Authors: Jeff Noon
Nola looked around for comfort.
On the bar’s screen, Melissa’s hands were pounding against the curved wall of the Dome. Her fingers stretched out, seen through the surface patterns: a father’s eyes, a broken doll, a snail covered in salt, melting.
The twelve frozen viewers raised their hands as though to help her escape. Or to keep her there. Clearly, they could not decide which. Half in love, half in fear.
The image skipped, settled. Fizzed with interference.
Evelyn pulled out a glamacam. ‘I love these little things so much, don’t you, Nola? I mean, they give everything such a gorgeous sheen!’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Wait. Keep still. I have to take a picture of you.’
Nola felt a sudden anger.
Her own mind in mirror mode to the wall screen: jump-cut thought patterns, random images, crackle, spark and fuzz.
She told Evelyn to back away.
‘I will. I will. But just let me do this. What is that glow you have? Where can I buy it. Does it come in a bottle?’
The wall screen crackled and went black, sputtered with light, died again, came back on. Dome flutter, snowed under with fluff and haze, Melissa’s voice caught in a fog of noise. Data readouts jumped and shivered.
Sound of a fuse shorting, magnified loud.
Fzzzztk!
The Dome reappeared, cloaked in static.
Sfzztztsztxztztztsfssstsztttt...
Some of the younger drinkers were cheering by now, enjoying the damage on view. More people turned to the screen. Others checked the programme for themselves on their portapops, the little devices each crackling in time as they found the correct frequency. The screen danced with broken pictures, spluttered with noise. Some viewers booed and jeered. A beer glass glittered through the darklamp air, smashing against a wall. The landlord fiddled desperately with the screen remote. He remembered the riot that happened when the cup final had gone down in the power cut. Bad days. Bad nasty fucked up days all over.
And within this chaos stood the spellbound ones, bodies at rest, their eyes still locked on course, still fixated. Silent now, each one of them.
Evelyn rubbed a hand along Nola’s shoulder, her neck. She said, ‘I’ve seen you before, somewhere. Aren’t you one of them singer types?’ Fingers on flesh. Hot wet skin. ‘Yeah that’s it. My sister’s got your first tune. Played nothing else for a week or two.’
Nola scratched at her palms.
Skrit, skrit
. Taste of blue burn metal in her mouth. The whole room blurry in her sight. Ears abuzz with noise: croaks, harsh drawn breaths, ribald chanting. Crunch of glass underfoot. Mouths pressed against telebugs, portapops flickering with vids. Nola could feel a shift inside, a spark set loose in the body’s red-dark chambers, deep down, and the wall-screen followed suit, clicking to a new programme. Natural History.
Undersea World.
An octopus wafting through deep water, legs curling and uncurling, skin illuminated.
She’d done that herself, Nola felt certain; she made the channel change.
Click, click, click.
No hands necessary.
Screen commentary:
The octopus has millions of pigmented and reflective cells in its skin, known as chromatophores.
Nola’s black coat slipped from her shoulders.
By an act of will, the different colours of these skin pixels can be activated, intensified, creating a rippling, animated display.
She felt connected to the screen. Television and radio waves filled the room around her, glowing in silvery webs visible only to herself.
The creature uses this for the purpose of camouflage, to send out threatening signals, or for courtship display.
Click.
Another channel now. A boxing match.
Her own doing.
Nola: the human remote. She peeled off her gloves, one then two.
Click, click.
More channels, the screen stuttering, fizzing.
Punters raised their voices in protest. All seemed of one voice and one vision now, one need.
Bring back the live feed. Bring back the Dome!
A fight was breaking out. The landlord called for order.
Nola Controller shifted, feeling her stomach clench. Her mind pulsed.
Here she was.
Click, click, click.
Here she was, working the waves.
The programme changed to an Arts show: ballerinas twirling in dresses of silver dazzle, the moon a man in a mask, weeping. And every device in the place, every handheld screen showed the same image, the same stream, the same download.
Shouts. Flare up. Drink spillage.
Fuck! Piss off! Lousy fucking machine!
The landlord banged his own remote against the counter, managed to get the picture back.
Pleasure Dome.
Nola flesh-clicked it away, bringing back the dancers, then the octopus once more, now a midnight pool in a forest clearing.
Evelyn turned from the screen.
Nola took off her dark glasses. But her eyes were not on Eva, not on anybody in that room. Nola’s eyes shifted focus, soft, watery.
Evelyn could see the glow of warm light seeping through Nola’s clothing, the play of colours around this woman’s neck. She could hear the voices from the skin, quiet as yet; they drew her nearer.
Eva was breathing on Nola, smelling her.
