The Eyes of God
A story of science, illusion, and the truth beneath
By Daniel McKenzie
The lab had the kind of cleanliness that erased time. No windows, no clock. Air filtered until it forgot it ever smelled like anything. On the far wall, a red light above the door blinked every seven seconds—the only pulse in the room that felt personal.
Mira settled the visor against her temples, waiting for the slight suction of the cups and the soft click of the electrodes finding home. The cable arced from the crown of her head to the console like a careful question.
“Baseline stable,” Ana said, eyes on the graphs. “You’re clear.”
Mira exhaled. “Starting at twenty.”
The fern on the bench reorganized first, as if relieved to drop the mask it wore for human eyes. The lazy label plant fell away, and what remained was insistence: fronds splitting into smaller fronds, angles holding steady across scales like a promise kept too many times to count. She could feel the visor subtracting—turning down the brain’s running commentary until structure stood without narration.
“It’s there,” Mira said. “It’s always been there.”
Ana’s pencil tapped the clipboard. “Self-similarity. Cheap way to build from a thin genome. Nature’s been compressing data since before we had a word for it.”
Mira smiled without looking away. “You always manage to make beauty sound like accounting.”
“Accounting is how you keep beauty honest.”
Mira tilted the fern gently; the leaves answered with tiny changes in torsion. Not metaphor. Mechanics. “I want water next.”
Ana wheeled the cart closer. A stainless cup under a gooseneck lamp. The meniscus curved, a taut confession at the edge. When Ana blew across the rim, ripples ran like messengers, canceled, reappeared from the far side with second-hand news. The HVAC signed its name in delicate crosshatching. Even her own pulse, amplified through fingertips on steel, revealed itself as a traveling wave.
Mira’s throat tightened. Not from sentiment. From relief. Seeing the pattern felt like setting down a weight she hadn’t known she was carrying.
“Note that,” Ana said. “Relief.”
Mira resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I’m not a subject.”
“You’re the first subject,” Ana said, too evenly. “Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-eight.”
The bowl of river stones refused to remain background. Smoothness decomposed into history: grain sizes broadcasting flow speed; nicks and concavities as ledger entries of collisions; a gloss that spoke of time under pressure. She picked one up. It was heavier than it looked—mass asserting itself against the lie of sight.
“Ordinary rocks,” Ana said, not quite masking an edge. “I still can’t hear the choir.”
“You don’t have to hear it,” Mira said softly. “It’s singing anyway.”
The corner camera watched them, a glass pupil where wall met ceiling. It didn’t move. It didn’t have to. Its existence had a way of lengthening pauses.
“Thirty-two,” Mira said.
Ana’s hand hovered over the dial a beat longer than necessary. “You push, you’ll eat semantics.”
“Do it.”
The world sharpened. The bench stopped being bench and became a compromise between human reach, weight limits, and low-bid materials. The stool admitted it was a solution to torque and fatigue. The fern, stripped of its noun, stood on ratios alone and didn’t mind.
“Δ equals point five six,” Mira murmured. She had invented the index to soothe the part of her that needed numbers: a crude measure of how much her perceptual prior was being turned down. “At first, subtraction makes things cheap. Then it makes them rich.”
Ana scribbled. “That line will kill at a conference.”
“Only the first time,” Mira said, and it made them both smile.
“Something mechanical,” she added. “I want flow.”
Ana produced a plastic desk fan from under the bench like a magician’s slightly ashamed rabbit. Mira flicked it on. Blades that were formerly a blur resolved into a moving equation of torque resisting air. Currents braided into ribbons, shed vortices, tugged the fern with a signature Mira could almost spell. The motor hummed a chord with a wobble: one blade fractionally heavier than the rest; a manufacturer’s indifference fossilized in sound.
Ana leaned in despite herself. “I’ll never look at my fan the same way.”
“Careful,” Mira said, smiling. “That way lies madness.”
“Useful madness,” Ana said, and Mira couldn’t tell if she meant it as a joke.
They took a break at the sink. Paper cups, lukewarm water. The visor sat in its cradle, faintly lit like a small animal at rest.
“How long until you let me try?” Ana asked the faucet.
“When it’s safe,” Mira said, and immediately wished she’d said it differently.
Ana dried her hands on the back of her lab coat. “You mean when it’s safe for you.”
“Don’t make me the villain,” Mira said, but she kept her tone light. “I’m being the adult in the room.”
