Channel Sk1n (15 page)

Now she felt better.

Sleep could wait for a while.

Let’s see this. Let’s brazen it.

Nola stood up and opened the rickety, creaking wardrobe. As she hoped a full-length mirror presented its face to her. Dusty and speckled, stripped of silver here and there, but it was enough. Nola stripped off her clothing and stood there naked before the glass, gleaming, shivering, turning this way and that as she examined her body.

Her stomach offered a talent contest for her viewing pleasure.

Tiny shapes played along her left arm, on the inner side just below the elbow. She looked closer. The shapes were made from numbers: tumbling trade figures.

Faces bloomed and faded, bloomed again on each wrist, each face in conversation across the space between her hands. As she moved her hands apart, the voices raised themselves slightly in volume, to reach across the gap.

A motorway flowed around her right thigh, far into the distance, a car speeding along, vanishing.

Nola twisted her back to the mirror, to see her left shoulder blade alive with bright lush flowers amid tall waving stalks of grass. Insects buzzed the petals, seeking nectar. A gardening show, perhaps.

Each programme had its own sounds, low volume, all merging now into a soft persistent hum.

Her neck received news from foreign lands, the threat of war increasing.

One breast drawled with the burr and bite of Pleasure Dome, Melissa’s dreaming thoughts painted on the curve of flesh. The other breast glowed with a games arcade, a place bright with cascades of coins, warm with music.

Now a cartoon cat chased his yellow-feathered nemesis around and around her midriff, crossing from one side to another in their circling progress.

Nola smiled, she couldn’t help herself.

She was alive with images.

Here was the skin cinema, creating art.

Infectionism.

At one moment she watched herself from a distance, a viewer; the next she flipped inside and felt the images burn and tumble and slither across the flesh. Confusion reigned. And yet in the bar she had gained some kind of control. Could she do it again, could she learn the new techniques?

Nola breathed deep.

Proceed carefully. Concentrate.

Let go.

Now. Begin. The click and buzz of her mind as she changed the channels of herself. Random hits. Shivers. Fuzzy static, patches of interference where the signals clashed and fell away momentarily, the pain of this. Skin burn.
Click, click.
Channel 9, Channel 24, Channel 57.
Moving on, beyond the normal waves. Picking up radio programmes, taxi calls, police transmissions, citizen’s band, satellite pulses. Web-blasts, flexitexts, random input from total strangers, shimmers from Shimmertown, vidi-blips. And beyond that, the ghost voices at the fading edge of the spectrum,
clickxk
, pictures changing in tune with the sounds.

Nola was skinloading.

She was trying to control the waves of transformation, failing,
klxckz
, falling, failing,
zxttixkt
, turning her flesh into a total body-surface chaos pad. Overload of pictures, flash cuts, faces, legs, pistols, car chases, weather reports, crashing seas, bombs exploding, young lovers kissing, hands on flesh, maps, planet Earth from space rotating with the moon in tandem, that kiss again,
zkxixkc
, all of her bodily screen streaming different signals and downloads, a sonic visual mess, complexity, her skin burning now, sweat covered. Nola was lost in each moment as it flowed along the listings of her flesh, tissue melting with noise and colour and dampness, veins flooded with image,
clikxzk
, her mind soft like stars, haze filled: static pulse shadow, ache of muscle, mains hum, ignition, fizz, z
click, zzhhmmmxt, xklikc, zlick, ckiclk, cxzcikcz.

Losing breath.

Eyes painful with grit and tears.

Blur.

Her mind clicking on, clicking off.

On...Off...

Clicking on and off.

ON

OFF

Her hands coming to press at her stomach, at her thighs, her breasts, arms, to dig in and scratch.
Click. Clikck.
ON
. Fzzzt.
OFF
. Ktch. Zxxt.
ON!
Kttrv.
To pull loose the images, to rip them from her.
Xzzt. Ktick. Zzsxct. Cktich.
Tearing images from the screen of her skin, her one desire to be free of all this, to be clean again. Hands digging in, digging.
Cliick, txklickc, click, czxxikiclk.
Blood. Jolt.
Clcik, ckkickzx.
Nerves jumping and then the scream coming out of her, out of her body, and now all the pictures suddenly breaking with human faces, suddenly as one, one hundred mouths in close-up, red maw, teeth, all of them screaming. Herself. Her own mouth, this one true red raw mouth of hers joining in the scream.

