Siren is the story of a contemporary singer who is a genetic throwback to the Sirens of ancient Greece. Within her DNA is the song that will re-order the Universe, were she to discover it and, existentially, sing it. Harpies, Furies, and the Fates intercede, as does the goddess of love, Aphrodite, in a byzantine interplay of many mythological characters navigating the modern world.
SERIES MANAGER
IV. The Healing Blows of the Februa
VI. The Titaness and the Power of Is
VII: Girls Gone Wild
VIII: The Immiscible
CHAPTER IX
PeekNeek
As Penny Stenton sat idle at the idle cubicle of the idle major corporation, her twitching muscles worked overtime. She sat unsettled, and it was the unsettlement of a lifetime. Rhea, on the other hand, tried to defuse her morning terror by taking advantage of her official medical leave and decided, if she could manage it psychologically, to play. After all, she needed it. First she walked to New Orleans Centre to do some shopping, but bought nothing; next she walked back to the International Business Commerce Building again but didn’t go back up to visit Penny. Instead, she strolled into KwikKlips. It was near the end of the day, and she figured she’d get in before the after-five crowd gave Francesca her next wave of customers. She was surprised to see that the place was hopping early. Francesca noted her and furtively waved her to her chair ahead of several waiting customers.
“You’re so busy so early. Is there a special on?” Rhea asked her as she took her seat. Francesca looked at her hair to see if the mandatory shampoo was necessary.
“Specials don’ work. Thees ees your company. Everyone decided to have a peekneek today.” Rhea looked around and began to recognize some employees she had seen in the cafeteria from time to time.
“Sure enough, Francesca, these are Ensley people. Great.” Rhea’s face assumed a worried look, thinking about the virus. But then she realized that the company should not be angry with her, but that she should be angry with the company. She toughened up by usurping the alpha anger.
“They say they shut down because of a computer virus or sometheen like that.” Francesca now whispered. “If you ask me, I theenk they geeve een to those lunaticos so no one gets keeled.”
“Oh, yes, the threat from the nature people.”
“Si, them. I mean, eet sure ees strange that thees Ensley all macho and gonna produce, produce, produce, an’ they don’t geeve een because eet would be anti-Amereecan, an’ then—whaddaya know—they shut theirselves down real fast. Sure ees strange.”
Rhea turned over the day’s events in her head. The virus had been set to go off at 11:03 that morning, three minutes into Mr. Harper’s affair. Mr. Harper gets bludgeoned by some phantasm of her imagination—her? Penny?—in a drugged stupefaction. He gets taken care of and is 911’d by his sister. The virus, meanwhile, has been up and running, apparently more powerful than she could have ever dreamed, while the simultaneous refusal to give in to the blackmail is broadcast as the official response. Rhea felt very uncomfortable. Her complicity in the viral infection meant getting her mixed up in the threats to the company in a way, since what she did seemed to be related.
“I can’t believe it!” shouted a very angry Jim Jameson. “Vicky! Get in here now!” Vicky Lennox entered demurely. She herself had been quite pleased with the coincidence. It spared her feelings of any moral turpitude were the first victim to fall, for unlike Jameson, she had believed the threat.
“Yes, Mr. Jameson,” she answered.
“What the hell is going on? The whole EnsleyNet’s down. We can’t use fiberoptic, cable, SatCast, EnCast, or even regular modem.”
“Modem?” Vicky asked. “Do they even make those anymore?”
“This company is going to have to rely on overnight express and fax to get anything done, and there’s too much volume for that. We depend on timely EnsleyNet traffic instantly.”
“I know this, Mr. Jameson.”
“I know you know this, Vicky. What else do you know?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“You were dead set against ignoring this guy who called. Oh, yes, I forgot—HATO. Stupid name. Scared you, though, didn’t it?”
“Not the name, sir. It’s just that any threat against people’s lives should be respected.”
“They’re being respected now, I can tell you that. So are the threats to jobs at Ensley. Their pensions, too. This company is cost-efficient. There are no labor unions at Ensley. If we continue to misplace, say, a couple of hundred million dollars per working day, I’d say a lot of us are going to meet the corporate austerity clause in our contracts pretty soon. Well, I shouldn’t say us, Vicky. You will, though. You’re peripheral support personnel, not regional management.” Vicky Lennox grew angry.
“Then that’s the way it will be,” she said.
“It kind of makes me wonder...” Jameson supposed.
“Kind of what?” Vicky goaded him.
“Oh, nothing,” he said coyly.
“Kind of makes you wonder if I had anything to do with this?”
“Did I say that?”
“If this is why the virus got launched,” she said, “then I feel better that there are others with a conscience in this place. People with more important issues on their minds than white collar working conditions, pet activism, or sexual harassment.” James Jameson smiled an unfriendly smile.
“It’s always been nice knowing that you thought sexual harassment was bullshit.”
“People should be able to handle those situations. But protecting innocent lives from targeting needs help from anyone who can help.”
