“X-Static Process”
The woman with the gun had no eyes.
Melanie knew it had to be an illusion of some sort—she told the police later that she thought it must be some kind of high-tech contact lens, some sort of really advanced plasma screen or something , but at the time she simply stared at the black-and-white blur that filled the stranger’s eye sockets in utter, bewildered horror. It was somehow much more unnerving than even the gun; Melanie had worked as a bank teller for over five years now, she had gone through robbery drills, but nobody had ever taught her what to do when a woman walked up to her with nothing but endless pits of static where her eyes should be.
It didn’t seem to stop her from seeing; she walked up to Melanie’s window and pulled out the gun with a calm, confident smile on her face. “If you could, please?” she said, putting a bag on the counter and opening it up. “Just whatever you happen to have handy, the money’s not really the important part. He doesn’t even need it, honestly, but everything needs to start somewhere. Right, Melanie?”
Melanie murmured something affirmative—it was part of the training, keep calm and agree with everything they say—but her mind wasn’t really focused on the other woman’s words. It wasn’t even focused on what it should have been, which was the standard checklist of procedures in the event of robbery by threat; Melanie knew she was supposed to be hitting the silent alarm, slipping the dye pack into the bills she was already beginning to empty into the bag, memorizing the robber’s appearance for later, and a host of other things. But those eyes.
They looked like holes. Not even holes leading into the woman’s head, just holes in... in everything. Like when Melanie stared at them, she could see all the way outside of the universe and there was nothing outside existence but an endless void of fizzing, silent static. It was more horrifying than Melanie could have imagined, and far more horrifying than she could describe to the police afterward; all she could really say was, ‘She was a Caucasian redhead, about five foot six, wearing a black leather jacket over a white blouse with red pants and black boots, and her eyes were... static.’ She couldn’t make them understand.
Whatever it was, it didn’t look like it was painful. The woman’s smile seemed natural and unforced, and she waited for Melanie to finish emptying out her drawer like she was simply passing the time waiting for her bus to get here. “Please don’t be nervous,” she said, her voice mellifluous and devoid of any regional accent. She sounded like a local television news anchor reassuring the public about the bad weather expected to roll in overnight. “I know you’re going to be, no matter what I say, but it really is going to be alright.”
If anything, that only unnerved Melanie more. Bank robbers were supposed to intimidate tellers with the threat of violence, not reassure them. Melanie struggled to respond, but the woman had already taken her best material. “Of course, ma’am,” she murmured weakly, emptying the last of the cash into the bag. “You’re absolutely right.” Her voice sounded thin and terrified in her own ears, like a bad impersonation of herself. She wondered suddenly what would happen if she simply passed out and fell behind the counter. Would the woman shoot her? As soon as the thought popped into Melanie’s head, it began to feel like a horrifying inevitability.
Melanie’s vision began graying out around the edges, and at first it felt like the static had somehow escaped from the woman’s bizarre, impossible eyes and was closing in on Melanie from all directions. It seemed almost like a relief to realize that she was about to faint instead. She slid the bag across to the robber and leaned heavily on the counter, focusing every last bit of her willpower on keeping her knees from buckling.
“Thank you, Melanie,” the woman said, seemingly oblivious to the terror she had created. “Again, please don’t be frightened. It’s all part of the process, I promise.” And with that, she turned and walked away. Melanie forced herself to watch the robber leave the building and go around the corner out of sight before she sat down hard and put her head between her legs. After that, she couldn’t make herself move for a little while.
She recovered a bit by the time the police arrived, at least enough to take her statement and try not to sound too absurd when she got to the bits that sounded crazy even to her. Luckily, the manager was able to corroborate most of her story, but it sounded like nobody but Melanie had caught a glimpse of those strange, inhuman eyes. She wondered briefly if she’d imagined it, or hallucinated it, but... no. The memory was too vivid to be fake.
The detective told her that they’d found the bag sitting next to a trashcan about half a block away, money still inside, and credited Melanie’s calm under pressure for remembering the dye pack. Melanie thanked them automatically, but she had a strange, numb certainty under it all that they would have found the money anyway. ‘The money’s not the important part.’ ‘He doesn’t even need it.’ And most disturbingly, ‘Everything needs to start somewhere. Right, Melanie?’
The words echoed strangely in her head the whole time she was riding home (one of the detectives was kind enough to give her a ride, and Melanie had filed ‘getting back to her car’ under ‘Shit I Will Deal With Later’), the whole evening as she tried to push the entire incident out of her head with ‘Friends’ re-runs and weed, and even in bed until she took a couple of sleeping pills to silence the maddening memories and dull her wits into somnolescence. Melanie knew it was all just adrenaline backwash, the panic and terror that she didn’t let herself feel while she was being held at gunpoint suddenly crashing in on her, but she couldn’t seem to silence that voice.