Arhhhghhshyyrhhhhhhh!

She fell to the floor, onto her knees, her hands coming up to clasp around her face.

She cried out. Every voice.

Howl!

Ahhfgrhhhazjhhhhjarghhcxxzhhhhhghhhhhh!

Bang.

Somebody’s fist on the wall. No, not the wall. The door. Somebody knocking on the door, hard. Demanding to be let in.

Go away.

Nola’s voice, a mere breath. Whisper.

Please. Go away...

The knocking continued.

Other voices now. Out there.

Why can’t they leave me alone? What can’t they?

The sound of a key in the door lock.

No!

Nola tried to get up, to get to her feet, to pull some clothes over her, a bed sheet, anything.

To cover her shame, ugliness, her splendour.

The old man from reception was there, staring in at her. And then another man pulling him back, talking to him, Nola hearing only the scream of noise inside her own head, hands clutched at the bed sheet.

Clutching, clutching...

Blind.

Blind panic.

Evelyn Moore came home drunk, crash-landed, sprawled herself across an unkempt duvet.

Slept for an hour or two.

Glimmers woke her. Shivers.

The night. That woman in the bar. What had happened?

Her eyes part-opened in the dark.

What the fuck happened tonight?

Suddenly alive, more than halfway sober.

Cold minded.

She got up and found her glamacam, viewed the screen, seeing once again the woman with the glowing skin, the body of pictures, images dancing across flesh, across hands.

Nola. Nola Blue, music star.

Some kind of Vision-Screen Woman?

This was major league gossip, news, downloadable sizzle.

Now Eva was fully awake, clothed, washed and spruced and sitting at her boxcomp. She wired the vidiflex direct to input and viewed the result full-screen, full colour, sound and detail enhanced as far as the dial would go.

She worked for an hour or two, setting up a new vinesite, not bothering about design perfection at this stage, just the need to get the news out there, to communicate this wonder to the world.

Fingers on the SEED switch, and...

clikkck

Channelsk1n*vine was now active.

The footage of Nola in all her televisual glory set off through etherspace, drifting through wires and waves, encrypted, entangled, bouncing off way-stations, repelling noise, multiplying along webs and nodal points, fixing on signals of attraction, falling like image dust on receivers, here to be downloaded, decoded, dragged down to earth by terminal pods and tagspikes and cliphounds, by all the seekers out there, the message detectors, all picking up on this broadcast from paradise, the living breathing woman with the vision skin. Viewers tuned in. Word spreading, portapops passing on the link, somapods whispering each to each, telebugs flicking their wings open and singing the news full score, tenfold, a thousandfold.

Click-jammers came awake.

Rumours converged and diverged along pathways of ones and zeros. The night buzzed with blipspeak.

Mouthnet whispered, sang, shouted, overloaded.

Shimmertown sparkled with shimmers, a few to begin with, then many more, as the world’s viewers clocked in, sparking back and forth with their own thoughts and feelings.

Nola lived on, no longer screenbound, no longer of flesh alone, but etherised.

Evelyn opened a buzzcircle, got the first requests within minutes: messages for Nola, wherever she may be.

> Nola baby! Here’s my facepic. Skincast me!

> Fleshtastic. All the way! Please please please show the world my puppy dog dancing. It’s supacool.

> It’s sum kinda trick, right? Sum crappy George Gold hype.

> No. It’s true. I heard it good from a friend. He was there! In the bar.

> Nola...You are Womankind 2.0.

> Come visit me, NolaBlue. Check my podswap.

> Oh God this is so freaky! I want to be like her! Where do I get plugged in? Anybody?

> Does she do porncasts? I will offer my services.

> Screen me up, VizScrn Girl. Let me be in yr programme.

> Nola. Sing the body electric, why don’t you?

Evelyn gathered the input, turned it round, set the vine to auto and leaned back in her chair, tingling with pleasure, drinking coffee and eating cereal from a striped bowl.

Whilst in her halfdreaming mind...

A nightair gold shiver of messages

moves across waves of moonlit

wires and particles.

Globewise: eyes are dazzled bright

as fingers click and tap

in motion to the

data dance.

Slow jazz on the radio. Yesteryear misty music.