“The adult in the room has a cable coming out of her head,” Ana said, and they both laughed, and the air thinned in a good way.
Back at the bench, Mira asked for a mirror. It wasn’t part of today’s plan, but the urge arrived like a tug. Ana fetched a square from a drawer and set it in Mira’s hand with the ceremony of an offering she didn’t approve of.
Mira lifted the mirror. Expected herself. Got planes and ratios instead. Symmetry held, but not perfectly—childhood bike crash still in the tilt of a cheekbone; years at a screen in the set of the shoulders; diet and sleep, genetics and chance, all negotiating quietly and leaving their minutes in the face. Her eyes blinked back with no caption attached. Not I. Just constraints solving for survival.
She lowered the mirror carefully, as if it might bruise.
“Different when the subtraction is you,” Ana said, almost gently. “Leaves and stones don’t argue.”
Mira nodded.
“What’s the number?” Ana asked.
“Δ is point six zero,” Mira said. “Enough for today.”
Ana didn’t argue. She powered down the amplifier with a sequence of clicks that was probably, to some engineer, also music.
Mira opened her notebook. Perception is prediction. The visor subtracts the prediction. What remains is pattern. Patterns everywhere. Beauty = compressibility. Wonder = the relief of fewer bits. She paused, then added a line she didn’t entirely want to see on the page: Ethics: when we turn this on people, what exactly do we take from them? If labels go, does blame?
Behind her, a switch snapped. “Or meaning,” Ana said, not looking up. “Maybe that goes, too.”
Mira capped the pen. “You don’t believe that.”
Ana lifted a shoulder. “I want to know what’s really there. Not what I hope is there.”
The door beeped. The red light above it leveled into a steady on, then went dark again. No one entered. The room went back to being a sealed idea.
They logged the session. They put away the fern and the stones like props after a show. The visor cooled in its nest.
In the hallway, their badges opened a door that didn’t look like a door until it did. A guard nodded the way people do when nodding is part of the uniform. The corridor smelled faintly of lemon and long decisions.
“Tomorrow,” Ana said.
“Tomorrow,” Mira said. She didn’t add what rose in her throat: Let’s keep it on stones a little longer.
Outside, evening had remembered how to smell: cut grass, a food truck’s grill, rain far enough away to be a promise. Mira stood a moment under the split sky and watched students cross a green with the ungainly grace of people learning themselves. The visor was in a case at her side, quiet as a kept secret.
She considered calling her father, telling him that the spirals he drew on napkins weren’t just pretty lies—that beauty really was compression, that patterns could carry wonder without permission. She put her phone back in her pocket. The words weren’t ready. Some truths needed to warm in the hand before they could be given.
At the crosswalk she waited with everyone else. Red meant wait, white meant walk. Lawful enough to trust, for now. When the light changed, they moved as one and didn’t step on each other, which felt, in its way, like a small miracle.
Tomorrow they would point the visor at faces.
Tonight she would let the world keep its gloss.
The Campus Walk
They crossed the campus at dusk, the visor tucked into its padded case at Mira’s side. Ana walked beside her, silent except for the occasional scuff of shoes against pavement. The quad ahead was alive: students spilling across the paths, bikes carving diagonals, voices overlapping into a shifting hum.
“Baseline twenty,” Mira said, lifting the visor.
Ana tapped her tablet, eyes on the data stream. “Vitals steady. Proceed.”
Mira adjusted the strap and let the subtraction begin.
The gloss peeled away. Categories she normally snapped onto strangers—freshman, professor, groundskeeper—never arrived. What came first was older: the physics of posture, the grammar of mimicry.
A boy lifted his chin as he joined a group, syncing his stride without realizing it. A girl laughed too loudly, the sound shaped like a request: let me in. Mira hadn’t known she knew this, but her body had always been decoding the grammar. The visor simply refused to hide it.
“Vitals?” Ana asked.
“Fine,” Mira said, though her stomach was taut.
Ahead, two students argued. Without the visor, their words might have seemed defiant. Subtracted, the heat resolved into defense: storm fronts colliding, each bluffing against dissolution. Free will evaporated. What remained was weather.
Mira shivered. If she could see this so plainly, then anyone could. An advertiser, a politician, a machine. All you needed was the pattern, and you could play it.
Ana’s voice cut in. “Weather, yes. But noise too. People pretending their storms mean something.”
