God's Window
GOD’S WINDOW
If felt like death, thought Daniel, although he didn’t know what death was like. He’d been down on his luck of late, desperate for one chance to make good; but the chances never came, one wrong turn leading to another and yet another.
Daniel called it a slow death, his life evolving into something that was listless and deflating, an ever-expanding emptiness at the heart of life’s promise. His ambitions had once been enormous, but he’d long since learned to think small and expect little.
He was an antiquarian who’d once been tasked with digitizing the library of human content, everything that hadn’t been digitized before because it hadn’t been worth the bother. People didn’t think much of antiquarians, not with the sensory payoff from text and flat multimedia so disappointing. Why watch a story when you could immerse yourself in it, courtesy of viewscapes and sleepthrills?
Daniel adored the past. He figured it was his love of what was forever out of reach: love lost and mistakes yet unmade.
He didn’t always obsess over what couldn’t be changed, and ten years earlier, he believed in the future long enough to fall in love and accidentally produce a child. His son Tristan was eight now, and blissfully ignorant of his father’s agonizing loss of hope.
As long as there was work, there was hope, but when there was nothing left of the past to memorialize, work dried up; the few people who found some value in antiquarians no longer returning com requests. He was getting cut loose, the future he’d planned for his family stretching out of reach, one frayed thread at a time.
Daniel could picture the future and found it alarming. There would be little left for him to do once the entirety of the past had been neatly digitized, filed and stored; although it was only fellow antiquarians who could be persuaded to pull off their Evolv visors long enough to reimagine the past, and there weren’t many of those.
The future was solitude, not to mention failure. He still felt obliged to offer his family a future even though he didn’t believe in it; but what future could there be without the past to console him?
‘Out with the old and in with the new’ or so said the slogan that got the sitting President elected. It was the same slogan that, in the course of Daniel’s living memory, got at least four Presidents elected, but people fell for the same promises time and time again. People wanted change but they never got what they wanted.
Daniel concluded that all hope was a lie. It was a tale told by a politician, signifying nothing.
He couldn’t tell Tristan this. Tristan, after all, was eight years old and as thrilled by the superhero antics in the viewscapes as any eight-year-old boy.
Now that Daniel was rendered redundant and put on a stipend to transition him into obsolescence, he couldn’t look his son in the eye for fear of revealing the truth and souring him too early. It was the lie that would keep his son alive. Without the lie, there was no reason to live.
Daniel had been contemplating suicide, not for self-pity but for the purpose of leaving his family with the proceeds of a generous insurance payout. It was the only possible future that provided some measure of consolation.
But what value was the future that didn’t have a past? It was a spinning rock in an empty universe.
The space network was impressive, he thought, momentarily distracted by the view outside the shuttle. They called it the pride of human engineering, although Daniel’s admiration soon devolved into disappointment, the sun concealed long enough to reveal the broken underbelly of what he realized was just an oversized grid of metal.
As the sun reappeared, Daniel narrowed his eyes. It was the only thing worth gazing upon – the blazing eternal that would light the world long after humanity committed itself to oblivion. And yet he wasn’t supposed to look at it.
Turning, he could see the steward smiling at him, perhaps mistaking his squint for a grin. They’d been feting him ever since he won the prize, a trip to gaze upon God’s window, or whatever it was they chose to call it.
Another gimmick, concluded Daniel; another lie to keep people buying into the system, if only for a chance to look at something which probably wasn’t anything at all.
Daniel wasn’t expecting to win the coveted Luna prize. For one, it had nothing to do with the moon. Second, it had everything to do with Omega Corp putting an altruistic face on its rampant hoarding of the world’s last resources. It was the usual talk of guiding mankind to the moon and beyond, after effectively enslaving the planet.
Daniel smiled. It was expected. He was the first member of the public invited to view God’s Window. He speculated as to what they’d give him to convince him not to tell the truth: that it was just a shameless publicity stunt.
He would have preferred funds to help sustain his family, but what they offered him was the experience of a lifetime. All that assuaged his disappointment was the possibility of the Omega officials trying to buy his silence.
