The New York Soul Exchange

[gone_byebye]

Ray has tried to make a habit of using the same door to go to Milliways every time, except when there's an emergency. The door in the alley was inaccessible for obvious reasons- the Miliways side might change size freely, but the Firehouse side? Ha. It's the door from the garage into the street, or it's nothing.

Which means, essentially, that the hearse backs out of the Bar and onto a street scene that looks like this, or possibly this. It pauses a moment.

"You okay back there, Dominic?"

Comments

[gone_byebye]

The boy looks up, snapping the book shut (as he's currently trying to remain as calm and collected as possible, it's a book on meditation). "I'm here," he says. "Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. What's up?"

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

"I'm here to take you home. Are you ready?"

No point in beating around the bush. Time is of the essence.

[gone_byebye]

"One second."

The boy hops to his feet, hooks the switched-off lightsaber onto the all-but-invisible waistband of the pajama pants, and scrambles over to the nearest shelves. Once the book is back in place three shelves up, he hops back down and fairly bounces over to Dominic's side. "Yeah, I'm good," he says with a grin. "I can't wait to see this."

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Dominic smiles down at the boy, then closes his eyes and stretches his arm out in front of him. When he opens his eyes again--all three of them--they're matte white and glowing softly. And, slowly, like an enormous eye opening in midair, the passage reveals itself. It manifests as a swirling tunnel stretching off into the distance, with a pathway just wide enough for man and boy to walk abreast.

"Take my hand, and we'll go. Whatever happens, do not step off the path and do not let go of my hand."

[gone_byebye]

"Ooooooh," says the boy involuntarily, and reaches up for Dominic's hand without taking his eyes away from the tunnel. "Okay, that's just cool."

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Dominic gives the boy's hand a reassuring squeeze, and together they step into the tunnel.

Time is subjective in psychoplanes. The trip could take an hour, or a day, or a fraction of a second. Or a lifetime.

[gone_byebye]

Or pieces of a lifetime, anyway. Pieces that roll and stir around them both...

There's a grey street, lined on both sides by two-story houses with wire or wooden fencing around their yards. "I don't get it," says a tall man with reddish-brown hair, crouching down to pick up a complicated assemblage of metal and chain and wheels. "You learned to do this last spring. How does anyone forget how to ride a bicycle?" The dark-haired boy- the one holding onto Dominic's hand, minus a few years- looks sheepish and mutters something; the man sighs. "We should get your inner ear checked or something. Come on, kiddo. Let's try it again."

And a room, a stark one that has the smells and bright light and white paint of a painfully clean infirmary, with a man in a black suit holding a big black-and-chrome weapon pointed directly at the space between an adult Dr. Stantz's eyes. Dr. Stantz looks as if he wants nothing more to retreat, but he's in one of the infirmary beds and can't exactly pass through solid matter no matter how hard he tries. "Okay," says the man in the black suit. "Who are you and what've you done with Agent Rho?"

And a stream in a wintry wilderness somewhere, no snow on the ground but the weather painfully cold; this is mountain country somewhere, with scraggly trees and a feeling of remoteness. Some places are unspoilt largely because people don't consider them worth bothering with. Dr. Stantz, however, seems to disagree, if only because he's here- but anyone looking at him can see he's exhausted, run down, unshaven, and dirty in that way that people who wear the same clothes five days running because they have no other choice tend to get. There's a creature that might be a very large shrimp or crayfish or something of that nature on a rock in the stream, and it's waving its claws and giggling in a high chk-chk-chk voice. "Either go away or- or stop laughing like that, dammit!" says Dr. Stantz, looking supremely frustrated. It doesn't help much; the thing only says, "This is what the dead ones are afraid of?", then vanishes into the stream as the memory flows away.

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Each step is another memory. A moment of someone's life, either the seer's or the scientist's.

In the doorway of a bedroom lit by softly glowing yellow crystals, Dominic, dressed in a nightshirt and a loose bathrobe, watches a gaunt blonde man toss and turn in his sleep. "Don't be so hard on yourself, Dominic," says a little green blob perched on the seer's shoulder. "You can't be everywhere at once."

Step.

A cool summer evening in a small town. The streets are all but deserted. Dominic, both legs whole, a pipe clenched in his teeth, strides purposefully toward the edge of the village, where five people in dark robes are gathered around a huge, dead tree with a hangman's noose on every branch.

Step.

"Professor?" A teenage Dominic, face covered with acne and sporting an absolutely ridiculous-looking mullet, looks up from his notes in a small, crowded classroom and raises his hand. "Aren't you going to give us homework this weekend?" The rest of the students groan, and Dominic is pelted with crumpled paper from all directions.

