Long Eyes and Other Stories

by Jeff Carlson

  #

  The music industry is crowded and vicious, perhaps worse than acting, writing, painting. Average ears are capable of perceiving no more than a dozen distinct musical notes or more than a handful of truly different styles — and in the few brief decades since recording technology began preserving every effort great and small, almost all of the pleasing combinations of sound have been done over and over. Most of the unpleasant ones have been done repeatedly as well.

  At first the Internet offered new venues, buyers and stages, but it also quickly became a vast garbage dump into which every copycat and tin-ear poured their knock-offs.

  Alan's not above borrowing concepts or inspiration from his favorites like Christ Butter or the Beatles, but he labors to make each composition fresh. He has fought for and earned each of his few professional credits, and puts only his best songs on the two web sites promoting his work... but it's nearly impossible for any single voice to rise above the global mob.

  What it takes to stand out is a completely new style.

  #

  The strange text in the photographs is definitely music, Alan decides. Strange music. He tries to give it voice, coughing through the unique tempo: "Dah dah wa. Wa dah."

  Very strange. As if someone combined bagpipe marches with reggae, wind noise and dashes of punk.

  Its clash and contrast are unspeakably lovely.

  #

  "Dah wa. Da dee..."

  He finds himself roaming his one bedroom apartment like a slow-motion pinball, flopping down on the couch to continue his translation, rising to dig through the refrigerator, the whispering in his head escaping him in wet-dog shakes of his body and hands. "Dah dee. Dah dah."

  He finds himself mumbling, always mumbling, water bubbling from his lips under the hot spray of the shower, flat echoes surrounding him as he paces in the short entry hall.

  "Dah wa. Dah dah."

  He finds himself in bed, lurching from a deep but restless sleep, the phone ringing. The answering machine speaks, his boss, furious. Apparently he left the FastFoto door unlocked.

  Alan is exhausted, damp all over with sweat, his belly glued with semen. For the first time in twenty years he's had a wet dream. But it was a nightmare. He remembers thick conflicting emotion — anger, longing, joy — coupled with random sensations like hunger and heat as well as cascading memories of being a teenager, a child and, insanely, an old man heavy with arthritis.

  He pushes out of the twisted sheets and hurries back to the shower. And, again, water bubbles from his lips as he begins to chant the magic sounds: "Wa dah. Wa dah."

  For the first time he feels a touch of fear.

  #

  The name on the deposit envelope is Wendy Dannenbring.

  Originally Alan had planned to observe her, meet her, at FastFoto when she came in for her film. But there isn't anything there for her anymore. The prints, the negatives and the deposit envelope all came home with him. And he can't wait.

  Caught by the warm yellow dawn, sitting on a frigid bench for the cross-town bus, Alan examines the envelope again. Her address is not in an upscale neighborhood, so in that respect at least she is like him, still struggling. For the moment. Wendy Dannenbring is about to knock the world off its feet and he thinks he can help. He thinks he can improve her ballad by underscoring it with a more normal bass. Good reviews from the critics are wonderful, but if an audience doesn't understand what they're hearing, they won't come back for more.

  "Dah dah, dah. Dah wa."

  He imagines he's found his perfect match. She obviously understands the power of solitude, given that this creation must have required years of intense labor. Yet she's also passionate and starved for intimacy. It's all in the music.

  Dreaming over her tight spiky cursive, he thinks of his few lovers — a teacher who earned his first crush, a favorite, untouchable cousin who mercilessly flaunted herself for years and once let him surprise her by the pool with her top off. He thinks of women he's only hoped for, daydreams, gentle nurturers.

  The loud arrival of the bus shocks him like an alarm clock. So does discovering, as he rises, that he has an erection.

  Fear spikes through his heart again.

  #

  A sagging old dumpling of a woman opens the door only as far as the security chain allows. Alan stares at her, then gives the apartment number a double-take. Her eyes, bright with anxiety, bruised by sleep-deprivation, sweep over him and past his shoulder as if expecting someone else.

  He holds up the deposit envelope.

