Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  I'M DEAD

  What?

  'I'M DEAD,' said Serge.

  'Then maybe you'd like to invent special godlike powers for yourself,' said the girl.

  'The Grid is in you,' another girl said. 'It is of you, for you, with you, by you. Among other things. The Grid can walk you through yourself and out the other side. You're just a wind tunnel, Bonny Serge.'

  'Yeah? It takes one to know one,' retorted Serge glumly. And felt. . .

  . . . it begin again, like the raven tapping on Poe's back door, a tipping and trapping of flown essences, desires, possibihties, piling up and swirling and exerting pressure like a dam about to— no, not like that at all, more like a laundromat's jumbo-sized washing machine full of sloshing clothes and some f@*ker puts a bullet through the glass during a holdup for the $33.78 in the self-service change-making machine and it all comes spewing out, dirt, water, underwear, detergent, broken glass - all this STUFF is banging on the periphery of her senses, saying I AM HERE and YOU ARE NOT

  Well f$%k it.

  Maybe she should off herself, surrender her will to IT and go for a ride but NO, IT had animated her dead embryo, animated, grown, nurtured it on human chemicals and human dreams and there was no getting around that: do I dare peek inside my own daughter(s), she thought.

  And if they are human, then what?

  What will happen to them?

  When the MFeels come.

  Serge looks at the thing the girls built.

  'Why did you save the mines? Why did you pull down the MaxFact and hide it in the well before it could detonate? You killed parts of the planet to build this contraption.'

  'We had to save ourselves. No one else was going to.'

  'But you haven't saved yourselves. Listen, you don't think you can fire that thing back at them, do you? Because even if you could launch it, one MaxFact can't blow away the entire colonization effort.'

  'We don't need to fire it. It's not a weapon anymore.'

  'Then what is it? Where is it? Nobody saw where it went down.'

  'You can go inside it and see for yourself,' said her daughter. Her tone was that of an owner offering a walk to her dog.

  But Serge was afraid.

  'It's not an invitation to a beheading,' said the child. Coming out of a six-year-old's mouth, the words are particularly ugly.

  'How the frig did you get so smart?'

  'We used what you gave us. Come see.'

  Down at the bottom of the dust bowl that had once been the well, at the base of the scary tower made of stereo components and body parts, there was no more well anymore. No more missile lying quiescent in the pond-scum. Now there was a door lying in the ground. It wasn't a trapdoor, although it was lying flat instead of standing up. It was an ordinary door. Suspiciously ordinary. It looked like an illustration from a children's book. It was made of wood. It had brass hinges and a round knob and four rectangular wooden panels. It was the kind of archetypal door that Serge hadn't seen much of in reality.

  Architecture is a projection of the body on the environment. Serge remembered this wisdom from watching Channel 13. It's an effort to extend the body, impose the space of the self on the space of the world.

  Just like music.

  Doors were significant in dreams and horror movies. Either way, she wasn't happy to see this one.

  While she stood there thinking about it, the Grid crackled and popped and hummed. The Grid had an elephantine groove, a beat that didn't correspond to anything so mechanical as a heart, but was rather a mathematical statement whose meaning lurked almost below her awareness, never quite declared and never quite denied.

  She walked across the pit, squatted down, and opened the door.

  She received no memory of passing through. To gaze on this place seemed to be as real as to enter it. Already, without intending to, she was moving through the city of the Grid's children.

  It extends in all directions without prejudice, turning corners and changing orientations as effortlessly as one of those optical-illusion Escher staircases. Every so often you glimpse something bright and blue, like sky, like water, but when you turn to look at it square on it yields to become nothing more than a mirror over a garbage dump, or the cat's cradle-work of a fancy, multidirectional bridge buried under an exuberance of bird shit. The falcons weave corkscrews through the alleyways, pausing sometimes to rend their prey on the stained lip of a concrete hole made to release effluvia into some bottomless gully, sometimes to preen themselves on the beautiful clock towers that stand on the green university hills, where libraries and music halls lie open to the rainless skies while the stars glimmer faultlessly in the bottoms of storm drains.

  She was walking, though. Not climbing, not monkeying, not swimming: walking. One-two, one-two, like a gunslinger waiting for the ambush.

  The girls were with her, eight of them like a posse she couldn't trust at her back.

  'What does all this got to do with the missile?' she said, and her voice bounced off metal and stone, shocking her: she had gotten used to a constant background of Gridspeak, and now there was only silence torn by her echoes.

  'The missile is the source of it,' the nearest girl stated proudly, capering a little. And she pointed to a building the size of a football stadium, looming ahead as though it had moved there of its own accord just by her mentioning it.

