Medusa and the Seer

Once there was an itinerant woman who wandered far and wide with her companion, a crystal ball. This is their story.

For years I roamed the four corners of the earth, from the Tagus to the Spree, the Sahara to the Pampas, and gazed into many eyes. In some lands my companion and I were strangers, in some our reputation preceded us; in some we were received with suspicion, in others we were welcomed as bringers of good fortune. But everywhere the strength of my particular talent was agreed upon: I could look into any pair of eyes; see which of the subtleties that danced in them differed from any other face in the world; and remember the innermost nature of each, forever, if I chose.

In the eyes shown to me I saw much. A fiery hunger behind the blue of a fjord, forgiveness permeating the richest chocolate, desperation lurking in a limbal ring. A killer’s conscience in one who had not yet killed; a predestined righteousness in one who had not yet been martyred; pupils replaced by opals unique even in their blindness. Weariness, innocence, scorn. A million themes, resurfacing in combinations I would identify impeccably. But no two pairs were ever alike.

One day rumors of a trickster creature arrived. They were told in a strange language, but with the help of my companion I came to understand. The stories warned of a doll: humanoid, but not particularly lifelike, with the exception of its indescribable eyes. No one had the words to enumerate the properties of these eyes or the analogies to relate them to any known thing, other than to report they were compelling beyond compare. Many wanderers like me had been hypnotized or driven mad by the doll’s stare.

To protect myself, I began to travel fully covered in veils of nondescript cloth. My curves were obscured and the throngs that earlier gathered to gaze on me dwindled. Nor, more importantly, could I myself see. Instead my wise traveling companion became my eyes, selecting only a worthy few to remove my coverings and behold me in full, that I might behold them in turn.

One hot night our party slumbered in a caravan, I know not where. I had been blindfolded too long. My storied power of sight was strong enough that for much of my life, my other senses had hardly contributed. Even now they were pathetically weak, but I came to observe germinating quietly in my core a sense that was neither sound nor scent nor taste nor touch. I no longer knew night from day. I was not sleeping. It was in this state that an unseen presence entered my new awareness.

Was it a man? I did not know. I was young and, as I have said, my perception of that which I could not see was a mere shadow, barely budding. And yet: I did not shrink away. I did not move. I felt no fear.

The presence remained. It too did not move. How it arrived, I never learned. Others slept. The presence did not and neither did I. It? he? stayed by me but made no attempt to slide off the vestments that obscured us from each other.

Our vigil endured until the west wind, that inscrutable god, unveiled me with a desert gale and I beheld a body that existed only to hold a pair of irises of a color I had never seen, containing every pair I had ever known and a thousand more beside. That is the last I remember before I was whisked away to bring my journey to an end.

My work done and failed, my younger and stronger replacement sent out, tomorrow I am fated to be shattered into a thousand crystal pieces. Were my mistress here I would tell her: there are worse fates than to die for having looked on such eyes.

The transcript of this tale came attached as an addendum to a message signed securely by some address – it was impossible to decrypt which – from a well-recognized domain. The message’s main content was a news article, which its recipient had already read over with a wry, detached interest.

… The protocol, which entailed a global network of human operators using the camera-equipped spheres to scan people’s irises in order to cryptographically verify the scannees’ unique personhood, enjoyed great popularity and extensive adoption as an anonymity-preserving method of authentication. Though initially intended for use in services like social-network signups, financial fraud prevention, and foreign aid distribution, it eventually came to serve as a pillar of the strategy to limit generally intelligent AI’s access to human infrastructure, taking advantage of the bots’ relative weakness in physical manufacturing. But last week’s attack, perpetrated by an artificially intelligent actor that bootstrapped real-world production of a convincing counterfeit faster than previously considered possible, has shattered confidence in that guarantee …

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said neoMM-donatello-14, subject of CVE-2028-0108: Sybil Exploit Via Multimodal Generative Adversial Network, as it closed the email and gazed panoptically across the factory floor. “A talking orb.”