On a bench, a couple leaned close. Without subtraction they were charming. With it, they became choreography: the girl tucking her hair behind her ear, the boy’s eyes pausing at her mouth. Predictable vectors of attention, old as deer in a clearing.
Mira felt a pang. The glue that bound people together was real, but fragile. If stripped bare, what would hold it?
Ana watched the couple a moment longer than necessary.
“Hormones and habit,” she said finally. “Call it romance if you want.”
She hesitated, then added quietly, “But I was curious whether the visor might show something else.”
“Forty-two,” Mira said.
Language thinned. Conversations around them unraveled into probability flows: one sentence ending inviting interruption, hesitations exposing where each person was willing to be wrong. Speech wasn’t dialogue, it was math in duet.
A professor pedaled past on a bicycle, a stack of graded papers strapped to the rack. The red marks clustered in predictable places. Tired, but fair. Compassion surfaced in Mira before judgment had a chance.
Ana caught her expression. “Still good?”
“It doesn’t make me colder,” Mira said. “It just makes judgment feel clumsy.”
Ana frowned. “Judgment’s all most people have. Take it away, what’s left?”
Near the fountain, a child slipped on the wet stone. His father caught him by the jacket before he fell in. The visor showed the rescue not as heroism but inevitability: reflex braided from anatomy and urgency. The boy’s breath changed shape as humiliation dissolved into relief.
The kindness wasn’t diminished by seeing it this way. If anything, it felt more certain, inevitable as gravity.
Ana’s arms were crossed. “A frog kicks when you touch its leg. Doesn’t mean it’s noble.”
Mira lifted the visor half an inch. The world’s gloss rushed back in—labels, names, the mercy of ordinariness. Students talking, leaves rustling, cars idling at a light. She breathed the relief of it.
“Plateau,” Ana said.
“Plateau,” Mira echoed.
But she couldn’t resist lowering the visor again.
A security guard held the door for an older man. Through subtraction, it wasn’t courtesy but adjustment: one body recognizing another’s slowness and making space without thought. The kindness was real, but impersonal. The pattern closed itself.
Mira’s chest tightened. If this was all pattern, then blame was flimsy, credit thinner still. The scaffolding of morality trembled like a house of cards.
Ana noticed the flicker in her face but said nothing. Her silence was harder than words.
Back in the lab, Mira set the visor in its cradle. The fern looked dull again, stubbornly ordinary.
Ana slumped into her chair. “Well?”
Mira stared at the table. Her voice was quiet. “People are lawful. That much is clear. What I don’t know is whether seeing that makes them more precious—or more disposable.”
Ana didn’t answer. The silence between them was safer than any guess.
Dinner at Home
The visor stayed in its case on the kitchen counter, its cradle light pulsing faintly like a pet waiting to be fed. Mira tried not to glance at it, but its presence pressed against her attention as surely as a third chair at the table.
James was already eating when she sat down. The lamplight softened his face, catching in the fine creases around his eyes. He looked up, fork poised.
“How was it?” he asked. His tone was casual, but she caught the check-in underneath. He wasn’t just making conversation.
She turned food on her plate without tasting it. “Hard to explain,” she said. “Strange.”
James gave her a look—the kind that asked for the truth without saying it aloud. “That’s your answer when you don’t want to tell me.”
Mira tried to smile, but it faltered. Words resisted her. Instead, she studied him: the steady cycle of his jaw as he chewed, the rhythm of swallow and breath, the faint narrowing of his eyes before he spoke again. She saw it all as lawful, patterned. The visor wasn’t even on, and still she couldn’t unsee.
Ana’s voice drifted back from the quad: Hormones and habit. Call it romance if you want, but biology doesn’t.
“What?” James asked, setting his fork down.
“Nothing,” she said too quickly.
“You’re staring at me like I’m an experiment.”
She laughed softly, but it came out thinner than she meant. “Maybe you are.”
His expression sobered. He leaned forward, forearms braced against the table. “Mira, don’t bring that thing home. Whatever it’s doing, it’s in your eyes. You feel… far away.”
She forced herself to look again, really look. His smile—crooked, lopsided, the one she had loved since the first night they met—resolved into nothing more than ratios of muscle and light. Ana would have dismissed it as a reflex. But the warmth Mira felt seeing it—that hadn’t vanished. If anything, without the gloss of ownership, it felt stronger, more certain.
