Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

Genres: Science Fiction; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

When shy, psychic bookworm 'Cookie' Orbach watches television, she sees things. But not the things that you or I would see. Cookie sees The Grid - a strange, shifting landscape where human forces battle against an enemy they dare not kill. Her employer, the mysterious Dataplex Corporation, pays her well to watch this war, and asks only that she report her observations but take no direct action, which suits her passive demeanour just fine. But Cookie's quiet life is about to be shattered. Her two very different worlds are threatening to merge in a way that shouldn't really be possible. Everything is about to change. And we do mean everything...

Release date: May 29, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 704

Sample

Maybe it’s the bonelessness messing you up. Like, if you aren’t feeling too confident about things, maybe it’s because you’re all folded over on yourself, limp as a piece of wet Charmin that clings to anything it touches.

You can hear guys discussing your situation. You can even feel them handling you, but you can’t see them from here. All you can see is a bunch of sheds and a ship surrounded by scaffolding – and, looming beyond this, a distant chunk of the Grid. It’s flashing in and out of reality in its own special, hostile-fungus-with-horrible-geometric-properties way. This doesn’t contribute to your overall grip.

Plus, Serge isn’t exactly cheerleader material.

‘I hope that hankie’s gonna fly, Lewis.’

Captain Bonny Serge’s voice percolates in her throat, phlegm effecting the same break-up of tone by white noise as the interference on a walkie-talkie so that she can be standing two feet away from you and sound like she’s in Paraguay. Now she hovers on Gossamer’s dorsal side while Lewis fine-tunes Goss’s receiving systems to take into account the electrical disturbances that have been plaguing the flyways since the stand-off at N-Ridge began.

The scaffolded ship kaleidoscopes and then vanishes as the tech untangles Gossamer from herself. Now you can see clearly. The Grid fills your field of view, pulsing, until it’s obscured by Serge’s body as she moves around to ventral. Her stocky trunk always appears mismatched with her stork legs, just like her Texas accent doesn’t jive with her geisha-girl features. Maybe the physical comedy of her appearance is what makes her aspire to such hardassedness: fear of being laughed at just for existing.

Lewis, kneeling, leans over you to snap her kit box shut. She says, ‘Gossy’s good to go. If she makes it to N-ridge, the nex will take her recordings straight to Machine Front. I think we’re on top of the interference problem, too.’

A grunt from Serge: the most courteous response she ever gives at this hour of the morning. It’s enough to satisfy the tech, who smiles and stands up, relaxing.

‘I still can’t believe the golems could of sabotaged the friggin’ MaxFact,’ Serge adds, blotting her forehead with her sleeve. ‘It’s Machine Front passing the buck again. They f%#ked up and now we’re gonna pay for it. You lose control of your rocket-guidance system, you might as well give the Rompers a 695 because you’re going to Wisconsin in a bucket.’

You don’t know what a 695 is but Serge doesn’t expect you to answer – the nature of the nex means you can’t. She just wants to hear herself saying it. She’s like a guy talking to his dog.

Lewis doesn’t realize that Serge’s commentary isn’t directed at her, so she tries to contribute to the conversation by saying, in a manner lamely imitative of Serge’s backwoods drawl, ‘Captain, we got to hope that rocket don’t come back to visit us in quadruplicate. We got to hope it ain’t landed in the well.’

The conversation has taken on a rehearsed quality. You don’t know whether it’s being repeated for your benefit, since everything you hear is transmittable to Machine Front, or if it’s just shop talk and in fact Serge and Lewis have been trading remarks like this for two weeks, ever since a golem raid on N-Ridge culminated in a misfired rocket, downed communications to the mines, and the disappearance of N-Ridge’s command officer, Dr. Arla Gonzalez.

Serge should really hawk and spit, but she just lets the phlegm go on clogging up her pipes as she says, ‘Yeah, well, I need this like I need a leopardskin pillbox hat.’ She glances at her watch and gives a little jerk. ‘Come on already, when are Machine Front giving their report?’

Serge sticks her finger in her ear and wiggles it spasmodically, as though scratching a furious itch. An instant later, Dante Perelli, the Machine Front bimbo of choice in Serge’s army, appears as a projection above Serge’s yellow-and-green Swatch.

‘Hi, Serge,’ he purrs. ‘Ready for the numbers?’

