Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  At first it's like watching a polar bear try to catch a seal. The children simply scatter, slip into the well, and disappear, only to pop up again elsewhere as if diving through holes in the ice. But, like polar bears, the MFeels hunt in packs. And they have the predators' persistence, too. Their strategy begins to unfold. They are driving the girls together, sheepdogging them, wearing them down and cutting off their options. They are backed up by the full force of MF – no longer concerned about the consequences for life on the surface, MF are letting loose all their favorite toys. Explosions roil the surfaces of the well – first one, then two, then ten at once as MaxFacts are dropped all around. Soon there are no nearby pools for the children to dive into. They are driven into the higher branches. Clouds of indigenes rise, making it hard to see – a temporary reprieve.

  You can hear the Grid, even from on high. lt howls and chimes, but its music is not mysterious to the MFeels: they pulse in resonance; they have internalized its rhythms.

  'There are some things you shouldn't see, Cookie,' Mom used to say. 'They get in your head and you can't ever get them out. There are some things you don't want to look at.'

  Case in point. What she didn't tell you was that, by seeing some things, you could make them happen.

  You watch the first MFeel catch up with its prey. The child, so frightening and atavistic to Klaski and the others, so dangerously unreal with that faster-than-fast movement and unpredictable mosquito-like direction-switching behavior, now appears desperately ordinary. In the context of the sinuous MFeels she looks particularly human. She scrambles clumsy and panicked like a wounded animal in the branches of the Grid. She's trying to get to the blasted region that the girls make their home. It looks like she's trying to get to the door in the bottom of the pit, X-marked, visible from the air like a helicopter pad. The door to the MaxFact city. But the door is closed.

  The child takes a wild, swinging leap, arms and legs flying in reflexive abandonment. She sprawls on the closed surface of the red door. She has something in her hand: a Grid-modified whip-cutter. She begins to hack at the door with it. The door splinters, breaks at the edges; she claws, starts to open it, can't lift it at first.

  And the MFeel comes at her from behind. She never sees it. It gores her with its sharp head and begins to burrow into her small body. You see her ribs part as it buries its voracious head in her thorax. Her black-haired head slumps. The logic bullet within the MFeel's translucent body glows like a live coal. It jerks, shakes itself with a wave motion undulating all down its length, and for a moment you are reminded of a cat killing a snake by smashing it against the rocks: only it is the child who is being killed and the snake that is thrashing with obscene animation. It is changing. Its skin breaks open and wings sprout. It lifts its head and shifts its mechanical snout from side to side, eyeless but no longer mindless in the way it moves. Lights flash across its belly like Smaug's jewels or the instrument panels on Star Trek: jelly-bean lights, here splashed with blood.

  That's enough. That's really a hundred percent enough. The inner voice has taken on a warning tone like a playground monitor about to blow into the whistle around her neck. Mom doesn't like this. You don't like it either.

  No, I won't do it, I won't see it, I won't do it.

  But it goes on and on, and you can't close your eyes. The metal dragon-thing raises itself into the air, flapping awkwardly, twisting its body from side to side and thrashing until limbs spring out from where they must have been straitjacketed within what was its casing and is now its flesh.

  Still blind, it comes into the air, flits across the roof of the Grid, picking up colored pollen as it goes. Its wings seem to be growing as it flies.

  Below, the corpse of the child, a husk, left behind by her sisters or other selves. She never stood a chance.

  Her sisters have followed her. They reach the door, scrabble at it, force it open. MFeels scream after them. The girls drop through the trapdoor in fast motion and the MFeels follow in a crowd, jostling one another like salmon on the spawn in their efforts to get inside.

  You experience a moment of pure relief as you realize that, once inside, the MFeels will not be able to see their quarry, because you are their eyes and you are out here.

  They will escape.

  You urge Gossamer higher; but she doesn't listen. Just like before, the Grid is sending her a different message. The Grid is calling her to the door.

  NO NO NO.

  You try to pull Gossamer back from the door. You use all your will. It doesn't have any effect at all.

