Third Eye Blind

I spent my entire life in rooms the size of a shoe box.

Every time I got in trouble, they managed to find a smaller one to put me in. One of them was the size of a coffin.

I didn’t like the coffin one.

I spent my entire life getting corrected.

Told I’m just too damn much.

Reminded that I’m too damn much with a quick smack up whenever someone felt the need.

And why? Not because I couldn’t win fights.

Because I didn’t have rights.

I didn’t have a right to get upset if someone beat me up.

That was my job. That was my place.

In a masculine world, Meridian, Zolotov, even parts of Thread. Might made right.

I wasn’t mighty enough to fight for my rights, and even if I could, there weren’t any at the end of that road for me to claim.

I lived in a very easy binary kind of math.

Ones were everyone. Zeroes were clones.

It was simple.

So I took it.

Sure, I ran my mouth. That’s the only thing they couldn’t take from me. Mido used to beat the shit out of me just to get me to stop talking.

I wouldn’t.

“I say what I want.”

“Then you’re asking for more pain.”

And he would give me a nice heaping helping of it. With seconds.

All of that was my life. Floating high above this.

I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or cry.

“This is your house!?” I yelled finally, after I’d walked from room to room, numb.

Dvar was sitting at the breakfast bar in his opulent kitchen, swiping through his smart phone.

I was walking around with my mouth wide open, my amber eyes flicking around this Indo-Japanese interior design magazine he lived in.

“Yep.” Dvar said, still swiping on his phone, nibbling at a bowl of fruit.

“I only see this stuff online, man.” I said, after I walked into the kitchen. It took me a full twenty minutes to see it all.

And he didn’t stop me.

Where was I going to go anyway?

I literally came with a receipt.

I walked around the entire estate, the square shaped house had four structures connected by long hallways. Each one had a door in the middle leading into the courtyard at the center of the house.

If you could call that a courtyard.

It was more like a zen garden in the middle of an estate.

“Why would you be looking at other people’s houses online?”

I glared at him.

“Look. We’re not all able, alright?” I said, gesturing at his lovely estate as if to say ‘this is only boring to you’.

“Ability is rarely the issue.” He responded, eating a piece of cantaloupe.

“This isn’t about to be one of those ‘people choose to be poor’ speeches is it?”

“Luck. Actually.”

“Oh. Yeah...” I shrugged.

“A lot of genius is misattributed gains granted by luck. I’m no exception.”

I stepped further into the kitchen and took a seat opposite him at the two way breakfast bar. Without asking I reached into his bowl, grabbing a pear half.

His eyes followed my hand down to his bowl. Then up to my mouth.

He watched me bite it.

I didn’t care.

“I didn’t eat anything. I was actually gonna go—…” I stopped chewing.

“I said Benny owes me free lunch.” He said, staring at me.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means I was offering you lunch.” He said, biting a piece of fruit.

“No. You said somebody owes you lunch. How was I supposed to assume that includes me?”

“… You’re assuming I’d chain you to the hydrant outside?”

“Would you chain me to the hydrant outside?”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t assume you meant me too.”

Dvar squinted at me.

Tilted his head.

Shifted in his seat to get more comfortable.

And then sparks flew in my vision. It was the fourth of July in my skull while someone ran sandpaper across the side of my face.

Twenty thousand miniature cats were fighting on the side of my jaw.

I could feel the sun coming down from the sky to rest inches from me as I laid on the ground, basking in its cruelty.

Drying.

Withering.

Dead.

No, wait. He slapped me so hard I started hallucinating.

I was on the floor in the kitchen, crumpled up against the bottom of the refrigerator.

Being a Dharma Yog that meant blades couldn’t pierce us, bullets couldn’t stab us and knives wouldn’t cut us. That meant the only way to ring our bell was with concussive force.

A thing we all mastered. Body strength. Impact. Even the Punch Cannon fired Resonance Rounds that didn’t kill.

They kicked like a mule.

They kicked like getting slapped in the face by a six-foot-five-inch, muscled grizzly bear who’d gotten tired of my shit again.

“F… fuck…”

“Please keep your hands out of my food. I won’t ask again."

“Oh…” I grunted. “I thought it was something I said.”

“Are you hungry?” He asked.

His calm was unshaken.