  Her eyes widen, then slide to his face. Whatever she sees there does not seem to lessen her anxiety, but she raises one small hand to free the security chain.

  #

  Wendy Dannenbring's place would have been cliché Grandma except that the frilly white doilies on the sofa and end tables are visible only where the massive drifts of paper have been organized into stacks. And it's unusual for people her age, the last of the pre-Boomer generation, to be high tech. She has three computers. Oddly, all are unplugged and two have been disassembled, the printers stacked upside down in a corner of the small room. Filthy crusted dishes sit among the paperwork.

  Alan stands motionless while Wendy sits and fusses through the photos.

  "Should've known," she mutters.

  He waves at all the paper. "Why did you take pictures?" he says.

  "To see if it would stay the same."

  "What?" Disappointment is not uncommon in Alan's life, but this wacky old bat could not be farther from what he'd hoped for. The shock of her temporarily quiets the song in his head.

  "Should've known better," Wendy says again, still talking to the pictures or maybe the floor, rocking gently. "I thought it was all automated now." She stops and looks at him. "Do you know what this is? Can you understand it yet?"

  "It's brilliant, beautiful, who wrote it?"

  "It's extraordinarily dangerous."

  Hope leaps through him like fire. "It wasn't you?"

  Wendy's gaze lifts up, weary and scared — and determined. "I'm not sure," she says slowly.

  "What the hell do—"

  "Oh, I typed it. That much I'm sure of." Her eyes have not left his face. "Are you dreaming?"

  He tries not to flush or look away.

  "Me too," she says, her deliberate, measured tones infected now with a hint of panic. "Fantasies, real-life, sex, hope, death, everything mixed together non-stop."

  "That's why this is so incredible! Good music should make you feel and think and remember."

  "Music?"

  "Of course, are you crazy?" Then Alan laughs. "What am I saying, obviously you're—"

  "This is computer code. Binary."

  He shakes his head and steps away from her.

  "We're being read," she says. "We're being learned."

  "You're crazy." Alan starts toward the door.

  "Wait. Please." Wendy drags a revolver from between two of the sofa cushions and thrusts it at him. "Please."

  #

  They remain like that for several moments, Wendy's small hand steady despite the revolver's weight, Alan staring into its short dark barrel. His eyes flicker between it and her face as he tries to listen.

  "My husband Richard was a neurologist who wanted to improve human intelligence by improving memory." Words fall out of her in a rush. "Three years ago he got sidetracked by the nature of dreams, which current science thinks are byproducts of the mind organizing each day's experiences. He thought maybe... He wanted to control the dream state and tried bio-feedback, drugs. Finally he created a universal program that would redirect the mind in organizing short-term memory more efficiently."

  She pauses long enough that Alan considers running. But the mess will slow him down and make him a target.

  Words spill from her again: "One of his test subjects went insane in her isolation tank and the other strangled on a contact wire. Intentionally. Two days later Richard jumped off a roof, I thought because of the disgrace, because they were g
oing to ban him from..."

  Wendy rocks and rocks on her cluttered sofa, covering both ears as if trying to drown out her own voice.

  "Two months ago," she says, "when I had to move to this apartment, I found some of his programs in our PC. Artificial intelligence, maybe. Certainly it's self-replicating. Changing. I first noticed it when it piggybacked on an e-mail to my friends. It was trying to get out."

  She stops rocking and glances up from the floor.

  "We were all very lucky," she says. "The netserver software scrambled it into meaningless gibberish."

  Alan tries to say something, anything, but his eyes are still locked on the revolver.

  "It did get into me. And it's gestating." Wendy hugs herself with her free hand. Her voice is almost a whine. "It's using everything I know to evolve. Controlling me. I wipe magnets over the hard drive but catch myself rewriting it from memory. I burn stacks of notes and then find the most recent version still in my desk. The photos... Fortunately I'm not very educated. It hasn't benefited much. But it might not need to change a lot more to find a form that's easily communicable. If it does... if it reaches the world..." Her voice is genuinely sad. "I can't let it have whatever it might learn from y— "

  Alan leaps across the coffee table, banging his knee into a stack of paper, slipping, clawing.

