Blink
Observation Notes - 10pm
Weather clear over URSA tonight. Continuing forecast favourable. Data collection on schedule, early readings within expected ranges.
—
Nina shifts her weight over the padding of the observatory’s main seat, leaning to set down her notepad and pencil. The ergonomic cushion doesn’t so much as squeak.
Couldn’t they have made the chair a little less comfortable? Surely it must have crossed the mind of one of the geniuses who’d designed the world-leading, state-of-the-art facility. Astronomy being the significantly nocturnal pursuit it is, the least a chair could do is make itself a bit more difficult to fall asleep in.
She picks up the first of her takeaway cups, wafting the aromas of cardboard and hot coffee into the air. She can still recall her swooping excitement the day the approval had arrived, the moment she’d read the allocation and bounced right up off the couch. An entire week’s slot on the Ultra-long Ranged Spectral Array. One of the first upon its grand opening. It hadn’t been essential for her dissertation, not based on her existing plan, but the chance to apply had been too much to pass up. Her flatmate had laughed at her, and then bought her an ice-cream cake to celebrate.
Now, at day seven of the mistreatment of her sleep cycle, even Nina can admit the novelty of retaking the same hourly readings has started to ebb. That’s science for you. Monitor all variables, ensure results are replicable. Rinse, repeat, repeat again for good measure.
Tonight, between the rising of Aldebaran and the setting of Vega, something blips her attention during a scan. Nina pauses, squinting downwards, almost brushing her nose to the console before remembering to use the zoom control. Some human habits are hard to break.
It’s not the deviation she’d been watching for. Not a wobble on a fourteen-line chart, a flicker in a pattern that she’s trained for the better part of a decade to interpret. No, it’s something on URSA’s visible spectrum displays.
There’s a spot. Is there? More like a smudge, though it doesn’t wipe away from the screen under her sleeve. It’s not shining. Not a cluster, or a molecular cloud, not like any she’s ever seen. Just a bundle of refractions like creases on the background of the universe.
Nina’s no astronomical surveyor. But by now, she could swear she knows this particular track of sky like the planet poster on her bedroom wall. This thing, this crimp in the vantablack—it wasn’t there before.
—
Observation Notes - 12am
Potential visual anomaly identified at Right Ascension 2h 09m 12s, Declination 89° 34’ 27”. Not relevant to current targets.
—
The observation room is as quiet as night in a metal forest. Both Nina’s cups have cooled to the comforting, familiar temperature of distraction, by the time she drains one empty. Her brother always complains that it’s weird she lets her coffee go cold. She tells him it’s weird he drinks his with four sugars.
Her attention keeps drifting back to that spot.
She doesn’t mean to linger. To stare into that empty patch on the furthest reaches of the sky. But as she does, the lines grow clearer. The visual itch of a contour solidifies upon nothing at all, no substance, no matter, only the backless rent between stars. Yet it almost has a shape to it, that fold on the gradient of space-time itself. An oval. A centre. A deeper point—
No.
No.
Nina spins the zoom. Squints and blurs at the viewscreen. She has dedicated her studies, her career, to the phenomena of the universe. She can recite dictionaries’ worth of cosmological terms, categories, classifications, definitions. She does not sit here at URSA’s helm and think that this thing looks like—
An eye.
She looks away. Her heart feels somewhere past the belt of Mars above, pulse stretched slow upon the dilation of the expanding universe. She slams her gaze to the floor, the walls, the window through which the night twinkles unmagnified. No, not even there. To the side table.
The green of her notepad cover is a cool swatch of colour in the pale LED light. Matte plastic, scrawled across in blue sharpie with the date she first opened it. She has dozens of them, littered across her life, filled with every scribble from experiment logs to shopping lists. It used to drive her ex crazy.
When she looks back, the smudge on the displays is gone. The patch of space blank, vacant. As it was.
Nina’s breath is cool on her lips. Fine. Of course. She has things to be paying attention to. Actual targets of the evening.
