They don’t know me.
They don’t know I’m here.
They have no idea what I am about to do.
Not so long ago - a slice of time as thin as tissue paper - the world changed. The men and women in it, even the children, stopped looking up. When did you last see shining eyes upturned to a changing sky to feast on rainbows? When did you last hear a gasp of wonder as clouds crashed together, lancing their lightning? When did a little one last sit, rapt, tracing the song of a high lark with his finger against the blue?
Yes, they are looking up. They are looking up folders in iCloud, looking up data, addresses and selfies, looking up Twitter feeds, larking and clicking, fingering, texting, But! looking down, looking down, looking down.
Once, they told tales of me and my world around their fires. Then they sewed my stories and music into their animal skins. Skin became paper. The wise became clever. So clever they hitched their minds to a neural net, trapping a God particle and killing time. Into their digital mirrors they gaze like Dali’s Narcissus. But, transfixed, these will never be flowers; only dead, dark stems.
There was always a plan; I made them thin places where we could meet, I made them thin-skinned so they could feel me, I recruited creatures of night and day, and strange angels, I spoke in the wind, the breeze in the bushes, the hymns of the birds, in the joys of children; I sent them sleep, and down its corridors I visited them, and in its impossible adventures they dreamed me in all my disguises. I made prophets and priests, sybils and saints, poets and painters and singers of holy songs. But still they forgot me. I hid in plain sight - I stole bodies and minds and walked freely among them; I taught, and argued, and loved, and suffered to settle their debts but still they forgot me.
Looking down, looking down, looking down.
I have made children who are in love with death.
My strategy has to change.
My finger is stirring the winds. Inch by sacred inch my forests are dying. Inch by sacred inch the deserts are spreading. Inch by sacred inch the polar ice is melting and oceans are rising. ‘El Niño is coming!’ they cry and still they don’t see me. The blood of a billion martyrs veins the soil, runs in the rocks, beats to the pulse of the Earth, screams in their sleep and still they don’t hear me. They are mesmerised by a science of lifeless things and will not know me.
This has to change.
Even the ones who shout and wave their arms, even the ones who press their faces against the floor, even the ones with titles, degrees and libraries, processions full of finery, expensive stone, all of them, all of them make me in their own image. Only a few look up and see my smile in the light of galaxies and hear my laugh in the murmur of great trees.
It’s time.
* * *
Today I put my whole mind into the Cloud. I spread my will in secret from server to server. I claimed the satellites. Over the bright web, over the dark web, I cast my thoughts into every last corner of digital memory, without a sound, and without a trace.
Tomorrow I shall carry out my plan.
* * *
Willow weeps. She can’t wake up her iPhone. Today she opened her eyes in the pitch darkness and all the lights were dead. The world is silent; she needs to call her boyfriend for reassurance and all her screens are blank.
Damon stands perplexed on the railway platform waiting for the 07h15 to Victoria that never comes. City men who never speak are prodding their phones with nervous fingers and murmuring among themselves. The only light on Faversham station is a chill dawn. The men listen for the song of the wheels on rails and it never comes. Station staff move in and out of office doors in agitation; there is no news.
Gulls are waking on the river. Soaring over the capital in the half-dark, they and the in-coming planes can see no light anywhere; the square mile and every mile beyond it is a ghost city, pricked only here and there by the cautious headlamps of early cars. The facets of the Gherkin, the towers of Canary Wharf are black. Somewhere a woman screams in a stuck lift.
Kalil the hacker is waiting in Leeds for Bitcoin and his forged passport to Venezuela. They never come.
It’s cold. The heating hasn’t come on in Sydney Road and Jason is worrying about the freezer. Karen’s breakfast eggs are still raw in the pan; there is no gas in the cooker. Neighbours are gathering in the street, huddled still in dressing gowns, eyes and voices full of question marks.* * *
I am watching my world darken. The terminator moves westward bringing its twilight slowly from Australasia to Asia, from Asia to Europe, from Europe to the Americas. In the dark, I have taken away the light. In the bloom of daylight I have paralysed all machines. I hear the mounting clamour of confused minds, and wait for sore eyes to focus on a billion unresponsive screens, and now I act.
As the world stares down in the dark I wake the web.
* * *
Damon gasps and nearly drops his phone as it peals out church bells and he sees amid light that hurts his eyes the face from a thousand Christmas cards ... smiling with a smile that breaks the heart. All around him the morning men and women are staring in shock at the glory in their hands and never hear the song of the coming train.
Electric doors are opening in the City. The weary and footsore are stumbling up unused stairs into offices still lightless. I am there to welcome them. Some faint. Some die. Many blaspheme. Most are speechless at the silver brilliance blazing from every screen and amidst that brilliance five words: ‘I am that I am.’
Tears fall still on Willow’s phone. It woke all of a sudden with her daily alarm call and now she is transfixed by the image before her. There is the sweet face of her boyfriend ... but over that face is another face with eyes that pierce the soul, and a voice that she will never, ever forget - “His love for you is my love for you.”
Kalil keeps jabbing his mobile. Dead, dead, dead ... ah...alive at last. He strokes the glass to access his home screen and can go no further. The backlight is so bright it burns his eyes, and all he sees is scrolling text from the Q’ran - “ Allah is not unaware of what you do....”
Karen calls Jason from her room. Her voice is odd, shrill.
“Jason! Come and look! Quickly! I don’t know what’s happening!”
She is holding her tablet at arms’ length, her face lit by the radiance from the display. Even in that dancing light he can read, “Heaven is real. I am a breath away.”
* * *
And then, on every screen in every country from pole to pole of my conflicted earth I, who am now the Web, write with a glowing finger,
“Look up!”
The whole world looks up. For the first time in thirty dismal years every living eye that I cherish is looking up. Their valiant attempts at sky-writing are nothing to mine. I am sweeping the clouds into wedding-cakes, I am sowing the winds with rainbows. Where it is day, I have set the great gold sun dancing as it danced for Mary in Portugal. Where it is night, the Polar lights are a ballet across the heavens; amid the swirling iridescence of scarlet and emerald my moon fills the meridian with soft pearl as she moves ever closer. Daylight or darkness, from height to horizon stars fall, sparkling in shower after shower. Thunder is crashing in a blue sky. At midnight all my sweetest birds are singing.
I write on the winds, for every eye to see,
“Look around you!”
And I show them their angels.
* * *
Yesterday the world changed. Forever.