  They are using you, using you, using you - don't you care? STOP, drat it!

  It's all about willpower – you've got to resist.

  But what kind of willpower could we be talking about, when you've never even been able to resist a Twinkie?

  Gossamer whips through the aperture and you are flying through the MaxFact city. You seem to have entered via its underside. The MFeels have scattered, confused by their lack of vision, and the girls have a momentary advantage while MF regroups, using your eyes.

  Close your eyes, close your eyes, don't look.

  You can't stop.

  See the wild children: they are running now, pell-mell like frantic, anonymous civilians in a Japanese monster movie. They run through the streets and down the steps and up the walls of their impossible concept-labyrinth, panicking because they can be killed.

  They aren't the only ones. Golems appear like zombies from doorways and up from sewers, and are cut down without ever being seen because the only humans here are the ones running for their lives. Machines see only lightning and storm; you see a mother defending her young as the city itself seems to open up in front of the children and close down on their enemies. You see the Grid bare its teeth in anger and pain.

  The children scatter, making multiple targets of themselves. It is not enough. They are being speared.

  Again and again, you watch it happen. The helpless child killed; the precision machine brought to life. Dragonish weapons abandon their murdered prey and fly to roost in crooked towers and on radio antennae. Their logic bullets beat like hearts.

  It seems like destiny. Are you supposed to support it because it looks like destiny? Is this one of those things you just have to accept and try and look on the bright side, feed the cat, go on with your life?

  Nothing can change how you feel. No matter what you tell yourself or what Machine Front orders, you still see small children being pursued by monsters.

  Serge's Gridborn girls are not just information-states. They are not just placeholders in some bigger schema. To me they live, and the knowledge that they will die, out here without help, neither human nor Grid, abandoned to the neverbefore/never-again, written-off – to me this knowledge comes like a terrible ache in the gut, the one we all dread asking a doctor about because we know it must be the end of us, sooner or later. To me these children are not just some trick. Even if they are, to me they are not.

  Yes, to me. Me me me. I am here, so shoot me. I admit it; I exist.

  The MFeels must see the children to hunt them.

  They can only see the children because of my eyes.

  My eyes see this dream city. They see floodwaters pouring out of pipes in the walls, gushing brownly into a canal below. Behind gaps in the brickwork shines a red machine light. There is a smell of rust. All this dead structure has reassembled itself in living pieces. It has a logic, this arrangement, but the logic is extrinsic to the form of its parts. Rules change according to scale. Like Miles and his irritating new physics.

  And I am part of the mind that does this reordering. We, Cookie/Gossamer, are already fused. We already live in more than one place. We already are/I already am more than one thing.

  I could think my way into action.

  I could stretch across the concept barrier, starfish beyond the known dimensions.

  I will take my eyes away. I will not give my eyes over.

  And damn you all. Including you and your company
picnics, Gunther. By the way.

  I can still fly, which is more than most can say. I take Gossamer away from the fray. I refuse to look. I study the architecture; I gaze into the architecture, seeking its antecedents, its associations, its paths of truth backbackback deep in the suitcase of the MaxFact, disarraying the carefully folded costumes of organized human time. I don't look for targets; I look inside them. This confuses the MFeels.

  Machine Front are not having this. They try to make me help with the hunt. Gossamer jerks and writhes in my grip. They are overriding me. They are calling her with cheap electrodine cattle-prod tactics.

  GOSSAMER TO TRACKING. REPORT NOW OR BE TAKEN OFFLINE.

  Other fliers come swarming from the fake sky, ready to replace me.

  Oh, no, you don't. Not this time.

  In the middle of the city there was a green place. It was shaped like an eye and it consisted of cypress trees buried up to their knees in brackish fluid. It consisted of circuits and battery acid, it consisted of ink and barbed wire. It was a dream.

  It could have been a park or a graveyard. All I knew was that the well steeped the roots of electric trees like neon everglades. And in the depths of the well lay golem bodies, blurred by decay or growth; hard to tell the difference, here. Their memories fed the collective. They no longer scared me.

