He stood across from the West Mall when the second question was answered, as he was able to detect a wispy, glowing strand that seemed to originate from somewhere behind his head, move and stretch away as the woman it was connected to walked past him, growing ever fainter and thinner until it seemed to disappear.
He fell into step a few paces behind a student in a hoodie, trying to focus on the strand that connected them, but it was puzzlingly elusive; the harder he tried to concentrate on it, the fuzzier and fainter it appeared.
It was while he was doing that that he first noticed it. Something moving out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look, but there was nothing but darkness.
As he walked, he kept catching a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, some vague swirling shape that disappeared when he tried to look at it.
He’d only had a light dinner and was starting to feel hungry, so he crossed the street and entered Dobie Mall. As he made his way up the escalator, he concentrated on the strand between him and the girl just ahead of him. He should be able to, at least, determine which part of his head the strand entered, and his inability to do so frustrated him.
That’s when he saw the shape again.
In the lighted interior of the mall’s food court, it stood out more clearly, a sort of spiral-shaped fractal pattern with tendrils radiating from it. It wasn’t any sort of color, only a wavering disturbance in the air. But when he turned to look at it directly, it seemed to skitter away to the periphery of his vision.
Not quite a spider, or a spiral, but sort of like both.
The thought that he was seeing what Doug had seen chilled him.
“Hi, what can I get you?”
Tim found he was at the counter of the cookie store and snapped his gaze back from the shapeto the menu choices.
“Uh…two chocolate chip cookies, please,” he said, looking through her face to the five separate, glowing regions inside her head. “And a lemonade.”
While she was getting his cookies, he turned to see if he could catch a glimpse of the shape. It was still there, if a bit fainter, but it slid away from his gaze again.
While he sat and ate his cookies, he tried concentrating on a glowing strand connecting his head to a bearded diner at another table. The more he concentrated, the fuzzier it got.
But as he concentrated, the swirling shape became clearer, a fractal disturbance that, while still only visible out of the corner of his eye, seemed to grow larger as he concentrated on the strand.
No, not larger. Closer.
Suddenly fearful, he snapped his gaze away from the pattern and toward the TV, which was showing some sort of sporting event, the trip visuals apparent there but more muted than earlier. As he watched, the pattern seemed to move away, until it seemed to fade out altogether.
Strange. Was it a hallucination? The location at the periphery of his vision suggested so, just another tweak of his visual cortex and part of the usual complex of psychedelic effects. But what if it wasn’t? What if it, the glowing points, and the lines were all part of some underlying reality that only GOAP made him aware of? Was the pattern he kept seeing some sort of hostile entity?
He shook his head. That sort of thinking led to Doug’s paranoia. He lived in the real world. GOAP might briefly rewire his brain, but it couldn’t have any affect on the reality outside of his own head, one devoid of angels, demons, machine elves, or killer spirals.
As he left the mall, he caught a glimpse of the pattern at the edge of his vision.
It seemed to follow him all the way home.
#
He woke early Saturday morning, his brain humming, too buzzed to continue sleeping.
He knew how to finish GOAP II.
After a hasty shower and breakfast, he went in to Welch, the solutions for the tricky process steps were ridiculously clear in his mind. In fact, he thought there was a good chance he could bang them out that day.
But that wasn’t all. He also saw a way to advance his polymer project months ahead of schedule. While GOAP II was in a reduction phase, he whipped out a three-page proposal on the polymer project and sent it off to the project sponsor and dean for approval.
So far, GOAP was living up to its billing and then some. He could hardly imagine the effect of GOAP II.
Every now and then, he seemed to catch a faint glimpse of the distortion pattern out of the corner of his eye. He ignored it.
#
“You look like hell,” said Tim.
Doug just grunted, sipping his latte. The dark circles were back, and his eyes darted around the room. “Problems sleeping again,” he said at last.
“Did you see that spiral spider thing again?”
“Sometimes. Not too often now. Occasionally in my sleep, chasing me.”
“That why you can’t sleep?”
“I’ve got other dreams.” Doug shook his head. “What’s up?”
“I saw the spider spiral thing too.”
Doug’s eyes widened. “No shit? When?”
“After I took 500ug of GOAP.”
“You sure it was what I was seeing?”
“A sort of spiral-shaped, fractal disturbance with waving, radiating arms?”
Doug nodded. “That’s it. What do you think?”
“I think it’s just GOAP, tricking your visual cortex, making you see things out of the corner of your eyes.”
“That both of us saw?”
Tim shrugged. “A spiral is a pretty universal shape, and a lot of people see fractal shapes when tripping.”
“What if it’s real?”
“A real what?”
Doug shook his head. “I don’t know. But I’ve never had something like that come back to me again and again, days after a trip.”
“Maybe it’s just a little mental housekeeping. Your mind moving things from short-term to long-term storage, just like REM sleep?”
