Mr Smith stood slack jawed, a tube of toothpaste dangled limply from one hand, and the other, toothbrush gripped tightly, stopped an inch from his open mouth.
“You spoke to me!”
The toilet said: “Pardon?”
The voice of the blocks, however, replied, “Yes, we did. You have progressed to a new level. But please, be aware that while we can now talk to you, and therefore communicate at all times without obscuring your vision, we can still hear your thoughts without you needing to vocalise those thoughts. You do not need to speak, so please stop doing so when answering us!”
To the toilet, Mr Smith said: “Oh, Sorry, nothing! I was just thinking out loud.”
Well, he might be getting on better with the household gadgets, but he certainly wasn’t making any progress in his relationship with the blocks, or voices as he now thought of them.
“We are aware of the friction between us. While we will not apologise for this, given the help that we have proffered, we would like to point out that, in time, this shall fade, and we shall become at ease with one another.”
“If you could just be a bit less impenetrable it would be a start.”
“We would hope to be more forthcoming this evening, but we need you to see some things before we can take the next step.”
“What about Fulvia?”
“We can spare a little time for your breakfast in bed idea. But then we will need to go. And she should not come with you, as she cannot be party to what you need to see. Besides that, has this night with Fulvia so turned your head that you have already forgotten about Sally?”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.”
“Goodness, you are so very negative!” said the blocks, “You will be seeing her later today. And for now we would suggest that Fulvia should not meet Sally. She would probably not understand. You will need to make another date with Fulvia, but make it clear that this evening you are just too busy with a prior appointment to be able to see her. But promise her that tomorrow you will come over in the afternoon and spend rest of the day with her.”
“So I have to just blow her off for today?”
“No, be firm, be fair and be nice. Make her breakfast in bed, make love to her, and then bid your leave. Remember it is the space between people’s lives that allows them to feel connected. Her sadness at your absence will be more than compensated for, when you arrive tomorrow with a set of bath salts and massage oils.”
Mr Smith wondered what Sally would think of him taking massage oils to Fulvia. He did not think she would be happy.
“You underestimate her.” was the only reply he received. God, how annoying it was that they overheard his every thought.
Breakfast went well, but precious little was destined to be eaten. None the less, the thought, in this case, defiantly counted. He was rewarded with much tenderness.
Afterwards he held her to him, spooning, amidst the scatter of the sheets. She bit into his arm, “How do you do that? Make everything seem brighter, more colourful?”
“I watch your eyes, and that way I know what you are thinking.” He teased her by nibbling on her exposed neck.
“I wish that I had met you before. I would rather have spent the whole of my life here with you. All I would need would be here in this bed.”
He put his head back on the pillow, and with a somewhat sad voice answered her, “I would not have been what you wanted. I had to get to a place where I could give you everything you want but nothing that you need. Only then could it be complete, only then would it be honest.”
She turned to look at him, her eyes opened wide in surprise. “You make me feel alive. I have never met anyone who touched me the way you do.”
He rolled fully on to his back and she rolled with him, ending up nestled beneath his shoulder.
“All that matters is what we have here. This single moment; as long as we have that, then we can face the world together.
When it came time for him to leave she did not seem to mind too much, once he had promised to come over the next afternoon. As he opened the door to leave the apartment, she came running over, still naked, and flung her arms around him for another kiss: “I think I’m a little smitten.”
Then she let him exit and closed the door behind him.
As he descended in the lift the blocks spoke to him once more: “You need to prepare yourself. What you will now see will be difficult for you to handle, but we will try to filter the data to match your ability. But be aware that some sensory overload may occur. Are you ready?”
He did not know what to say to that, and a tingling feeling of dread enveloped him.
Suddenly his vision dimmed and a series of coloured boxes appeared overlaid upon the image that his eyes formed. He turned his head to look at the lift’s control panel and the overlay attached to it enlarged so that it almost filled his field of view. This display was then filled with a multitude of smaller boxes, flooded with streams of data. Vertigo threatened to engulf him, and he had to fight off the acute sense of nausea that it brought on.
The blocks tried to calm him. “These are the various data feeds. Each box represents a data node on one of the core networks. Boxes in blue are stand alone, non-networked devices. Those boxes in green are communication channels attached to the network back bone. Red boxes represent control points, such as these lift controls that you are interrogating at the moment.
“You can now take control of any such box simply by focusing your gaze on it. By mentally choosing to take control of it you will have virtually unlimited access to whatever functions it offers. However, there will be some cases where hardwired safety facilities may override your remote control of the device.
“Be aware that any action you take in both accessing the data streams and issuing control commands will be masked by us. You are effectively at liberty to alter any electronic device within your visual range, and if you choose to connect to one of the communication channels you can, from there, access any remote location that is connected to that network.
“For example, by choosing to take control of the lift computer, you may command it stop at any floor, even if that floor has not been selected. Try it.”
Mr Smith’s head was still spinning. Torrents of data were streaming past his eyes, and the coloured boxes shifted and changed as his eyes roamed the sides of the lift. If it was like this in here, where there were only a few electronic devices, what would it be like outside, or in a shopping mall?
