Spectare

A story about the dangers of progress, and in a different way about the dangers of knowledge and self-knowledge.

“Great stuff,” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voce, as she dispatched the bottle and let it roll lazily beneath the tires of the Jeep.  “Can’t imagine how awful it would be to actually taste something.”

            “Come on, Alina, they’d kick me off the base if they found me liquoring you up, and I can’t risk it right now.  Not with how closely they’re watching you.”  It was a fair point, though she found it almost as distasteful as the cider.  “And besides, I’m not sure you’re in the right state for al…”

            He cut off under her glare.  Him, too?  It hurt her more than she expected.  She watched with her inner eye, curious at the subtle emotional pain it registered.  Betrayal.  He was supposed to understand.  She wanted so badly for him to understand.

            “Alina, your father…I mean…”

            “He’s dead, Tom.  I know.”  The words stung, momentarily, and then her heartbeat settled, her spine relaxed, she breathed out just lightly.  Her eye watched for distress, and withered it.  She turned away from him, stared out over the open training yards, made desert by the midday break and the bleak overcast sky.  Two flags, American and Californian, flew at half-mast from the central administrative hall, across the field from where the Jeep was parked.

            He just pressed his hand over hers.  She could feel his heartbeat, so fast, the light sheen of sweat on his skin, the tension in his muscles.  He was worried for her, and she didn’t want it, not from him.  She wanted something else.  He didn’t seem in the mood, but that, she knew, could be remedied easily enough.

            She focused her inner eye, foregrounding her neural map.  She knew the ones she needed, traced the route of CN VII from between the pons and medulla, branching into the greater petrosal before winding its way into the lacrimal glands.  She willed the nerves to fire, meanwhile adjusting the bloodflow of certain nearby capillaries.  She gripped Tom’s hand tightly and twisted her head away as the tears carved out paths over her lightly flushing cheeks.

            “I’m here,” he said quietly, turning her face gently back with his free hand.  She pulled him into a hug, letting her body shudder.  It was not difficult, although restraining her impatience required more effort.  She pressed her head into his shoulder, and after most of a minute, she lightly kissed his neck, then again, and moved up to his lips.

            She felt his hands pushing her away, and she looked up to him.  She filed through her memory, recalled the pattern she thought of as the wounded dove, that pathetic look of injured innocence, and laid it over her neural map, feeling the subtle adjustments of her features, the slightly downcast, slightly too-wide eyes, the trembling lips.  “Please,” she whispered, “I don’t want to be alone.”  The words, at least, weren’t a lie.

            His objection only lasted some seconds before he began returning the kiss in earnest.  She backgrounded the map, and let the feelings flow naturally, the desire, the grip of his hands on her back, the faint scent of pressed cotton and perspiration, the slick resistance of the copper buttons on his uniform as they slipped away beneath her fingers.  They had time before anyone would be back outside. 

            She hadn’t made it past the fourth button before she felt the disturbance of her map.  It was not quite hearing, not quite feeling, not quite smelling, but the effect on her was clear, and her body knew before her mind that someone was approaching.  She pulled away from Tom, as annoyed as he was puzzled, and turned, waiting some moments to see Jane Crawford walk around the Jeep.

            The woman’s dark hair curled about her rounded face, emphasizing the frown.  “Off with you,” she dismissed Tom with a wave, and he fled in embarrassment with no more than a remorseful glance backwards.  Alina didn’t blame him.  Jane shook her head as she watched Tom’s retreat, “I hope you appreciate how cruel that was, what you were just about to do.” 

Alina was stunned by the anger in that voice.  She’d known Jane for far too long to expect anything besides a lecture, but it had been years since she’d truly upset the woman.  Alina had almost grown to believe it beyond her own ability.

            “I see you don't,” Jane softened the voice with a sigh.  It seemed the woman had decided that ignorance was the culprit here, “Alina, these boys loved your father.  They are grieving, and they cannot handle an…assault from you right now.  You worry them enough as it is, as cold as you appear about his passing.”

            “I loved my father,” Alina said, somewhat more heatedly than she had expected.

            “I never suggested that you did not.  But to that boy…sex with you right now would be a betrayal to your whole family, and to whatever portion of himself he has invested in you.  He would see it as taking advantage of you �" never mind that it was actually the other way around �" as well as breaking the old man’s trust by failing to protect his daughter.  You will have caused him significant guilt just getting him as far as you did.”