  Up in the high air the music of the Grid could be felt where my teeth should have been if only Gossamer had had teeth. The Grid had a pulse of sorts, a numerical array expressed as sound of the variety that stuns bats and annoys people. I nestled, listening, into a space between axonic impulses and their silence, and far away in my own body I drew a deep breath because boy did I need it. I heard my heart beat five times. Then I brought Goss down like a kamikaze kite, burying me and her and our eyes in the deepdeep fluid substrate of everything that was the well.

  My two eyes converge to become one Grid-swallowed Earthmade Gossamer eye. It pulses in a static field, rises into being from the depths of the city where cabling and pipes snake-dance around each other and plunge in and out of a thousand staircases. The eye emerges from the well in greengrass: a scrap of abandoned baseball diamond long since built over with more useful structures. Buildings shadow it. Warped and twisted aluminum bleachers writhe in a semi-helix, bent over like an osteoporotic spine, and on the places where people are expected to put their butts I can see the inky scrawl of somebody's handwriting plus a scrap of that famous sketch of a male body within a circle – Michelangelo's graffiti. Standing guard in a watchful semicircle, old billboards flap burned paper like dead skin. Ads.

  Their words have long since been rendered in bone.

  This is Gossamer's eye. The well is doing what the well does. The well is changing it, making its mechanical properties into something alive. I am within the membrane, looking both ways, two-dimensional, like a Janus-faced playing card.

  Gossamer's eye is large. The iris opens tall and narrow, like a cat's.

  The pupil pulls like a vortex.

  The nerves of this hybrid eye are like roads between worlds. I can see both worlds. I can see the prison TV room where the guard is blowing the steam from her Folger's. I can see the devastation of the ruinous city. I can see the last of the girls running towards me, pursued by the last of the MFeels.

  The last one.

  The last Cassidy runs up to my eye. She looks into me. I have been seen. For the first time, I have looked and have been seen in turn.

  'Take me back,' she begs. I see her lips move. 'l don't want to become one of them. Take me to where you are. Please.' I am in the place where seeing is acting. The nex is still open.

  I have no thickness at all; I am infinitely thin and permeable, and I am pulling the world through my self like a drain sucking water.

  I take her. Starting with the MaxFact suitcase unpacking and peaking with the girl, I take it all. And I am Serge and her undead offspring. I am the bodies of the soldiers, plundered for their logic. I am the machine guts and nerves, stratae of meaning lying on one another like colors in a sand painting. In this moment, I am the Grid.

  I can make a parting, or a curtain, or a door.

  Gossamer's eyes will feed back, like a guitar amp.

  The world will look on itself.

  So this child can escape her fate. I will do this.

  I won't leave her there, alone. I won't see her turned into some rending, killing thing.

  I want to save someone. I want to make something come right.

  I pull the girl through unharmed. I smell her green-stained body and feel her oily fingerprints. I hear her essence like a voice. She slips through me and out the other side, losing all substance, vaporized or transformed into thought; I don't know.

  Then comes her pursuer.

  I try to close the eye, stop the action here, but the well is stripping Gossamer away from me, casting me out as it remakes her machine parts into something alive. I'm losing the nex.

  I see the blind snout arrowing towards me. As if it has already tasted of its next meal, the MFeel breaks all the rules and begins to change as it enters me. l see metal nostrils, green flame, cabled wings and articulated vertebrae. I see corrugated skin like the side of a metal garbage can. I see flashes of circuit board and intestine, white bones like an X ray. It's a visual tornado and it fills me entirely in a flash.

  Then I flinch, and, like a spirit leaving its body, perforce I flee.

  But I am still here. I was always here.

  I'm sitting in a vinyl-covered orange chair looking up at a 19" color TV that's bolted to the wall. Tinny synthesizer music is playing. Credits are rolling, partially obscuring the puffy little purple and yellow starfish that cavort across the galaxy, studded with chocolate chips and grinning.

  my coffee with reality-substitute

  Miles came to see me.

