Read Online Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone by Ian McDonald - Free Book Online
Authors: Ian McDonald
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Raw. Absolute. Terror.
Hesed: arousal to orgasm in under three seconds.
Binah: the fracter that annihilates the sense of time the creator of order.
Hokhmah: forgetting. Utterly, instantly, irrevocably.
It was as if that one glimpse of the face of God had set in motion a wave of crystallization that precipitated entire choirs and chapters of visual entities. Every night, at the Hour of Harassed Cleaners, perceptual pioneers Cranitch and Ring would watch the un-images— fracters, Ethan Ring’s coinage—unfold from their blind spots into things that sent them into paroxysms of laughter or hysterical weeping or plunged them into suicidal depression or took them to highs that the designers of the new mass-market synthetics could only hope for in wet dreams or left them paralyzed, immobile, dropped into stasis by a display that annihilated their sense of time until the fail-safe timer blanked the display and released them. Marcus, having digested The Illuminati during his teenage paranoia years, suggested naming them after the ten Sefirot of the Hebrew Cabala.
Luka now only visited the C.A.D. suite to issue warnings to Ethan. Marcus she must have thought beyond hope of salvation. Her visits to the sixth floor and the mayhem of Design Communications decreased correspondingly. She no longer came knocking on his downstairs door. It was months since she had slept with him, or stolen his shopping. Ethan stopped her on the stairs one Thursday evening in the hope that a confrontation might cause her to relent.
“Why? Close encounter between two Trans-Atlantics this morning?”
“A smart mouth isn’t you, Eth. Okay. Why. You’ve been lucky so far, what happens one day you’re gawking at the screen and up comes something that induces psychotic rage? Or total amnesia? How about schizophrenia, how about epilepsy, or suicidal depression, or worse? It frightens me. There. That’s it out in the open. Luka Casipriadin, that girl who isn’t afraid of nothing? This scares her. Just because I got this natty Mohawk doesn’t make me a cyberpunk ice-queen. This. Scares. Me. Fuckless. It scares me fuckless because I love you, Ethan Ring, and you’re too fucking stupid to realize it.”
Ethan reported the conversation, minus the last eighteen words verbatim.
“Worse,” Marcus mused. Their experiments had now taken them into the realm of the Diabolicals, subfracters—now numbering over one hundred—evolved from permutation of the Sefirah program parameters. “Gives you that cold prickle right down in your balls, doesn’t it, Eth? Like when you know you’re going to get laid. She always could put her finger right on it. There is bigger game out there waiting for us. The biggest game. Epilepsy, amnesia, psychosis, sure. But sometime you got to put it all on the line for the big one. Live on the edge. Kiss the razor. Every explorer knows he’s taking a risk. That’s what we are, Eth; mental explorers, psychonauts, going deep in the darkest places of the mind.”
“One hundred percent pure rockist macho bullshit,” said Ethan Ring. “You’ll be asking me to sniff your armpits next.”
“You going to let Luka Casipriadin tell you what’s game and what’s not?”
Two fistfuls of black denim shirt. Face ten centimeters from face. The closest range of social interaction: lovemaking range, violent anger range. Taste-my-breath distance.
“You are within this of having your face pushed through that screen, Marcus Cranitch.”
Illuminatus. Ethan Ring saw the unsuspected depths of anger within him, the fear he had made appear on Marcus’s face, and was afraid. It was as if one of his mothers had sat him down and told him, quietly, fearfully, of some hitherto unmentioned congenital defect: schizophrenia, hemophilia, AIDS, lycanthropy. Ethan Ring, his life, his history, were a pretense, a robing and masking of the glass-hearted monster that was the true Ethan Ring. For an instant—brief but real—he had been filled with a
Hesed: arousal to orgasm in under three seconds.
Binah: the fracter that annihilates the sense of time the creator of order.
Hokhmah: forgetting. Utterly, instantly, irrevocably.
It was as if that one glimpse of the face of God had set in motion a wave of crystallization that precipitated entire choirs and chapters of visual entities. Every night, at the Hour of Harassed Cleaners, perceptual pioneers Cranitch and Ring would watch the un-images— fracters, Ethan Ring’s coinage—unfold from their blind spots into things that sent them into paroxysms of laughter or hysterical weeping or plunged them into suicidal depression or took them to highs that the designers of the new mass-market synthetics could only hope for in wet dreams or left them paralyzed, immobile, dropped into stasis by a display that annihilated their sense of time until the fail-safe timer blanked the display and released them. Marcus, having digested The Illuminati during his teenage paranoia years, suggested naming them after the ten Sefirot of the Hebrew Cabala.
Luka now only visited the C.A.D. suite to issue warnings to Ethan. Marcus she must have thought beyond hope of salvation. Her visits to the sixth floor and the mayhem of Design Communications decreased correspondingly. She no longer came knocking on his downstairs door. It was months since she had slept with him, or stolen his shopping. Ethan stopped her on the stairs one Thursday evening in the hope that a confrontation might cause her to relent.
“Why? Close encounter between two Trans-Atlantics this morning?”
“A smart mouth isn’t you, Eth. Okay. Why. You’ve been lucky so far, what happens one day you’re gawking at the screen and up comes something that induces psychotic rage? Or total amnesia? How about schizophrenia, how about epilepsy, or suicidal depression, or worse? It frightens me. There. That’s it out in the open. Luka Casipriadin, that girl who isn’t afraid of nothing? This scares her. Just because I got this natty Mohawk doesn’t make me a cyberpunk ice-queen. This. Scares. Me. Fuckless. It scares me fuckless because I love you, Ethan Ring, and you’re too fucking stupid to realize it.”
Ethan reported the conversation, minus the last eighteen words verbatim.
“Worse,” Marcus mused. Their experiments had now taken them into the realm of the Diabolicals, subfracters—now numbering over one hundred—evolved from permutation of the Sefirah program parameters. “Gives you that cold prickle right down in your balls, doesn’t it, Eth? Like when you know you’re going to get laid. She always could put her finger right on it. There is bigger game out there waiting for us. The biggest game. Epilepsy, amnesia, psychosis, sure. But sometime you got to put it all on the line for the big one. Live on the edge. Kiss the razor. Every explorer knows he’s taking a risk. That’s what we are, Eth; mental explorers, psychonauts, going deep in the darkest places of the mind.”
“One hundred percent pure rockist macho bullshit,” said Ethan Ring. “You’ll be asking me to sniff your armpits next.”
“You going to let Luka Casipriadin tell you what’s game and what’s not?”
Two fistfuls of black denim shirt. Face ten centimeters from face. The closest range of social interaction: lovemaking range, violent anger range. Taste-my-breath distance.
“You are within this of having your face pushed through that screen, Marcus Cranitch.”
Illuminatus. Ethan Ring saw the unsuspected depths of anger within him, the fear he had made appear on Marcus’s face, and was afraid. It was as if one of his mothers had sat him down and told him, quietly, fearfully, of some hitherto unmentioned congenital defect: schizophrenia, hemophilia, AIDS, lycanthropy. Ethan Ring, his life, his history, were a pretense, a robing and masking of the glass-hearted monster that was the true Ethan Ring. For an instant—brief but real—he had been filled with a
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