“Mother Teresa, here. Get me the building concierge, I need a limo.”
“Sorry. Not here. I’ve already tried him. He’s downstairs getting his weekly haircut early. Ex-marine.”
“Great,” huffed Jameson, as a sandy-haired ex-marine far below them did a final inspection of the back of his head with two mirrors at KwikKlips.
“Well?” asked Francesca as she ran her fingertips through Rhea’s short hair, occasionally cocking her head at an angle, curious at what to offer such a closely cropped head.
“Well, what?” returned Rhea.
“Well, what hoppon?” Francesca asked again.
“Oh, you mean with my outing with Mr. Harper.”
“Yea, your boss.”
“Well, Francesca, you know he’s more than just the boss. He owns the whole company. Probably owns this building—he owns half the country. The good half.”
“Yea, yea, yea, O.K., heem. Well?”
“It was alright, I guess,” Rhea finally answered vaguely.
“Oh,” said Francesca, “eet was alright she guesses.” The other women laughed.
“It didn’t turn out very nice,” Rhea clarified.
“Oh,” said Francesca, now with a slightly apologetic tone.
“Francesca, clean up the back.”
“Rhea, you were just een here thees week.”
“I know. I’m just killing time.”
“Well go home, Rhea. Take you a sugar nap. Wash your brain.”
“Yea, that’s what I need—a good brain-washing.”
“Hey, aren’t you up on the fortieth floor?” the sandy-haired, ex-Marine building concierge asked Rhea. He sat in the next chair. His hair was short and it was wet, still fresh from a before-and-after-haircut shampooing. Water droplets dripped onto his smock as the hairdresser put a comb through it. The comb laughed. Rhea turned to answer, but then looked back to Francesca.
“And you fuss at me because my hair’s too short to do any work on,” she told her.
“Answer the man,” Francesca said. “Don’t be rude.”
“Yes, I do. Cubicle 4012.” answered Rhea.
“Well there’s a rumor that the virus started on your floor. What do you know about that?”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Rhea retorted.
“No, really.”
“How bad is it?”
“How bad! It’s shut down Ensley operations in five continents, or so they say.”
“How many cont’nents are there?” asked Francesca.
“And that came from my floor?” Rhea laughed at the prospect.
“Yea, I guess that’s pretty funny,” he agreed. “But, then again, it had to start somewhere.”
“I heard it came from Singapore,” Rhea offered, remembering Dwayne’s “Read.me” file.
“Singapore?”
“Yea, Singapore. Maybe from some fortieth floor there, huh?” She laughed again.
“You’re done, my leetle customer,” Francesca informed Rhea.
“Oh come on, you just started. You only did a couple of snips.”
“Hey, we’re KwikKlips, right?”
“Right,” Rhea fired back.
“Are you sure this is as short as it usually is?” the concierge complained to his own coiffure, too. “You didn’t spend much time either.”
“We’re KwikKlips,” his stylist also answered him, and she and Francesca laughed together.
“You just snipped a couple of times,” Rhea fielded the next phrase for him.
“Oh, you want I should take off more?” the woman asked Rhea for him.
“Hell, take it all off,” Rhea told her. The man sat upright suddenly from a slightly slouched position.
“Too late,” his hairdresser fired back.
“That’s O.K.,” he said. “This is fine. Really.” His attendant desmocked him and shook off the few hairs.
“You’re going to be sweeping a while here,” he commented sarcastically. Then to Rhea, “Little girl, I don’t know where it came from, but Ensley’s shut down. Sure sounds like they gave in to the terrorists to me. And blamed it on a hacker to save face. Just another way to pay the piper, if you ask me.”
“Pay the piper up front,” both his hairdresser and Francesca told him at the same time. They were getting to be quite the team.
“Thanks,” Rhea told Francesca. “I’m going home to wash my brain.”
“That’ll be good for you,” she answered.
Rhea didn’t have a company car. And she certainly didn’t have a concierge. Her Hyundai had a standard transmission and drove more like a truck than a sports car. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be driving with her uncertain diagnosis, but couldn’t bring herself to pay for taxis for some indeterminable length of time, because no one could tell her how long she would be considered susceptible to her ailment. She ran through the gears as she left the spiral that took her from her parking spot out of the building.
But I’m not sleepy, she thought, rebelling against her planned nap. I’m all agitated and discombobulated. I need to fill in Dwayne on the virus, she thought. She drove toward his house but began catching a great deal of traffic. She suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten all day. She figured she’d scoop him up and take him out for a bite. He would appreciate it since he was still unemployed until his next job started, even though he’d be on salary for a few severance weeks. But unknown to either Rhea or Dwayne, he was still on the routine payroll, and he would remain there until Jameson transferred him over to the dismissal roster, the delay falsely swelling the ranks for targeting by HATO. Rhea found Dwayne home and dressed, all prepared to step out on his own.
“Have you come to apologize again?” he asked her.
