“You have six legs,” Wilkes said. “Plus two arms.”
“Uh-huh.” Plath wasn’t really listening. She was focusing on the sheer speed with which that window inside her brain was moving toward the finger. Zoom.
She saw the swirls of fingerprint now. An object the size of a skyscraper, but curved, and covered in amazing whorls that soared up and away into the sky. It looked strangely like some stucco walls that are finished with a toothed trowel.
But as she ran—as her biot ran—the giant became even more detailed, and close up the fingerprints began to look like farmland seen from an airplane, the prints like furrowed fields but where each row stood five or six feet high. And there, strangely atop the rows rather than down inside, were what might be holes drilled at regular distances.
The flesh became less smooth and now seemed more like a desert of dry, baked earth.
Anxiety hit her in a wave. She was meant to climb up onto that alien surface. Her finger twitched, scooted wildly across the surface, almost riding over the biot.
“Aaaah!” Plath cried.
“Don’t worry, you can’t crush it. Too small. You know how hard it is to squash a flea?”
“It’s … It’s leaking! My … the … my finger!”
And indeed from the holes a glistening liquid began to seep. A liquid that sat atop but did not soften the baked soil terrain. Little droplets that just sort of stayed there.
“Sweat. You’re jumpy so your skin starts to sweat.”
Plath stopped. The curve of the fingertip made what had seemed like a vertical pillar into a descending roof of dried, tilled soil now intermittently oozing small droplets of liquid. The drops should fall like rain, but they didn’t. It clung to the cracked, furrowed surface.
“Freaky, huh?” Wilkes asked with a smirk.
“I’m supposed to get up there?”
“Yep. Jump. You can jump probably ten times your own body length. You jump up and grab on. Don’t worry about gravity. Gravity is nothing to the likes of us!”
Plath held her breath, trying to calm her heart. She closed her eyes—her macro eyes—and leapt.
The biot twisted expertly in midair and landed upside down. Her legs gripped, and she hung there like a fly on the ceiling; but it was no longer a ceiling, it was a vast farm field spread out before her. Vertical and horizontal had lost their usual definite meanings.
“Hah!” Plath cried.
“Yeah, hah!” Wilkes agreed. “Definitely: hah.”
“I’m on my own finger.”
“Heh-heh-heh,” Wilkes cackled. “Better than “’shrooms.”
Plath wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she was feeling the rush of this adventure now. She was freaking Spider-Man.
“Now what?” Plath asked.
“Now you stay put in the nano, and you go over and poke your boyfriend in the eye in the macro.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Plath said automatically.
“That’s good, because what you’ll see of him will probably deep-freeze your girl parts. If you know what I mean.”
Wilkes was a strange girl, with her creepy, eye-dripping tattoo and her clothing that somehow split the difference between dominatrix and thrift-shop emo. But Wilkes was her Yoda on this trip, so Plath was inclined to be tolerant.
Plath focused on the task of walking toward Keats. The boy’s face had an expression of mixed amazement and fear that was probably a pretty close facsimile of her own.
They met at the foot of the MRI. Ophelia stood beside him. Her smile now was all about mystery and memory. She was remembering when she’d done this same thing, felt these same trembling fears.
“You first, Keats,” Ophelia ordered. “You just put the tip of your finger as close to the eyeball as you can get without touching it. Then you hop off.”
Keats’s finger trembled close to Plath’s eye. She couldn’t help herself blinking as he touched her.
“Ahh!” he cried, and jerked back.
“Eyeballs!” Wilkes said, and laughed her heh-heh-heh laugh. “They’re a trip.”
Plath’s turn. She tried to touch his eye. She saw the vast white orb beneath her, like she was in orbit on an alien farm planet above an Earth of red-rivered ice and a distant …
She jumped.
But the eyeball, that sky-filling planet, drew suddenly away.
“Sorry!” Keats said.
There was nothing beneath Plath’s biot feet. She was falling.
“Don’t move, moron!” Wilkes yelled at Keats.
Plath fell, twisting. The “ground” zoomed past below her. Like she was flying a supersonic jet just inches off the ground. She saw no detail, not at this speed, not twisting madly like this.
Sick fear welled up in her.
“Grab anything you can grab!” Wilkes shouted. “Shit!”
The ground was falling away, like she’d been flying low over a mesa and had the ground suddenly dip.
Then she saw something gigantic on the horizon. It appeared first as a sort of ridgeline, a swelling rise stabbed with leafless tree trunks, each traumatized by something that had chopped it crudely off. Like someone had clear-cut a sparse forest of redwood trees.
Then she was flying over those trees and seeing a huge chasm, like the Grand Canyon opening beneath/beside her biot as it fell. And within that terrifying dark canyon stood massive slabs of grainy, pearlescent—
“I’m passing his mouth!” Plath cried out.