Authors: Andy Futuro
There is light ahead, a circle of gray that looms larger and larger—pause, another fucking beacon!—and then she is at the opposite end of the pipe, crouched in the shadows, staring into what appears to be a kennel. The screams and barks and growls and cries are a wall of sound, drowning her in their madness. She sees in the nearest cage a monkey covered in welts and sores, scratching with bloody paws against the red-stained bars of its cage. It turns to her and she gasps and swears, curses caught and drowned within the chaos of screams—the monkey has no face, just a raw mess of scab with slits for eyes and mouth. She scans the floor below the pipe and sees a pressure plate, and gently lowers herself a step beyond, and scans again. Monkeys, possums, rats, shrieking and squealing, covered in cuts and scars and burns, limping on crushed legs, ripped-off tails, torn-out fur. These are the old toys, kept around just in case. She’s looking for the new ones.
She stalks forward, swatting away the soup of flies buzzing around her head, adding their
zzzzz
to the background of cries, landing in black shrouds across the twitching forms of animals too weak to shake them off. Her eyes lock on the door on the opposite wall, straying only to scan for more traps, desperate to avoid seeing the animals—don’t do it! Don’t think about it. Don’t let it get inside your head. Focus! Focus on the door! She feels the Betty sliding its way out of its holster, ready to leap into her hand, finger twitching, yearning to shoot whatever mad bastard could put this nightmare together. Step by step, heart pound, breath out, brush away the flies fucking on her lips.
Her hand reaches down for her cattle prod, and it flicks ready. Her other hand closes around the doorknob and turns—stops. It’s locked. Of course. She lets out a breath and laughs, and nearly swallows a horde of flies as she breathes again, goddamnit. She runs her fingers around the knob, drumming them like spider legs, sending out vibrations that the sensors in her fingertips relay to her pallein implants. A rough schematic of the lock appears in her mind’s eye; a simple bolt lock. The feedback vibrations from her pallein implants slide the bolt back into its niche. The door swings open.
Darkness, and a pale triangle of light, illuminating a figure hunched over a low table like a workbench. The figure is naked, skeletal, skin as pale and gray as the light, spine bones poking through the skin. Dreadlocks dangle in bunches from his skull. He is shaking. The light from the doorway creeps forward at a slant, to merge with the light above the workbench, and her shadow rises above him. There is a body on the table, small, still. She steps forward, prod at her side, sweeping for traps. There are none. Closer. A sound, synced to the shaking, a high-pitch staccato. A sob. He’s sobbing. Closer. She sees his skin now, covered every inch with a patina of scars, like snowflakes across his body. The dreadlocks are wires, dozens of wires drilled into the skull, dangling around his naked body, spilling onto the table, and she sees the wires end in jagged needles, each like a little harpoon. They stick in the small body on the table, the neck and thighs and chest all with smiling-wide cuts and burns and punctures. Nails, drills, scalpels, knives, stained red and yellow, scattered across the table, red, staining the man’s hands, dark and red, so much blood. The Betty dangles out of its holster, she raises the prod high to smash in the wired skull, to splatter the bastard’s brains all over the table, to give him something real to sob about. The prod hovers and then lowers. The man doesn’t turn, doesn’t look at her, doesn’t acknowledge her in any way. She takes a StunEaze from the pea coat and jabs it into his neck. His body tenses and goes limp.
Saru can’t know how he got his fetish, but she can guess—lurking in the dark places of the Net, the Wekba, witnessing vicariously the thrill of sadomasochism amplified a thousandfold by implants. It was like a drug, a compulsion, a need overwhelming the simple circuits of his brain. He’d started on himself, a few cuts here and there, agony, ecstasy, and then kept going as far as he could, cutting out his lips, his eyelids, his tongue, his nipples, and cock and balls. The animals when he couldn’t squeeze any more pleasure from himself. And when the animals just couldn’t do it for him anymore, he’d had no choice but to go further. She zip ties his arms and legs and throws a sheet over the poor dead girl. Then she walks into the cage room, and even though bullets aren’t cheap, she goes from cage to cage and stops the screaming, until it’s quiet, save for the buzz of flies.
