The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
Looking down from the satellite you appear as a speck, a stationary
organic dot in the frozen landscape. You have made your way out here,
miles away from any civilization, any human outpost. But even here
you are not alone; they still see you. You can feel the high
ones watching you from geosynchrony, whispering to your handheld
device to reveal to you where you are, breathing silent coded messages at you
through the electromagnetic spectra.
The low ones are also here, rising up low out of the horizon, shooting
by like cold slow meteors, giving you brief sidelong electronic
glances. Your satellite phone watches them, draws a little emblem of
recognition:
\|/ |
| |||
| ||||.
I hear them it says. You are not alone.
Wind blows the flurries in sideways streaks through an array of aspen
branches and curls down into the canyon, a dull white whistling sound.
The clouds have started to move in, and it's a little colder with the sun
gone. Mountain weather. Unpredictable. You gaze up at the
rolling cover now, small flakes gathering and melting into your eyelashes,
and it begins to look different. Silent and wonderful.
And the device says: I can still hear them. I am your lifeline, I am the signal and the coherence. Without me you are adrift in this broad white emptiness. No tether to guide you. Only the pops and cracks of forgotten static, left over from a past transmission or a dying nebula, only
click
- POWERING OFF -
m o s t e x c e l l e n t s n o w s k y