‘Tell them it was a revelation,’ they’d beseech him, after it turned out the window was a sham.’ ‘Tell them you saw God,’ they’d insist, assuring him that funds were already being submitted to his account.
It wasn’t the money that mattered to Daniel, it was a chance to tune out, no longer obligated to register compliance with a system that wanted him archived. It could even mean a chance for his son to refuse participation. Tristan deserved better than the same old lie that made saviors of villains and heroes of clowns.
Could Omega erase the past as if it never happened? Would his parents become fictions and his memories random simulations in a virtual arcade, the truth made a lie and the lie worshipped as gospel?
It all came down to binary code, the ‘1’ birthed from a ‘0’ long enough to create life; the ‘1’ that made it possible, the ‘1’ that that was God, the ‘1’ that was the promise that never came to pass.
“Five minutes to window,” whispered a voice in his ear. He’d forgotten to turn down the ear com. It was silence he wanted, not more talk of all the wonders to come. He didn’t believe them.
Why hadn’t he told Tristan the truth about the world? He’d abandoned him to the usual Omega Corp half-truths. If he returned home without profiting from the lie, he’d tell Tristan everything before turning himself off, a memory cluster of ’1’s soon to become ’0’s.
Better to choose one’s demise than to have it chosen for him. He didn’t know how’d he’d take his life, but he’d find a way.
Outside, the space station once again hove into view, the glint of sun appearing like a flash, the shuttle walls vanishing to reveal the emptiness of space, his skin translucent, the veins on his bare hands like tendrils of light, its warmth coursing up his arms and to his head, enveloping him in a riot of incandescence.
Feeling his feet on the floor, he turned to find himself securely belted into his seat. “Four minutes to window,” whispered the voice in his ear.
He removed the ear com and sunk in his seat.
A woman, attractive in a clinical way, appeared before him, her expression vacant.
“We’re thrilled to have you here,” she told him unconvincingly.
Daniel nodded.
“You should consider yourself very lucky,” she continued. “I feel fortunate enough merely to witness it.”
Daniel had never been called lucky. He grinned at the poor choice of words.
“Of a hundred million submissions, yours was chosen,” she continued.
Everything was a lottery. Everyone played but only a select few succeeded.
“I was chosen?” he asked, hoping for confirmation that the entire process was rigged. “I thought it was random.”
“We didn’t choose you. You were chosen by fate.”
“By fate?” he repeated. Was that what they called a computer algorithm?
“So what’s in it for you guys?” he asked, hoping to provoke some honesty.
“Human progress is our only reward,” she answered flatly. Perhaps she didn’t believe the Omega slogans either, hoped Daniel.
“And what am I supposed to see in this window?” he asked. He’d heard of a window in space, astronauts suiting up to peer inside and returning transformed, as if having come face to face with God. It came as no surprise to Daniel that the astronauts kept a low profile and dodged every question. If only there were proper public scrutiny, the charade would have been unmasked by now.
What Daniel couldn’t understand was the purpose for the publicity stunt. He figured Omega Corp was going to establish itself as the gate keeper to God, presenting the divine message only to the obedient. The officials invited him to see it for himself, and he was the lucky lottery recipient who’d submitted his name only because his son had asked him to do it.
“I don’t know what you’ll see,” she answered, her face turned, her eyes peering into his. Embarrassed, he turned away.
“Everyone acts different, so I assume they see different things,” she continued.
“They see God?” asked Daniel, curious if the Omega Corp policy was to support the existence of a divine creator.
“That was one case. He said he could see everything, as if he had the eyes of God.”
“Which is why it’s called God’s window?” asked Daniel. “Because someone thought he was a god?” A better name might have been the window of delusion, he pondered.
“It’s a good name,” she offered.
“And the others? Did they believe themselves gods too?”
“I know about as much as you do. We don’t know what’ll happen when they float you inside. That’s …”
“Between me and God,” he said, finishing her sentence for her.
“I was going to say that’s your business. You have no obligation to tell us anything although we’d appreciate everything you can share. For science.”
