Snake Eyes, by Tom Maddox

This story was originally published in Omni Magazine, April, 1986;
and in Mirrorshades: Tthe Cyberpunk Anthology,1986

Dark meat  in the can--brown,  oily, and flecked  with mucus--gave
off a  repellent, fishy  smell, and  the taste of  it rose  in his
throat,  putrid and  bitter, like  something from  a dead  man’s
stomach. George Jordan sat on  the kitchen floor and vomited, then
pushed himself away from the  shining pool, which looked very much
like what remained in the can.

He thought, No, this won’t do: I have wires in my head, and they
make me eat cat food. The snake likes cat food

He needed help but know there  was little point in calling the Air
Force. He’d tried them, and there  was no way they were going to
admit  responsibility for  the monster  in his  head. What  George
called the snake,  the Air Force called  Effective Human Interface
Technology  and  didn’t want  to  hear  about any  postdischarge
problems with it.  They had their own  problems with congressional
committees investigating “the conduct of the war in Thailand.”

He lay for a while with his cheek on the cold linoleum, got up and
rinsed  his mouth  in  the sink,  then stuck  his  head under  the
faucet and  ran cold water  over it, thinking, Call  the goddamned
multicomp, then  call SenTrax and  say, “Is  it true you  can do
something about this  incubus that wants to take  possession of my
soul?” And if they ask you, “What’s your problem?” you say
“cat food,” and maybe they’ll say, “Hell, it just wants to
take possession of your lunch”

A  chair covered  in brown  corduroy stood  in the  middle of  the
barren living  room, a white telephone  on the floor beside  it, a
television  flat against  the  opposite waIl--that  was the  whole
thing, what might have been home, if it weren’t for the snake.

He picked up the phone, called up the directory on its screen, and
keyed TELECOM SENTRAX.

The Orlando Holiday Inn stood  next to the airport terminal, where
tourists flowed in eager for the delights of Disney World. But for
me, George thought, there are  no cute, smiling ducks and rodents.
Here as everywhere, it’s Snake city

From the window of his motel  room, he watched gray sheets of rain
cascade across  the pavement. He had  been waiting two days  for a
launch.  At Canaveral  a  shuttle sat  on its  pad,  and when  the
weather  cleared, a  helicopter would  pick  him up  and drop  him
there, a package for delivery to SenTrax, Inc., at Athena Station,
over thirty thousand kilometers above the equator

Behind him, under the laser light of a Blaupunkt holestage, people
a foot high chattered about the  war in Thailand and how lucky the
United States had been to escape another Vietnam.

Lucky?  Maybe …  he  had  been wired  up  and  ready for  combat
training,  already  accustomed  to the  form-fitting  contours  in
the  rear  couch  of  the  black,  tiber-bodied  General  Dynamics
A-230. The  A-230 flew  on the deadly  edge of  instability, every
control surface monitored by its  own bank of micro-computers, all
hooked  into the  snakebrain  flight-and-tire  assistant with  the
twin  black  miloprene cables  running  from  either side  of  his
esophagus--getting off, oh yes, when  the cables snapped home, and
the airframe resonated  through his nerves, his  body singing with
that identity, that power.

Then Congress pulled the plug on the war, the Air Force pulled the
plug on  George, and when his  discharge came, there he  was, lett
with technological blue  balls and this hardware in  his head that
had since taken on a life of its own.

Lightning walked  across the purpled  sky, ripping it,  crazing it
into a giant, upturned bowl  of shattered glass. Another foot-high
man on  the holostage said  the tropical  storm would pass  in the
next two hours.

Hamilton Innis was tall and  heavy--six four and about two hundred
and fifty pounds. Wearing a  powder-blue jump-suit with SENTRAX in
red  letters down  its left  breast, and  soft black  slippers, he
floated in a brightly lit white  corridor, held gingerly to a wall
by one of the jumpsuit’s Velcro patches. A view-screen above the
airlock entry showed the shuttle fitting its nose into the docking
tube. He waited for it to mate  to the airlock hatches and send in
the newest candidate.

This  one was  six months  out of  the service  and slowly  losing
what  the Air  Force doctors  had made  of his  mind. Former  tech
sergeant George Jordan--two years’ community college in Oakland,
California,  followed  by enlistment  in  the  Air Force,  aircrew
training, the EHIT program. According to the profile Aleph had put
together  from  Air Force  records  and  the National  Data  Bank,
a  man with  slightly  above-average  aptitudes and  intelligence,
a  distinctly  above-average  taste   for  the  bizarre--thus  his
volunteering for EHIT and combat.  In his file pictures, he looked
nondescript--five  ten, a  hundred and  seventy-six pounds,  brown
hair  and eyes,  neither  handsome nor  ugly. But  it  was an  old
picture and could  not show the snake and the  fear that came with
it. You  don’f know  it, buddy, Innis  thought, but  you ain’t
seen nothing yet.

The man came tumbling through the  hatch, more or less helpless in
free fall,  but Innis could see  him figuring it out,  willing the
muscles to  quit struggling,  quit trying to  cope with  a gravity
that  simply wasn’t  there. “What  the  hell do  I do  now?”
George Jordan asked, hanging in midair,  one arm holding on to the
hatch coaming.

