“My eyes had been replaced by melting-hot chrome. That was all I could feel. I close them now because I can, but not for too long. If I do that, then the swirling colors melt back in reverse and I then I can see her face simmering behind the glassy wall of ionized air, ultraviolet blue light seeping up from the floor beneath, turning her curves flat and cold.

Then it changes.

And then I blink again, trying to rub it away. But I had looked at it too long, afterimage seething behind my eyelids every time they slip together. Red and green phosphors dance, making something like clouds. Only for a moment though. Never long enough.

The machine hums behind me, but I can hear that something is slipping into the drone of the power lines. It shudders and the lights flicker in time with it like a ghostly pulse, like blood flowing through racing veins. There isn’t long now.”

– From “Blink”

 

 

BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell, available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting.

Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle

I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). First up is from Blink. Free fiction (but not the whole story) after the jump.

–

BLINK

by Matt Maxwell

 

My eyes had been replaced by melting-hot chrome. That was all I could feel. I close them now because I can, but not for too long. If I do that, then the swirling colors melt back in reverse and I then I can see her face simmering behind the glassy wall of ionized air, ultraviolet blue light seeping up from the floor beneath, turning her curves flat and cold.

Then it changes.

And then I blink again, trying to rub it away. But I had looked at it too long, afterimage seething behind my eyelids every time they slip together. Red and green phosphors dance, making something like clouds. Only for a moment though. Never long enough.

The machine hums behind me, but I can hear that something is slipping into the drone of the power lines. It shudders and the lights flicker in time with it like a ghostly pulse, like blood flowing through racing veins. There isn’t long now.

I honestly don’t know how long this battery is going to hold out. Hopefully long enough to get this all down so somebody will know, be able to puzzle through what is about to happen. I thought about leaving, just running away from here as fast as I could, maybe getting a drink at that place just over the bridge. But then I thought that it wouldn’t hit me fast enough. Then I thought that I should face it sober.

 

—

 

I knew that I had finally found professor Fowler’s good side. Or at least proof that he even had one. That subject was one of serious contention at the university pub during the Wednesday night physics gatherings. Most referred to him a “Growler” and every other doctoral student offered me condolences after they heard the answer to “Who’s your advisor?” which was the inevitable icebreaker question amongst physics grads.

I knew that they all secretly thought “Better you than me,” of it, too.

After two years of berating and only the most grudging acceptance of my competence, Fowler allowed me access to his lab. Oh sure, there was the university lab that he quietly walked through every morning, eyes lost under beetling brows and a shock of curly hair that always seemed longer and more unruly than it actually was. He scarcely looked up and around at the others working there. They were beneath his notice, not even worthy of actual contempt, only a distant irritation.

But he did all his real work in his lab on the fourth floor. Nobody knew what it was. Only that it took a special card key to get up there and that the third floor was an abandoned buffer zone between mere graduate work and whatever he tinkered with.  Fowler was is position not to have to answer to much of anyone on the issue. I’d watched as Dean Lester had tried to threaten him in his own office while Fowler studiously ignored him. He had looked up the Dean only to point at a picture of a decades-younger Fowler shaking hands with the then-President. Fowler looked bored and the President smiled grimly in the press-conference-perfect morning.

Fowler had pointed at the picture and said “Don’t make me call.”

Dean Lester had stomped out, horrified and shaking with aimless and unspent rage. Fowler had gone back to his calculations, which he had always carried out on yellow legal tablets with chewed pencils.

This morning, Fowler looked me up and down once, which was odd. He had made his judgment about me a long time ago and didn’t have any reason to change his mind. But there was something else going on. People had talked, whispered really, since Sime had stopped coming to the lab. There was a rumor that Fowler had made him snap somehow and that he couldn’t even show his face in shame. But that was simple rumor. Students burned out. It came with the territory.

Still, I felt his gaze piercing through me and was finally forced to look up from my calculations and over towards him brooding in the hallway, his attentions aimed squarely at me.

“Are you coming or not?!” Fowler snapped as he stood by the elevator, the up button pressed and burning.

I jumped by reflex. To say that I wasn’t expecting such an invitation, brusque as it was, would be like saying that the universe is big and cold.