The numbers come swarming out of the Swatch like little green Space Invaders. Dante’s brow furrows sympathetically: no self-respecting ArtlQ could fail to anticipate the human reaction to news like this. But Serge isn’t just any human. You can tell more about the nature of the data from looking at little digital Dante than from the reaction of Serge herself.

All she says is, ‘There has to be a better way of stopping them.’

‘You know the algorithms,’ says Dante. ‘The more we kill, the faster they come. The faster they come, the more we have to kill or they’ll take apart the equipment.’

Grunt. Pause.

‘I won’t be forced into a torch operation. Not while we still got a guy out there might be alive.’

Whatever you may say about Serge, you can’t say she doesn’t look out for her guys. Everybody else has given up on Gonzalez.

Dante answers her angry stare with, ‘I’m only here to offer information and assistance.’

‘What’s on the card for N-Ridge, then?’

‘If they keep multiplying by current rates? Eleven thousand for your neck of the woods. Maybe nine-five, maybe twelve.’

Serge is quiet for a second. ‘Dante, Dante,’ she says at last. ‘This is not what I like to hear. What do S&T say?’

‘Strategy says they predicted this in March. Tactics say that Logistics didn’t allocate enough hardware to deal with the swollen figures on N-Ridge. Research say the well’s hottest in N-Valley and Logistics say, quote, you try schlepping fourteen hundred tons of plastic up the side of N-Ridge when there’s Iowa boys and girls throwing themselves under the treads and screaming to Jesus as they die, unquote.’

‘A golem is a golem,’ says Serge flatly, ‘and they don’t come from Iowa. I thought we was past all that emotional hoodwinking.’

‘We won’t be past it until you girls have gone home. Machine Front is here to do what you wetheads can’t.’

‘So what now? What’s the actual position at the mines?’

‘Standoff. Us on the road, heavily armored. Them blockading the mine perimeter, waiting for us to kill them so they can reproduce.’

It’s an inadequate description; you know because you’ve seen it for yourself, from the air. Nevertheless, Serge seems to have the imagination to visualize it for herself, because she says:

‘Yuck.’

‘We have to penetrate, Captain. I know you babes don’t like killing—’

‘That’s why we’re here, dopehead. To not kill. Because the boys got carried away and now look at all the friggin’ golems.’

‘As I was saying, I know you don’t like killing golems but in this case it’s essential that we get through to N-Ridge. The third wave of unmanned relief vessels is already launched and en route to us. Once they get here, you can all go home and leave the battle to us machines. But the new ships won’t be able to make their targets without Grid-specific logic bullets, and N-Ridge is the only place to get those. Ergo—’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I intend to retrieve Gonzalez. I ain’t gonna deviate from that plan without a direct order to the contrary from X.’

‘The clock is ticking, Captain. If Gonzalez is alive and knows what went down up there, great. If not, Machine Front has to move in.’

Before Serge can respond, you feel Goss shudder and stiffen. She’s reacting to a chemical signal in the Grid that the humans can’t sense. Gossamer’s action catches Serge’s attention and gives her an excuse to snap the image of Dante into her Swatch.

‘It’s about time we was movin’ on up.’

Gossamer is already standing on end. She – and you – have been lying loose like a shimmering cloak on the repair rack, but now that she is aroused for flight she stiffens like a sail in the wind. You’re picking up input in her olfactories. The Grid communicates with her by scent as often as not and, at the moment, it’s calling. She squirts a reply from her ventral slits, and then, without further warning, launches into the sky. There’s a momentary jockeying for power between you and the Grid with its beckoning scent: both seek to use Gossamer. Then you assert control. It feels good. Once you’re in the air, all your uncertainties vanish.

‘Don’t get shot down,’ Serge shouts, like you’re in a WW2 movie with Zeros over the Pacific and shark’s-teeth snouts, with those symbol thingies numbering your kills.

But you’re not a pilot. In the air you are Gossamer. You’re a living rainbow: people have to be in the right place at the right time to even see you. Along the length of Gossamer’s belly you feel every slight variation in texture and temperature and pace. Your ventral side is so sensitive you feel like the pea-wakeful princess in the old story; sometimes you swear you could sense the undulations in the Grid below through the very air, if you shut your visuals down. Gossamer’s wings have been mapped onto your human fingertips and her tail, more oddly, has been mapped onto your lips. You think this is something to do with the density of nerves required to process the sensory information. Gossamer’s tail is particularly subtle and since the Gossamer-equivalents of olfactory nerves are located there you guess that crossing it with your human lips and tongue makes some kind of sense. But it means that sometimes, after flying, you can’t speak properly for awhile. It also makes food taste funny for a couple of hours.

