![]() Some of the databases are full of giant, ancient bitmap files. Photographs of documents-actual photos, the kind you have to develop. In the beginning, there were some seriously screwed up methods in play. See, when Vital Statistics started going digital, technology still sucked. Then I log onto my computer, and search the server until I find the database that matches the binder. This is my job: I check out a sequentially numbered binder from the archive. It’s real and it’s mine, and basically, that’s how people are, right? If it’s about you, it’s the center of the universe, no matter what. So I fixate on my finger, numb but not numb. I can’t tell if this supernova thing is really important or if it’s just a slow news day. But just there, just on the tip of one finger. A tingle runs between them, like the skin fell asleep. Listening, but not listening, I press the tip of one index finger to the other. ![]() ![]() The passengers buzz around me, and I fade into my own quiet. I may as well start collecting citations.” “Because I can tell right now, my daughter’s going to end up doing fifty million supernova projects at school. Cell phone whipped out, she watches iPad expectantly. Suspiciously, like there might be a conspiracy theory. “Makes you wonder what else they don’t know,” Fruit Basket says. The man with the iPad turns the screen to her. It’s a nice switch up from the usual BO, motor oil, and general-city-life smell. The fruit’s ripe, nipping scent perfumes the air. She balances a basket of oranges and mandarins on her knees. “That’s what I heard,” another woman says. “If you get out of the city, you can see it. “Yeah, weird, huh?”Ī little blonde I’ve seen a million times and never spoken to cranes into the aisle. Looping my messenger bag over my neck, I slide into the space beside him. The opening act of a web series or something. A general buzz of conversation fades, and a black man with an iPad leans toward me, interested. The story’s big enough, or weird enough, or something enough, that strangers on the bus look up when I get on. Hazy pictures crowd my Twitter timeline, shots of the sky with a bright point fixed in the middle. Print papers are pissed as hell, I bet, but who reads print papers anymore, anyway? There’s already a Google doodle for it. It’s the top story on my news feed, the TV, the radio. So for me, the supernova isn’t real yet, even though it’s ubiquitous. The only stars in the city are the ones sitting in puffy coats, cordoned off from the masses, backing up traffic in every direction while they shoot the five thousandth episode of Law and Order: Epic Crimes Division. I look at the sky, but it’s a waste of motion. Hair wrapped, lunch packed, I step into the morning. Speed of light, light years away, Star Wars jokes, when you wish upon a . . . This fact, I’m thinking, is going to be repeated frequently as the day goes on. Now it’s in the middle of no thing actually, it has been for four hundred twenty-two years. It was, until this morning anyway, a lonely little nobody star, sort of in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t on the Wikipedia list of stars about to shit themselves. Like my arrival into this world, KV-62’s demise is a surprise. They’re just facts, presented for your amusement and edification. That’s not in order, not chronologically, or in order of importance. Other things that happened on this day in history: Eli Whitney got a patent for the cotton gin, Charles I granted a royal charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and I was fished out of a trash can in the Union Square subway station. Well, according to the news, it went supernova on March 14, 1592, but we’re just now finding out about it. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |