The Glistering
For my siblings.
Not too long ago, near a star just a few light-years from Earth, a strange thing happened on a little indigo-colored planet called Orb.
An inky dark sea covers the surface of Orb, except for a small continent that houses intelligent life. Its inhabitants might look strange to us. Orblings—as they’re called—average about a meter tall, and have egg-shaped, translucent bodies. Their most distinctive feature is a pair of large, luminous eyes. But in most other ways, orblings are surprisingly… well, human. Almost all of them have two arms and two legs, and they communicate with spoken language. Orblings have schools and jobs, art and technology, and even religious beliefs. Like humans, each one has a unique personality. And, like humans, orblings tend to be divided among themselves.
Just recently, the situation on Orb was dire. Every level of orbling society was typified by discord, hatred, and even violence. Some feared that a collapse of orbling civilization was imminent. Before the glistering, this is what things were like…
Jinko jolted violently from sleep, nearly tumbling out of the bunk. What’s happening? A glob attack? He looked around wildly, but the room was dark, and he could hear nothing but the pounding in his own ears. Another bad dream? After a moment, the sense of panic subsided, giving way to a sicklier and less familiar feeling. Then he remembered. Today was the 100th day of the war, and Jinko was finally being sent into battle.
The fledgling recruit glanced at his wrist. Still too early to suit up, but there was no sense trying to sleep again, not with this gnawing unease that seemed to have lodged itself deep in his gut. He wondered if his commotion had woken any of the squad, and winced at the thought—they wouldn’t like that. Given the sensitivity of the current operation, he would be sure to get a verbal beating from the other troops, if not an official reprimand from Squad Leader Bert himself.
Jinko shivered. This cold had an edge to it, even here in the bunk-tent. He settled gingerly back into the fleeting warmth of the bed, and stared up into the darkness.
The Florbs had started it, of course. Without provocation, they’d globbed a newly built fyber farm on the central plateau, claiming the farm was actually a “Zorb military offensive” or something. It was so predictable of Florbs to invent that kind of nonsense. Everyone knew the plateau rightfully belonged to the Zorbs, it was in the oldest stories. And who wouldn’t set up a new farm without a squad or two for protection?, what with aggressive Florbs hiding under every rock these days. Florbs—Jinko was always repulsed to consider—with strange beliefs and different old stories, false stories that spoke of a day when the whole of Orbland would belong to the Florbs. How convenient! Jinko knew it was a waste of time trying to make sense of backwards religion. That wasn’t his job, anyway. The fact of the matter was that the Florbs had destroyed Zorb property and killed innocent orblings, and they needed to be taught a lesson.
The Zorbs had reacted to the attack quickly and efficiently, training up hundreds of squads of troops and moving them into defensive positions along the plateau. A declaration of war against the Florb State was all-casted just hours after the enemy had globbed the second fyber farm. But most impressive, thought Jinko, was the rapid completion of the wall, which now cut sea-to-sea across the entire length of Orbland, achieving a towering average height of four meters. Even if those lying Florbs somehow managed to take the plateau, they’d have a tough time scaling the mighty Zorb wall! Jinko winced again. But what about the glob cannons? Can’t they be fired over the wall?
Like Jinko, most new recruits hailed from agro-country. Most had never seen orb-to-orb combat, and many hadn’t even traveled as far as Orb City. Raising crops was a reliable and wholesome way of life, and he knew it was actually a good thing to be ignorant of society’s troubles. But the glob cannon was known even to the most insular of farmers, and Jinko had witnessed its destructive footprint first-hand. On just the seventh day of the war, his squad had run cleanup duty for a globbed-out Zorb position. He remembered the scene vividly, even though he wanted to forget. The distinct pungency of smoke and sulfur. Huge radial spatters of sticky blackness that could burn through your membrane within seconds. The charred and wind-blown bodies of deflated orblings…
Jinko now felt the surge of a more familiar emotion, the one that had made him sign the enlistment docs and leave the security of agro-life behind. The heat of indignant rage was growing inside him, and he hoped it would somehow burn away the uneasiness in his stomach. The Florb problem had to be solved, and there was only one way to solve it. The Zorbs had deadly weapons too—cleaner and more precise laser shooters—and he’d been trained in their use. And it was only a matter of time before Zorb engineers discovered how to make their own, more civilized version of the glob cannon. But until then, they were taking the fight into Florb-held territory, hoping to surprise the enemy up close, inside the minimum range of the bulky cannons.