None of that matters, though. Because when you fly, you’re real. What a feeling. You’re so thin and light that you’re just a membrane relaying information. You almost lose your self, your sense of subject: you almost become a verb.

You scan incessantly for relevant data. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. While you’re flying over the dun baldness of X, the Landing Zone, everything’s straightforward enough. In the very center of X are the intensive gardens – seven levels of them. Encircling these are the command buildings and residence units, then the factories and signal towers. Each arm of the X has a landing pad. You cross over the last of the signal towers and pass above the security net, which consists of an energy barrier to keep out golems. It’s patrolled by indigenous Fliers; but unlike Gossamer, these are wired directly to Machine Front so as to sound the alert if golems try to enter X. You choose a roadway from among the many that radiate from X like beams of light from the heads of saints in medieval paintings. To aid with orientation, you’ll follow the N road as far as it takes you into the Grid.

You take a last look back at the lights and the straight lines, the blandness of human architecture basking in a dull, diffuse light that doesn’t necessarily seem to come from the sky. You can see Serge’s team as they load into the Machine Front convoy that will crawl after you while you fly overhead. You can see a couple of jeeps puttering over the tarmac toward the scaffold-covered ship. You can see dark rain clouds scumbled over the flat surface of featureless white cloud and, below them, the emerald green of the gardens like a little piece of Oz.

Then you stop looking back and start looking forward, and there it is. The Grid.

Sometimes you’d swear you could see it breathing; but the limits of the Grid are hard to perceive, and if it does respire then it exhales confusion. Even its name is misleading. The first explorers inaccurately called it the Speed Jungle because its structures reminded them of trees that could move, snaking and changing positions like beans sprouting on time-lapse film. Later, the First Wave soldiers who escaped immersion in its well called it The Headf@*k, and when the generals saw what end the Grid’s captives came to, that name was reified by the fact that no more soldiers were sent in. But those who control the names of things now call it the Grid – a euphemistic, deceptively neutral label that suits the purposes of the war-makers. Ostensibly they chose ‘Grid’ because the phenomenon in question functions as an armature for the soft stuff of the planet’s life codes. Also you figure it’s because from the air the Grid looks more like a spider web than the forest it resembles at ground level. Especially at night, in the absence of the blond light that can etch the details of each terminus, each leaf, each flower spiralling into cloud, the faintly luminous Grid seems two-dimensional, reducible. It seems a statement, not a question. It seems localized and therefore finite. Yet, by daylight when you have flown in close like Gossamer has, then the hairs and tendrils of the Grid become apparent. Its essential seediness asserts itself as you realize you are flying through a delicate life-pod like those blown from dandelions on Earth, only far more complex. You perceive that the identity codes of the Grid are sticking to you and Gossamer like motes of pollen, looking for a fertile place to replicate themselves and ultimately, by their persuasive powers, to make you into something for the well.

Something like lunch.

Gossamer is a human-modified indigene. Thanks to the efforts of the Machine Front engineers, she is carrying a spy kit consisting of electronics so low in mass that they don’t even register on a standard Dataplex scale. Without these silicon prosthetics, Gossamer would be just another native entity – unusual, yes, because so few of the planet’s organisms are independently motile, but not extraordinary.

The extraordinary part comes about because Gossamer carries you, Cookie Orbach, all one hundred ninety-seven pounds of you, within those slender, body-electric-powered filaments. You: Cookie: World’s Chubbiest Spy: You fly above it all.

What the Grid’s well would make of Gossamer’s Earth-made parts if it ever got hold of them is a matter you have refused to consider on the basis that you might flip out. The well makes golems of human bodies; it swallows armored vehicles whole, and strange tree-cities spring up in their place. Missiles, too, are transformed, and red lights like malevolent swamp-eyes hover in the froth of the Grid’s upper layers when the well has been cooking the weapons of the terrestrial colonists. But what would become of Gossamer’s Earth-made eyes if Gossamer fell in the well is an unknown belonging to that broad category of things you would rather eat cake than think about.