She takes the first swig from her second coffee, licking chocolate powder and half-dissolved foam from the corner of her mouth. It’s time for the next round of readings. Eyes back to the charts, another sweep to be done—
It’s not gone.
It’s there. Not in the same place as before.
It’s closer.
—
Observation Notes - 2am
Apparent location of anomaly appears inconstant. Phenomenon quite unique. Worth documenting over a longer period?
—
In space, no one can hear you scream. What about at the end of a telescope?
Nina thinks about screaming. About breaking the flat, lonely silence. She does not.
If a tree falls in a forest with no one around to hear, does it even make a sound?
Astronomy is a soundless field. Draped thin, dragged far across emptiness traversed only by heatless, untouchable light. No astronomer hates that emptiness. No astronomer fears the dark spaces that they blindly prod with their cold glass eyes, heedless of what they might meet in those far, fathomless depths.
Less far, now. Less and less.
Nina’s legs have gone cold in her comfortable chair, in the tall wool boots her parents sent for her last birthday. Her charts and figures scroll on. Data streams, flickers past, but there is no comfort to be had in the cushion of numbers, in the breaking down of unimaginable energy and distance into neatly trim formatting. There is no analysis or distillation to be done as this thing creeps closer. This pupil lined in the very curvature of reality. This gaze that has no way of being, yet it is.
It is something beyond. Nina feels it in her bones, her plasma, from the quake of her lungs to the tips of her fingers that scrape numbly across the screens. It is something else, in all ways else. Something of the weight of gravity, of the endurance of time, that has been for longer than we have known what it is to be. And it has torn through the plasticover of the universe to glance our way.
No astronomer fears the dark. How many have wondered if they ought to.
—
Observation Notes - 4am
There’s an eye. Inside the fucking sky. There’s an eye and it’s coming closer what the fuck whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck
—
There is a point, between then and forever, between the surface of thought and the depths of oblivion. That is the point it arrives.
When it halts, above our planet, in whatever dimension there can be above, when it sees—
Nina sees too.
It descends like a fog with the density of tungsten, the press of eye contact through the strained pores of reality. Arcing down the lens between them, searching, seeking, understanding except she can never understand, never grasp the width and length of all that this thing is.
There are numbers too large, too long for the human mind to conceive, and this is all of them.
She dangles, swaying, at the end of a thin line of thread. Above gapes the thing built of void and echo and she can feel it, folding into her awareness, contortions of knowledge that struggle and bow to twist their infinite complexities into her paltry laws of physics. The nature of a being that has stretched itself over the recoil between singularities. Swept its fringes through the dust of supernovae. Spun out across the rotation of pulsars, to touch its own event horizon.
Nina dangles, a fisher hooked to a leviathan, and she—tugs.
She tries to respond. To push back, to meet it with all the bounds of what she is, even as she staggers under the tininess of it. Her little corner of the cosmos, this planet where there are almost eight billion humans alive, and four-point-five born every second if she remembers the statistic right. And eight-point-seven million other species living today, as the narrator said in a YouTube video she watched last week, with five billion more that have ever lived, except those counts are not big, not at all, compared to the ones this thing already knows.
Her world, it is not grand. Its breadth is not wide, in space, nor time. Its scale is not the distance betwixt galaxies, but those of the chemical reactions in carbon-based cells that we term life, the firings of electrical signals in our neurons which we name thought, knowledge, memory, emotion. It is small. So small.
—And it is dense, and crowded, and messy. It is the thousands of colonies of bacteria that live and die across every patch of her skin, the smears of mould she spotted on last week’s leftovers this morning as she threw away the container, the hairs her flatmate’s dog Crystal leaves on her collar when the three of them watch Netflix on the couch. It is the droplets of ink the part-time art student sometimes has on his cheek, when he serves her from behind the counter of the late-night café. It is the way that cheek dimples when he smiles.
