by Bryan Hurt
She claims she slept all night that night. As soon as she got home, slept and slept. But several of us got messages on our machines from her at around 2:00 a.m., quiet sleepy messages all about the painting and this sad bewilderment. I erased mine, it was too embarrassing, but some of the less kind employees who have wanted a raise for years have kept theirs for possible later blackmail.
That night at the museum, someone touched the little Degas ballerina again. No licking this time; instead, someone stroked her curved bronze neck with fingers coated in peanut oil. The bells rang and rang but the guard was in the bathroom at the time and missed it. By the time the guard was back, the Degas was already covered in sliding sweeping tracks of oil and the gallery was empty. You could only hear the swing of the back door.
Creepy, I know.
The museum head returned the next day and found the canvas leaning against the file cabinets in her office. It was still blank. She dragged her desk to the side and sat directly across from the canvas and stared at it. She stared at it the entire day. From nine in the morning until two or so in the afternoon, she was glued to that chair; I walked by and I saw it. Her phone would ring and she’d answer and write down notes but her eyes did not leave that painting.
But for all her good watching, nothing happened. It was only after she went off to the bathroom, not even to cry this time, just to use it, that she returned and saw the new pattern through her office window. She ran inside, dashed in to see the new box and arc and little dancing lines, the precise pattern you see now. Yes. Exactly.
And she fell to her knees, asking it to change in front of her. She was desperate to see it happen. She talked to the painting so long that anyone who wanted to hear her could’ve just walked by. I happened to, yes. It was disturbing to see, someone pleading like that is always disturbing to see, and of course especially disturbing if they are pleading with things inanimate. The security guard, Lola, went upstairs, shaken, all set to confess that she had missed the Degas-touching but the museum head waved her off and said it was fine, fine, whatever. She said clean off the oil with a damp rag and some soap. The bells were ringing and you could hear another security guard talking loudly downstairs, but the museum head didn’t seem to notice or care. All her energy was focused on the painting and asking it to shift that box into a circle, to make a tiny line—anything, AN-Y-THING. She sat there the whole day, ordered food on the phone without moving her eyes, and stayed there the entire night. She spent about three days staring at that painting. Alarming; we were all distressed by it. Her hair was falling out, or maybe it was just unbrushed. Her husband delivered the divorce papers in person and tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t even look at him. She held out her hand and he placed the papers in them, and she nodded to the painting and he left. Downstairs, someone actually lifted the Degas ballerina off her platform to the loud ringing of many bells and was halfway out the parking lot with it when the youngest janitor screamed “thief!” and the thief dropped the ballerina and ran. We didn’t catch him. The ballerina was facedown in the grass and has a small dent on her toe shoe from the fall. The reason you didn’t see her up today is because we thought it’d be best to keep her in storage for a while until this whole thing blows over.
On day three of her observation, on who knows how many energy pills, the museum head called all us staff up on the phone and said we had better clear a space for the painting, the most important space in the gallery. Last, on the tour line. Here. “Do it today please,” she said, slurring her words from exhaustion. This certainly did not match our carefully discussed plans to put our best Vasily Kandinsky last, since it is such a sizzle of a grand finale, but we made the space and painted the wall ecru behind it, and then she called up the electronics store and installed a video camera directly across. Up more. Yes, the glint? There. She kept her eye on the canvas until the camera was up and rolling. It goes to one of those security TVs in the basement, and if you want to check on it, it’s on twenty-four hours. With help from three of the janitors, she moved the painting downstairs and hung it up and then went home to sleep and sleep.
It hasn’t changed once.
She wants to catch it on film but it hasn’t even changed a centimeter and I don’t think it will ever again. Would you? The whole thing makes me tense. Whenever she dies or if she quits, if I am still alive, I think I will snap off the camera right away and give the poor painting a break, but until then, she has us all under oath that we will leave it on all the time and if we were to violate that oath and turn the camera off, not only are we fired, which might not be so bad, but there’s some city policy that requires a huge fine. And let me tell you people, a museum salary does not leave room for huge fines. And since it’s a camera, you’re sure to get caught if you do it because she has bolted it in there with titanium cords.
I do sit up sometimes at night feeling bad for the painting; one wonders about the health of us docents sometimes, spending all day with all of this art. But it does not seem like a good life for a painting. Worse than a zoo, in a way.