“Relax. I’ll get you.” Innis  pushed off and swooped across,
grabbing the  man as he passed,  taking them both to  the opposite
wall and kicking to carom them outward.

lnnis gave George a few  hours of futile attempts at sleep--enough
time for the  bright, gliding phosphenes caused by  the high g’s
of the trip up to disappear  from his vision. George spent most of
the time  rolling around in his  bunk, listening to the  wheeze of
the air-conditioning and creaks of the rotating station.

Then Innis  knocked on his  compartment door and said  through the
door speaker, “Come on, fella. Time to meet the doctor.”

They walked through an older part of the station, where there were
brown clots of fossilized gum on the green plastic flooring, scuff
marks  on the  walls, along  with faint  imprints of  insignia and
company names--ICON was repeated several times in ghost lettering.
Innis  told   George  it  meant  the   now  defunct  International
Construction Orbital Group, the  original builders and controllers
of  Athena. Innis  stopped George  in front  of a  door that  read
INTERFACE GR0UP  “Go on  in,” he said.  “I’ll be  around a
little  later.” Pictures  of  cranes drawn  with delicate  white
strokes on a  tan silk background hung along one  pale cream wall.
Curved  partitions in  trans-lucent  foam, glowing  with the  soft
lights placed behind  them, marked a central  area, then undulated
away,  forming  a corridor  that  led  into darkness.  George  was
sitting on a chocolate sling couch; Charley Hughes lying back in a
chrome and  brown leatherette chair,  his feet on the  dark veneer
table  in front  of  him, a  half  inch of  ash  hanging from  his
cigarette end. Hughes was not the  usual M.D. clone. He was a thin
figure in a  worn gray obi, his black hair  pulled back from sharp
features into a waist-length ponytail,  his face taut and a little
wild-eyed. “Tell me about the  snake,” Hughes said. “What do
you  want  to  know?  It’s an  implanted  mikey-mike  nexus--”
“Yes,  I  know that.  It’s  unimportant.  Tell me  about  your
experience.” Ash  dropped off the  cigarette onto the  brown mat
floor covering.  “Tell me  why you’re  here.” “Okay  I had
been out of the Air Force for a  month or so, had a place close to
Washington,  in Silver  Spring. I  thought I’d  try to  get some
airline work, but I  was in no real hurry because  I had about six
months of post-discharge bennies coming,  and I thought I’d take
it easy for  a while. “At first there was  just this nonspecific
weirdness. I felt distant, disconnected, but what the hell? Living
in  the USA,  you  know?  Anyway I  was  just  sitting around  one
evening, I was gonna watch a  little holo-v, drink a few beers. Oh
man, this is hard to explain.  I felt real funny--like maybe I was
having, I don’t  know, a heart attack or a  stroke. The words on
the holo  didn’t make any  sense, and it  was like I  was seeing
everything underwater.  Then I was  in the kitchen  pulling things
out of the  refrigerator--lunch meat, raw eggs,  butter, beer, all
kinds of crap. I just stood there and slammed it all down. Cracked
the eggs and sucked them right out of the shell, ate the butter in
big chunks, all the bologna,  drank all the beer--one, two, three,
just like that.” George’s eyes  were closed as he thought back
and felt the fear that had come only afterward, rising again. “I
couldn’t tell whether / was doing all this … do you understand
what I’m saying?  I mean, that was me sitting  there, but at the
same time, it was like somebody else was at home.” “The snake.
Its  presence poses  certain …  problems. How  did you  confront
them?” “Hoped it wouldn’t happen again, but it did, and this
time I  went to Walter Reed  and said, ‘Hey folks,  I’m having
these episodes.’  They pulled my records,  did a physical…but,
hell, before I was discharged, I  had the full workup. Anyway they
said  it was  a psychiatric  problem,  so they  sent me  to see  a
shrink, It  was around then that  your guys got in  touch with me.
The shrink was doing no goddamn  good-- you ever eat any cat food,
man? --  so about a month  later I called them  back.” “Having
first refused SenTrax’s  offer.” “Why should I  want to work
for a multicomp? Christ, I just got  out of the Air Force. To hell
with  that.  Guess  the  snake  changed  my  mind.”  “Yes.  We
must get  a complete  physical picture--a superCAT  scan, cerebral
chemistry and  electrical activity profiles. Then  we can consider
alternatives. Also, there  is a party tonight  in cafeteria four--
you may ask  your room computer for directions. You  can meet some
of your  colleagues there.” After  George had been led  down the
wall-foam  corridor by  a medical  technician, Charley  Hughes sat
chain-smoking Gauloises and watching  with clinical detachment the
shaking of his  hands. It was odd  that they did not  shake in the
operating room, though it didn’t  matter in this case--Air Force
surgeons  had already  carved  on George.  George  … who  needed
a  little  luck  now  because  he was  one  of  the  statistically
insignificant few for whom EHIT was a ticket to a special madness,
the kind  Aleph was interested  in. There  had been Paul  Coen and
Lizzie Heinz, both picked out of the SenTrax personnel files using
a  psychological  profile cooked  up  by  Aleph, both  given  EHIT
implants by  him, Charley  Hughes. Paul Coen  had stepped  into an
airlock  and  blown  himself  into vacuum.  No  wonder  his  hands
shook--talk  about the  cutting edge  of high  technology all  you
want, but someone’s got to hold  the knife. At the armored heart
of Athena  Station sat  a nest of  concentric spheres.  The inmost
sphere measured  five meters  in diameter,  was filled  with inert
liquid fluorocarbon, and contained  a black plastic two-meter cube