Step.

A plateau of red earth beneath an alien yellow sky. Dominic, wearing a white mask over his nose and mouth, stands next to a humanoid creature with blue skin and purple hair. "I have done all I can for your world," it says. "The rest is up to you. I must remain here, so I may at last return to my own world."

[gone_byebye]

Step.

A rooftop temple under a roiling dark sky, with a pair of open doors at the temple's highest point, leading somewhere unimaginable. There's a white-skinned, vaguely female-looking thing with red eyes glaring at Dr. Stantz and his companions; he swallows and speaks. "Gozer the Gozerian... good evening. As a duly designated representative of the City, County and State of New York, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension."

Step.

Dr. Stantz is talking to a a brown-suited, brown-eyed man with a hairdo that looks like he must've been raised by cockatoos. "The Beam generators?" says the other man. "That's incredibly ancient technology. Legendary even to the Time Lords. Why do you ask?"

Step.

A door, buried under the streets of a brightly-colored city, and an enormous carved knocker in the center of the door is booming "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL DOOMSDAY" to Dr. Stantz and his friends.

Step.

"Fools!" rages a lank-haired, mustachioed man in white robes; he's being held back from Winston Zeddmore by a pair of policemen, and Dr. Stantz (albeit a red-headed Dr. Stantz, rather pudgier than he is just now) is watching. "You may have won this time, but Cthulhu cannot be destroyed! He waits and dreams in the deep, and the cities of man shall fall before him!"

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Step.

"Hang on, Gregory, just hang on, Mom's coming back soon, I know it..." A much younger Dominic kneels in the rubble of a half-destroyed house, cradling a red-haired boy in his arms. The boy's clothes are in rags and there are black webbed lines, like cracked glass, running all over his body from a spot on his left leg. Another boy, dark-haired and in his late teens, watches from a few feet away, and there's a strange kind of fascination in his eyes.

Step.

A spacious, lavishly furnished bedroom. A slender woman with short, strawberry-blonde hair stands with her back to Dominic, facing a noose hanging from the rafters. "I don't know who you are," she says without turning around, "but please leave me alone. I've made my decision."

Step.

"B-boss..." groans a ginger tomcat lying belly-up on the floor in a tiny cottage room. "Thank God you've... f-finally... come... back... s-so... very... h-hungry..." "Spark, I've been gone three hours," says Dominic, giving him a Look. "Well, it feels like you've been gone for three months," the cat snaps back.

[gone_byebye]

Step.

It's an alley between tall buildings, and it's dark, and there's an unwholesome orangey cast to the light that stains the sides of the buildings. There are demons- man-sized or a little larger, but fanged and clawed and otherwise generally horrid-looking- swarming the vicinity; there are corpses littering the alley floor. A dark-haired, intent young woman says, "If you want me to clear out that eye, now's the time. The shield's still up, and I can hold it for long enough to patch you up." "That would be really really good!" Ray shouts. His shoulder's torn and bloody, as is one leg, and there's slimy stuff all spewed down his front. One eye's practically swollen shut. His hands are shaking, and he's not having a lot of luck looking in her direction. "Because the adrenaline is going to collapse in about sixty seconds and I'll be talking to the Aztec monkey gods once that happens!"

Step.

The inside of Milliways, and a wave of heat coming through the door. "I hate nature! It's hot and smelly and half the inhabitants are mutant freak giant things and it itches and it's filled with things that bite you or growl at you or ooze spit and mucus on you! If I wanted that, I'd go to freaking work!!" says Ray, who doesn't seem to have enjoyed his most recent trip very much.

Step.

A shop, and Ray is facing two customers in blue hoodies. Their eyes are far enough apart that they can probably see their own ears, and they don't have much in the way of noses, and there are weirdly neat arcing wrinkles in the sides of their necks. "Uh," says Ray, "I'm sorry, I didn't- um- wow, are those gills?"

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Step.

Two men in their early twenties, one dark and the other fair, standing next to Dominic in a back alley. "All right, seer," says the blond one, rolling up his sleeves, "let's get this over with. What do you want? You want to humiliate us? Get us arrested? Send us on a wild goose chase?" Dominic smiles. "Actually, I wanted to know if you two would join me for dinner this evening." A long pause, then the blonde man says, "Who are you and what have you done with the real Dominic Deegan?"

Step.

