Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  'It's obscene,' said Serge. 'I don't like it.'

  They took her to the place where the missile had fallen. It didn't look the same to her now. She was still aware of all the misfit equipment arranged above the dust bowl, but the importance of the human artifacts seemed reduced in her new eyes. She noticed now that the Grid was woven into a spiderweb, a concentric series of irregular rings crosshatched with pulsing beams of something forever caught in a state halfway between solid matter and sheer light. And she knew what had happened because the Grid's memory was a part of Serge: it lay in the bottom of her lungs, the coming of the MF missile with intent to destroy all life at the logic mines and being instead itself pulled down by the defensive system that these little girls had created.

  Oh, they had built it, for sure. Six would have provided that aptitude in his ejaculate.

  They had sacrificed miles of the Grid's sinew, wedded it to stolen stereo components and transistors, poached body parts thrown in for good measure; and now by the will of the Grid, whatever that was, the dead zone was coming alive in some sneaky and hard-to-fathom way.

  The girls went down into the dust, proud of their creation.

  She looked at them, jerky little Sergettes with music around them like a smell.

  She was no longer wanting to have them exterminated.

  She was well and truly screwed. What good was she, Captain Bonny Serge, with the Grid leading her around by the nose, literally? Information hung in the air. It thrummed in the branches. It simmered in the well. She was just another storehouse, a mobile one, but a member of the club now all the same.

  'Holy Poobah,' said Serge. 'I'll never be just me again. I'll never be an individual. From here on out, I'm always a part of something else, something alive.'

  She paused, chewing her lip.

  'I don't like that.'

  'You always were a part of something else. You were never you. That was an illusion.' Serge jumped.

  One of them was nearby, watching her.

  Serge whispered, 'Did you say something?'

  'You ever see a stranded starfish?' The voice of her undead daughter was thin and clear. It carried Serge's accent like a strong odor. 'Just layin' there on the beach, out of his element? All flat and useless. It's sad.'

  Serge stared. The kid had picked up the image out of Serge's childhood memories and played it back to her. The kid was inside her thoughts. Serge was laid right the way open, eviscerated like roadkill to a crow. Still she resisted.

  She said: 'A starfish can't feel sad. He can't even think.'

  'If a starfish was part of the Grid, then he could be sad. But he wouldn't have to be, because—'

  'Because he'd never be stranded, he'd be part of the Grid, yeah I know. Sounds like a friggin' cult to me.'

  'It ain't no cult. It's just a friggin' reality. Mom.'

  'Since when you talk?'

  The girl shrugged. 'Since you need us to. You didn't like the music. Even though it was like taking a bath inside and you needed it. You want to play human being. We can do that, until you see it's going nowhere and give up.'

  'I never give up,' said Serge, but her words were hollow. 'What the hell are you guys, anyways?'

  'There isn't a word. Union you express as marriage, two units producing a third but none of them ever really touching or changing each other. There is no behavior you've ever seen that describes us. We are the weaving, the woven. We are the river: that which divides and that which collects and transforms itself on the axes of time and distance. We move in and out of each other and our home because there is no such separation for us. We can make you. We can take you apart. And you can do the same, now. If you allow it. But you hold fast to your old patterns. You cannot forget.'

  Serge considered this. Then she said:

  'Does my ray gun still work?'

  syntactical reversal

  I woke up feeling depressed. I had crawled into bed, baffled by what I'd read on Miles's computer – and far too weirded out even to think about telling him. I wanted none of it to be happening. I wanted to be normal. Like other people. I wanted a huge stack of pancakes, with microwaved bacon on the side, nice and crispy Real maple syrup. Fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  But I knew that I might as well stick my finger down my throat because the result would be the same. I drank some water and wandered around my apartment, ignoring the invitations of the cats to play, and spent half an hour tearfully sorting through my mother's record collection. I played The Pointer Sisters in the hope of cheering myself up, and so I nearly didn't hear the phone.

  'Hello?'

  'I know you told me everything was copacetic, but I did some homework on your employer,’ Miles said. He paused significantly. 'Do you think this is a secure line?'

  I laughed. 'Do you want me to meet you under some bridge on the Seine at midnight?'