“It is alright.” comforted the blocks. “We will filter the data, until you are more comfortable with working with the streams.”
“How do I turn them off? God, my mind is going to burst!”
“We will show you how to temporarily disengage the connection later. For now we need you to practice. Try to reach out, in your mind, to the lift control then tell it to stop at the 3rd floor.”
He recalled from the first day that when he had tried to see the blocks he had focused on infinity, and then had to slightly slit his eyes. He tried it again now, and found that the overlay disappeared.
The blocks were none too happy, “Yes, that is how you disable the overlay; however that is not the point of this exercise. The idea is to control the lift computer.”
By now they had arrived at the lobby, at which point the lift doors opened.
“Okay, now re-enable the overlay, take control of the lift, and return to the sixteenth floor.”
“Why the sixteenth? That is where Fulvia’s flat is.”
“Exactly! You will surprise her, and she will feel even more desired. Now do as we have instructed, please!”
The ‘please’ was not very convincing, but he had to give the blocks credit for at least trying to be nice.
He focused on infinity and started to close his eyes. Instantly the overlay was back. For a moment he swayed from the onslaught, but then focused on the lift’s control panel. The overlay switched to show him the internal state of the lift, and he immediately noticed the status window, sh
owing the message “Waiting”. He tried to reach out to that panel, and it immediately took over the full extent of the overlay.
“Sixteenth floor” he thought, and the matching text appeared in the display. The doors slid closed, and they began upwards again.
On the way up he was instructed to override various lift calls from other floors, and was also tasked to stop the lift between floors, and force the emergency opening of the doors.
Having completed these tasks to the satisfaction of the blocks he once again found himself at Fulvia’s floor. He knocked on her door.
When she had come to open the door she had simply wrapped a sheet around her nakedness, and consequently looked a little flustered. “Is everything okay?”
He reached out to her and pulled her to him, and kissed her hard on the lips. He tried to make it last as long as the kiss with Sally had lasted, and when he finished she was trembling and flushed.
“When I got to the lobby I realised that I has not kissed you back.” He stared into her eyes, “And I wanted to fix that.”
He turned away, and strode back to the lift, leaving her slack jawed and wide eyed in the doorway.
Out on the street the blocks congratulated him, “That was nicely done. We did not expect you to learn this fast. But you have made excellent progress. Fulvia was astounded by your actions. Well done.”
He actually found himself appreciating their praise, and he found that his step was even lighter as a consequence.
He gazed off into the distance, and instantly found the overlay back. He wondered if he would go crazy from the constant overload of his senses. It had been bad when it was just the blocks obscuring his vision, but now he had voices in his head and images in his eyes. What would be next, smell-o-rama? But he now realised why the blocks had migrated from his optic nerves to his auditory ones. They were just making way for this overlay function.
Abruptly, he stopped, dead in his tracks. The people walking behind him cursed and swore as they had to dodge past his suddenly stationary frame. The blocks seemed to question, silently, his sudden inertia. It had suddenly come to him that he might have actually lost his mind. With voices in his head, and visions in his eyes, how could he be sure? With new-found, and decidedly odd, abilities and behaviour, could this be some brain tumour? The blocks hummed.
“You have an interesting point there. However, we feel that we have amply demonstrated our control of external events, and that this should be enough to convince you that this is not a metal issue. Lunacy cannot make a lift move, nor pre-determine where a random person will be at a given time.”
None the less, he found himself unable to fully shake of that sense of foreboding, of dread. Perhaps, he thought, this was all just the last few remaining neurons firing off random thoughts as his body withered and died.
The blocks seemed a little subdued at that thought, “Well, then, if that is what is happening, at least you are going out in a blaze of glory.” Then they lightened somewhat, “But we doubt that death would be that pleasant.”
He looked out at the world, now blanketed in the coloured squares and the strange symbols of the overlay and realised that whatever was, and whatever might be, all he would ever know was what his senses told him.
He trudged on.
At the railway station he was inundated with vast flows of information. Video feeds from the myriad surveillance cameras. Audio streams from the handyTalk phones, and listening posts deafened him. Identity records poured into him from the implant scanners. Ticket readers, vending machines, lamp posts, payment booths, advertising hoardings, even the clock spat great gobs of data at him.
He could listen in to the private talk going on around him; all he had to do was lock on to the implant in anyone's skull and he could hear what they were saying. Or he could piggy back off the handyTalks to hear both sides of the conversation at the same time.
He could tap in to any of the camera views and see the world from that perspective, and as he became more fluent with the operation of the overlay’s capture facilities the blocks switched on more and more detail, more and more new facilities. He found himself opening multiple views of the station, each shown as a little thumbnail window on top of the larger view.
He sat on a bench seat, and reached out to explore this new found virtual world. He connected to the main network bus, and found himself navigating the invisible byways of the network as if he were speeding down canals. He dropped in to Fulvia’s apartment, peeking through the lenses of the numerous camera dotted around her rooms. He watched the changing shadows of her face, listened to her talking to herself. At one point she stared intently into the digital mirror, as if she could see him on the other side of the wire, and then she had said “I really think he likes me!” Feeling guilty, he dropped the connection. It was not fair to see her in that way, nor to hear her private thoughts.