            Alina studied the words, pained by her failure to understand them.  In that way that she had, Jane always somehow managed to make simple concepts completely obtuse.  Alina had tumbled Tom a number of times already, and her father had certainly never been involved before.  Why should his absence now make a difference?  It was another instance to remember, another landmine to avoid.  She had marked so many of them, over the years.  Jane watched her pensively, “Alina, you worry me, too.  You say you loved your father.  I know you did.   Such a loss so suddenly requires grieving to heal.”

            “Do you know that?”  She was a sample size of one, as Dr. Bledlow was so fond of pointing out.  Nobody knew anything about her.

            “You are still human, spectare or no, and a capacity for love implies a capacity for loss.  It is not healthy for you to push this aside.”

            Alina sat down on the Jeep’s side step uncertainly.  She couldn’t bluff or lie to Jane.  Not out of any moral compunction, it just wouldn’t work.  Jane was the only person who really understood Alina, more than her parents, more than her friends.  More than herself.  She was the psychotherapist assigned to Alina’s case, but Alina loved her as much as she loved either of her parents.  Which was why the woman was so frustrating.  And why the woman was so much more frustrating when she refused to listen.  She had already explained this.

            She chose a new angle.  “Maybe that’s it, then.  A simple contrapositive.  What does the absence of a capacity for loss imply?  What if what I think of as love isn’t what other people feel?”  This was her first death.  She’d had setbacks before, which bothered her not at all, but this was her first real test, and she felt it as she felt a bugbite.

            Jane sat down, hugging an arm around her shoulders, “I don’t believe it, Alina.  Not for a second.” 

            Alina shivered slightly as a cool breeze swept over her skin.  Her eyes had fixed on a square window into one of the east classroom wings.  A man was pounding out erasers in a flurry of chalk dust, yesterday’s tactics lesson blowing away in the wind.  “It’s going to rain soon,” she said absently.  Her epithelium was her barometer, and the slowly descending air pressure was relieving tension all over her skin.

            “Alina, did you try what I asked you to do yesterday?”

            She nodded, “It’s like holding my breath.  If I focus and think about him, I can hang on to the pain for a little while, hold off my eye to keep it from correcting, but the longer I hold it, the more it hurts, and eventually I can’t take it anymore.”

            “Alina, that pain, that is what you should be feeling right now, that is how the death of a loved one feels.”

            “But most people don’t have a spectare.”

            “No, they don’t.

            “So…how do they breathe?”

She sighed again, “They don’t, Alina.  That’s my point.  It takes weeks, months, years even, sometimes, to get over a death.”  Of course, Alina knew grieving, had formed a concept of it in her mind, but like so many emotional concepts, the eye muddled it terribly, no matter how long she tried to understand it.  How would you deal with so much pain without the eye to correct it?  Jane’s knowledge, the collected knowledge of thousands of years of human understanding, suddenly obsolete in the face of a single device.  “We have always known you had a…tolerance, but I had suspected that something this brutal would break through even your defenses.”

            The woman threw a playing card into the air, and Alina descended into her neural map, plotted the motion, and allowed her arm to follow the instructions, snagging the card as it flew past her.  It was a focus game Jane had devised, years ago, to make sure that Alina was attentive, forcing her into rapid concentration on the small ragdoll image of herself that the eye provided.  Hardly a conversation went by when there wasn’t a card.  She rarely missed the catch.  She looked at it, Queen of Diamonds.  So cold, diamonds.  So red.  Somehow, it seemed fitting.  An empress of ice blood.   “I’m a psychopath, aren’t I?”  She had flirted with the idea on and off for years now, since she had learned the word, though she had always been too nervous about the answer to ask.  That it would be Jane, and only Jane, she would ever ask �" that was a given.

            “Not even close, dear,” Jane almost sounded amused.  “The mere fact that you are troubled that you might be is evidence enough that you are not.  Tell me, do you intend to try again to sleep with that boy today?  I thought not.  Your experience of pain is different from other people’s, but that doesn’t mean that you have no regard for it in others, once you understand it is there.”