*
…her first, yes. He was her first torture fetishist, the first person she’d seen with his brain so twisted by the Net, by the implants, by easy self-adjustment. She had wondered then, wondered at first what made a person get that way, what pathways in his brain had grown so worn and comfy that he followed them no matter where they led. And then after him there were so many others, so many freaks and demons, so common that they killed her wonder and her curiosity, and then even her disgust. It was just work. Had she cared once? Had she ever felt like she was doing something right? How obvious it now seemed that the UausuaU could exploit the human rot, so much pointless cruelty, so much needless pain, so much fear! A species like hers, keen to self-destruct, must be ambrosia for a cosmic invader. Love, the UausuaU had promised, and the memory of that artificial love was enough to stir within her yearning. How fiercely humanity must hate itself, that the love of an alien death God appeared to so many to be the better option.
Now Saru was the one being tortured, one of her ten thousand enemies had finally caught her, and, really, she couldn’t see the appeal. The pain was everywhere—in her head, in her face, in the ache of her shoulders as they bent forward at bad angles, in her thigh, still throbbing from the hole where the Hathaway brand had been, from the cuts in the desert on her legs and her feet, so little separating her from the outside world. Where did she end and the universe begin? She felt like a wave, like her skin was unimportant, like it was just another piece of clothing. Her body was a car she used to get around, but not necessary. The solid parts of her were bags of slosh that weighed her down.
Saru let them slip away, so easy, just a nudge of conscious effort, undressing from her skin, unshackling herself from that obnoxious pain. The harsh metal of the room faded, the cold thrilling her nipples, the perky voice “…please confess…please…confess…” The twin red circles of the goggled eyes, the stink of her spit-up, all melting away, like drifting off to sleep, away from all this bother, the responsibilities of flesh, the forced memories of bastards prying into her brain. She simply left, to fly, to drift, to be a wave, floating freely in the dark.
The dark faded in long degrees, to a dark blue, and then a light blue, so gradual Saru almost couldn’t tell it was happening. Stars appeared like a plague, so many dots of bright they threatened to tear through the paper-thin, black and blue bruise of sky. First came weight, a sensation of being solid, of being a
thing
, and then boundary, cramming her waveform into the limits of a shape. She sensed this was more a matter of practicality than necessity in this place—after all, she knew how to get around as a
thing
, as a body, as a human being. She could take information from her surroundings using her nose and eyes and fingers, and digest it all well enough; she got how the system worked. Being a wave was fun, and relaxing, even, but it was hard to get things done.
A new plane of blue appeared below what was now her feet. It was a roiling, greenish blue, with occasional white lines—an ocean, spreading across the plane to meet and merge with the lighter shades of blue, the curving dome of the sky. Seeing dimensions appear like this made them feel small, like a bell jar, that, vast as they were, dimensions were still limitations, and not something known to a wave. But the smallness was a comfort too, a feeling a part of her liked, knowing her smallness made her unimportant, free of responsibility, and less of a target for predators.
A white dot appeared amidst the ocean, growing as she drifted down, an island, a lonely spot of sand with a single palm tree and a few coconuts. This she had expected. She had been here before, once, when she had touched a feaster. Now she recognized the island. It was the same island that was on the label of the fancy, rich-person water bottle, the same palm tree at the same angle, the same blue sky, the same clear waters, the same tiny waves. She must have seen it long ago, in a store or a client’s house—or Jojran’s, maybe? Clue number one: this place was in some way a creation of her imagination.
Saru landed gently, and stretched. She dug her feet into the sand, massaging them against the fine grains. Ah, that was nice. It would be so nice to lie and sun herself, to get a tan, to swim and maybe drink something fruity. So much nicer than the real world, full of shocks and stabs and impacts.
John was there, standing where Friar had stood before. He was naked as well, but this was merely an observation, a fact without any entangling judgment. His body was whole, not mutilated, his face still young and handsome.
“Hi, John,” Saru said. She was glad to see him, but she knew she should be sad.
“Hello, Saru,” he said.
“You’re dead,” she said, plainly. The sadness was there, but it could not interfere with the truth.
“An unfortunate state of affairs,” he replied.
“I’m sorry.”
“I too am sorry.”
“Was it…painful?” Such a stupid question, she was talking without thinking.
“The pain is a distant memory,” John said. “My captors could find no useful information. They wanted to keep me alive for further study. My training allowed me to decide for myself. I chose to leave.”
Saru turned away. It was hard to look at him. He was so calm. So relaxed. He should be angry. He had every right to be angry.
“And you came here?” she asked.