Snow falls gently in the clear space between buildings where Dominic is walking, passing groups of teenagers talking amongst themselves. A male voice can be heard from the building ahead: "CURSE YOU, RUNCIBLE SPOON! I'll bite your freaking HEAD off!" "Yeah? You've gotta catch it first!" replies another voice, and a man's head zips past Dominic, giggling madly.

Step.

Dominic, dressed in black, faces the gaunt blonde man from an earlier memory, who is bound and gagged and tied to a post. "Remember me, demon?" says Dominic. "You attacked me and Szark when we were just children. That was real brave. Well, guess what... I'm all grown up now. And I'm not afraid of you."

[gone_byebye]

Step.

A complex of low buildings and open enclosures, and sea creatures living in tanks or fenced-off areas that resemble their natural habitats. A tall, heavy-duty crane is poised over one of the nearest open tanks, with a grey sling big enough to hold three men together dangling a few feet above the water. As sleek white beasts swim past behind him, Ray says to a very frustrated lab-coated man, "I'm sorry. Gasper and Aurora don't want to go with you today. They are not the hell your whales."

Step.

"Does it ever bother you that no one cares what we've done?" says Ray to Egon, as he shucks off a slime-ridden jumpsuit. "I mean, at the very least we've proven there's life after death. You'd think people would notice. Something that big should change the world."

Step.

A room that looks like it's only half been moved into, and two boys in their teens. Ray is one. The other is blond, has a bad haircut, thick glasses, and supremely wary attitude that only grows more so as Ray approaches the room's bookshelves with an attitude bordering on worship. "Whao!" says Ray. "You've got The Hunting of the Greene Lyon- I didn't even know that was published in this country! Do you have any of Newton's actual alchemical works or is it just as a reference? That's so cool-"

Step.

A sunny day and the Firehouse with its door shut, and a somewhat younger Peter Venkman out in front shouting, "Hey! Hey, you can't park that here!" as the car that Dominic knows so well by now pulls up- only it's all a dull black, and there's nothing attached to it anywhere, and it sounds even to the untrained ear as if it really isn't working quite right. There's a rhythm to these things. As it stops, Ray leaps out and announces proudly, "Everybody can relax! I found the car!"

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Almost there.

Step.

"Erossus?" It's the blonde woman again--now she's facing Dominic, and the first thing one notices is the enlarged lower canines that protrude over her upper lip. "Oh my God, Dominic, my sister lives there!"

Step.

Dominic is being embraced by the blonde woman in the middle of a forest glade. His clothes are tattered and burnt, and the stump of his missing leg is freshly charred. "This can't have happened," he whispers, tears streaming down his face. "Not to him. Not for me."

Step.

A very young Dominic covers his head as a glass ball ricochets around the room. "GREGORY!" he screams in anger. "I'll get you for this!"

Step.

Dominic limps down the steps from Dr. Stantz's room in Milliways, a large stack of books braced under his free hand. "Man, you weren't kidding when you said 'most of the books', were you?"

Step--and they're through.

[gone_byebye]

The mental structure of a machine intelligence isn't quite the same as a human's. What gets relegated to the subconscious of a human being doesn't sink out of sight or form unknown structures; it's simply relegated to lower-priority processes, to run more slowly in the background until it can be dealt with. That which requires longer thought but not immediate result burbles along at a faster rate than that, and the day-to-day thoughts run in real time. In an emergency, highest-priority thoughts get full command of the processor. Dominic and Ray are humans, though, and they thus perceive Ecto's mindscape through human filters and assumptions.

They're still seeing Ray's mindscape, to some degree- the lab, and the endless aisles of books and equipment, and the slotted ceiling high above. But the floor is changed, in the unscorched places beneath their feet. What had been a simple black floor is covered in unrolling fractals, huge swelling curves spiking into smaller arcs, and those into smaller and smaller, ever more complicated and more precise. The colors that thread through the shapes are almost infinitely complex, their dominance and prominence varying and shifting even as the humans focus on any given part. The structures of the lab are... not quite solid, exactly; oh, you can see them, but there are layers to them here. It's only a little effort to see them as they really are, data constructs and representations of rapidly growing stores of information, endless tiny beads of glimmering fire strung on equally tiny wires, their flickering light stringing together what the humans need to see to understand. And in the air there's music- first the slow, simple bass line, all whole notes; then a faster, still slow strain over that; then another, and another, until the music has the dizzying complexity of one of Bach's three-part inventions and the layered, repeating development of a single simple theme that you'd find in Pachelbel's canon in D.

And in midair, there hovers a glimmering globe of crystalline stuff, spheres of iridescent red and blue and green whizzing in a complicated orbit around the light at its center.