“Am I guinea pig?”
“We did explain the risks. And I was told you signed off on everything.”
“I did,” he acknowledged, remembering the approvals he’d provided for documents he never read.
“Of course, there’s no guarantee as to what will happen. But I can assure you that everyone who’s gone inside is currently safe and sound.”
“Sound of mind?”
“They’ve kept to themselves.”
It was turning out to be more of an experiment than a prize. Omega Corp wanted to test their discovery on the public.
“And what if something happens to me? What happens to my family?”
The woman tapped her wrist screen.
“You have a son and wife, correct?”
Feeling a hand on his arm, he turned to the empty seat to his right; only it was no longer empty, his son Tristan seated next to him, a broad smile stretching the width of his face.
“Everything will be fine,” Tristan assured him.
Daniel reached for the boy who drifted away in a ripple of light, the walls of the shuttle once again replaced with the speckled black of space, the grid of the Omega space station blocking the earth like an iron clamp.
He reached for his son, but the belt held him tight. He struggled to release the mechanism but couldn’t find it.
“Tristan,” he cried, panicked.
“Nothing’s ever lost,” said his son’s voice from the left. Daniel turned to find Tristan seated where the woman had been sitting.
“I haven’t lost you,” insisted Daniel, his hand firmly clasped to his son’s arm.
“Did we lose you?” asked the boy.
Light faded as if by the sheer weight of darkness. He and Tristan were cast adrift, their lungs full of air despite the vacuum of space.
Daniel tightened his grip, but the hand he was holding was his own.
“You’ll come back for me?” asked Tristan who was already drifting back to Earth. “Tell me you’ll come back.”
Reaching for his son, Daniel found a wall.
“We’re here,” said the woman.
Daniel turned. “What happened?” he demanded. He was hallucinating and it frightened him.
“Nothing yet,” she told him, offering him her hand. “We need to get you suited up.”
Daniel accepted her hand, a shimmer of light coursing down her arm and up his. For a moment he could almost see his reflection in her face.
He recoiled.
“Something’s happening,” he exclaimed.
“You’re nervous,” she observed with her customary detachment “It’s alright. Come”
The floor beneath his feet opened to reveal a gaping chasm, and yet he didn’t fall. It was death that had come for him, death that awaited him on the other side of the window. It was what he wanted, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready. He needed more time.
He clutched the woman’s arm, fearing he might fall.
“Have you forgotten us already?” said a familiar voice. It was his wife’s arm he was holding.
“No. Never.”
“You weren’t going to come back, were you?”
Before Daniel had time to answer, the shuttle shifted, lurching forward, his wife opening a door into which he fell.
He stumbled in the dark, imagining the walls of a room and then feeling those walls with his hands. Seeking a light switch, light began to illuminate what appeared to be the inside of a cavernous box. The illumination came in the form of a man.
“Are you ready?” asked a voice he hadn’t known for many years. It was his father’s voice.
“Is it you?” asked Daniel.
As if in confirmation, shadows took shape, a face appearing through the incandescence. It was indeed his father’s face, long and gaunt, eyes sunken from the illness that plagued his final days.
Daniel grabbed his father’s arm, the skin dry yet soft. If this was a memory, he was entirely immersed in it.
“Where am I going?” queried Daniel. It had been so long since he’d asked his father a question.
“Did I say you were going anywhere? You should pay attention. I asked you if you were ready and as usual you answered a question with a question.”
“Dad?” intoned Daniel to himself, fearful that reality would pound its way inside his skull before he had a chance to catch-up.
“Another question,” answered his father, his grasp on Daniel’s shoulder strong for one who looked so sickly and cancer-ridden.
“Why can’t I ask you a question?” he demanded. How easily his father could provoke him.
“I asked you if you’re ready?”
“For what?”
“You should put this on,” said another familiar voice. It was his mother standing before him, a gravity suit held before her.
“I wish you’d listen, Daniel,” she said, exasperated. He couldn’t remember seeing her look so young. She could have been his daughter.