For the past two days, the squad had been secretly working its way toward an enemy base, keeping to one of the rocky spines that scarred the otherwise flat landscape. Before daylight today, they would make their move. Jinko had waited long enough for this. Sick with anxiety or not, he would do his part to eliminate these murdering Florbs; they were a threat to all of Orbland, and should be uprooted like the invasive weeds they were.
The tent ceiling was now gray with the portension of another cold dawn on the plateau, and the other bunks were beginning to stir. Today was the 100th day of the war, and Jinko was going into battle.
Not too far from the plateau, just within the protective shell of the Zorb Wall, Trino was riding the B-Line to work. Scenes of an urban morning scrolled by as the tram raced toward the center of Orb City, home to a million orblings. A million too many, thought Trino. The commute was the worst part of her day, and not just because it took so long; she knew how to fix that.
The day FyberCom finally decided to pony up and give her a promotion, she would leave the grimy outer limits of the city and get herself a decent apartment downtown. If only the company could realize that sitting for two hours a day on the B-Line wasn’t exactly great for her productivity. Trino had always been an exceptional student, collecting top marks in everything from geology to orbonomics. She’d studied hard to land the fyber engineering position, and she wasn’t finished. It was only a matter of time before FyberCom would recognize her true abilities, elevating her position financially, and, she hoped, physically, to the higher levels of FyberCom Tower, where the cutting-edge work and secret projects happened.
But while living downtown might save her time, it wouldn’t save her from the real menace: the riff-raff of Orb City. Twice a day, Trino was forced to contend with a mob of jostling, grumbling, stinking orblings whose numbers seemed to be growing daily, in a way that was suspiciously correlated with a rise in garbage and petty crime. They crowded the streets begging for money, just like they crowded the tramcars, stealing seats from people with real jobs. Many, it seemed, could speak only a broken version of orb-common. Some said it was the war, but Trino knew better. She’d seen it her whole life as a city-dweller. Some people just…didn’t belong here.
Fortunately for Trino, she had just purchased a three-hundred channel personal headcaster unit from TechDreams, which served to drown out the noise, if not the sight and smell of the general populace. Trino was also certain she was the only person on the B-Line who could afford such a thing, and wore it with pride. She clicked it on.
<<…that was Jorbosis Kingsby’s “Pedantry in Twelve Modes”. One of the more influential but lesser known works of the developmental period. Next up we have…>>
Yikes. Classical. *Click.*
<<…welcome—to the soothing aural atmosphere of downtempo fyber-flute. Playing cool and staying cool…>>
Jazz, even worse. *Click-Click-Click.*
<<…don’t understand is why these people can’t live *outside* the wall. They’ll still be protected. Why do we keep letting them in? I’m just saying. There’s not enough space for everyone in here. And if you’re not an active, contributing member of society, do you really deserve to be here? Orb City is about industry, it’s about hard work, it’s about knowing your history. Go ahead and take handouts, just do it *outside* the wall. Just saying. This is KBOB 100.1 in the morning. Smart talk for smart people. We’ll be right back…>>
Trino couldn’t disagree, but she usually skipped the commercials. Maybe she’d cycle back to KBOB. *Click.*
<<…are saying the donut is nothing to worry about, folks. Just business as usual. Nothing Florby about this thing. Probably a weather anomaly. You remember the electrical storm nonsense from last year. Had half the city about to pop for no reason at all, no reason! It’s a new day in the greatest city on Orbland! You know they say clouds can form these bubbles…>>
Gross. She despised this newscaster’s voice. *Click.*
<<…heard that right. No fewer than FOUR-HUNDRED high definition caster channels, beamed direct to you for your endless listening PLEASURE. This new model from TechDreams is noise-canceling, comes in high-gloss white, and the head band is VERY comfortable, VERY sleek, let me tell you. I have it right here. It’s high DEF, high GLOSS, high CLASS, and priced SO LOW for our listeners today, you might want to sit down before…>>
*CLICK.* Trino shut off the headcaster with a snort. Noise-canceling, huh? The promotion would have to pay for that too. Annoyed, she fixed her eyes on an open patch of floor, peripheral vision informing her of the packed car, all the misplaced and mischievous faces, the disgusting closeness of it all. Get me out of here.
Orbling bodies swayed together in involuntary synchrony as the tram hurtled around long curves. Mercifully, Trino’s stop was up next, so she stowed the headcaster and prepared to brave the final city blocks of her commute, without making eye contact.