“For what?”
“For shutting down the world. It should be a big apology, I would expect.” Rhea strolled into his apartment without invitation and she sat at his coffee table and fanned his magazines across to identify anything that might be interesting. All he had were magazines on science and astronomy. In fact, one of the magazines was just that, “Astronomy.” Another was “Sky and Telescope.” There was “Cosmology,” “Scientific American,” and “Thomas Edison Quarterly.”
“What’s cosmology?” she asked.
“The science dealing with the origin of the universe, beginning of time, things like that. Didn’t I tell you that already?”
“Oh, really fascinating,” she said, opening up the cover with blasé fumbling. She looked at the table of contents, but it was Greek to her. “Superstrings,” “wormholes,” and “dark matter” were topics listed. She froze. “Dark matter!” she exclaimed.
“Dark matter,” he repeated. “Yes. What about it? Do you know about it? You don’t know about that, do you?”
“I might,” she bragged. “Maybe I’ve even seen the stuff.” He sat next to her on the sofa and handed her a beer.
“Not likely,” he laughed. “So what do you know about dark matter?” he challenged her.
“It’s not really dark,” she answered.
“Who says?”
“Phoebe says,” Rhea said with a self-declared credibility.
“And who is Phoebe. Is she from Stanford or MIT?”
“She’s my imaginary friend,” Rhea said coyly.
“And what else does your imaginary friend say?”
“Well, she says that I’m pregnant.” Dwayne jumped back. “Oh, don’t worry, silly. I’ve been favored.”
“Can we talk about this, please?” he asked, his tone demanding more serious discussion.
“Oh, calm down. I’m not pregnant. We just did it the beginning of this week! Besides, I’m all locked up with endometriosis. Everybody’s safe.”
“Everybody? How many apologies have you made this week?” Rhea slapped his shoulder.
“Just you. And my dreams.”
“If I were the man of your dreams, then it would be just me, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t seem to have much control over my dreams lately. I don’t know if it’s the epilepsy or the medication.”
“Have you talked to your doctor?”
“Charles wants me to take the stuff.”
“Yes, Charles. Have you apologized to him?”
“That’s really none of your business, is it?”
“Sorry,” he said.
“I accept your apology,” she said.
“How come I can’t apologize like you can?” he asked.
“Tell me about dark matter.”
“Tell me about the virus.”
“I thought you didn’t want to know anything about that.”
“I changed my mind. I’m dying to know,” he confessed.
“I thought you would be,” she said, smiling. “We loaded it in, timed it to go off, and...well, it went off.”
“It surely did. The business cable channel’s been wrapped up in it all day long. Then the prime time anchors have all been speculating on the news about whether it’s a put-on to give in to the terrorists and save face.”
“I guess the timing was pretty special,” she said.
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I still have to think about it. What did the terminal do?”
“It asked to be excused.”
“Really? Damn! It’s such a macho network. It asked?”
“It begged,” Rhea said. “It said, ‘please.’”
“Wow, that’s bad.”
“Yea,” Rhea agreed. Dwayne tipped his beer can almost upside down over his mouth to finish it off.
“I don’t know why I feel bad,” he said, placing the empty can on the coffee table. “I really shouldn’t. They were pretty ruthless with me after twelve years.” He then placed one of the other magazines under it to protect the wood. He turned the can around to inspect all of the labeling. “I guess I feel bad because for so long it was ingrained into me to be the guardian of the machines against the ghosts in the machines.”
“The machines are suffering now, Dwayne. They suffer for you. They suffer for me,” Rhea said sternly. “They suffer for Penny and Penny’s mother, too. Harper fouls everything he touches. He fouls the world. He soils everything.” Rhea stopped.
Even the plans for the reforging of the progression, she thought, the quest to make the immiscible miscible. He soils it as the surrogate, but in ignorance.
“Dark matter?” she asked him again.
“Dark matter. Why is that so important?”
“Please just tell me about it.” She wore a needy expression. It was obviously very important to her—even special. He knew he had to satisfy this need, and he wanted to, if this is what she needed.
“O.K. Dark matter.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“The truth is, no one knows for sure.”
“That’s what dark matter is?” She asked angrily.
“No, no. It’s very complicated. We know it’s out there.”
“Out where? Take nothing for granted.”
“Out in the universe. Out in space. We just can’t see it. But we know it’s out there because light bends around it. We even suspect that gravity bends around it. Maybe even time since it seems to have its own gravity.”
Rhea thought about the fly stuck in mid-air. Was it stuck in mid-time? Penny had been stiff as a mannequin. The rest of the world was encased in shellac when she last had her visit with the gossamer apparition known as Phoebe. How could all of this be straight out of her head? she wondered. How could she dream up things that really existed? Was it like Charles had said, that it was an ancient memory from college days, dredged up by the seizure? If so, was dark matter a subject kicked around in college even a few years ago? No, this concept, the way Dwayne was explaining it, was on the cutting edge. And certainly not at her college.
