The Apex Book of World SF 2 (11 page)

Again, no answer.

"Want
to look around? Okay. Let me introduce some lovely neighbours to you." Calmly,
he closed the book with a loud snap, removed the keys from the wall and
staggered into the darkness while holding onto the rock wall.

"You
liked the words on the plate. Well, that's from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4,
verse 12. No, no, I'm not a Christian. Religion no longer matters if you are
already in hell. You said you call this place ‘Alice's Rabbit Hole'?"

Chen
was deep in thought, his skinny fingers scratching a few scraggly lines into
the wall like a long musical score without any notes.
Must've been from
section B.

The
British are the only ones into such silly fairy tales. The Greeks called it "The
Prison of Hades", Argentineans, "The Library of Babel", and Americans, "Zion",
which is Biblical, but more likely they took the name out of movies. With all
these names, all of them mourned the past glories of their civilisations.

Only
the Chinese did not.

Against
their five thousand years of tradition, the Chinese showed amazing courage and
candour this time.

They
named this world—"The Tomb".

I've
lived in The Tomb for ten years, twenty, or perhaps longer?

 

The
sliding fingers were stopped by a bulge on the wall. He came back to his
senses, stopped and showed a pleasant smile.

 

"Sir,
this is our Room 1, the magic hut of Mrs Shi." His hand was poised to knock,
but he thought it over, put his hand down and pulled out a key. "Shhhh… I
think we'd better just take a peek instead of frightening her."

"You
know, the people here on the outskirts of section V have all been assigned here
because the old level could no longer hold so many…" Hmm, what's the word?
The critically ill? The diseased? But Mrs Shi never considered herself ill. She's
just living in a spiritual world.

How
fantastic that experience is: the teapot tilts to pour not water but an arc of
whiteness; everyone's playing the puppet game; all she can see are mechanical
poses and expressions, then it all disappears, or else the eye sees through
walls, furniture or bodies and pauses at another corner. The world is like a badly
degraded copy with too many dropped frames, its beauty only glimpsed in jerky,
broken bursts. Chen licked his lips.

"Multiple
regions in Mrs Shi's lateral cortex were "filtered", so she can't perceive
moving objects. Bodies and objects flit into her vision like ghosts. It was
very difficult at first; her screams almost became our time piece. Heh-heh."

Wheresoever
is physical phenomenon, there is delusion; but whosoever perceives that all
phenomena are in fact no-characteristics, perceives the Tathagata
.

"She
considered this her sin and kept praying to the Buddha for relief."

When
all phenomena became no-characteristics all of a sudden, the human race wasn't
ready. When the Tathagata was perceived, thus came one. How ironic.

He
sighed.
When was it? Ten years ago, Twenty, or longer? Was it war? An
unidentified virus? Or divine retribution? Forgotten, all forgotten.

All
we knew was that the visual cortex regions of the brain were severely damaged,
a phenomenon known as "Filtration". In the post-Filtration world, one-third of
the population died of brain damage; one-third became insane and committed
suicide; only less than one-third survived and eked out a living on the ground,
immersed in toxins and radiation. To protect themselves, the survivors built
huge burrows and lived off underground water and food reserves. Several small
wars followed as people competed for resources before the synthesiser was
invented. Thereafter, the burrows were expanded, networked together, until even
the continental networks were connected. Social and economic systems were
re-established, and the Cult of Satan spread and extended into the arts.

Chen
closed the door quietly. "She's searching for peace in the darkness, like
everyone else." His fingers resumed the progress to the next door. He looked at
the visitor,
Hmmm, an ordinary grey suit, an ordinary pale face, what kind of filter does he have?

 

Each victim had his own filter.
No-one realised this frightening fact until five years after the Filtration. It
was discovered at the end of 20th century that "vision" is a brain process involving
the active interpretation of stimuli from the environment. There was no
noticeable gap in our visual field despite the existence of the scotoma on the
retina, a region with no photoreceptors. The visual system interpolated and
filled up the blind spot through a precise and complicated process, and created
the illusion of "reality". In other words, what you see is not what you get.
Filtration selectively destroyed the brain regions responsible for the
formation of vision such that the world through filtered eyes was significantly
altered, not unlike the filters used in photography, and thus the symptoms were
named "filters" as well.

