Light years

Date: 14.403562857 billion Orbits after Big Bang, 37° azimuth from Central Star.

Transduction: START.

I was born near-sighted, some 30-odd Orbits ago. So us meeting is a bit ironic, you see. Ha, pardon my little pun; I’m nervous.

Ma said I shrieked till the stars fell out of their bloody cosmic positions whenever she took two steps away from me. Maybe even you heard me, if you already existed back then.

To stop me crying, Ma stuck an old doll, its radial symmetry broken by a missing sixth limb, near my rooting station while she worked. Said it soothed me because it kept her spirit close. I reckon I just couldn’t tell the difference between it and her from even that short distance.

*****

She was gone before my twelfth Orbit. Struck by asteroid debris on her respiratory limb. Wrong place at the wrong time.

I was barely mature when we did her rites, newly released from my roots and stumbling on fresh hexa-limbs. We launched her matter past our local gravitational pull, a projection into space of someone no longer in existence.

They handed me to my grandfather. He, too, was near-sighted. The only thing we had in common, other than being related to Ma.

Grandfather wore what he called an eyeglass. The lens sat bulkily in the wiry frame resting between his second and fifth limbs. He’d made it in his glassblowing workshop. After catching me squinting, he dug up old designs and let me figure out how to construct an eyeglass for myself.

When I donned it, the Universe crystallized before me, shifting into my perception like water condensing from thin air. The first step to finding you, though I didn’t know it then.

*****

That taste made me greedy.

Day and night, I pored over glass, tested calculations. Some weeks, I never left the workshop. Grandfather brought me sustenance with each rise and fall of the Central Star.

Until he didn’t.

I don’t know how long his body lay in the hallway before I went looking. I did the rites for him, too.

Grandfather’s residence, where I alone remained, was large. Quiet. I fanned flames and chipped glass to fill the workshop with vibrations.

*****

My lenses elongated, thinned, bending light more powerfully with passing Orbits. I suspended them at all six points outside the residence, moving from one to the next, drawing maps of worlds beyond the one I live in.

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And in one of them, I saw you.

We aren’t constructed the same — your symmetry is bilateral, with only four limbs — but your residence seems empty as mine. The twinkle at the end of the tube you pointed at me caught my attention; you had a lens of your own. Through it, I saw your eye with mine.

All this time scrutinizing the six corners of the Universe, I never imagined someone else would want to look at me.

I’m estimating your coordinates to send this message. Even if I’m off by a bit, I hope the vibrations strike close enough for you to notice.

*****

I’m sorry for rambling. I want to learn everything about your existence. I hope I haven’t presumed too much by starting at the beginning of mine. Knowing you’re there gives me hope, because everything I experienced — everyone I lost — connected the two of us. Perhaps there was purpose behind the pain.

You direct your tube-lens at me as often as I turn my gaze towards you. Are you alone, too? May my words comfort you the way your presence does me. I can’t wait to learn your history. To intertwine our futures across this expanse that separates us.

*****

Using my long-range encoder, I send this message in pieces that fit into a vibration wave without disrupting its integrity. The first fragments must have reached you by now, surely? Yet you remain at your lens as if nothing has changed.

Perhaps I miscalculated. I take down my own lens, hold it by the fire, measure the refraction angle. Slap one limb against another, for what a fool I’ve been!

I’ve missed by orders of magnitude. The light my lens captured, although originating from you, was detected light Orbits away from your actual position. I’ve touched upon your emitted apparition somewhere along the vast space between us. My focal reach hasn’t got to your physical location.

I’ve seen you stack multiple lenses in your tube contraption, increasing your visual range. You’ve given me the idea to try the same. To catch your light earlier, just as it leaves you.

*****

I adjust the gap between my combined lenses. Your world resolves. Suddenly, I’m the closest I’ve ever been.

But something’s different. Where it was moving pieces and beams of light, now it’s eerily quiet.

Layers of ash stifle any colour. Nothing locomotes, or stirs, or breathes.

The cuboid edges of your residence have crumbled into dust.

*****

Something monumental must have transpired while I fixed the lenses. Frustrated, I wrench away the new glass.

And there you are, peering at me within my old lens. Vibrant as before.

I hold up the second lens again. Your world collapses into stillness.

*****

My waveform messages take time journeying to you. Without the long-range encoder, my vibrations are raw, slow — like the sobs reverberating through this empty residence.

And although it’s faster than that, light needs time to travel, too.

The additional distance conquered by my new lens doesn’t just take up room. It also takes up Orbits. And Orbits and Orbits.

So many Orbits that your world has become rubble, and you’ve never seen me at all, because you ceased to exist in the space of that time.