“No one knows what type of particle makes up dark matter. Like our electrons, neutrons, and protons, it seems to be of some yet undiscovered substance left over from Creation—from the Big Bang. Hopefully, finding the supersymmetry particle in Cern at the Hadron facility will help tie some of this together.”
“Is there a lot of it?” Rhea asked.
“The majority of the universe is dark. And there’s dark energy, too. All in all, they make up about ninety per cent of everything.”
My God, Rhea thought. We’re the anomaly. And anomalies are mistakes. And mistakes can be corrected.
*********
SERIES MANAGER
Start at the beginning, PRELUDE, “Odysseus.”
IV. The Healing Blows of the Februa
VI. The Titaness and the Power of Is
VII: Girls Gone Wild
VIII: The Immiscible
A chapter a week will land here. FREE.
IX
“Peek-Neek”
Dr. Charles Vincent happened to be one of two physicians working the Emergency Room at Hotel Dieu Hospital that day. Ordinarily he was a neurologist, but he had just finished his residency and was moonlighting in the emergency room to help pay the bills while waiting for his practice to grow.
Another hat he wore was that of Assistant Coroner, to some a glamorous-sounding title, but in fact a drudgery that brought him some extra income that was especially hard earned. It did, however, keep him abreast of the latest cruelties and kinky traumas. This is why he found Peter Harper so interesting. Such injuries could blur the line between medical care and police forensics.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Harper?”
“Hurt,” he hissed through the oxygen mask, biting down on his tongue to distract him from the pain in other parts of his body. “It hurts bad. Give me something, please,” he implored the doctor.
“You’ve already got a morphine pump going. You’ve your pint of HēmEnsley going, too. I bet you’ve been dying to try it, considering you own the company.”
“You did what!” he screamed. He grasped the IV tubing showing the white substance trickling into his arm. Dr. Vincent grabbed his hand when he tried to yank out the line. When Dr. Vincent tried to prevent him from getting off of the gurney he became combative.
“Nurse!” Dr. Vincent shouted. A nurse came over and helped Dr. Vincent restrain Harper. She temporarily stopped the infusion of the HēmEnsley to push the sedative.
“Why is he like this? Why is he in so much pain?” the nurse asked.
“Mr. Harper had both of his testicles forced up his inguinal canals,” Dr. Vincent explained as Mr. Harper reposed. “They’re trapped at the fascia just at his abdomen. He’ll need surgery if the urologist can’t milk them down by force back through the canals. I’m sure he won’t be a good patient for that maneuver. He has sustained second and third degree burns of his suprapubic area—see the pubic hair is matted where it’s been actually burned. He’ll need plastic work and some grafting on the skin here. His penis, which is hard to miss, has multiple contusions; the tunica is ruptured and there are extravasations of blood into the spongiosa where an artery’s been ripped apart. The swelling has clamped off his urethra, so now he’s got some bladder nerve damage from overdistension. He’ll need a suprapubic catheter pretty soon. And it’s hard to say where his cardiac arrhythmia fits into all this.”
“My goodness,” said the nurse, sorry she had asked.
“Yea, well, the cardiologist doesn’t feel it’s a dangerous arrhythmia, but it is strange. Almost as if the entire electrical pathway of his heart’s been re-routed. Additionally,” Dr. Vincent concluded, “he’s got a collapsed left lung, his sacroiliac joints have subluxated and are separated on both sides, and he’s got his pelvis fractured in three places. He’s a mess.”
“Was he hit by a car?” the first nurse asked.
“Oh, did I mention he’s passing flatus from his penis. It’s the only thing that’ll come out. I have to tap his bladder every two hours until he gets his suprapubic catheter. And—oh, car? I don’t know. No one’s talking. He was hit by something, though, that’s for sure. Everything’s so hush-hush, I guess, because of who he is.”
“Why is he in New Orleans?” the nurse asked.
“You didn’t hear? His local outfit here’s being extorted by terrorists. Some environmental radical group is threatening to kill an employee a week until the whole corporation shuts down for a little while to prove their concern—or at least give the appearance of concern.”
“That’s terrible,” she said.
“Well, they’re not going to knuckle under for a minute. The local guy here for the company gave the official refusal just a little while ago.”
The refusal was replayed over and over on New Orleans television, but Penny and Rhea would have to rely on the NewsNet relay on Rhea’s computer.
“Why are you still here?” Penny asked her. “You’re on a medical leave. You can go—I’m trapped. Go!”
“I’m not leaving you with all this going on. Are you kidding? Did you call your mother yet?”
“No. I was kind of afraid to. She knows better to call me here, but I haven’t called her. I don’t know how to tell her about it. I don’t even know all about it myself.” Penny shooed away a fly that seemed to be bothering her. “Oh, get away, damn fly.” She was exasperated, but it wasn’t the fly.