Over in Zorb Suburbia, Mr. Fil was trying to trim the tall hedge that surrounded his yard. It was the only such hedge in the neighborhood, and Mr. Fil was certain that everyone resented it, simply because it was different. From his perch atop the gardening ladder, he might’ve noticed the distant top of FyberCom Tower poking up through the morning haze, just over Bill Phob’s roofline. He might’ve noticed the drone of Mrs. Fil’s housecaster through the side window, or the chirping of all the little birds that lived in the hedge, or that he wasn’t successfully trimming much of anything. But Mr. Fil, a tenured science professor, didn’t notice any of these things. As usual, Mr. Fil was lost in thought.
He was thinking about the war against the so-called “Florb State”, and wondered why nobody seemed concerned that the term had been conjured out of thin air a little over 100 days ago.
Sure, Florb culture was a real thing. One could take the Florb Studies course at Zorb-U and learn all about the dress, language, history, and religion of the people who mostly called themselves Florbs, and who mostly lived on the other side of Orbland. Mr. Fil could even admit that some of this culture made no sense to him; their insistence on wearing those pointy hats, for example, or the prophetic meanderings of the Book of Florb. Other things, like those indiscriminate glob cannons, were downright wrong. But Florb State? There was no such thing. The Florbs were known to be a bartering, nomadic society, migrating their many impermanent villages every few years, following the suitability of the land for foraging, pasturing, and hunting. Any major disagreement within a village typically resulted in one party peeling off to start a new village.
There simply was no unified Florb government, nor word that a rogue military group had taken control. Neither was there any obvious motive behind the recent Florb aggression. The only communication had been the strange looping broadcast picked up by the military in the days following the initial attacks, demanding that Zorbs “end offenses on the sacred steppe”, along with a concatenation of random Florb scripture. Besides this, all that was really known was that every Florb village on the plateau now seemed bent on destroying anything, and anyone, related to fyber farming. And Mr. Fil thought he knew why.
High-Density Organic Chain Fiber—more commonly known as fyber—was a lightweight, durable, and recently-discovered material that could be used to produce everything from musical instruments to skytower infrastructure. And with the right techniques and equipment, it could be grown like crazy on the central plateau, where the deep soils hid old-growth nutrients. There was virtually no limit to fyber’s industrial potential, and this was no secret, least of all to the Florbs, who, for all their oddities, weren’t stupid. They’d had caster-tech for years; at least the full audio range, if not higher frequencies. And Mr. Fil personally knew most of the Zorb scientists working in laboratories day and night to decipher glob chemistry; the stuff was ingenious, however destructive. These Florbs—whether an alliance of local villages, or possibly a larger coalition—recognized the economic value of the plateau, and wanted in on the party. This was a war of control over natural resources, plain and simple.
And so the Zorb collective consciousness had hallucinated the menace of a “Florb State” to justify the violent protection of its investment, and the masses were eating it up. Mr. Fil could see the reality of the situation with crystal clarity. He thought it regrettable that there’d been no discussion of a peaceful solution. Weren’t they all cohabitants of this great, but finite island of Orbland? Weren’t they all orblings, filled with the same noble gases, silly hats or not? Why couldn’t the plateau be parceled up fairly, without anyone getting globbed or lasered? But inwardly he knew that would never happen, not with the old stories claiming the central plateau as Zorb heritage “since the Zorbs on Orbland did alight”.
Orblings loved their old stories, almost as much as they loved picking sides. If it wasn’t Zorbs vs. Florbs, it was city-natives vs. refugees, TechDreams vs OrbDroid, Zorb-U vs. UOC, etc, etc. Everywhere, labels. Everywhere, walls! It was a wonder there was any functioning society to speak of! Mr. Fil was glad to be above it all, and just wished others could see it his way. If only orblings could work together to create urban housing units, expand the caster spectrum, even explore the Great Sea with new fyber boats! Too bad everyone was blind to the truth.
Mr. Fil remembered that he was trimming the hedge, and set to snipping away with renewed vigor. Then, he paused, turning to stare down into Bill Phob’s front yard. Something was different. What was it? Phob’s yard was the stereotype of suburban horticulture, an irony of manicured extravagance and mindless self-affirmation. The broad walkway, perfectly-spaced topiary, razor-clipped lawn… hmm, something about the lawn? Nothing new, just the usual assortment of political signs. There were the two Phob had put up after the declaration of war, still standing there smugly: [ZORB COUNTRY] and [MAKE MORE LASERS]. Next to those was a more recent addition: [NO REFUGEES]. And there was the fourth… ah, that was it! Old Phob had put up another sign. This one was positioned closer to Mr. Fil’s hedge than the others, and had tinier script. He squinted down from the ladder to make out the words: [← FLORB LOVER NEXT DOOR].