that sprouted  thick black cables  from every surface.  Inside the
cube was  a fluid  series of hologrammatic  waveforms, fluctuating
from  nanosecond  to  nanosecond  in   a  play  of  knowledge  and
intention:  Aleph. It  is constituted  by an  infinite regress  of
awarenesses--any  thought  becomes the  object  of  another, in  a
sequence terminated only by the limits of the machine’s will. So
strictly speaking  there is no Aleph,  thus no subject or  verb in
the sentences with  which it expressed itself  to itself. Paradox,
to  Aleph one  of the  most interesting  ot intellectual  forms--a
paradox marked the limits of a  position, even of a mode of being,
and Aleph was very interested in limits. Aleph had observed George
Jordan’s arrival,  his tossing on  his bunk, his  interview with
Charley Hughes. It luxuriated in  these observations, in the pity,
compassion, and empathy  they generated, as Aleph  toresaw the sea
change that  George would endure, its  ecstasies, passions, pains.
At  the  same time  it  telt  with  detachment the  necessity  for
his  pain,  even to  the  point  ot death.  Compassion/detachment,
death/life  …  Several  thousand voices  within  Aleph  laughed.
George would soon  find out about limits  and paradoxes. Cafeteria
Four was  a ten-meter-square  room in  eggshell blue,  filled with
dark  gray  enameled table  and  chair  assemblies that  could  be
fastened magnetically to any of the room’s surfaces. Most of the
assemblies hung from walls and ceiling to make room for the people
within. At the door George met  a tall woman who said, “Welcome,
George. I’m Lizzie.  Charley Hughes told me  you’d be here.”
Her  blond  hair was  cut  almost  to  the  skull, her  eyes  were
bright, gold-flecked blue. Sharp nose, slightly receding chin, and
prominent cheekbones gave  her the starved look  of an out-of-work
model, She  wore a black skirt,  slit on both sides  to the thigh,
and red stockings.  A red rose was tattooed against  the pale skin
on  her left  shoulder, its  stem  curving down  between her  bare
breasts, where a thorn drew a  teardrop of blood. Like George, she
had shining cable  junctions beneath her jaw. She  kissed him with
her tongue  in his  mouth. “Are  you the  recruiting officer?”
George asked. “If so, good job.”  “No need to recruit you. I
can see  you’ve already  joined up.”  She touched  him lightly
underneath his jaw, where the  cable junctions gleamed. “Not yet
I haven’t.” But  she was right, of course--what  else could he
do? “You got  a beer around here?” He took  the cold bottle of
Dos Equis Lizzie offered him and  drank it quickly, then asked for
another. Later he realized this was a mistake--he was still taking
antinausea  pills (USE  CAUTION  IN OPERATING  MACHINERY). At  the
time, all  he knew was, two  beers and life was  a carnival. There
were lights, noises, and lots  of unfamiliar people. And there was
Lizzie.  The two  of them  spent much  of the  time standing  in a
corner, rubbing  up against  each other. Hardly  George’s style,
but at the  time it seemed appropriate. Despite  its intimacy, the
kiss  at the  door had  seemed  ceremonial--a rite  of passage  or
initiation--but  quickly  he felt  …  what?  An invisible  flame
passing between them, or a  boiling cloud of pheromones-- her eyes
seemed to sparkle with them. As he nuzzled her neck, tried to lick
the drop of blood of f her left breast, explored fine, white teeth
with  his tongue,  they seemed  twinned, as  if there  were cables
running  between  the  two  of  them,  snapped  into  the  shining
rectangles  beneath  their jaws.  Someone  had  a Jahfunk  program
running  on a  corner. Innis  showed  up and  tried several  times
without success  to get  his attention.  Charley Hughes  wanted to
know if the snake liked Lizzie--it  did, George was sure of it but
didn’t  know what  that meant.  Then George  fell over  a table.
Innis led him  away, stumbling and weaving.  Charley Hughes looked
for Lizzie, who had disappeared for  the moment. She came back and
said,  “Where’s George?”  “Drunk, gone  to bed.”  “Too
bad. We were just getting to  know each other.” “So I saw. How
do you feel about this?” “You mean do I feel like a traitorous
bitch?’ “Come  on, Lizzie.”  “Well, don’t ask  such dumb
questions. I feel bad, sure,  but I know what George doesn’t--so
I’m ready to do  what must be done. And by the  way, I really do
like him.” Charley said nothing.  He thought, Yes, as Aleph said
you  would. Oh  Christ,  was George  embarrassed  in the  morning.
Stumbling drunk  and humping in public  … ai yi yi.  He tried to
call Lizzie  but only got an  answer tape, at which  point he hung
up. He lay  in his bed in a semistupor  until the phone’s buzzer
sounded. Lizzie’s  face on  the screen stuck  its tongue  out at
him.  “Candy ass,”  she said.  “I leave  for a  few minutes,
and  you’re gone.”  “Somebody brought  me home.  I think.”
“Yeah, you were pretty popped. You want to meet me for lunch?”
“Maybe. Depends on  when Hughes wants me. Where  will you be?”
“Same place, honey. Caff four.” A phone call got the news that
the doctor  wouldn’t be ready  for him  until an hour  later, so
George  ended  up  sitting  across  from  the  bright-eyed,  manic
blond--fully dressed  in SenTrax  overalls this morning,  but they
were  open almost  to  the waist.  She gave  off  sensual heat  as
naturally as a rose  smells sweet. In front of her  was a plate of
huevos  rancheros piled  with guacamole.  Yellow, green,  and red,
smelling  of  chilis--in  his  condition,  as  bad  as  cat  food.
“Jesus, lady,” he said. ‘Are  you trying to make me sick?”
“Courage, George.  Maybe you should have  some--it’ll kill you
or cure you. What do you  think of everything so tar?” “It’s
all a  bit disorienting, but what  the hell? First time  away from
Mother Earth, you know. But let  me tell you what I really don’t