“You Mom’s going to be hunting you down pretty soon, you know. She will definitely try you here if you don’t call her soon.”
“I know,” Penny sighed. “She’s my mother—that’s her job. Hey, what are you doing?” Rhea was getting out of the EnsleyNet program. She returned to the opening shell program and typed in a few commands. The NewsNet interactive logo came up on the screen.
“I didn’t know you still had NewsNet on your computer,” Penny said. “You were ordered to take it off months ago.”
“Sure do,” Rhea responded, “and sure didn’t.” She answered some requests for ID numbers and passwords. “It’s time to catch the news.”
“Oh, shit. About our virus?”
“No, Penny, not the virus—the blackmail. That crazy guy who wants Ensley to shut down. The virus will make a few memos, I’m sure, but they’ll keep it quiet for the sake of their customers.”
“Especially with how nervous assassinations will make them. Still, I thought the virus was going to be a major screw-up for them.”
“It should. It’s pretty nasty. It’ll foul up a lot of records for a few hours, if not days.”
“Even a few minutes will cost them plenty,” Penny argued, defending the newsworthiness of her corporate treason. The electronic ditty sounded, indicating connection to the NewsNet service. With a few clicks, Rhea was able to get the news feature to pop onto the screen.
“O.K.,” she said, “insurance companies seen as next victims of mismanagement; President vetoes work-ethic bill; tropical storm upgraded to hurricane...”
“Wait,” Penny interrupted. “Do that one first. The hurricane one. Is it coming our way?”
“Stop, O.K.? Calm down.”
“Right,” Penny huffed, “calm down.”
“It’s summer in New Orleans. There’s always a hurricane somewhere out there. You’re just like these people that buy up ten years’ worth of batteries when we’re in the thousand miles of possible target range and one of the pieces of spaghetti go through us on the models.”
“It’d only take a minute to find out,” Penny complained.
“Don’t you want to know about the company you’re infecting? Forget the stupid hurricane. Besides, I like hurricanes. I think they’re fun.”
“Oh my God, you would,” Penny remarked. Rhea moused around the news item choices until she found the corporate headline which read, Ensley-Mix, Inc. Refuses to Deal with Terrorists.
She scrolled down the screen, reading aloud. “Ensley-Mix, Inc., citing precedent established by the President of the United States, as well as by other countries such as Israel, France, and Germany, declared a non-cooperation policy when it comes to extortion by terrorists. Referring to environmentalism as a worthy cause, James Jameson, CEO of the Gulf South division centered in New Orleans, nevertheless decried the tactics used by the organization HATO. Speaking on behalf of Peter Harper, who was unavailable—”
“Hmmph!,” Penny scoffed.
“Jameson,” Rhea continued, “went on to say, ‘It would be unpatriotic for us, as a responsible corporate citizen, to cave in to blackmail. It would be treason for us to shut down a capitalist entity in a capitalist society, no matter what cause is championed by the thugs perpetrating the intimidation. In America, folks can disagree, but nothing is solved with violence.’ Peter Harper, founder and majority owner of the company, has not returned our calls.”
“I guess not,” Penny commented. “He was too busy getting his penis worked over by a veg-a-matic, or whatever we used on him up there.”
“Shh,” Rhea demanded, continuing to read. “Already, the company has been praised by members of Congress, the governor, and such diverse and polarized groups as the League of Women Voters, the John Birch Society, all major labor unions, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Only a few environmental groups have not joined in on the otherwise universal denouncement of the terrorism by abstaining from commenting until further review.
“The conservation groups, however, all agree that any outrage over the plight of Ensley-Mix, Inc., should not meliorate the fact that the company is the world’s largest polluter, should not bury on the media’s back pages the negative publicity the company deserves, and should not cause a sympathetic white-wash of the on-going investigations into indicted improprieties on the part of the company. Regarding the mixed emotions that concerned groups have regarding Ensley-Mix, Inc.’s track record and the extortion, Mr. Jameson declared, ‘Full speed ahead.’“
“That is,” Penny added, “right after the little glitch we threw in.”
“Oh, they’ll notice,” Rhea said. “They’ll notice big. In fact, I can’t wait to see if there’s any reaction. Any regrets?”
“No,” Penny emphasized, “no regrets.”
“How long do you think it’ll be before Harper is back to the home office in Atlanta?” Rhea asked, referring to his injuries and a lengthy recuperation needed now.
“I don’t know, Rhea,” Penny answered. “He was in pretty bad shape.”
“I know that more than you. You refused to look at his balls.”
“I can’t believe we did that to him,” Penny said. She paused to consider that. “Drugs. Drugs can be pretty amazing.”
“Yes, I guess they can,” Rhea said angrily. She strained to remember the lunchtime session. “You said you saw me when I saw another woman who wasn’t you. Both of us saw that woman, meaning that this was some third woman, not one of us.”
“Unless the drugs,” Penny theorized, “caused us such a distortion of the perspective of self-in-place.”
