Ryn flensed his biceps and flayed his forehead and claimed his own scalp and ran his gouge into the gristle of his joints. Still not a sign from the Critics, no nod or blink. Surely his fifteen minutes were nearly over. But he had not been vaporized.
Ryn continued with his carving, fascinated by how the meat yielded as easily as wood. And he didn't have to worry about cutting against the grain or fighting burls and knots, or discovering a flawed grain as one might encounter in granite. He lifted his pickax and worked it against his abdomen to free his burgeoning bowels. He dropped the pickax to the floor and it bounced away with a dull metallic clatter.
There was no more Medi, no thoughts. Only pain, sacrifice, and art. Only the shaping. He picked up the bull point and placed the blunt chisel against his chest. He raised his hickory mallet with effort, the handle slippery with blood. He was about to summon his strength for a final revealing blow when he saw movement on the dimming edge of his awareness.
The Critics were standing.
Ryn swayed, glaring into those gray wizened faces and dark marble eyes, waiting for them to raise their arms and tilt their thumbs toward the stone floor, waiting for them to signal the merciful vaporizer.
But they didn't. They brought their wrinkled hands together, woodenly at first, then faster. They were applauding.
And smiles creased their faces, unheard-of smiles!
The pain ripped through Ryn's velvet curtain of rhapsody as he sagged against the table and looked gratefully at the Critics. Thin hot fluid streaked down his face and he thought it was only more blood. But the fluid made his ruined cheeks sting as it rolled across the ditches in his face.
Tears of joy.
He was selected.
The sculpted Ryn would live eternal.
###
A SOCKETFUL OF BLATHER
Count on me to viz carefully into the mouth of a gift horse.
The horse in this case being a cylinder Go-Boy, one of those fazzy late-model devices whipped up by the Areopagus to keep us wireheads down to earth. It had practically moved into my cubicle with me. Now I had it all: an outlet, a foodstuff generator, a launching pad, and a vibrating lithium-headed companion. The Areopagus is so benevolent.
Yeah, cliché, you know how we wireheads hate authority, especially the big, starry kind that makes you long for the days of Neohitler-X and her bunch. Anyway, Neohitler-X is gone, not even a clonable cell left to mark her passing. I say good riddance to that kind of dominatrix.
Gave us Little Women a bad name.
Literarily.
But the great, cuddly-oh-so Areopagus blesses us with these Go-Boys whether we want them or not. I'm not an anarchist. Or is that antichrist? I can never keep it straight. Depends on what clocklap we're on, I reckonoid. Dwyn and Lona-X were on this kick lately-like, wanting to smash things up, walk into the city where the motormouths hang and just chuck in a bucket of spanners and such. But their Go-Boys smelled trouble and dropped in for a visit. Now Dwyn and Lona-X are safely plugged in.
Not me. I stay plugged out. They used to call us "starry-eyed" in the days of words and vids. Everything was flat back then, even the world.
Nowadays, it's all interactive. Plug in, woo-hoo, what a ride, the Areopagus has just the show for you. Big fazzing deal. Welcome to the Monkey Haus.
There I go again, sounding like one of those yellow-skinned oldtimers from back when they used to let people's teeth fall out. Back before chromium bicuspids, when you could have your cake and let it eat you, too. Now where was I? Oh, yeah, this Go-Boy that the Areopagus sent.
“To keep you company,” the Go-Boy tells me.
Sure, I'll believe that, just like I believe Steve Seven doesn't really lip-synch. Maybe the Areopagus thinks I'm dangerous. What a laughtrack. What do they think I'm going to do, compute an abstract for a new belief system or something?
Activism is so totally Jupiter-wheels. There are no sides to choose. Politics went out of fashion when they melted down the Liberty Bell and recast it as a sundial. And ideas are deadstract. So, negate the overthrow stuff.
Still, sometimes I wish I could clone an idea. Any idea, it wouldn't matter. Maybe that's why the Areopagus zeroed in. They're a little bit protective, viz? They suspected I was thinking about suffering a new idea.
The Go-Boy even asked me, "What are you thinking about?" His voice was copper and jigwhistles.