  Wendy fires. She misses, barely, the muzzleflash scorching his cheek and deafening his left ear.

  He slaps her hand aside as the revolver goes off again. This bullet scratches his right shoulder. The third punches a wet hole through her cheek as they struggle.

  Alan barely remembers to grab the pictures and the deposit envelope before he escapes.

  #

  Home again, he composes for nineteen hours, burning, surging, stopping only to suck down half a gallon of water. The slapdash whirling collage inside him easily overpowers the aches of his damaged ear and bleeding shoulder — and eagerness mutes his fear. This is like nothing he's ever known: orgasm, pot dreams, the normal thrill of creation.

  This is the unfettered confidence of a diving eagle.

  He catches himself in the moment between finishing his long song and posting it on the Net, like a man at the edge of a building. Breathing hard, blinking, he recalls Wendy's wretched face, her dry voice. Can he stop himself?

  It's too beautiful. He presses 'Enter.'

  Adrenaline courses through his limbs, but fades as nothing happens... Then e-mail returns to him from all over the world, terribly fast. He double-clicks on several and his song pours from the computer speakers, altered, added to — accompanied by something more.

  A fearsome storm explodes within Alan: other minds, other perspectives and personal histories, different languages, new bodies, a prism of humanity. Desire, energy, industriousness. Madness and perversion.

  The darkness is just as strong as the light.

  His physiology allows only a few instants of roaring input before he collapses onto the floor.

  #

  Seventy-one individuals across the planet died of cardiac arrest or cerebral events. Two hundred and thirty-nine more smothered, burned or were electrocuted as they lay unconscious. Another three thousand and four committed suicide in the minutes immediately following, unable to face what been reflected back at them.

  They all live on inside us now.

  Millions of us experienced the merging. Millions of us everywhere were changed. The first crude version of the meme had been too much for isolated people to withstand, like Richard Dannenbring's test subjects and, later, his wife — yet it transformed into something truly majestic as it echoed back and forth through a sea of minds. It became an actual "collective unconscious," if only for several seconds.

  Here and there a few delicate souls were deeply wounded, yet many more agitated ones were calmed. Together we found balance, empathy, the essence of peace.

  But we didn't find as much of ourselves as we'd like. The wars in west Africa and eastern Europe continue, as do the politically-induced famines in central Africa and North Korea. Not enough minds were awakened in those places. Yet we know that our immortal union will be repeated and spread further in years to come as we study and recreate the phenomenon.

  As instigator of the so-called Explosion, Alan Lilly finally discovered the fame and small fortune that he had long sought, but neither seem important to him now in comparison to our love of the human song.

  END

  Afterword

  "Meme" is the brother story to "Pattern Masters." It originated from my obsession with the no-security photo drawers at the drug store.

  It's also the only story I've written in present tense, and there's a good reason why. Reading in present tense is weird. Like our convention of three-acts-and-a-climax, we're trained to absorb stories in past tense. "This was what happened." But the unusual voice pays off in the ending, when the narration jumps from third person limited to plural omniscient. I also like the immediacy of the present tense voice in the opening section.

  "Meme" holds a special place in my heart for two reasons.

  First, Alan Lilly is me. I never worked in a photo department, and I'm not a musician, but everything else about his background came straight from an endless succession of lousy part-time jobs.

  Second, this was my first story to sell to a magazine stocked in major chains like Barnes & Noble. DNA Publications' revival of Fantastic Stories had good distribution. Visibility made this sale more real to me than the check. I was in a real magazine! Early sales like "Meme" kept me on course through the long slog of mind-numbing jobs, and I still remember opening the acceptance letter. The editor, sneaky Ed McFadden, used letterhead as red as a stop sign, which at a glance I figured was another rejection. Then I read it and shouted to my bride, who'd married me just six weeks before.

  Diana's patience and support have been exceptional. I think there's a hint of her in Wendy Dannenbring, the strong wife of "Meme"'s mad scientist.

