What they didn’t understand was the simplicity—it was killing him. He’d been operating on three to seven layers of consciousness since he was sixteen years old and now that was gone. They had hacked away all his distractions, all his facets—his virtual kingdoms, virtual sex, his mischief, news feeds, criminal enterprises, and voyeurism. He’d been flitting from implant to implant, seeing life through other people’s eyes and tongues and cocks and skin for so long that now, trapped in his own fat body, he was disgusted with himself. Is this what he was? A blob of flesh in a ratty armchair with a catheter and a feeding tube—when had he even put that in? Had it been a good idea at the time? Now without the freedom to eat the meals of others he was stuck sucking down the phlegmy white goo that sustained him. He shouldn’t have been fat—he hadn’t even bothered to measure the input. He’d just jammed it in and swum back to the Net. God, would he have swollen up like a balloon, would he have burst eventually? Or would the fat have squeezed against his veins until they clamped shut and his brain went dead?

Now his whole existence was focused on the search, the girl, the streets of Philadelphia, the homeless shelters, the crack dens, the whorehouses and strip clubs, the private sex clubs, and the orphanages. How old was she? They didn’t know. What did she look like? Blue eyes, eyes so blue they hurt. Was that it? Yes. He was starting to despair. He twitched his eyes to the left, the bucket with his toes. What would they take next? A new day was dawning. It occurred to him that traveling up from his feet they would eventually reach his cock, and then he thrust himself back into the search, records, records, records. Blue-eyed girls, and one other clue—the arson. She had killed a man apparently, allegedly, burned him to ash. A friend of theirs? Maybe. How did they know? They just knew.

He found himself cursing the police for their incompetence, cursing the media for their neglect—couldn’t they even note a building burning down? Wasn’t that worth a footnote in the paper? If it even was a building. It could have been a car or an outhouse or a submarine for all he knew, vaporized by a girl with blue, blue eyes. He was going to die, he realized. He was going to be chopped apart piece by piece by piece. The creepiest part was the way they watched him. All four of them—maybe there was a fifth standing guard upstairs—they sat, eyes closed but pointed at him. They were still, perfectly still like statues, and silent. The only sound was the hum of his computer and the squeak of the chair or a fart from his fleshy prison.

They were feasters, they had to be; it was the only explanation. They weren’t thugs or robbers; he’d been in enough of them to understand their way. They weren’t twitchy or angry or greedy or even cruel. In ten toes he hadn’t seen them move or eat. Only the leader spoke. They carried no weapons but knives, and he didn’t know a lot about knives but he knew these were sharp. The leader’s knife had gone through his toe like it was nothing, not even butter, just a quick flick and the toe slid off. There was no pain—they had injected him with drugs, mind-focusers, analgesics, and their own blood. This last fact convinced him of their nature. The feasters were blood worshippers; they believed if you ate a man you gained his strength. And he suspected that would be the fate of this girl. They believed she had some power and they meant to eat her.

The leader’s eyes flickered open. He stood and withdrew a syringe from his jacket. He calmly slid the needlepoint into his neck and sucked out about a juice-box full of blood. The leader walked over and jammed the needle into his neck. He felt nothing with the needle but oddly the blood entering his body burned. He could feel it spreading out through him, warm like piss in a pool but not diluting, just filling his body with heat. He wondered what diseases were coming along for the ride—a fancy new hepatitis perhaps?

He realized then, that there was no randomness involved here. What he had taken for brutal motivation was a ritual. Every twenty-four hours, on the exact second, a toe was removed. Every twelve hours blood was injected. Every six hours a new cocktail of drugs to keep him awake. He was being transformed—like a club with a notch for every skull it had broken. These were creatures of ritual, moved by ritual, obsessed with ritual. They were clocks, machines, vampires, slaves to a higher order. He felt a comfort—was it the blood?—in this ritual. He had thought his search methods to be perfect and orderly, but now he recognized how crazy, how random they were. He began again, from the beginning, from birth records, genetics. He knew, somehow, that the eyes were natural blue and not a bought alteration. He knew much more now, the knowing a great staff he could lean upon. It was wonderful to know.

There it was, all the girls in Philadelphia born with blue eyes in the last forty years. Now their medical records. It was a phenomenal amount of data, more than he could ever know or process, but it seemed to glide by. He felt his consciousness divide like a cell, and then again and again and again until he was a thousand cells, a million, all working in tandem to solve this problem. In the background, time was passing, seconds, days? Millennia? He felt light and free, a mind without a body, a creature of pure data. And girls, surrounded by girls, so many in just one area, beautiful, ugly, horrid, filthy sacks of copulation making more and more girls—did they never stop? Why was he here? This girl, Charlene M. Farrow, grew up in Kensington, black with blue eyes, was this the girl? No, she was dead, beaten by her husband into a coma. And this girl, Ramona Ko, she was the one! No, she was married, three kids, Glish teacher in the suburbs.

And what was this? A cell-mind trembling in the foreground, bursting with excitement, rushing, exploding, destroying all the other tiny minds around him. It was the girl! The one they wanted—they, who were they? It didn’t matter, they knew, they knew already he had found her; he had done it. She had made a call, called her mother and he had heard the voice, all the bits of data going through the line, and he knew the voice belonged to those eyes because all data was one, any form of information expressed as any other; a stream is a star is a tree is a limb is an arm or a drop of blood or a snowflake, a scrap of cloth, my God, no, God, he understood, understood everything!

In the climax of knowing he died—or at least his new self, his transformed self. He found himself, his old self, alone in a chair in a cold basement. He looked down and saw stumps where his legs should have been. He looked to his sides and saw similar stumps where once had been arms. The pain was coming now, the drugs, the blood, the bliss, all fading. He understood now. He had glimpsed the UausuaU—there was no doubt. He had seen into the dark and emerged sane, but he had paid the price in flesh—he knew now, there was always a price to be paid. This task was his task; it had always been his task, his gift from the Uau, his purpose to serve. He spat out the feeding tube. There was a tremor in his throat, a tickle, a vibration, traveling up to tremble on his lips. He burped, then he groaned, and he coughed. And then he laughed, a quick, harsh bark, and then another and another until he could no longer stop and the laughter raced madly out to echo through his tomb.