Magonia(36)

Ship. In. The. Sky.
I am not a fool. I haven’t told my moms anything about the ship. They would look at me for about three seconds, and then put me into the car, and take me directly to the children’s hospital (an insult, but it’s where you go until you’re eighteen) where we’d have a speedy meeting with the psychiatric unit. So, no, I don’t tell Carol and Eve about the ship.
In fact, I tell them nothing, beyond: I’m working on a project. My moms have the look of people who might be getting ready to take me offline. The Great Unplug has happened only once before, when I was nine and in the obsessed throes of memorizing a chunk of the OED. The moms did not approve.
Memorizing took up the extra places in my brain that were otherwise occupied with counting down the seconds of Aza’s life until age ten, when the doctors had, at that point, decided she was going to die. It was about this time my moms discerned that meds were required.
“So,” Eve says. “Do we need to take you offline?”
“I’m not even on right now,” I say, lying.
She looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
Yeah, Eve has a bandwidth monitor. I find this hilarious. They got the monitor to keep me from looking at porn, I assume. They were definitely convinced that’s what I was doing when I was working on the OED project. Carol burst into the room, all, AHA! And found me midway through H.
Maybe I’ve looked at some things on the internet in the category of naked. Who hasn’t, I ask you? But there are a million categories I care to look at, and most of them are not porn.
Categories like historic UFOs. Categories like history of flight. Categories like peculiar weather patterns since the eighth century. I’m compiling said categories into one larger thing in my computer. Because, reasons.
“I’d actually not be that unhappy if you were looking at porn,” Eve says, reading my mind, and sighs. “At least you’d be human.”
I look up.
“You wouldn’t be happy,” I tell her.
“I would be reassured that you were normal,” she says.
“Yeah, but I’m not,” I say.
“Go outside,” says Carol.
“It’s cold outside.”
“See a friend?”
“In case you missed it,” I say, playing the illegal card, “my only friend died.”
“She wasn’t your only friend,” Eve says, impervious to my attempt.
“Name another,” I say.
She can’t.
I do have other friends. Those Who Live Online, in Other Time Zones. Mind you, I’m not nine anymore. If I ended up unplugged again, I’d get around it.
“School tomorrow,” says Carol. “We love you, and we understand what you’re going through, but it’s either school, or doctor.”
Understand what I’m going through? They do not. I’m going through the history of civilization, basically. Not a big deal. Only minor work there.
I wait for them to leave my room, and then I’m back in it. There’ve been several sightings since the funeral. One person saw weird lights. Another saw a bright thing near the horizon. Another actually saw something he said was a rope.
Sir, you have my attention. But then he recanted and said some stupid stuff about downed power lines. Whatever.
There were other sightings of the same kind earlier this year—one above Chile, one in the air over Alaska, one over Sicily—but none of them helped me. People, alas, don’t document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.
Now, however, we live in the epoch of the app. The official ones, and these, the nonofficial. Forget jailbreaking your phone, I’m talking about the ones that require you to break that phone out of Alcatraz.
There are a few hundred of us who develop them (See: Friends in Other Time Zones), mainly because someone else on-list dared us. I’m a midlevel amateur at this point, but they magnanimously let me on the message boards, and even allow me to throw down the odd gauntlet to the real players.
Hence: I now have a sky-anomaly app. You just aim your phone at wherever you saw the strange thing—cloud formations, weird lights, storms out of nowhere—and the app plots coordinates and checks with satellite info to gauge air displacement, mass, humidity, condensation of whatever you’re looking at, cross-referenced with similar reports.
The world is sometimes amazing.
Most of the sightings I’m researching are clearly fake, but three have been real, or as real as I can figure. I think they’re from the same clump of impossible sky out of which I heard Aza’s voice.
I’m done with being cautious now. I’m just going to call it what I think it is.
So, henceforth, we will be referring to that piece of sky as Aza’s ship.
Aza’s ship is heading northeast, slowly, spending a lot of time over farming areas. Those areas have been plagued by hailstorms, windstorms, lightning. Tiny tornadoes have scattered and flattened several fields. No crop circles. Just unforeseen, chaotic weather patterns, destroying harvests.
What Aza said she saw—what Aza saw—is part of a long tradition of things seen in the sky since the sixth century. In 1896, for example, there was something called the Mystery Airship scandal. People all over the western US saw skyships, brightly lit, flying fast. People in Illinois saw some kind of airship on the ground, and watched it take flight. After it was gone, they discovered footprints all around the place it had been. And the thing they said, my favorite quote?
“Something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for.”
Yeah. So that’s where I’m working right now. Something above the clouds.