Mr. Fil continued staring for a long moment, and then his eyes darkened. Label ME, will you?! Many years’ worth of exasperation with the closed-mindedness, no, the sheer idiocy of orbling society began to boil over, and Mr. Fil began to shake with rage. He’d avoided the pettiness of yard signage up to this point, to the disappointment of Mrs. Fil. Now, he was ready. If labels were what the people wanted, then they would get labels! What would it be? [FLORB COUNTRY]? [END THE FYBER WAR]? Those might be a little too interesting to the authorities. How about [REFUGEES WELCOME]? No, the Mrs. certainly wouldn’t stand for that. Aha! He grinned maniacally, raising a trembling digit to point at Bill Phob’s front door. “LABELER!”, he screamed. “LABELER NEXT DOOR!!”.
Suddenly, Mr. Fil’s entire egg-shaped body was overcome by an intense tingling sensation. His vision was drawn to the sky above Bill Phob’s roofline, and his mouth opened in astonishment. It was the strangest thing his large, luminous eyes had ever seen. There, dominating the horizon, hung an enormous, silver torus.
Beyond the metropolis, over the rolling patchwork of agro-country, past shadowy dunes and almost to the Zorb-shore of the Great Sea, a little orbling named Mini was crying in a storage closet. Mini had many reasons to cry, but she wasn’t sure which reason was to blame this time, and this felt like reason enough alone.
Sometimes it was just that Mini felt stuck, in a quiet kind of way.
Everything around her was… well, small. The fishing town where she lived with her family had only five buildings, including the rickety hut that housed the four of them, which itself had only two bedrooms plus a kitchen-common room, and this stuffy storage closet. Mini didn’t count the privy as a building.
She knew that much bigger places existed in Orbland, like Orb City with its skytowers, or the open plains of central plateau, or the Far Mountains. She’d read about these places in books, or heard about them on their old caster. The only big place she’d actually seen was the Great Sea, when they went down to check for sea-fish. But even if she were older, and her parents were to allow it, Mini wasn’t sure she wanted to actually go to any of those places. Not with the war and problems and danger constantly on the caster. And no one technically went into the Great Sea anyway, it being so dark and rough, and empty, as far as anyone knew.
But the thought of staying here, no, of belonging here, to this little place with its same old habits and tides, was enough to make the tears well up, unbidden. Everything here was too desperately… normal! The simplest things could send Mini running to the closet. Like the musty-sweet smell of father’s gear shed. Or the soft clinking of mother preparing another evening meal. Or Jot’s round little face, still gray and pre-gendered, tottling around the bedroom. And so she was stuck in the smallness of her life, stuck in the stuckness itself, and the pure familiarity of it all was sometimes just inexplicably… well, sad.
A more obvious reason to cry, Mini remembered, was the fact that she was half Florb, an idea that had carried no immediate meaning for her until recently. Yes, she knew all the stories from mother. How their fishing town had once been a migrating Florb village. How mother’s uncle had pleaded with the village leaders for them to stay another season, after mother’s aunt had become sick. How almost everyone else had continued on. Mother’s parents had stayed here too, of course. Years later, father had come from Orb City—“looking to get out” was all he usually said about it—and then met mother while working as a net-fixer. And now they were all here, catching fish and selling them to agro-merchants.
For as long as she could remember, Mini had known this narrative as the trivial backstory to her small existence, known that mother was Florb and father was Zorb, known that she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers about it. But she hadn’t felt half Florb until the war started.
Now, you couldn’t so much as turn on the caster without learning something horrible about Florbs. If it wasn’t a newscast of the latest globbing, which gave Mini regular nightmares now, it was some talkshow explaining the stupidity of village migration, or a preacher raving against the Book of Florb. Even mother regularly condemned her “crazy steppe cousins” with their “tilling taboos”. If Mini was half Florb, was she half horrible too? She didn’t feel like somebody who would glob anybody, except maybe a newscaster. Come to think of it, none of them ever talked about how horrible Zorbs could be. Hadn’t Zorbs destroyed their own people’s homes just to build a giant wall? Weren’t they lasering entire Florb villages on the plateau, and then celebrating? And what was so bad about the Book of Florb? Mini had sometimes read it to herself in the storage closet, felt soothed by its rhyming verse, even though she didn’t understand all the words. When the war started, father had buried it under the shed along with all their other Florby possessions.
Mini tried to decide which half of herself was more horrible, and the tears came hot.
She didn’t know which side was right, or who she would fight for, if it came to that. She didn’t know what would happen to her family, or whether the Zorb wall was a protection, or a prison. She didn’t know why this old fishing town, her only place of safety in this whole wild world of Orbland, was also irreducibly sad. She didn’t know where she belonged, or why she spent so much time crying in a storage closet. She just… didn’t know.