  'I'm only saying. Remember, you aren't supposed to talk about your work. You signed a non-disclosure agreement.'

  'How do you know that?'

  'Aha.' I could hear him cracking his knuckles. 'Vee haff vays, jah?'

  'I don't think Dataplex give a hoot what I do now. Just tell me what you found out, already.'

  'OK, well, let's see. Where to start? They claim to have computer programs – highly secret, of course, aren't they always? – that purportedly take the transcripts of your debriefings and analyze the product influences. The subliminal content then becomes visible, and they know what's being transmitted to you successfully and what isn't.'

  'Subliminal content of what? What are you talking about? I'm looking at a blank screen.'

  'Cookie, think a minute. They signed you up because you can see other things when you watch TV.'

  'Oh, well, I can channel the Grid, yeah.'

  'So it's not a blank screen. They're either showing you TV, or they're showing you some kind of video that they want to test, or both. Didn't you know that?'

  'No, Miles, I think you're missing the point. My job is to gather intelligence. About what's happening. There. In the Grid. That no one but me can see. Well, the machines can see it, but they can't see everything.'

  'Oh, dear,' Miles sighed. I pictured him rubbing the back of his neck. That's what he does when he's going to break it to you that a white dragon just Surprised you and you're about to get blasted with a Cone of Cold sixty feet in diameter and there ain't buzz-all you can do about it. 'See, I don't think you quite—'

  'Nonono, you don't quite, Miles. Maybe they're saying that it's market testing,' I explained. 'But that's just what they use as a cover. Foreign Markets Research doesn't mean, like, Japan and Korea. It means foreign foreign. As foreign as you could get.'

  Long silence. I wonder if I should tell him about the gravity-torsion generator in New Hampshire . . . or was it Vermont?

  'OK,’ said Miles brightly after a while. 'Let's just explore a hypothetical situation. Say you were going to do some market testing. You wanted to find out how well your message was getting across. You found someone who was, say, a sensitive. Someone who could act like a barometer, a highly specific barometer, for subtle messages and influences. Subliminal content.'

  'Subliminal content? I thought that was illegal.'

  'Only the kind that's easy to detect. Flashing an image or embedding sound – that's illegal. But there are more subtle ways of delivering a message that can't be outlawed because they're part of the art of advertising. These are the ones Dataplex claim to be able to find, decode, and evaluate. They can do this better than the advertisers themselves, who are often using guesswork. And of course, the logical next step would be to use this same analytical ability to design ads and implant the ideas.'

  'But I don't see TV, Miles. And I don't see things chopped up into segments. When I fly, I'm part of a continuous story that makes sense, at least to me. I don't see how I could be getting all that meaning out of being shown some TV shows that aren't even visible to me.'

  'But you are. Your brain is organizing the mess they feed you
into something you can recognize. Our brains make narrative out of whatever they're fed.'

  I felt myself begin to pout.

  'I thought it was my psychic talent.'

  'You're special, Cookie, but you're not unique. This method could work on anyone. You're just more suggestible than most people, particularly when it comes to TV. That makes you an unusually effective subject. What you say about their advertising, their programs, wnatever they throw at you, is more revealing than what the average person can glean. But you're really just picking up on signals that are there. You're not delusional, not in that sense, but you're not psychic, either.'

  'I am psychic, Miles,' I said. 'You don't know what I've been through with the police and stuff.'

  There was a silence. I could hear his fingers tapping the keys.

  'And of course I'm not delusional,' I added.

  Mile's computer chirped and beeped at him. He typed some more.

  'Miles, I am definitely psychic. I don't read the tarot, I don't keep crystals, I don't want to be, but I am. I guess I inherited it.'

  He was definitely ignoring me.

  'Miles, I told the police where to find bodies. I told them the circumstances crimes had been committed under. I saw things I really didn't want to see. That was before I stopped watching TV.'

  At last Miles said, 'Cookie, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, and you probably don't want to hear it, but I've talked to the Hasbrook Heights police about you.'

  'Well, then, they told you.'