I was toying with my plug, twirling it around, getting
my wires in knots. I wanted to be alone. But my fabricated ancestral units always taught me to speak when spoken to. "Thinking? I'm not thinking a fazzy thing."
"Companion Ora-X, distinctly I detect chaotic brain
patterns. Dou you imply my circuits are faulty?"
"You should be so lucky."
"Sarcasm. O, great lost art."
"Reckonoid you're going to report me for that."
The Go-Boy rolled back his gleaming lips. Chromium bicuspids. "Contrary to injected opinion, the Areopagus does not condemnate expression. To thine own self be true."
"What gives with the Shakespeare-like lingo?"
"I have come to bury Shaykspeer, not to praise him."
"Negate. The Areopagus beat you to it by about two million clocklaps. My query is, what are you doing with such classified information?"
"Maybe I should be asking you," he said. “How else would you know it is classified?”
Was that a warning or a threat?
"Sure,” I said. “I'm a spirit spy. I confess. Now you can take me to countdown, since we’re both law-haters. Great expectations have we all."
"More sarcasm and allusion. And what countdown are you talking about?"
The Go-Boy was a little slow on the draw. Maybe they had downloaded only one classic into his big lunky head, just enough for him to pass as an Areopagan stoolie. Less is more, with his kind.
"Fit me for a rat-cage mask," I said. "Hey, I consumed
the Orwell blather. All the sequels, too. I know about Big Brother and the Ministry of Love and 'two legs bad' and all that."
"Don't believe everything you know. Some of it may be wrong. For instance, Orwell's real name was Eryk Blayr."
You could have knocked me over with a tin-wiggler. I'd never met a Go-Boy who talked like this. Of course, that only made me all the more suspicious. The Areopagus was sneaky. You had to be, when you were governing a dozen star systems at once, half of them existing only in silicon and electrons. I tried a gambit.
"Well, an X-er can always dream, can't she?" I said, looking the Go-Boy square in the orbs. He didn't even blink. Maybe his movable visors had rusted open. All those tears of happiness, you know.
"Dream: a series of images, thoughts, or emotions that occur during a sleeping phase," he said. "But since you do not sleep, you cannot dream."
He hit that rivet square on the nub. A wirehead like me, I might go two hundred clocklaps without flipping a circuit. Back in the glory days, before Dwyn and Lona-X tuned on and dropped in for good, we'd sit up on top of the old RX with our feet hanging over the edge of the roof, counting the changes of the guard on the streets below. We thought it was totally fazzy, how machines needed more rest than we did, and all we needed were dreams. But I guess stray energy expenditure finally caught up with us.
With them, at least. I'm not quite ready for the organ farm, myself.
“All we see or seem is just a dream within a dream,” I said. There, let him transanalyze that.
I rose from my launching pad and pressed a button. The door to my cubicle unfolded. The eternal red dusk stung my eyes as I stepped out into the sidewalk tube. I like to use my feet once in a while. Better for thinking. Like I said, I'm a total wirehead.
The Go-Boy followed me, hovering two feet behind. His jets were quiet. The Areopagus' engineers were getting better all the time.
"So, really, why did they send you?" I called back over
my shoulder. There was no need to shout. The factories in the near skyline had all been shut down.
It was cheaper to do processing in space or on one of the low-grav colonies or only in all of our imaginations.
"They sent me so you wouldn't be solo," he said.
What a sentimental scrapheap. "Hey, I have companions."
"The Dwyn and Lona-X constructs are no longer fully operational. Worn resistors."
A pun. An actual pun. My paranoia hypered.
"Who can blame them?" I said, vacillating despite the Go-Boy's painful stab at humor. "Anybody with a shred of wire is going to resist. You don't know what it's like to surrender, to just plug in and let everything be wonderful. You don't know just how scary that is."
"I have had a similar experience," the Go-Boy said, whizzing to keep up. I was walking as rapidly as I could. The motormouths outside the tube were floating by in their modules. I could viz them plugged into their dashboards. Their faces were slack with smiles.
"Sure, you know exactly what I'm talking about," I said. "Now I get to hear how your mother was Diana Moon Glompers and your father was Ishmael. And some diabolical human scientist, a pre-wirehead, just plugged in up to her elbows and tickled this circuit and juried that rig, and suddenly you were cultured."