“Self-in-place? What the hell does that mean? No, this woman was a different person altogether. That incredibly beautiful woman...” Rhea trailed off, going deeper into her memory. She recalled the arms of this woman reaching to her from the infinitesimal distances of the psychedelic fractal that spiraled into the pin-point horizon—the Creation Horizon! She perspired somewhat when she recalled that phrase. She couldn’t remember whether she had said it or the beautiful woman had. She remembered the weaving of her world, albeit distorted by drugs, and another type of world, a shiny existence, each intertwining back toward the Creation Horizon. And this woman’s arms reached to her from this point to rescue her. That was it! She felt the safety from harm this creature extended by the extension of her limbs—her arms to her, and her legs to Peter Harper. Who was she? She was sure that it had not been Phoebe.
“No, it wasn’t me,” her shiny friend said. Rhea spun around to greet her periodic comet who glowed ever so sweetly for her. Penny was seen as motionless, as if time itself slowed down for the rest of the universe except for Rhea. A fly hung suspended in mid-air over Penny’s frozen frame.
“Oh, no,” Rhea said. “Here we go.” Phoebe looked puzzled by the reaction. Rhea addressed her puzzled look. “I need some answers. I know I’m having another seizure, I know this.”
“Not just you,” Phoebe said with a smile. “All that is, shudders in the wake of the Creation Horizon.”
“There! That Creation Horizon! What is that? What is going on in my head? And if you are that spokesperson that symbolizes the weird thinking from my disease, I think I don’t mind talking to you at all if you’ll just answer some questions.”
“I’m just as real to you as you are to me,” Phoebe said. “I’m just as unreal to you as you are to me. At this brief moment we’re the only ones who use the spoken word. Just look about you, Semele.”
“My name is Rhea,” Rhea said, now becoming irritated by too many delusions. “Looks like I get a new name every day.”
“You actually are many,” Phoebe said. “No doubt you’re Rhea, true, the daughter of Earth and Sky, who arose from the Chaos itself. And this Chaos also exists as the foam that frothed from the blood of the Sky, as your brother eunuchized your father on his conjugal bed. Therein lies the source of the immiscible progression. Out of the Creation Horizon emerged two aspects of self-awareness, each begetting the other: Chaos begetting Earth and Sky, and the Heaven’s castration begetting the foam that resulted as the new Chaos.”
“Please, Phoebe,” Rhea said, “do you mind if I write some of this down?”
“You are also Parthenope, the daughter of the Muse. You desire to mark these words? It is the nature of the daughter of a muse.”
“Which Muse am I the daughter of again?” Rhea asked after completing some short hand about Rhea as daughter of the Heavens and Earth; about the foam begetting Chaos as Chaos begets the Heavens, who is castrated by her brother to make the foam; about how the Creation Horizon contains this paradox of which came first, yielding the immiscible progression. Progression to what? Rhea thought.
“The Muse, whose daughter you are, is Melpomene.”
“Like the street,” she said, remembering her conversation with Charles. “The street they renamed for Martin Luther King.”
“As Tragedy, the Muse who then begot Parthenope.”
“Who else am I, Phoebe?”
“You’re Semele, the mother true of Dionysus, by the semen of Zeus himself!”
“Is that what that bird-man with the claws meant? That guy who whipped me—what the hell was that about?”
“The Harpies foul the world. They soil everything. Even the plans for the reforging of the progression. But your womb was opened. And the unwitting Harpy was the surrogate in ignorance. They’re such mean and silly creatures. The reforging of the progression continues without his interference. Even Zeus thanks him as his vehicle.”
“For what?”
“For impregnating you.”
“Oh, God,” Rhea said to herself, somewhat astonished by what Phoebe was saying. “And that woman?”
“Aphrodite,” Phoebe said in reverent awe. “She came from the foam first. Because from her all procreate forth. But her sisters in the foam are the Erinyes, the Furies. And so Aphrodite has a vengeful streak, and she has this need to punish those who misuse her qualities. Your tormenter, your Harpy who fouls your life and the planet around you—he had discovered what it means to love too much. You have been rescued from the hubris of his distinctive attention to you and your friend.” Rhea continued writing as Phoebe spoke and glowed.
“Can she visit a person with her good qualities—her true qualities—showing?”
“I know, my Rhea, what you are pursuing even before you’ve said your thought-out intentions. Aphrodite’s pleased with your use of her qualities when you visited your friend Dwayne Cody. You yourself do not know why it meant the undoing of the Harpy’s soiling; you just know that it did. And that is what announced your arrival. That is what caught the eye of Aphrodite. But it would have been unheeded by you and by those of the lumineferous aether, the dark matter, if you had not unlocked the first lock by seeing, really seeing. The swirls that point are symbolic for the road to the Creation Horizon.”
“You mean the fractals? The fractals, yes. What I saw when Aphrodite reached into my world was just like that. All of that swirling around.”
“The Creation Streamers. They progress from the Creation Horizon.”