“Yes! Of course!” I shouted, too eager, like a letterman in a strip-joint.

Fowler explained, after the doors closed, that not everyone gets a chance to do this and that any of those mongoloids downstairs would sell their mothers one piece at a time for an opportunity like this. He didn’t mention Sime.

“Don’t waste it,” he had said, tilting his head at me as if he was looking over a pair of glasses that wasn’t there.

Adrenalin boiled in my veins as the elevator slid up.

 

—

 

My hands shook and my head throbbed. My eyes felt like they had been studded with a thousand glass splinters now. Closed or open, the pain was all I could feel. I rubbed them, half-convinced that my fingers would come back with shards embedded in them

“Aaah!” I never knew that my eyes could hurt so much and still work. The rubbing took the slightest edge off of things. I sighed and slumped. The workspace was still lit blue, flickering now. Like icy candle-flames or a swarm of fireflies all pulsing together in time

The blood on my hands looked black now. More like spilled ink than anything else

I was tired and weak and I almost looked back behind me. It would have been easy. I could have driven the image of her from my mind, banished it. Something else would rush in to fill that space. And surely anything would be better than that. I almost looked, but I turned away before I could.

“It’s just the lights,” I told myself. “They hurt too much. My eyes can’t take it.” but I knew the real reason was that I was afraid to lose the image of her face. I’d paid too much to give it up now.

My hands began to itch, skin feeling like it was too tight. But there wasn’t a bathroom on this floor. Another of Fowler’s bizarre requests that the University and conceded to.

I went back to writing, listening to changes in the pitch of the equipment drone, maybe to give me a little warning that the field would be coming down. There was no preventing that now. I couldn’t even grasp the theory behind it, much less the practice that enabled it to stay closed and hold…whatever was behind it.

But first I close my eyes and hope that the image comes back. Just a moment. I can type with my eyes closed.

 

—

 

The doors opened to a white-tiled hallway and walls that were webbed in traceries of hair-thin wires. They crisscrossed in patterns that were both organic and crystalline. They could have grown there like this, the ghosts of intricately-arrayed vines. They wound all the way down the inside hallway and around the corners.

“Copper, platinum and palladium,” Fowler said as if he was discussing the quality of blue in the sky this morning. “Don’t insult my judgement by touching them, though they are much stronger than they appear.”

He abruptly marched down the hallway to the left.

“It doesn’t matter which way you go,” Fowler snapped, continuing his terse lecture. “Left or right, it’s the same distance to the lab door. I always choose the left, for my own reasons.”

I dared not question his superstitions.

“I at least admit my habits,” he said, knowingly “The simpletons downstairs all do the same thing. They cross their fingers and perform their lab work in patterns that they are loath to break, but to get them to admit that they’re doing things for luck, hah! You might as well get them to admit they pray.”

We turned the second corner and our footsteps echoed off the walls. It seemed as if the vibrations caused the webs to move with a slow life of their own. I watched them for a moment, trying to find another possible explanation and failing to.

He stopped in front of a wooden door which felt oddly antique compared to the sterile hallway. Wires passed before it, but they were laid out in such a way that you could pass between them if you were careful. The door, too, was chased in patterns similar to those in the hallway. There was nothing overtly familiar about the patterns but perhaps for an echo of mathematics in them.

“And though you can’t see them, there are similar suspensions above and below. Yes, the rumors of an abandoned third floor are quite true. That allows for proper isolation of the ionizing and containment gear.

I tried not to let the word “containment” bother me too much. Probably low-level energy fields or the like. Whenever you get deep enough into physics, you start playing with radiation.

“Your lack of incessant questioning is refreshing, Drake,” Fowler admitted grudgingly. “Normally I don’t get to the main door without being bombarded by all manner of inanities. Your ability to control your tongue is welcomed. Now, let’s step inside.” He slid a very long key into the lock and it made three distinct clicks before a large bolt shot back.

I found myself wondering how many times this scene had played itself out before. There had clearly been others before me but who? Nobody talked about it that I could recall. Maybe nobody else I’d talked to had passed the audition. Fowler was tough to please, no doubt of that.