“Am I alone in this?” she said.
“Mom?” Daniel.
“Am I the only parent here?” she asked, facing the wall.
“Listen to your mother, Daniel,” bellowed his father, his withered features now full and youthful. Both of them towered above him and yet he felt safe. He couldn’t remember what it was like to feel such assurance. Surely, his father could protect him from anything.
Daniel’s mother leaned against a wall, her head bowed. “Go Daniel,” she murmured listlessly.
He wanted to comfort her. Taking her hands in his, he kissed them. He wanted to see her happy, but she failed to notice him.
Pulling her hands from his, she stood and walked to a door. Opening it, a gust of wind blew her outside.
Before Daniel could reach the open door, the walls vanished in an explosion of light.
Light dissipated to reveal a gravity suit set out on a bench. He was on all fours in the middle of a changing room.
Was reality eluding him? He never hallucinated. He was too aware of his surroundings to be deceived by chimeras.
Daniel hurriedly slid into his suit. Upon opening the door, the outfitters began making adjustments, tightening loops and refastening straps.
“Remember that the suit gives you weight where you need it,” said the woman from Omega Corp in a monotone. “If you drift, lean to the other side. Use your feet and you can stand.”
“I’m going out like this?”
“You’ll get the space suit too.”
“And you what … dangle me into this window?”
“It’s more like a hole in space. A portal, if you like. We don’t know.”
“I could change my mind, couldn’t I? It’s not too late.”
“Why would you want to do that?” she replied testily; finally, something worthy of emotion.
“This doesn’t feel like winning anything.”
“What else were you gonna do, Daniel? Kill yourself?”
He felt transparent. As if for confirmation, he turned to his arms. They glistened in a reflective sheen of light, as if his corporeal form might vanish at any moment.
“Do you think you know me?” he asked, unsure if he even knew himself.
“We need to be careful about who gets invited.”
“Then it IS a sham,” he answered decisively, feeling vindicated.
“You’re here now. Millions envy you.”
As he moved his hand, it appeared translucent. He flinched.
“It’s alright to be nervous. But we’ve done this many times before and no one’s been hurt.”
“I don’t care if I get hurt.”
“That’s what we thought,” she answered softly, a hand to his arm.
Men in uniform appeared, a bulky nylon suit placed at his feet, hands grabbing his arm until he stepped into place, the suit pulled up to his waist and over his arms.
“This is what you want, isn’t it Daniel? The chance to become something new?”
“What will I become?”
“Does not knowing frighten you or excite you?”
A smile parted the woman’s lips. She was enjoying his discomfort.
It was neither fear nor excitement because he didn’t believe in God’s window, which would imply the existence of God, and the only god on Earth was Omega Corp which gave nothing away without getting something more in return.
He could imagine the press release. ‘Omega Corp transformed my life,’ says a former archivist who preferred anonymity to ill-earned fame.’
A helmet was placed atop his head, the chatter of the room muted. All he could hear was his steady breathing as men and women affixed the helmet to the suit.
Guided to another chamber, what appeared to be a belt was affixed to a series of loops on his suit. Daniel followed the belt as it coiled onto the floor.
It was the cable that would be his lifeline.
“You don’t have to do anything,’ said the woman’s voice in his ear com. “You can even close your eyes if you want because the camera will catch everything. But I hope you don’t close your eyes.”
Hands guided him to an open door. Glancing back, he realized he was alone; that was until a shadow appeared at the door.
A crest of white hair framed a familiar face. It was his grandfather. The only grandfather he ever knew.
As the gravity controls were lowered, he could feel his feet lift off the ground. But his grandfather remained standing, turning to bundle something in his arms before turning yet again to reveal an infant cradled in his arms, legs kicking and hands clutching at air.
Daniel adjusted his posture, straightening his legs until he could feel them firmly on the floor, the gravity suit keeping him grounded.
The old man looked considerably younger as he turned to the door. The infant was no longer in his arms.
“Are you ready?” asked the woman in his ear com.