“So you haven’t had any problems?”
“No, quite the opposite,” He said, pulling a small package out of his pocket and placing it on Doug’s plate.
“What’s this?”
“GOAP II.”
Doug fingered the package uncertainly. “That was fast.”
“I figured out all the process roadblocks after my last trip. I think that one of the effects of GOAP is enhanced intelligence.”
“How could it do that?”
“Don’t know. I’m not a neurologist. Maybe activating those receptors encourages dendritic branching or helps clean toxins or plaques out of the brain. Some studies showed LSD helping Alzheimer’s patients remember better. I don’t know. But it seems to work that way on me. You haven’t noticed anything like that?”
Doug shook his head. “It just gives me weird dreams.”
“What kind of weird?”
Doug sighed and spread his hands. “I can’t even describe it. A normal dream I’m getting laid or taking a test naked or there’s a leak in my ceiling. At least I know what’s going on. These, I have no clue. They don’t have people in them.”
“What do they have?”
Dough shook his head again. “I can’t describe it. But I seem to wake up more tired than before I went to bed.”
“Still taking the downers?”
“I stopped. Maybe I’ll have to start again, at least temporarily.”
“Well, you probably do need to do something. Sorry you had such a bad trip.”
“Oh, the trip itself was great. It’s the come-down that’s wearing me out.”
“Here anything from the DMT guy?”
“No. As far as I can tell, he and the other guys on that mailing list have all dropped out of sight.”
“Well, there’s another meth crackdown going on nationally. That’s a pretty good reason to la
y low.”
“Maybe,” said Doug, checking his cell phone. “Look, I gotta go,” he said, getting up and finishing off his latte.
“You want this?” asked Tim, picking the GOAP II bundle off the table and offering it to him. Doug hesitated a minute, then took it and slipped it into his pocket. “We’ll see. Maybe I just need some sleep.”
“Do that. And take care.”
#
That week, he seemed like the golden boy. The project sponsor approved his polymer proposal, the dean was impressed, and everything was ahead of schedule.
The only drawback was that Friday night was the only slot he could get hands-on time to demonstrate the ultracentrifuge for his graduate class, which meant sampling GOAP II would have to wait until Saturday.
He was in the middle of the demonstration when he got a call, so he let it go to voicemail. When he checked after class, he saw it was from Doug and only ten seconds long.
He hit play.
He heard Doug breathing heavy for a few seconds, as though he were running. “They’re coming for me!” he said between gasps of breath. “Don’t—”
Then the call ended.
Who was coming for him? The police?
He called back. The phone rang a few times, then went to voicemail. “Hey Doug, it’s me,” he said. “Sorry you went to voicemail, but I was teaching a class. Give me a call and let me know what’s up.” Best not to leave anything that might be construed as evidence.
He briefly wondered if he should flush GOAP II, but hated to see all that work go to waste. He was eager to see if it improved upon the intelligence-enhancing capabilities of the original. Plus, he knew the compound itself was too new to be on any drug schedule list or else he would have heard about it as part of his liaison duties.
By the time Tim went to bed, Doug still hadn’t called back.
#
After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, Tim found himself in the familiar chair, TV on, computer open, and a blotter with 250ug of GOAP II beside him. He tried calling Doug one last time, but it just went to voicemail again.
He put the blotter under his tongue.
Less than 10 minutes later, the trip kicked in hard, waves of ever-changing fractals washing across his vision, melting the walls.
After a moment, the waves receded, and Tim looked out on the vast array of glowing lights and the network of lines more clearly than ever before, stretching everywhere around him and into the distance. Looking more closely, he could see tiny lights racing through the lines between people, some steadily, some in bursts. It was like watching packet throughput on a network monitoring tool
Once again, he walked down to the Drag, anxious for a closer look at how those lights and lines intersected with people. The more he looked, the more convinced he became that it was, indeed, some sort of information network connecting every person to every other.
He suspected he could tap into and understand the data being passed back and fourth. He imagined himself reaching up and grabbing the nearest conduit, then plugging it into his own mind—
And it worked.
In an instant, a vast flow of information flooded into him. And he knew.
The glowing points and flows of data he saw belonged, not to people, but to another form of life entirely. They existed, not just apart from humanity, but on top of it.
Human consciousness was the computational substrate that underpinned their world.
He staggered against a light post, overwhelmed by the knowledge. And as he stood there stunned, he saw the fractal spiral shape materialize out of the air.
Then another.
Then another.
All headed toward him.
He started to run, but knew there was nowhere to hide. The spiral patterns weren’t creatures, weren’t conscious at all, but merely low-level functions ensuring the integrity of the network.
By understanding the true nature of the world, Tim had accidentally triggered a recursive loop. A piece of the network had suddenly become self-aware and, thus, unstable.