            Alina was feeling morose.  She knew because she recognized the pattern of her neural map, the collection of trivial shifts in transmission rates and arrangements that collectively defined emotion.  She knew them all, the subtle sadness of delayed neuron backloading, the quiet joy of symmetric multicourse firing alignment, the panic of synapse flooding.  It was purely empirical, of course, she had learned the map from the emotions, but the complexity the map showed, once she understood the components, was so much more detailed that she relied far more on it now than she did on her feelings to gauge herself.  She wondered at times how anybody else ever knew how they were feeling, in anything but the broadest sense of the word.

            “So what are we to do with me, then?  I could lie, if that would help.”  Jane wouldn’t agree to that.  She thought Alina too practiced at it already.

            The woman shook her head, “I don’t know, Alina.  I still think we can help you to feel this, and that doing so will be good for you.  You are so strong in so many ways, but it is a strength born of the ability to evade problems, not to deal with them.  I fear what will happen to you if you are ever forced to confront an emotion the spectare does not allow you to correct.  And despite how you insist on phrasing it, it is not the spectare that is correcting your distress, it is you.”

            That last sentence was absolutely backwards, and Alina had to respond, “Well, of course it’s me.  It’s my eye.  You might as well say that it isn’t my arm picking up a rock, because it’s me.”

            “No, Alina, that is a false analogy.  Think for a moment about what your eye is.”  Alina grimaced after only a second, being corrected about the function of her own senses by someone who didn’t even share them.  It was just so hard to think of the spectare as a purely sensory organ, like the ears and eyes.  The woman glanced to the sky, “How long ‘til the rain?”

            “Ten minutes, maybe.”

            “We should get you home, then.  No use being soaked out here.”  Alina stood slowly.  “You’re coming to the memorial dinner, aren’t you?  I think you should go.”

            “I’ll go, though I can’t promise much grief.  I’ll try to hold my breath.”  Jane gently caressed her cheek, and Alina shivered at the prickling nerves on her skin.  She clasped the woman’s hand in both her own, and kissed her on the cheek.  The eye never altered feelings like this, and she was glad for it.  “I can make it home on my own.  I will meet you tonight.”

            The therapist nodded a goodbye to her as she stepped away across the asphalt towards home.  The base was quieter than usual.  The hangars disgorged their multitude of APCs and humvees and jeeps, a fleet of brash young men flooding into and out of the eight-square-mile training ground that was soon to become the eight-square mile mudpit of Area 2-4.  Somehow the shouts and hollers that constantly filled the air were subdued, apologetic even.  As if they realized they were intruding on some solemn sacrament, that Alina’s hike back to the rugged castle of a shack she called home was not to be disturbed.

            She watched the gray steel barracks, one by one, as she walked past.  They lived in cans, military men.  Sardines, crammed tight, prepackaged death.  Just twist the pin, roll back the lid, aim.  Here and there walked past a friendly face, a sympathetic smile, quiet and understanding.  Alina didn’t understand.  She just walked, unhurried in the intensifying drizzle, to her lusterless iron habitat.  Habitat was the word, or perhaps Petri dish. 

            It struck her as peculiar, stepping through the door, that she had never recognized the house as merely the last in an identical row, the same dimension as the others, made mansion only by its emptiness.  There were none of the solid oak benches that lay like logs in the barracks, no embarrassingly open showers, no double bunks to bounce on or rusted footlockers prizing away mementos and memories and the half-worn remains of an old t-shirt or a bright blue sweater that smelled like cigarettes and nail varnish and home.  There was only emptiness, and the light furniture and useless trinkets her mother had formed into her legions in a losing battle against the void.  Was that what death should feel like?

            Alina stepped into the shower, closing her eyes to the cool rhythm of three days’ water ration against her naked skin.  She dismissed the neural map and dissolved herself in the fine detail of existence.  She let herself follow the patternless drumming of water on skin as her consciousness sped from nerve to nerve, each drop a rallying cry, a summoner conjuring her attention with the magic of momentum.  She fell further into the spell, time politely slowing to give her space to savor each drop before she abandoned it and fled to the next, every cold twinge of skin a world of nervous, delicious, microscopic wonderment.

            The tiny watchmaker of her mind, who shouldered the burden of keeping her heart beating and her lungs pumping while she was absent, tugged anxiously at her, and, eventually, she withdrew with reluctance from the trance.  Ten minutes had passed.  It was almost a drug, and it was always mournful to let the exhilaration of pure activity dissipate. 