“When a Gaesporan dies, their mind is absorbed by the shared consciousness. It is a new stage of life, a consciousness living inside a larger consciousness, a thought within a thought. Being disconnected from the Gaespora, I did not know what the death of my body would bring. It seems you have called me here.”
John held up his hand and showed her the silver-green ring on his finger.
“Through the ring?” Saru asked.
She held up her own hand, where the same ring was mirrored on her finger.
“In the service of the Gaespora I had built many glanes,” John said. “But never without the guidance of the shared consciousness. On my own it appears I erred. I wove my own consciousness too tightly to the glane. I bound myself to you.”
“Yeah,” Saru said. “I figured it was something like that.”
It was nice here, the simplicity of this place, to simply gab—even if it was about alien techno magic.
“I was expecting to see Friar,” Saru said. “He was a…colleague of mine. He was here last time.”
“You have come here before?”
“Once. I ran into a feaster who was impersonating my friend, playing tricks on my mind. He was telling me the UausuaU loved me, promising me things, and I fell for it like an idiot. I reached out and touched his hand. And all of a sudden I was here, on this island.”
“And your colleague was here as well?”
“Yeah. Friar had been doing experiments on the elzi. I never understood what he was trying to accomplish before, but now, now I get it. He was trying to look into the consciousness the elzi shared with the UausuaU. He was able to ask the elzi a question, and it answered.”
“Your colleague’s experiments were doubtlessly expanding his margin with the UausuaU.”
“Oh, you don’t need to tell me. It turned out Friar was a feaster too. He brought me in on one of his little experiments. It went bad and he started to transform. He made me kill him—the bastard. I think now that’s when it happened. When he became a feaster. And then he was haunting me, fucking with my head, making me see things…”
Saru shivered, feeling unclean. She wondered how much of that interaction with Friar was accidental, and how much had been planned. Did Friar know she was a host to the Blue God then? Or had he only figured it out after the experiment? Had he intended to crawl inside her brain? To live in her margin with the UausuaU? Or had his attack been opportunistic—him sensing her mental vulnerability, and darting inside before the door slammed shut?
“Last time I was on this island,” Saru said, “Friar told me I was making a decision. He didn’t want me to be here. I think I was making a decision that would have a big impact on my margin. I could have joined the feaster, joined the UausuaU…I wanted to…I was tempted…but I came here instead. And then I killed the feaster.”
Saru looked out across the waves, to the backdrop of stars. She craned her neck up to study the sky, the planets and rings impossibly large, looming overhead. It wasn’t real. And yet it was.
“This place is part of my mind,” she said. “I know because I recognize the island. But it’s more than that. It’s the Blue God’s mind too, isn’t it? This place is the consciousness I share with the Blue God.”
“Yes and no,” John said. “This,” he raised his arms and gestured around him, “is a mirthul. It is a state where the mind is maximally receptive to a shared consciousness. It is similar to a glane in that it serves to give you control over the interaction. The mirthul allows you to navigate the shared consciousness with the familiar tools of your body. Being here represents a deep communion with your God.”
“Have you ever been to a place like this before? When…when you were alive?”
“Many times. As a Gaesporan, I would often enter a mirthul during the course of sleep, when my mind was relaxed. But as you are a Saialqlaian, I cannot say what brings you here.”
“I have a pretty good idea,” Saru said, thinking back. “It’s danger. Lethal danger. Last time I came here when I thought I might die. And now I’m—or, my body is being tortured.”
“Danger would seem a likely trigger. With training you may be able to come here at will.”
“At will,” Saru said, rolling the words around her tongue. “Willpower…control over the interaction. That’s why Friar isn’t here. Because I destroyed him. Deliberate action! That’s what you were talking about before. Friar had been attacking me mentally—I heard his voice in my head. He was trying to tempt me, to confuse me. I imagined myself destroying him, tying him to a stake inside my head and burning him. And it worked. He was gone. I beat him. That’s right, I beat you, Friar, you fuck!”
Saru plucked the white flower of the Slow God from her hair and studied it.
“If I want to destroy this for good, I can,” she said. She placed the flower carefully back in her hair. Her hand stroked the silver-green ring
“If I want to remove the ring, I can. I can control it.”
“Will you remove the ring?” John asked. He asked calmly, without anxiety. It was simple curiosity.
