The Red Crystal Watcher
short story//
The Red Crystal Watcher
Strapped inside the ship’s cockpit, a jasper red crystal womb glowing across the sky of some alien watcher, Bianca Potentia shuffled through various states of agitated unrest, having long ago grown weary of the stated purpose of her mission: to record and interpret the signs and symbols, the biological semiotics, of this absolutely confounding planet.
For the longest time, Bianca could make no real sense of the things she had observed, the patterns of movement, of destruction and regeneration, undulating waves of creation and dissolution, reaching no satisfying thesis regarding their habits of life, a consequence, she had decided, of long stretches spent drifting in puzzled orbit, taking notes, making audio recordings, committing to memory their languages, stories, the names of every obscure body of land and water, every word of the riddle, typing up her conjectures, speculative lines of thought that ultimately led nowhere, hypotheses fracturing in a thousand directions with the sticky splitting sound of cracking glass.
[REC.]…rituals of necrophonesis, compulsive transfers of death, transmutations of precious life into uncanny legions of the un-dead, walking and breathing order, unprecedented shapes of hostility rendered self-devouring, a linear despotism unmatched in its all-encompassing techniques of assimilation…
…the only ideas that seem to take hold are the truly insane. Their insatiable need to destroy what they create chief among them. Locked inside of systems they themselves created, every idea thereafter becomes a madman banging his head against the walls of a prison cell, like fallen leaves cracking wild against pavement. Tlitl tlitl.
Poetry, once the highest achievement of the planet’s most evolved species, their sole cosmic triumph, is but another of their dead things.
What else had she seen?
Wandering tempests, divine forms of salt and wind carried forth in spiral tyranny, a rhythmic planing of the jagged continental surfaces, bitter mineral faces of calico tan desert grayed over by habitual abuse, dull viridian and lemon yellow sanctuaries harboring life in all its self-defeating improbability. Bianca saw a mind, a self-reflecting and self-referencing organism capable of both self-discovery and self-destruction, of evolving within the boundaries of the very life which it both sustained, and, most frequently of all, with which it raged eternal warfare, wailing beneath cavalries of ghostmen on horseback like smoke above blackwater, constant de-differentiation, necessary death and obligatory rebirth, each cycle resulting in a diminished variant of the previous geo-intellect, a self-correcting ego mechanism that Bianca knew, at least this time, would reach its state of absolute un-resurrection prematurely, long before its star reached its own melansis, a scorched condition of purified ash.
Most improbable of all, Potentia watched the hopeful and desperate grasping, generation after generation, by a select few, toward some better, more hospitable, life-affirming take on reality, a repeated unearthing and rediscovering of the lost methods for optimistic forecasting. Potentia bore witness to these reflexive twitches skyward, past the distortion of their city’s light, not at her but past her, at the infinite void of possibility, and thought better of recording their prayers.
But did any of it matter? One could argue that nothing mattered more, because, in the end//beginning, when there were no more curious souls down there watching, it would be up to Bianca Potentia to rebuild that world from what she’d learned. Without them.