Of course, you are aware that Gossamer is a prisoner of war. It has no cortex as such, and therefore possesses neither intelligence nor consciousness nor selfhood, so there is really nothing to feel guilty about because Gossamer doesn’t know that it’s being exploited. It was picked up by Machine Front in an opportunistic nest-strike. It was taken away from the Grid and loaded with spy tech; then it was returned, with you on board thanks to the beauty of the nex.

Your job, apart from hanging on to the nex and translating what Gossamer sees, is to make sure that Gossamer stays clear of the Grid and its integrity-remixing properties. This act of will exerted upon the relatively simple nervous system of Gossamer does require a degree of communion with the indigene, however vague. It is the nature of the nex to fold you into Gossamer a little, as egg whites into angel food cake. Finding the end of yourself and the beginning of Gossamer is sometimes like finding a contact lens in a white shag rug. But that’s a subtle point, not one you often consider.

So:

You don’t understand your job, but you do it anyway. The more you learn about people, the more you believe that’s not so unusual.

Besides, no one understands this war.

LOOK FOR BURN SIGNS, Serge reminds you unnecessarily. She’s nervous today. That makes two of you.

Burn signs are important because if Dr. Gonzalez has been forced to commit suicide, she will have self-immolated to prevent the Grid making golems of her.

Serge is relaying a message from Machine Front.

SAT SAYS YOU GOT A STORM BREWING AT 60 DEGREES, AND THERE’S A GAP IN THE GRID AT 22 APPROX THREE KILOMETERS FROM PRESENT POSITION. CAN YOU CHECK THE GAP BEFORE WEATHER HITS?

The storm is no surprise: nobody’s been able to fly over the mines since the incident thirteen days ago. The Grid brews impossible weather and magnetic conditions. But this alleged gap doesn’t sound right to you. You know this area well. You’ve never seen any break in the continuity of the Grid around here.

You can’t answer Serge, you can only direct Goss as best you can. You move towards the location she transmits, but there’s nothing immediately visible. Sat’s got it wrong – but they’re not wrong about the storm. The wind’s already kicking up and the sky’s gone black over your starboard side. Goss shivers, detecting small electrical disturbances.

Then you see it: a break in the Grid as clean and precise as if somebody has cut a hole in the planet’s topography with scissors. In the same moment, sensory cross-mapping with Gossamer gives you a sickly-sweet taste in your mouth as Gossamer’s olfactories go into overdrive, trying to read all the scent messages the Grid’s giving off. They hit you on an unconscious level, making you feel twitchy and out of control.

A flood of primary emotions floods your chest and guts. You don’t have time to analyze or even name them fear, anger, elation, loneliness, hunger because they follow one another in such rapid succession. You let them run over and through you, like you learned in that book about Paul Atreides: Fear is the mind-killer, you tell yourself this. And your discipline kicks in. You are a conduit. You are not to get involved.

RECORD – URGENT TRANSMISSION – RECORD ALL

You start sending pictures, angling Gossamer carefully to catch as much of the new phenomenon as you can in one bloom of data. It looks like a good hundred vertical feet of the Grid have been shorn off, exposing its foundation and the gnarled, knotty bases of what had been an intricate and mathematically sophisticated structure. There is an implied violence about the sight, not least because on the perimeter of the event the Grid is dead.

Dead, like gray flesh around a wound. Without light, or color, or movement: dead. It’s just a brittle skeleton. Deep in the gray pit, well-fluid still gleams. There is something else down there, too, but you can’t make it out before Gossamer’s pass is finished and you lose sight of the gap.

How did this happen? No machine could chop up the Grid on such a large scale – and you’re nowhere near any of the roads that machines use, anyway. It can’t be golems because they don’t build things or even use tools. It’s one of the ways everybody can be sure they’re not like humans. They don’t have to use tools: they don’t need shelter any more than they need food or sleep. They’re like mushrooms. They spring up full-grown, clad in the battle gear their progenitors died in, and they do it literally overnight. They disappear into the well again just as easily.

You bend all your effort to recording a clear and focused image despite the best efforts of the Grid to repel your sight. The storm’s visible now, its wind bending the stalks of the upper Grid and sending petals and clouds of pollen your way. Gossamer doesn’t like the smell. She’s like a horse scenting cougar. She wants to get the heck out of here.

But there’s something funny about the living Grid in the region around the hole, as well. You don’t know if you’re imagining it, but you’d swear there are the beginnings of a visible order within the seething mess. You think you can detect angular structures within the freeform. They probably wouldn’t pass an ArtlQ test; but to your subjective eye, they are there. You lean hard on the nex and transmit:

URGENT. NOTE APPARENT STRUCTURES. AMPLIFY BANDWIDTH.