In his last few seconds of life, Tim wondered if Doug had ever understood the nature of the doom GOAP had triggered.
Tim had become a bad sector and was about to be reformatted.
Rex
Joe R. Lansdale
Joe R. Lansdale delivers
his twisted take on the classic tale
of a boy and his dog and aliens.
Benny was at his open bedroom window, looking at the stars through his telescope, when the space ship fell silently out of the sky, drifted like a feather behind a great row of trees in the distance, and went out of sight. There was a white puff of smoke, then nothing.
“Rex,” Benny said. “Did you see that?”
Rex, the family dog, a Great Dane, was lying on Benny’s bed, and he hadn’t seen a thing. He hadn’t been thinking about a thing. He lifted his head.
“A space ship,” Benny said.
The dog said nothing, of course.
“We ought to go look.”
Benny paused. “No. I should tell Mom and Dad...Oh, that won’t work. They don’t like being woke up. And who’s going to believe me?”
That was when Benny realized the only thing to do was go take a look himself. If he could find the ship, then he would be able to take his dad there and show it to him. He could even pretend he wanted him to go for a different reason, because that whole “I saw a spaceship fall out of the sky and hit the earth without making noise” was not going to fly.
Benny moved the telescope, shrugged out of his pajamas, put on his clothes, and climbed out the window. “Rex, come on, boy.”
Rex got off the bed and bounded through the window. They raced like wind blown shadows across the yard, running toward the great line of trees beyond. It took a while to get there, and when they did, they had to ease down a hill and cross a creek. They went through the woods, Benny thinking on things, trying to figure where the ship might have landed.
The forest trail was narrow, but Benny had been down it many times before with Rex. Rex was always with him. Rex never failed as a loyal dog. Rex even took the lead, Benny thinking it was because he was hoping he might startle a sleeping bunny, scare up some low nesting birds. Then, smack dab in the middle of the trail, where it widened, right before the trees broke into a clearing on the other side, they saw it.
It was at an angle. It had knocked down a couple of trees and smacked part of the way into the ground. The wound it had made in the earth was what was holding it up. It was a small space ship, a saucer. It was maybe the size of Benny’s bedroom.
There was a round portal in its side and it was open. A bit of white smoke drifted out of it, but that soon turned clear. Benny could only see darkness through the gap. A thought occurred to him. Whoever had flown the machine might have gotten out of the saucer and was decided to wander about. Or maybe it had only opened the portal and had not been able to get out. Maybe whatever had been in the saucer was still in there, and injured.
Benny looked around, found a bit of limb that had fallen off a tree. It was small enough to handle, big large enough for a club. If he could get on board and bean him a man from outer space, kill him, then he would be hero. He could say it had a ray gun or something. No. They’d look and not find one. That wouldn’t do. Whatever. There was a good lie to be tol, all he had to do was tell it, because the rest of it was real. There was a space ship in the woods and he was here with it. Him and Rex.
Easing the ship, Benny came to the gap and looked inside. Dark. Nothing else. Just dark. It was scary.
Benny put a hand on the ship, to step up through the hole, and found he could lift it. Lift the whole thing, the entire ship. It occurred to him it might be cardboard, that he may have seen a special kind of kite fall, and this was i
t. He had been fooled.
No. This was no kite. Too big for that. The answer was simple. It was made out of very light material; some kind of super space science. Benny sat the saucer down so that it rested in the middle of the trail, where the clearing started.
Rex put both paws on the gap, looked inside the ship and growled.
“Is it still there?” Benny said.
Rex wagged his tail.
“Go get it,” Benny said. “Kill it. You get it down, I’ll come in with the stick.”
Rex turned his head and looked at Benny.
“Go get it,” Benny said again.
Rex didn’t want to go, that was easy to see. But Benny kept urging him, and faithful as always, Rex climbed inside with a bit of a boost from Benny. Benny could hear Rex running around inside, hear his paws scuffing over the floor. After awhile, Rex barked. Then there was silence.
Benny called for Rex, but Rex didn’t come out.
All of a sudden, Benny didn’t want to hit the space man anymore. He didn’t want to be there. He felt sorry for Rex, but in a case like this, it was every man (or dog) for himself.
Benny threw down the limb and darted back the way he had come, over the creek and up the hill, across the clearing, and back through his bedroom window.
He sat for a long time on the edge of the bed, looking out at the night. And then he saw the craft lifting up from behind the trees. Whatever had been wrong with it had been repaired. It was leaving, and he had no way to prove it had been there. He wondered if Rex were inside. He watched it rise high. Then there was a puff, and it looked like plant seeds were scattering and falling out of the sky.
Poor dog, Benny thought. But, he could get another one.
He fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was to an awful smell. He looked up into Rex’s face. The dog was on the bed, standing over him, panting, and its breath was awful.
“Rex, you made it back.”