The Degas ballerina’s toe is being restored and you’ll be able to see it on Level Two in about a month. We’ll have our burliest guard watching it. And good question, we did call the Atlanta benefactor, but he just babbled on about guns and defense funding. He had no memory of sending the package at all. And yes, the museum head’s divorce did come through. I saw them on the last day they saw each other, maybe forever. He went up to her office again, I assume to collect those papers, or maybe just to say good-bye. I happened to be up there at the drinking fountain—it was a very warm day and I was very thirsty and the best drinking fountain happens to be right next to her office. So I happened to overhear. He said, “Good-bye,” and she just smiled at him. They didn’t hug. He said, “I know it’ll take time,” and she just smiled at him. He said something else then that I didn’t hear because in a gigantic ding-dong, all the bells went off down below, louder than ever, all at once, and I had to run downstairs. It was craziness, when I arrived. Pandemonium. On the first floor, a whole team of rebels—four people, grown adults, three men, one woman—had taken off their clothes and were making love with the Jackson Pollock. I ran in and the security guards were securing three of the people, all nude, and the last one was still wriggling on the painting, humping it, eyes closed, kissing the dribbles of paint. A security guard seized this last one, called the police, and the art experts ran in from their offices and began looking closely at the painting with magnifying glasses to see if it was stained. The male rebels were still erect so it appeared likely that no one had reached a climactic point yet, which was very good news, though as they perused the painting, in the lower right quadrant one expert located a possible foreign blob of gray-white material. He blew his whistle. “Violation!” he yelled, pointing. “Press charges!” he said. The guards pulled the delinquents away, in handcuffs, down the hall. They were yelling back, all the way down the hall. “But it inspired me that way!” one nude guy was yelling. “It aroused me! You’re telling me I’m just supposed to look at that thing?”
The museum head did not come down. We handled that one on our own. We are considering building a glass case, but the board is waffling.
So, yes, it has been quite a year. Very eventful. I appreciate your attentive listening. I highly recommend the gift shop, on the left, for the end phase of your visit. There are silkscreened T-shirts, and high-quality mugs and umbrellas. We also have an unusually fine selection of magnets. They are tiny and detailed and they will stick nicely to your refrigerator and hold up photos of your loved ones. Bring art into your homes, people. Thank you, again, for your interest and continued support of our museum.
Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at
by a Blackbird SR-71
by Paul Di Filippo
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens,
“Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
I
We stopped digging vertically in our pursuit of a life free from surveillance when we reached one mile straight down into the bosom of the earth, and began to excavate laterally. With that single perpendicular shaft the only access to our refuge, we finally felt safe from all prying eyes dominant on the panopticon surface. Now we could begin to build our surveillance-free society.
The big boring machines opened up huge caverns, all connected in pleasing and harmonious arrangements. A ceaseless stream of chewed-up rock ascended the shaft in conveyor buckets, while an equally endless stream of equipment and supplies came down. We installed fusion power plants that brought to life the natural-spectrum lights affixed to the cavern ceilings. Programmed to replicate the eternal cycle of day and night, they would provide comfort and familiarity. Smaller lights mimicked the constellations when the large lamps were turned off.
We tapped underground aquifers for more water than our population could use. Air-filtering and air-regeneration machines were installed. Lacking weather and enjoying a perpetual ambient temperature of seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, we were able to build simple, delicate houses. Nudism was encouraged. Vast hydroponic systems and mushroom farms were established, along with aquaculture tanks and herds of some small animals for meat production. Supplies and items we could not manufacture would continue to arrive, thanks to funding from a secret self-sustaining foundation aboveground. All our well-off members had to tithe.
Finally, the new world was ready for its immigrant population to arrive.
Our pioneering settlers passed through the stringent inspection. No cameras, no communications devices, no recording devices allowed. There would be no Internet, no broadcasts, no telephones to tap. Our government was a benevolent anarcho-libertarianism with an emphasis on minimal interference with the rights of citizens. All social and civic intercourse would occur face to face, and when one wished to be alone and private, no one would monitor or intrude.
For the first six months our paradise rolled along smoothly.
But then people began to complain of feeling spied upon. An unmistakable feeling.
We examined our lone connection to the surface world, but found that no intrusive devices had been stealthily inserted. We reluctantly performed exhaustive searches of every house and storage facility underground, and came up dry of spy bugs.
And then someone noticed a camera lens in the floor of our world. Soon, many others were found, and eventually traced to their source.
Yes, all the old legends were true. Deros, C.H.U.D.s, and Mole People all existed, flourishing down below our level, and they wished to know everything about us. We had moved into a neighborhood that boasted more suspicious eyes focused on our every move than we had ever experienced in the open air.
We filled in our caverns and returned aboveground, where at least the spying was performed by our own kind.
II
The discovery of the secret to the compression of matter allowed the creation of miniature humans: perfectly proportioned, naturally functioning men, women, and children only three inches high at most. These Tom Thumbs and Thumbelinas, these Stuart Littles and Borrowers, were initially heralded as the saviors of the planet. By shrinking in size, they would consume many fewer resources. This assertion was true, and many socially responsible volunteers stepped forward to be shrunk. But a corollary, at first unnoticed, was that maintaining surveillance of these tiny beings was much harder.
