Kalifornia (11 page)

“Yes, yes, I know all about it,” said Thaxter, “and I say well
done! They have my full support.”

These words amazed Sandy. “Your support? But they’re—fanatics!
Kids! And they’re killing themselves!”

Thaxter shrugged. “Which is what any devotee does in an impossible
situation. Their selfless act illuminates a shameful corner of our society—the
wage slaves cut off from life for eight hours a day, six days a week. I
expected a benefit from this action, Sandy. It will lend momentum to the
special election on Proposition fifty-nine-ninety-seven—to ban those awful
office scramblers throughout California.”

“I’m afraid you just lost yourself a whole fleet of voters.”

Halfjest seemed unconcerned. “Plenty more where they came from.
Besides, my stats show they were mainly too young to vote.”

There was no flexing Thax on this point. Sandy gave up.

“Speaking of getting cut off, I just tried dropping in on Dyad.”

“Oh, bad idea! Don’t even try.” Thaxter’s face darkened; he looked
almost enraged for a moment.

“I won’t do it again. Somebody took a shot at me.”

“Ooh, that girl—I don’t understand her. Those so-called
Castilians—another regressive faction—are moving the whole operation down to
the South American Republic. She’s probably with Raimundo in Baja by now. Those
people won’t be happy till they’ve found a time machine to carry them back to
the Dark Ages. She had her wires completely removed, can you believe it? That’s
a dangerous operation! I’ve never felt so cut off from her.”

“Mexico?” Sandy said. Great. Now I’ll never see her.

“She’s broken my heart,” said Halfjest.

“I hate to break this up—” said the pope.

“Sorry, Father.”

“—but I have a mass to lead this evening at Caesar’s Coliseum,
before the gladiatorial gambling games.”

“So, Father,” Sandy said, “you must know the answer to that old
question, ‘Does God play dice?’ ”

“Does he play? My boy, he’s one of our best customers. We comp him
to a suite, drinks, girls, you name it.” The pope let out a great laugh. “It’s
worth the investment, believe me. The old boy never fails to lose his shirt!”

Thaxter clucked and shook his head. “How pathetic. A god who
gambles? Don’t you two agree it’s time for some new divinities?”

S01E05.
 
Seersuckers

The Seer raged, raged at her studio audience. She had to
grab
their attention. They lived in her flesh, but the sight of it
bored them. They preferred the veil to the face beneath it. They craved the
illusions she cooked up for them, preferring insubstantial fantasies to solid
food. And they loved it best when she insulted them for their bad taste.

“It’s criminal, the mental degeneration I see here!” she cried.
“Am I the only one who still has a mind of her own? Let’s talk concepts, let’s
talk eons of time. You’re devolving. You’ll be blind and white as cave fish
soon, your bodies will shrivel up, your eyes will cloud over, you’ll be nothing
but a bunch of body-temp insulation for your wires.”

The audience laughed in tentative agreement.

“Oh, Shiva!” she cried in mock exasperation. “Do you even hear
what I’m saying?”

Pulses of acknowledgment lit up the tall response boards along the
walls, like lightning flashing in stained-glass windows. She noted the boards
with satisfaction.

“I see that some of you are still breathing. But how much of this
is
really
getting through?”

Fewer flickers this time. She glanced at the ratings monitor to
make sure that the audience was still with her; they were too self-conscious to
give their all just yet. She signaled her thruput man with a pinching gesture:
Peel
me a few off the top.

Her vision darkened. Her wires began to warm and purr. She slid
sideways into the astral realm, sailing the pure ether of information, skimming
the Akashic records.

Shadows filled the studio, blotting out the audience, the
tech-crews, the walls of equipment. Her normal sight was displaced by a fly’s-eye
view, a composite of signals skimmed from the vast population of her audience.
RO was a misnomer; most people never thought of the fact that they were all
potential senders. Wires were wires, if you knew which switches to throw. They
had been designed that way, with the distant goal of continuous two-way
operation, just as the telephone companies had provided early push-button
phones with symbol keys that no one used for years. It was all a matter of
opening their eyes and using them as her own.

