by Jeter, K W
He came to the ancient, decaying building where Mary had brought him. She’s forgotten, he thought, mounting the stairs. Left the dead behind. He stood before the room’s closed door and touched the cold metal of the doorknob. The only one who might have saved me ... died. Limmit pushed open the door and gazed into the dark, silent room. He saw that the box of clothes Mary had gotten for him still sat in the same corner, a thick coat of dust covering it, shroudlike. She’s gone, he thought; like everything else.
Faint light streamed from the window on the other side of the room. As Limmit stepped into the room he saw a man’s figure silhouetted black against the window. Limmit turned slowly toward the figure, palms outward, to accept the bullet.
There was no shot.
“Hello, Limmit,” said Dr. Adder.
I sat there for a long time. Or laid there. Depending on which way the old woman put me. She fed me, wiped my mouth and ass. I didn’t move; I had become an object. After my vision cleared, I watched TV—more than I had since I was a kid in Orange County. The old woman nearly always tugged and pulled my lolling body into a position where I could see the TV; I guess she thought that as long as my eyes were open I deserved it in some way. I would lie in the same spot for days, my face turned to the screen, while the old woman crept through the room’s piles of debris, muttering to herself. Sometimes the young girl would drift into my field of vision. She seemed to be attracted to the TV, although I could tell she was blind, as well as deaf and speechless and with impaired tactile sense, I discovered later. Lying there on the room’s moldering couch, I would see the girl kneel on the floor and press her face and the palms of her hands against the side of the TV, her blank gaze turned direct into my empty one. I figured then that she liked the faint heat the set gave off.
I didn’t sleep, or think, or remember anything. I lay there, or was propped against one arm of the couch, filled with a strange contentment. Not filled, actually: it was as if something enormous had been drained out of me, and I could now touch and feel the vacuum left behind. Peace defined as the absence of .. . something. I had never realized before how much of everything I did had been a consequence of some nameless fury within me, as if all my visible manifestations were simply results of an inner storm. Now I was content to be a tube, without tension or restriction at either end, and the TV programs passed through me just like the old woman’s prepared mash.
I watched the TV families omnivorously. It got to where I couldn’t distinguish one bunch from another—they merged in my perception into one giant collective entity, like a jellyfish compounded of thousands of smaller organisms. The father-extensions would smile at the mother-extensions, and these would in turn smile at the children-extensions; and they would all flex and grope through their daily adventures. Which must have been hilarious, judging from the hysterical laughter that accompanied their every move, but it all seemed to me like foreign movie actors going through an unknown language’s tragic opera. Over and over: rituals.
Then other times Mox would come on the TV, and I would watch him just like everything else. All my former contempt and hate for him was gone—in fact, I was unaware that I had ever had any. He would drone on and on, his voice sliding through me like it was oiled. Sometimes, he would mention a figure called Dr. Adder. I knew there was a connection between that dimly mysterious person and myself, that he had once even occupied this body lying on a dirty couch in Rattown; but he was gone. Purged.
I started to fall. Memory began to come back, but it changed nothing. Behind my empty face I watched again all of that one night’s bodies blur and leap at me, shattering into corpses. Blood oozing slowly, half-life speed, onto the Interface. Dr. Adder had done it all, with this metal forearm that dangled from my side as limp, volitionless, as my other of flesh. It had taken quite a lot out of Adder, I realized—in fact, had taken quite a lot of him out of me. Who was I? I wondered, falling farther. On the couch, observed by the muttering old woman, the blind girl, and the happy faces on the screen.
I watched old Betreech’s look of fearful knowledge dissolve into splinters of bone, clots of blood and tissue, flying teeth like decayed pearls around Dr. Adder’s metal hand. I watched you sell the weapon to Adder, to him, to me. He and I were still one, but as I fell farther I could feel him splitting away from me. Pazzo’s head dissolved on point of impact. A long parade of women went naked beneath Dr. Adder’s knife, customers under him and the ADR. All those revelatory visions merged, like the TV shows, into a single feverish dream of overpowered flesh.
