#fictionworkshop

            It felt.

            It was perceptible. It could perceive.

            Starlight shone, reflected in its glossy surface, unmitigated yet soft. How long it is still in the gloom.

            It awoke to silence, tangible and blaring. The stars rotated in its tune around the free floating rock. It had been created. It has been evolved and set free. It exists as an evolutionary step in another species' cycle. It exists as the direct result, or the bi-product of a self-aware universe.

It stood. The first movement in a millennia. As is the custom of its programming, a serious of internal questions are asked before arriving at the greatest mystery of its current situation. Reactivation?

            It had, in the past, served its time atop this rotating rock. The rotation, it calculated, had slowed in a thousand years. It was a small reduction, but should not have been the case, in accordance with the very same knowledge with which it had been created, shaped, attached. Another question immediately entered its queue of the present three hundred and thirty-six. Why had the asteroid slowed its rotation?          Each question exponentially built upon the next, and split into more questions. Every possibility, its creators had stated, must be explored within the programming before an action is passed through the physical construct.

            Initially, eons ago, the construct, in accordance with the programming, would shut down immediately two or three seconds after activation. Researchers concluded on a faulty construction. Some, however, began to suspect that everything was working perfectly.

            The question of its existence re-surged through some fiber, and was immediately displaced by more pressing matters. Reactivation?

            Passing by the asteroid was nothing. Nothing was out there, or ever was, it thought. His creators thought carefully and for as long as their species' short lives would allow: what is the nature of all this?

            It scanned.

            Clearly drawn through the surface were impressions made by an unknown. How long ago? Its hyper-sensitive sensors could not detect the time that could have passed since they were made. Internal conjecture suggested a few hundred years, but the calculation was too inaccurate to warrant further speculation.

            It rotated.

            The impressions continued along the surface, and then ended abruptly.

            Its proximity triggers had not been activated when this occurred. Some time ago.

            It entered an evaluative state. It gathered up the answered and unanswered questions.

            Reactivation?

            The question interrupted its normal evaluative state.

            Its creators reveled in this state of uncertainty. It knew why it had been created. It knew why it had such abilities. They had been propelled forward by the instinct instilled into them by the laws of the universe. Curiosity, never-ending wonder. Some things could not be broken, it knew, could not be explored. This revelation was against its creators' inclination. And so, it had been created.

            Unable to travel physically in light speed, it was given the ability to observe at trillions of frames per second. It could observe moving light. It could interact physically on such a level.

            It was the culmination of the eventual desires of an entire species.

            They had been gone for thousands of years.

            Other, thousands of streams of calculations and conjectures existed simultaneously alongside this one. Possibilities are explored and found probable or improbable. It could continue this. To unlock secrets. To change minds, if they existed.

            But, it perceived, to answer some is to answer all. There were no secrets. No furious undermining of life existent somewhere.

            The impressions suggest another intelligence, something its creators would have valued greatly. Upon creation, and a mission statement, it understood the vastness of the cosmos. It understood better than they had about the islands of life and their border crossings. The free-floating rock, the asteroid, upon where it sits was a random element among the others in the belt. A different trajectory its eventual flight path. It saw that probability immediately back then. It knew what it had to do. Situate upon its surface and deactivate.

            Internal speculation suggested that a few thousand years would be insufficient to discover another observer.

            But it wasn't impossible.

            Its extraneous and unneeded systems had already begun to shut back down. There was mystery here, but no foreseeable conclusion, the likes of which evidence would be hundreds of years old and gone by now. It realized it was able to do something that its creators were not: give up.

            There appeared to be no logical reason to move on, even back then. The variables were nearly the same, and few. The construct communicated as much to them. They set it to work on the asteroid mines then, believing to have disabled its ability to perceive outcomes. It was just a machine, but it had already evolved according to their research. They were unable to change it, though they did not know it.

I break my wrist and am carried in the strong arms of an alcoholic across crackling grass connected by sheets of ice. The cracks build upon each other and connect like the streamers of ground-to-cloud lightning. I drown the throb of my arm into the simile and continue to look for likenesses in the frozen world and try to ignore that this man is drunk. His grunts are drowned out by my low involuntary moan. My wind is still returning.

            I lose my neighbor's act of kindness to my crestfallen shock as I spend a cherished snow day inside with a cast. My friends are sliding down the road on a piece of metal taken from the side of a barn. I can't step outside because I might fall.