“Welcome to the new frontier,” Fowler said with an unusual theatricality. “You’re here to observe and assist. If you make yourself useful, you’ll find that you’ll never lack for anything at this institution again. Your career will be made, and as you’ve seen before, made in such a way as to leave yourself untouchable.” This last was said with a flat grin of satisfaction.

The lab itself was quite spare, only a few tables and some banks of equipment to be seen. The obvious centerpiece of the place was curtained off by translucent fabric that hung in perhaps a twenty-foot diameter ring from the ceiling. Whatever was behind it glowed blue and cold, like dying fireflies. A single oscilloscope traced a complex, slowly modulating waveform that matched to a clearly-audible humming sound.

The whole place seemed somehow unearthly, as if it weren’t on the top of a university laboratory building, but rather in a capsule at the bottom of the sea or in a remote shack in the arctic or outback. It was somehow removed, distant from the comfortable surroundings that I had known since the beginning of my academic career.

A career that was now assured, if I was to take Fowler at face value.

“Professor Fowler,” I began with more than a little hesitation. “You said I was here to observe. But I don’t see much that couldn’t be watched remotely or even automated. A handful of instruments and not much else.”

“The Suspension creates a number of associated phenomena that make many standard procedures impossible. Networked communication for one. No wireless, no phones, and you might have noticed a lack of ambient sound from outside this floor. The humming you hear is only perceptible because the Suspension has made the outside world silent, literally banishing it.”

“So who is being contained? Us?”

Fowler smiled like a man who’d been looking for something only to discover it right under his nose all along. “And to think,” he said “I was about to write you off entirely.”

 

—

 

The blue pulsed down like a held breath and the ghostly light dimmed down for the space of a heartbeat. A shiver ran through the Suspension like brittle and broken music, tuneless and distant. Something ran fingers through the metallic hairs and they brushed against one another, whispering.

I willed myself to blink and the room was still there. My eyelids slipped over sandpaper and they came out of it feeling bloodied, but were dry.

I wished I’d had the presence of mind to close the curtain. It hung there, like a discarded wedding veil, translucent and glowing from within. The field was holding still. After it failed it wouldn’t matter whether or not the curtain was up. It would be through as easily as breathing.

Maybe Fowler would have known how to keep the field going, but he was long past that now. And I couldn’t even apologize to him, much less ask how to keep his precious machine going.

The oscilloscope traced a frenetic series of overlapping curves, blue phosphors blending into a an erratic smear that writhed like a pinned caterpillar or severed fingers unable to rest. The system was being overloaded but was continuing to draw power down in an effort to keep the field up. Fowler had joked that he had enough electricity routed though the Suspension’s field to black out the city if it were handled poorly. Maybe it was already happening. There was no way to tell from here, and I would know soon enough if it was just more hot air on his part.

He had liked to talk an awful lot. Not so much now

Something raked across the ionizing field and the room pressed from within. It felt like massive hands pushing into all of his bones at once. The oscilloscope screen flatlined and then splayed wildly and flatlined again as the room breathed. All of the air in the chamber was displaced like the world was an immense set of lungs

It was ready to take its first steps.

 

—

 

“You are not needed for your analytical mind,” Fowler instructed. “In fact, I find your work sloppy, though perhaps showing some flashes of inspiration. In particular, your grasp of Dale mechanics in standing wave fields may come to have some utility.”

The insult was tolerable for the small praise he offered, considering most students simply received abuse and nothing more.

“Thanks, I think.”

“What I really find myself in need of is a change of perspective,” he said by way of admission. He choked back something bitter, maybe his own pride. “I will be presenting you with some concepts, and more importantly some…realities, that you will have a difficult time reconciling with…

I had never seen Fowler speechless before. It frightened me in a way that I was not prepared for. Rubbery and chilled fingers stirred through my stomach contents and finally settled on poking at my bladder. As a physics student (“not yet a physicist,” Fowler had warned me at our first meeting) I manipulated concepts that kept the layman up at night or gave undergrads something to talk about between bong hits. I was comfortable with that.

But when Fowler found himself without words, the room grew cold. Something had stripped him naked of his considerable armored ego. And if it could do that to him, I wondered what I had really signed up for.