She looked out at dingy living rooms with stuccoplast walls; she
leaned against splintered doorframes, stroked mangy dogs, squatted in an alley
as her guts heaved.

“I’m disappointed in you,” she said, closing her fingers to
constrict thruput to a more manageable stream. “I mean, you people, you people . . . my
God, you have no respect. Someone out there right now, yes you, shitting in a
back street. Yeah, I see you—damn right I do! You ever stop to think that’s
disrespectful? You don’t find me shitting on the program, do you? You don’t
tune in to find that kind of stuff going on. We all know it happens, we’re
adults here, but do I shove your faces in it? How would you like me to treat
you with that disrespect? You’re so tied up in me that each and every one of
you would crap your pants or your reclining chair or your kitchenette, wherever
the hell you are. If you want me to take care of your bowel movements for you,
all
right, I’ll do it. But get this, people.
I’m not going to wipe your collective ass!”

She completely closed the gap between her fingers and the signal
window shut. Herself again, free of the leeches, she faced her equipment, her
crew, and the restless studio audience.

“It’s time to do a little skimming,” she said.

The ratings monitors hummed as the audience grew. All over the
state, people who’d tuned in with half a mind now got completely snagged. She was
scooping receivers from a hundred competitors for this, her most popular
segment.

Nobody outdid the Seer at her job. No one else had her particular
talent for illusion weaving.

She gave the newcomers time to settle in.

“We’re going through the fire today, folks. Anybody doesn’t like
it, tune out now. I’m warning you so that you can pretend to be responsible,
free-willed adults capable of making your own decisions. The fire is painful.
It’s the fire of truth. You’re not going to like this. Well, a few of you
might, but I think by and large you’re going to find it very unpleasant.”

The ratings increased steadily. As usual.

“In fact, I think you’re going to hate it. It’s going to
hurt
you!” The lack of response infuriated her. “I mean, people, why do
you put up with this every day? This has got to be the worst experience of your
day. Why do so many of you sign on for the ride? For a few bits of throwaway
enlightenment? What’s it worth? You want out of here, people, you want to
forget about me for good. Tune in on someone else, someone calm, someone who
takes things for granted and never looks too deep. Tune in on
yourselves.”

There. She had them now—she’d hit a nerve. Even the studio
audience looked angry, gnashing to get into her. She didn’t want so much as a
dribble of thruput at the moment. She stoked the hostility to an almost
unmanageable level. That’s showmanship. That’s suspense!

“You don’t like to hear that, do you? You don’t like to be told to
think for yourselves. It goes right against the grain. It rubs against all the
training and habits that you think are nature itself. Well let me tell you
something, people. You don’t know the first thing about nature. If you did, you
wouldn’t live the way you do. You’re the first of your kind—the prime degenerates,
the first true two-dimensionals, the most devolved ever. You remember TV? Kind
of a curiosity now, but your grandparents may talk about it. Those were the
days, right? TV worked the brain cells and the muscles, too. With TV, you had a
choice. You could shut it off. You could reach right out and change a channel
just like that, of your own free will; you could look at a dozen different
things. But
you
had to
decide
to
do
it.
You couldn’t be wishy-washy. And those images . . . nothing
but flat pictures on a box: you had to use your imagination, your experience,
your knowledge of the world to pretend they were real, that those flat little
things were living, breathing, life-sized people. All that was healthy! That
was the peak of our evolution! That was exactly the sort of thing our sun and
planet and minds and bodies evolved a hundred billion years to achieve: TV
watching. We were built for it, people. It didn’t involve invasive technology;
it didn’t mean growing polynerves. Nope. It was natural, stimulating, healthy.”

She paused. The audience was peaking. Time to fly.

“But things have changed since then, folks. Things have definitely
changed.”

She held up both hands, flicked her fingers wide open, and the
techs went to work.

In an instant, they routed her out of the main signal and sealed
her into a safe, muffled pocket of consciousness so that she wouldn’t lose any
personality or suffer psychic erosion in the flow of raw traffic. All the time,
thruput was rising. With the Seer out of the way, it snapped up to full. She
couldn’t conduct the signal herself; her mind would have disintegrated in the
blast like a dirt clod dipped in a torrent.

