Channel Sk1n (6 page)

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Nola stared into the bathroom mirror.

She was showered and fresh and feeling better. Having checked the bruise again, she was glad to see the colours were fading a little and that any physical sensations had lessened, fading to a mild skinglow.

She moved into the living room, clicked on the screen without thinking, just for the sound of it, the flicker, the company, the chatter of voices.

Szhzfzztttht.

Connections were made.

Her stomach lurched.

Her hands were drawn to the screen as it lighted. The warmth comforted her, the crackle of electrics. And now she could smell fused wiring. Her tongue licked around her mouth, tasting smoke, sparks.

Fingertip sizzle.

Body heat.

Head buzzing with random input.

Szfistt...szifftst...

Not painful. Just this feeling of being fragile,

on edge.

She needed to take something, a pill. Fuel. Something sweet and thrilling to get her through the day. She would ask Christina’s advice, yes. When she came round...

Nola sat down on the floor in front of the visionplex and stared at the screen.

She recognised the programme.

The Pleasure Dome.

Scattercast twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Cross channel round-ups on the hour, specials at the weekend, all access available via the grapevine sites, legal or otherwise.

Shimmer now. Colours forming...

The clear plastic of the Dome itself, twenty-one metres in diameter, buried partway into the soil, eighteen meters tall at the apex. Dots of orange and blue traverse the curved surface, slowly mutating into sun and sea, melting from there to a speeding car, a wave of surf, a ruined tower under a twin-moon sky. The outer surface displays constantly changing images, sometimes in abstract patterns, other times forming into semi-coherent episodes, fragments, glimpses of a narrative.

Early morning Sunlight caresses the Dome like a lover’s ghost.

Interior shot: the woman, kneeling in the centre.

The young woman kneeling in soil, with her greasy matted hair and dried out skin, her fingers covered in clay, scabs, dead insects. Torn flowers around her, the remnants of a meal, bones, apple cores, wafer crumbs. A roll of cloth for a bed. Nothing more. The woman’s hands, working, knotting, tangling string and wire and twigs together.

The image flickered.

Nola’s eyes blinked in time.

The young woman frowned.

Her name was Melissa. Famous Melissa. The chosen one, this year’s oracle. Participant. Victim. Call her what you will.

The camera moved closer to the woman’s head, showing the tiny marks, one on each temple, where the transmitters had been injected. They glowed red: active signal.

Now her face filling the screen entirely, her eyes...

Melissa’s eyes gazing out at Nola.

Staring. Dark. Fierce.

Nola could not turn away, not even for a second.

Cut to: Dome shot. Exterior.

The surface reacted with swirls of red and gold, flickers of blue, flowers, petals, bees landing on stamen to gather pollen, flying away. Shift and slant into pure white, milk white, off white. Crackle of flames. The surface of the Dome danced with imagery, all of it conjured in real time from the woman who sat and slept and prayed and slathered and murmured and howled at the centre, locked inside. From the skullflow, let bloom skullfowers. Fill the screen, move in, bleed. Take us over. Witness now the buzz and crackle of a mind at play, setting flames to a bird’s wing, tearing at raw meat, sucking a wound, caressing naked flesh, sweat on a man’s back, muscles at work, the sky folded, darkened, the myriad stars in their constellations, all cast for a few seconds in turn on the surface. The images were constantly shifting and merging and separating and fading and dying away to let new images take over.

In this way, the young woman in the Dome gave her thoughts to the world. Whatever she dreamed was immediately made visible, uncensored, direct to the audience.

Direct to Nola.

Jump cut.

Now Melissa’s eyes in close-up, yearning.

Nola stared back.

Melissa rubbed the fingers of one hand in dirt and shit. She took up a stick and started to scrawl letters in the soil around her.

D...A...

She hesitated as though remembering an impulse, then moved on.

...D...D...Y...

Nola gazed upon the woman from the safety of her living room, reading the letters as they formed.

DADDY I...

Melissa’s hand trembled. The stick pushed and bent against the ground and was now taken up, and stabbed into the bare flesh of her arm, digging.

Blood flow.