Melanie was glad they gave her a few days off; going back in to work tomorrow would have been flat-out impossible with this hanging over her head. She needed time to rest, to recover, to let the memories scab over and flake off. She needed to forget it all, the creepy woman and her creepy eyes... all of it. Just forget, she told herself drowsily as she finally nodded off. It’s over. Just forget it.
But when Melanie woke up the next morning, she could see static in her eyes.
It wasn’t much, not at first. When Melanie stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water onto her face and chase away the cobwebs from her brain, the woman staring back at her in the mirror had only a few tiny dots of white flickering against the darkness of her pupils here and there. Melanie could almost almost almost convince herself that it was her imagination, that she had spent so much of yesterday morbidly dwelling on the woman with static in her stare that she was seeing it everywhere she looked.
But then she stared at herself in the mirror a little while longer. And she could see the static in her eyes.
Once she trained herself to notice what she was looking for, Melanie could actually see out through the parts of her eye obscured by static. She watched own eyes for what felt like hours, grabbing the hand mirror from her dresser and taking it into the living room where the light was better and staring at her own reflection until she could see the difference between the world as she normally viewed it and the world as seen through the bursts of visual noise.
It didn’t obscure her vision, surprisingly enough. Instead, it seemed to... simplify it. It was as if a veil dropped down over the tiny fragments of the world she watched through the haze of static, turning them into an outline of themselves that only seemed to let a little bit of understanding pass. Clothing became washed out and colorless, walls and furniture turned into shadows that merely suggested solidity... her hands and arms remained clear and vivid, in some ways even moreso than through the parts of her eyes that still saw normally, but most of the things around her simply dropped into a sort of visual irrelevance.
This was real. This was absolutely fucking real. Melanie sprinted to her computer, looking up the closest doctor with trembling fingers, rehearsing her explanation in her head until it no longer sounded insane. ‘This woman, she had some kind of static in her eyes, and now I’m—’ ‘This woman, she had an eye condition, I think it might be contagious—’ ‘Can you look at my eyes? I keep seeing something weird—’ ‘I’m scared that some kind of eldritch horror has escaped out of the woman who held me at gunpoint and burrowed into my brain, and now it’s burning a hole into my head from outside the universe so it can use me to see through. That’s medical, right?’
Melanie decided not to go with that one. Instead, she put on a pair of sunglasses and pulled her long dark hair back into a ponytail, and went out to the bus stop. She called the police while she was waiting, but it turned out that unlike the movies, they didn’t really welcome the help of a spunky civilian with no formal training but plenty of common sense and bright ideas. She got as far as, “Were there any fingerprints on the bag?” (no), “Did the surveillance cameras show anything?” (they confirmed your story, ma’am), and “Did you notice anything funny about her eyes on the video?” (click)
Melanie decided not to call back.
When the bus arrived, she took a seat as far away from anyone else as she could—she didn’t understand what was going on, but she felt weirdly like it would be irresponsible to make eye contact with anyone even through her sunglasses. Whatever was happening to Melanie, it started when she looked at the woman at the bank; it only stood to reason that looking at someone else might carry a risk of... contamination? Infection? She had a sudden mental image of the hospital filling up with creepy, static-eyed people as the doctor she visited turned into a vector of transmission for every single person they examined, spreading the (virus? Bacteria? Fungus? Eldritch horror?) throughout the city. They hadn’t gone more than a mile before Melanie got out and caught another bus going back the way she came.
She spent most of the second bus ride with her compact right up against her sunglasses, trying to figure out how fast the static was spreading. She didn’t have to look for more than a moment to know that it was definitely getting worse—Melanie could see patches of black-and-white visual noise where there were originally only scattered dots, and they lingered longer and longer as the bus wound its interminable way back to Melanie’s apartment. She felt a sinking sensation of helpless dread wash over her, spreading through her mind the same way the static crept across her eyeballs bit by bit.
She couldn’t just tell a doctor about the problem. They wouldn’t believe her unless they saw her eyes, and Melanie didn’t want to show anyone her eyes until she knew that it wouldn’t make the same thing happen to them. The police didn’t have any idea where the bank robber was, so Melanie couldn’t find out what was causing all this. She didn’t know what to do next, short of tracking down the woman herself based on the clue that she lived somewhere in the city and had funky eyeballs. Melanie felt... doomed.
