LOOK AT ME -- an experimental AI illustrated short story

LOOK AT ME 

Gary Fry

 

... an experimental AI illustrated short story ...

The last thing he could remember was stepping out of the TV studio and heading for his Porsche. Then there was only darkness … until now. As he struggled to open his eyes, a terrible pain in his skull suggested that he’d been hit so hard he’d lost consciousness. But who would want to do such a thing to him, and why? More to the point, where the hell had he been taken? He sure as hell wasn’t in the leather padded bucket seat of his car right now.

Eventually he managed to gain some vision, bleary yet true. The surface of a sizeable table floated into view, and he used it to push himself upright, unmindful of the clanking as he did so. The chair in which he sat creaked as he straightened, too, sounding like every bone in his body under protest.

He squinted as he accustomed himself to the whiteness of his surroundings – a smallish room, close horizons, and no obvious signs of a doorway, though one might be behind him. But he wasn’t inclined to check, because now the figure seated opposite had claimed his attention.

It resembled a scarecrow, its body stuffed with either straw or balled up paper. Its arms were clothed in an aged shirt and hung lax; its shoulders slumped at an uneven angle. He couldn’t see its legs beneath the table, or the chair it occupied. But he had full view of its head. It was covered by an inverted sackcloth bag with two holes in the front to reveal eyes. Both diseased globes – muddy whites, dark irises, shrunken pupils – glared his way, stark and glassy, untroubled by moisture.

Disturbed and still in pain, he tried to flee. Although he could rise from his chair, that was as far as he got: both wrists and ankles were shackled, a metal hoop encircling them and linked to a chain which ran off into one of the four upper corners of the room. Each was attached to some sort of meter, a black box with rolling numbers in a little window at the front. He shuffled anxiously, a metallic whisper of his chains the only noise marring the room’s silence. He looked around, seeing no door in the one wall that hadn't endured his scrutiny earlier. Despite his unsteady breathing, he wondered what any of this meant.

By now his mental focus had returned in full force and he realised he’d made a mistake earlier. The room wasn’t perfectly white, after all – a glass dome, foggily discoloured, rose maybe a foot above the centre of the ceiling. If he could get up there, he might look outside and determine where on earth he was.

Ignoring the figure on the other side of the table, which continued to glare with implacable relentlessness, he turned to address the chair he’d previously occupied. It was a basic wooden model, four legs, a back, and no arms. Hampered as he was by the chain, he was still able to manoeuvre his feet and hands with some skill – a professional dancer for many years, his limbs were nimble – and he managed to lift the chair and place it squarely on the tabletop. That done, he clambered up to stand on both items of furniture to see beyond his place of confinement.

He was at first disappointed to find darkness in every direction. But then he squeezed shut his eyes, shook his head free of more pain, and looked again. Murky shapes took gradual form, in locations that corresponded with the room’s corners, all about thirty yards away. The harder he squinted, the clearer he could see four tiny living rooms, elevated in the dark. Each resembled the one in his childhood home, when he’d first grown aware of his great ambition. Although none had any walls, all boasted a couch and an armchair with a coffee table between them, a lamp, a rug, and a TV illuminating much around it. Vague figures, plump and ill-dressed, sat slumped in the rooms, their heads pointed the way of the TVs.

Why, this was like a facsimile of his working-class upbringing, his parents ever fixated by media. The one difference was a kind of metal chute no wider than a coin secured to each of the coffee tables; these ran away from the rooms and directly towards the one in which he was bizarrely imprisoned.

Confusion and disquiet suddenly caused him to lose his balance; he hadn’t realised quite how concussed he’d been. He dropped back to the floor, his chains jangling manically in the silence. What the hell was going on? He stood to twist and turn, looking every which way, finding nothing new, just the blankly indifferent white walls.

So, how had he been delivered here? He recalled again the chat-show interview he’d given at the TV studio, promoting his latest one-man dancing spectacular. He was very popular with the public, who’d fully embraced his larger-than-life talent. But he knew there were others in his life who, for one reason or another, had taken against his aspirations. 

He shouldn’t think about that now. He needed to escape his surreal captivity. But how might that be managed? The hoops around his wrists and ankles were tight enough to hurt, the small meters holding the far ends of the chains refusing to yield when he tugged and yanked at them. Once he regained his steady breathing, he righted the toppled chair and sat once more. He must think, think. The more he did so, however, the closer he felt scrutinised: indeed, that stuffed figure across the table simply wouldn’t take its eyes off him. He felt his heart-rate rising.

“What are you looking at? Huh? Huh?”