“From the foam,” Rhea wrote.
“From the foam. These fractals, as you call them, sing of immiscible progressions, like the Creation Streamers that emanate from the Creation Horizon. And these fractals are made on your device. They are made on a box your friend has unlocked. And loosed into the world are the foils for the Creation Streamers. These Streamers which caress you. They caress you from the foam. And that is why Aphrodite is with you. And that is why you are Parthenope, the daughter of Tragedy, for your song will comb the Creation Streamers. That is what Aphrodite awaits.”
“I know this is important, but I’ve failed myself and you. I’m not sure I understand any of this,” Rhea said, exasperated. She threw her pen down on the desk pad she was writing on.
“You will. You’ll understand each piece of knowledge that you devour. Just listen to your heart, and you will begin devouring the knowledge you will have.”
“I did hear. I heard the sound from the foam, of the Creation Streamers. I heard it. I know. It was musical. But it was too fast. I couldn’t catch it.”
“You will. Unlock the four locks. They are there.”
“What four locks?”
“They are there,” Phoebe said, fading slightly.
“Wait, don’t go,” Rhea urged her. “The world is stopped. Am I mad? Will you leave me like this in this cubicle with me the only one moving—with the rest of the world catatonic. Or am I the one catatonic? Am I crazy. Is that what you’ve delivered to me, my insanity?”
“You will at times waver between your world and the Creation Horizon. All that is, wavers in its relation to you. All is not still. It is just a wavering. The Creation Horizon distorts all that is. But you will always be comfortable with it.”
“And what happens if I go deeper past the Creation Horizon?” Rhea asked. She felt she had been perched on it before, as on a precipice, and Phoebe was the one to ask, certainly.
“While all that is, is immiscible, that would be ill-advised. Going past it will doom you to all eternity, because there is no time beyond it. No past, no future, just an ever-present. A place where time and space do not exist separately; a place with no frames of reference—only eternal confusion where a mind races nowhere, always, in panic and terror, forever. How many forevers are held in just this passing moment?”
Rhea again regarded the fly frozen in mid-air.
“Imagine the number of forevers there could be. You cannot! You do not cross the Creation Horizon. There is nothing there; there is no one there. Except the one who falls there, never to return.”
And with that Phoebe faded away for good.
Rhea looked around. All was still motionless. She once again regarded Penny, who was as stationary as a pillar of salt. The fly remained fixed as it was. Rhea approached it slowly, converging her gaze upon it. She touched it. It felt just like what she imagined a fly to feel like. Ever so slowly she noticed a slight movement of its wings. They began to slowly sweep one cycle of a flutter. This grew into a progressive buzz until suddenly the world caught back up with Rhea with a jolt, pushing her like that unseen car that runs the stop sign and seems to leap at you from the corner of your eye. She was jostled by the reconnection, losing her balance and falling on Penny.
“Ouch!” Penny said, catching the full weight of Rhea on her lap. “How’d you get over here? Did you just jump on me?” Rhea slowly reconstituted herself and reclaimed her own seat.
“I don’t know,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “I don’t know what’s going on sometimes.” She looked at her desk and saw a note pad with what should have been references to foam and horizons, to goddesses and begetting. What she saw on it was jibberish.
“So, no news about the virus damage, huh?” Penny asked. Rhea snapped alert and regarded her screen.
“Not here,” Rhea answered, shutting down NewsNet. “We can look later, but I don’t know...” she mumbled.
“What?” Penny asked her friend.
“Never mind,” she again mumbled. She clicked her mouse this way and that and was unable to bring up the EnsleyNet screen. All but the little corner was blank. The little corner itself had just enough room to squeeze in the words, Turn off the Computer Immediately! Please!
“What is that?” Penny asked. Rhea obeyed the directive and flipped the switch that shut the machine off.
“Wait!” cried Penny. “What did you do that for? I want to know what’s happening. Did we do that? Is that the virus?”
“It’s big,” Rhea answered. “It’s bigger than we thought. That’s a message from the CPU of EnsleyNet itself.”
“How do you know?” Penny whispered.
“Because it was pleading.”
At 186,282 miles per second the infection spread throughout the world of Ensley. This run of digital toxin thusly covered the planet in less than a quarter of a second. The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, of the EnsleyNet in Atlanta flickered in its indecision. Binary schizophrenia called the numbers back when the numbers fed to it made no sense. But actually, they did. And that was the worst aspect of the virulence. Because the numbers weren’t just scrambled, they were altered according to a system. EnsleyNet could see a sense in the systematic alterations. It was smart enough to perceive the system used as an alternative self-awareness; it tried to co-aware with it. This lured more of the system into the very progression of the virus the more EnsleyNet tried to deal with it.
