I never really began, after all, he thought. Just a few weeks on my own away from the Center. With him bothering me most of that. And now this. I’ll fight back. I’ll push him out as he pushed me. I may not have been born, but I was real and I wish to return to existence.
Patiently he sought to examine his available options. Was it possible to establish sensory input? Let us see. Let us muster our powers of concentration. If we gather our energy—so—and direct it purposefully in a single direction—so—do we make contact with anything? No. No. Glassy darkness is all. And yet. Now. What do we have here? A node, a handle. Which we can seize. To which we can apply a subtle interior pressure. Yes! And we perceive. The inward-rushing flood of sensation. But what do we perceive? Our surroundings.
Yes, just as Hamlin said, you arrive at a kind of percept-surrogate image of the brain you’re in. If only you had paid more attention, at the Center, when they were trying to teach you a little structural anatomy so that they could explain what they’d been doing to your head. The synaptic vesicles. The synaptic cleft. Dendritic spine. Axon terminal. Organelles, filaments, and tubules. Neural mitochondria. Corpus callosum. Anterior commissure. Limbic cortex. Centrencephalic system. Words. Words. This baffling torrent of referentless nouns. But somehow a little comprehension slides through. You poke around, you insinuate yourself, you learn a thing or two. And the darkness clears.
Macy sent a tendril of himself down a narrow moist corridor and found, at the end of it, a pulsing pink wall on which a golden honeycomb-textured plate was mounted. The tip of the tendril went into one of the apertures of the honeycomb and a tiny explosion of light resulted. Progress, no? Now we subdivide the tendril, and poke one end of it in here, and one in here, and one in here. Flash flash and flash. Presto jingo, we get an input! A bright cluster of sensory data. As yet what comes in is undifferentiated; it might be sight, sound, touch, smell, anything. But at least there is an input. We will continue. Macy tirelessly probing. Seeking out new avenues of exploration. More honeycombs; more subdividing tendrils slipping into slots; more bursts of light.
Will any sense ever come out of this? You are trying to tap a television image, and you can succeed in making contact only with widely scattered phosphors, a dot here and a dot there. Little spiky blurts of information, not enough for comprehension. Not yet. But no one is rushing you. You have no sense of the passage of time. Take an hour, a minute, a century, a year. Sooner or later you’ll have a good hookup. It’s just a matter of—what was that? A flash of coherence! Here and gone, but it was a total image. Audio? Visual? You still can’t tell, but you know that you had all the information, even if you weren’t able to interpret it. It was, say, a complete sentence, subject predicate adverbs adjectives expletives articles punctuation dependent clauses, which Hamlin read or heard or spoke out loud. It was, say, a full sweep of Hamlin’s optical reservoir, taking in the entire visual input of a fiftieth of a second. It was, say, a spear of abstract thought crossing Hamlin’s consciousness from northwest to southeast. Let us now relate such random rootless inputs to our own bank of data. So that we may evaluate. So that we may interpret. So that we can tell sight from sound from cognition. Thus. And thus. We string our telegraph wire across miles and miles of desert and at last it brings us messages.
Such as:
A sense of motion. Jolt jolt jolt, stride stride stride, Hamlin is going somewhere.
A sense of position. Hamlin is standing upright.
A sense of muscular activity. Hips and thighs in action, soles of feet hitting pavement Hamlin is walking.
A sense of environment. Bright light. Sunlight? General warmth and humidity. Morning? A summer morning? Street noises. He is walking along a street.
A sense of vision, coming jerkily into focus, now clear. Office buildings, pedestrians, vehicles. A street in Old Manhattan?
Riding along as though seated on Hamlin’s back, legs around his neck, Macy felt a sharp pang of discontinuity at the absence of proper transitions. At the moment of loss of consciousness this body had been grappling in a slum-building corridor with an unknown assailant, late at night. Now it was walking down a busy daytime street. How much time had passed? What was the outcome of that struggle? What injuries, if any, did the body sustain? Where is Hamlin heading now? None of these things could readily be determined with the resources presently at Macy’s command. One can try to improve one’s resources, though.