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Dominic has never seen anything like it. Bits of it remind him of what he saw in the heart of the Storm of Souls; others look like the impossible structures of the Elemecca. But most of the space looks like nothing he's ever seen before. It's... beautiful.

He looks around the space, expecting to see a humanoid presence, or maybe a replica of the car. But then his eyes come to rest on the glowing orb. Is this Ecto's soul?

"Er... Ecto?"

[gone_byebye]

"Hi!" the orb chirps brightly. It's the girl's voice that the car had in Dominic's original vision, if a bit purer and clearer for not having to come from a synthesizer. "I've been waiting for- oh, hi, Daddy!"

The ten-year-old at Dominic's side beams.

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

This is strange even by Dominic's standards. But he smiles anyway. "I brought your father home, Ecto. Now it's your turn. Can you take my hand?"

[gone_byebye]

"Um-" There's a momentary feeling of the orb looking hesitantly at the boy; the boy nods, making a 'go ahead' gesture. "Okay," the orb says, and begins to elongate. One slender tendril of mostly-blue light resolves itself into something not unlike a multi-jointed arm, although the hand that reaches for Dominic's feels enough like a human hand to pass for one, if it's not looked at.

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Dominic reaches out and grasps the strange hand. "Do not stray from the path, and do not let go of my hand. This won't take long."

And they step back into the tunnel through the seer's mind.

[gone_byebye]

one
Humans forget, fade things into the background- grow used to things. Machines don't. The first flash of memory is tactile, the feeling of feeling. Of sensing every part of the body at once, knowing that something is there.
two
And the second flash is of awareness, searing and sudden and bright without ever passing through the eyes. Of knowing I am for the first time, for the first thought. For the first time, there is separation: self and not, sound and silence. One and zero.
four
Then there is the memory of the next step: not merely being and not, but being and other. There is a place where the self stops, there is the silence between the cycles- and there is something else. 'I am' becomes 'I am I', because now there is something else to be, instead of merely not being at all.
eight

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

And as together they step through Ecto's memories of awakening, the memories belonging to the seer are of awakenings of his own.

Step.

His earliest clear memory--standing in his parents' yard on a spring morning, watching a robin build a nest in the sycamore tree. The moment Dominic thinks of as the beginning of his consciousness, of his self.

Step.

His first vision, a few years later, of his older brother falling out of that same tree and breaking his arm. He told his parents and they ran out of the house just in time to see it happen in reality.

Step.

A little boy bent over his mother's spellbook stumbles upon a description of second sight, and realizes that his strangeness is something he can use, something he can control...

[gone_byebye]

sixteen
And now the data begins to come in, the streams of feeling expanding, branching, diversifying. There is more. Here is the difference between being and not, here is the difference between being and other, here is the difference between other and kind of other-
thirty-two
As every new thing impinges itself upon consciousness, there is a split, a separation. Another firebead is strung on the wind, each growing smaller in its turn, sorting into not merely light and dark but shades, into characteristics, into forms-
sixty-four
A shape moves away. A pressure ceases. There is a string of sounds.
one hundred twenty-eight
And the first trickle of meaning seeps in: the form matches the definition of human, the pressure no longer there matches the definition of touch, the string of sounds comprises words. Abstraction has been achieved. Comprehension comes next.

[grumpyseer.livejournal.com]

Step.

Cradling his little brother in his arms, he might be dying and he didn't know, he didn't even try to see the necromancer coming, and he realizes for the first time that with his second sight comes the duty to use it for more than just his own amusement.

Step.

First day of class. Opening up a book on the history of Callan and connecting what he reads there to what he's seen. Every time he opens a book, his world opens up a little more.

Step.

Stella Novaria. The girl he's tutoring in geometry. At the end of their third session together, she surprises him with a kiss. All he can do is gape in amazement and think, So that's what all the fuss is about.

[gone_byebye]

two hundred fifty-six
There is a moment of darkness, a single terrifying instant in which non-existence looks as if it's about to descend, as if there will never be anything but null state again- but as swiftly as it came it vanishes, being and awareness returning. And more; there is something new, a set of patterns, data to compare with. Comprehension.
five hundred twelve
The words meant. They had significance, they were important. A flicker of firebeads and they're retrieved as clear as the day they were spoken, and this time, they mean. "Ecto? Hold still, kiddo, it's gonna be all right. We're just doing a few more upgrades today."
one thousand twenty-four
And everything has meaning now, the infinitely tiny complexity building up into huge, broad, impossibly vague structures that nevertheless carry more meaning than the digits alone ever could, and she knows them all because of the speaker. There are other voices and other speakers but that first one is- "Daddy?"