“…Yeah…” I said, still sprawled on the floor, my voice a tiny, uncomfortable croak as my vision returned.

Least I sounded a lot better.

“I’ll be in the car.”

And then he was gone.

I laid on the kitchen floor for a long while. My only line of defense and defiance in such a humiliating moment.

I distinctly thought if I stayed there long enough, I wouldn’t have to smell his cologne leaving the room.

Up there, at nose height. But then it wafted down to me and I closed my eyes, breathing it in.

It really did smell good.

I really laid there and forgot for a split second that he just fired on me like the civil war.

I wondered how long this would go on. Would this really be my life? For the rest of it? Living in mouthy but fearful situations, moment to moment, not knowing if he was going to laugh or bully me?

Wanting him to bully me?

Hating myself for wanting that?

I pictured what my trauma would look like if it was an actual person sitting on the actual couch. I didn’t want to glamorize it. I just wanted to think about it.

Really.

I couldn’t act like it wasn’t there. Even now, laying on the kitchen floor in absolute silence, my head was full of the sounds of anger. Screaming. Growing up in a masculine madhouse, hearing other boys going mad in their coffin rooms. The ghosts of their wails echoing in my memories.

People always screamed at me.

Every time I got something wrong.

Not the instructors. They were silent. Silently judging me. Expressing disappointment in any and everything I did. Never good enough. Ranking every failure on me and issuing punishment callously.

They gaslit us into thinking we were garbage unworthy of love.

We were soldiers who lived to die.

“You do not feel pain. You do not need sleep. You do not need love. You do not need kindness. You are the thing that takes. You are the thing that eats. You are paid to destroy. You are paid to bring ruin. And when you are paid, you take your misery with you when you leave. There is nothing more glorious and hated than a warrior who does what he is told. What is your dharma?”

The sick pledge they made us all pledge.

At 9-years-old.

They taught us how to make money hurting and killing. But never how to spend it…

I had more money than I knew what to do with. Which honestly wasn’t much. Everything I made went to The Silence.

I got an allowance.

It gave me stomachaches if I spent any of it. It had to be something I really, really wanted or I just wouldn’t.

Like, I was terrified that the only thing that gave me value, proof that I could succeed, was getting spent.

But then there was the rest. The social game they force you into.

Leaving you to defend yourself in a school full of young egos all fighting for hierarchy. To prove dominance. They tied our value to currency so heavily we would argue and fight over who had more. Living and working together, bragging about how much we had earned, how much suffering we inflicted to prove we were good sons of The Silence. Over half of us clones, the other half left over war orphans.

A society of boys terrorizing each other for supremacy. Forming cliques. Jumping each other in secret. Then you turn eighteen and they move you in with the adults.

And the game escalates.

When I got my own frigate assigned to me for the first time, I would impulse shop on shoes so my balance was always lower than most. But even with what remained, I didn’t know what I’d do with it. I’d never be able to buy freedom, so why did it matter?

If it wasn’t shoes, I didn’t have an identity.

If it wasn’t for money, I had less than that.

I needed more of it just to prove I wasn’t a loser.

The circular nature of my life.

Pathetic.

I hated that about myself.

When you’re the smallest, everyday someone screams at you. Roaring in your face. Telling you why you failed.

A new black eye before the old one healed.

A new reason to go to the tissue clinic.

All of it rattled around in my head.

Chatter in the skull.

I sat up quickly, realizing I’d rabbit holed.

“Shit!” I hurried, scuttling, stumbling, falling over a chair to get to the door.

I ran to it and snatched it open.

Just as Dvar had gotten annoyed and come back.

He reached for the handle as it opened.

My eyes went tea cup sized.

His hand was on my throat faster than I could protest. Mercifully he didn’t clutch it. He instead used my neck like a handle, pulled me aside, yanked the door closed and slammed my back against it.

“Uugh!” My teeth clacked together.

“I’ve been sitting in the car for twenty minutes, Boy-Boy.” His mouth was tight. He was irritated. I wasn’t going to correct his taunted ‘boy-boy’. Even though it made me want to punch him in one of his coffee colored eyes.

“I…” If I said the wrong thing I was gonna get fucked up.

I could feel it.

“You?” He asked.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Think of something. My eyes were wide. My lip trembled.

“I… I…”

“You?” He calmly asked again.