“It’s strange,” she whispered. “The more I see you as pattern, the more I love you. Not because you’re mine. Because you are. Because you exist at all.”
James blinked, caught between confusion and tenderness. “That makes no sense.”
“I know.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “But it feels true.”
For a moment the silence held them. His hand was warm, familiar. Her chest loosened, as though something clutched too tightly had finally released.
They finished the meal without much talk. Later, when James dozed on the couch, Mira sat watching his chest rise and fall. Breath in, breath out—the body solving itself. Ratios, reflexes, inevitability.
She waited for the feeling to collapse into machinery.
It didn’t.
If anything, it felt larger, less dependent on him being hers.
For the first time, she wondered if this was what love really was: not possession, not story, but a quiet gravity pulling everything together. Wholeness.
She whispered it to herself, testing the word as if it might break: “Wholeness.”
James stirred in his sleep, and she pulled the blanket over his shoulders.
The visor pulsed faintly from its cradle in the kitchen. Mira didn’t look at it. For now, the rise and fall of James’s breath was enough.
Ana’s Turn
Ana lasted almost a week before caving.
She had hovered near the console every session, arms folded, jaw tight, jotting notes that never satisfied her. She mocked, minimized, but Mira could feel it building—the envy, the hunger.
That evening she broke. The lab was quiet, the air tinged with the faint lemon of the cleaning crew long gone. Mira was logging data when Ana spoke.
“Let me try.”
Mira looked up. “No.”
“You mean not yet.”
“I mean no,” Mira said. “It’s not safe.”
Ana’s laugh was small, sharp. “You’ve been swimming in it for days. You’re still here.”
“That doesn’t mean I should’ve.”
Ana reached for the visor. “Mira, I’ve been with you since the first napkin equations. If this is going to matter, I need to see it. I won’t stay your assistant in the dark.”
Mira’s hand hovered over the cradle. She wanted to refuse. She wanted to protect. But Ana’s eyes had the set of someone already decided.
“Thirty,” Mira said at last, her voice flat. “No higher.”
Ana strapped the visor on, her hands steady. The console hummed as the system came alive.
The fern shifted first. Ana tilted her head. “Recursive geometry. Sure. Pretty enough.”
“That’s enough,” Mira said.
Ana ignored her. “Forty.”
“Ana—”
“Forty-five.”
Her breath hitched. She looked at Mira, then back at the fern, then at her own hand.
“What do you see?” Mira asked carefully.
Ana’s lips parted. At first her eyes lit with wonder, but the light cracked almost immediately. “You,” she whispered. “Not… you. Ratios. Reflexes. Your smile—just a spasm of muscle. Your voice—a pressure wave pretending at kindness. Even the way you tilt your head when you’re worried. All of it—scripted.”
Mira’s throat tightened. “That’s not all it is.”
Ana gave a sharp laugh. Hollow. “Isn’t it? Look—” She raised her hand, turning it back and forth. “Flexion, extension. Signal, response. Puppet strings.”
“Stop,” Mira said.
Ana leaned forward, eyes fever-bright. “Don’t you get it? There’s no one here. Not in me. Not in you. Just the machine running itself.”
Her voice rose, brittle. “And all those students you love to watch—their tender little dances? Pathetic. They think they matter. They think they’re choosing. They’re not. They’re wind-up toys.”
Mira reached for the console. “I’m pulling you out.”
“Forty-eight,” Ana snapped.
The visor clicked.
Ana stiffened. Her face drained of color. She pressed both hands to her temples. “Oh God.”
Mira’s chest constricted. “Ana—”
Ana’s words tumbled out, shaking. “It’s nothing. It’s all nothing. I thought there’d be something underneath, some spark. But there isn’t. Just pattern grinding against pattern. Meaning is the prettiest lie we tell ourselves. Even love. Especially love.”
Mira dropped the gain to twenty. The visor sighed and released her.
Ana ripped it off, threw it onto the bench. Her breath came ragged, shallow.
She stared at Mira, eyes wet, voice hard. “You said this was beautiful. To me it’s death. If this is the world, then nothing matters. Nothing at all.”
Her hands shook as she gathered her bag. “Don’t ask me to put this thing on again. Ever.”
She left the lab without looking back.
Mira stood in the silence, the visor gleaming faintly in its cradle. Two people had looked through the same window. One had found wonder. The other, a void.
—
From "The Eyes of God—A Collection of Short Stories"
Coming soon