The mirror servers fell for the same trick. The chain reaction spread from CPU to peripheral locations; from peripheral locations to the regional EnCasts; from the regional EnCasts via microwave to the geosynchronous EnSats 22,236 miles above the Earth; and back down to every urban substation on every continent. Less than a quarter of a second was the lifespan of the virus when the return strings caused its erasure at terminal 2 in cubicle 4012 on the fortieth floor of the New Orleans substation, under synchroCom from the Southeastern EnSat above the Central and Eastern time zones that caught the regional Encasts from Atlanta. A round trip of quarter of a second.
It was a long time by computer standards. Ensley-Mix, Inc. shut down worldwide at the very moment it was announced that it would never give in to terrorist demands. Yet, the terrorists’ demand was to shut down and shut down it did. Noticed immediately by everyone at the end of the EnsleyNet, then Homeland Security, then the stock exchange, then the NSA, the media anchormen and anchorwomen were quick to whore out the information with that gleam it their eyes that sparked the breaking news touted as the interesting ratings-grabbing twist to a tragic story:
Did Ensley-Mix, Inc. comply?
The HATO organization was not pleased. Could they really gave given in? So quickly? So cowardly?
At HATO headquarters there was mass confusion, and it occurred in the head of the man who was HATO. This was not supposed to happen. Ensley-Mix, Inc. was supposed to hold its ground. There were supposed to be several assassinations. He was assured of this by those who had hired him. They indicated to him that he could be assured of at least four to six fees-for-services, that the anti-environmental Ensley-Mix, Inc. would hold out as long as it could to persist in its rape of the land, air, and sea. Of course, the man who was HATO couldn’t care less for the cause. He wanted his fares, and if the company folded into submission before the very first hit, then his employer had better give him a partial fee for the aborted plan. The next contact man had better have a suitcase with innumerable small bills or there would be a hit for sure. A heart would surely fail.
He sat, waiting for his phone to ring. He sat for hours, but no one called. He grew angrier, and he was a man who did not do well when he was angry. His adrenal glands did his thinking when he was angry, and they pumped all of the wrong decision-making chemicals into his system with each stinging beat of his black heart.
In a hospital several miles away, Peter Harper was undergoing a general anesthetic. His testicles were pressed along the paths of his inguinal canals until they reached the final bottlenecks that reminded the Urologist who milked them down of a biblical passage.
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get to Heaven,” he said under his breath as the second one also stopped at the inguinal ring.
“What?” asked the anesthesiologist.
“The eye of a needle,” he repeated more clearly as he placed a gloved thumb on each bulge where each of Harper’s thighs flexed against his hips. Instructing the nurses to flex them passively for him, he pressed the gonads, squeezing them forward until they finally popped through, allowing them to fall into their familiar resting places.
“Those are surely gonna be some sore balls tonight,” the urologist said, handing the case off to the orthopedic surgeon, who prepared the plaster of Paris to immobilize the pelvic ring for the next six weeks. After this was accomplished, back went on the ice packs to try to reduce the swelling of his genitals that sat exposed through holes cut away in the cast. Next the urologist returned and placed the suprapubic catheter to rest his bladder until his penile urethra was navigable with anything more viscous than gas; and finally, using the very last hole in the cast, the colon and rectal surgeon identified the source of the rectal-bladder fistula via a proctoscope and sealed it with an absorbable endoscopic procto-ring.
In the recovery room, the nurse assigned to him was filled with pathos such that she did not seem irritated by the invasion of the privacy that threatened her Recovery Room tasks, an invasion by the man who had rejoined her patient the moment he was no longer sequestered away in the sterile area of the OR. This man re-assumed his position with his charge. A large, light-skinned Jamaican in a blue blazer, he was the official box-holder for Peter Harper. Per instructions, he held the locked black hard wood box as close to Harper as allowed by the uncertain permission of the nurse.
“Mi av permission,” he said in a heavy Jamaican patois. He handed her a name badge and it was signed by the administrator; it was the same badge given to medical device reps who are cleared to go deep into the hospital inner spaces. She handed it back and abruptly turned back to her patient. After the sputtering and suctioning and tidying up of saliva and other comatose indiscretions had been attended to, Peter Harper tried to utter his first words.
“What?” his nurse asked him, leaning her face close to his. The man with the black box looked keenly interested. “Speak clearly, Mr. Harper,” she encouraged him. “You’re out of surgery and are doing fine.” He spoke again. Once again she couldn’t understand him. “Try again, Mr. Harper, O.K.? Cough first.” He coughed and then groaned from the pain.
“Who was that woman?” he finally uttered clearly, albeit raspingly.
“What woman?” the nurse asked. “Who are you talking about? Cough again.” He coughed again. He groaned again.
“That woman,” he repeated. “I have to find out who she is.” He coughed yet again. “She was fucking fantastic.”
He drifted off after that.
********
Next week, Chapter VIII: The Immiscible
SERIES MANAGER
Start at the beginning, PRELUDE, “Odysseus.”
IV. The Healing Blows of the Februa
V. The Luminiferous Æether
VI. The Titaness and the Power of Is