Read Are You There and Other Stories for Free Online Page A

actually.”
    “Where is your husband?”
    “He passed away two years ago.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She was looking at me in a strange way, and it suddenly struck me that she knew what I was. Somehow, people can tell. I started to stand up.
    “Don’t go yet,” she said. “Wait until they come for Buddy. Please?”
    “You’ll be all right by yourself.”
    “Will I?” she said. “I haven’t been all right by myself for a long, long time. You haven’t even told me your name.”
    “It’s Robert.”
    She reached across the table for my hand and we shook. “I’m Kim Pham,” she said. I was aware of the soft coolness of her flesh, the way her eyes swiveled in their wet orbits, the lemon exhalation of her breath.
    “You’re an Eye,” she said.
    I took my hand back.
    “And you’re not on your medication, are you?”
    “It isn’t medication, strictly speaking.”
    “What is it, then?”
    A lie , I thought, but said, “It restores function. Viagra for the emotionally limp, is the joke.”
    She didn’t smile.
    “I know all the jokes,” she said. “My husband was a data analyst on the Tau Boo Project. The jokes aren’t funny.”
    The name Pham didn’t ring any bells, but a lot of people flogged data at the Project.
    “Why don’t you take your Viagra or whatever you want to call it?”
    I shrugged. “Maybe I’m allergic.”
    “Or you don’t trust the emotional and cognitive reality is the same one you possessed before the Tank.”
    I stared at her. She picked up her ice tea and sipped.
    “I’ve read about you,” she said.
    “Really.”
    “Not you in particular. I’ve read about Eyes, the psychological phenomenon.”
    “Don’t forget the sexual mystique.”
    She looked away. I noted the way the musculature of her neck worked, the slight flushing near her hairline. I was concentrating, but knew I was close to slipping away.
    “Being an Eye is not what the public generally thinks,” I said.
    “How is it different?”
    “It’s more terrible.”
    “Tell me.”
    “The Tank is really a perfect isolation chamber. Negative gravity, total sensory deprivation. Your body is covered with transdermal patches. The cranium is cored to allow for the direct insertion of the conductor. You probably knew that much. Here’s what they don’t say: The process kills you. To become an Eye, you must literally surrender your life.”
    I kept talking because it helped root me in my present consciousness. But it wouldn’t last.
    “They keep you functioning in the Tank, but it’s more than your consciousness that rides the tachyon stream. It’s your being , it’s who you are. And somehow, between Earth and the robot receiver fifty light years away, it sloughs off, all of it except your raw perceptions. You become a thing of the senses, not just an Eye but a hand, a tongue, an ear. You inhabit a machine that was launched before you were born, transmit data back along a tachyon stream, mingled with your own thought impulses for analysts like your husband to dissect endlessly. Then they retrieve you, and all they’re really retrieving is a thing of raw perception. They tell you the drugs restore chemical balances in your brain, vitalize cognitive ability. But really it’s a lie. You’re dead, and that’s all there is to it.”
    The animal control truck showed up, and I seized the opportunity to leave. The world was breaking up into all its parts now. People separate from the earth upon which they walked. A tree, a doorknob, a blue eye swiveling. Separate parts constituting a chaotic and meaningless whole.
    At the fence, I paused and looked back, saw Kim Pham watching me. She was like the glass of ice tea, the dead weight of the dog, the cold pool on the fourth planet that quivered like mercury as I probed it with a sensor.
    Back in the car, I sat. I had found the automobile, but I wasn’t sure I could operate it. All I could see or understand were the thousand individual parts, the alloys and plastics, the