He shut off most of the feeds, and got wearily to his feet. It was time to go home.
The blocks came back then.
“You need to get ready to meet Sally.”
“Where will we be going?” Mr Smith did not know how he could face her, and hide what had happened between Fulvia and himself.
The blocks told him not to worry. They told him they had it covered. They told him to trust them.
But still he did not trust them.
When he arrived home he felt numb from the constant barrage of data that had been poured, relentlessly, into his head. His eyes were gritty and dry from staring too long at the various parts of the overlay, and he had a ringing in his ears from all the audio feeds. He felt a headache forming in the near distance, and went straight to the bathroom to splash water on his face.
The easyAid, thankfully, left him alone. After he had taken some aspirin he sat on the edge of the bath, feeling empty and somehow disconnected. Here he was, able to connect to the vast reaches of the networked data, and yet all it was, all it could be, was a thick wall of glass between him and the real, vital, living world. Always slightly distorting, and never able to reveal what needed to be exposed.
He got up and went into the bedroom to lie down. He wondered where the kids were. Hopefully they would not disturb him.
The blocks switched on the overlay, and shunted him to the next door bedroom, where in split screen detail he observed his son, browsing through various archives of illegal pornography on his virtuDesk. He fed upon that diet of ridiculous, salacious rubbish, speeding from one sweaty pointless moment to another. Never satisfied and never satiated. Mr Smith hoped the censors did not happen upon that little bit of information, or his son would be off for reclamation directly.
“Do you know what the panopticon is?” asked the blocks.
“No. Why? Does it matter?”
“Of course it does,” answered the blocks. “Everything matters! The panopticon is the greatest invention of control and coercion that has ever been developed. It is designed to induce paranoia and neurosis at the same time; to instil fear and generate self-loathing. But most of all it is designed to create guilt. With the panopticon everyone is guilty, all of the time. No one can ever be innocent, and thusly when the authorities choose to arrest someone, their guilt is already established! They know it themselves, and so does everyone else. No one complains, no one argues, because there is nothing to argue about. All are guilty as charged.”
“So what is it?” asked Mr Smith.
“It is the all seeing eye. A beacon of watchfulness somewhere out there upon the horizon. You can never be sure if its gaze rest upon you, so you live your life in the baleful stare of its singular eye. Eventually you become accustomed to its icy gaze, and you live in the dualistic knowledge that it knows your every thought, sees your every action, and yet it chooses not to react. It is this, rather than its scrutiny, that creates the neurosis. Individually you become aware of your own palpable guilt. It does not judge, it does not condemn, and in so doing, it forces everyone to accept their guilt and live with that self-knowledge. Thus when th
e jackboots come to kick in your door, you are just glad to get it over with. You have been found out, and now you can relax and accept your long overdue punishment.”
“That is the only point of the surveillance? To makes us, each and all, feel guilty?”
“No, not simply to make you feel some guilt, but to make you actually guilty.”
The screen shifted, and after a moment of vertigo he was watching his fifteen year old daughter, again in split screen fashion.
She had her blouse open, and her skirt hitched up to reveal a pair of pink panties. Her fingers toyed with her hair and she was giggling. On the other end of the connection an older man was telling her to show him more, asking her to take her blouse off.
Mr Smith sat bolt upright on the bed, but the image cleared as quickly as it had appeared.
He tried to rise from the bed, but something was blocking him, some force was interfering with his movements.
Then the blocks said: “Calm down. You knew this was happening. You have always known it. They, both of them, have found a route through life in the shadow of the panopticon. They live, knowing that they are observed and monitored, and now they no longer care. If one day they take a wrong step, then all of this will be used to destroy them – utterly! In the back of their minds they are aware of this, but they choose to hide the truth from their conscious selves. So your son spends much of his time in an endless pursuit of meaningless, voyeuristic sex, and your daughter earns cash by exposing herself for the gratification of older men.”
“Oh my god! Why would she do that!”
“We", said the blocks, "would be far more concerned about your son, if we were you!”
“Why is that?”
“Because she does what she does to achieve a sense of self-worth, which she is unable to furnish in other ways. As long as she chooses not to question too deeply the motives of those who pay to see her naked, she can believe that they do it because she is attractive to them, desirable. In other words, that she is worth something; even if that is only for some empty, sexless foreplay.
“Your son, on the other hand, has descended into a world of self-loathing that he finds himself unable to escape from. Furthermore, while your daughter will be fully accepted into society having an effective ‘use’, your son’s predilections lead nowhere.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and sobbed. He did not really like either of them. He felt they were spoilt and heartless, lacking in both imagination and courage. But then who wasn’t these days? Yet they were still his kids.
The blocks, however, were not done. “Sally will be here soon. You should get ready.”
“And the children?”
“They will, of course, continue on their current path. If you wish to change that, it will take much time and effort. For now there is nothing that can be done about it.”
Part 7 - Inversion
The Kubic Kat Page 13