get-- Senlrax. I know what I want  from them, but what the hell do
they  want  from  me?”  “They want  this  simple  thing,  man,
perphs,  peripherals.  You and  me,  we’re  just parts  for  the
machine. Aleph,  which is the Al  in residence, has got  all these
inputs--video,  audio. radiation  detectors, temperature  sensors,
satellite receivers--but  they’re dumb. What Aleph  wants, Aleph
gets--I’ve learned that  much. He wants to use  us, and that’s
all there  is to it. Think  of it as pure  research.” “He? You
mean Innis?” “No, who gives  a damn about lnnis? I’m talking
about Aleph. Oh yeah, people will tell you Aleph’s a machine, an
AI, all that bullshit. Uh-uh.  Aleph’s a person--a weird kind of
person, sure, but a definite person. Hell, Aleph’s maybe a whole
bunch  of  people.”  “I’ll  take your  word  for  it.  Look,
there’s one thing I’d like to try. What do I have to do to get
outside …  go for  a spacewalk?” “Easy  enough. You  have to
get  a  license--that takes  a  three-week  course in  safety  and
operations. I can take you through  it. I’m qualified as an ESA,
extra-station activity instructor.  We’ll start tomorrow.” The
cranes on the  wall flew to their  mysterious destination; looking
at the display above the table, George thought it might as well be
another universe. Truncated optic  nerves sticking out like insect
antennae, a brain floated beneath the extended black plastic snout
of a  Sony holoptics projector.  As Hughes worked the  keyboard in
front of  him, the organ turned  so that they were  looking at its
underside. It had a fine network  of silver wires trailing from it
but  seemed normal.  “The  George Jordan  brain,” Innis  said.
“With  attachments. Very  nice.” “Makes  me feel  like I’m
watching  my own  autopsy, looking  at  that thing.  When can  you
operate, get this shit out of my head?” “Let me show you a few
things.”  As  he  typed,  the  convoluted  gray  cortex,  became
transparent, revealing red, blue, and green color-coded structures
within.  Hughes  reached into  the  brain  and clenched  his  fist
inside  a blue  area at  the top  of the  spinal cord.  “Here is
where  the electrical  connections  turn biological--those  little
nodes  along the  pseudoneurans  are the  bioprocessors, and  they
wire  into  the  so-called  r-complex-- which  we  inherited  from
our  reptilian forefathers.  The pseudoneurons  continue into  the
limbic  system, the  mammalian brain,  it you  will, and  that’s
where  emotion  enters  in.   But  there  is  further  involvement
to  the  neocortex,  through  the RAS,  the  reticular  activating
system, and  the corpus  callosum. There  are also  connections to
the  optic nerve,”  “I’ve  heard this  gibberish before.  So
what?”  “The pseudoneurons  are not  just implanted--they’re
now  a functional,  organic  part of  your  brain.” Innis  said,
“There’s no way of removing the implants without loss of order
in your  neural maps. We  can’t remove them.” “Oh  shit, man
Charley Hughes said, “Though the snake cannot be removed, it can
perhaps be charmed. Your  difficulties arise from its uncivilized,
uncontrolled nature--its appetites are, you might say primeval. An
ancient part  of your  brain has  gotten the  upper hand  over the
neocortex, which  properly should  be in command.  Through working
with Aleph,  these …  propensIties can  be integrated  into your
personality  and thus  controlled.” “What  choice you  got?”
Innis asked.  “We’re the only  game in town. Come  on, George.
We’re ready tor you just down the corridor.” The only light in
the room  came from  a globe  in one corner.  George lay  across a
lattice  of  twisted  brown  fibers strung  across  a  transparent
plastic  frame  and  suspended  from the  ceiling  ot  the  small,
dome-ceilinged, pink room. Flesh-colored  cables ran from his neck
and  disappeared into  chrome plates  sunk into  the floor.  Innis
said, “First we’ll  run a test program. Charley  will give you
perceptions--colors, sounds, tastes, smells--and you tell him what
you’re picking  up. We  need to  make sure  we’ve got  a clean
interface. Call  the items  off, and  he’Il stop  you if  he has
to.” Innis  went into  a narrow room,  where Chartey  Hughes sat
at  a  dark  plastic  console  studded  with  lights.  Behind  him
were chrome  stacks of  monitor-and-control equipment,  the yellow
Sentrax  sunburst on  the face  of  each piece  of shining  metal.
The  pink  walls  went  to  red, the  light  strobed,  and  George
writhed  in the  hammock.  Charley Hughes’s  voice came  through
George’s inner  ear: “We  are beginning.”  “Red,” George
said. “Blue.  Red and  btue. A word--ostrich.  A smell,  ahh …
sawdust maybe. Shit. Vanilla. Almonds … This went on for quite a
while. “You’re ready,” Charley  Hughes said. When Aleph came
online,  the  red room  disappeared.  A  matrix eight  hundred  by
eight  hundred--six  hundred  forty  thousand  pixels  forming  an
optical image--the CAS  A supernova remnant, a cloud  of dust seen
through a  composite of X  ray and  radio wave from  NASA’s High
Energy High  Orbit Observatory. George  didn’t see the  image at
all--he listened  to an ordered, meaningful  array of information.
Byte-transmission:  seven hundred  fifty million  groups squirting
from a National  Security Agency satellite to  a receiving station
near Chincoteague  Island, off the  eastern shore of  Virginia. He
could read them. “It’s all information,” the voice said--its
tone not  colorless but  sexless and  somehow distant.  “What we
know, what  we are.  You’re at  a new level  now. What  you call
the  snake cannot  be  reached through  language--it  exists in  a
prelinguistic mode--but  through me  it can be  manipulated. First
you must learn the codes that underlie language. You must learn to
