Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

you never knew what would suddenly come into view before sinking back down again. Eulie could have been in the shower for two weeks and I wouldn’t have noticed. As I flipped through the channels, clicking them off, what I thought at first to be a black and white movie caught my eye, or rather my ear; I knew I’d heard the voices before. There were four people in a living room set, and as I listened I matched the voices to the faces I’d seen in radio guides. I was watching, stuck to the channel like glue, when Eulie strolled out of the shower, heavily towelled from top to bottom. »›I Love Lucy?‹«
    »I’ve heard this one before,« I said. »Nothing looks like I pictured it.«
    She pressed something on the table and a number appeared at the bottom of the screen. »Livonia network. Show’s almost a century old. How have you heard this?«
    »It was on the radio,« I said. She turned it off. »Hey, wait.«
    Eulie unturbaned her head and shook her hair loose. »You’ll zone. You’re already deadeyed.« Like her, I thought, but didn’t say it. Once the set was off I heard the outer world again – beeping sounds that must have been sirens in the distance, whirling noises somewhere overhead, a low hum that never stopped. »Quiet, finally. How are you?«
    »Bearable,« I said. »You?« She nodded. »Why didn’t you tell me you were from the future? It’d have been a hard sell, granted, but everything would have made a lot more sense a lot sooner –«
    »It’s more complicated than it seems,« she said. »We’re not from the future. Not your future, anyway.«
    »Eulie, please –«
    »If our world was yours, this might be your future, yes,« she said. »But your world is different. Not just in look and feel. It’s a different place, entirely.« She took something out of a pocket in one of her towels and ran it over her hair. As I looked, it dried. »How explain that, simply?«
    »I don’t know. Give it a try, though –«
    Even before she started I could have told her there wasn’t any real point, but I liked the sound of her voice so much I just sat and listened. »Our worlds coexist, separate but equal. You understand?«
    »Which one gets the short end of the stick?«
    »No, Walter, not like that. We don’t exist in the same time. We’re years ahead of you, or you’re years behind. Depends on which side you’re on.« She sat down on the couch next to me. »There are different paths in the garden, and we’re many paths later.«
    There was nothing I could do but buy it. »How do you get from one side to the other?«
    »Holes in the fence, they’ve been called. Slip through, slip back.«
    »Does Dryco have anything to do with it?« I asked, pretty much failing to get the idea, but giving her credit for trying.
    »No, it tries to advantage the situation, but –«
    »What does Dryco do, anyway?«
    She looked at me as if I asked her why the sun was shiny. »Everything.«
    »If it’s a company it must be a business,« I said. »If it’s a business it must make something. If it makes something, it must sell what it makes. So what does it do?«
    »Dryco doesn’t do. Dryco is.«
    »Is what?«
    »Lookabout,« Eulie said, and guided her hand in a wide circle, as if to take in the room, and everything that lay outside the house as well. »All seen and unseen.«
    »OK,« I said, trying a different tack. »You said it runs itself, or did until recently. How?«
    She took a deep breath, as if trying to remember. »It replicates, organizes, controls, commodifies. Expands or impands as needed.«
    »But how?«
    »Until recent developments, under the guidance of Alice.«
    »Is Alice the old lady?«
    She shook her head. »You know about computers?«
    »You mean like Univac?« A second earlier, until I conjured up the deadeyes once again, she’d looked ten years earlier. »Never mind. So Alice is the one wheeling, dealing, stealing –?«
    »She was, until the manifestations began,« Eulie said. »For forty years, communicating first through the Drydens, then Mister O’Malley, then through herself. Madam let her. Then, four months ago, when the problems first evidenced, her systems began to negate. The day before yesterday, she blued.« She rested her head on my shoulder. »That was when we came to get you.«
    »Eulie,« I said, »what’s going on? What’s happening?«
    »Uncertain,« she said. »Whatever it is, isn’t good.«
    »How so?«
    »Indications specify that our worlds are starting to occupy the same