Here comes the storm. Gossamer has no bones to feel the weather in, but her primitive nervous system is screaming warnings; in a minute, she’ll flee or risk being crumpled up like a used Kleenex and tossed away. Magnetic dirt blocks your transmission. You see everything, but Machine Front will get only fuzz.

All the same, you force Gossamer to come around for another pass, scanning for clues. Your prosthetic eyes record a few more anomalies in the Grid: rectangles where there should be parabolas, spaces where there should be form. Nothing you know how to interpret. You take Gossamer on a wider circle now and pass through a series of scent-phrases that hit Gossamer’s olfactories like Pop Rocks hitting a kid’s tongue, temporarily overriding your sense of taste and obscuring whatever hidden messages may lie beneath.

Gossamer makes a bid to surge upward – whether seeking to avoid the storm or the crackling and singing upper extremities of the Grid, you can’t tell. You manage to keep control of her, but you figure: enough already. You get the hint: time to go home.

You turn Gossamer around and start going back. And just then, her eyes give you the prize.

Serge’s lost soldier is sitting in the Grid, high up at the very edge of the mysterious gap, overlooking the well. Just like a little statue, except for the automated blinking flare on the back of her helmet that is meant to alert fliers to her position.

Can’t leave now.

URGENT. TRANSMIT. HAVE SIGHTED MAJ GONZALEZ. REPEAT HAVE SIGHTED MAJ GONZALEZ. URGENT.

You can’t do anything. Goss has no supplies and she couldn’t carry a field mouse, much less a hundred-and-twenty-pound soldier plus full equipment. You note the coordinates and hope they’re right – the Grid can mess with orientation and does, especially with the storm front doing its thing in your left eye – then you decide to try and signal Gonzalez. Your data strip offers a ‘stay/wait’ sequence that Gossamer can pulse on scent towards the soldier’s position so that she won’t be tempted to wander off and get herself more lost than she already is. You start to implement the command.

Gossamer is not interested in carrying out your instructions. She has never rebelled against you before, so either you’ve lost your touch, or the storm is worse than you are able to perceive and she’s shutting down non-essential nervous activity.

You judge by the rush of body-electricity and concomitant bladder-dump that it’s the latter. Goss’s survival reflexes are kicking in bigtime. She executes a neat maneuver, literally turning on her tail, and flees the coming storm, dropping the nex.

You’re nowhere. You’re blind, deaf, gagging – choking, actually, and—

—‘Cookie! Pizza!’

Ah, sugar. I’m back.

I sat listening to my heartbeat for a few counts, getting accustomed to myself again. My feet were asleep. My hands, palms-down on the reception pad, were cold and sweating. The TV screen was blue. I smelled Old Spice.

‘Cookie? You out yet?’

‘Yes, Gunther,’ I whispered.

‘Good. We’ll debrief in five.’

He sounded crisp and impatient. I wondered if it was his fault I lost Goss. Why had he been calling me, anyway? I licked dry lips, about to turn in my cheap plastic chair and ask him what was going on, but I heard the door of my assignment room snick shut and knew he was gone.

Five minutes. I had just enough time to go to the bathroom and get a Coke from the machine. Popping open the can, I shuffled along to Gunther’s office, feeling awkward and dislocated, like a sea mammal on dry land. The post-flying bad taste in my mouth was even worse than usual. It was a funeral taste, like orchids, or something that had died – or both. I sipped Coke but it only seemed to complicate the nastiness.

Gunther is singing along to Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain and shooting baskets with a nerf ball. I’m a little out of breath and my upper lip is sweating so I sit down on his leather couch and pretend to be interested in his little performance.

‘You missed Gloria’s birthday party,’ Gunther said. ‘I think they saved you pizza and cake.’

I blinked. ‘What time is it?’

Outside Gunther’s window I could see maple trees tossing in a warm breeze, and traffic passing on the Garden State Parkway, which runs right behind the Dataplex building. The traffic was heavy.

Gunther shrugged and fished in his desk for his watch. ‘Six … eleven.’

I put my hand to my mouth. I had entered the nex at ten o’clock. ‘I had no idea …’

‘Yeah, I know. I was hoping the pizza shout would get your attention.’