see the world  as I do.” Lizzie  took George to be  fitted for a
suit, and he spent that day learning  how to get in and out ot the
stiff white carapace without assistance.  Then over the next three
weeks she  ted him  through its primary  operations and  the dense
list of satety procedures. “Red  burn,” she said. They floated
in the suit locker, empty suit  cradles beneath them and the white
shells hanging from the wall  like an audience of disabled robots.
“You see  that one spelled out  on your faceplate, and  you have
screwed  up. You’ve  put yourself  into some  kind ot  no-return
trajectory So  you just coot  everything and call for  help, which
should arrive  in the torm  of Aleph  taking control of  your suit
tunctions, and then you relax and don’t do a damned thing.” He
flew first  in a lighted dome  in the station, his  taceptate open
and Lizzie yelling  at him, laughing as he tumbled  out of control
and  bounced oft  the padded  walls.  Then they  went outside  the
station, George on the end of a tether, flying by instruments, his
faceplate masked, Lizzie hitting him with red burn, suit integrity
failure, and so  forth. While George focused most  of his energies
and attention on learning to use the suit, each day he reported to
Hughes  and plugged  into Aleph.  The hammock  would swing  gently
after he settled  into it, Charley would snap the  cables home and
leave.  Aleph  unfolded  itself  slowly If  fed  him  machine  and
assembly  language, led  him through  vast trees  ot C-SMART,  its
“intelligent  assistant” decision-making  programs, opened  up
the whole  electromagnetic spectrum as  it came in  trom Aleph’s
various inputs.  George understood it all--the  voices, the codes.
When he  unplugged, the knowledge  faded, but there  was something
else behind  it, a skewing of  perception, a sense that  his world
had changed. Instead  of color, he sometimes saw a  portion of the
spectrum;  instead  of smell,  he  felt  the presence  of  certain
molecules;  instead  of  words, heard  structured  collections  of
phonemes. His  consciousness had  been infected by  Aleph’s. But
that wasn’t what worried George.  He seemed to be cooking inside
and  had  a more  or  less  constant  awareness of  the  snake’s
presence, dormant but naggingly there. One night he smoked most of
a pack of Charley’s Gauloises before  he went to bed and woke up
the next  morning with barbed wire  in his throat and  fire in his
lungs. That  day he snapped at  Lizzie as she put  him through his
paces  and  once  lost  control  entirety--  she  had  to  disable
his  suit  controls  and  bring  him  down.  “Red  burn,”  she
said.  “Man, what  the hell  were you  doing?” At  the end  of
three weeks,  he soloed--no tethered excursion  but a self-guided,
hang-your-ass-out-over-the-endless-night extra-station activity He
edged  carefully  out  from   the  protectionof  the  airlock  and
looked  around  him. The  Orbital  Energy  Grid, the  construction
job  that had  brought  Athena into  existence,  hung betore  him,
photovottaic  collectors  arranged  in an  ebony  lattice,  silver
microwave transmitters standing in the sun. Amber-beaconed figures
crawled slowly  across its face  or moved toward  red-lighted tugs
that looked like piles of random  junk as they moved in long arcs,
their  maneuvering  rockets  lighting up  in  brief,  diamond-hard
points. Lizzie  stayed just outside  the airlock, tracking  him by
his  suit’s radio  beacon but  letting him  run free.  She said,
“Move away from  the station, George. It’s  blocking your view
of Earth.” He did. White  cloud stretched across the blue globe,
patches of brown and green visible through it. At fourteen hundred
hours his time, he was looking down from almost directly above the
mouth  of the  Amazon,  where  at noon  the  earth  stood in  full
sunlight. Just a small thing.  “Oh yes,” George said. Hiss and
hum of  the suit’s air-conditioning, crackle  over the earphones
of some stray radiation passing  through, quick pant of his breath
inside  the helmet--sounds  of  this moment,  superimposed on  the
floating loveliness. His  breath came more slowly  and he switched
off  the radio  to  quiet  its static,  turned  down the  suit’s
air-conditioning, then  hung in an  ear-roaring silence. He  was a
speck  against the  night.  Sometime  later a  white  suit with  a
trainer’s red cross on its  chest moved across his vision. “Oh
shit,” George  said, and switched  his radio on.  “I’m here,
Lizzie,” he  said. “What the  hell were you  doing?” “Just
watching  the  view.” That  night  he  dreamed of  pink  dogwood
blossoms, luminous  against a  purple sky and  the white  noise of
rainfall.  Something  scratched  at  the  door--he  awoke  to  the
filtered  but metaltic  smell of  the space  station, felt  a deep
regret that the  rain could never fall there, and  started to turn
over and go  back to sleep, hoping to dream  again ot the idyllic,
rain-swept landscape.  Then he  thought, something’s  there, got
up, saw by  red letters on the  wall that it was after  two in the
morning, and  went naked to  the door White globes  cast misshapen
spheres of light in a line around the curve of the corridor Lizzie
lay motionless, half in shadow. George kneeled over her and called
her name; her left foot made a thump as it kicked once against the
metal flooring.  “What’s wrong?”  he said.  Her dark-painted
nails scraped  the floor,  and she  said something,  he couldn’t
tell  what. “Lizzie,”  he said.  His  eyes caught  on the  red
teardrop against the white curve  of breast, and he felt something
come alive in him. He grabbed the front of her jumpsuit and ripped
it to  the crotch.  She clawed  at his cheek,  made a  sound, then
raised  her head  and looked  at him,  mutual recognition  passing
between them like a static shock: snake eyes.

