I tried to relax my mind, and picked a shape to follow as it made its drunken way around the lid. I was right on it, and began almost anticipating which way it would turn. I felt I knew where it was going to move. This went on for a short time before I realized that I was no longer following the movements of this puzzle piece – I had gained control of it.

I traced my eyes slowly toward the upper left portion of the lid as other shapes came and went, careful not to let go of the piece I’d taken hold of. I brought it to a spot in the corner and thought consciously about letting go. It worked. When I averted my eyes, it stayed put.

After a few seconds it disappeared like the others. I selected a new one. A neon blue rectangle. I willed myself to be in control of it, and then I was. I tossed it around the area of the lid with my eyeballs, not feeling any lag whatsoever between the snapping of my eyes back and forth and the responsiveness of the shape. It was like a projection of my mind. I settled the piece directly above my face. And then, locking my eyes straight up, I thought about putting it into the upper left corner. The shape obeyed. My eyes hadn’t budged, and yet I could see the piece moving to the designated spot through my periphery. Amid this lucid trance, a link had formed between myself and the dredge in some kind of mind-meld.

My consciousness occupied a new space now, halfway in and halfway out of my body – reaching into the language of this machine and communicating with it. I wasn’t observing a light show, I was the light show.

One thing I couldn’t do was to persuade the images to stick around. They were fleeting, with most blinking out of existence in under a second. Others might last for five or ten seconds before fading away, with only the brief afterimages burnt onto my retinas. They were adding up, overloading the rods and cones inside my eye. I tried blinking them away.

For a brief instant, one of the residual images hung over a new shape that flashed on the glass, and for a millisecond I saw them together. The next pattern appeared and I let it blur into the afterimage of the previous. They fit.

I began to understand. Not the why, or what, but the how. Layered upon each other, the images formed a more complete picture. To see it, though, I had to hold onto the image even after it was gone. I had to focus on some parts and ignore others – to train myself to compartmentalize the afterimages for recall while allowing others to fade. The thought occurred that this would be much easier with a schizochroal compound eye.84