connecting…
It took every bit of grit and steadfastness to keep from drawing back, or at least blinking.
Almost in.
But not quite.
It seems that-
The floating characters stayed outside the cone of action, yet somehow remained readable. They throbbed with urgency.
– you must press your eye
against the window.
He rocked back, sickened by the thought.
Peng Xiang Bin you must.
Please do this
or all is lost.
A low moan fought to escape his throat and he barely managed to quell the sound, along with a sudden heaving in his gut. Gritting his teeth hard, all Bin could think about was the need to overcome raw, organic reflex- passed down all the way from when distant forebears climbed out of the sea. An overwhelming impulse to withdraw from pain, from damage, from fear-
– versus a command from far more recent parts of the brain. To go forward.
Using two fingers of his right hand to hold back the lids, Bin let out a soft grunt and pushed his head against the glass so hard that the eye had to come along.
It was bad.
Good.
Not quite so forcefully.
Hold it.
Hold it.
Hold it.
He held, while greenish flares shot back and forth between his lens and the glassy one on the buoy… and flashing reflections rebounded inside of his right eye, like a maelstrom of cascading needle-ricochets. At one point, his confused retina seemed to be looking at an image of
And meanwhile, another part of him wondered in detachment:
Worse. It got much worse, as the sea serpent seemed to catch on that something was going on. Its throbbing intensified and a low growl resonated up and down the intestine-like cloaca. Bin responded by clenching hard and holding even tighter.
All sense of time vanished, dissolved in pain. The little window felt like it was on fire. Using his feet and legs and back, he had to fight a war with himself, and the instinctive part seemed much more sane! As if he were trying to feed his own eye to a monster.
Then-
Black, floating letters returned. But he could not read the blurs. They clustered around his fovea, jostling for attention, interfering with his ability to concentrate. Bin sobbed aloud, even as the green reflections faded.
“I know! I’m…
Finally, the characters coalesced into a single one that filled every space within his agonized eye.
Meaning took a few more seconds to sink in. Then, with a moan that filled the little compartment, Bin let his body weight drag him backward. He collapsed upon the passenger seat, quivering.
A minute or so passed. He rubbed his left eye free of tears. The right seemed too livid, too raw to touch or even try to open. Instead of blindness, though, it seemed filled with specks and sparkles and random half-shapes. The kind that never came into focus, but seemed to hint at terrors beyond reality.
Slowly, a few of the dazzles traded formlessness for pattern.
“Leave me alone!” he begged. But there was no way to escape messages that took shape inside your very own eye. Not without tearing it away. Oh, what a tempting thought.
While he cursed technology, clear characters formed. These featured a
Peng Xiang Bin, I represent a community-a smart-mob-with members around the world.
We have taken over this ai-patch.
So… whatever group originally programmed the device-perhaps it had been Dr. Nguyen’s cabal, or else competitors who managed to sneak something more sophisticated into Bin’s eye-whichever faction provided the software that had made him shove his eye against that glass… it had now been replaced! Some
It was all so dizzyingly complicated. In fact, Bin surprised himself by keeping up at all.
We want to help you.
More than just the characters’ shape and color were different, he noted. They felt less like the simple responses of a partial ai. More like words sent by a living person.
He must have subvocalized it as a question, because when they next reconfigured, the writings offered an answer.
Yes, Peng Xiang Bin, my name is Tor Povlov.
On behalf of the Basque Chimera, and Birdwoman303, and the rest of our community, let me say how very glad I am to meet you. It took a lot of effort to find you!
One of the names sounded vaguely familiar to Bin. Perhaps something he once heard in passing, about a fugitive underdog, like himself.
Now I’m afraid we must insist. Please get up and take action. There is very-
“I know! Very little time!” He felt on the verge of hysterical laughter. So many factions. So many petty human groups wanted him to hurry, always hurry.
A groaning mechanical sound. The sea serpaint started to vibrate roughly around him.
We’ve suborned the machine’s brain to keep the jaws open. It may be temporary.
He didn’t need urging. With his right eye closed, Bin slipped the worldstone into its carrier, then started crawling forward as the giant robot convulsed. Pushing the worldstone in front, he squeezed through constrictions like fighting upstream against a throat that kept trying to swallow him back down… only to spasm the other way, as if vomiting something noxious.
Spilling into the mouth, he found its head rising and falling, slapping waves, splashing torrents of spume. The jaws kept juttering, as if trying desperately to close. They might succeed at any moment.
Scrambling, Bin grabbed a garish tooth, hauling himself and the satchel toward welcoming brightness-
– only to pause before making his leap.
Don’t be afraid, Bin…
“Be quiet!” he shouted and swung the valise with all his might-
– slamming it against the inner face of the serpent’s left eye casing, which caved in with a brittle, shattering sound. He cried out and did it again to the other one. Those things weren’t going to aim burning lasers at him, once he got outside. Nor was he worried about the worldstone, which survived both space and collision with a mountain glacier.
Good thinking!
Now…
He didn’t need urging. Not from any band of “smart-mob” amateurs, sitting in comfortable homes and offices