            Emergent hyperfocal reidentification was the term Dr. Bledlow had invented for the phenomenon.  It had been neither designed nor anticipated, and it still gave Bledlow trouble at times.  From what she understood �" which, when she was being honest, was very little �" almost all of what she experienced of the device was emergent.  It had only been designed to provide nerve-data summaries to the brain, and everything else was just a conspiracy of her cerebellum, her spinal cord and her temporal lobe to make the most of that data. 

            Reidentification, which Alina couldn’t help but think of as dissolving, was one of the few direct hazards of the eye.  It seemed unfair at times how good it could feel to be a simple nerve, to exist as a minute fragment of the self, or rather to exist as thousands of fragments of the self spread across her entire body in a deck-shuffling, synapse-jumping rush.  That was what typically triggered it, sudden physical stimulation across large areas of her body.  The first time she dove into a swimming pool, when she was five, she had nearly drowned in ecstasy.

            She shook away the recollection and the water from her skin.  After drying and dressing, she caught her reflection in the mirror and regarded the black sleeveless gown sharply.   The waist was too small, the bust too large, and despite being black it somehow contrived to be lighter than her hair, which was, she had always thought, not even a particularly dark shade.  She never looked good in black anyway.  Maybe…

            She sighed.  She had already promised Jane she would go.  She tried and failed to feel guilt over the desire to skip her father’s memorial dinner.  He would have forgiven her.  It held little appeal, the idea of spending three hours listening to middle-aged subordinates make insincere toasts to the greatness of a man whose death would, the day after tomorrow, be regarded as a fine career opportunity.

            She frowned.  She was being unfairly critical �" the eye was a marvel of self-judgment at times, and right now her map was a mere mockery of truth.  Most of the officers had genuinely liked her father.  She sighed once more and marched dutifully to her mother’s closet in search of a set of pearls to accent the dress. 

All she managed to locate was a strange black briefcase that couldn’t possibly belong to her mother.  Her father was not a businessman, and though he was brass, he was practically retired these days, and his real job �" and she felt this with mild regret �" was keeping her safe.  Test subject.  Hrmph.  Just a hint of sorrow shadowed her as she realized she had been thinking of her father as if he were still alive.  It didn’t survive long.

The suitcase was locked, and heavy, and she hefted it onto a dresser.  The family birthdays failed, as did standbys 1234 and 0000.  She suspected a few codes her father might use, pulled a few fragments of numbers from her memory and a few from the air, but the lock firmly refused her advances.  She was out of ideas, aside from rolling code-by-code, or smashing the stubborn thing to pieces (which option, though quite satisfying to the imagination, risked damage to the contents, defeating the point). 

            Alina eyed an intruding thought anxiously, like stumbling on a rock and finding herself face to face with a large wolf, then hearing its stomach grumble.  She entered the numbers, felt the click of the latch release before she heard it, and wished she hadn’t.  The odds were only ten thousand to one, right?  It could have been chance.  It could.

            The suitcase opened to reveal a solid sheaf of papers, tied tight with twine.  She recognized the top page.  Every month Dr. Bledlow’s team had her into the lab to get a snapshot from the eye to monitor how its recordings changed over time.  The snapshots weren’t human-readable, just garbled nonsense characters, like words written in a deconstructed Asian alphabet, each character a quarter-kanji, but tiny, so that hundreds printed per line at hundreds of lines per page.  It was a dense forest of tiny black twigs that made the eyes quiver, and gave the same sense of motion as static on an old television.  She’d long since given up caring what any of it meant. 

            The only difference between this and the computerized version she saw every month was the giant red CLASSIFIED running diagonally over the page.  Then she noticed the date stamp, and her breath caught.  Her monthly meetings were always on the fifteenth.  This page was dated five weeks ago, on August 4.  She hadn’t been to the lab that day. 

Nervousness unfolded into panic, and she grabbed quickly into a drawer for a pair of scissors.  She stabbed rather than cut the twine.  There were dozens of pages dated August 4, and she flung them to the floor one by one, top secret snow drifting in a storm around her.  More than dozens.  Scores.  Hundreds.  And even more were dated August 5, and August 6, and then she toppled the pile out of the briefcase and saw the last date.  Six days, total, the briefcase held. 