The logical next step, Macy told himself, is to hook into Hamlin’s consciousness. So I can read him and maybe hamper him if not entirely control him. A tentacle into the cerebral cortex. But where is the cerebral cortex? Macy could only repeat his previous trial-and-error tactics, groping here, groping there. No luck, though. Impossible to grasp the handles of Hamlin’s cerebration. Macy’s efforts succeeded only in giving Hamlin’s memory storage regions a high colonic, stirring turbid strata of ancient events. Across the screen of Macy’s awareness floated a cloud of mucky particles of experience, miscellaneous rapes, seductions, artistic triumphs, investment decisions, childhood traumas, and indignations, drifting murkily about. While the sensory inputs continued to show Hamlin swinging jauntily along down the sunny street.
Now for the first time came desolate moments for Macy. A feeling of hopelessness. A realization of the reality of this unreal captivity. Admissions of defeat, the inevitability and finality of. It was to be expected that he’d catch me and lock me up in here. A stronger ego than mine. Wilier. He lived thirty-five years and I lived only four. A criminal mentality, too. He knows how to defend himself. I’ll never be able to meddle with him as he did with me. I’ll never get out of here.
But as he mourned for himself Macy automatically went on searching for the right place to plug in, trying this and that and this, marching into one blind alley after another, battering himself against dead ends and withdrawing to try again. And abruptly he made his connection, tapping into the line he sought and drawing a staggering numbing dizzying but ultimately satisfying current, the pure juice, the unimpeded flow, the hefty amperage of Hamlin’s unfettered soul.
go to see Gargantua first almost there ten minutes more find out what’s been going on the business the buying and selling my price these days it must have gone up plenty I bet they figured I’m dead the cocksuckers no more Hamlins so double the price every week well why not why not why not and then out to the studio all boarded up I bet just take a little look of course I’ll have to pose as Macy that will present some problems won’t even be able to let Gargan know the truth outright although I’ll drop him some hints that fucking mass of meat he’s clever he’s clever he’ll figure it out won’t say a word a buck or two in it for him you bet your fat ass there is so then to the studio a sentimental journey I mean I need to go there like a shrine like my own shrine like like all dusty I bet the Goths and the Vandals fuck fuck fuck they bust everything up maybe I wasn’t so pleasant a guy but I had a decent respect for property except of course all those cunts if you consider a cunt property and anyway I was crazy then much better now purified by adversity my head clear at last rid of Macy stuck him where he belongs the poor dumb shit no personality at all just a construct a plastic man well it wasn’t his fault but it wasn’t mine either the survival of the fittest don’t you see Darwin was no dope and then I’ll visit Noreen old time’s sake I’ll have to play it very cagy with her that bitch is perfectly capable of turning me in but maybe not after all nobody ever gave it to her in her life the way I did even if toward the end we were somewhat estranged nevertheless that’s part of the normal risks of marriage especially when you marry an officially accredited genius a member of the international elite of artistic achievement high intensity sometimes boils over I’m almost at Gargantua’s now I think unless he’s moved the gallery four years shit the whole shitting universe changes in four years every cell in the body turns over doesn’t it or is it seven years anyway we aren’t the same and Gargan probably sells his schlock out of Philadelphia now Chicago Karachi who knows but we’ll find out fast enough God it’s good just to walk the streets again breathe the air throw my shoulders back and tonight we’ll find some friendly hole for dicky dunking yes indeed four years without a piece that’s quite a long time for a man of my ability artistic and physical well maybe out in Darien I’ll find Noreen willing to come across or one of the others God that creepy Lissa I guess she’d do it she’d do it for anyone even Macy thinking she’s really fucking me of course but I don’t want her I don’t want to go within a million miles of her too dangerous what a shot in the head she gave me that time I don’t want her ever again ever ever I wonder what kind of work I’ll turn out as soon as I’m back in the swing of things it better be good if I can’t maintain quality might as well give the body back to Macy but I think I’ll pick up fast enough do some small pieces first recover my grasp of perspective my perspective of grasp and then we’ll see anyway the important thing is that I’m back