I See You

Hi guys - this is my first fiction posting and, indeed, my first posting of any form on ATS. This story was one of my first, primitive efforts at short story writing. I hope you like it.

I See You - Part 1

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The eyes had simply … opened. In utter defiance of reason and science and order. They had appeared in the dark of the night sky on the belt of Orion to a starkly horrified worldwide audience. Down the length of the West African coast to the capitals of Europe, millions awoke to find themselves being watched by an impossibility. Where the outer two stars had existed on Orion’s Belt since time immemorial, now a pair of eldritch eyes, the very colour and luminescence of the stars themselves, gazed down upon the Earth and its mutely terrified denizens.

The BBC broadcast live video of the stellar phenomenon into the cities of America, where its people watched with growing horror the lengthening shadows and darkening skies that heralded the arrival of the star eyes into their own lives. All those who watched the broadcast and especially those watching not via television, but with upturned faces, marked that the eyes darted this way and that, as though they were straining to behold the movement of the creatures who lived upon the Earth. Journalists live on the scene remarked on the seeming intelligence that shone from within the eyes whilst noting, silently, so as not to give voice and form to unspoken fears, the obvious malevolence that radiated from the eyes like an intense heat.

Radio observatories in Chile, Spain, Australia and within Russian submarines in the Atlantic Ocean confirmed that the exterior stars framing Orion’s Belt were gone, replaced by the impossible physicality of the star-spun eyes. Television studios rushed to recruit astronomers to explain to the viewers at home exactly where in the infinite vastness of space the constellation of Orion lay. Armed with the latest in 3D computer graphics, an assortment of science types explained how, based upon the distance of Orion from Earth and the apparent size of the eyes in Earth’s skies, the eyes were each believed to have a diameter roughly twice that of our solar system. The computer models showed an Earth the size of a pinpoint poised helplessly next to a pair of eyes whose sheer size was far beyond the comprehension of any human.

In the face of this revelation, the newly elected Pope’s calls for calm became alienated amongst the more popular assertions from radical religious groups that Satan had been freed from his thousand-year imprisonment and that, consequently, the Apocalypse was at last at hand. A few optimistic souls suggested that perhaps the eyes were those of God Himself, but this reasoning was neither widely accepted nor inherently more cheerful. If it was God, observers noted, He looked mighty angry.

Even as debate concerning the nature of the eyes raged among scholarly circles, riots festered across the globe as the fear and the anger generated by the continual reality of the eye’s presence was directed at the mechanisms of society, impotent as it was to harm or even touch the star-cold gaze of the eyes themselves. Oddly enough, reactions were most violent in those societies which held themselves up before the world as beacons of scientific prosperity: the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Less technologically advanced cultures, perhaps vesting their trust in faith rather than reason, were noticeably more accepting of whatever fate had in store for them.

I See You - Part 2

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Five days ago, the eyes vanished. The world awoke to another fearful night to find the eyes were simply gone. Nobody reported seeing them close, they just weren’t there any more. A collective sigh of relief rose and then died in the throats of men and women everywhere when it quickly became apparent that not only had the eyes left the night sky, but so too had all the stars in and surrounding the constellation Orion. In a region of space which less than a week ago had been home to countless stars and nebulae and comets and clouds of incandescent dust, now an unfathomable blackness gaped, as though the glistening, star-specked skin of the universe had been peeled back to reveal the dark nothingness of the flesh below.

Telescopes on Earth and in orbit revealed that the black void emitted no light, no heat, no radiation, no energy of any kind. It wasn’t matter; it wasn’t antimatter. It was just nothing. In defiance of the physical laws of the universe, the black stain began to spread at a speed which beggared belief. If you looked up into the heavens where the stars had once stood like faithful sentries, you could actually perceive the expansion of the dark blight as it gradually ate the night sky, devouring familiar constellations and swallowing the bright stars Men had dreamed of and wished upon since time out of mind.

The TV and radio stations were ordered to continue normal broadcasting, while the world’s leaders tried to assure the stricken peoples of Earth that everything which could be done was being done. Just don’t panic. Don’t panic. Their words were filled with a morbid hopelessness, for what contingency plan could hope to counter a threat that existed on a universal level, forged in the cold, star-lit malice of two great eyes? In the face of the dark unknown, who could hope to dream?

This morning they told us that Pluto and Neptune were gone; that we may have mere hours before Earth’s rendezvous with the black unknowable that ate the universe. I sit here, writing this and remembering a comic written by an Englishman named Neil Gaiman. In it, the Fates, the three women who are the embodiment of the final realisation of everything, declare that “Everything created has a beginning, just as everything created has an end”. I think about that and I remember that once, in a high school science class, I had asked my teacher where the universe had come from. He said it had come from Nothing. So I sit here and I wait and I hope to dream.