Bolt almost dreaded to look upon those eyes at night. They reflected too keenly. Like two icy orbs which had lived to see the world for a time–span that would have been impossible a few centuries ago. They hid wisdom. Yet if technology hadn’t progressed along the threads that it had, the Proxy himself would have long since done his share of clinging to a deathbed. And being a somewhat public, although enigmatic figure, only showing up for select few, Max was living proof, a poster child for augmentation.
“An old man rotting in his own body,” he heard them whisper. They never whispered again once they had seen him, or heard him speak. “I fell into those eyes,” they said afterwards. “I don’t even remember his face, just the eyes.”
Max blinked away the info–display in his mind and turned to meet Bolt’s gaze as the man began to speak.
“It’s strange,” Bolt said. “Why all this secrecy? Why announce nine years ago that we’ll visit a planet with intelligent life and then keep the ship we would travel on a secret when it’s finally complete?”
“I have the sense that it’s been finished for a while now,” Max said. “Maybe even gone places.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Think about it. It takes us less than a day to build entire structures bigger than mountains, but it takes nine years to build a ship?”
“Hell,” Bolt spat, “why didn’t I think of that? You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. It least, not as much as I’d like it to. Any clue of the reason? Why not say anything?”
Max had no answer. He shrugged and took another sip of his coffee. He was about to place down the cup when a pain, sharp and metallic, forced him to let go. The cup bounced of the mag–table with a hollow sound and spilled its contents, rolling over the floor. Max didn’t remember seeing it fall from the slab or hit the deck. He did hear it, however, its crash against the floor loud and reverberating. It didn’t shatter, it never would. It never could.
He rubbed his forehead and heard Bolt asking him something. Max didn’t hear it as the pain droned in his brain. The hurt subsided relatively fast, but even that didn’t feel swift enough for its intensity. It felt as though someone had simultaneously yanked on all the veins behind his eyes, pulling the nerves of his teeth along just for good measure. He blinked away the last of it. Unlike the last time, however, something stayed with him this time, a thing which at first appeared to be no more than a speck of dust, an eye–floater. It took a while for him to realize it didn’t appear to be in his eye, but rather, drifted upon the air itself, wiggling and turning, its tail stretching out towards its source somewhere outside his vision. Max tried to shoo it away with his hand as one might an insect. His hand went through it.
A hallucination?
He did it twice just for the heck of it before Bolt grabbed hold of his hand.
“What’s the matter? What are you doing? You in pain?” His friend’s tone carried genuine concern.
Max tried to focus on just one question at a time, but he could not.
He felt a shift in his consciousness. His inner eye opened.
His head banged against the mag–table and Max felt the hard thud. His inner vision and the sensations that came with it invaded his conscious senses. And while he would welcome them while meditating, it was too much for him now, with eyes open. Max’ shoulder slumped and added to the weight, tilting the mag–table tilted on its side. Max fell from his chair with all the elegance of a falling brick. His thoughts escaped him, and his mind trampled itself into unconsciousness.
***
His flesh welcomed the mind’s return to reality with a fresh dose of pain. It felt as if he had spent an entire weekend drinking alcohol, then, just to make sure he’d wake up even worse, slept in the intoxicating vapors. His lungs labored with each breath and air only managed to escape him in ragged whizzing.
Max knew he couldn’t have been out for long. For the smell of freshly–spilled coffee still hung in the air. In a confusing and half–asleep kind of way, the scent kept him grounded against the strangeness that now tattered on the precipice of his perceptions. A sense like he was missing something important lingered on his thoughts. Disconnected from the Link and realizing it, he suddenly felt more connected to everything than he had ever before. A veil made of an indefinable something had been drawn away from his eyes. Max felt the uplifting effect of it, but didn’t understand it. The sensation morphed into a thought, he felt he needed to remember a secret he once knew but had forgotten.
