I woke up to Jim dry-heaving in the bathroom, like a metronome that had lost interest in time. There was a glass of water, loaded with electrolytes, sweating on the counter, untouched. His laptop was still open on the couch where he’d passed out, fans whining softly, like it was embarrassed to still be awake.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you remember last night?”
He squinted at me as if I’d asked him to solve something expensive.
“You stood right there,” I told him, pointing at the kitchen doorway. “Barefoot. Shirt inside out. You kept saying you’d figured it out and that nobody was listening because we were too close to hear.”
He rubbed his temples as he opened the fridge, grabbed a beer and popped it open. I could see his headache forming in real time. He drank half almost immediately.
“You said the data wasn’t broken,” I went on. “That it wasn’t corruption. That something was missing on purpose. You said you lost forty-something seconds and that it mattered more than anything you’d ever measured.”
He shook his head, slow, like the room might spill if he moved too fast.
“You kept correcting yourself,” I said. “Every time I called it an event. You got really upset about that. Said events end. Said this didn’t.”
I hadn’t told him the part that stuck with me. The way his voice dropped, almost calm, right at the end.
"The environment is aware of us."
He asked if he’d been loud.
I lied and said no. What else do you say to a Signals Intelligence Officer who's bi-polar?
Then I closed his laptop. It was still warm, like he had been staring at it all night and just set it down.
File Under: #sciencefiction, #scifi, #uap, #visualstorytelling, #animation, #aishorts, #anime