And it kept getting worse. Every time Melanie looked up now, wide swathes of her vision had that stripped-down, simplified effect like she was looking through some sort of a reverse Google Glass. It was like the static in her eyes simply redacted anything it didn’t care about—road signs stayed perfectly visible, but the text on billboards and newspapers flickered in and out of view as the static passed in front of her pupils. She could see a few colors, lavender and hot pink and cherry red, but most things faded into a neutral, washed-out gray in the veil of static.
Melanie couldn’t resist the sense that there was a pattern to it all, that she saw the things that the static wanted her to see with incredible clarity and the things it didn’t want her to see through a grudging, filtered haze. It didn’t seem possible that the static could be sentient, but at the same time it didn’t seem possible that Melanie could even see a woman with two holes full of visual white noise where her eyes should be and that looking too deeply into those pits of endless static could somehow infect Melanie with it. ‘Possible’ seemed to have wandered off on a long lunch break and Melanie didn’t know when it was coming back. She had to get used to crazy now.
She went back to her apartment and made herself some brunch, hoping that the world would make a little more sense with some pizza inside her. The food seemed to take on that same washed-out quality, though, with only a few fruits and vegetables maintaining their color in the face of the effect—no. Not effect. What did the woman at the bank call it? The process. She said it was all part of the process.
Melanie mulled that over, as she made a frozen pizza with grim determination and chewed her way through it even as the static swirling over her vision seemed to numb all of her other senses to it until the acidic tomato sauce and rich cheese tasted like damp cardboard in her mouth. The woman at the bank told her it was a process. She told her not to be afraid. She knew this would happen, and she knew that Melanie was going to worry, and... and...
Melanie’s eyes suddenly widened. She felt a burst of understanding explode in her head. “Oh damn,” she muttered to herself. She suddenly knew how all those detectives felt on television shows, when they heard their stolid-but-unintelligent partner make a casual joke and suddenly had the key to the whole mystery. It was just too bad that nobody down at the police station wanted to talk to her, because Melanie was feeling spunky as all fuck.
“Okay. Maybe not using that exact wording,” she mumbled to herself as she tossed the leftover pizza in the fridge and went to put her shoes back on.
“She called me Melanie. That was weird, and I knew it was weird even at the time, but it didn’t hit me right away because I was kind of freaked out by her eyes.” Melanie smiled, unable to hide her pride at her own deductive genius. She understood now why Sherlock Holmes and all those other guys loved to do this kind of big dramatic reveal; there was something so powerful about telling a story to someone who thought they knew the score and springing your big surprise on them one sentence at a time.
“But I realized a little while ago that she wasn’t just calling me by my name because she’d seen my name tag or something. I wasn’t even wearing my name tag yesterday.” Melanie felt a tiny twinge of guilt, admitting that to one of the senior vice presidents at the bank she worked for, but she felt pretty sure that he wasn’t going to write her up by this point. Not if what she suspected was true.
“No, the woman who robbed the bank yesterday was talking directly to me. She knew that I was going to get infected by this, this process...” Melanie gestured vaguely up to her own face, where she could tell that the static now covered her eyes almost completely. “She even planned for it. That was what she meant when she said, ‘Everything needs to start somewhere.’ Someone who knew my identity told her to go into the bank and give me a good long look at this, this...”
“X-Static,” the vice president said. Melanie couldn’t remember his name—he was someone from several entire ladders up the corporate hierarchy from her, a face she only saw in newsletters and corporate training videos and once or twice at mandatory social functions. It didn’t really matter. He was the one who did this to her, that was the important part. “I discovered it myself,” he said, sounding slightly out of breath. “I’d explain how it works, but you really don’t care, do you?”
“I really don’t,” Melanie chuckled, not even bothering to hide her disinterest. “I’ve got more important things on my mind right now, to be honest.” Like the static in her eyes; it had been a while since Melanie had looked in the mirror, but she could tell from the way that the colors in the room were washed out everywhere she looked except for the vice president that the process was almost complete. She could almost hear it in her head now, a constant hiss in the back of her brain that threatened to drown out her train of thought.
The vice president nodded, his expression a mask of indulgent amusement. “Like finding me,” he said. His face seemed so bright in her altered vision, almost as if he was the only thing that mattered in the entire room, and Melanie kept having to remind herself not to stare at him. “How did you manage that, by the way?”
“Well, I realized it had to be someone who worked at the bank,” Melanie said, smiling as her mind returned to familiar territory. “Someone very high up in the company, who could get away with having one of their own banks robbed as a ‘security test’ if something went wrong. Someone who was wealthy enough to have access to cutting-edge, um... technology...”