Max looked up. A face of a man greeted him, a he was certain he should know, but couldn’t name or place. A face much like his, seemingly impervious to age and strikingly handsome. The man wore an attire of a physician, a simplistic coat of white traced with grey edges. His neck was closed–in by the tightly–fitting fabric. The material looked like it might be made of plastic, laminated even – it must have made it easier for blood to wash off.
“You called me for this?” the man’s aged voice asked, contradicting his youthful features. Fighting his tunnel–vision, Max turned his neck slightly to his left, where the doctor’s eyes had indicated. He saw Bolt standing by the side of his couch. “He fainted,” the doc continued, “he’s conscious now. Happy days. I’ll ask again, you called me for this?” the doc repeated.
“Well, obviously,” Bolt said.
The grey–striped cat Max had picked up jumped up on his chest and began to lick his chin. Its coarse tongue strangely relaxing. He tried to get up, shooing the cat away.
Bolt pinned down Max’s shoulder. The touch was gentle, but had a force of necessity behind it. His head spun, making it more than obvious to Max that laying down was probably for the best.
The cat watched the scene from the edge of the couch for a moment, licking its paw, then scurried away to gaze down the balcony.
Bolt must have carried me to the sofa, Max realized, suddenly thankful they had taken the time to drag the big–ass piece of furniture to the balcony. None of them had used it until now. Its padding had adjusted for Max’s weight to provide optimal comfort.
“By the look on your face, I’d say it’s a shame the couch can’t do much for your brain,” Bolt smiled down at him. “Examine him,” Bolt said to the doctor, “Just scan his head. He banged it pretty hard,”
“Scan his head? What is he, ten? His head made of paper? I’ve to get back to–“
“It’ll only take a minute, what’s the big deal? Scan his damn head.”
Sighing, the physician’s expression shifted from annoyance to a look of concentration as he stretched out his hand. A black substance engulfed and enveloped the man’s limb, forming a thick coarse glove, it moved in spikes, like ferrofluid under magnetic influence. The physician extended his long fingers and stretched his hand closer to Max’s forehead. The five extremities halted centimeters before Max’s head. A translucent screen flickered to life above the man’s palm, stretching and expanding into a 3D projection. Upon it, Max could first see his own skull–bone – then his neuron pathways as the man thought–zoomed in the view. The doctor’s concentration wavered as he began to speak, and the hologram lost some of its sharpness as a result.
“What did you do?” the doc asked. Max suddenly remembered the man’s name – Ty.
Groggily, Max slurped his words, “What is it?”
“Tell me what the hell happened here,” the doctor insisted.
Bolt’s expression remained stoic. “What do you mean?”
The doc looked into the projection. “Your visual aid implants have completely fused with your optic cord. See here.” The specifics of the image hardened and sharpened into focus again. Details came with the clarity of a highly–capable microscope.
Max tried to blink away the last of his blurred sight to get a better look, but the haze wouldn’t dissipate completely. He stared at what had once been his optic cord, all the while blinking with the rapidity of someone being splashed with water droplets.
“The implant you got to help with the
fading sight of old, I see a lot of these by the way, has fused,” Ty said. “But, to be honest, I’ve yet to see anything like this. The thing seems to have wrapped itself around the string of flesh which runs from the back your eyes to your brain. See these small, tendril–like hooks? See how they hug the cord? A near perfect fusion of machine and organics if I ever saw one. It’s hard to even tell where one ends and the other begins. Hard, but not impossible.”
“I told you to get a new set,” Bolt said, unintentionally making the statement sound less sympathetic than intended and more like ‘I told you so’.
“Sight isn’t only a product of the eyes, the mind has a lot to do with it,” the doc added.
Max ignored him. “Can you fix it?”
“I can replace it,” the doc answered, “not sure much can be done in terms of ‘fixing it’. I have never seen anything like it.”
“What exactly does it mean?” Bolt asked, “What would happen should he not replace the implant?”
“I’m not talking about replacing the implant,” the doc said.
“Then what are you–“
“You know what.”
“Replacing the cord?” Max asked.