’Yes,” he answered, impatient to terminate an ordeal which couldn’t be any stranger than his hallucinatory experience on board. Had they injected him with something? Were they hoping to manufacture a divine experience?
He didn’t want to believe in Omega Corp lies. Believers were fools.
He panicked. This was all manipulation and he refused to be manipulated.
Daniel was startled by the appearance of several other people in the gravity chamber. People in costume, early twentieth century he suspected. He knew their faces from old photographs, but he was at a loss for names.
He closed his eyes, refusing to be dazzled by visions.
“Wait,” he murmured.
It was too late. The air lock released and out he flew, only a cord linking him to the ship that birthed him into the void.
Ahead of him appeared a dark smudge with an almost reflective surface, a swirl of light as if it were some kind of black hole. He realized he’d been foolish not to care, but it was too late to refuse. He would soon disappear inside the hole, perhaps never to return a clear-thinking nonparticipant, but returning, instead, a complicit stooge.
“Contact in t minus ten …” intoned a muted male voice in his ear. “Nine. Eight. Seven.”
Sound grew faint as Daniel approached the hole. He struggled to slow himself or at least change course, but the precision rockets would not permit deviation. Would he lose his mind? Would he remember who he was and that he had reason to be disappointed with the world and the people who mismanaged it?
“Three. Two. One.”
He was expecting a flash of light, but nothing happened, the cable unraveling for several more seconds before tightening. And then he stopped.
Turning back, he could no longer see the shuttle which could have been obscured by the darkness; although there was nothing to obscure the brilliant light of a billion stars.
Above stretched the crescent of the earth and, further away, the sliver of what he believed was the moon. The world that failed him had never before felt so far removed.
It was the solitude he wanted, perhaps even the death he’d imagined for himself. Mankind’s failures were of no consequence here, although he couldn’t shake his own.
There was nothing divine about solitude like this. He’d never before felt so vulnerably human, so disappointingly human.
There was nothing to see, no window to gaze through, no answers to his many lingering questions, and no quietus to the disturbance of his mind. He’s chosen misery.
He knew that his love of the past was love of something he could never have. It was an unrequited love that would hollow him out until he could barely call himself a man.
Here he was, a piece of flesh dangled before an unseen God, the bait used to lure some semblance of meaning. But nothing would come.
“There’s nothing here,” he reported. “You can pull me back.”
There was no response to dispel the silence.
“Hello?”
The silence endured.
“I want to go home,” he declared. The solitude was unnerving.
Daniel tugged on the cable. As he did so, a flash of light in the distance revealed the underside of the shuttle as it turned, the faces of passengers peering out of windows.
The cable pulled taut and he began to drift in the direction of the shuttle.
This was neither a prize nor an experiment. It was a punishment, yet to be inflicted on any unwary nonconformist. If they refused to participate in the drama of the absurd, they got dropped in a dark recess in space.
He’d never been so relieved to anticipate the company of others. Solitude was only a delight when it was a choice.
A sharp tug sent him careening at a precipitous pace, stars appearing to move alongside him as if he were traversing billions of miles in a matter of seconds.
What at first appeared to be the movement of stars turned out to be a retreat. They were disappearing, thinned out of existence as if atoms were torn to pieces, matter dissipated to its constituent parts. The universe was dying, or so it seemed.
As the stars vanished, so did the Earth and the moon. The sun was the last to depart the celestial sphere, plunging the known universe into a darkness that Daniel could never have imagined.
And yet something was alive, a speck of light in the void. Daniel refused to believe in nothing. Surely, there was something, the seed of creation, both bright and marvelous.
Daniel couldn’t confirm his suspicion but he knew there was light even in the darkness. It was only waiting for the word.
It wasn’t just light Daniel wanted. It was an explosion. And an explosion was what he got.
When the light burst all around him, he felt nothing, heard nothing. He shouldn’t have survived what he saw, but he remained suspended in space, nary a tear in his space suit.
It was life he wanted, a smattering of starlight overhead; and so he imagined the night sky of memory, anything to give shape to the diffuse glow surrounding him.