Mini really wept then. Her little orbling body trembled, and the tears rushed and splashed.
Then, she gave up trying to sort herself out, and it was as if her heart had unclenched a long-held fist. Maybe not knowing was just the way of things. Or maybe she’d just had a good enough cry. The dim and dusty shapes of the closet pressed in, familiar as ever. Mini took a deep, slow breath, and let it all go with a long exhale.
The noise from the housecaster was oddly loud through the closet door. It wasn’t like her parents to turn up the volume. Maybe Jot had gotten to it? She reached up to crack open the door, and peeked out into the common room. Her parents were sitting side by side on the sofa, also strange, with Jot struggling in father’s arms. The two adults were staring, transfixed, at the caster unit, as the noise resolved into the voice of a serious-sounding newscaster.
<<…had been descending all morning, until apparently stopping just a few moments ago, possibly centered over Orb City, although it’s hard to tell given the massive size. The object still shows no signs of activity except the script that seems to be flashing all over the, uhh, donut-shaped surface. Again, the script reads: [PREPARE FOR BROADCAST]. We’re still not sure what “broadcast” this refers to, but it’s best to stay tuned right here to KNWS, folks. No clear indication that this is a Florb attack, however, authorities are advising all citizens to remain indoors and away from windows. If you or anyone you kno…>>
The newscaster cut off abruptly, and the unit scratched and popped unnaturally. Through the crack in the closet door, Mini saw her parents look worriedly at each other. “Mini! Where are you?”, called mother. Then, a deep and strangely accented voice emanated from the caster:
<< WE ARE VISITORS WHO MEAN YOU NO HARM. WE TRAVEL THE GALAXY FOR THE RESOLUTION OF BEINGS, SHINING LIGHT IN SKILLFUL WAYS.
YOU MUST SEE THE ONE IN THE MANY. AFTER THIS, TRY NOT TO FORGET.
COMMENCE THE GLISTER. >>
Before she could add either galaksi or glister to the list of things she didn’t know, before she could run from the closet to join her family on the sofa, Mini went completely fuzzy. She felt light and tingly, as if she were made of swirling sea foam. Then, an even more abnormal thing happened: Mini’s body began to glow.
It started soft and warm, like a round yellow moon. But soon, she’d gone full daylight, and had to shield her eyes from her own sparkling brightness. Her vision still adjusting, Mini gasped. Not out of pain, or even fear, she was surprised to notice, but at the change in the old storage closet, its long-dark clutter now fully illuminated. Buckets and bins blazed with incredible colors and textures. Mop and broom cast towering shadows that stretched and slid with her faintest movement, and golden dust motes descended in stately shafts. It was the most most dazzling thing Mini had ever seen. And it was all her own light.
Whoever these visitors were, wherever they’d come from, Mini felt their strange message was meant for her. Florbs and Zorbs might be at war on the plateau, but there was no reason their war had to rage inside of her. Yes, she was a child of both worlds, had grown up with Florb books and crafts and fish recipes, all while speaking orb-common and using Zorb technology every day. But this humble existence out beyond the dunes, with its melancholy routines, its secret history and tiny crop of buildings, even this trusty storage closet, it was all… well, hers. She belonged to both sides, and to neither, and this was something she now knew, well and truly.
Mini breathed deeply again, and surprised herself with a smile. She’d never felt so excited, let alone by the prospect of simply being herself. Mother was calling again. She got to her feet and pushed the closet door all the way open, flooding the common room with light.
Mr. Fil, in the shock of the moment, had fallen over his hedge onto Bill Phob’s front lawn, and was now laying face up, directly adjacent the sign that read [← FLORB LOVER NEXT DOOR]. The gravity on Orb is weak enough not to harm anyone who falls only a couple of meters, but orblings, being naturally rotund, can have a difficult time getting back to their feet without assistance, and it didn’t help that Mr. Fil was getting on in years. So he struggled there helplessly, mind racing to comprehend the situation.
He wondered, worriedly, if his rage had triggered some kind of medical event. It had certainly been a long time since he’d felt so angry, or yelled so loudly. Maybe he’d ruptured something internally. That might explain the tingling sensation, which, he noticed, was still intensely present. But it wouldn’t explain that thing in the sky, which, if it was real, was hidden from this particular vantage point. Nor would it explain the incredible blast of noise that had followed the inception of the tingling: a deep, orb-shaking foghorn of a noise. Mr. Fil thought it unlikely that a rage-induced medical event could also cause one to hallucinate sights and sounds, but the alternative seemed even less likely, especially if all these phenomena were connected: a giant toroidal object—hovering in the sky, he reminded himself—had emitted, and was possibly continuing to emit, violent quantities of energy that could… interact… with orbling bodies.