 

Room
Two. "Mr Wei's luckier than the others." He knocked, but the door creaked and
swung itself open. "Wei, this is our new neighbour. Come on, shake hands with
him. Right, you'll take care of each other."

He
waved and closed the door with a click.

"Wei
is a blindsighter. Large areas of his V1 visual cortex were destroyed. The
prevalence of that is 0.03 percent. Did you notice that he gripped your hand
immediately when I told him to shake hands with you, and that his blink reflex
was intact when I waved? But he thinks he's blind. People with these symptoms
can perceive light, shape and simple movements and react accordingly, but they
resolutely deny that they can see."

Useless
trash gets special privileges, what a world…

He
let out a sly grin. "Aren't the blind luckier than the seeing, here?"

"Why
doI know so much? Ho-ho, didn't they tell you where this is?" Chen stopped at
another door. "Not your fault. It was a long time ago."

"Mr
Wang must be sleeping. He usually stays up all night working. But you can check
out his works." He opened the door softly. A rotten stench filled the air. "Oh,
the sun is gone, but time continues."

In
the dim light, broken chunks of plaster were scattered around the room, their
phosphorescence like bones in a graveyard. Inspected closely, these were
fragments of female bodies, plump breasts next to slim calves, chubby hips
connected directly to pretty heads. Quite a terrifying sight. The only thing
the pieces had in common was a lack of proportion and symmetry, like failed
genetic experiments that had been abandoned.

"Mr
Wang used to be a sculptor, you know, before. His filter is "planarity". The
world is two-dimensional in his eyes. Even an elephant looks like a piece of
paper. And objects can only be identified from certain specific angles; that
is, he can't distinguish a disc and a sphere from above."

Chen
stepped on the white splinters. The snaps and crackles, like breaking bones,
haunted this room day in and day out. Mr Wang's hope, modelled with those
distorted Venuses and Aphrodites, was smashed along with them, as well. A lone
easel stood in the corner. Chen touched the panel and wiped away the thick
layer of dust, revealing a sketch of the face of a middle-aged man. The
proportion and expression were both surprisingly accurate, despite empty spaces
where the irises and pupils should have been. Like a soulless stone face.

"The
beauty in his eyes has already been filtered. This sketch was a requiem for
himself."

Chen
stared at the sketch thoughtfully. When he discussed the painting, Mr Wang's
tone, like that of a deserted wife, gave him a headache, but that face… The
fingers ran over the high forehead, along the brow bone, across the tall nose
ridge, and fell into the deep philtrum and the pair of bow-shaped lips, and
then held the full chin. He sighed. It had been almost unbearable.

He rubbed his fingers, and looked at the visitor again.
Hmmm, an ordinary black
suit, an ordinary yellow face, what kind of filter did he have?

 

"This
is the home of the obsessed. They were either infatuated with the filtered
world, or denied the existence of the Filtration. While others re-adapted to the
world with the assistance of rectifiers, they were sent to this, ho-ho,
Shangri-La, for the peace of their heart."

 

Chen
flung his head back towards the rocky ceiling as if he could look through the
layers of infinitely dark rock to see the vast underground world, complex like
neural networks. On those prosperous new floors, humankind was attempting to
modify itself. Fresh flowers would bloom on the summit of the evolutionary
tree, to wither or to fruit?

What
about us? Are we left to ourselves, in this crack of Hell, to live or die in
due course?

No.
"I am their
watcher. I will lead them back to light." He sounded resolute, full of sanctity
and pride.

But,
but what kind of filter do you have, indeed?
Chen's hands twisted together, rubbing and writhing.

He
hurried his steps, scraping one door after another, his fingernails screeching
along the wall.