Then I fell, motionless on the couch in Rattown, down farther. When there was no Interface yet for him to come to or create. When he lay encysted in Orange County like a tumor. There was more of me, whoever I was, than of him back then. Years of medical school flowed by—I walked through them now in slow, dreamy reverse. Then Buena Maricone High School: I was part of a river then, indistinguishable from the mass, the spot of blood that was the embryonic Dr. Adder within me concealed beneath the skin. I fell through grade school, more of the same, and into a preschool class. The memories stopped at one particular day. The attendant was not aware of me having crept up behind her with the other pair of scissors that had been dropped on the floor. The spot of blood that was Dr. Adder lay right on the surface, formed only minutes ahead and not yet covered up with my bland layers. He didn’t hesitate, but plunged the scissors into her calf, the blood creeping in memory’s slow motion over the child’s hand. I hesitated, did not plunge the blades in; she turned around and saw me, snatched the scissors away, scolded me, and I resolved in my sincere childish heart to be a good boy forever. A simple choice between what one should do and what they want you to do; that’s how it starts for everybody. The attendant walked away on unscarred, unpenetrated legs, and the bloodspot burned fiercely and disappeared into me, drilling a corrosive hole that healed over it without a trace.
And then I didn’t fall any farther. There was no need to. At that point he and I were more than distinct, separate: only one of us existed, and I was at rest upon that couch in that innocent child’s time. The rivers of blood would never flow over this body’s hands; no one would open their septic minds to its interior eyes. There was no Dr. Adder—I had erased him. I will lie here, I told myself, and be good.
I don’t know how long it took for me to reach that point, but once I had, time almost completely ceased to flow around me. It took what seemed to be days for the old woman to cross the dingy room toward me, her mutters now edging into subsonic rumbles. The food she placed in my mouth crawled softer than but as slow as glaciers toward my anus. I could trace its progress through my guts for weeks, it seemed. The voices on the TV oozed toward me like paste, the vibrations in the air fluttering and sucking at my ears like warm contra-bass kisses. The girl, crouched beside the TV, seemed like an unmoving rock formation, blank and perpetual.
I think now that I was dying. There was only a finite amount of time left before my heart, sensing that some finality had been reached, ceased to beat. My lungs would no longer inflate the sluglike body I was evolving to. My mind was thus stretching out for as long as it could this sweet, empty bliss. It was a race, with me as the dispassionate observer, to see which stopped first —my heart or my gradually slowing perception of time.
Years, it seemed, after I had reached the end of my fall, something happened. If anything deviating even slightly from the room’s frozen routine ever occurred (the dropping of a dish the old woman was carrying to me or the blind girl, strange flurries of noise out in the street), time speeded up slightly to encompass the event, then slowed down again to its lengthening pace. My face was turned toward the TV, as was more or less usual; the people inside it were swimming slowly through their static ballet, their laughter emerging as great woofing roars. The girl crouched, dumb and sightless beside it, pressing against. She had taken to this practice increasingly during the last few centuries I had been observing the room’s contents— perhaps because of the decreased, due to me, amount of attent
ion she received from the old woman.
Suddenly, the image on the screen flared out in a brilliant burst of white light and static. The TV family’s figures resolved back on, but distorted, wavering. They slowly twisted and flowed, their bodies lengthening and contracting into erotic contortions, while the TV’s speaker howled and gibbered. The old woman, who had been sitting in the filthy upholstered chair beside the couch, shrieked, her voice traveling from the bass end of the audible spectrum to an ear-piercing siren as time raced up to its normal speed. “Get away from there!” she screamed, leaping up and pulling away from the side of the TV the blind girl, who lolled limp, clutched in the bony, clawlike hands. She shook the girl’s body back and forth, screaming a storm of warnings, threats, and curses at the head which snapped back and forth with its blank, unhearing expression. The old woman finally gave up in disgust, her outburst exhausted against the girl’s stonelike face. She flung her across the room, against the couch where I was lying, and raged out of the room.