  They approached the stadium through a cloud of paper fliers advertising something in Chinese that blew against their legs and stuck there momentarily before whipping away. After a few strides the stadium did not seem quite so big or far away. Details appeared: a buckled asphalt parking lot; loading bays; flagpoles with their cables flapping musically. The white facade of the structure was in fact grooved and the indentations furred with green and brown molds, dusted with diesel fumes. She didn't see an entrance as such, but a set of bright blue fire doors had been propped open with a surveyor's stick trailing an orange fluorescent ribbon. It seemed to take a long time to reach these doors across the parking lot, especially because she kept stopping to marvel at things she never would have found remarkable on Earth: tufts of grass coming up in the cracks. Red ants. The paper wrapper of a drinking straw plastered to the asphalt by rain.

  At the doors she heard the humming, deep and resonant, coming from within. Cool, damp air flowed out through the crack between doors. Serge thought of generators and boiler rooms. It was dark in there, but when she stood on the surveyor's stick and pulled the flanged edge of the door to open it slightly, she saw the darkness wasn't total. There was an undersea glow coming from a warehouse-sized space within.

  She slid her shoulder in and took a look.

  This was a very large space. Her ears told her this, and the downdraft of cold air from far above. She couldn't actually see much.

  It was like an aquarium, most of the space taken up by liquid trapped behind a transparent wall. The liquid was greenish and transected by numerous fibers, faintly luminous.

  In the middle lay the MaxFact like a big penis or turd. The bright fibers were sucking on it.

  She turned. The girls were giggling and standing on each other's feet and running around. She snarled:

  'How did you do this? How did you do this?'

  Shrugs; laughter. Infuriating.

  'Six was a good mechanic, but this is crazy. What are those stringy things? Are they wires?'

  The girls answer in that annoying way, bouncing the words back and forth between them. 'They're like veins. Implications made physical.'

  'What?'

  'See, the Grid has unraveled the machine. We didn't do anything, we just use what we find. And when we looked inside the rocket, we found a lotta stuff. This whole city, in fact.'

  Serge made a face. They were taunting her.

  'You could understand if you wanted to. You're part of it now. You could know.'

  Serge propped the door open behind her and went in. The MaxFact looked small in this great space, and inconsequential. The girls followed her in, whispering.
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  'Bulls@*t,' she was muttering.

  The missile was lying in a tank and around the tank were platforms with stairs and ladders, workstations of some kind. She climbed up and the sound of her boots on the steel rang like gongs. There were clipboards with Japanese writing hanging from the metal frame.

  'Too bad Klaski's boyfriend ain't here,' Serge snorted. She reached the top of the tank. It was open. The water lapped the thick glass just a couple of feet below the lip of the tank.

  Only it wasn't water.

  She put her hand in and touched it. It was well fluid.

  The girl was right. She understood. From that tactile point of commonality, she could perceive the whole thing, like when a word breaks apart a dream you'd forgotten and offers it up all at once, glistening and strange.

  'I heard of people taking their car apart and turning it inside out on the garage floor,' she said after a while. 'This is pretty extreme. You turned the missile inside out. You drew out everything that it implied.'

  'Or that implied it,' sang the children.

  The cart horses that pulled the wood that fuelled the fire that Copernicus wrote by are in that MaxFact. The battered wife who worked for rice for her children, fourteen hours a day making weapons in a tiny hut in Tokyo during a failed attempt to take over all the world that ended in mushroom clouds and the Marshall Plan and gave rise to the personal stereo. The dead insect species in South America that are ghosts to the rubber used in some of the synthetics. It goes on and on, an unspooling web of connections where everything leads to everything else, into language and through math and out again, behind the stars and under the sea.

  With all of that information, building a city must have been no sweat.

  Yup, you had to give it credit. That MaxFact had to be the ultimate in chic travel accessories: it looked like a tube of mascara and unpacked like a whole history of civilization.

  My phone was ringing. The machine picked it up, but by then it was too late - I'd lost the nex.

  I rubbed my eyes and staggered into the kitchen, tripping over Rocky.

  'Cookie, it's me, are you there?' Miles.

  I picked up the phone.

  'Uh-huh,' I said.

  'I'm going to Barnes and Noble. Wanna come?'

  'OK.' Anything to get out of my own head for a while.

  What I forgot was that Miles never goes to Barnes and Noble for half an hour to pick up a few paperbacks. He installs himself in the computer section and reads for hours. I got a Roger Zelazny paperback and went outside, into the heat, to wait for him.

  I sat down on the concrete divider between the Barnes and Noble parking lot and Einstein Moomjy. I watched people going in and out of Einstein Moomjy, the heat shimmer, the traffic. I tried to fathom it. How a piece of land that was once a forest full of wildlife and Indians could become so loaded with abstract thought. Road engineering. The mechanics of cars. Architecture. Wiring schemae, sewage, plumbing. The materials of the buildings and their petrochemical origins. Then there were the people, bred of every possible ethnicity, tracing their past to innumerable cultures and geographical locations, yet all of them brought here by some circumstance to acquire a NJ twang and a MasterCard. What are these people capable of that they'll never even know? If they're anything like me, anything at all, then they aren't doing much with their lives.