The engine in his chest, every bit as honed and powerful as his Porsche, achieved maximum revs and he lurched forwards to attack the thing. But his restraints prevented him from doing so, jerking back his arms an agonising inch shy of the figure’s head. All the same, he could now observe its stare more closely. And were those twin globes really unseeing? Hanging before it by his chains, amid the ongoing silence, had he just heard tiny mechanical whirs, the kind usually indicating a precision instrument adjusting – a lens? Or maybe even two of them?

He looked closer still. As he pushed his face forwards, was he seeing the figure’s pupils dilate, as if widening to achieve more accurate focus? The irises were too dark to say for sure, but at that moment he had an idea. It was a troubling notion, without question, but given the unlikeliness of his situation, would it really be surprising?

Nodding as if to confirm his suspicions, he eased back. Having returned to his original position in the room, he started to dance. It was what he felt he’d been put on earth to do, the gift having manifested early in life, when he’d been unpopular at school. He’d soon humbled doubters – his bullying dad, his indifferent mum, all the kids who’d mocked him in playgrounds – achieving fame in his teens and a fortune in his twenties. And if he’d upset people along his way to inevitable stardom, so it went. A big ego was essential for success. Belief in oneself. A little bit of arrogance.

Despite the enforced limitations engendered by the chains, he danced and danced, performing some of his most inventive stationary routines. The onlooking figure’s head bobbed in appreciation, though perhaps only in response to the draft he worked up with his ceaseless motion. If there were more mechanical whirs from inside the sackcloth bag, he was unable to hear them above the clatter of his feet, the swish of his legs, his arms jerking back and forth with perfectly choreographed style.

One minute passed … and another … and then many more. He danced and danced and danced. All the while, he upheld the notion that his actions would yield results, and after about a quarter of an hour, during which he expended almost every ounce of energy he could muster, he wasn’t disappointed.

One of the four chains – restraining his left arm – fell away from one of the room’s upper corners, hitting the floor with a fierce clang. It had been promptly ejected from that small meter-like box whose rolling figures had now changed, almost certainly hitting a pre-programmed target. He was still manacled, but the chain was slack now. Pausing a moment in his impromptu performance, he heard another sound, an incessant muffled scraping which increased in volume, as if something moved with inexorable haste along a perfectly sized groove.

He’d been right in his intuitions. His dance was impressing the viewers outside, their TVs broadcasting footage from the scarecrow’s camera-loaded eyes. They were showing appreciation by feeding coins into the narrow chutes connecting their rooms to this one, each of which fed the elevated meters. When the accumulating sum reached a specific amount, his restraints would be released. One had already fallen, but there were still three to go. And all he must do was dance some more, offering similar pleasure – the kind he’d always known he could bring to the world – to the remaining audience out there in the dark.

He went on and on, jigging and strutting and cavorting. Nobody could match him at his best, and he now discovered that disquiet had elevated his skills, bringing a greater fluency to his frantic motions. He danced like a dervish, a religious zealot. Time seemed to pass like some hurtling spacecraft.

Then … another chain was released, this time the one hampering his right leg. That allowed him to expand his repertoire, making even more effusive moves for his adoring onlookers. Their feedback was almost instantaneous: first his other arm was freed, and then the remaining leg. Each chain fell to the floor with a mighty thump. Finally, he was free.

          All the same, there was still the task of escaping the room. Despite realising the futility of doing so, he glanced again at the four walls, one after the other. But apart from the now superfluous meters, each bore nothing but painted blankness. The only explanation for his arrival must therefore be through the dome above; perhaps it lifted like a lid.

Rebuking himself for not having had the gumption to check this earlier, he hoisted the chair once more on top of the table, the lax chains jangling as they dragged. He felt a sudden rage at whoever had placed him here in this dilemma. In fact, before remounting that elevated chair, he rushed around the table and, in a fit of irrationality, ripped the sackcloth bag from the stuffed figure’s head.

          The only thing inside were eyeballs, maybe a hundred of them, stacked together to form a crude sphere. Some gazed inwards, their severed optic nerves trailing like clots of hair; others looked directly out, just like the two almost certainly loaded with cameras had, their dark pupils staring. Some species of intracranial jelly held the mass in place, this headful of plucked-out eyeballs, gazing nightmarishly in all directions …

He stepped back from the unhooded scarecrow, appalled, and not just at the disgust the naked skull of eyes had engendered, for reasons he couldn’t quite define. He focused anew on the task of fleeing. With the tension gone from the chains, it was a simple act to leap onto the table and then the chair and, shrugging the tassels of the chains aside, at last jam his hands against the glass high up.