The physician nodded.
“And what happens if he doesn’t do that? If he doesn’t want to,” Bolt asked.
“Pain. Probably a lot of pain My projections estimate he has exactly five days until he goes completely blind and well, mad,” the doctor told Bolt.
“So unless he does something about it, he won’t live more than five days?” Bolt asked.
“Yes.” Ty admitted.
“Then what the hell are you waiting for, man? Operate on him,” Bolt growled.
“I love how you two are talking like I’m not even here, please continue,” Max said.
“Really?” Bolt asked. “This is the time you start cracking jokes?”
“No worries, Akram,” Max said, “that demon–child of yours won’t be the last thing I see coming out of this world,” Max managed a smile and weighted his options. A second to think was all he needed – a second of silence to notice all the chatter going on in his head. At first, he had attributed it to an open Link–line picking up residual currents of free–floating data and storing it in his capacitors for later analysis. But his Link connection was only open to local connections, which meant only the people inside a bubble of a few meters could share their thoughts with him, and only their thoughts could he have hoped to have picked up. But this didn’t seem to be the case.
Max realized the voices weren’t local either, but came from distances he couldn’t discern. From people who weren’t even in the room. Traveling on patterns similar to a twisting double helix.
Hallucinations he saw before blacking out began to prop up again. He lost track of time. The sight of things moving where the other two men clearly saw only air frightened him. But since no pain accompanied what appeared to be visual expressions of thoughts on the fabric of reality, Max forced himself to approach the visual stimuli with the practiced calmness he had come to acquire with years of meditation. He began to see ideas as currents of data, felt them more than saw them.
Private feelings and thoughts of people he couldn’t see meshed with the air, forming shifting webs of vectorized auroras. He couldn’t catch a single word they wished to convey. Not one. Nor could he define them or form them into sounds from which his brain could craft ideas of its own. Ideas about the nature of what Max was witnessing. All were gibberish. Whispers coming and going in a visual haze.
Instead, Max struggled to focus on the doctor. Looking at a solid form afforded some clarity. He then looked at Bolt, and his friend’s face managed to dispel some of the fear. But as for Ty’s form… it swam within what Max could only describe as a grey aura. It alloyed the doc’s outline with the background. As he looked and wondered, Max suddenly sensed something in the back of the physician’s mind. Something the man knew was there, but chose to hide. A secret he wasn’t willing to share. The doctor spoke, and what he said froze the marrow in Max’s bones. “When did you opt for another implant? I have no record of any other operation, when did you do this?”
A feeling of dread shot down his spine. Max had no idea what the man was talking about. “What implant?” he asked.
“There’s one in the center of your brain.”
“What?!” Max practically jumped out of the couch. This time Bolt couldn’t have stopped him even if he had tried. Grabbing the physician’s arm, Max directed him inside the apartment.
They entered through the balcony’s doorway which led to a room where an entryway a few paces in front of them led to a corridor immediately bending to the right. A faint light burned from it and Max killed it with a thought. The main room thus stood illuminated by the natural bluish light from the outside. Not overly decorated, the room sported a sofa in the middle, its shape–adjusting fabric dark brown in the gentle light, with another couch of similar shape and design stretching against the glass–wall to their left. An elongated workbench protruded out the wall on their right. Max directed Ty to the central sofa. The man didn’t sit.
Following the two inside, Bolt stood at Max’s side, eager to see what came next.
“Scan me,” Max said, bluntly. “Project the image of the implant through the holo–imager, Maximum resolution.”
The holo–imager was a meter tall and pyramid–shaped device serving as a mind–to–machine interface much like the ear–phone. It allowed thoughts to be channeled through it and projected them in form of images in perfect three–dimensional clarity. It also served as a multi–purpose data storage and entertainment system. Above the spike, a blue–tinted image wavered into a perfect, two meter wide hologram of Max’s brain. The glass–wall automatically darkened.
