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This Blue Ball
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Free online
Type: Fiction
Copyright: 2005; Creative Commons License
From an unearthly distance, earth seems blue – but not where we stand. Life seems predictable because we live backwards, always seeing into and repeating the past, but sometimes the future surprises – and sometimes you surprise yourself. This novel tells of a contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence and illuminates the tragic confluence of a handful of lives though this alien light.
Now, this evening, he stood across the street, and strolled across the
street, up the sidewalk, to the door. He rang the buzzer, perhaps a
little too abruptly for a guest, rather than a regular visitor. She
didn't ask who it was, just buzzed him up. The hallway smelled of
cilantro and curry and a quarter century of dust, as it had always
done. "The hall of a thousand smells," she had called it, dryly. The
front door to her apartment was open, and he knocked briefly on the
frame, called, then went in.
Alice replied from Andrew's bedroom -- Gary assumed that she was
orchestrating this to avoid falling into pleasantries and mistaken
impressions. He found them looking at a drawing that Andrew had made of
the scratches and comparing it, from a distance, with the screen
itself.
"Hello, Gary, thanks for coming," Alice said without looking at him.
Andrew looked over his shoulder and said, "Hi."
"Hello to you both," replied Gary. His eyes were already drawn to the
screen and the drawing held up almost in his line of sight. Even Gary's
dulled and neglected gray mass was not fooled -- and yet also not to be
trusted. In a moment you could tell that this was not the confluence of
an electrical spike with the chaotic breakdown of the monitor. This was
a directed action, etched into a dumb object by a crude and forceful
hand. But how? It was as if an evil villain had directed his
electron-beam rifle at this monitor and let fly, with a laugh both evil
and chilling. But there was no such gun, and no such villains to
provide context. The context, if any, had to come from elsewhere:
either back to the random occurrence or to another form of
intelligence.
Gary looked at Alice's immense brown eyes, now directed at him. They
saw the confusion and she sensed the alarm in Gary's face. Together
they might even have recognized, if either mind was ready to encompass
it, that this was one of those moments at which reality, subjective
reality, forks. An experiential quantum mechanics, if you will: an
experience that by common sense must have a mundane explanation, but
which at the same time does not admit of one. Such an experience is
both and neither until the moment that either outcome establishes
itself and your own personal reality is confirmed or torn apart,
depending on which direction you were leaning and on the weight you
applied to your belief.
"That's quite an engraving," he said in an effort to sound nonchalant,
going slowly up to the monitor. Alice wanted to tell him stop and she
put out a hand, but she didn't open her mouth.
Gary put his face up to the monitor. The etching was as regular as if a
PhotoShop wand had drawn it -- a whoosh of an electronic paint spray,
with a solid core line and fuzzy pixilation, dribbling away alongside.
There were three distinct areas: one looked a little like an iconic
representation of "the twilight zone," a spring emanating from a point
zero outward; there were two others to the side, one looking like a
miniature explosion and the other like an ocean wave about to strike a
shore. That was all, but enough to be hieroglyphic, not chance, not a
blown circuit, not a cosmic accident. That was will.
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