He grinned. Gunther’s going bald but otherwise he’s not bad-looking, he’s not married, and he’s not stupid. However, he has some work to do in the sensitivity department. He seems to think my weight problem is funny.

‘It was really rough out there today,’ I said. Gunther didn’t pay any attention. He and Billy were singing something about Sesame Street.

‘Gunther, there’s some kind of structured effect going on in the Grid on N-Ridge. Near the mines. I couldn’t get Gossamer in for a close enough look, but from what I could see it was pretty weird stuff. The Grid was actually chopped off. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Gunther went for a bank shot and screamed, ‘PRESSURE!’

‘Gunther! Don’t you care? What kind of debriefing is this?’

He startled and dropped the nerf ball.

‘Sorry,’ he said in a different tone. He switched off the boom box, cleared his throat and sat down, loosening his tie. He picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser on a legal pad. ‘OK, tell me everything.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but didn’t. He was staring expectantly at me. I stared back.

‘The tape recorder, Gunther?’

‘Oh! Right. Yeah.’ He reached into his desk drawer and dragged out the tape recorder. He cued the tape and turned it on.

‘This is Gunther Stengel debriefing Karen Orbach on July 2, 1984 at … six-thirteen p.m. Go ahead, Karen. What happened out there today?’

He assumed an attentive pose and maintained it throughout. The thing about Gunther is, he’s so fake he’s real. I used to hate him, then I liked him, and then I started to wonder if there was something, like, wrong with him. By now I’ve given up trying to understand what he’s all about.

It took me a long time to tell my tale, but if he checked his watch I didn’t see him do it. When I was finished, my face felt hot and I must have looked excited.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘Well!’

He sat back.

I added, ‘Serge thinks she can get Arla out of there. It’s remarkable that she’s still alive, but there are so many golems in that area that Serge could be walking into a trap. If I were advising her—’

‘You’re not.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not advising Serge.’

‘I was only saying.’

‘Don’t. I’m telling you this for your own good, Cookie. Don’t make it personal. That’s what the Grid wants.’

I hate it when Gunther decides to play big brother with me. I said, ‘How do you know what the Grid wants?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? It plays our own fears against us. It uses our own hardwiring to short-circuit us. We can’t let ourselves be fooled by that.’

I knew he was right, in a technical sense. But: ‘My hardwiring, as you so unromantically put it, is all I have. If I can’t trust my instincts, what am I doing in there?’

‘You are a set of eyes for Machine Front, no more, no less. Leave it there.’

I shrugged, trying not to act offended.

‘You want me to go back to N-Ridge, then?’

He picked up the nerf ball and stood up. ‘That’s not up to me.’

In other words: I know my place, and so should you.

I stood up. Gunther took a jump shot with the nerf ball and while his back was turned I glanced at what he’d written on the legal pad. But there was no writing at all, just a drawing of Fred Flintstone.

‘The Grid has no respect for human life,’ Gunther said, retrieving the ball from behind his wastepaper basket. ‘Remember that.’

I left.

How could I argue? I never went to college. This job pays over forty grand a year and I don’t have any other skills. I can’t even type. I’m fat. I’ve never had a boyfriend. This is the one thing I can really do.

I couldn’t find Gloria so I went into the break room and picked up a piece of cold pepperoni pizza. There was some RC cola left over, too, so I poured that in a paper cup, but I didn’t sit down. Thinking:

Do I really want to keep doing this?

Then again, what choice do I have?

I started out as a police psychic but I was too good at that. I started getting death threats from some guy who got out of prison on parole and wanted revenge because my information had led to the discovery of one of his victims’ bodies. I tried to get police protection but even after all my help the police didn’t want to do anything for me. I was a nervous wreck and in danger of losing my job as a file clerk. Around that same time I developed my TV allergy. I thought it was just stress. Then I answered the ad for DEH and found out that what I thought was an illness was actually a talent. So I came here.

The Department of Extraplanetary Hauntings is hidden within Dataplex Corp under the moniker Foreign Markets Research Division. Which is accurate enough in its way; I mean, how much more foreign can you get than another planet? We’re at the back of the building next to Programming. All the geeks and weirdos in one pen. The programmers don’t bother us and I don’t think we even attract their notice.

I always said I would accept no money for my work because I am a real psychic and to profit from it would be greasy and uncool. But there are a few other factors in the equation. For one thing, all the other Fliers collect a paycheck. As far as I