  'They told me that you thought you saw crimes being com-mitted. And then you thought you were being stalked by some guy who just got out of prison on bail pending his murder trial. They went to see the guy you identified to them and he turned out to be a UPS driver with a clean record. They asked you to stop calling them but you kept phoning in tips anyway. And then, mysteriously, you stopped. In the spring of 1982. Wasn't that when you started at Dataplex?'

  I felt myself going hot. 'It wasn't like that,' I said. 'I don't know who you talked to, but it wasn't like that. That guy was a killer, he just hadn't committed the crime yet and I didn't realize that, I thought they caught him on my tip and he was out on parole but he hadn't even done it yet and he found out who I was and came after me. Check it out now, tell them to check it now – what kind of idiots are they in the police? I'M NOT CRAZY!'

  There was a crackling noise. Miles was dipping into the Cheez Doodles.

  'I don't think you're crazy, Cookie.' He didn't sound very convincing, though. His words came through muffled as he chewed. 'I think you have a problem dealing with some things, though. That's just an observation, not a judgment.'

  'You sound like my father now,' I sniffed. 'He says I'm afraid of the world. I'm not! It's just that I don't want to live in it, as such. I know that deep down inside I'm somebody.'

  'Well, of course you're somebody.'

  'No, really, Miles. You don't get it – this isn't the world for me. How can I be the real me in a world of office buildings and highways and supermarkets and TV? It's all so fake. No, don't start with your back-to-the-wilderness stuff. I wish I really could be a warrior. I wish I could be a hero instead of stuck just watching wars on a screen. Unfortunately I've always been picked last for kickball teams and they don't teach sword-fighting in gym class.'

  'There's always archery,’ Miles offered.

  'Besides, I figure my father's 'real world' isn't interested in me so why should I be interested in it? I'd rather play D&D and read Del Rey books – how is that any less legitimate than keeping track of what Meryl Streep wears to the Oscars or following the Yankees? At least my way has an element of imagination. And now I'm learning karate, so maybe I can become warrior material after all. And if I can't, at least I can enjoy pretending for a couple of hours every night in the presence of like-minded people. It's like a real-life RPG. And the black belts are real warriors, Miles. Maybe I have a chance after all. Maybe I could get there.'

  'OK, OK. You wanna go to the arcade?' he said. Bravely. He's way out of his depth here.

  'That's OK.' I made myself take deep breaths. Miles is my friend. I can't afford to alienate him. 'I have to go practice my pocketbook-and-broom for the demonstration. I want to look better than Cori, and she's already one up on me. She sleeps with her pocketbook and flies on her broom.'

  The big tournament was fast approaching. Doing pocketbook-and-broom was now taking every molecule of my concentration, and afterwards I was reeling around like a drunken trout on a line while I tried to regain my equilibrium.

  'Sorry, Miss Cooper,' I said weakly. 'It's my allergy medication. I'll be all right in a minute.'

  For some reason I could endure the work in the weight room, and I could even jog a couple of miles at a time if it wasn't too hot, but the pocketbook-and-broom seemed to strain my body as much as it did my sense of credibility

  I passed out in the low horse stance a few times, too, and once I keeled over during a cat-stance drill and knocked into Cori, who banged her knee into a pillar and had to sit out (big surprise there). I used the excuse of helping her with an ice pack to sit out, too, until I could recover.

  Miss Cooper cornered me afterwards and told me to eat something or she'd get me banned from the dojo for health reasons.

  I checked my calendar. I hadn't had any real food for twenty-seven days. Maybe she had a point. I got a take-out slice from Tony's.

  The fasting book said just to have dilute orange juice and reintroduce food gradually, but I am not patient enough for that kind of thing. I wanted to get this over with.

  I brought a pillow and blanket into the bathroom, so I'd be right there on location when the time came to throw up.

  Then I picked up an old, chocolate-stained copy of Dune and started nibbling. I only made it halfway through the slice. Then I sort of toppled over into the pillow and fell asleep.

  I woke up reborn. My stomach was growling and my mouth tasted like an old soccer ball, but I bounced through the living room dodging piles of my mother's stuff like I was a puppy.

  It was like, with Killashandra's Milekey transition, you know how her symbiont lets her see colors that she could never see before and heightens all her senses? It was sort of like that.