Mr. Fil continued to flail uselessly on the lawn, now afflicted by a rising sense of panic. If he wasn’t in the process of dying from an internal rupture, he had better get up and investigate all this craziness. It was quite possible that this was a dangerous situation indeed. Could it be the Florbs, come with a surprise attack? No. There was no way that even a fully unified Florb society could muster the resources to construct that. Perhaps a Zorb weapon of some sort? Some terrible final solution to the Florb problem? Then why did it appear to have been centered over Zorb territory when it activated? A mishap? No, Mr. Fil was too much in the know about new technology, even secret projects. He’d have heard long ago about something of this magnitude, with skyborne abilities, nonetheless. The sheer science required to create such a thing!
His breath came faster now, emotions whipping up into an excited frenzy. What if the object was something truly alien? Some malicious entity from the uncharted darkness of the sea? What if—and now a stab of fear put Mr. Fil dangerously close to a literal internal rupture—what if orbling society was about to end, not by the division and infighting he’d long lamented, but by violent extermination from an outside force?
“Help!”, he cried, round body twisting and rocking on the lawn. “HELP ME!… PLEASE!!”
Where was Mrs. Fil? Where was anybody? Compromised, he realized. This was a global catastrophe. Everyone must be in their final throes, incapacitated and isolated, like him. Mr. Fil managed a sardonic grin. This would be how the species ended; divided, every orbling for themself. Unwilling to unite while they’d had the chance, they’d be forced to die alone, squashed by a superior intelligence. It’s what they all deserved. But not him.
“Not me!! Spare ME!!”, he agonized into the sky. “I’M DIFFERENT! PLEASE!!”
A brightness impinged all around his peripheral vision, and Mr. Fil knew it was the end. The malicious entity had dealt its killing blow, firing a high-energy weapon that would destroy the Orb City metropolis and probably the whole continent. He let himself go limp, shut his eyes, and awaited the conflagration.
“Bob?”, said a voice above him. “Bobby Fil? That you?”
Mr. Fil opened his eyes, then squeezed them back shut immediately, the retinal image of a blazing star burning in his visual field.
“What?”, he croaked. “Who?”
The voice was at his side now. “That is you, Bob! It’s me, Bill Phob, your neighbor!”
“No!”, squeaked a thoroughly bewildered and still lawn-bound Mr. Fil. “Don’t hurt me, please! I’m different!”, he pleaded.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you Bob. Here, take my hand.”
An orbling-like hand grasped Mr. Fil’s, and he was hoisted up onto his feet. He tried squinting open his eyes toward the source of the Phob-sounding voice, which now said: “You are different Bob, we both are.”
After a moment, Mr. Fil was able to open his eyes wide enough to perceive what was directly in front of him, and he was completely unprepared for what he saw. Mr. Bobbert Fil of Zorb University, decades-long conceptualizer of unexplained phenomena, social critic extraordinaire, and interpreter of the ongoing toroidal apparition, was personally, professionally, and profoundly flabbergasted.
There was no doubt that it was Bill. The rough-hewn facial features, wrinkled forehead, and drawling voice all clearly identified the entity standing there as the aging Bill Phob, Mr. Fil’s widowed suburban neighbor of eleven years. But he was… on fire, from the inside.
Typically, an orbling’s membrane was only weakly transparent, passing some light if the individual were to interpose a bright enough source, a rosy departure from the usual dusty-white. Phob, however, was lit up like an incandescent bulb, his membrane a patterned brilliance of crucible colors, a glassy magma surface intimating deep complexities and an impossibly brighter light within. Mr. Fil even thought he could see the mute shapes of internal organs drifting below the surface, but was too amazed to register embarrassment.
“How…?”, he managed. “Does it hurt?”
No answer came, but Mr. Fil wasn’t listening for one. He continued to gaze unabashed into the molten depths of Bill Phob. Then, his eyes, which by now had fully compensated for the solar luminosity that was his next door neighbor, refocused on a single bright splotch of color, and Mr. Fil realized he was looking at a slightly warped image of himself, reflected on the surface of Phob’s membrane. Only then did he raise trembling hands and look down to see appendages ablaze, his own abdomen a galactic swirl of light and color.
Mr. Fil collected himself and stood upright. For a long moment the two neighbors stared at each other, until Phob broke the silence: “You’re a scientist, Bob. What’s happened to us?”