“No,” Saru said. “I’m keeping the ring. I want you here. Hell, I need you. Who else is gonna help sort all this alien shit out? Unless…do you want me to take the ring off?”
“No,” John said. “I am glad to be here. It is comfortable for me. I did not realize how much I had missed being a part of another mind. I think that I was ill-suited for freedom.”
“You never really got a chance.”
It occurred to Saru then, that John’s motives might not have been completely innocent.
“When we were with Tess,” she said. “And you were telling me to listen—you wanted to bring me into a mirthul didn’t you? Into Tess’s mirthul with you. That’s the real reason you made this ring.”
“I am not so guileful,” John said. He smiled, wanly. “I made the ring for all the reasons I shared with you. And I hoped in secret that with the ring you could hear Tess’s song, and would choose to join me in our mirthul. Can you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
They fell quiet. Saru listened to the beat of the waves, enjoyed the beat of the light on her skin. She stared out across the water. It was so calm, so clear. She could feel her thoughts settle, moving as fluidly as the light playing upon the water, settling into new patterns of revelation.
“You know,” she said. “I think I’m a better detective without my implants. Not that I was all that terrific before, but you know what I mean. I used to use my implants for everything, checking the feeds constantly. But now I think I’m thinking better without them. Everything’s a little sharper, more focused. Like my brain’s chugging along and putting things together on its own.”
“That is not surprising,” John said. “The Net erodes cognitive function.”
“You sound like a Puritan,” Saru said. She picked up one of the coconuts and bonked it against the tree trunk, trying to crack it open. What would be inside?
“There’s a lot of bullshit on the Net,” she said. “But some useful shit too.”
“In its early days, the Net was a tool for empowerment,” John said. “Little of that vision remains. The Founders of America, and their scions, transformed the Net into an instrument of mass manipulation. The American people are locked into the Net from birth. Their brains suffer ceaseless assault by the advertisements and opinions of whatever scion owns their subscription.”
“True, but you can just go to any body modder in the city and drop two fucks worth of cash to carve out your Net locks. Then you can do whatever you want.”
“Few raised in the captivity of the Net can see the existence of that option. Fewer still desire it.”
“Funny, I know a bunch.”
“The people you know are not representative of the population as a whole. The Net is a noose our civilization tightens willingly around its neck.”
“Why are you so down on the Net?”
John’s talk reminded Saru of Hemu, the hip that had brought her to the Slow God’s chapel. The hips hadn’t liked the Net either, didn’t have implants, watched their feeds on screens. They’d even cut wires and destroyed antennas, waging a little war on Net fixtures. Saru had a pretty strong suspicion of why that was, but she still wanted John to confirm it.
“The Net allows humans to replace truth with fantasy,” John said. “Feeds allow users to exclusively consume data that reinforce a preconceived idea. Dependence on AIs and programmed routines renders the mind passive. Virtual kingdoms detach the body from the environment, and the mind detaches from the body. The result is credulous, uncritical thinking, vulnerable to contagion. The system we have designed to exploit one another has been hijacked by the grandest exploiter of all. A person who wanders too far into the fantasy of the Net will be consumed by a mirthul of the UausuaU.”
“And become an elzi.”
“Yes. The term for this misunderstood phenomenon is the L’eilith Zoriathan complex, frequently abbreviated to the LZ complex. The sufferers, colloquially, are known as the elzi.”
“And this is what they see? A mirthul like this?”
“We cannot know what the elzi experience. To know would be to join with the UausuaU.”
“But you can guess.”
“A Uausuan mirthul likely begins as the ensnaring fantasy. It could be a paradise, whatever the host most desires. But it is unlikely the mirthul remains benign. There is no escape, no returning to the body. If you are trapped forever in a dream, even a pleasant dream, the knowledge of your imprisonment will warp the pleasantness into a nightmare.”
“Like an acid trip, when you start thinking bad thoughts and can’t get out of the spiral.”
“I must defer to your knowledge on that subject.”
“But I heard the elzi talking. When I was in New Jersey.”
“That is impossible.”
“I couldn’t believe it at first either, but they were talking. About tampons. And tacos, and…energy drinks.” Saru stopped to ponder her own words. “No. You’re right. They weren’t talking. They were parroting, repeating advertisements. Whatever was getting picked up by their implants. Still, I don’t know why that would happen. Unless it had something to do with the destruction of the holodomor in Philly.”