Kalifornia

by Marc Laidlaw

  The Seer raged, raged at her studio audience. She had to grab their attention. They lived in her flesh, but the sight of it bored them. They preferred the veil to the face beneath it. They craved the illusions she cooked up for them, preferring insubstantial fantasies to solid food. And they loved it best when she insulted them for their bad taste.

  “It’s criminal, the mental degeneration I see here!” she cried. “Am I the only one who still has a mind of her own? Let’s talk concepts, let’s talk eons of time. You’re devolving. You’ll be blind and white as cave fish soon, your bodies will shrivel up, your eyes will cloud over, you’ll be nothing but a bunch of body-temp insulation for your wires.”

  The audience laughed in tentative agreement.

  “Oh, Shiva!” she cried in mock exasperation. “Do you even hear what I’m saying?”

  Pulses of acknowledgment lit up the tall response boards along the walls, like lightning flashing in stained-glass windows. She noted the boards with satisfaction.

  “I see that some of you are still breathing. But how much of this is really getting through?”

  Fewer flickers this time. She glanced at the ratings monitor to make sure that the audience was still with her; they were too self-conscious to give their all just yet. She signaled her thruput man with a pinching gesture: Peel me a few off the top.

  Her vision darkened. Her wires began to warm and purr. She slid sideways into the astral realm, sailing the pure ether of information, skimming the Akashic records.

  Shadows filled the studio, blotting out the audience, the tech-crews, the walls of equipment. Her normal sight was displaced by a fly’s-eye view, a composite of signals skimmed from the vast population of her audience. RO was a misnomer; most people never thought of the fact that they were all potential senders. Wires were wires, if you knew which switches to throw. They had been designed that way, with the distant goal of continuous two-way operation, just as the telephone companies had provided early push-button phones with symbol keys that no one used for years. It was all a matter of opening their eyes and using them as her own.

  She looked out at dingy living rooms with stuccoplast walls; she leaned against splintered doorframes, stroked mangy dogs, squatted in an alley as her guts heaved.

  “I’m disappointed in you,” she said, closing her fingers to constrict thruput to a more manageable stream. “I mean, you people, you people . . . my God, you have no respect. Someone out there right now, yes you, shitting in a back street. Yeah, I see you—damn right I do! You ever stop to think that’s disrespectful? You don’t find me shitting on the program, do you? You don’t tune in to find that kind of stuff going on. We all know it happens, we’re adults here, but do I shove your faces in it? How would you like me to treat you with that disrespect? You’re so tied up in me that each and every one of you would crap your pants or your reclining chair or your kitchenette, wherever the hell you are. If you want me to take care of your bowel movements for you, all right, I’ll do it. But get this, people. I’m not going to wipe your collective ass!”

  She completely closed the gap between her fingers and the signal window shut. Herself again, free of the leeches, she faced her equipment, her crew, and the restless studio audience.

  “It’s time to do a little skimming,” she said.

  The ratings monitors hummed as the audience grew. All over the state, people who’d tuned in with half a mind now got completely snagged. She was scooping receivers from a hundred competitors for this, her most popular segment.

  Nobody outdid the Seer at her job. No one else had her particular talent for illusion weaving.

  She gave the newcomers time to settle in.

  “We’re going through the fire today, folks. Anybody doesn’t like it, tune out now. I’m warning you so that you can pretend to be responsible, free-willed adults capable of making your own decisions. The fire is painful. It’s the fire of truth. You’re not going to like this. Well, a few of you might, but I think by and large you’re going to find it very unpleasant.”

  The ratings increased steadily. As usual.

  “In fact, I think you’re going to hate it. It’s going to hurt you!” The lack of response infuriated her. “I mean, people, why do you put up with this every day? This has got to be the worst experience of your day. Why do so many of you sign on for the ride? For a few bits of throwaway enlightenment? What’s it worth? You want out of here, people, you want to forget about me for good. Tune in on someone else, someone calm, someone who takes things for granted and never looks too deep. Tune in on yourselves.”