  No wonder Gandhi always looked so cheerful, I thought. All that fasting.

  I decided to play it safe and stick to orange juice, like the book said. I knew I'd have to start eating a more balanced diet soon. My body couldn't take much more deprivation. I just wanted to hang on to this clarity a little longer. I didn't want to go back to the way things were. I didn't want to be Algernon. And I was starting to see something now, like finding yourself in the crazed pattern of broken mirror, the fractured vision that was my talent or my curse. I was starting to think that I could make sense of this starfish thing after all, if only I'd try.

  Or it could make sense of me.

  Everything's in the grammar, isn't it?

  It's like, the true diversity and strangeness of the world is something which continually escapes us. Or rather – case in point – we continually escape it. All the duplications and identifications we heap upon one another – golden arches and red aluminum cans littering every last wilderness on Earth – classification systems for every possible species of creature, thing, illness, psychological state and philosophical possibility – all are there to keep the Grid at bay.

  Even the Grid's name is to keep the Grid at bay, for gosh sakes.

  We are so fragile. A bomb can blow you apart in gory and horrifying ways. The Grid can do it cheaper and cleaner. Like a clever sadist, it leaves no obvious marks. And the worst part is, I can't be sure it's entirely a bad thing. I just don't know.

  It's like this:

  They did trick me. They did use me.

  Did they trick me. Did they use me.

  If only by implication, such a simple syntactical reversal changes everything.

  Could reality also displace itself so easily. Reality could . . . well, you fill in the
blanks.

  max fact unpacked

  'What do you need a ray gun for? You already told Machine Front to wipe us out.'

  'That's right, and it's only a matter of time before a big fireball comes down and ends this conversation. For the best. Really'

  'It won't destroy you. Only us. You are part of the Grid. You will be reabsorbed. But as long as our other body is somewhere else, we cannot return to the Grid.'

  'What do you mean, you can't return to the Grid? I seen you. You go in the well all the time.'

  'And come out again. We're the stranded starfish. Not you.'

  But Serge was only interested in herself. 'What's that clicking noise in my chest, then? Don't you got me wired to blow up?'

  'It's a monitor. The Grid can read your internal state through that sound.'

  Serge's internal state, in point of fact, was jumpy and hostile – that was, more so than usual.

  'The Grid this, the Grid that. What the peashooter is the Grid, anyways?'

  Fear, because a headlong like water over pebbles overing undering throughing absolute impossible identityless the sigh of you never were will be again, the fear always tracks through us you them like blood bringing poison from the source to the extremities where it blooms forth. Heads rising from water or water-mockery, ersatz water wannabe neverwas can't you remember the difference between self and others YOU singing badly in the shower, Zestfully clean and splashing on the Jean Nate and THEY the originators of the collective golem-memories: men mostly, one walks his dog across the Delaware River, one remembers smashing gypsy moth caterpillars by the thousands in the summer of '81, riding over them with his Schwinn tenspeed in the year before he got his license, playing games to see how many he can squash as the sun sets Mt. St. Helens fluorescent puce and chartreuse thanks to all that ash in the 'sphere, and another breakdances even in his sleep, the muscles of his neck twitching in an effort of imaginary support but he is dead now, all are dead and golemed, we are of the dead and there is no room for life that preordained pinball game of habits and deeply grooved behaviors; no, here room only for the endless remix, sophisticated worm action in the poetry of the Grid's bronchial tracts, information routes and reroutes and routs again, algorithms run patterns are made and tweaked and unmade, the creativity is disgusting, obscene, yet you are it is you now, Captain Painter is home eating hay and you are forever here. So you have brought Captain Painter here, too, and the spirit of Bob's Chevy Lot on Route 8 and Palomino Corners Beauty Salon with the stylist who always cut your bangs crooked because you was a jap even though you wasn't no jap you was part Eskimo what do they know about Eskimos in Sagebrush County? And I can't find any confederacy of humans here, I am just an old sieve of electrical impulses and clotted beliefs, catching what I catch, missing what I miss, if the Grid is God it's a long time til next Sunday, maybe we want to take a recount on that whole notion? Dead dead dead just means out w/the old in w/the new, get a new structure asap even a bacterial one is OK—