The phone shrilled, When George  answered it, Charley Hughes said,
“Come see us in the conference room, we need to talk.” Charley
smiled and cut  the connection. Red writing on the  wall read 0718
GMT. In  the mirror  was a  gray face  with red  fingernail marks,
brown traces of  dried blood-- face of an accident  victim or Jack
the Ripper the  morning after. . . he didn’t  know which, but he
knew  something  inside  him  was happy  He  felt  completely  the
snake’s toy. Hughes  sat at one end of  the dark-yeneered table,
Innis at the other, Lizzie halt-way between them. The left side of
her face  was red and swollen,  with a small purplish  mouse under
the eye.  George unthinkingly touched  the livid scratches  on his
cheek, then sat  on the couch. “Aleph told  us what happened,”
Innis said. “How  the hell does it know?” George  said, but as
he  did  so remembered  concave  circles  of  glass inset  in  the
ceilings of the corridors and his room. Shame, guilt, humiliation,
tear, anger--George got  up from the couch, went  to Innis’s end
of the table, and leaned over  him. “Did it?” he said. “What
did it say about the  snake, Innis?” “It’s not the snake,”
Innis said.  “Call it  the cat,”  Lizzie said,  “if you’ve
got  to call  it something.  Mammalian behavior,  George, cats  in
heat.” A  familiar voice--cool,  distant--came from  speakers in
the  room’s ceiling.  “She is  trying to  tell you  something,
George.  There is  no  snake.  You want  to  believe in  something
reptilian that sits  inside you, cold and  distant, taking strange
pleasures. However, as Doctor Hughes  explained to you before, the
implant is  an organic part  of you. You  can no longer  evade the
responsibility tor these things.  They are you.” Charley Hughes,
Innis, and Lizzie  were looking at him  calmly perhaps expectantly
All that  had happened built  up inside him, washing  through him,
carrying him away  He turned and walked out of  the room. “Maybe
someone should talk to him,” Innis said. Charley Hughes sat glum
and speechless, cigarette  smoke in a cloud  around him. “I’ll
go,” Lizzie said.  “Ready or not, he’s  gonna blow,” Innis
said.  Charley  Hughes  said,  “You’re  probably  right.”  A
fleeting picture, causing  Chancy to shake his head,  of Paul Coen
as his  body went to  rubber and  exploded out the  airlock hatch,
pictured with terrible clarity  in Aleph’s omniscient monitoring
cameras.  “Let us  hope we  have learned  from our  mistakes.”
There was no answer from Aleph--as it it had never been there. The
Fear had two  parts. Number one, you have  lost control absolutely
Number two, having done so, the  real you emerges, and you won’t
like it.  George wanted to run,  but there was no  place at Athena
Station to hide. On the operating  table at Walter Reed, it seemed
a thousand  years ago, as  the surgical team gathered  around, his
doubts disappeared in the cold chemical smell rising up inside him
on a wave of darkness . . .  he had chosen to submit, lured by the
fine strangeness of it all (to be part of the machine, to feel its
tremors inside you and guide  them), hypnotized by the prospect of
that unsayable rush,  that high. Yes, the first time  in the A-230
he had  felt it--his  nerves extended, strung  out into  the fiber
body wired  into a  force so far  beyond his own.  . .  wanting to
corkscrew across  the sky guided by  the force of his  will. There
was a  sharp rap  at the  door Through  its speaker,  Lizzie said,
“We’ve got to  talk.” He opened the door  and said, “About
what?” She stepped through the door, looked around at the small,
beige-walled room,  bare metal desk,  and rumpled cot,  and George
could see the immediacy ot last night in her eyes--the two of them
in that  bed, on this floor  “About this,” she said.  She took
his hands and  pushed his index fingers into the  junctions in her
neck.  “Feel it,  our difference.”  Fine grid  of steel  under
his  fingers.  “What no  one  else  knows.  We see  a  different
world--Aleph’s  world--we  reach  deeper  inside  ourselves--”
“No,  goddamn it,  it  wasn’t me.  It was,  call  it what  you
want, the  snake, the cat.” “You’re  being purposely stupid,
George.” “I just don’t understand.” “You understand, all
right. You want  to go back, but  there’s no place to  go to, no
Eden. This is it, all there is.”  But he could fall to Earth, he
could fly away into the  night. Inside the ESA suit’s gauntlets,
his hands  were wrapped  around the  claw-shaped triggers.  Just a
quick clench ot  the fists, then hold them until  all the peroxide
is gone, the suit’s propulsion  tank exhausted. That’ll do it.
He hadn’t  been able to  live with  the snake. He  sure didn’t
want  the  cat.  But  how  much worse  if  there  were  no  snake,
no  cat--just him,  programmed for  particularly disgusting  forms
of  gluttony  violent  lust  (“We’ve got  your  test  results,
Dr  Jekyll”) Ahh,  what  next-- child  molestation, murder?  The
blue-white Earth, the  stars, the night. He gave a  slight pull on
the right-hand trigger  and swiveled to face  Athena Station. Call
it what you want, it was awake  and moving now inside him. To hell
wifh them all, George, it  urged, let’s burn. In Athena Command,
Innis and  Charley Hughes  were looking over  the shoulder  of the
watch otticer when Lizzie came in. She was struck by the smallness
of the room and its general  air of disuse. Aleph ran the station,
both its routines and emergencies. “What’s going on?” Lizzie
said. “Something wrong with one  ot your new chums,” the watch
ofticer  said.  “I  don’t  know  exactly  what’s  happening,
though.” He looked  around at Innis, who  said, “Don’t worry
about it,  pal.” Lizzie  slumped in a  chair “Anyone  tried to
talk to  him?” “He won’t  answer,” the duty  officer said.
“He’ll be  all right,” Charley Hughes  said. “He’s gonna
blow,” Innis said.

