Amusement Park

New York City was a city of glass.
Millions of windows on taxis and apartment complexes, hundreds of screens in hands and on wrists, all silently reflecting the autumn morning sun, watched the bustle and flow of passersby, noting every individual as no member of the crowd could.  Glass stood between the stuffy interiors of coffee shops and the shivering homeless, between displays of white dresses and men in black suits. 
The throng ignored the winks from the waking windows of the great gray city, until one young woman stopped, spun, slipped around an old couple, and approached a grand one looking in on a department store.  The glass smiled at her, and she smiled back as she watched herself run her pale white hands through her long black hair.  Behind the ears, low on the forehead, spread out over the shoulders…one last look and she walked away more upright than before. 
A blinding white creature rising into the sky, shapeless and ninety-two million miles away, focused a few of its winking glass eyes, eyes of reflecting sunlight, on her. 
New York was gray, but to the creature it was a great network of buzzing blue.  It felt the pale woman’s heartrate rising, pumping deep blue blood; it felt the blue sparks running from her humming mind to her thrumming chest to her sweating hands.  It saw the bubbles of sapphire take to the wind as she breathed out slowly, then disappear as a nearby jogger gasped them in.  A little girl on the next street scraped her knee, and her tears were blue, but the mother’s love was a twinkling red light. 
Wherever it was in the world, the creature only ever glimpsed brief flashes of red before they faded into blue, but they never failed to appear.  It stared determinedly at the ruby of the mother’s soothing fingertips until the blue of her nerves shone through again, then turned its eyes back to the pale black-haired woman.
As she removed her phone from the darkness of her pocket, the creature beamed up at her from its screen.  Her fingers skittered over its surface and sent a message up into a different network, stretching through atmosphere.  This one was not blue, but black.  Thin black lines branching through the air, unable to penetrate the body.
Even as she sent a streak of black into the sky with a tap of her thumb, the creature felt the blue, chemical pounding of her mind and watched with joy as it bloomed into a soft red smile.  A brown-haired man across the street giggled as the black streak reached his own phone, then waved a hand that, in the creature’s eyes, shined scarlet. 
The man and woman ate together in a shadowy café, in a snug corner far from the windows, and the creature was glad to leave them alone for the hour.  It turned its eyes happily from their ruby footsteps, still glistening on the sidewalk, to gaze back at its own glowing figure up in the sky.
It watched as its body shimmered behind a raging, silent storm of black and blue rising above Wall Street.
Indigo sparks flew as inky-black swords clashed.  The cobalt body of a serpent twisted as its heads multiplied, then disappeared in a puff of blue smoke that blocked out the sun.  A blue figure fell from a burning black ladder, and his body shattered in midair, sending razor-sharp diamonds spinning through the morning light.
Shrieking, the creature blinked and in an instant, its many eyes in Downtown Manhattan opened wide.  The air was a violent blue of chemical panic, electrical anger, crisscrossed with countless terrified black messages – emails, texts, calls.  A thin white-haired man fell to his knees with his phone in his hands, drowning in the words on the screen.  A plump blonde girl glanced nervously around as her mother turned her face away to hide a sob.
            “Mom, Mom, I’ve lost it all, it’s gone, I’ll be -”
            “Oh Em, what are we going to do?”
            “Sell it, sell it all, just get out now -”
            It was a hurricane that had no eye, and instead converged at a building the color of quicksand.  The words New York Stock Exchange were carved into its cold concrete walls beneath a shuddering flag.
The creature growled.  Its eyes were everywhere, from the sunlight reflected by the moon to the sunlight reflected by the Atlantic, yet it was trapped here suddenly, claustrophobic, for it knew this kind of storm intimately and could not look away.
The buzzing blue that was the world itself was so complex, made so beautiful by chance and time, that it reduced the black network to a childish scribble drawn by the human hand, such a young form of life.  But that childish scribble held voices, memories, years of study, lifetimes of work, decisions to destroy, resolutions to rebuild.  It held money.  In time, it had become a skeletal system without which the sapphire flesh would rot and the precious beacons of red would disappear.
So each person in the city lived to balance on their black lines, grasping one and swinging to the next.  Every step was calculated, and they knew that they must always be alert as they climbed ever higher into the maze, dreaming of the dreaded fall.  They were red and blue flies trapped in a sticky black web, and when its strands began to snap, red began to die in bottomless ocean.
Now, the black network did more than break.  It whipped its tentacles out from under some, leaving them dangling, screaming.  It tightened its black claws around the throats of others, forcing them to their knees.  It morphed into a beast with no eyes to glare or voice to growl, but with a vice for a body.
The creature growled as the people caught in the belly of the monster – young men in suits, old women in skirts - glowed a fierce blue and reached their hands out to it in supplication, mewling, wanting only to hold its black bones again.  They could not. 
The creature closed its eyes and escaped into its memories.
 