 

“Dimensions, particularly what had been referred to as fractional dimensionally has long been a bugaboo of physics. Merely a convenient shorthand to balance equations and to assure us that we are indeed the ones pulling the strings and that they in fact are not pulling us.”

He bend over and adjusted the oscilloscope and the curve flattened in response. Muttering, he forgot me for a moment and began going through a practiced sequence of checking the machine backwards and forwards.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a humility that was two sizes too small for him. “I saw a variation in the field balance and had to make sure that there was no cause for alarm.”

“Is there?” I asked.

“Certainly not, at least on the part of the systems here. But the sample might raise a hair or two.”

“Sample? Behind the curtain.” I pointed towards the indigo-glowing plastic sheeting.

“I was getting to that. The idea of a dimension beyond our four, assuming you count time, and you already know from my papers that I do have a problem with that, are unreadable abstracts is about to become a thing of the past.”

“And you have a sample? A thing from what? From where?”

“That is a most excellent question. Perhaps we might find an answer together.”

I now understood that I had walked through a looking glass somewhere between the elevator and here. Somehow Fowler was asking me for help with a problem that he himself had created. This was like Einstein picking a random Princeton undergrad to just help him polish up an irreconcilable issue in Special Relativity. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming from the room.

Instead I said “Well, whatever I can do.”

“Wonderful,” Fowler said with relief as the worry lines disappeared from beneath his triangular and spiked eyebrows. “I don’t wish to prejudice you by making a statement beforehand, so here.”

He flicked the curtain aside and it slid with a sound of plastic rings riding a plastic rail and an enormous sigh of fabric displacing air in the silent room.

I blinked once in reflex.

 

—

The air crackled like static, an audible pop loud enough to make me jump. In panic I almost looked back behind me. My head turned to find the source of the sound, though I already knew it to be the ionizing field discharging against a power buildup on the other side. I knew that, but I wanted to see what was causing it. It could have been anything.

Yes, I had seen it before, but it would have changed. Who knew what it would have looked like now, what form it would have taken. It could have been anything.

There’s the joke about Shrödinger’s cat. The cat is in the box and inside the box is an isotope that has a fifty-fifty chance of having killed the cat. But you can’t know if puss is alive or dead, and in fact puss doesn’t have an existence apart from your peering into the box. Until you look inside, the cat is in this truly weird and uncertain half-life, not alive, not dead.

So the joke that’s passed amongst undergrads when asked by their professor “’What’s the cat doing in the Schrödinger box?’ ‘Waiting for you to make up your mind.’”

We all used to think that the joke was terribly clever.

I stopped myself from looking back. The joke wasn’t funny anymore.

I sat back down and went back to work. Not much time now.

 

—

 

“I’ll ask you to keep your eyes open. There are associated phenomena which will be unsettling at first.”

My eyes adjusted to the blue light. Without the curtain, it felt warm, almost like the sun lamp that my aunt used in the winter so she didn’t go crazy with the six hours of daylight. I willed myself not to blink, but the urge was strong, perversely because Fowler had just told me not to.

“What do you see?” Fowler asked. His voice projected oddly and then I realized that he had his back turned to the containment field, so that he wouldn’t see. That was the only logical explanation.

“It’s bright. Hold on.”

The sapphire-blue glow muted now. The air before me curved and summered faintly like heat waves on asphalt in the distance, but it was close enough to touch.

“There’s some distortion and the light is…”

Standing in a circle of radiance on the other side of the field, I saw a stony obelisk, perhaps my height, or just a touch shorter. It glistened and liquid wept out of hundreds of tiny or invisible pores. Rivers of an oily substance trickled down the rough surface, coursing slowly down its faces. There were an odd number of sides to it, perhaps thirteen or more. I couldn’t count them. They simply wouldn’t hold still in the faint rippling of the Suspension. I watched, fascinated at this object from another place, unable to determine whether it had been carved into this shape or grown into it.

There was a faint sucking sound as a flock of mouths opened up in unison and cooed at me. What I had taken for tears were instead salivation.

“Aah!” I cried out, unable to contain my surprise. And more than my surprise, it was shock and unease at the realization that this fascinating artifact was in fact an organism. Or at least alive. Or at least…hungry?