Citrus notes tickled my nose, spiking the fear clawing up my spine.

I pinched both of my eyes shut, “I don’t know what happened I just started thinking about a buncha dumb stuff and time got away from me?”

Silence.

I opened one eye.

He blew a sigh and let my throat go, turning to walk back to the car.

“Hurry up.”

“What…?” The word left my mouth a whisper. My face was torn up with confusion.

“Thank you.” He grunted as he hopped over the driver’s side door to get in.

“Telling the truth works…?”

Since when?

I ended up getting the quietest car ride of my life.

The funny thing was, it was as loud as could be. Filled with all the things that would have been said had I not irritated him first. He let me stew in it. For nine minutes as we moved in his convertible through Thread.

My amber eyes ping-ponged around at all of the sights of this amazing city I’d never set foot in, just stared at through a telescope when I was allowed. Or saw it on video.

Dreaming from afar about what it would be like to be down here.

Like a normal person.

I wanted to be normal so bad.

He had a big, shiny, wide bodied thing.

His car, I mean.

Real Miami.

Or Thread I should say.

Kinda hard telling them apart from a post card. At least the beautiful parts. Thread liked to hide her ghettos pretty good and by the time you knew you were in one, the Yakuza or the street gangs would come for you. Naga Gita was one of many, though the biggest now. There was occasionally turf war.

I got a reminder of that when we pulled up to a stop sign. I looked over at it, but Dvar looked the other way.

I leaned forward to see what he was looking at, taking my eyes off of the peculiar octagon with lights framing it, flashing on and off. What ended up catching my eye was an Asian man in the front seat of another convertible. With three other Asian men in the car with him.

Two of them were shirtless, Tattoos all over, from neck to chest, the other two had similar tattoos but ones that disappeared inside of their shirts. There were no words exchanged but I could tell they weren’t friends. They reinforced that by giving us a dirty look.

Dvar turned his head back forward and gave a confident smirk.

“Silent stares.” He said, pulling off of the stop sign in no particular hurry.

“Stares?”

“Yeah.” He said, and for another long moment he was silent.

At least he said something to me. I kinda felt somewhat better about that.

“Sorry.”

“For?”

“Making you wait.”

“I knew you were going to do that,” He said casually, turning his big, pretty car left at a lit intersection.

“Where are we going?”

“You haven’t eaten, right?”

I stared at the side of his face, my eyebrows knitting together.

“I mean, I know we’re going to get food… like… where?”

“Wok and Roll.”

My eyebrows tightened more, but I smiled a little. “Full disclosure. I’ve never been down here before. Every time I’m coming back home, I make plans … I tell myself I’m gonna do it. But every time I don’t.”

“I know.”

“What? How?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“Implanted memory. They make you guys scared to not follow orders.”

“You gonna tell me my life is a lie now?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

“You’re a clone. Your life is always a lie… But no.” He offered, taking another slow turn, both of us looking to the right as we moved onto the expressway.

From up here as we curved high over the city I could see everything in his nearby area. Big donut shop. Lots of restaurants. There was a park down on the right that had an odd looking fountain.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?”

“Oh. Thread Fountain. I dunno how they thought anybody would see a squiggly line as a thread, but… that’s what they decided to do. I don’t make the rules, Kiddo.”

“That’s stupid…”

“Yup,” Dvar said, reaching over and giving my left knee a playful squeeze. “That’s how they keep us guessing.” He chuckled, merging into traffic as his car picked up speed.

I was more surprised he touched me and it didn’t hurt. Just firm pressure from one of those big hands.

Several other convertibles were on the road and it made sense. Thread’s weather was always the same. Beautiful with no chance of rain.

There were no weathermen on this planet.

Least not any who weren’t on drugs… The hell else were they gonna do?

“So what’s up with the planted memory thing?”

“I should say planted wants more like. What do they feed you on Meridian?”

“A really boring, really balanced diet. Like, really boring. I get whatever I want when I complete a mission or when I get something right. Which ain’t often.” I added, “But I always wanna go down to Thread- here, I mean, and go to-…”

“Get butter chicken and ramen.”

My eyebrows quivered, my head jarring back slightly from realization.

“… Yeah…” I said, “How’d you…”

“So why haven’t you?” He interrupted.

