THE EYE MACHINE
Grand Maester Pycelle climbed the narrow, winding staircase back to the castle's main floor clutching between a thumb and pointer the long, thin stem of one of King Joffrey's mushrooms. He gave it a sniff, then touched it to the tip of his tongue. It brutalized his senses, like a thing never meant to be ingested by either man or beast. Whose idea had it first been to try eating one of these things? And how fucking hungry must that guy have been?
Back at court, he shuffled to the foot of the Iron Throne and handed the mushroom up to Queen Cersei, who still had a leg tossed over the armrest. Someone else had delivered her two bottles of wine, and one of them was already half empty. "Thank you, Maester," she said warmly. Then she lifted the mushroom between two fingers of her own and dropped it into her open mouth. It was difficult to tell because her face had been ripped off, but Cersei seemed to do something with her cheek muscles that suggested disgust.
"You little twats have been eating those for the past week?" she demanded of Vice King Tyrion, who was watching eagerly from the foot of the Throne. He looked at King Joffrey, and they both laughed.
"We've been brewing them up in tea lately," Joffrey clarified. "Because they're so fuckin' gross."
"Chewy," Cersei agreed, lashing her tongue around her mouth to try and get the taste off. "How long does it take? To turn into a god?"
"You are a goddess already, Your Grace," Grand Maester Pycelle murmured.
"Goddamn, listen to this old fool," Vice King Tyrion said, and hooted laughter. "Why don't you climb off the queen's nut sack and go sit back down, Maester. It'll take about half an hour or maybe an hour to come on. You'll see."
With the court dismissed, Cersei and Joffrey and Tyrion decided to drink the wine and play trivia while they waited for the mushroom to work. They drafted Pycelle to be trivia master, but his slow speed and rather dim mental acuity made the game frustrating.
"We should let Cersei be the trivia master and ask the questions," Tyrion said. He lifted one of the wine bottles to his lips and drained it halfway before stopping for breath. He laughed, then explained: "She'll ask some hilarious shit when she starts to get high."
This idea resonated with all three of them, so they dismissed Pycelle and began to play.
"It's your turn, Tyrion, you fugly little hobbit," Cersei declared venomously about twenty minutes later as she settled on a certain page of the trivia booklet that was already gummed up with her blood. "King Aegon III Targaryen ruled from 131 to 157, and had two queens. Tell me: was Daenaera Velaryon his first queen, or his second?"
Vice King Tyrion stood up drunkenly and slapped the neck of an iron brazier, spilling live coals across the floor of the court. "You bitch!" he screamed. "Stop asking me stupid Aegon questions! No one cares about that ancient fuck!"
Joffrey rolled onto his back and howled with laughter, but Cersei merely sat up straighter and met Tyrion's stare.
"This is the first Aegon III question I've asked," she said primly. "You simply hate all the history questions."
"That's because they're boring, and all the names sound the same," Tyrion moped. He sat back down and resumed tonguing the mouth of his wine bottle.
"All right Your Grace, here's a good one for you," Cersei said, turning to a page they hadn't explored yet. She selected an interesting factoid about the crazy stuff the Crannogmen ate, and sat staring at it for a while. Eventually Joffrey sat up and said, "Well?"
Cersei looked. "Well what?" she asked.
"It's my turn, give me a question."
Cersei sat perfectly immobile. A drop of bloody sweat oozed from what had once been her hairline down the side of her temple. "No!" she shouted, and then cocked her neck and launched a stream of wine and bile that flew nearly a meter.
"Oh my gods," Tyrion cackled, rolling to escape the spatter zone. "Joff, did you just see that?"
"How are you feeling, mother?" Joffrey asked with a mischievous smile.
"Radiant," she told him, standing up. "I'll be right back." She gathered herself, took a few steps, and then went into a slinking crouch. She darted out of the court, hearing the echoing laughter of her brother and son clanging like metal inside her mind. She sped through a number of stone corridors. The queen looked at everything, just looked and looked. It was all she could do, apart from her low scuttle. Her eyes were growing, overtaking her head... perhaps, from the feel of it, even melding together; turning into one oblong supereye from the back of which her brain hung by a mysterious pink cord. Her human body had fled and been replaced with a red skeleton that sweated blood everywhere it went, leaving a trail like a slug cast out from the bowels of Seventh Hell. A skeleton on her outside, a true exoskeleton, like a beetle. Compound beetle eyes. Beetle nervous system, more robot than animal, pumping viscous juices up and down the tripod of her legs and spine. Walking was becoming more difficult now. She could almost watch herself from above, could see herself as a terrible hovering Eye Machine, nothing but a huge eye with no eyelid, like a spotlight mounted to a ladder wheeling itself around from thing to thing. Nothing could turn the Eye Machine off, and no sight was too horrible or too gigantic to fit inside its defenseless visual apparatus and take up residence there, for good.
I'm going to remember everything I see today, the Eye Machine realized with an upswell of black dread. Its rigid limbs vibrated. The eye was now half of her entire body, a grotesquely large disc, not a sphere but a bulging membranous disc that could never stop seeing, could never unsee. The Eye Machine screamed and went cartwheeling across the drawbridge of the Red Keep, observing striations in the fabric of reality, lines and forms in a sky full of pure, burning color. The Eye Machine could no longer speak but it had learned to run. The nerve tissue bared in her flaying hummed and glowed with ghostly, inexplicable pleasures, and the eye grew.
The Eye Machine went hobbling past Jaime Lannister, who was doing some kind of business at an obscene kiosk. A mountainous freak enveloped in an inch-thick coating of translucent grease was trying to sell Jaime glowing dildos from behind the counter. The Eye Machine caught Jaime's gaze, and for a single instant an eternity of information was passed between them in a pink beam of light. Jaime reeled back, stunned, and the Eye Machine saw itself aging backwards, into a red skeleton, into a woman, into a girl, into a baby, into an embryo, into a cell, into unreadable DNA encodings hidden in the cells of the beings which had carried her before the universe was made. I am an Eye Machine, she tried to tell Jaime, but all that came out was this: "Hnnnnnhhhh!"
The Eye Machine scrambled onward.
The geography of the streets had become totally alien to her, and the physics, too. She could only move her legs in great swooping strides like those of a spider or a marionette. Suddenly she crashed into God, the Eighth of the Seven, a lumpy old man with a frizzled beard and a fisherman's cap, who would not look at her even though it was all she wanted of Him. To be seen by God, to be known as an Eye Machine.
You are a character in a series of novels, God told the Eye Machine, and the Machine stared helplessly at it all. And people on the internet are allowed to rewrite those novels, God went on. They can fuck them up in the weirdest ways. There's not even a law against doing it.
What is the internet, the Eye Machine tried to ask, but could not. She ran on, through the Canyon of Tears, through the Vale of Molten Shards, into the blazing sky, where she underwent one final transformation: from character into ether, from a woman into the theoretical Eye Machine that can never sleep, an ethereal non-being that is at once everywhere and nowhere.
There was one final crackle among the stars, and then Cersei Lannister was no more.
She had thought herself completely out of existence.