Melanie felt a bit of a mental wobble there—she had to admit, she didn’t know if the ‘x-static’ was really a technology at all—but the hiss in the back of her head silenced her sense of unease, leaving her calm and confident. Even if she was wrong, and the process was some kind of weird sympathetic magic that jumped from one victim to another and tore a hole in their thoughts for cosmic energies to pour into, she’d guessed correctly. He was practically admitting it with that self-satisfied smirk of his.
“Um, so... so I had a pretty narrow list. Of suspects.” Melanie could hear the hiss again, getting louder and louder, almost as if it was trying to tell her something. Or maybe there was something she was trying to tell herself, and the static was editing it out the same way it made the taste of pizza fade into the background or the hot pink lipstick on her nightstand stand out. But if the static was in her head, too, then... then she might not even realize something was wrong. She might not even be able to notice the shift in her perceptions. Her hands fell loosely to her sides as she struggled with the concept...
No. That couldn’t be. No matter what this ‘x-static’ was, it couldn’t change who Melanie really was. If her mind was really being altered like that, she was sure she would notice. She’d have to. Something in her head would sound alarm bells that even the loudest hiss in the universe couldn’t drown out if she was really being affected like that. And if anything, the buzz in the back of Melanie’s head was finally quieting down at last.
Satisfied, Melanie’s fingers returned to her nipples as she continued her explanation. “There were only, um, a... a few?” Melanie lazily tweaked and teased her sensitive tits, trying to remember the exact number, but it kept slipping away into the static in her brain. It didn’t really matter anyway—she didn’t need to remember numbers any more than she needed to remember names—but she felt somewhat foolish forgetting something so simple. She was a, a... a money numbers person, wasn’t she? She should know an easy little number like, like... like...
Melanie moaned. God, that cock felt good inside her. Maybe that was why it was so hard to think.
But the vice president didn’t seem to be having any trouble thinking. He prompted her again, asking, “So how did you know it was me, out of all those people?” His voice sounded a little bit husky, kind of growly and hoarse like he was having a hard time talking, but he didn’t seem to be confused like Melanie was. It was weird, but—oh right! He asked her a question. Melanie smiled blankly as the hiss helped to keep her mind on track by quieting down all the distracting thoughts in her brain.
“I thought that maybe the, the stuff in my eyes was smart,” she whimpered, the constant bouncing of her cunt onto the vice president’s cock making her clit tingle unmercifully. “Or that it was made by a smart guy. And it was, it was making me see what he wanted me to see and taste what he wanted me to taste, and um, and um...” There was something else it was making her do, she almost knew it, but then the hiss in her head went so loud for a moment that her ears practically popped, and she forgot.
Instead, she clenched her pussy around the cock between her legs, trying to make it squirt like a good girl while she answered the nice man’s question. “So I went to all the people on my list, and I looked at them with my new special eyes. And I, I looked for the one that looked handsome, and sexy, and smart, and all, um, um... um...”
The sexy man put his hands around her waist, cupping Melanie’s ass and thrusting up into her creamy pussy. “Masterful?” he husked out, sounding like he was about to cum any second.
“Uh huh!” Melanie cooed, her voice breaking into a squeak as she felt her clit tingle in orgasmic bliss. “Mmm, yes, Master, yes please!” She was so happy to have solved the mystery, so happy that she finally found a Master to take all those boring, silly thoughts away and show her how to obey. She didn’t have to worry about her eyes anymore; now that the process was complete and she had a Master to think for her, they could stay empty forever, just like her. She didn’t even have to worry about money or numbers, because Master would take good care of her from now on. All she needed to do was make his cock happy, and Melanie knew she was good at that.
As if to prove her right, she felt Master’s cum dribble out of her messy cunt as his hips strained up and his eyes rolled back in orgasm. “Oh fuck thank you Master thank you thank you thank you!” she gasped out, the pleasure of his climax stronger than anything she’d ever imagined. She sagged down onto him, staring blankly at nothing as the sheer bliss of pleasing her new owner overwhelmed her drowsy, static-fogged mind. “Thank you...”
“I know just how you can thank me,” he said, his voice almost drunk on post-coital ecstasy. “You’ve got a friend who works at the Grand Circle branch, don’t you? A woman named Ella?” She nodded sleepily. “Good, good. I want you to go visit her tomorrow, pretty pet. Show her your eyes. Start the process.”
Melanie nodded blankly. She still didn’t understand how the process worked, what x-static even was. But she didn’t need to understand anymore. She only needed to obey now. And a good girl like Melanie always wanted to do what her Master commanded.