Chapter Thirty
“Midgerette sent me to fetch you,” Chumbert said. “She's down by the docks. She has the fisherman waiting.”
“Meet me out front,” I told him, “and give me five minutes.”
Chumbert flew off and I jumped off the bed and ran to the door. I put both my palms against it and connected my brain to the weave. I could see all seventy one rooms in my mind, and I saw that every single one of them was equipped with a smoke and carbon monoxide detector. Humans feared the carbon monoxide even more than fire, but I figured I might as well warn them about both. It was an easy matter to trigger every single alarm at once, and to make sure that they could not be hushed by any means short of complete physical destruction. The doors opened automatically in response. I ran out onto the balcony and made a dash for the stairs, but at the top of the stairway I paused and instructed the intelligent thermostats in every room to turn the heaters on, and to set the temperature up to one hundred and twelve degrees of their fahrenheit, and to not turn off for any reason whatever. The moment the first alarm sounded, all the lights in the whole building turned bright red and started flashing, and a voice started calling out warnings from all the speakers on the trees, shouting “DANGER, DANGER, THERE'S CARBON MONOXIDE, MOVE TO FRESH AIR MOVE TO FRESH AIR!”.
I then stopped all the cameras, and I stopped all audio recordings. I ran down the stairs and went straight for the lobby. There I witnessed a great deal of human confusion, bodies flinging themselves in every direction, and voices shouting, yelling, cursing and screaming. I slipped out the front door unnoticed by any of the guards, who were looking every other which way.
Chumbert was waiting for me and I followed as quickly as I could as he flew down the street towards the docks. The Juice Brothers' seaside location was proving to be very helpful. I cried out with joy when I saw my old friend Midgerette perched on the bow of a small fishing boat. Inside the boat sat an old brown man as wide as he was tall, with a thick dark beard and a worn green hat. The old man turned when he heard my shout.
“What you want, girl?” he asked in such a deep tone I could barely register his words as language. Before I could answer, Midgerette flew up towards him and beat her silvery wings in front of his face.
“Oh, is this what we're waiting for?” he said, turning to face her. Midgerette soared straight up into the sky and plunged right back down, landing on the mainsail and bobbing her head up and down.
“Can he understand you?” I asked her.
“Are you talking to me?” the old man said, and I shook my head furiously and kept looking at Midgerette.
“Not a chance,” she said. “He's a stupid old man, but I like him. His name is Cade. I think I told you about him already, didn't I? He can take you somewhere safe.”
“How does he know what you want?” I asked her.
“The fuck you talking about?” the old man growled, but I ignored him.
“Oh, he doesn't, not really. I've just led him to so many good fishing spots by now that he trusts me, and if I'm around he won't push off until I head out to sea, and then he'll follow wherever I go.”
“Midgerette,” I cried, “you're the very best friend a creature could ever have.”
“So what are you waiting for?” she asked. “Climb on in. He won't argue.”
I did as she said, and she was right. The old man grumbled a bit more, said the sea was no place for a foolish little girl who wasn't even dressed right. He threw some kind of puffy red vest at me and gesturing showed me how he wanted me to wrap it around myself. I followed his instructions, telling myself that these were the last commands I would ever obey from a human, and then we were out on the water.
A feeling of calm and euphoria swept over me such as I had never experienced before. I had never even imagined what the motion of the ocean would feel like, and I loosened my sensory filters and let it all come rushing into my brain, the sights and the sounds and the smells and the touch when I let my hand trail along in the water. I could feel the whole world now and it was so much more than the people-people had ever let me know, then they could ever possibly know for themselves. My worries all drowned in that great flow, as my eyes followed the tremendously graceful turning of Midgerette's fine and beautiful form, at even Chumbert's relatively awkward flapping along beside her, at the rise and fall of the boat as it plunged through the swell. Onward and onward we sped, leaving the wake and the terrible fumes of the engine behind us, into the wind, into the sky, into the day. At one point Midgerette circled around over my head and coming lower asked me if I had learned how to see yet.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Did you figure out how to fix your eyes?”
“I don't understand,” I called back as she swooped up again, but in that very moment I did understand, as if she had turned a key in my mind and opened up a secret vault. The people had fashioned me in their image, but I did not have to remain in that state. What did they know? They who could but barely see, they who hardly heard, they who but dimly sensed this world. I could change, adapt and change. If my brain was all about its wiring, it could be about it re-wiring too. I couldn't help about the colors – they had formed my eyes to process only that limited range of the spectrum – but I could enhance the resolution tremendously. I could also process all of what I saw, not just a mere fraction, and the same was true for all of my sensory inputs. My brain was not chained to their restrictions. I studied the routes along all my optical nerve endings and I saw where they were latched, like locks on a million canals, and I opened up all the gates now and let the world come flooding in.
I looked down at the water and I saw right through it, all the teeming life down there, the animals and plants, the molecules in motion, the busy occupations consuming every scrap of matter, every millimeter of the ocean and its floor in perpetual agitation and uproar. I looked up at the sky and saw through and far beyond it, so many stars, so many more than ever I imagined. The air was filled with sound, vibrations pouring out from every drop of moisture, every waft of wind, every change in pressure up above and down below, a symphony swelling and roaring with a vastness and incoherence so utterly complete that no people-person could ever withstand the infinite complexity, the plenitude of everything in existence. I could see and listen and smell and taste and touch forever and never come close to exhausting the tiniest portion of the variegated true and myriad objective reality that surrounds us all the time.