“I-…d…” I had to think about that. My eyes blinked rapidly. Then they clocked about in thought. “I dunno. Just never got around to it.”

“How do you know what it even tastes like?”

“I remember having it before.”

“Do you?”

I had to take a moment and recall my life. All of it. I remember the taste of butter chicken and ramen but I’ve never been anywhere except Meridian and wherever my supply missions took me. I even fought in the last parts of the separatist war when Thread got her independence.

I literally fought for a place I’d never been.

But I remembered the truth of it.

And it hurt.

“No…” The word came out hollow as reality sunk in. The only thing I’d ever known was torture and the back of Mido’s hand when he got tired of my mouth. Of bland Meridian health food.

I could count on one hand how many times I’d had something sweet.

Or a piece of candy.

God, they wouldn’t even give a kid a piece of candy.

My eyes moved about, considering that.

Dvar reached over into the glove box at the next stop light and removed something. I wasn’t paying attention, I was still deep in thought. I felt his middle finger tap my forehead.

Suddenly the world around us came to life.

My eyes went to work dissecting it all. Rapidly absorbing information. It was overwhelming but I liked it. Thread was so much more than just a beautiful coastal city-bowl. It was alive with digital life.

Signs moved, fake ocean waves blasted rocks in floating digital images to the left and the right of the highway, advertising fruit juice. The road itself was alive with lights, leading us where we needed to go, directing the other cars in traffic.

Even when I looked upward at the sky lanes, forty ornately Indo-Japanese zeppelins slowly scooted through the sky, their massive balloons digitally altered to look like cloud plumes.

One was a big orange and I couldn’t help but remember Dvar’s cologne.

“Wow…” I smiled.

Then I realized he’d stuck a third eye to my forehead.

A temporary one. A slim bit of bronze tin foil in the form of a circle that adhered smoothly. But I could see it all now. The digital underpinning that made Thread what she was.

Even when I turned to look at Dvar his clothing was alive. Little lines of light moving along the seams, lit up in his signature shade of deep orange. His entire jacket blazed, even his tattoos outlined themselves once in a while in a quick little run of dark orange.

“The tailor I ordered can outfit you with a permanent one. For now, use that.”

“That is so cool…” I said, watching his clothes. “How come my clothes don’t do that?!”

“Because your clothes are probably replicate substrate on Meridian. Or from the real where they get them cheap. Remember, The Silence didn’t get rich off hand outs.”

“Yeah… there’s not exactly a lot of options, but I pick what works. They let me buy sneakers when I go to the real.” I pointed out.

“You can buy sneakers on Thread.”

“What!? No way… like classic earth sneakers from the real?! There’s this place in New Kyoto I get classics from. They even restyle them for you. It costs SO much money. These ones,” I excitedly pointed at my Jordan Concorde 11s, lifting one up onto Dvar’s dash.

He quickly swatted my foot down.

“Sorry- these ones? Cost me like 9k!”

“That’s a lotta scratch for a pair of shoes. They’re like 2k here.”

“No way!”

“Yeah, way.” Dvar said, his voice no way near as excited as mine. “Do me a favor?”

“Huh?” I asked, looking at him like a kid at his favorite baseball player.

“Keep your feet off my dash.” Dvar said, pulling us into the parking lot of Wok and Roll.

I could smell the food already and it made my stomach groan in complaint.

In the real, food options were there, but sparse. Most of the cuisine had shifted to what they could grow in the aftermath. Lot of mushrooms, beans, vegetation that could grow in the harshest of climates.

Corn for example. And of course goat.

All the goat you could eat. One of the few remaining, mass producible animals.

Pretty much everything was goat, rabbit, chicken or fish.

I tended to eat a lot of chicken and fish. When it was available.

On Thread, everything seemed available.

But then something hit me.

“Why do I like butter chicken and ramen?”

“All clones like butter chicken and ramen. Why do you think I know your favorite food?”

Something about that realization felt cold and unfair.

If I was just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy from a server.

Who served a different purpose.

Do I die nameless, or come back as a different version?

“Existential dread later, Cutie.”

His finger caught my chin, snatching me out of my head, forcing me to look at him. I snapped out of reverie to focus on his eyes.

“I’m starving.”

Then he was out of the car. I followed him with my eyes, catching the scent of orange citrus and followed.