Slowly the one begins to overtake the other. How much time passes, she isn’t sure, but for a long while her mind feels frayed and spastic, like so many centipedes twisting into a ball. She has no vision, only a haywire perceptual antenna. She has been here before, the sensation akin to when she first tried on the Mirage. The doctor told her she needed to be patient, needed to remain calm, and he was right. Everything eventually settled into place. She tries the same now. She tries to be calm.
But it’s difficult. Because at first it feels like she’s spiraling along a drain rainbowed with color or maybe funneling through a tornado that carries millions of LEGO blocks in its wind. There is no up or down or left or right, no depth or design, only a whirring sense of pieces that don’t fit together.
“Where am I?” she says. “What am I looking at? Tell me how to see.”
Derek’s voice sounds far away. “It’s just a photo I took. That’s all. A JPEG of the storm front that blew through on Friday night.”
She remembers the way the air pressure shifted so suddenly her ears popped, the way the wind hushed and then the raindrops spattered the windows. She had watched the weather from the living room. Watched with her new eyes, the Mirage, as the lightning forked and the clouds churned and the city blacked out. That was when this all began, it seems. As if the storm blew it in.
She calls up the memory now to fit together with the data channeling into her brain. And then—not all at once, but piece by piece—the panic wipes away and her perception clarifies. She was trying to look at something, as you would look at a screen. But she is not looking at the storm. She is a part of the storm. She can ride the lightning, brush against the stony underside of a cloud, taste the raindrops frozen in flight. Here are skyscrapers to climb, the reflections in their windows burning pleasantly. It’s all there, a tiny infinity.
Derek says, “What can you see? Can you see it?”
“Yes,” she says. “No.”
“Which is it?”
“I can navigate it.”
He doesn’t respond for a long time, but when he does, his voice is touched with an almost childish curiosity. “I don’t know if this makes sense, but could you—can you touch the storm? Can you change it somehow?”
“I’ll try,” she says.
She tries to center herself, find a place of vague untraceable calm before attempting anything. She cannot touch with her hands, so she must discover other muscles, invisible muscles that might respond to her commands. He wants her to change the photo. The possibility makes her feel like a small god who might on a whim knock over buildings, set trees on fire, blacken the world. She cycles through the data. The lightning is white-hot. The windows are orange-lit and warped with reflections. Everything is otherwise so dark. Overwhelmingly dark. It cloaks what could otherwise be seen. She recognizes the dark by its name. A string of identifiers that determine color. If she rearranges the string, changes the code, everything will lighten. She tries.
The coefficients. The bitstream. The parameters. The multiple compressions. She perceives the storm, but she also interprets its component parts. In this way she feels afflicted with a kind of double vision, like the child who experiences wonder at a fairy tale while also feeling safely tucked into a chair or who studies the sky and recognizes a cloud while also willing it into the shape of a dragon or bunny or moth.
“Holy shit,” Derek’s voice says. “She’s doing it. You’re doing it, Hannah.”
?
Lela stands behind Derek and studies the monitor. The photo gradually lightens, the pixels crystallize, and then she blinks and the city appears suddenly unrobed of shadow. As if the screen, once smudged with soot, has been wiped clean.
Hannah grips the armrests so tightly, the ligaments stand out on her forearms. Sweat gleams on her skin. Her head leans back and her teeth grit and her eyes stare at nothing, the pupils so dilated they appear bored through, gateways to something cavernous.
For the next hour or so, Derek trains her. At first they play around with more pictures. Compressing and recompressing, cropping and rotating and downsampling and block splitting. From there they move on to word processing, music files, games, websites. She gets faster, figures things out without him having to coach her. Maybe because her blindness inclines her toward the extrasensory.
Juniper is asleep on the bed and Josh is asleep on the futon, his arm thrown around Hemingway. All of them snore softly. Lela wishes she could join them. She digs around in her purse for more Adderall but the bottle is empty. She shakes it anyway. A gesture of stupid hope that captures the spirit of the room.
Her exhaustion gives her a bruised feeling behind her eyes that courses through her body and extends to the tips of her fingers. She has been standing so long, so still that when she changes her posture, the blood hurts when it floods into the crimped-off spaces. She tries to pay attention, but Derek only makes so much sense as he talks to Hannah about firewalls, VPNs, how she’ll be vulnerable to attack, but he’ll monitor everything, checking for viruses, worms, pirates. “I’m your wingman.” If someone tries to hack them, he’ll block the IP, shield her.
“But what if the IP is our target?”
“Goes both ways. There will be a wall between us.”
“Then don’t.”
The mouse is wireless and Derek spins it in circles, while turning the idea over in his head. “The system could get overridden. You could conceivably get overridden as well.”
“Possessed you mean.”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“Don’t block the IP unless I say so.”
“This is my equipment.”
“Don’t,” Hannah says in a voice that shakes the air.
?
Lela feels like now is when she should come to her senses. Now is when she should muffle her ears against whatever possesses Hannah and commands the room. Lela must see her for what she is—a girl, just a little girl—without a mother and in need of protection.
Cheryl always lectured Lela on her irresponsibility, her recklessness and selfishness and solipsism. She was trying to be good. She was trying to do what was right, but it felt wrong. Cheryl would never have allowed any of this, but Cheryl was gone. Every thought conflicts and dead-ends, and she doesn’t know what else to say except “I think we need to slow down and rethink—”
Hannah’s hand seizes her wrist. And Lela has a vision then. Of the great expanse of years that lie before them. Hannah is not alive. Lela is not alive. No one is alive because the world is a vast plain of fire through which figures stride, some with beaks and claws and tails and horns and scales, and some with beetles and spiders and flies spilling out of their floppy mouths.