“What is it?” I asked finally, unable to take my eyes off of it. The lips began to move independently of one another and the voice swelled to a chorus that was both grating and beautiful, at a register perhaps never meant for human ears.

“What do you see?” Fowler asked, unable to see it himself. I grew even more uneasy at his reluctance to look at when I did. “Describe it.”

“See it?” I asked. “Can’t you hear it? It’s, ah… It’s singing,” I said not believing my own words.

My eyes stung from the prolonged staring. I could feel them when ordinarily I just took them for granted. Instead I focused on it and reported. “It’s an object, like an idol or an obelisk, evidently carved out of stone. And it’s covered with mouths. Drooling mouths. God I sound stupid.”

“Not at all,” Fowler said soothingly. “We are far removed from the seminar where you are right or wrong. We’re off the edges of any map that humankind has drawn in the past, at least in the applied sciences that you and I have put our faith in.”

“Why aren’t you looking?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, just take it in. You’ll understand why in a moment.”

The stone gurgled and spoke and there were too many words for me to follow so it all flowed past my like a stream of forgotten languages. Azure in the containment field, it stood there and just existed while my brain tried out a hundred possible explanations for what it might be, everything from Fowler-hoax to fever dream to a movie that I didn’t know that I was staring in. None of them could match the elegant possibility that this was simply something that nobody had ever seen before.

Seen. My eyes burned now and the lids slid shut of their own accord. The blue impossibility remained behind my closed eyes, a red afterimage composed of swirling bubbles the color of rubies suspended in a slow ocean.

“Are you still with us?” Fowler asked with a concern that might have been touching once but was now uneasy making. It was the voice of the tiger-trainer asking his assistant if the cat had just bitten his head off.

“I’m fine,” I said. “My eyes just hurt and I had to…”

I was dimly aware that the chorus had stopped, voices replaced by the too loud hum of the nearby machinery.

“It’s stopped,” I said as I rubbed the afterimage away and then blinked my eyes to clear them.

“That’s most unfortunate,” he said. “We’ll start again in a moment. Don’t look at if you can help.”

As he said that, I couldn’t help but to peer past the field again. The obelisk was gone, even the rivulets of drool that had pooled around its base were gone. In its place, there was a spider like thing, more than a yard across. It was made of tiny disembodied hands, all of them fingers locked together like molecules writ large. Rings flashed upon some of the fingers and they were all cyanotic blue. I flashed on the image of a nursery filled with strangled infants, all of them clutching at the air like their last breaths could be pulled from the air.

“Oh my god!” I spat, revulsion choking my voice and I imagined a thousand tiny hands at my windpipe, locked like steel, nails cutting a swarm of crescents into the skin there.

“What is it?” Fowler asked with urgency.

I told him what I was seeing, trying to make it as mundane and as calming as possible, even when the fingers all started beckoning to me with a single curled index finger, all in uncanny unison.

“Nothing auditory? What about the other senses?”

The spider wrangled its legs, unruly and disorganized, as if the force holding it together was weakening. It was walking towards me, littering discarded phalanges and delicate bones. All I could smell was burning enamel, scoured away by dentist’s drill. I told Fowler this, as dispassionately as I could.

“Keep watching! Do not close your eyes now! I’m turning around.”

I had to take his word for it. The spider was now attempting to climb up the walls of the containment field. The air in front of me shimmered and bowed and I was gutted, my insides replaced by snaking ice water, blood rushing but so cold that I shivered.

“I’m looking now,” Fowler announced. “And what I see is a tangle of bicycles, gears and spokes intertwined. All of them are blue and they are all sounding out a perfect D tone on a brass instrument as their gears mesh and rattle. None of them have riders but all the wheels are spinning. Chains run off to nowhere but still run around the gears, endless.

The hand-spider pressed a single leg against the field in greeting. At the tip of the foot, the tiny fingers were splayed in greeting.

I screamed in spite of myself, knowing that it would break the containment if I looked at for even an instant longer. The handprint had been left on my brain more than my eyes, seeing it even with the lids shut so tight I thought they would bleed.

 

Click here to get the rest of the story, and two others for less than the cost of a single-issue comic book.

 

Check back later to get samples from the other stories in this volume.