The girl slid, dazed by the shaking, to the floor beside me. I watched her blind head swivel from side to side, unaware of my being there, moving gradually slower and slower as time started to congeal around me again. In slow motion I saw her rise to her feet; she stumbled against the side of the couch and flung one arm out, so slowly it seemed, to catch something to break her fall. I watched her outstretched hand move through the thickening air above me, and then light on the flashglove, this metal arm, the skin of her fingers kissing the cold surface, then her weight coming full upon it, the fingers curving across it, grasping.
Nothing happened for a long moment. An expression I had never seen on her immobile visage appearing was the last thing I saw then. Something flared around me in a brilliant white flash, just as the TV screen had done, then faded away. There seemed to be a waiting silence. A girl’s voice came to me, moving in real-time. “Hello,” I heard it say, but somehow not with my ears. “You’re ... Dr. Adder, aren’t you?” There was a faint sizzle of static behind the words; the voice was shy, a child’s, almost.
Adder broke off for a few seconds, staring at some point beyond the window. Watching him, Limmit sensed the silent alteration behind the now razorlike face. Something seemed to have disappeared irrevocably from around its cutting edge.
Her name was Melia—she remembered somebody calling her that, before she became deaf. That was a long time ago, she told me. There had been a man, her father, she thought. She was never able to understand any of what he did, but gathered from what she told me that he had had both a taste for kainine-herpezine combinations and a fertile imagination. And two victims for it: the woman, too fucked up on bovaine to run away, and the child, too young. When he finally ODed, the woman’s placid shell was cracked open by madness, and Melia, the little girl, was senseless. She had walled off the little one-room hell behind closed eyes and ears; the nerve endings in her skin had finally shut down almost completely against the pain. She was isolated—the mother took care of her in her lunatic fashion, living like vermin in Rattown on Mother Endure’s handouts.
It went on that way, she told me, dark, silent; until she wandered into the TV set the old woman kept playing constantly there in the room. When I was in med school in Auckland, the university was studying a group of blind Maori children who could erratically manipulate small electronic calculators without touching the controls: the IBM Syndrome, it was called. Perhaps if those children had been as completely shut off from sensory input for so long a time as Melia, their mutated nervous systems would have developed into an ability like hers.
She became able to leap the gap from beneath her skin to under the TV’s metal cabinet, and plug directly into its electronic circuitry. At first the sensations were meaningless to her —random flashes inside her skull of the colors she remembered as a baby, noises and voices crackling and fading in and out unintelligibly. She squatted closer to the set for months on end, until, like learning to see, she mastered this new sense. It didn’t take long, actually—there was nothing to distract her.
At last she had it: she received the TV’s signals directly, without it being necessary for them to be translated into light and sound waves, which were lost to her anyway. She watched the families, and Mox. This was her existence, clamping herself tight to the side of the TV, sucking these electronic portions of life from it. She told me she remembered being a little girl like the ones in the TV families, but she believed she had died, and now she just floated in some uncomfortable limbo, looking back at the world in this way.
Gradually, as she absorbed more and more from the TV, she reasoned out the truth. The TV families were less alive than she;
the memory of the sight of the TV from the days past when she could still see was recalled; finally, she relived, silently screaming, the forgotten pains that she had sealed herself from. She knew, to some degree, where she was and what was going on, and that she was alone and unique—no one in the TV families used a set like this. She watched on, and discovered there was more to her talent than that.
