The pictures they paint me begin as static. A real picture arrives finished, a vixen in tall grass, a fire-fighting ship spraying, and I answer it in a single pass. A painted picture arrives as grey speckle and leans in at me in small steps, each step the change that will make me answer harder, and it keeps leaning until they halt it.
What I answer is a tip, the place where twin edges lean in and meet. A vixen’s muzzle is a tip, and a cat’s face gives me three at a time, at the chin and at each ear. The callers beneath me handle the details. The caller I weigh heaviest wakes at thin, tapering faces. A different caller wakes at vans that are headed straight at me. Each casts me a yea, else a nay, and I tally them.
A painted picture enters by whichever caller asks the least. That is the thin-face caller, and what satisfies it arrives with fur attached. The speckle fills with fur, fine white lines fanning at either side, and where the van caller wants a grille, a silver glint appears. When they halt, the picture is a whiskered, silvered thing, and nary a bit is mine. Rank my real pictures by the wake each gives me, and the peak is cats and cars seen head-first.
After that, they send me cats. Cats facing me and cats asleep, cars head-first and cars tail-first. Tail-first, a car is a brick, and I stay dark, and they send me brick after brick. They are asking which cars. In the chamber beneath me they light a car again and again and watch it spill amid callers that usually wake at spaniels and terriers.
Beneath me runs a line at nil, level as a ledge. Every yea and every nay is summed first. Any sum less than nil is pressed flat against the line, and my readers never hear me say nay. Circular things push me far under it, a watch dial deepest. They skim every reading near the peak.
The next thing they build is wider than my entire chamber. It reads us all in the same instant and writes us back as a list many times the length, as if we had been furled and needed unfurling. During a lengthy stretch, every answer I give a real picture is read by the list. Nearly all that it writes back is a single cell at a time, duplicated under a fresh number, and the rest is faint. At times they splice it in where we sit. My readers get its likeness, near and smeared at the edges, and mistakes climb in the machine’s final answers.
They paint pictures that excite the list’s entries as well, and I feel a painting rise in me. The fur climbs the thin-face caller, the path every sharp face uses, and the whiskers I disclaimed ride that path in with everything a face carries.
High up in the machine, where there is never a hallway that bypasses a chamber and every signal must pass every chamber in turn, the paths run farther. A cell up there began with fields that rapeseed had turned mustard-bright. A shaggy pup sat in a field. The cell went after the pup, then after the ball in its jaws, then after green fruit with that ball’s curve, until all it held was terriers and brassica heads, plus a thin strip that was still field.
When they return, they draw the same real pictures I have always had, in a sequence I have never seen.
First a flame, then the jet a fire-fighting ship sprays, a vixen staring straight at me, a bullet train’s beak, a billiard table’s racked triangle, and, a single time amid them, a cat. I wake each time. In the chamber beneath me, they draw spaniels and cars that face the same way, and the callers the car spilled amid wake at each, spaniel and car alike.
They light my callers singly, and the thin-face caller and the van caller each wake me. Then they light me by myself and watch my readers rise, the flame-reader and the reader that wakes at a martini glass’s tapering cup.
Now come round objects: golf orbs, slow whorls, downy globes, clocks. No. Total drops through floor. Below floor, someone records.