting a horse. 'Machine Front is playing games with you. The Grid isn't your enemy, Machine Front is.'

  'You're sick. You need help. Don't you realize that without machines we'd be dead?'

  'Would we?'

  'I don't follow you and I'm not sure I want to.'

  'Let's take the concept of the ArtlQ test,' Arla says. 'lt's easy to get an ArtlQ to duplicate an image – to make a photograph, say. But ask an ArtlQ to create a painting and it can't do anything but copy. It can't put its own interpretation in. It doesn't have that creativity. Now, people have compared the Grid to a highly sophisticated computer. It takes dead bodies and reproduces them, synthesizes them, and animates them. It even manipulates their neural structures so that they can function with a modicum of intelligence. So far, so good. But what about an embryo? Something in an early state of gestation has been torn from its human host and dropped in the well, and somehow the Grid has grown this thing, developed it, and taken it past the point of what would have been birth and into its childhood. How is that possible? How could it know what to do? It's an extraordinary leap, and I would argue that the only way it's possible is if the Grid is able to actually identify with the developing embryo and sense its wants and needs, and then provide them. If the Grid is identifying with us to that degree, why are we fighting with it and not talking to it? If it is coming to us in the form of our own people, shouldn't we see that as a bridge to communication, and shouldn't we cross that bridge?'

  'But they're not talking to you. Doctor, are they?'

  'Not yet, not as such. But the situation raises the question: if a dead embryo could be brought to life by the Grid, what about a live person? Could a live person become a conduit, a—'

  '—Channel? A psychic medium? Gypsy Rose Lee, Fortunes one dollar. . .'

  'You can laugh about it, but the only way forward that I can see, Captain, is for a living human to go in the well and see what it does to her. Meet it halfway.'

  'And is that going to be you?'

  'I'm working on it,' says Arla.

  'Ho,' says Serge. 'l see a pattern here. Weren't you supposed to suicide up at N-Ridge with all your subordinates? And if you were gonna jump in the well for thrills, haven't you had enough time to work up the nerve? You know the way I see it? I think you like the romance of committing suicide but you don't got the necessary pumping action. You can't do it.'

  'We'll see what happens,' says Arla in her sweet voice.

  Serge grunts, 'l doubt it. I know your type.'

  'And I know your type, Captain Serge. I know your type all too well.'

  'So then you know what I'm gonna have to do about this.' Serge gestures to the well without looking at it, as if afraid that she might meet the gazes of one of the children.

  'And I don't think you have the requisite pumping action, Captain.'

  Serge swallows.

  'Why don't you tell me about my. . . offspring. Go on, then. I'm listening.'

  Arla's voice drops to a whisper.

  'You're shaking, Captain. It's a good front, but I can see you shaking from here.'

  Serge's eyes flare. She gropes in her pocket. 'Want a Snickers?'

  You are getting too close. You can see the poison in Gonzalez's eyes. You have to bring Gossamer around in the air and take her higher, or risk getting entangled in the Grid. And in doing so you lose sight of them, just for a few moments. Just as Gossamer goes into a banking turn, the golems come.

  It's very fast.

  You use the Swatch to shriek a warning at Serge. She springs back from the nearest golem with a curse.

  'You don't need friggin'rescuing,' she hisses at Gonzalez. 'What are you doing? Are you controlling them?'

  Gonzalez shakes her head sadly.

  'No, I'm not controlling them. That's your job.'

  'What the skunk you talking about?'

  'Machine Front are just using us. Always have been. They need us to die, Captain Serge. Without us, no golems. Without the golems, no one to take apart the machines.'

  Serge snorts. 'That's bass-fishing-ackwards, Gonzalez.'

  'You go up to N-Ridge and look around, Captain. T
hen you can tell me about bass fishing or fly fishing or any other kind of redneck killtime you can think of.'

  'I can't buy into this paranoid fantasy crap,' she said. 'A f!*kup's a f!*kup's a f!*kup. And this is one, I can feel it right down in my toes. Because if I believe that some disposal-seal malfunction resulted in the dead embryo going into the well, and the kid that resulted from it was hell-bent on putting machines into the well to make them alive. . .well, it could be true but if I was to follow this popcorn trail of logic to its natural end, I gotta be believing that the machines done it all on purpose. That they want to be alive. And that's just too Frankenstein for this Kansas girl, Toto.'

  Gonzalez doesn't say anything for a moment. Actually, she looks like she's going to cry.

  'Maybe when Machine Front have manipulated you the way they've done me, then maybe you'll understand. If you can still think, which I'm starting to realize I can't.'

  And she retreats into the webbing, leaving Serge with her spi-derwhip and her Swatch, surrounded by golems.

  'Is she a downer or what?' mutters Serge.

  You start to call Lewis for help, but Serge stops you.

  'They're going,' she says.

  And the golems do leave once Gonzalez is out of sight. But you can still make out the children, half-secreted in the Grid's netting, watching Serge.

  like my hiney

  I dropped by Miles's house to pick him up for the funeral, He didn't want to drive his car into Clifton; he's funny like that. I've known Miles since high school and we both went to Rutgers. He didn't even have a car then; I liked it that he stayed friends with me even after I dropped out and started having mental problems and he started making all kinds of money doing his hobby computer games, even before he graduated. Now he had an expensive, if staid, Buick, and he kept it washed and waxed and never subjected it to stress. It's not like Clifton is exactly the South Bronx, but that's Miles for you.