Ty held his hand almost half a meter in front of Max’s face, and his fingers looked as though he were trying to hold a basketball and squeeze it. He did this until he reached optimal concentration and produced the best resolution image he could, he saved it into the imager, free to examine.
Max thought about zooming in, and the machine picked up on it. Zooming in slowly, the projection adjusted its quality. The three of them looked, all of them trying to see what the device was connected to and what it was actually doing. Max turned the image around its axis and tried to spot a serial number. A long shot, he knew. As expected, he found nothing.
“The same,” Ty said, “just like the implant on your optical cord, this one too had morphed with the tissue around it to a point where it’s almost unnoticeable. Most doctors would no doubt have classified it as a benign growth.”
Someone clearly didn’t want Max to know the implant was there.
“Any ideas what it is?” Bolt asked as he moved behind the image, his body vaguely visible through the projection.
“Who put this is my head?” Max said and turned to the doctor.
“What makes you think I know?”
He hadn’t expected to be given an answer. But he could feel it, could almost taste it – hiding behind the physician’s mind as if covering.
The man was lying.
Max, grown to be a man of calm demeanor, didn’t harbor a hate for many things, but what he did hate was people lying to him. A rage he hadn’t felt for years came to the surface, unexpected and blazing. His sight clawed with images of webbing from all directions, the ones already there intensified. Frequencies slithered through the walls in waves and patterns like strands of hair submerged in water.
For a moment, he became unsure if he was feeling things move about him, or seeing them. The two sensations meld into a maddening whole.
Through his perceptual confusion, Max could almost touch the lie behind the doctor’s eyes, its black thread even clearer as the man fought to deny it, to hide it. It had become the sole source of his rage, influencing him, shattering the practiced calmness attained through meditative states. It felt like a door Max needed to break open and cast aside in order to find the truth. <
br />
Through the froth and abstractions of his mind, a question came to the surface.
When had I assigned this man as my personal doctor anyway?
He couldn’t remember. He tried… and then tried some more. But no memory of this man came to mind, not a speck of remembrance or recollection. It didn’t matter, however, not really, there was only one thing which mattered now, one thing he had to know. What was thing inside my head and who put it there.
In a moment of pure intent, Max channeled all of his will into one clear sentence. The force of it gushed out in a shockwave of psychic energy. It sent Bolt to his knees. His friend stayed up for a moment, swaying, holding himself with his hands, throwing up on the floor, his eyes turning distant and milky. Bolt managed to keep himself propped up for a while, rubbing at his bleeding nose absently with one hand, his mouth oozing strips of saliva, while Max’s will pressed down on Bolt’s brain like gravity. Max heard him take another half–breath, before Bolt collapsed onto his own blood and filth.
The sentence Max had willed into Ty’s brain had been simple: Tell me all you know about the implant! The doctor, however, stayed up, resolute and defiant, only his eyes had changed. They became glassy and hard, lids wide. A different voice greeted Max, a low mechanical growl. Ty’s lips didn’t move.
>Never,< the man thought.
CHAPTER 4
The Eye Of The World
>You will tell me,< Max pressed a moment after, and the words Ty had uttered a moment prior became the answer. The doctor’s dead stare had been enough for Max to know. Something lay there. Hidden inside the physician’s mind, perhaps his only chance to find the clue he had been seeking all along.
He had learned too much in his extended lifetime to believe anyone would give away such power lightly. There was always a purpose. A price. That’s what they usually say, he thought. There’s always a price. In fact, he would soon learn it was something quite worse.
The doctor shut down, as his brain had shrunk and took its body with it. It squashed what little time Ty had left in him. Yet seeing the doctor’s eyes as they turned and rolled into his skull did the opposite of what Max had expected. It didn’t stop him, or even made him pause – it only managed to get him even angrier – to know the truth to be just out of reach suddenly infuriated him. Mad–eyed, Max embraced the feeling, it seemed to give him focus. He grabbed the man’s neck and slammed him on the couch. The soft fabric didn’t produce the dramatic effect he had envisioned.