Something was taking place, color and light called together in the wake of re-emerging darkness. The stars were returning, born of the vaporous manna that could birth life itself.
Daniel wanted an expanding universe of light, and even as starts clustered together they spread apart, swirling accretions that promised life. How could he come into being unless he could conjure a world to house and nurture him?
He imagined a rock circling the nearest star; a rock with towering peaks thrusting up through frothing oceans.
The Earth returned, as did the Moon. Whatever he conjured, he salvaged from oblivion. He believed in existence, and everything he believed came to pass.
Creation was a thought of fantastic things, of swirling furnaces of light infusing every rock with a spark and every dark recess with a glow of possibility. Creation was the belief that there should be more.
His arm extended, Daniel studied the Earth as it rested on the palm of his hand.
With a breath of life, Daniel wished life on the planet: fish in the ocean, reptiles and mammals on land, and birds in the air. Time was of no consequence because all time was simultaneous, one day the equal of billions.
His distance from the Earth couldn’t prevent him from studying every unseen underground current of water and every lightless trench far under the sea, every shaded obscurity under every tree and every cavernous hideaway lost underground.
Daniel could see everything and do everything.
Imagining people to tend to this beautiful realm, he beckoned them from trees, envisioned tools in their hands and fire in the hearths. They would understand all that he could understand one day. They would farm land and populate cities, creating monuments to the power of divine beings. But it didn’t belong to the powerful few, it belonged to everyone. Power came of belief and belief was the very stuff of existence.
It all came from an idea, and that idea made a forest of his hair, a mountain of his knee and a lake of his mouth. He was the very world he believed should exist. He was everything he wanted, and he was the possibility of yet more.
Daniel had no need of a space suit, much less a body. He needed nothing but the belief in his own existence and the existence of every creation. Consciousness was all, and to consciousness all would return.
‘I am not a god,’ thought Daniel. The universe had no need of gods. It needed the collaboration of self-conscious creators to dream up a universe that would never die; for there could be no death as long as there were sentient beings, even one, to believe in life.
“There is no death,” he murmured to himself, and so it was that death would plague human thought no more. There need be no end to things, only new beginnings.
“Nothing is lost,” he whispered into the dark. And so it was that everything would be remembered, every word spoken and every idea pondered. No good intention would be forgotten, hope for the future never diminishing.
It was the wish of every antiquarian that everything could be preserved just as it once was; that nothing that once meant something to someone would be consigned to oblivion on account of neglect. Everything could be retrieved at any given time because there would be enough information to reconfigure the relation of every atom to another at any given time in the story of the universe.
It was an intricate web, this collection of subatomic particles, forming, disassembling and then reforming again, forever shifting and replicating. Belief energized and enraptured life at its most infinitesimal, compounding upon magnification until that belief impelled the motion of entire galaxies of stars, pushing the bounds of the universe itself.
“Everything is possible,” Daniel assured himself, and so it was.
He surrounded himself with everyone’s thoughts and hopes, their words and deeds. Like the DNA of a cell, the vast sum of human knowledge was written into the interstices of every particle. Everything that was known or would ever be known was written on the molecules clustering into new life.
As mankind swelled in population, Daniel imagined his own progenitors meeting and committing belief to the promise of a new generation, life in renewal even as it withered away; for there was no death, only a sequence of many beginnings and many generations.
With the blueprint of history written into every subatomic particle, it was easy to tell the same story of mankind and to make the connections that long ago brought his grandparents into being, and his parents. It had once felt like happenstance, his life a series of many accidents. He now realized it was all inevitable, including his life and that of his son.
His son Tristan was born again, everything that had ever happened in the history of the universe designed to make this one miracle possible.
Daniel was no longer observing the events on the planet he rebirthed. He was experiencing them firsthand, his infant son in his arms, just as he once was eight years before.
With his son’s fingers curled around his, Daniel could see that they shared the same energy, the same relentless force of creation. They were as one, along with everyone who came before and everyone yet to be born.
His wife knew their son would be Tristan. She said she’d always known. It was a choice, and yet no other choice was possible.