Mr. Fil watched as flicks of brightness spiraled off of Phob’s head, like wayward sparks escaping a silent campfire. “Uhh… no idea”, he chuckled, “but I’m guessing it has to do with that thing in the sky over Orb City… did you see it?” He pointed up at the roof.
“Yep. It’s all over the caster”, replied Phob. “This voice took over the channel, said they were visitors from galaksi or some place, said they were tryin’ to resolve the situation, whatever that means.”
Mr. Fil chose to ignore the whirring and clicking of his mind, as Phob continued. “Tell you the truth, I’m scared Bob. We’ve been sleepin’ on those Florbs for too long now, I know it’s them, tryin’ to upset our way of life…” he trailed off, eyes drifting down to the recently occupied patch of lawn. Mr. Fil followed his gaze. The contested label was creased and fallen, an apparent casualty of his existential struggle just moments before.
“Whoever this is, I think they’ve succeeded at, uhh, upsetting our way of life”, said Mr. Fil. “But, as you might’ve guessed, I don’t think it’s the Florbs. This is well beyond their technology, beyond any Zorb science I’m aware of, actually.” He moved to fix up the sign. “That noise gave me quite the shock. Knocked me off the ladder. Thanks for helping me up, Bill.”
“Sure,” said Phob uncertainly, helping to adjust the sign so it pointed in the correct direction.
Mr. Fil remembered that it was mid-morning, and that he lived next door. “I’ve got to go check on the Mrs.”, he said, pausing to consider a new kind of thought. “Why don’t you walk over for breakfast in a few minutes, and we can sort this out together.”
“Okay”, said Phob. “Well, thanks. Maybe the Florbs have gone all shiny too. Maybe it’ll knock some sense into ‘em!”
“We’ll see, I guess”, retorted Mr. Fil, and turned to walk back around the hedge, which, he noticed, was alive with birdsong.
Trino’s morning commute had gone from bad, to worse, to nightmare. She was leaning against the wall of a dark tunnelway, breathing hard and trying to regain her balance. Her headcaster was on the ground somewhere ahead, dislodged by the same deafening foghorn-vibration that had sent her lurching down into the tunnel for cover. Above, people were screaming in the street…
She’d re-donned the headcaster just moments before, shortly after stepping off the B-Line. The riff-raff were thick on the ground, and the inner-city sounds and smells exceeded their usual levels of offense. Trino would need some extra insulation from the chaos today. She had to push her way through a loud knot of people outside the station, some seeming to gesture nervously overhead. Finally she got the headcaster fitted into place, and clicked it on.
<<…assumed to be an interesting weather pattern, but this is confirmed to be a real physical object, uhh, floating above the Orb City metropolis. You heard that right, folks… floating. The obvious question here is whether this is the Florbs, but unfortunately we have no evidence one way or another, at least not yet. The military assures us that their strongest lasers are trained on the object from many angles. If you or anyone you know has information that could help identify this thing, use the KNWS inbound line…>>
Trino clicked through, thinking it might be some prank drama-cast, but it was the same on every channel: an enormous, silver, ring-like thing was alleged to be hovering over Orb City. She clicked off the caster, leaving it fitted in place, and ventured a glance overhead, conscious of looking like just another ogling city-dweller, but could see only atmosphere between the looming skytowers. She quickened her pace anyway. Was this really happening?
The question was answered, indisputably, as she rounded the next corner. Trino stopped abruptly in the middle of the walkway and looked up, eyes wide and mouth agape, suddenly on hiatus from the world of social ramifications.
The thing was indeed there, but “enormous”, “silver”, and “ring-like” were just words from the caster. The reality of this massive… presence defied description. The nearest part she could see was berthed perhaps a hundred meters above the top of the FyberCom spire: a glinting gunmetal facade, itself hundreds of meters tall, curving back into the gray-white of the morning haze. Trino could see hints of more metallic surface over the tops of distant towers. Shape-wise, she supposed it could be like a thick circular tube connected back onto itself in the horizontal plane to form a… what was that geometry called? a toroid? It was hard to tell given the density of the skytowers here, but if so, the thing must be several kilometers in diameter. The “object”, if something so large could be considered an object, imposed itself from above like a silent city, poised to crush the metropolis under its seemingly impervious bulk. Where had it come from?
Terrified, Trino looked on from the middle of the walkway, oblivious to the cries and curses of orblings shoving past her. Suddenly, the toroidal surface shimmered with hundreds of strangely etched symbols that rapidly changed and cycled. The bright red fissures over dark gunmetal reminded her of images she’d seen of cooling lava flows in the Far Mountains. Then, the symbols resolved into various sizes and orientations of the phrase [PREPARE FOR BROADCAST], which proceeded to flash on and off at odd rates.