Darkness filled the room, filled her mind, rushed out through the
airways, and filled her audience. It was intense, total as system death, but it
lasted only an instant. Then the equipment came up to full and started the
mind-numbing shriek of sensory feedback, the fire through which she daily
dragged her fans.

All the receivers who tapped into the Seer were suddenly turned
into senders, their signals thoroughly mixed and sent out again. Her audience,
for a painful moment, was able to look through all its eyes at once. The fire
was too much for most of them, so many solipsists sitting at home nursing on
wires, thinking themselves the center of the world and liking it that way. Now
a blinding light dawned in their heads. Democracy. They experienced the reality
of a vast population, knew at firsthand that their cherished ego was nothing
but an illusion made of silken self-deception. They saw that even solitude was
an artifice, requiring the construction of incredibly elaborate barriers. They
were little more than motes in a dust storm of humanity. Not only were they not
the center of the universe, but the universe had no center.

Oh, if they could only have harnessed this power to govern
themselves. That was the
promise
of the
wires. But no ordinary politician had found a way to do this without going
mad. It remained the domain of “magic”—or art, which is how she secretly thought
of it. She was a weaver of the wired world’s dreams.

Eyes within eyes within eyes; nerves inside of nerves. Each signal
cannibalized itself and amplified along the axis of pain. Fine distinctions
broke down to gross generalizations. The Seer kept silent but her flesh began
to howl. The feedback’s siren call reached her even in the sanctum of her
signal cocoon. She couldn’t resist the pure power of an audience, and this was
that power distilled to its ultimate. Two hundred proof. The purity of
broadcast consciousness climbed an infinitely steep curve, tugging her along.

She hit the floor without feeling it, bringing the audience down
with her. She went into convulsions, swallowing the white heat. She exploded,
sailed out in every direction at once, fragmented into exactly as many
particles as there were people in her audience. She felt she was all of them.

Hands grabbed her; a hard rubber pad was jammed between her
teeth; her arms were strapped down to the sides of the throne. The crew, bless
them, gave her release. She could truly ride the wires now, let her body fall
away, leave the audience numb and trembling while she found new things for them
to chew when they came back to their old selves, cleansed and purified by the
fire, ready for the visions that she wove.

Free.

Floating in radiant darkness.

Seeing . . .

She saw wires. Wires running everywhere. Wires in the shape of
human beings, wires like nerve schematics suspended in space, wires of all
colors sending and receiving, receiving and sending, three-dimensional antennae
of lovely, fractal complexity held in place by the faint sheen of a flesh-and-blood
matrix that seemed almost ugly compared to the pristine wires.

Around the wires, energizing the darkness, spreading out through
space, she saw a glow of divine electromagnetism. Polarities reversed, setting
compass needles swinging, betraying true north. All the plasmic roads led to
Power and the Flow.

Where the current tends I see the current trends.

Voices. In the distance.

The staccato chatter of binary conversation, an on-again:
off-again ideology, fell uninterpreted through what remained of her conscious
mind. It slipped down between the widening cracks in her subconscious and
encountered her own wires, which drank the clamor thirstily. Turgor in her
polynerves, a subtle, satisfying expansion. Data rose from the wires like
steam. She leaned over the vent, the fuming fissure in the floor of her
subconscious, as if she were a Delphic oracle receiving psychoactive vapors.
Dreams filled her soul. Visions and voices came at last.

—no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the
legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs, to explore
the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw
round the corners of time. 1 have broken the wall
—

—and I desire you as you owe me any love, that you suffer me to
enjoy him. If you accuse me of unnaturalness in that I yield not to your
request, I am also to condemn you of unkindness, in that
—

—in the soffits of the six windows is a beautiful chorus of
angels, busts in medallions, altogether twenty-four, making music, censing
—

—this string zero one seven this
—

—
man, the woman, the children at the aerial table
resting on a miracle that seeks its definition
—

Raw traffic. The Flow from which she drank. Meaningless, even to
the Seer. Her skill was that of spinning colorful strands from this woolly
haze; her talent was for weaving these separate strands into a living fabric.