          It wouldn’t budge; it was jammed tight, the frame possibly even welded shut. He pushed and punched out at it, but nothing worked. Sweat rolled down his face; frustration made his skin burn. But however hard he tried, he couldn’t get the dome to rise an inch. Halting with irrepressible gasps, he glanced again outside.

The distant living rooms remained, each mini portraits of a pathetic humdrum life he had sworn never to fall foul of. Nevertheless, all were now vacant, their shadowy tenants having departed elsewhere, maybe to similarly dark-enshrouded bedrooms to commit equivalently decadent acts of joy. The TVs must have been extinguished, as the blackness all around had almost entirely engulfed each room.

          “Let me out!” he called, slapping the glass again and again. “Do you know who I am?! Haven’t I just entertained you?!”

          He had a sense that nobody would hear him even if they’d been present, but just then he detected a noise from elsewhere. There was a protracted creak, followed by a vacuum gulp of space gradually being revealed. Disorientation made him first look up at the darkness overhead, but that was when his bewildered ears identified the source: it came from below.

He looked that way. An opening had appeared in the room’s floor, a single panel about three-feet square tilting downwards. The furniture on which he perched stood directly above it and was now yielding … yielding … and soon gone down the vertical tunnel that had finally been exposed.

          With nothing to take hold of – in a moment of spiking terror, he certainly tried – he followed, plunging into the waiting throat with dismaying plumbness, his train of chains following without collision.

          He fell. And fell. Long seconds seemed to drag by. And still he fell. He had time to experience the fall, to study it almost. He felt suddenly cold in the plunging tunnel. An organic scent of living, or at least recently deceased, flesh assailed him. But that was all he was allowed by way of sensation before he hit his destination with an almost endless squelchy thump.

His body was slowed but didn’t instantly stop, whatever had cushioned the blow serving as a de-accelerant, breaking his fall only gradually. A moment later he did cease moving, and although his limbs encountered a sluggish resistance which was more than the chains snagging, he found, barging aside the jettisoned table and chair, that he could clamber and crawl his way to the top of a mountain of whatever encased him in its profuse wet constituents.

There were hundreds of the snooker-ball things, perhaps thousands, possibly even more. As he gasped for breath to assist his manoeuvre, one briefly entered his mouth, but he quickly spat it out as it tasted as sulphurous as blood and had boasted something like an eel’s tail. Finally, he reached the surface of this lumpen slush, and his vision was assisted by what little light the chamber it occupied could offer.

It wasn’t much … but it was enough. Enough to show him a landscape packed with socket-less eyeballs.

He screamed, flailing his dancer’s limbs, the chains rattling and prattling. Horror rising, he somehow stroked and crawled towards the source of light he’d detected moments earlier, off to his right where more glass seemed to wait with a shiny invitation. Having swept aside countless armfuls of detached human eyes, kicking others behind him as he advanced with escalating disgust, he located a small platform, as black as all the space around the room he’d escaped, forming the base of a large transparent pane.

Wiping so many fluids from his face, he tugged himself free of that swamp full of failed vision, sitting for a moment on the dark perch. He steadied his heartrate, wondering not only who would do this terrible thing to him, but also how they’d rigged up such a perverse location full of grotesque artefacts. It must be a warehouse, he fancied, or maybe an aircraft hanger: the room, that tunnel, and now this chamber of ocular horrors! And had he finally reached its exit?

He leaned back, felt the sheet of glass press reassuringly against his spine, and pictured daylight beyond, the world as he’d once known it, where he was famous and adored, at least by those who didn’t know him personally. Yes, his ruthless ambition, his look-at-me attitude, had made him enemies along the way, but that could change. He’d felt as if he’d learned a lesson here and no mistake. He’d been humbled. And so, with incongruous gratitude, hoisting the chains of his former captivity, he stood and turned to look through the waiting window.

Only the planet earth glared back at him. Around it was just a blackness marred only the bright sun half-hidden by the globe’s rim: the source of illumination by which he’d navigated here. If he’d felt disturbed during every part of his ordeal so far, he now experienced terror. Was he onboard some form of spacecraft? But that made no sense at all. No, it had to be special effects, he thought with sudden urgency, slapping at the screen, wondering how its ingenious manufacturers had rendered imagery projected upon it so realistically distant. He moved left and then right; the planet directly up ahead didn’t shift at all. The whole wide world, the one he’d once felt such a master of, glared implacably back – like a huge eyeball, in fact.

It was real. Oh God, this was real. And now all he could do was wait for the sun still moving behind to draw a shadow across it like a lid, plunging him into the blackness of cosmic obscurity.