The panic transmuted, via the alchemy of personal violation, into rage.  There were half a dozen days of her life scattered about the floor.  They were watching her.  Every breath, every muscle ache, every bathroom break, every tryst, every vital detail of every moment.  The lab visits were embarrassing enough sometimes, if she were on her period or her body was betraying her with arousal toward that cute lab tech who wouldn’t stop smiling at her, but this, this was…she could barely breathe through the fury, and she curled her fist around the page she held as she stormed from the house, shoes forgotten, hair still damp.

            She arrived at the lab offices in minutes, only more incensed by the rain and the distance and all the private intimacies she’d had time to imagine on the way.  Alina was a well-known figure at the lab, and so the outer guards, despite their orders to keep out unauthorized visitors, did not stand in her way.  This possibly had more to do with the reluctance of any man to stand in the way of a mud-speckled, barefooted woman with daggers in her eyes wearing a wet black dress and an expression resembling an only-barely-contained explosion. 

            The inner guards were more stalwart in their duties.  Jake and Kevin. They held their ground, and her arms to her sides �" to keep her from scratching further at their faces.  Kevin had earned a gash under his left eye by refusing to let her through.  They both knew Alina, might even have called her a friend, and they managed to share a look of bewilderment before the shrieking began.

            It was late, and most of the staff had already left, either to home or to prepare for General Rumman’s memorial.  The handful that remained, a couple of junior scientists and lab techs staying late, were all drawn instantly to the high-pitched clamour at the front of the office.  Two of them were fidgeting nervously about the inevitable paperwork this would cause.

            The stares of the scientists reflected harmlessly off the mirror shine of Alina’s anger, and her ears picked out from among the patronizing streams of futile solace the most senior voice, and she snarled “Bledlow” at it.  The reply reflected away as well, and she wouldn’t have believed it anyway. 

She stopped screaming and stood impassively for some time, contriving via her map to appear harmless.  She couldn’t manage despondent just then.  At the release of her second arm, she plotted her actions out and watched distantly as the map trigged her body, swiftly elbowing Jake in the ribs and darting past the reaching grasp of everyone else, through the open doorway the crowd had left, and past the soft chittering of sleeping computers and incomplete experiments into Dr. Bledlow’s office.

Her body froze, discarded panic reasserting itself momentarily under the stranger’s gaze, a sharp face silhouetted in digital blue-grey.  A thinning cloud of cigar smoke stung Alina’s eyes as hands gripped her shoulders, pulling her back, but the man said, “Leave her.”  The voice was silken and suave and she saw in herself an instant, nameless and indescribable revulsion.  As she regained control, she tried to back out of the room, but the door clicked shut behind her, cutting off the bright hallway lights.  The handle wouldn’t turn.

Eyes, heavy in the darkness, flicked downward to the now-soaked paper she still held tightly, “I see you’ve located our missing records, then.”

“Who are you, and what are you doing in Dr. Bledlow’s office?” she gambled on boldness, because, flight denied, only one option remained.  The anger was not gone, but it had been suppressed by something older and wiser than anger, an ancient mammalian recognition of rules that predated society, predated thought.  The eye amplified the whispers of her body.  This was a scream.  It said predator.

            “Samuel Edi, Director of Biotechnology Research of this station.  A pleasure to finally meet you, Alina.  You can call me Sam.”  His lips curled upward, but if there was a smile to be found anywhere, it wasn’t on his face.  Alina almost shuddered.

            “That is…”

            “Was, I fear.  I have assumed the role.  Dr. Bledlow is no longer with us.”  There was no mistaking his meaning.  She felt the constriction of her throat, watched herself swallow.  His speech was clipped, brief, the voice of a man who never expounded or even explained.  Imperative.  “I have overseen your project for many years now, and I assure you that I am quite familiar with every detail of your case.”

            Every detail.  The words resonated her fury, and she flung down the crumpled sheet, “I demand that you stop spying on…”

            “It was necessary.”  That was all he said, all he gave any indication of saying, and the impertinence of it struck like a flame to a hydrogen balloon.

            “No, I…”

            “Necessary, Alina.”  The calmness galled her.  She was shaking with anger and fear, and he just didn’t care.  He took a long, slow sip of rum from a small glass.  “Tell me, what do you believe to be the aim of Project Verity?”