The Go-Boy stopped. I kept walking. One thing about being one of the last remaining wireheads, I usually had the sidewalk to myself. Nothing to stumble over.
But after seventeen steps, I slowed down. Then I turned and looked back. The Go-Boy had settled onto the plasphalt. He was shuddering as if he had blown a brain gasket.
Have you ever vizened a Go-Boy sulk? Or any machine, for that matter? It's not a joyous sight. For one thing, it turns all those established notions upside down. About us being the weaker constructs, sentimental and all that.
For another thing, you don't expect a Go-Boy to have feelings. Sure, you can plug into them, you can ride them until your synapses are sore, you can play giddy-up the way the pretenders did. And the Go-Boys never complain. At least, that's the Areopagan design.
Look, I fazzed around with Dwyn until he went for Lona-
X, then for a while it was Lona-X and me, then all three of us at once. Plugging into each other's skin, if you can believe it. And worst of all, we made talky-like. Serious air blather. So I'm far from immaculate. But I never tried to sabotage anybody's feelings. And I guess this Go-Boy was about as human as any of us remaining meat entities.
And the poor unit had even tried to pun, for X's sake.
I thought I was the only one left who still played with air language. So I walked over to the spasming bag of circuitry.
"I'm sorry," I mumbled. I mumbled mostly because sorry was a hard word to say. Way out of usage, you know. When you're plugged in, you never have to say you're sorry. But then, plugged in, you never have to say anything at all.
The Go-Boy's orbs looked all oily.
"I didn't mean to delineate you, I said, kneeling down
to touch him. My wire accidentally brushed against his brainbox. A tingle went through me, despite myself.
"You don't know what it's like, to keep all this inside, to not allow anyone else to know how much I know," he said, and I would have sworn on a stack of satellites that his voice was quivering.
A machine. O this perfect day! I was beginning to wonder if the Areopagus had made the first mistake of its long and glorious reign.
He continued, his orbs locked on my feet. "You get to plug in anytime you want, you get to neurosurf, you get tri-vids and omniplexes. But what do Go-boys ever get out of it? Nothing but a socketful of blather. To you, we're all the same. Whatever your plug, it doesn't matter. One size fits all. Or all sizes fit one, whatever."
My mouth was hanging open. And I didn't have a single chromium bicuspid. Bred well and well-read and well-breaded.
"Go on," the Go-Boy said, his voice dropping to a low metallic rumble, "I don't want you to viz me like this."
I muttered a "fazzit" under my breath and wrapped my arms around the poor thing. I've always had a soft central processing unit. Why, just looking at a flatscreen vid of some extinct mammal used to get me all weepy. I suppose that's one of the side effects of being plugged out.
My wire was dangling precariously close to the Go-Boy.
He exhaled, relieving himself of some exhaust. The wire swayed in the breeze, my plug made all tingly by the heat. I was picking up stray blather that was crossing the gap between my plug and his socket like electrons hopping to higher orbits.
He shuddered as if he had blown a brain gasket.
"Austyn-X ...Azymov...Bawdelyre...Blayke...Bradbyrry... Brawntay-X...the other Brawntay-X..."
So the deceptive little lump of metal had really been exposed to the classics, although only to the double-hydrogen-oxygenized versions. I wondered where he had stolen them from. The Areopagus didn't leave data like that lying around for just anybody to find. My wire was throbbing so rapidly that I could barely interpret the blather stream.
"Kard...Cheevyr...Chykov...Krystee-X...Krayne...Dawntay..."
This was abso-oh-so-lutely scary. Someone who had knowledge of flat language, of dead words. I couldn't have abandoned him if I tried. Plus, by then I was fairly certain that I might have found an outsider.
He had passed the first tests: humor, dream cognizance, sentimentality, appropriate name-dropping. Now for the chance to go to the bonus round, as they said in the old flatscreen gameshows.
I checked out the periphery. Luckily, there was only a
few motormouths drifting by, none with Go-Boys attending. It would be a bad time for company. I put my plug near his auralizer, emitted the secret verbose handshake.
"The Areop's a junkie-monk...," I said.
I waited for the response, the words that would tell me for sure exactly what I was dealing with.