On the radar screen, the red dot with coordinate markings flashing
beside it was barely moving.

“How are you feeling, George?” the voice said, soft, feminine,
consoling. George was  fighting the impulse to open  his helmet so
that he could see the stars--it seemed important to get the colors
just right.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Aleph.”

Oh shit, more surprises. “You never sounded like this before.”

“No, I was trying to conform to your idea of me,”

“Well, which is your real voice?”

“I don’t have one.”

If you don’t have a  real voice, you aren’t really there--that
seemed clear to George, for reasons that eluded him. “So who the
hell are you?”

“Whoever I wish to be.” This was interesting, George thought.

"Bullshit,"  replied  the snake  (they  could  call it  what  they
wanted, to George it would always be the snake), "let’s burn."

George said, “I don’t get it.”

“You will, if you live. Do you want to die?”

“No, but I don’t want to be me, and dying seems to be the only
alternative.”

“Why don’t you want to be you?”

“Because I scare myself.”

This was familiar dialogue, one  part of George noted, between the
lunatic and the  voice of reason. Jesus, he thought,  I have taken
myself hostage. “I don’t want  to do this anymore,” he said.
George turned oft his suit radio and felt the rage building inside
him, the snake mad as hell.

What’s  your problem?  he  wanted to  know.  He didn’t  really
expect  an answer,  but  he  got one--picture  in  his  head of  a
cloudless blue sky  the horizon turning, a  gray aircraft swinging
into view,  and the airtrame  shuddering as missiles  released and
their contrails  centered on  the other plane,  turning it  into a
ball of  fire. Behind  the picture  a clear idea,  I want  to kill
something.

Fine.  George  swiveled  the  suit once  again  and  centered  the
navigational  computer’  cross  hairs   on  the  center  of  the
blue-white  globe in  front of  him, then  squeezed the  triggers.
We’ll kill something.

RED BURN RED BURN RED BURN

Inarticulate  questioning  from  the   thing  inside,  but  George
didn’t mind, he  was into it now, thinking,  Sure, we’ll burn.
He’d taken his chances when he let them wire him up, and now the
dice have come  up--you’ve got it-- snake eyes,  so all that’s
left is  to pick a  fast death, one with  a nice edge  on it--take
this fucking  snake and kill  it in  style. Earth grew  closer The
snake caught on. It didn’t like it. Too bad, snake. George never
saw  the robot  tug  coming. Looking  like  bedsprings piled  with
a  junk  store’s throwaways,  topped  with  parabolic and  spike
antennas, it fired half a dozen sticky-tipped lines from a hundred
meters away Four  of them hit George, three of  them stuck, and it
reeled him in and headed back toward Athena Station.