            The question caught her off guard, but she knew…she paused, suddenly uncertain.  She knew what her parents and doctors and watchers had told her, but now she doubted herself.  The wording of the question had been specific.  What do I believe. “The eye is the first step in creating a real-time human-machine interface that will be capable of translating digital networks into experiential phenomena while fully digitizing the intentions and actions of the human to provide direct access to network resources,” she parroted the words and wondered at how suddenly hollow they had become, that hollowness sinking away her anger.

            The not-a-smile returned, “You need not feel quite so betrayed.  That was indeed the project’s initial inspiration, and a lofty goal, to step out of your mind and into the Net.  Then you came along, and showed us what the project could be.  It is now, as it were, something greater.”

            “And this?” she indicated the printout.

            “You are not intelligent, Alina.”  She blinked, unable momentarily to accept that someone would just say that, and failing to see the insult’s relevance, but before she could mount a reply, he continued, “Yet you could make it into any college in the country regardless of the name or picture you applied under, simply because when you focus, you do not merely ignore distraction, you eviscerate it.  You are not particularly gifted physically, but you can run a 5:43 mile, you have better fine muscle control than a pianist, and you could probably scrape by as a professional tennis player.  Why do you suppose these things are, hmm?”  The question was clearly rhetorical.  Alina waited for the point.  “How did you open the briefcase?”

            That was much less rhetorical, and much more frightening, “I used the code.”

            “And where did you get the code?”

            “Where did you get it?” she growled.  It couldn’t have been a coincidence.  It was hers, and she’d never shared it even with Julie.  Her date, from her dream, and nobody else had a right to it.

            “From here,” he pointed to the sheet.  “No, we can’t read your thoughts, they are too complex, but the noise of the body reveals a great deal about the mind.  Patterns emerge.  It might interest you to know that 5819 has become something of an informal codename for you, we see it so often.”  She would have slapped him if he were closer. He simply paused at the guttural snarl coming from her throat.  “We know more about you than you do.  We know who you are attracted to, what smells make your mouth water, what can drop you to your knees, and whether it’s in fear or in ecstasy or in pleading.  Information, Alina, is the currency of knowledge, and knowledge, as they say, is power.”

             She suddenly understood, horrified.  Her voice came out a whisper, “So it’s your eye too.”

            “Just so.”

“And you’ll sell the public on all the benefits, get one into every child in the country, and in exchange, all they have to do is strip naked for you.”  The eye tried to correct her horror, but she struggled desperately to stop it. She needed it too badly.

            His head shook, “Only underneath their clothes.  Is it such a bad trade?  Privacy is a wonderful thing, but it is only just slightly more wonderful than its image.  Nobody will know, and so there will be no concern for its absence.  Governments need information, and in payment, the populace becomes more productive, more focused, more in tune with their bodies, happier.  Did you know, Alina, that you are, as best as we can measure, about eighty percent happier than an average person would be in your circumstances?  Moreover, the people will be better served by their government, which will be able to target criminals, exonerate the innocent, and understand and respond to complex social issues in ways never before possible.  Would that really be so odious?”

Yes, she wanted to scream, but something held her back.  She considered herself, saw anger and nervousness making a mess of her mental map, her body a sea of adrenaline-laden confusion and horror and rage.  And some incongruous anticipation, almost a footnote to the other emotions.  She couldn’t feel it, but she saw it: some part of her suspected something worse to come.  She was much too frightened of finding the answer to ask herself what it might be.

            “You think some secrets are worth keeping, do you?” He waited for her nervous nod.  The voice darkened, “We agree.  It’s why we have the classified stamp.  Your father stole some classified documents.  Now he is dead.”

            Alina staggered backwards as if struck.  It had never occurred to her, never would have occurred to her, but there it was, and she was completely unprepared.  Finding no outlet for the panic, she funneled it through to anger as she surged forward, her hands strangling the man’s desk because she couldn’t reach his throat across the desk. “And what’s to stop me from telling the world what you are doing?” she growled through clenched teeth.

            She froze at the words, at the look on the man’s face, once again losing her grip on anger to her own uncertainty.  There was something to stop her, and she had no idea what.  It was wrong, this talking.  She had sensed it from the start: this was not a man who explained.  But here he was, explaining.  The image of the cat and the mouse was inescapable.

            “This,” he said simply, holding up August 9, page 112.