"Miss
Ji in Room 5, the ‘stranger' filter. She lost the ability to recognise faces
and lives in a world of strangers. Every day, after waking up, she spends half
a day habituating herself to the new weeping face in the mirror…

"Mr
Lv in Room 7, hippocampus and adjacent cortex damaged. His short-term memory
lasts for one minute and twenty-three seconds only, so his life is sliced into
episodes each lasting one minute and twenty-three seconds, just like the name
of his filter—‘debris'…"

All
those familiar feelings flashed through his memory, various misfortunes, the
same destiny, the past filtered to nothing, patched and woven together again
this day.
Just like me…

No,
I'm different
. Chen shook his head, hard, and strode forwards.

I
am their watcher.

 

Finally,
at the end of the cave, a grand door blocked the way, with a small "c" etched
on it.

 

"I'm
sure you've found that the cave dead-ends here. I dug every single one of these
rooms with my own hands and left the last one for myself. I can see all the
doors, watch all the people, all…"

The
rapturous hands paused in the air like a conductor pausing at a rest. His mind
slipped again, remembering a proverb: Man turned into an animal, digging one
exit after another in the burrow to protect itself, but he can never walk out
of the burrow. That's from Austria, a dead country.

But
why should I walk out?

"Don't
you want to come in?" He put on his routine smile again. The door banged open,
deep darkness soaking everything except the faint fluorescence on the ceiling. "I'll
show you my private collection."

He
danced on, light-footed, sliding and swirling in the dark room, his voice
flying like a moth.

"Do
you know the ‘dark burrow' filter? This name actually originated from Anton's
blindness, and the symptoms are very similar: blind without realising the
blindness." He paused for a moment. "I was like that, living in my fictional
world, even the rectifiers couldn't help me…"

Great
Anton, no, the Sovereign Dark Pope, grant us lightness and hope, the sacrifice
of the black mass will be offered immediately.

In
the blue fluorescence, by the line of dome-shaped containers, his form
fluttered about, and his hands kept on stroking the glossy domes.

"Are
you feeling dizzy and weak? Ah-ha, it's suppressing your neural transmission.
Soon, soon it'll be all right.

"Soon…"
He fished about for something with great effort. With a crack, a strong
electric arc flashed behind Chen, revealing a strange machine: two long thin
tentacles stretched out from a jumbo-sized fruit blender, wriggling like
snakes.

"You
know, when I was assigned here, I tried to communicate with them, learning to
match the hallucinations in the brain with the reality, but I failed, and I
almost broke down from the failure." Chen began to hyperventilate, huffing like
the bellows of a broken organ, his breaths imbued both with nervousness and
excitement. "Man is too self-centred, too attracted by the present, the past,
the undamaged world, even if it is just an illusion. But I couldn't. I needed
release. Finally, the forbidden Society of Compound Eyes opened up to me. You
must have heard about it, yes, the so-called "evil cult". That, that is all true…"

Chen's
breath came even faster, breaking up his sentences.

Oh,
the Society of Compound Eyes, the loneliest child of the dark Church of Satan,
but also the one with the mightiest dark power. We, the three million "dark
burrow" filter owners, were called to serve the sole truth: only with compound
eyes will we see again. Each compound eye needs many ommatidia, each ommatidium
needs…

Another
blue-white electric arc flashed through; the collections in the dome-shaped
containers glittered: the twists and turns of the gyrus, the creamy sleek
texture, and the deep fissure running through the centre.

All
human brains, like plump, translucent fruits.

The
damaged brains with their individual symptoms are the ommatidia. The dark
science of the Society of Compound Eyes enabled those with the ‘dark burrow'
filter to wear these ommatidia, even though they were still seeing only a
distorted world. But just as one can piece together a complete dollar bill from
many bills damaged in different ways, when the number of ommatidia reached the
threshold for a full compound eye, the "dark-burrow" sufferers would see the
light again. So, in all the rumours, they were called…

"Ho-ho!
I am the so-called Filter Collector." Chen howled with laughter, grabbed the
two tentacles on the machine and stabbed forwards violently. Brilliant sparks
burst at the end of the tentacles, lighting up Chen's face. On his face, where
the eyes should have been, there were two deep, dark holes, all the more ferocious
on his twisted face.