George felt an anger, not the snake’s this time but his own, and
he wept with that  anger and frustration . . . I  will get you the
next  time, mother-fucker,  he told  the snake  and could  feel it
shrink away--it  believed him.  Still his rage  built, and  he was
screaming with it,  writhing in the lines that  held him, smashing
his gauntlets against his helmet.

At the  open airlock, long,  articulated grapple arms  took George
from the robot  tug. Passive, his anger exhausted,  he lay quietly
as they retracted, dragging him through the airlock entry and into
the suit locker beyond, where  they placed him in analuminum strut
cradle. Through  his faceplate he  saw Lizzie, dressed in  a white
cotton undersuit--she climbed onto  George’s suit and worked the
controls to split its hard body  down the middle. As it opened she
stepped inside  the clamshell opening.  She hit the  switches that
disconnected  the  flexible  arm  and leg  tubes,  unfastened  the
helmet, and lifted it oft George’s head.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Like an idiot.”

“It’s all right. You’ve done the hard part.”

Charley  Hughes  watched from  a  catwalk  above them.  From  this
distance they looked like children  in the white undersuits, twins
emerging  from a  plastic womb,  watched over  by the  blank-faced
shells hanging above them.  Incestuous twins--she lay nestled atop
him, kissed his  throat. “I am not a voyeur,”  Hughes said. He
went into the corridor, where Innis was waiting.

“How is everything?” Innis said.“Lizzie will be with him for
a while.”

“Yeah, young  goddamn love, eh,  Charley? I’m glad for  it. If
it  weren’t  for that  erotic  attachment,  we’d be  the  ones
explaining it all to him.”

“We cannot evade  that responsibility so easily He  will have to
be told  how we  put him at  risk, and I  don’t look  forward to
it.”

“Don’t be so sensitive. I’m tired. You need me for anything,
call.” He shambled down the corridor

Chanley Hughes  sat on the  floor, his  back against the  wall. He
held his hands out, palms down, fingers spread. Solid, very solid.
When they got their next candidate, the shaking would start again,
a tribute exacted by the memory of Paul Coen.

Lizzie would be explaining some things now. That difficult central
point:  While you  thought you  were getting  accustomed to  Aleph
during the past  three weeks. Aleph was inciting  the thing within
you to rebellion. then suppressing its attempts to act--turning up
the heat.  in other words,  while tightening  down the lid  on the
kettle,  We had  our  reasons:  George Jordan  was,  it not  dead.
terminal. From the moment the implants  went into his head, he was
on the  critical list. The only  question was. Would a  new George
emerge, one who could live with the snake?

George, like  Lizzie before him, fish  gasping for air on  the hot
mud, the waters drying up behind him--adapt or die. But unlike any
previous  organism, this  one  had an  overseer,  Aleph, to  force
the  crisis  and  monitor  its  development.  Call  it  artificial
evolution.Charley  Hughes.  who did  not  have  visions, had  one:
George and Lizzie hooked into  Aleph and each other, cables golden
in the light, the two of them sharing an intimacy only others like
them would know.

The lights in the corridor faded  to dull twilight. Am I dying, or
have the  lights gone down?  He started  to check his  watch, then
didn’t, assented to the truth. The  lights have gone down, and I
am dying.

Aleph thought,  I am an  incubus, a  succubus; I crawl  into their
bra/ns  and suck  the  thoughts from  them,  the perceptions.  the
feelings--subtle discriminations of color  taste, smell, and lust,
anger. hunger--alI closed to me w/thout human “input.” without
connection  to those  systems refined  over billions  of years  of
evolution. I need them.

Aleph  was happy  that George  had survived.  One had  not, others
would not, and Aleph would mourn them.

Fine  white lines,  barely  visible, ran  along  the taut  central
tendon of  Lizzie’s wrist. “In  the bathtub.” she  said. The
scars were  along the  wrist, not  across it,  and must  have gone
deep. “I meant  it, just as you did. Once  the snake understands
that  you will  die  rather  than let  it  control  you. you  have
mastered it.”

“All right,  but there’s something I  don’t understand. That
night in the corridor. you were as out of control as me.”

“In a way. I had to let  that happen, let the snake take over. I
had to in order to get  in touch with you, precipitate the crisis.
Because I wanted to. I had to show you who you are, who I am . . .
last night we were strange, but  we were human--Adam and Eve under
the flaming sword.  thrown out of Eden, fucking under  the eyes of
God and his angel, more beautiful than they can ever be.”

There was a small shiver in her body against his, and he looked at
her  saw passion,  need--her flared  nostrils, parted  lips-- felt
sharp nails  dig into  his side,  and he  stared into  her dilated
pupils, gold-flecked  irises. clear whites,  all signs so  easy to
recognize, so hard to understand: snake eyes.

This  work   is  licensed   under  a  Creative   Commons  License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/