            She watched it warily, suddenly a strange creature, an unknown threat.  “You can’t blackmail me, I…”

            He just chuckled, shifting his eyes briefly to his laptop screen, and his hands followed.  There was no time, and Alina’s body made the decision for her as it pushed to leap across the desk. 

            Her feet never made it off the ground.  She was suddenly overcome by such a painful disorientation that she nearly vomited as she careened to the ground, all thought perishing instantly.  The earth had turned sideways beneath her, and she was convinced that her body had splintered.

            It was mere seconds only before Alina returned to herself, but they were long seconds.  She heard a sharp inward breath above her own quiet groans, and felt Edi standing over her.  She hadn’t recovered to the point of looking up.  “Tell me, how did that feel, Alina?”

            What surprised her was not the question itself, but that the voice asking it had sounded, for the first time, genuine.  He was actually interested in the answer.

            “Wh…” she began, then reconsidered as the bile burned her throat.  She waited some breaths, tried again, “What happened?”

            “Quid pro quo, then.  You answer my question, I’ll answer yours.  Since you’re on the floor, I think it only fair that you begin.”

            A game…but that was okay, it gave her time to think, to recover.  “Why don’t you…just check the eye?”

            “The answer to that is subsumed within the answer to your first question, so I will not count it against you.  Answer the question.”

            It felt like sunshine and roses, you b*****d.  She didn’t dare.  “It felt like I had been ripped in two, and that both halves had just been set through a spin cycle going in opposite directions.”

            “Interesting.”  Edi paused as if to think, and she turned slightly.  His face was a mere silhouette, grey on black in the anemic light.  After some moments, he lifted a handheld and typed quickly into it.  A test subject even now.  “As to what happened, well, I switched the spectare to output rather than input.

             “You see, Alina, the human brain is first and foremost an associative device.  It builds connections, it sees patterns, and it restructures itself around those patterns.  For your entire life, every aspect of your body has been described to your brain by the spectare.  Every pin prick, every spasm, every chill nightmare sweat against your skin, all of it imaged in your mind, a new pattern of nerve activity for every thought, every action.  So complete was the association that you have learned, and, more importantly, your brain has learned, that, in the same way that your arm or leg is part of your body, the spectare is the whole of it.  I simply had it tell you that you were somewhere else, in a position you could not be in.  The reason I could not check it is that I already know what it says.  It was not recording information from you, it was feeding information to you.”

            She lay still, gaping.  She couldn’t believe the words, but she couldn’t disbelieve the voice, the confidence, the derisive smile lurking in the pauses between sentences.  The triumph.  She tried to think back to the memory of the eye, to step the ragdoll map a few paces backwards in time to disprove the words, but the pain and disorientation of the moment had overcome all of her senses, even the eye.  “I don’t believe you,” she said weakly, because it was too terrifying a thought to be believed. 

            “Nevertheless.  Perhaps a demonstration.”  He tapped a few keys on the handheld, and she saw with the eye and felt with her skin less than an instant later a gentle, caressing warmth all over her body, through her clothing, as though she were lying naked in the sun on a warm beach.  Tap.  She saw/felt the biting breeze, bringing with it a sting of cold water to her face, her breasts, her arms.  She brushed at her skin, bewildered by the causeless sensations.  “As I said, we know you.  Knowledge is power, and power is control.  Welcome to Project Verity, Alina.”

            She began to push herself up, the terror edging out the pleasant sunbath and the existential weakness of moments ago.  “No, this is just a trick.  That’s not control, you’re just…” Tap.  Instantly, she was standing straight up…except that for half a second she wasn’t.  And in that half second, the painful disorientation returned and her body was snapping to attention faster than a recruit on day four of boot camp.  Upon reaching a standing position, the disorientation abruptly vanished as she fell back into alignment with her map.  It was frozen in a standing position, breathing in and out.  So was her body.  She had forgotten how to move.  It was not as though she was fighting, struggling against some mad oppressive trap.  It was more like the tiny executor of her mind, that part of her that translated desire into action, had turned deserter. 

