I know I am a day late, but that is only because I have already
posted before I thought about this post. So, from one blunder and on
to the next, I wend my way through the oblivious cloud of unknowing
into the mists of forgetfulness.
It took me a while to
remember, but I do now. I remember when I almost freaked when I saw
it! It was a long dark cylinder against the brilliant backwash of
energy fields illuminating the nebula for a few thousand light years in
any direction. The crowning glory of a nova was seen to flash across
the universe for all time, and just as blatantly capturing the sharp
silhouette of the object from the moment it appeared in normal space
until it disappeared within a cloak of energy fields only moments
later. Still, that brief exposure was just as much a photograph as it
was a beacon of Life and living to the rest of the chaotically
inanimate universe.
I saw that image captured and displayed to
the public world as a rare glimpse of a stellar nebula in it's finest
moments of glory and total destruction. Who could know the
implications of a tiny little dot barely visible to the naked eye. Who
could understand just who or what wsa behind the faint shadow of
pixelation shaded into the broad array of vivid shades and shapes so
colourfully portraying that distant nebula. For that matter, who even
knew the name of that distant speck of light magnified a few thousands
of times out of the background of countless other similar little
specks of light lasered into the digitalized image of a tiny pinhole of
a view onto the galactic scene. Yes, who indeed?
I saw that
shape and shivered. I began to recognize the shape and associate that
shape with a more dim and dreaded memory of ultimate terror. That
simple cylindrical shape was the only clue to the memory that had
hidden for most of my conscious lifetime until now. Now, it was seen
again, seen for what it was, and recognized as the distant passing of a
fate that was no less than the complete destruction from which it had
only briefly emerged.
The dark object was as fast as it was as
ominous in it's eternal hunt through the wisps of time. The dark
object had appeared, scanned the locality for signs of life, and then
as quickly, darted back into the passage of time from which it had so
briefly emerged. The ultimate hunter had looked, and in so doing,
determined that there was nothing worth the trouble to stop it's
logically empirical hunt to destroy. It was there and then gone, just
as if it had never existed any more than the silly myths about such
possibilities in the first place.
I sat in deep shock for a
long time. Time stopped completely for me while my mind swirled back
into my past life of experiences, searching for the relevence factor.
I had to know. I had to seek out and find the actual recessed memories
associated with that ominously dark cylindrical shape that had appeared
briefly enough to have been caught in the digitalized image of an
orbiting satellite observatory.
Who could have calculated the
odds for that image to have caught the briefest existence of that dark
cylindrical object in this space time continuum. Whatever, I had seen
that dark shape starkly illuminated in the dying gasps of the nova. I
had somehow recognized the presence of that dark shape as being
something worth the attention and priority I was now devoting to the
actual search for that significant memory. It had to be found and
verified, if only to satisfy the reason behind my gut reaction and
associated shivers of terror to the sight of something so innocuous to
any, other than myself.