  ENTER SANDMAN

  In the closing moments of the game, smashball's greatest champion aimed for his opponent's head instead of a score zone. Jake Bolt led four-to-three, and rattling his challenger was easier and almost as good as extending his lead. It was also far more stylish. His fans loved it. No feints, no trick ricochets, just a hard "Bolt special" from one end of the box to the other. He took advantage of a weak volley, skipping the ball sideways off the nearest wall as he bounced himself off the ceiling and onto his upper platform — a spectacular move possible only in lunar gravity. Then he clubbed the ball downward.

  Yet clearly Bolt had made too much a habit of kill shots. His opponent was ready and brought up both hands, fingers spread wide, pale blue fire sparking from each gloved palm.

  The magnetized ball shot back at Bolt's lower platform, dead on the red score zone. Bolt dove, getting a pinky on it, but the ball still struck the zone's edge.

  However, no points registered on the board.

  "Rewind the last two seconds and play it slow. Somehow that genius son of a bitch is cheating." Gerold Sandifer stood with his back to a plush smart-chair that he couldn't seem to use for more than a few moments at a time.

  He was a small man, made smaller by the partial crouch that put his weight on the balls of his feet. He unconsciously shifted from side to side exactly as the black-suited figures in the tape had done before each serve, gliding slightly above the floor.

  "Don't be stupid." Sandifer's trainer, Anne Ramey, placed both hands on her hips as he glanced back. Ramey had seventeen centimeters and at least ten kilos on him — and sixteen years.

  He knew she regretted the latter statistic but that she enjoyed having her breasts almost level with his face.

  "There are hardly any rules," she said. "How could a smasher possibly cheat?"

  Sandifer ignored her pose. "Just rewind it."

  Ramey sighed and fussed with the old digital projector. "This thing's a pain in my ass. Let's feed the whole match into your NP and we can dissect it frame by frame, okay?"


  "No. Nothing with a hard drive or Net connected."

  "Well then hold your horses, my boy."

  The wall of Sandifer's place had not been intended for use as a projection screen, and was dotted with adhesive buttons where he'd removed framed prints and proxy cards capturing the triumphs of old-time greats and his peers, including two shots from Jake Bolt's recent back-to-back Super Box wins. Sandifer's own trophies filled a closet upstairs — and decorated the front hall of Ramey's communal apartment across town.

  They were watching an illegal bootleg, the left side of which was partially blocked by a woman's shaved head. Ramey had remarked more than once on that smooth, sexy scalp. Her jokes and comments had grown more frequent as her frustration increased, and Sandifer worried he might have to cut her loose. He didn't want that.

  Each time she said, "Whew, love the close-up" or "Scan that skin," Sandifer replied that whoever she'd hired to smuggle in the camera must be an overpaid pervert.

  In truth, he was pleased with the quality of the footage. A plastic micro-cam sewn into a shirt collar could hardly be expected to do better, and all the spectator's head concealed were the challenger's upper platform and mid-step. Sandifer was far more interested in what Bolt was doing across the box.

  It was sheer paranoia to have burned the micro-cam chip after making a copy onto digital tape, rather than downloading the whole thing directly into his pricey NP wide-screen, but Sandifer wanted no traces left when he was done. Smashers were allowed to study publicly available broadcasts all they wanted, but the image and likeness of every player was strictly licensed by the Lunar Smashball League. And while the LSL unofficially encouraged extravagant behavior short of unprovoked homicide in its players — all the better to increase ratings and merchandise sales — bootlegging charges could get Sandifer suspended or even barred forever.

  He might have considered it too sweet to risk if he hadn't found himself so close to the absolute pinnacle.

  As the sixth-seeded player in the LSL, Sandifer should have come up short of next week's Finals, except the fourth seed disqualified herself by testing positive for Heavensent, and the fifth seed had broken several ribs when he charged his opponent's platforms and careened through the box in an uncontrolled fall that was still being replayed on the sports net. Numbers two and three would play each other — and Jake Bolt, top dog like always, had the privilege of facing the lowest seeded finalist.