Public CCTV cameras did not possess enough resolution to track the mannikins, and the tiny people could conceal themselves in a practically limitless range of common places. They did not emit big heat signatures on infrared monitors, or disturb pressure or motion sensors. They were, in effect, invisible.
Human nature dictated that there would inevitably be bad apples among the mannikins. Theft, sabotage, and, ironically, spying by the mannikins soon became rampant.
The authorities had only one solution: to create a class of humans even smaller than the Tom Thumbs, and use them to surveil and control the first-generation mannikins.
As of today, the latest iteration in the multiple generations of tiny people has reached atomic size, and subsequent generations will be stopped only by the firm boundary of the Planck level.
“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, /And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”
III
When I got home from school, I put my phablet down and it yelled at me.
“Excuse me, Mr. Johnson, but exactly where do you think you’re going?”
The festering voice was that of one of the myriad assistant festering principals at festering Boomgarden High School, Ms. Daggett. Each of the one hundred assistant principals had the task of monitoring twenty students. That accounted for the whole population of Boomgarden High. The authorities kept track of us 24/7 through the government-issued phablets. The machines could never be shut off. They recorded all the swipes and taps, spreads and pinches we made, which were analyzed by intelligent software for anything forbidden. Their cameras and microphones remained continually activated; there was no power-off button. We were told never to be farther away from our festering phablets than ten feet. The only time we could be separate from them was in the bathroom. And even then we had to leave them right outside the door.
“Gee, Ms. Daggett, I was just going into the kitchen for a snack.”
“Very well. But don’t dawdle! You have four point two five hours of homework tonight, and then studying for your AP exam.”
“Yes, Ms. Daggett.” Satan rot your festering soul!
At the fridge—the phablet still had a line of sight on me from the living room, so I didn’t have to tote it—I thought about how I might be able to thwart the damn machine so that I could sneak out to see my blazing favorite band, Llama Iguana, in concert tonight. I couldn’t damage the phablet, or I’d have to pay for it. Actually, of course, my parents would end up paying, and they wouldn’t be too happy about that. I wasn’t savvy enough to hack it. And I couldn’t pull a Tom Sawyer and get someone else to do my work, because Ms. Daggett would be alerted to a stranger’s face in one of her twenty windows.
I finished a quart of milk and half a box of Oreos before I got a brainstorm.
“I’m back Ms. Daggett. Here I go. I’ll start with algebra.”
I stared into the phablet’s camera with a real intense look of concentration, but I didn’t actually touch the screen. Ms. Daggett went away to focus on other kids for a while, and when she returned she was obviously puzzled and angry.
“Mr. Johnson, you haven’t done a lick of work. Why is that?”
I put on my most innocent look. “But I have, Ms. Daggett! I’ve gone through twenty problem sets—oh, damn, all my work just vanished! And now there’s a message on the screen with a lot of obscene emojis! Can’t you see it? It says, ‘Tough shit from the Honker Union.’ Ms. Daggett, the Chinese ate my homework!”
Ms. Daggett flipped out. “They’ve gotten past our firewalls again! God knows what they’re doing in our system right now. Mr. Johnson, put your phablet in its Faraday cage so it goes blind and deaf. I have to call Principal Finney this minute!”
I did as Ms. Daggett ordered, changed my shirt for a Llama Iguana one, and left the house.
God bless foreigners and paranoia!
IV
The rise of biometrics as a means of identifying individuals and tracking them caused many strange behaviors. But perhaps no phenomenon was weirder or more gruesome than eyeball spoofing.
Reliance on scanning a person’s irises to formalize their identity naturally led to measures to counteract or confuse or convince such systems. Simple contact lenses failed to trick the devices, as did artificial constructs, and eventually people realized that only living organic human eyeballs could fool the machines.
The savage surgical theft of eyeballs became a shocking trend, as rampa
nt as the theft of credit card numbers had once been. The iris was the key to unlocking all of a person’s wealth and information. And employing a stolen optic to register an innocent dupe as the perpetrator of your crime—entering a bank past its scanners under pretense, in order to rob it, say—was a default criminal move.
But soon, waving a detached eyeball in front of the scanners was technologically precluded. Only an eyeball firmly socketed would suffice.
Underground clinics arose to meet the demand, the science of whole-eyeball transplants having been recently perfected. (The banishment of many forms of blindness was almost overlooked in the clamor about eyeball thefts.) At first criminals could often be recognized as the possessors of two differently colored eyes, and innocent individuals with this condition were needlessly stigmatized. But the adoption of contact lenses by savvy crooks ended this easy-identification aspect of the crime wave.
Reluctantly, defeated organizations began to abandon this particular method of biometric security.