The Eyes Have It. A Painting and a Fabulism.

The Eyes Have it: Self Portrait by a 7th Generation Omniocularis, digital painting by D. H. Hermanson. Original is 12” x 12” at 600 dpi printed on Moab 300 gsm archival paper.

There are 9732 living members of my generation. Amidst the millions upon millions of varying Homo sapiens that share this world, we are often viewed with a kind of unpleasant scepticism or even disdain. In meeting these prejudices, my self-portrait does not include the lower part of my face, which so many find distasteful.


As a 7th gen. Omniocularis, I am proud of the accomplishments of my forbears. They underwent great suffering to help bring me, and others like me into being. Our first three generations were not viable. They often died in prenatally, or in early childhood. It took our makers a long time to realize that the models they were using in our creation were inadequate. The original visual cortex of Homo sapiens was insufficient to deal with the increased input from eight sources, instead of the customary two. This created an epilepsy like effect.

Upon realising the nature of their error, the makers achieved by viability in generations four and five, but my forebears in those generations suffered terrible pain, and often died before attaining adulthood. On analysis, it was discovered that the operating temperature of the brain was being affected by the dramatic increase in computational functioning required to integrate eight eyes.

The makers discovered they could adapt piscine float sack technology to create a subdural ventilation system. This was thought preferable to the creation of extra-cranial radiators, which proved, in the hapless 5th gen., to be extraordinarily vulnerable to damage. The criminality of the originators is limitless. They called that generation "reindeer" and their cruel adolescents would brag of "taking a rack." To our knowledge, no court, dominated as they are by those same originators, ever dispensed even the lightest punishment for such lethal cruelty.

My parental generation, gen. 6, was the first fully viable omniocularae. To external observation they appear identical to gen. 7. However, it was discovered on testing that this generation retained an unfortunate binocular orientation, that with maturation led to a tendency to ignore output from all but the forward facing eyes. This defect was corrected in my generation.

My cohort resolves this issue with the capacity to both consciously and unconsciously choose our point of focus. Just as an originating Homo sapiens can choose, for instance, to look down at his or her hand, and for the most part ignore background information, giving no attention to his or her feet, we can choose to look at a subject in any direction, focusing our attention as needed. Our visual cortexes are capable of fully integrating a 360° field of vision. When I relax and casually take in the world about me, it is the whole world. In a very real sense I no longer have a front and back or sides. I am as comfortable walking "backwards" as "forward”. Perhaps surprisingly, the genetic material for this capacity was found among cetaceans. We were able to develop a correlate to their auditory processing capabilities, a capacity that allows three-dimensional spatial processing. Originators seem to think that we simply “see more” than they. They imagine that our visual field is something akin to a panoramic photograph. This is a misperception on their part. That is not how we see. Indeed, ordinary language cannot convey what they are missing.

After maturation, I took education at an originator's University. As my field was practical genetics, I am now helping with the preparation of our  new 8th gen. Although my cohort has been in existence now for more than 70 years, we feel that the next step will be the creation of a true omniocularis, capable of seeing a nearly spherical visual field.

In pursuit of the goal, we are adopting a genetic mechanism found in Strepsiptera, a class of insects where the vision mechanisms have elements that synthesise both simple and compound eye principles. This will result in the simplification of 8th gen. cranial structures and the elimination of the native complex eyes found in all previous generations.

Results thus far have been dramatic. These new gen. 8 children have the capacity of looking out and seeing all of the world at once, or focusing on any particular image at almost any distance with incredible acuity. This True-seeing is already granting them insights into the nature of Being-in-the-world that far exceed those of even my own generation.

Our children live into the world in a way so much different than ours. Compared to them, we see as the ancient binoculars says, as through a mirror dimly. They try so hard to tell us what it means. We try so hard to understand, but we never really do. They are beyond us.

So far, we have not been able to make our children viable. With the restructuring of both eyes and visual cortex adapted from Strepsiptera, we have also brought that species' extreme sexual dimorphism. The males of the generation to come are not especially disturbing. Although their eyes rest in bands upon the skin surface in ringlike structures around their heads, they seem, at least when clothed, anatomically otherwise unremarkable. The females are tiny things. We have been unable to keep them alive. Among their partial ancestors, Strepsipteran flies, females live only within a host. Some poor creature’s body provides them with the environment necessary to sustain female life. Even now we are looking for suitable hosts for our future sisters.

This is a difficulty which we shall overcome. True-seeing demands it. The marvels of insight and wisdom that have already come forth from the male children of this next, the eighth generation, are such that we know our path forward is correct. Brothers (and perhaps sisters, as well), toward True-sight, always.