Even now, it could still feel its own blinding body pulling the contents of the universe closer to itself, drawing in gas and dust, particles spinning around and around in the darkness to form a humming ring.  It could see the particles draw together under its own solar breath – some, more than four billion years ago, forming a new rocky heart almost close enough to touch.  The creature had expected it to flutter its eyes open suddenly, and smile.
But the young Earth had been faceless and burning, glistening with countless eruptions of fire.  It was beautiful and empty, and soon shrouded in a misty atmosphere to blanket it from the cold infinite.  When the creature opened its first eyes on the newly born planet, they were the reflections of light rays off a scorched world.
A little while later, atoms and molecules began to organize themselves as they never had before – like the soldiers in the battles that would come much later, but with no commanding voice, they drew into formation.  The systems that could not sustain themselves perished, but the systems that survived could not remain static.  They faced challenge after challenge, shock after shock, dying in droves and surviving by chance, year after year.
There came a time when a family of systems began to actively strive for a better chance at life, and this family dominated.  Its children grew stronger, born into a never-ending search for sustenance – though, of course, they were unaware of any search.  They were unaware of anything at all.  Inside each child was only empty reflex, and outside was a mysterious world with no horizon line, for a horizon can only exist in a mind.
The creature knew there was no single moment in which the first horizon was born, but it liked to imagine it as one magical day in the memory of the universe.  For one lucky child, it told itself, a flow of experience became the first mind, and to receive the image that would finally be perceived as a sunrise, the child opened its eyes.  The world had been an old and abandoned amusement park, but as the child looked around in wonder, its lights blinked on and its chiming music started to play again.
It was this child that was the very first to join the creature in watching Earth’s story unfold.  Being a form of life, the child died quickly, but another came after it, and another, one sprouting wings, another blooming with scales.
Just a moment ago, it seemed, a broad-nosed, tufty-haired, somewhat feeble infant emerged in Africa, the diamond continent.  She enjoyed the amusement park as much as her siblings with tails and tusks, and she delighted in playing with fire, holding its energy in her small hands.
But unlike any of her brothers and sisters, she could see spirits in the flames.  She could look up at the sun and see a face smiling down at her.  She could tell stories about what would never come to be.  She, Sapiens, was blessed with imagination, and the ability to grasp the abstract. 
 
Imagination, the creature realized sadly as it watched Wall Street burn blue, often seemed to be far more of a curse than a blessing, even for those endowed with it.
 
The creature shuddered and opened its eyes again.
The scene in front of the stock exchange had only become more saturated with chemical dread, and the dull roar of the mewling children was rising.  The creature heard everything, from the squawking of a frightened pigeon to the trembling breaths of a crisply dressed man to the click-click, click-click of a woman’s heels coming around the corner.
Desperate to fix its gaze upon someone still beyond the pull of the storm, the creature turned its eyes towards the clicking shoes, then to the woman’s pale face.  Her black hair was tangled over her shoulders, whipped out of its careful arrangement.  The clicking shoes still left pools of red as she twirled a ribboned rose through her fingers.
No, the creature whispered hoarsely, go back, turn around, run…
When she looked up, the light died from her eyes and the red at her feet turned to poisonous indigo, seeping up into her knees as they began to tremble.  She dropped the rose and grasped her phone, her fingers searching furiously for a firmer hold on the black network closing in around her, click-click, click-click, click-click, silence.
Her screen reflected the sunlight, holding the creature’s fearful eye in its shiny surface.  She stared at it for a moment, all her red gone, living only in the rose at her feet.  All her blue had vanished too: The buzzing of her mind had quieted, and her knees were still.  The nerves in her fingers turned sluggish as their sparks died, and she dropped her phone facedown on the asphalt.  The creature whimpered as its eye shattered, but grew silent when she turned around and walked steadily away.
She made her way down the first block, a pearly fish swimming against the current of people surging towards the storm.  They were unable to resist its invisible pull because it was just there, just around the corner, a rearing beast – but the pale woman had already seen it and was immune to its gravity. 
“Pardon me,” she said when she bumped shoulders with a suited man.  He mouthed wordlessly, then ran on.
After four blocks, it was quieter.  She entered her apartment building through the revolving glass door, pressed 5 on the panel of elevator buttons, and rode alone in the mechanical whirring until a ding announced her arrival home. 
Finally, she stood outside on her tiny gray balcony, a cool wind spreading her black hair over her shoulders how she liked it.  In the immense building of blue-green glass across the street, towering far over her own, she could just see her reflection.  It was tiny and distorted, but still she felt that she could make out her own eyes.
Turning around and resting on the rail, she looked back into her apartment at a small collection of roses and a framed photo of a brown-haired man on her night table. 
When she faced the glass building again, she refused to find herself in its windows.  No matter how intensely the creature gazed at her from its sunny panels, she would not look.  Instead, she stared downwards at the street, upwards at the sky, directly into the sun until she saw spots. 
Behind her, just inside the apartment door, crouching in the shadows, was an eyeless monster made of inky tentacles and broken black lines.  She felt it and shivered.  She could not go back inside.  Only here was she safe from the black network crashing down all around her.  She could not go back inside, or she would have to walk through the world in its new pounding emptiness.
The creature screamed.  The monster waited.
 
If this woman had not been able to imagine, the creature reflected later in its grief, the monster would have dissolved like smoke in the wind, and the storm on Wall Street would have been nothing but a light breeze sending leaves skittering down the sidewalk. 
 
But she could imagine, and she imagined that her life’s worth hung by a black thread that had just snapped.  Now all she saw was empty air.
            And she jumped out into it.
 
Four blocks away, her phone lay on the ground with its shattered screen, ringing, ringing, bleeding red.  After a few tries, the brown-haired man left a message.
“Call me,” he said.  “It’s going to be okay.”