  But they're probably not like me or they'd be sitting here too, feeling baffled. And they're not.

  They're shopping.

  I saw a map of the human body in a book that Gunther used to keep on his desk. He has a lot of medical books. He says they're nice and heavy and make his office look more dignified, but I've caught him reading them from time to time. Anyway, the picture I saw was a cartoon scaled according to the density of sensory nerve endings. The eyes and lips were huge. So was the ding-dong (of course, it was a man). But the legs were puny and the feet were hardly there at all.

  Miles finally came out carrying one big book in a plastic bag.

  'What's up?' he said.

  So I told him what I was thinking about. I asked him if a computer could remap the world according to invisible qualifiers. He sat down next to me and scratched his head.

  'You mean like in geography, when they map the world according to economics or rainfall or something like that?'

  'Yeah, I guess. But I was thinking about more than one factor on the map at once. I was thinking about mapping the connections.'

  As usual, Miles instantly understood the idea and started vamping on it.

  'OK, take shopping. What if we mapped Route 17 according to the content of its merchandise, and where everything came from, and what it's connected to and how? The complexity of Tower Records alone would require more bytes than I could even calculate. If you took into account the musical relationships instead of just reproducing tones like you do on a CD, you'd probably kill yourself trying to encapsulate it all. And the bookstores. It would be crazy. The world could disappear into its own navel. Then there's fashion, interior design, cooking – how does all of that manifest when you look beyond the physical? We never think about it because we hold it all in our heads. But try to write the code, Cookie. Then you'll see.'

  I said, 'Like unpacking a very tightly stuffed suitcase.'

  'What?'

  'Never mind. I guess it all looks safe and predictable. Life in the suburbs. But it's wild, wild. It's all there, just waiting to be brought to the surface. And the smallest nudge, and the world could ... well, I don't know now.'

  I'm getting a little fanciful now.

  I wish I could eat.

  It's the antidote to thinking. The Club Med of the brain.

  'Well, if you had brought this up a couple years ago, I'd have said it was impossible to map the world realistically with a computer. But now I'm not so sure. There's this guy, Benoit Mandelbrot, and he studies the mathematics of soap bubbles and stuff like that. He's very hot with the graphics people right now, but it goes a lot deeper than that. I read his book two years back and it set everybody on fire.'

  In my mind's eye I saw giant bath bubbles drifting down Rt. 17.

  'You can create mathematical representations of natural phenomena using his methods. Usually math and nature don't mix, but now you can get to what's underneath a physical representation.'

  I said, 'So what would the underlying truth look like? If you could see its guts.'

  "The underlying truth?" said Miles. 'Have you been listening to that Rush tape I loaned you?'

  'Huh? No, I think that's 'the underlying fear'.'

  Miles snorted. 'Same difference. OK, well, I mean, there are so many factors.'

  'What about finance?' I prompted. 'The numbers behind the retail industry.'

  'Good, Cookie!' praised Miles in his typical I-have-an-IQ-of-147 tone. 'Very true. And even more complex. I bet you'd need more than fractals. And then there's marketing. Advertising.'

  I felt bile rise in my throat. I swallowed it and sat very still. Sweat was trickling down the back of my neck and into my tank top.

  I said, 'I don't need a computer program. I don't need math. I know what it looks like. I know what the guts of marketing look like. They are luminescent and tangled and they swallow dead people and spit them out in quadruplicate or more.'

  Miles didn't say anything. He seemed frightened. His knee started jiggling up and down like a kid who has to go to the bathroom. People act this way around me sometimes. It's annoying.

  'Never mind,' I sighed.

  Miles looked at me sidelong. 'You know, I have been thinking about what we were talking about before. With Dataplex and the way they were showing you stuff and then analyzing your . . . uh . . . visions.'

  'Yeah?'

  'It was working, wasn't it? I mean, they wouldn't pay you that much if you weren't getting something right.'

  'No kidding. It was working. But I answered one of their surveys all wrong, and I guess they started to doubt me. And then I got shot down.'

  'So what are they going
to do now that they don't have you?'

  I wasn't sure, and I said so. 'They do have other Fliers,' I added. 'But we're not allowed to talk to each other about the project. It's in the contract.'

  Miles snorted. 'This whole thing is totally bizarre. You should do something about it, Cookie. Get to the bottom of it.'

  Maybe I should. I didn't feel up to crusading, though. I said, 'My only problem is I'm crazy.'

  There was a silence made conspicuous by the fact that this was Miles's big opportunity to contradict me. After a while I said,

  'Could there be an ecology of the abstract? In other words, do abstract forms fight, and consume each other, and reproduce and stuff?'

  'If they do, it all happens on an abstract level.'

  'But is there evidence? Could you see it, like postulating dark matter? You know, could you find out about it indirectly, like when astronomers find out stuff by looking at other stuff.'