Perspiration, human flesh.
Something else?
Burnt out wiring, maybe? Electrics.
What was that?
Something wet dripping on hot glass. Pure NOISE.
Zzztsiztzle...
Nola’s skin pulled down the broadcasts. She sucked the life out of the screen, peeling images, replacing them. Drawing forth data, making a transfer pass.
Voodoo electrics.
Zxcxttxxtxkzktztttt!
Sudden bursts of colour and noise.
Handheld devices clicked and fizzled and blurred in chaos flow.
The pictures mutated in sync on every single screen in the place. They kissed and bred and gave birth to other images, other sounds, stranger images, stranger sounds. Now the bar’s wall-screen pulsed with life, with flashes of extreme violence, hardcore porn, rapid-fire gunshots. Spurts of blood, fake semen, spit. Car crashes. Burning buildings. Two towers falling in clouds of dust. Tongues in close-up, extreme, wet and pink. Cries for help. A severed head. Hands, fingernails long and sharp, tearing at flesh. Stomach wounds opening like slow-motion flowers. Blade-slice edits of rape, murder, torture. Broken glass. Crunch of bone.
The skull’s dark output.
All called up by Nola from the ether. All conjured by her, dragged down to earth from one hundred different programmes and films, all recast by skincast.
The audience fell silent.
All eyes present were bathed in vision light, all drawn to the wall-screen. And then they turned, this crowd, one by one by one, as one, aware of some odd creature in their midst, somebody making this happen.
The woman.
The music star revealed now.
Nola Blue.
They stared at her as they would at a pirate broadcast, a message brought in from another world.
Slowly Nola pulled her shirt open to let them see her stomach, the pictures, the faces, the dancers, the creatures of the deep, the ballerinas circling each other, all the night’s haze of message and noise and image.
All shown.
Hush. The place in shock.
Nola stretched out her arms towards the clientele, her viewers, the palms face out and opened up wide to show the image that glowed there on the skin: on each palm a filmed eye, two human eyes gazing at the audience from the warm wet skin of the hands.
Every person there staring at the two eyes that stared back at them.
Staring. Staring back.
Mirrored.
Eye
to
Eye...
Stillness.
Only one breath was drawn in the place.
Evelyn’s breath, quiet, contained, her fingers working at the buttons of her glamacam.
Whirrrrr.
Moments passing.
Clikck whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Nola moved through the crowd. No one stopped her, none touched her, none dared to. They parted to let her go. And even the guardians at the gateway, those of the black suits and the brick-wall shoulders, they let her pass freely.
The wall-screen flickered as she left the bar.
Zxxt, zscki, sssnmmmmm, sxxt!
Fuse blown. Vision cut.
Blackout.
Evelyn came out of the Fallen Moon, to watch Nola’s car moving away from the curb. She rubbed at her eyes where they stung, and shed tears.
She had seen too much this evening.
Still halfway disbelieving, still in awe.
The glamacam warm in her hands.
Fingers atingle, the tips smeared with colour.
Memory glow.
Nola drove on, pushing the car to its limits.
No destination.
The only lights around coming from nocturnal tattoo shacks and all-night pharmacies, each neon pulse and strobe hitting like a crackle show, shining from a borderline.
Sun Plague remedies on sale here. Guaranteed results! No prescriptions needed.
Dead shine in Nola’s eyes.
Feeling cut off from herself, not quite contained by her own skin. She was a living ghost moving through a series of separate countries, seeking peace, but each country along the way governed by weird laws and weirder people, and herself the weirdest of them all.
Tired. So tired. Need to rest. Need to...
The car was drifting along by its own instruction.
It was time to find a place to crawl to, to crawl into. Somewhere unknown.
Rethink, recharge.
She pulled into the forecourt of the next place that came in view, a small crumbling hotel on a street with only half a name.
Here now. To sleep.
The old man behind the desk looked at her like he knew her from somewhere in a past life but couldn’t quite remember when or where. One other person: a solitary man sitting in reception. Young. Neatly dressed. He too stared at her. Somewhat nervous, but like he had the right to stare, as though he owned a part of her already. Nola knew the look. He was viewing her as public property.
She ordered a tray of sandwiches and a coffee and then retreated to her room. Tiny and damp, candlewick spread, the sheets extra tight on the bed. Tepid hot water the colour of rust from pipes that clanked and rang. The food was fine, the coffee better for being cheap and strong, but there was a moment when she almost didn’t keep the meal down. But no, her stomach had this urge, a need for fuel. She gulped it. Stench and taste jarring her tongue but that was good, her metabolism like an animal living inside, needing to be fed.