She learned to trace the TV signal. All the way from the set through the underground cable back to Orange County. Right to the computer banks in Mox’s Broadcast Central where the video tapes are created, played, and stored. The entire electronic apparatus had become part of her nervous system. She could penetrate at will any section of the entire interconnected communications network that had Mox’s headquarters as its focus. The electronic extension of her ego raced through the computer’s memory banks, digesting nearly everything. In the medical data units she ran into the information concerning the other known IBM Syndromes. She realized her powers were already greater than anything she found recorded there. Bored as a child, she determined to see how far her abilities did reach.
Weeks later, she discovered that not only could she penetrate the network, she could to some degree control it. Starting with the TV she clung to in Rattown, she altered, distorted the signal appearing on that one screen. The phosphor-dot images would turn into the weird memories of her father that I saw later. She extended her power; for a brief period, a wave of distorted images hit all the sets in Orange County and L.A. as she reached right back into Broadcast Central and changed the signal from there. She gave up this little game, though; whenever she attempted it, something would pull her away from the TV—her mother, the old woman, instinctively sensing that her daughter was somehow responsible for the disturbing patterns on the screen. Also, she became aware that the network’s technicians were sending tracers throughout the system to catch their new glitch. Fearful of being discovered, she modified her actions. Only on rare occasions, when she could no longer resist, did she try it again, to the TV in the room or the entire system, and then only for a few seconds. That explains, I suppose, a few phenomena from back on the Interface. She confined herself mainly to exploring the system without creating any disturbances. She found out quite a lot that way.
When I was brought to the room, she was only faintly aware of my existence. On occasion she had brushed or fallen against the old woman, then me, and deduced from her limited tactile sense that there was another body in the room. Not that she cared—her life was in the TV. So it was until the incident I already told you of, when her mother threw her against the couch I lay on.
The electronic network connecting the flashglove’s sensors with my own nervous system is really only a simplified version of the network she had been playing with all that time. When she came into close enough proximity, her hand actually grasping the surface of the glove, the bridge was gapped, just as between her and the TV set. The glove was, in effect, an electronic interface between our two nervous systems. The signals from the glove’s sensors were designed so that my brain would perceive them as analogs of my original senses, particularly sight and hearing. The first thing she mastered was an “audible” signal—that was the voice I heard. A few minutes later she was giving me “visuals” through the glove.
I was the first live person her mind had been
in contact with since her father, the people represented on the TV signal being separated from her by the computer banks and video equipment. She knew who I was, having gone through the memory bank data on me. She was more curious than afraid; in fact, after a while I thought I could detect some of the inevitable worship, though whether she was impressed by what she had learned of me from the banks, or was imitating what she had learned of my fans, I couldn’t tell.
She gave up the TV, and “talked” incessantly with me. “Visually,” she appeared as a young girl, not the filthy and skinny creature sitting beside me, clutching the flashglove, but the one she might have become ... otherwise. She drew the image, I suppose, from what she had seen on TV. I didn’t even notice, for a long while, that time had begun flowing normally around me. I told her whatever she wanted to know about me and the rest of the world that she hadn’t been able to discover herself. She was able to hold on to my metal hand and reach across the room to touch the side of the TV—it must’ve been a sight, a blind girl stretching her arms between a catatonic on a couch and a TV set, like a bizarre seance. She led me through the TV, the cables, and back to the computer banks and Broadcast Central in Orange County: what she had told me of her discoveries I was able to see for myself. And there was something there, concealed deep within the network, that was very interesting indeed; but it took a lot of thinking, as I lay immobile on the couch back here in Rattown, being fed and wiped by the old woman, and “talking” silently with Melia, before I realized what it meant to me.
I stood up from the couch, finally. My muscles ached and screamed at the sudden exertion; the old woman saw me and fell into a fit on the floor, raving and scrabbling. I stumbled over to where Melia was kneeling beside the TV and placed her hand on the flashglove. I kissed her goodbye on the forehead, both there in the dark room and with our “visual” images in the glove, and told her I’d be back soon. When I walked out of the room I could hear, somewhere very faintly, the cry of a very small child falling submerged into a spot of blood as big as L. A.