Cut. Exterior shot:

The Dome’s curved expanse mirrored this moment in slashes of red, in scrits and scrats of noise, a mouth cracking open to moan, to sing demented under a staring moon. Words, tangle, wingbeat.
Dady I ahte you. Daddy I hte yu. Dddy Ih ate u.
Across the Dome they travelled, these words, merging with all the images that flowed there, into fog and fire and rainfall, into maps and tigers and rivers and the dance of headlamps on a night road, the tippy tap of a dancer’s feet on a wooden floor, the dancer’s ankles bruised and matted with crimson stains, the knees buckling, sequins stripped from her dress and falling in a glitter shower, pollen dust, shimmer time. The spill of skull clutter.

Interior: the woman alone.

Still now. Frozen.

Eyes hooded, half blind, a tickle of fluid from a tear duct in ultra close-up.

And for those few sweet moments Nola was held there by the spectacle, hypnotised. Frozen to the spot herself, in mirror of Melissa: throat tight, hands clammy. Nola had never been so affected before, not by an image, by a mere transmission of a human being. But now she felt the pain of the young woman. Nola
was
the pain. And all viewers around the world, like herself, they too had fallen into the pain of the moment.

And then the image shifted on the screen.

Szixfztst...

Nerve jump.

Nola was saddened. She needed to feel the connection once more.

The image stalled. Fluttered in lines. Found itself.

Nola breathed: ‘Come on. That’s it.’

There. There it was.

Falter. Twitch. The young woman’s face marred by static snow, flickers of noise.

Nola cursed the screen. ‘No. Not now. Work for me.’

She edged closer.

Warm glass against skin. She needed this.

Come back to me...

The screen clicked to dark.

Spell broken.

And Nola was shocked to find herself down on her knees, close enough to the glass to feel the afterglow.

Her body felt aroused, alive with a sweet hot buzz. Her hand slipped under her shirt, across her stomach.

The bruise.

Warm there...wet...

The doorbell rang.

Damn.

It was Christina, here to pick her up.

For Your Pleasure...

Imagine a sphere. Imagine a garden that grows on the surface of a sphere, the flowers moving freely, blossoming and dying, blossoming again in high-speed motion, their petals changing colour in a shifting array of patterns.

Imagine now that each flower is seeded from within, from inside the Dome. Imagine these flowers changing one by one into insects, these insects changing en mass into swirls of mist, into doorways opening and closing, into a red sun setting over a housing estate, into stars.

A woman lives inside the Dome. Her temples glow softly red. Sparks float from her eyes, from her hair, her brow, from her fingertips. Each spark a thought, a feeling, a seed. An image. Many images...

From this vision the Pleasure Dome was born.

The Dome’s surface is constructed from polyhobarium, a layered material whose sensitive pigments pick up signals from brainwaves, transforming them into patterns and colours and shapes. This exopsychic transferral process was developed by Hobart Projections, a UK-based company. The process allows the inner mind to be revealed or at least envisioned in material form.

Some call it a hoax, saying that the Dome randomly produces images. Nevertheless, the concept has certainly captured the public’s attention, most prominently in the popular cross-media programme in which a volunteer is sealed inside a polyhobarium dome for weeks on end, living in the most basic conditions as their thoughts and emotions and dreams are witnessed by millions of viewers around the world.

Fear, lust, memories, dark twisted visions, drifting patterns of abstract design: all are captured on the exterior screen of the Pleasure Dome. Nightmares. Innermost secrets. Idle ruminations. All revealed. It takes therefore a certain kind of person to submit to the Dome’s hunger. Psychologists have warned of the obvious potential for serious mental disturbance.

A number of teething problems plagued the early years of development. At least two subjects fell into comas, held in suspension for a period of three to four weeks. They recovered fully, waking of their own accord in their hospital beds, with no coherent memories of their trance state. Only whispers, fragments, glimpsed images of landscapes, bodies floating in darkness, people of shadow. The subjects’ brows were marked with charcoal, their fingertips with blood. Blood not their own. However, all such problems are now solved. There have been no incidents for many years now. The programme continues.

A poet wrote: Let flowers spring from the skull, that we may see them and be revived. The Pleasure Dome allows such a process, such blossoming. Pleasures await.

The day’s activities began. The new single had to be promoted. Here was daily life as Nola Blue lived it, this sacred opportunity she had worked for, a prize that thousands would wish upon themselves.