Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

subconscious message is so powerful that the reader has to obey whatever is written in it?”
    “To hear is to obey,” Marcus said.
    “To see is to obey,” Luka corrected. “Shut up, you guys, Ethan has something here.” He was wagging a finger at unseen choirs of Muses, sucking in his lower lip, and gazing at the bottom right quadrant of heaven as he did when the creative saps were flowing in him.
    “Are there, in fact, whole families of these things, out there, in there, somewhere; pure refined forms of what we have been talking about. Visual”—he caught at words—“entities that the conscious mind can’t process, that slip past our powers of rationality and discrimination and stimulate direct, physical responses. Like joy, or anger, or religious ecstasy, like getting high. Or even entirely new altered states of consciousness.”
    “Buddhist mandalas are supposed to open the mind to nirvana,” Masahiko threw in. “Perhaps mandalas, abstract art, different styles of typography, all contain hints, diluted forms of these things Eth’s talking about. The true visual entities, the pure forms, the absolute forms, await to be seen, synthesized, isolated.”
    “ ‘Lost Acres,’ ” ’Becca said. “An old poem by Robert Graves, I think. Didn’t they teach you anything at school?”
    “Wanking mostly,” said Marcus. “And how to roll joints one-handed.”
    “Shows. ‘Lost Acres’ is about how small parts of the landscape disappeared due to surveying errors. I’m not exactly sure how, but bits of fields, lanes, hedgerows, woods, got folded up and never appeared on the maps. On the map, A-ville will be right next to B-town; on the ground, there could be entire geographies in between.”
    “Hidden realities. Bit Swords’n’Sorcery for me,” Marcus said.
    “Like these entities may be the lost acres of the mind, things that have been overlooked by the higher consciousness; that it can’t see them, can’t process them, fills in the space where they are by folding up the visual map around them, putting things on either side next to each other, like the blind spot in the eye.” ’Becca again.
    “Perhaps they all exist in the blind spot,” Masahiko said. “Perhaps that’s what the blind spot is, the part of the eye that registers these visual entities the mind can’t see.”
    “Like the way the natural world embeds complex chaotic forms, like fractals, or the Mandelbrot set, that we find difficult to process,” Ethan said.
    “Maybe consciousness is nothing more than a filtering mechanism so that we can go about our daily lives without being blinded by the constant light of God,” Luka said.
    “Hey hey hey hey,” Marcus interrupted. “This is getting the teeniest bit scary, boys and girls.”
    That night the marina burned. All the Nineteenth House and its neighbors in the unit turned out to watch the blaze and pass around cocktails and binoculars.
    “Pure fucking apocalypse, the biggest burn since the Spanish Armada and I can’t find my fucking palmcorder!” Luka screamed in frustration. Someone was wheeling out a barbecue. Up on the road behind the Nineteenth House, the car headlights were nose to tail.
    “What we were saying this afternoon,” Marcus confided to Ethan. “I think I know how it could be done. Expert systems sift images, locate those areas that embed this nonconscious stimulus thing, stack them to isolate common factors, and image-processing software amplifies and enhances them.” Ethan was less than half listening to Marcus’s evangelism, hot dogs and curled-up burgers were going round; Nikki Ring had brought out a beatbox. The flames were now throwing themselves thirty to forty meters into the hot summer night. A gasp from the assembled spectators: a gas cylinder had gone up with a scream and starburst like a rocket. Not even the Coronation fireworks had been this good.
    “They reckon it’s terrorists,” said Masahiko, accepting something vaguely vodka-ey/orangey