  There. She had them now—she’d hit a nerve. Even the studio audience looked angry, gnashing to get into her. She didn’t want so much as a dribble of thruput at the moment. She stoked the hostility to an almost unmanageable level. That’s showmanship. That’s suspense!

  “You don’t like to hear that, do you? You don’t like to be told to think for yourselves. It goes right against the grain. It rubs against all the training and habits that you think are nature itself. Well let me tell you something, people. You don’t know the first thing about nature. If you did, you wouldn’t live the way you do. You’re the first of your kind—the prime degenerates, the first true two-dimensionals, the most devolved ever. You remember TV? Kind of a curiosity now, but your grandparents may talk about it. Those were the days, right? TV worked the brain cells and the muscles, too. With TV, you had a choice. You could shut it off. You could reach right out and change a channel just like that, of your own free will; you could look at a dozen different things. But you had to decide to do it. You couldn’t be wishy-washy. And those images . . . nothing but flat pictures on a box: you had to use your imagination, your experience, your knowledge of the world to pretend they were real, that those flat little things were living, breathing, life-sized people. All that was healthy! That was the peak of our evolution! That was exactly the sort of thing our sun and planet and minds and bodies evolved a hundred billion years to achieve: TV watching. We were built for it, people. It didn’t involve invasive technology; it didn’t mean growing polynerves. Nope. It was natural, stimulating, healthy.”

  She paused. The audience was peaking. Time to fly.

  “But things have changed since then, folks. Things have definitely changed.”

  She held up both hands, flicked her fingers wide open, and the techs went to work.

  In an instant, they routed her out of the main signal and sealed her into a safe, muffled pocket of consciousness so that she wouldn’t lose any personality or suffer psychic erosion in the flow of raw traffic. All the time, thruput was rising. With the Seer out of the way, it snapped up to full. She couldn’t conduct the signal herself; her mind would have disintegrated in the blast like a dirt clod dipped in a torrent.

  Darkness filled the room, filled her mind, rushed out through the airways, and filled her audience. It was intense, total as system death, but it lasted only an instant. Then the equipment came up to full and started the mind-numbing shriek of sensory feedback, the fire through which she daily dragged her fans.

  All the receivers who tapped into the Seer were suddenly turned into senders, their signals thoroughly mixed and sent out again. Her audience, for a painful moment, was able to look through all its eyes at once. The fire was too much for most of them, so many solipsists sitting at home nursing on wires, thinking themselves the center of the world and liking it that way. Now a blinding light dawned in their heads. Democracy. They experienced the reality of a vast population, knew at firsthand that their cherished ego was nothing but an illusion made of silken self-deception. They saw that even solitude was an artifice, requiring the construction of incredibly elaborate barriers. They were little more than motes in a dust storm of humanity. Not only were they not the center of the universe, but the universe had no center.

  Oh, if they could only have harnessed this power to govern themselves. That was the promise of the wires. But no ordinary politician had found a way to do this without going mad. It remai
ned the domain of “magic”—or art, which is how she secretly thought of it. She was a weaver of the wired world’s dreams.

  Eyes within eyes within eyes; nerves inside of nerves. Each signal cannibalized itself and amplified along the axis of pain. Fine distinctions broke down to gross generalizations. The Seer kept silent but her flesh began to howl. The feedback’s siren call reached her even in the sanctum of her signal cocoon. She couldn’t resist the pure power of an audience, and this was that power distilled to its ultimate. Two hundred proof. The purity of broadcast consciousness climbed an infinitely steep curve, tugging her along.

  She hit the floor without feeling it, bringing the audience down with her. She went into convulsions, swallowing the white heat. She exploded, sailed out in every direction at once, fragmented into exactly as many particles as there were people in her audience. She felt she was all of them.