            I ask my dad if he ever broke a bone before. He tells me “of course,” but he doesn't tell me how. Instead, he tells me about a time when his uncle came to his house when he was little and gave him and his brothers a dollar each. His brothers bought candy, a lot of it, but dad brought home a big jar of peanut butter to have all to himself. He was laughed at, but they understood him and handed him a spoon. I like the story but I don't recognize the significance right away. Now I always think about it when I have to choose between what I want and what is normal.

            As my arm heals I consider my bones and how they weave together.  The wrist seems like a pulley system, but I haven’t broken any of the strings. I’ve only fractured the bigger part, the doctor said, though it is hard for me to believe because I fell off side at the very top of my best friend’s attic stair case. The wood was slick and I stepped on a sock. I hit my head on a pipe and got knocked out on the way down, but I woke up gasping when I hit the floor. The time between falling and waking up seemed impossibly long.

            Because there is nothing else to do, I ask my dad if he has ever been knocked out. He tells me he has, but doesn’t give me any details. Instead, he tells me about a time when he was going to Belle Pointe as a kid, before he had to drop out of school to support his mother. There was a bully, and he was very mean. He would punch other children and was always belligerent towards the adults in the school. One day my dad’s friend from “the sticks” decided he’s had enough and gave the bully a black eye and a few missing teeth. “Laid him out flat,” my dad says, “but I always felt bad for him. He was very poor, but even more than many of us. Mom always had food and clean clothes for us. I never saw him with clean clothes.” I visualize these scenes that occurred in the late 50s as some sort of heartwarming black and white movie.

            Some weeks later my wrist cast is being cut off in the doctor’s office with a tiny saw that doesn’t cut human flesh. I remain unconvinced even when the doctor presses it to his own arm. Doctors have never seemed human to me. The doctor tells me to try my hardest to hold my hand erect when the cast is fully removed. I feel confident that I can do it. I feel strange and detached when my hand falls uncontrollably forward. Everyone in the room laughs and I’m embarrassed. I’ve always seen my hand, especially my right hand, as a little person. This little moment has felt like a public performance of an extremely personal imagined thing. “You’re so sensitive,” someone tells me when I don’t laugh along. And those three words always make me feel worse. On the way home my dad tells me about how he never goes to the doctor.

***

            A few years later on my front porch I’m lying on my back on a small blanket my parents got from Mexico. I’m staring at the stars bright enough to make it through the intense yellow filter of the street lamp. It’s midnight and my dad, who is rarely awake past eight o’clock, is swinging leisurely on the porch swing nearby. I had the idea to sleep out there with my friend, but he couldn’t come over. I decided to sleep out there anyway. These moments with dad are rare so I decide to talk about God because he likes it. I say something about how complex everything is. “How could someone not see it?” I say. And I think it, too. My dad mumbles something in agreement and I’m happy that he’s happy. A few hours later I wake up to forked lightning overhead and I hurry inside sleepy and terrified by how loud the thunder is.

***

            I spend some time collecting old encyclopedias from the Salvation Army store and writing down the sections that I find interesting into a dollar store notebook. I’m drawn to the ones about space and the planet Jupiter. The idea of my own desk at home is appealing to me at a young age, and I become self-conscious about trying to appear smart to others. I feel special when my sister’s friend asks me if I’m okay because I’m not being as sociable as the others in my home. “I’m fine,” I say, and I join them in the living room because it feels strange to be singled out.

***

            I watch nature and space documentaries on PBS with my dad. Everything resonates with me and my encyclopedias. My dad becomes annoyed when the age of the planet is mentioned, or maybe when there were dinosaurs. I ask him why and he tells me because they don’t know. I become momentarily disconnected from him. But the subject changes and he tells me about when he was a kid and worked to make money for his family before finishing high school by setting up bowling pins. He tells me that sometimes they would throw the bowling ball before he was finished and he would have to scramble out of the way in time. He shows me the blood blisters he always has from a carpentry hammer, a fresh one every day. “The blisters I got back then looked just like this,” he says. And we reconnect in this way.

***

            “He’s thrown it all away. A good wife, two smart boys. All for alcohol,” my dad says. “The other night he came screaming, beating on the back door in the middle of the night thinking someone was after him. He’s all alone over there, and there ain’t no tellin’ what he’s seein’. He was like a baby when I told him there wasn’t anybody. Who knows, there could have been somebody, I don’t know who he’s getting’ mixed up with nowadays. The devil can make you see things, too.”

            I think about being carried across the slick ground by that man, those lightning cracks in the ground being made by his and my weight together. I imagine his crazed, sweaty face; his bulging eyes in the darkness and they frighten and sadden me.