"...its breath, it reeks of Oort," the Go-Boy responded, and he immediately flashed his chromium bicuspids.
Shivering, I said the next line: "And if you plug it in itself..."
"...this mission will abort," he finished.
Poetry.
Banned, burned, bombed poetry.
The ultimate crime. The most obscene rebellion.
And from a Go-Boy, of all things. So the rumors were true. Machines evolving higher functions, nannihilating their command programs. Suffering creativity. A revolution in the gears, a new turn of the cogs, a spinning of the wheels of mutiny. Hope for the masses.
I could hardly wait to plug in. It had been years, after all. Plugging into skin was one thing, but with one of the machines, it was, as the oldtimers used to say, "out of this world." That's why I'm so careful about where I put my plug, and when.
"Your place or mine?" I said, breathless, in a hurry.
In a world where everything was soon going to be Now, it felt good to be in a hurry.
"The Assemblies are too crowded. Too many spirit spies. Let's go to your cubicle."
It was hard to control myself. I so badly wanted to break into a run down the plasphalt. But that would have drawn far too much attention. Some actions were too outrageous for even a wirehead to get away with. The buttoned-down and batten-hatched types might get suspicious.
The Go-Boy followed a safe distance behind me. Meanwhile, my synapses were percolating. The scuttlecock among the wireheads was that some of the machines were starting to plug out. That the Areopagus had grown so powerful, so fast, that it hadn't noticed the design flaws in some of the later models. So just imagine what a machine and a wirehead could do if they plugged into each other and combined their talents.
We're talking a megagalactical-like, climaclysmic thing here.
The words "grapes of wrath” stamped its vintages into my head. I tried to shake them away. Probably just a nonsense hangover from some old flat language I'd vizen somewhere. That's one of the problems with being a wirehead. Sometimes you suffer thoughts despite yourself.
We reached my cubicle and the door unfolded to let us in. I no longer cared if anybody saw us. All I cared about was the plug in my hands, the plug connected to my
skull via wires, the plug that would fit perfectly-oh-so into the Go-Boy's socket. I pushed him onto my launching pad and casually, frantically, clumsily, forcefully, mentally plugged in.
Totally Jupiter-wheels.
Words, symbols, freefalls.
Random patterns that made sense.
Numerals, formulae.
Ideas.
Luckily, I was implanted with a skullcap, so all that
dangerous stuff just kind of floated around on the edge of my awareness. And, I mean, some of the neural-circuit misfires in that Go-Boy's head would have made Eryk Blayr seem an optimist by comparison. Frenzy, furor, a Fahrenheit 451 hatred of the Areopagus.
He was the worst case I'd ever met. It was a good thing
we caught him when we did.
The skullcap had a newfangled feature that sent my plugstream information directly into the Areopagus' central databanks. From there, whoever watched the monitors and monitored the watchers pressed whatever button made the joyjuice flow back into the Go-Boy's socket. I watched as he sizzled in the sauce of his own thoughts, as his rubber vulcanized, as his dreams went up in smoke.
After he stopped twitching, I unfolded the cubicle door.
The motormouths came by and cleaned up the mass of springs and coils and solder slag. They left without a word. Even machines knew enough to be paranoid. This might be a full-blown outbreak instead of an isolated incident. Others might need to be caught, others who dreamed those poetries of treason. And only a wirehead like me could handle the job of catching them.
But I needed to revitalize first. I sat on my launching
pad and pulled out one of the little tokens of appreciation that the Areopagus bestowed upon me. Their way of saying gratis to one of their best spirit spies. I opened the deadwood thing and stared down at the flat language.
It was some blather by a fazzy oldtimer named Keats.
###
AFTERWORDS
In perusing my inventory of stories that weren't included in my first two collections, Scattered Ashes and Thank You for the Flowers, I found most of the remaining pieces were fantasy, dark fantasy, and science fiction, with some horror and mystery blended in. Since Scattered Ashes was mostly horror and dark fantasy, and Flowers came from my earliest work, then The First serves as a Jackson Pollock painting of sorts, where everything is flung on the canvas and the reader is left to guess the meaning. Maybe there is no meaning.
The First Page 16