Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [28]
‘Sorry about that, Janis.’
‘Wuhuhu…’ She let out a shuddering breath and shook her head. ‘Is that a bug or a feature?’
‘You want bug features?’ Kohn made as if to pull the glades down again. Janis caught his wrist.
‘No, thanks.’
She was looking at his eyes, and what she saw shocked her almost as much as the holograms had. But this time it wasn’t incomprehensible. The shock came from comprehending. Still holding his wrist, she leaned over and grasped his forehead gently in her fingertips and turned his head so that she could see his eyes more clearly. The irises were faint coronae around the eclipsing black of the dilated pupils.
Everything gets everywhere…
‘You’re tripping,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid…it’s something you picked up in the lab, that and the smoke. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’ There was an odd tone to the statement, as if were in answer to a different question. Janis frowned. What mazes had he been running? The black pits looked back at her.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Heavy,’ Moh said. ‘Sand in my veins.’
‘D’you have any vitamin-C here?’ she asked, looking around. ‘That might help bring you down more gently.’
Before she could remonstrate, Kohn rose to his feet and walked with elaborate caution to a small fridge in the corner of the room. He bit open a litre carton of orange juice and gulped it down. He dropped to the bed and lay back and closed his eyes.
‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘Thanks, but it’s not gonna make any difference. I am down. I been there and come back, Janis. This ain’t tripping. This is reality.’
Goddess, she thought, he must be tripping real bad.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Everything,’ he said.
Everything: Fugues of memory took him; any momentary slip, any lapse of attention on what was going on right now sent him slipping and sliding, sidestepping away, while in the slow now the sounds went on forming, the photons came in and made up the pictures, one movement completed itself and the next began. Volition became suspect as act preceded decision, millennia of philosophy falling down that millisecond gap. He’d just have to live with it, he decided, realizing that he already did.
Everything: The bright world the banner bright the symbol plain the greenbelt fields the greenfield streets the geodesic housing the crowds the quiet dark moments.
Everything: The plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the earth DEFEND PEACE the stacked clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet.
Everything: Creeping into the room at the centre of the house to watch his father working on the CAL project no sound but the click of a mouse the hardware fixes the earwax smell of solder.
Everything: The blue roundel the sectioned globe the white leaves the lenses and the muzzle swivelling.
Everything: OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.
Everything.
He opened his mouth and a sound came out: a sob and a snarl, human pain and animal rage. He pushed the helmet off, and it rolled over the side of the bed and bounced once on the floor. Kohn kept his hands at his head, fingers clawing into his scalp. Tears leaked from under the heels of his hands and trickled with burning slowness down his cheek.
He sat and brought his head, hands clasped over it, down between his knees, and for several minutes rocked back and forth. Time was running almost normally now. Those roaring gusts were his breath, that distant booming surf his heart. This giddying black vault of luminous pictures, of echoing whispers from tiny minds locked in repetitive reminiscences, nattering conversations, clattering calculations – this was what his head looked like from the inside. This was himself.
He made a frantic effort to control it, to keep tabs on what was going on. Then he saw the rushing, whirling, snatching self as from the outside, and turned to see from whence he saw, and saw