            “You see, Alina, the body does not disagree with the brain.  You know when you are standing, and if you know it even when it is not true, you will subconsciously work to make it true.  And if your eye sees that you do not move, then you see it too.” Tap. She was suddenly able to lift her arm, and now she seemed to have forgotten how not to.  Her will had been subordinated to her body, the desire to move her arm created by the act of the motion, rather than the reverse.  It was…odd.  It was particularly odd because she knew that she had moved her arm.  It wasn’t Edi, or the device in his hand, it was Alina that had done it.  She just hadn’t wanted or tried to until after the fact.  The will was there, it was just…late.  These thoughts came in a state of only mild alarm, because the upper echelons of emotion require bodily involvement, and hers was at equilibrium.  It is impossible to be truly panicked with a heart rate of sixty.  “It is all a matter of patterns, and we have spent years and years learning yours.  So have you, which is what makes it all work.”

            He stood, letting her think, but not letting her panic, or move.  Tap.  “I believe you, Doctor Edi,” she heard herself say, then think, and realized that she had no choice but to agree.  It may not be panic, but that didn’t stop it from being a sort of grand reflective horror.  A few hours ago, she wouldn’t have traded the eye for the world.  The benefits far outweighed the occasional emotional problems, and even that disadvantage would vanish once they were common, once it was no longer an oddity for a person to be able to react directly against negative emotions.  After they were released, there wouldn’t be a man born in the next fifty years who didn’t have one.  Who was it that said freedom’s grave hid within the garden of progress?

            It was some time before Edi spoke again, “I’m going to release you now, Alina.  I do not recommend you…attempt anything.”  He spat the words distastefully.

            Tap, and her body and her map were behaving properly again, listening to �" rather than deciding �" what she wanted.  She was suddenly very weary, and her voice trembled, “Anything?  You can do anything?”

            “I suspect eventually.  Not thought, yet.  But for now, you’ve seen sensation and motion.  There is also emotion.  For example:” Tap.  The rage returned in an instant, and her mind identified the source, but before she had the chance to leap for his throat: Tap.  And she was suddenly on the floor, weeping.  They were her emotions, and she cried for her loss of control of them and the loss of her father and for everything she had ever known in this horrid pit of a world, and: Tap.  A scream escaped as she orgasmed, the sudden overwhelming pleasure wrenching her to the floor as her skin reddened and the sweat beaded on her skin.  Tap.  She lay on the floor once again, panting in weak freedom.

            “It does not need to be unpleasant, Alina.  People will be happier and more productive, and the state will gain a measure of control which has always been…lacking…even in the most dogmatically totalitarian system.”

She couldn’t lift her head.  Her words were soft, a mutter to the floor, a prayer to any god that might be listening, “But you won’t be able to keep watch of everyone, at all times, the way you can with me.”  It was academic, but nothing else remained.  She needed a victory over the man, even if it wouldn’t help her.  The device had left her free to feel on her own, and what she felt was despair, pure, untainted.  Jane had hoped to teach her grief.  It had taken Edi under an hour.  She had no hope left for herself, and nothing could protect her from that.

            “We won’t need to.  You forget that we have had nearly twenty years since your spectare was installed to improve the device.  The newest model contains quite advanced algorithms for recognizing, recording and recreating the most significant activity patterns, and it can store them for retrieval and use indefinitely.  We won’t need a database beyond the box itself for most users.  For anyone who proves important or…troublesome…it is simply a matter of setting up a remote wireless download.

“The rest is just Pavlov.  Reinforced by every stimulus you have ever encountered since the moment of your birth.  How long do you think such associations take to break?  A human mind is nothing but those associations.  Do you not understand, Alina?  Your brain has learned correctly.  The spectare is your body.  And we control the spectare.”

            Oh yes, she understood.  There was nothing left.  She watched the traitorous ghost in her mind, her constant companion, her lifelong conspirator now become her prison guard.  She marveled at it despite the horror, in the way that she might admire a grotesque but perfectly executed sculpture.  It was hideous, monstrous…but somehow beautiful in its flawlessness.  And it looked just like her.  “And me?” the words were flat, empty. 

            He smiled, and this time, it was clear, whole, honest in the shadows. “Oh, we have one final experiment.  We’re going to find out what happens when we tell you your heart has stopped.”  Tap.

Author's Note

I suspect strongly that there is a lot of this story that is deadweight. I like the overall concept, but I'm worried about a lot of the details, and it's annoyingly difficult for me to separate my image of what is happening from a reader's perspective, so definitely let me know if there is anything that just doesn't make sense or seem sufficiently fleshed out - a lot of my original exposition was cut or heavily edited, and so I'm afraid some details may only make sense to me because I know what I cut.