WRITTEN BY BHAGATH SUBRAMANIAN.
There he sat, naked, amongst his cables and cathodes and anodes and thick bulbous glass screens. The Videohead. Massive and tall, slacked jaw cupping drool on the precipice of the drip. His eyes, hidden behind a headset so heavy that all his massive head could do was slump forward. His neck was at a right angle, snapping downwards on the backbone a few discs away from the base of his skull. He was thin, horrifically thin. His skin was withered and pale. It hugged his huge bones like vacuum sealed shrink-wrap. Through the skin, the veins showed, fat like a network of agonizingly melded together slugs pulsating in a slow fever dream.
And the cables- they were all around him. A nest of snakes, feeding him with light and electricity. Raw data. They snaked out of the piles and wrapped around his legs, up his back, and were slotted into the back of his head, into his arms, his spine. They might as well have been growing out of him, sprouting fibres of cultures of blackened mycelium. There he sat, his body mummified in his own sweat and his mind mummified in- whatever flash of light was penetrating the fried rods and cones in the backs of his eyeballs.
There was a small crack, a faint sliver- a gateway into the secrets of the Videohead. Less than a millimetre wide. Some would call it a hole in the world itself. A tear in the fabric. It was that crack of space, that damned infernal space, doomed to bear the near infinite weight of the headset and the Videohead’s great skull that stored the volumes. Through that gap between the headset and the Videohead, was a fissure. Through it, leaked the light. An unimaginable glimpse at the secrets that this great being spends the eons consuming. The light shown eerily, like a slow, graceful vortex of waves swirling in on itself. Fragments broke through. That line, the line that bisected the headset and the head, was all that the cosmos would ever know of what lay in front of those eyes.
In a few moments, that light will go out.
A few metres from where this great being sat, amongst the rubble and debris and decay and scrap metal and wretched nightmares of steel and aluminium, roamed a child. How long it had roamed, is unknown, and how long it had roamed as a child, is also unknown. Naked, like the Videohead, and young and plump and with skin unmolested by copper or steel, unlike the Videohead, it bumbled through this hellscape of drives and tapes and diskettes. Its little fingers groped and searched, scratching and clawing at the rust with its little nails, encrusted in grime. It poked and pulled at a great many things- stray dead wires, dead metal, faded tapes and powerless magnetic devices. It played with all the dead things that had once hissed and whirred and screamed with life in eons past. Things that had bleeped with light and sounds. Oh, and with colour!
The child began to hunt for colour. It began to hunt for light. Ignorant of the Videohead, and the terrible piercing hole of light that he kept for himself, the child bumbled along, looking for things that shined and glowed.
And there it was. Amongst the gray.
Light. Green. Small. A single blinking LED. Nestled on a chunk of plastic and metal, from it sprouting a cable. Jammed into the ground. The child crawled towards this light, eyes wide in pure amazement. It followed the reach of its little fingers, drawn towards the magnificence of this light. The fingers got closer, and closer, green shimmering through the grasping grip. Until it was in his hands. The child watched it glowed through its fingers. The green light. The fingers moved, caressing the light. Loving it.
And like any child, it decided that it wanted to keep it forever. Amongst this hellscape of solid metal nightmares, it had found a toy. And so, the child tugged. The light lifted off the ground, ever so slightly. The child tugged again.
The light flickered. It came closer to the closer.
The child pulled once more. And the light lurched closer to its wide eyes. There it was in his face, so close. Bright and green. Bright and warm.
With one final great tug, the child yelped and ripped the plug out of its socket.
The light died.
And the doomed gap, cursed to be crushed by the headset and the head, was freed of the light.
The Videohead’s jaw twitched, spilling drool onto his chest. He raised his great hands and clutched the headset with the massive fingernails sprouting from his bony fingers. The Videohead began to pull off the headset, ripping the gap further than it has ever been. He slid the headset onto his forehead, just enough for the lower hemispheres of his eyes to crack through. They were ringed by circles of swollen skin. Trophies of his perpetual quest.
He began to survey his surroundings, squinting. The ages behind the headset has squashed his eyes into thing discs, rendering them incapable of surveilling anything beyond a few inches beyond his pupils. And so, he reached out with one great hand. He leaned forward, stretching the cables attached into his spine, and began to rummage through the dead metal and debris. He felt the cold of the metal in his bones, through his thin skin. Sharp, frigid, wiry, rusty. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And then the nail on his thumb bumped into something. Something small. Something soft.
He pressed his thumb into this soft thumb and clasped the rest of his mighty hand around this thing. He spent time feeling it, studying it. It was flesh.
He leaned in closer, and with his other hand he lifted the headset further up his forehead. There in his hands, was a confused child. Next to the child, was the plug, displaced from the one place it was never to be displaced from- the socket. Its LED was dead.
With its tiny eyes, the child looked at the Videohead in awe. With his giant discs, he stared back. Unamused.
With one quick swipe of his thumb, the Videohead flayed the child into two.
He dropped this mangled pile of viscera and cracked bone where he had found it and with his other hand reinserted the plug into the socket. The green light returned.
And the headset whirred back to life. The light began to shine again, bathing the Videohead’s face in its beautiful aura. He began to lean back into his seat, sliding the headset back onto his eyes. Slowly, the gap began to form once more. Little by little, the headset enveloped the Videohead’s face, until all that remained of the light was in that infernal gap. That doomed space, cursed to carry the weight of the headset and the head. Enslaved once more.
Cover photograph by Bhagath Subramanian.
© Bhagath Subramanian. All rights reserved.