  'Well, at least they put you here. Rita says it's a nice jail.' He glanced around doubtfully. 'She says places here are few and far between. Especially for violent offenders.'

  'You're still mad at me,' I said, because it was obvious.

  'I just wish you would have told me. There are untraceable, really nasty things we could have done to the bastard by computer. Why'd you have to go all berserker? This isn't D&D, Cookie.'

  'I know.'

  'Rita could have gotten you out of it, you know. I wish you could have just pleaded.'

  I shrugged. 'Maybe I'm better off staying in here. Did that ever occur to you?'

  Miles gave me a dark look. 'Why do you say that? You don't think Dataplex would come after you?' I could almost see the thought-bubble form outside his head: Industrial conspiracy? Or paranoid schizophrenia?

  'No, not Dataplex. Never mind. Look, this lawsuit is silly. You're wasting your money. Gunther kept telling me to take time off. You haven't got a case.'

  Miles said, 'I want to shake the tree and see if any monkeys fall out. Don't worry about money. I've just started a contract with IBM for big bucks.'

  I beamed. 'That's great! Congratulations. Do you have to wear a tie?'

  Miles actually banged his fist on the table.

  'Can you be serious for one minute! Are you truly aware of what you've done?'

  'Quit talking to me like one of those darn psychologists, Miles. I poured Drano on the guy's face. I know what I did. I'd do it again, too.'

  Miles sighed.

  'Thanks for your staunch support, Pimpernel,' I added.

  'Sorry. It's just that, I thought we had a shot at getting somewhere with . . . you know . . .' He gave a conspiratorial shifty look at the room around us '. . . Our project.'

  I avoided his gaze.

  'I, uh . . . think I've taken that as far as it can go,' I said.

  'Meaning what?'

  'Meaning . . . well, I guess I'm cured now. I watched Hill Street Blues last night.'

  Miles stared at me. Embarassment clouded his face. He was thinking that I was just a fruitcake and everything we'd talked about was all part of it. He wasn't sure, though. He was
looking at me like he'd find some sign in my eyes that he hadn't just been wasting his time all along.

  'So,' I said, and my voice was shaky. 'How's the opera going? Speaking of The Marriage of Fig Newton, did you know that your eyes are the same color as Fig Newton filling?'

  He gave his head a rapid shake like a wet dog would. He kept looking at me, and twisting his visitor's pass in his hands. It was starting to look sweaty and fuzzy. This was all too much of a stretch for him. Couldn't he see how risky it was for me to talk to him? He hadn't believed me when I'd told him about the Grid. What if I told him about Cassidy and the dragon, and he laughed?

  I took a breath. Wished I had a candy bar. Took another breath.

  'Miles, what if TV became real?'

  He cocked his head. 'You mean, like when Daffy Duck starts talking back to the illustrator and this giant pencil comes into the frame and erases parts of him?'

  I rolled my eyes. I should have expected this.

  'Not exactly.'

  'Or cartoons and people in the same reality? I think Gene Kelly did it in like the 1940s. What if dreams became real?'

  'I don't remember my dreams.' I tried to explain it better. 'What if you could manifest your thoughts? You have a vision of a monster, say, and it becomes real.'

  'Ah! Ghostbusters. The Marshmallow Puff man. And I bet Stephen King's done it. Or like how about that TV movie where they go back in time and meet Sherlock Holmes. I mean – hello? Sherlock Holmes is, like, a fictional character?'

  'So everything's been done. It's all movies.' I couldn't keep the disappointment out of my voice.

  'Like I always say, Cookie, better movies than reality. I'd rather eat my popcorn and go home.'

  'Say you see something on TV and then it happens.'

  'You're talking about the Grid again, aren't you? Golems. Mechanical flying . . . eels, was it?'

  Miles's tone wasn't particularly sarcastic, but it was hard not to be defensive all the same. I tried to stick to the facts.