  Hands grabbed her; a hard rubber pad was jammed between her teeth; her arms were strapped down to the sides of the throne. The crew, bless them, gave her release. She could truly ride the wires now, let her body fall away, leave the audience numb and trembling while she found new things for them to chew when they came back to their old selves, cleansed and purified by the fire, ready for the visions that she wove.

  Free.

  Floating in radiant darkness.

  Seeing . . .

  She saw wires. Wires running everywhere. Wires in the shape of human beings, wires like nerve schematics suspended in space, wires of all colors sending and receiving, receiving and sending, three-dimensional antennae of lovely, fractal complexity held in place by the faint sheen of a flesh-and-blood matrix that seemed almost ugly compared to the pristine wires.

  Around the wires, energizing the darkness, spreading out through space, she saw a glow of divine electromagnetism. Polarities reversed, setting compass needles swinging, betraying true north. All the plasmic roads led to Power and the Flow.

  Where the current tends I see the current trends.

  Voices. In the distance.

  The staccato chatter of binary conversation, an on-again: off-again ideology, fell uninterpreted through what remained of her conscious mind. It slipped down between the widening cracks in her subconscious and encountered her own wires, which drank the clamor thirstily. Turgor in her polynerves, a subtle, satisfying expansion. Data rose from the wires like steam. She leaned over the vent, the fuming fissure in the floor of her subconscious, as if she were a Delphic oracle receiving psychoactive vapors. Dreams filled her soul. Visions and voices came at last.

  —no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs, to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the corners of time. 1 have broken the wall—

  —and I desire you as you owe me any love, that you suffer me to enjoy him. If you accuse me of unnaturalness in that I yield not to your request, I am also to condemn you of unkindness, in that—

  —in the soffits of the six windows is a beautiful chorus of angels, busts in medallions, altogether twenty-four, making music, censing—

  —this string zero one seven this—

  —man, the woman, the children at the aerial table resting on a miracle that seeks its definition—

  Raw traffic. The Flow from which she drank. Meaningless, even to the Seer. Her skill was that of spinning colorful strands from this woolly haze; her talent was for weaving these separate strands into a living fabric.

  It was pure gossip, stray rumors and innuendo that, combined, seemed integral parts of a secret that was hers alone to reveal.

  She shuttled in darkness, hands on the enormous invisible loom. Intuition inspired her. She hardly saw what was in her hands; she gathered the strands and wove them. This was something no one else could do. There was pure pleasure in seeing what emerged from the chaos:

  A narrow band of stars obscured by tumbling blackness.

  Dogmen slipping down metal stairs.

  A girl’s smile blazing like a weapon.

  Almost ready.

  A complete thought, an idea cribbed from the wire-borne cosmos, floated before her, still furled, like a crumpled tapestry. She grasped it by metaphorical corners and shook it out to see the whole picture.

  And dropped the cloth, screaming.

  She fled back to consciousness, groped her way blindly into flesh again, pulled her body on like a clammy wetsuit. Heart pounding, tongue thick in her throat, she spit out the rubber pacifier and opened her eyes.

  Terrified.

  The audience waited for her words. Waited for the oracle to speak, to illuminate them, to bring some bright speculation to their dreary lives. To give purpose to their passage through the fire.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  There was no way to tell them what she’d seen. Not that it was unclear. She could describe it, yes—she simply didn’t dare.

  If what she knew were true, and if, being truth, she revealed it, she would die. And while much of what she wove was pure deception, enough to make her doubt what she’d just seen, some part of it always came true, and that was enough to keep her silent.

  For the first time in her life, the Seer feared the wires. Feared what they had told her. Feared that they might speak again. Feared what they could do.

  Her audience waited.

  She had to tell them something. Anything. She must distract them.

  She rose and faced them. Raised her arms.

  An expectant hush. Walls shining with lights.

  Tell them anything.

  She threw back her head, closed her eyes, groped. . . .

  Screamed, sybillic:

  “Elvis lives!”

