The Search

“We’ve looked everywhere,” said Lansdale.  “I don’t think the eyes are here.”

“They have to be.  He wouldn’t have destroyed them.  They were the only thing he ever made that he was proud of—giving sight to the blind,” I said.  “We’ll find them.  Maybe they’re in his house.”

As I said it, I knew that it wasn’t true.  He would never bring the eyes home to his wife, his jealous wife who would have crushed them under her heels, hated them as she hated me and everything that took him further away.  Besides, he had spent the last few weeks living in the lab.  I had looked through them there, that last day I saw Bill before the Crash.  If they weren’t in the lab, they were gone, part of the dust of the room.

And all of a sudden it just felt so hopeless, this search through what was gone, and I was done trying to be a human, I can’t be a human, I can’t fit into this world and I don’t belong and I want to go back to the world where people hated each other and played games with each other and nothing made any sense, because that’s where I belonged.  Back to the world of the machines, where people spent their lives staring into boxes instead of looking into each other’s faces, and I knew that the humans were going to get more and more virtual until they were just like me, consciousness floating in the ether, jumping at emails, sharing bits of news.  HumoVision Eyes–well, I wasn’t human, and now I would never be.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said to Lansdale.  “You go on home to your goddamn Utopia.  I’m going to stay here and rot like Bill.”  And I sat down and burst into vacuum tears while he stood and watched me.

NEXT TIME: Aftermath