Surrounding them was the light of the past, friends and relatives long-deceased still participants in the design of the future.
Daniel knew the joy that his son would bring, and he knew the shame of failing him. His preservation of the past wasn’t enough to buy a future.
“Sometimes it feels like we’ve done this before,” said his son, once again an eight-year-old boy. They were both seated on a grassy slope.
“Maybe we have,” suggested Daniel, relieved to be given a second opportunity to relive his favorite moments. The disappointments, he could now ignore.
“We can do this again. Anytime we want.”
“Of course we can, Tristan.”
“But one day I’ll lose you like we lost grandma.”
“Not for a long time,” answered Daniel.
“I had a dream that you were gone. I called your name and you never answered.”
“That was a dream,” reassured Daniel. This time there would be no despair.
“But it was just like this. Like something that already happened.”
Daniel took Tristan in his arms, suspecting that his son had inherited his own melancholy turn of thought. “What matters is we’re together now,” he told Tristan.
But Daniel doubted his own words, as if they were together only by dint of an eternal idea.
His son was crying alone. Daniel reached for him, but he was too far away.
Millions of miles separated them, along with the nylon fabric of a space suit.
The darkness had returned, his lifeline disappearing ten feet away.
He hadn’t abandoned his wife and son. It had always been his intention to return.
Grabbing the cable with both gloved hands, he began pulling himself closer to the shuttle he could no longer see. Momentum began to build as he approached what looked like a shimmering pane of glass. God’s window. He had only to reach the other side.
Light swirled around him; the light of first creation, infusing every cell in his body. He closed his eyes.
Darkness returned.
Daniel opened his eyes to find that his cable had been severed. A large, metallic spherical object, like a collection of intertwined tendrils, appeared overhead. He’d never seen such a complex piece of machinery, its whirring noise hypnotic and calming. It wasn’t something the mid 21st century was capable of producing. Was this a glimpse into the future? Had God’s window broken all notion of sequential time and transported him ahead a hundred, perhaps even a thousand years?
A concentric ring of flashing lights outlined the dark blot behind him. God’s window had been given a frame, observers in the enormous ship noting every irregularity. Was he an irregularity?
Something thudded against his suit, and he felt a tug. Nothing punctured his suit, but there was a small magnetic plate on his chest, pulling him upward to the gyrating ship.
His plan was to return home, but this wasn’t the way home. This was a mistake. These beings – and perhaps they weren’t even human – were curious about him. They would prod and examine him. But they would never take him home to his wife and son.
Inside God’s window, everything was accessible. And inside God’s window was a vast archive and that included the life he wanted back.
It was never too late. He’d been ready to surrender his life once, but it had been his despair talking. He thought his future was a nullity. But that was then.
The metallic ring on his chest couldn’t be pulled from his suit. He would have to tear the fabric to remove it.
The device had begun to hoist him away from the black smudge. Daniel didn’t have much time.
The object had a sharp edge. Turning the edge of the device to his suit, he tore a hole in it. He didn’t fear death in God’s Window, much less a tear in a space suit.
The device wasn’t interested in his suit. It wanted him.
He threw it with all the strength he could muster into the smudge and waited. The device didn’t return.
Remembering his gravity suit, he leaned to the side, his body adjusting to the force of his will. It took time, but he managed to angle his body toward the window, a sheen on the blackness a welcome sight.
He felt another thud on his suit, but God’s weight had a gravitational power which was enough to counteract the magnetic device.
He slid back into the window, swallowed by darkness toward the light concealed within.
**
Daniel opened his eyes. There was a floor under his head. Tiles. A pool of blood seeping into the crevices. The screen on a handheld read “Luna Prize Winner to Visit God’s Window.”
He was dying, but he didn’t have to die. Not yet. It was a matter of belief, and he believed himself alive. He’d forgotten the future once, but he’d never dismiss it again. There was still Tristan. Where was Tristan?
If it was God’s window, everything was possible. Surely, everything was possible.
But when Daniel no longer had the strength to open his eyes, they closed.