  ***

  After each broadcast, the Seer gave private consultations. She kept a regular schedule for paying clients, but in order to accrue good karma she always took three needy visitors at no charge. Today, on her way out of the studio, she told the scheduling computer to cancel all her appointments.

  When she peered into the waiting room to dismiss her charity cases, she found three people already selected. One was an overly familiar face, a woman who came every time her son ran off to join a cult. She was a pain in the neck; the Seer felt no qualms about dismissing her. The next was slightly more desperate, a man whose skin had a soft, rotten look, as if it were a mushroom ready to burst and scatter spores.

  “You need a doctor, not advice,” she said. “I could get in trouble telling you anything else.”

  “No meditations? Nothing to help me relax?” he pleaded.

  She raised a warning finger. “I give you one little white-light mantric affirmation and the AMA’s all over me like a jar of leeches. Forget it.”

  He slunk out of the room, leaving a damp patch of mold on his seat.

  The last visitor, sitting quietly behind the door, made her hesitate.

  Clothed entirely in black, even the eyes invisible, this one sat stiffly upright in the chair, bearing a black-swathed bundle.

  “Excuse me,” the Seer said. “You’re a Daughter of Kali, aren’t you?”

  The figure inclined her head. “Greetings, Seer, most divine.”

  An older woman, the Seer realized. The Kali sect fascinated her. Even after the events of the afternoon broadcast, she was reluctant to let go of this one. The Daughters were a recent order, a curious new sprout from the occult mulch, and notoriously secretive.

  “This is quite a rare occasion,” she said. “I’ve never seen a Daughter of Kali in public. You weren’t in the audience, were you?”

  The Daughter shook her head. “My vows do not permit it.”

  “You must have urgent business to have come out of the Holy City at all.” She decided that she couldn’t resist this opportunity. “Why don’t you come into my office?”

  Her office was another studio, a small one that hadn’t been used in thirty years. It was jammed with equipment, mostly inoperable except for blinking lights and tre
mulous needles; it was all for show. She remembered too late that it would probably offend the Daughter. Many occupants of the Holy City had forsworn all contact with modern technology—in particular the wires, which were anathema to the more fanatical sects.

  But if wires made the Daughter of Kali uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. She rocked the black bundle gently while it made a cooing noise. The Seer suddenly realized that the Daughter held a child. A Daughter’s daughter. Odd . . . she’d thought they were celibate. They were definitely opposed to sex with men: Y-chromosome contamination. This must be a parthenogenetic child. Or perhaps the Daughter had gotten herself into some more old-fashioned kind of trouble. The Seer repressed a smile. No wonder she needed advice!

  “How can I help you?” she asked.

  “I came to show you this,” said the Daughter, holding out the child. The veil fell away from the infant’s face.

  The Seer gasped, gazing at a remarkable visage. The baby’s eyes shone like gold coins, new-minted, bright. The hair was short and straight, as orange as the skin. A girl child.

  “That’s a Figueroa,” she whispered.

  The Daughter snatched her back. “What?”

  “This must . . . this is the Figueroa child. The one missing since the bicentennial. How did she come to you?”

  Wait until I tell Alfredo she fell in my lap! Alfredo, my sweet secret lover . . . you’ll thank me for this in kisses and credit.

  “We found her on our doorstep,” the Daughter said slyly, as if suspicious of Figueroas and bicentennials alike. “An offering to Kali, made in the night.”

  “This is incredible. Don’t you realize—? But no, you wouldn’t. I’ll tell you, this child has been sought far and wide. Only someone in your isolation could have missed the news. Her poor mother will be delighted, to say the least.”

  The Daughter made a sound like a growl. “The only mother she’ll ever know is our dark goddess, Kali.”

  “She has a mother of flesh and blood, and a family. I happen to know them rather well.”

  The Daughter of Kali drew back indignantly. “If that’s the case, then I’ve wasted my time. Take her then, return her to the parents. I’ll have nothing more to do with such a polluted child.”