We don't matter. Nina sees this. She tries to explain, to elucidate to this thing of molecular stillness and fading photons. We will never reach the edges of the universe. Never learn all its secrets. We will laugh, scream, and breathe a billion breaths as we try.
On the other end of that intangible tether, something stirs. Gathers. Reacts.
If you suppose a thing strung astride the cosmos can do something such as feel. If you suppose one human, on one pinprick of a planet, can fit that feeling into a shape the curls of her grey matter can define. If you suppose that, you might call it—
Surprise.
Slowly, Nina trembles to her feet.
This thing, it knows the spaces that rim the stars. It can swim in them, drown in them, and keep drowning for millennia more. It has the patience to wait out the timelessness between epochs.
But now, it stares the other way. Into this accident of heat and gravity and chemistry, this speck of a world that is built of a trillion trillion other specks that squirm and squelch in their minutiae. Where eras of evolution conclude within a rounding error in the timeline of eternity, and not a moment passes without a turn of the cycle of creation and destruction that this thing, in all its unimaginable age, has never managed once to complete. And it is—
Surprised.
Maybe time passes, as Nina stands on the steel plating of the observatory floor and on the precipice of her reality. The feedback roils, reverberates between them, and is what comes from it next even—
Confusion.
Dismay.
Nina stands, and her knees do not give.
Could it be, when things are built to be vast, they do not know what it is to be small. That is their precipice.
When things are built for the empty, they do not know what it is to be full.
Our miniscule lives, all their clamour and chaos and contradiction, will mean nothing to the cosmos. We will live them anyway. Every joy and despair, every sight and memory that makes us, will add to nought against the span of infinity. We will remember them anyway. We do not matter. It is not that we don’t know this.
It is that we don't care.
The words, the question, arrives like the collapsing gases of a dying supergiant.
WHAT
ARE YOU
Me? she answers, from her fragile, fleeting mind, her trillions of infinitesimal synapses that pulse and fire every instant. I’m Nina Wong, daughter of Kevin Wong and Shelley Zhang and—
—I love the way they laughed on their 30th anniversary as my aunt complained about them stealing the cherries off the cake and my grandma took photos on her brand new iPhone—
Nina Wong, PhD candidate in asteroseismology and I—
—still wonder if I made the right decision kissing my ex goodbye at the airport after I’d told him I didn’t think long distance would work when I accepted my program overseas—
Nina Wong, twenty-seven years old, and the planet whose dirt I stand on was formed four-point-six billion years ago but that’s nothing, nothing to you and your aeons and it might as well be four-point-six days ago when I was trying not roll my eyes at my brother phoning me crying because his boyfriend had cheated on him again—
I’m Nina Wong and I can see you seeing me I see you I see you I see you.
And it’s over.
The weight is there between one vibration of a caesium atom and gone the next. There is no fanfare, no comet trail, nor even a wanting vacuum left behind. Just nothing.
Nothing but the comforting silver constant of Earth’s only moon. The familiar twinkling constellations that her ancestors spun down from the skies into legend. The soft-hued glimmer of galaxies far from here, whose light can be called beautiful.
Nina checks the displays. Re-trails the last positions that she’d followed through the sky.
She scans the rest of the night, watching, breathing, from her tiny patch of her tiny world. She does not find it.
The eye is gone.
Dawn comes. Nina clocks out of her last allocated shift, as the glow from the east envelopes the pinpricks of the stars. She tosses out her two empty coffee cups, listening to them rustle and thud into the belly of the compostables bin. The morning birds whistle atop the car park gate, she whistles back as she thumbs her key for the beep of the unlock. A curve of a smile wings her pursed lips.
Maybe she’ll pick up some dog treats for Crystal on the way home.
—
Some say, when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
And so they did. Gazed out, through the far, bleak reaches between galaxies, past the silent fields of crystalline stardust. Into the lonely emptiness of our universe, and how many other universes besides.
They gazed, until finally, from that endless vacant void—we looked back.
We were the abyss that opened its eyes.
—
Observation Notes - 6am
Sucker. You blinked first.