Well, if it spoke orb-common, it must be of orbling origin. And even if it wasn’t—which would be insane—it looked like there was going to be some communication before it did anything…hostile. Either way, Trino felt a sudden, desperate need to finish her commute. As horrific as all of this was, that thing was positioned over her place of work, and she wanted to be where the action was. There was a reason FyberCom owned the tallest skytower in Orb City: important things happened there, innovative things, and upper-floor management probably had an inside scoop, if not a direct line to whoever was behind this. There were two blocks left. She broke into a run.
Trino had closed about half the remaining distance to FyberCom Tower when the “noise” went off. Another woeful understatement, she thought. The impossible horn-blast, which had sounded for maybe five seconds, and resounded in the streets for many more, played the rigid skytowers like tuning forks and rattled the bones of Orb City in the subsonic. Her vision went blurry, and a wave of nausea sent her pitching down an access ramp into the narrow tunnel, headcaster loose and skittering ahead into the darkness.
—
After a moment leaning against the wall, she’d regained enough equilibrium to think about what was happening. Yes, she had stumbled into the mouth of a dark tunnelway—the kind used to access skytower utility systems—in the worst part of downtown, but the idea that it was likely crawling with refugee-types was only one of several problems now. The world was ending up there, and Trino was… suffering from full-body pins and needles? The intense tingling was like nothing she could remember. Perhaps it would clear up after another moment to fully catch her breath; it had been a while since she’d used the FyberCom gym, let alone sprinted a full city block. She turned to look back up the access ramp. What was happening out there? No more orb-shaking horn-blasts, but also… no more cries of distressed orblings. Strange. All she could hear was the echo of city-dregs dripping into hidden puddles behind her.
The strong nausea had subsided, or at least degraded into an uneasy stomach, but the tingling sensation had not. Trino turned to stare into the blind depths of the tunnel. It smelled like underground down here, that distinct combination of stale air and mineral humidity. Should she venture back up into the fever-dream and run the final distance to FyberCom Tower? Or continue to shelter in the dank mystery-tunnel housing who-knows-what? Lovely options, she thought.
There was a glimmer on the tunnel floor ahead. The headcaster! In all the excitement, she’d forgotten it had come off. Before venturing back up, she would check the channels for any new information. She stepped cautiously forward into the darkness, feeling around with her feet for the caster or any unseen hazards.
That was when the tunnelway changed. At first, Trino thought she must’ve tripped some motion-sensitive access lights. She stopped in her tracks. The center of the darkness ahead—Trino couldn’t tell how far ahead—seemed to bloom with glowing bulbs. She recalled images of globular deep-sea fish from biology class—bizarre, auto-luminescent creatures suspended in the inky depths—except whatever this was grew steadily brighter each second. As she watched, the bulbs of light also seemed to move through the color spectrum, evolving from the infrared through orange-yellow and into a pure white. A wide halo of a thousand sparkles shimmered around the brightening center; only later would Trino guess that this had been the same light, reflected off the moisture-slick tunnel surface.
“Oh!”, she exclaimed, and then giggled at her own outburst.
For the first time in her relatively short, but incessantly active life, Trino was surprised by beauty. The mesmerizing sight before her was utterly incongruous, even for a day when a megalithic donut had parked itself over Orb City. Her mind went as quiet as the dripping, glistening tunnelway, absent the clutter of the morning commute, FyberCom politics, even the surreal chaos of moments before.
As she gazed on, the radiant shapes grew larger, and Trino realized they were moving—no, walking—toward her! There were voices now too; stifled laughter and sharp whispers echoed down the corridor. Still inexplicably free of anxiety, and now intensely curious, she decided to wait for this ambulating cluster of brilliant ovoids to arrive. The space around her grew bright, and soon, Trino found herself in the presence of five orblings of various sizes, each one a distinct marvel of white light.
“Elly, she bright like us!”, cried the smallest in the group.
“Quiet, Mu!”, quipped a taller girl. “You know I does the talking.”
Trino was looking down at herself now, dazzled by the light there. Apparently, she’d missed her own transformation while witnessing a similar change in this odd assortment of orblings, some of whom appeared to be children.
“This is incredible!”, she uttered. “Do you know what’s happening? Did you see the… thing up there?”
“We doesn’t know, miss, but we heard a noise”, answered the tall girl who’d been called Elly. “These are my siblings, Mu and Tau”. Elly gestured down at the talkative little girl, and at another, thinner orbling boy. “And our friends, Zee and Bee. They doesn’t talk.” She indicated the remaining two, both stocky-looking, but of indeterminate gender.
“We lives here, miss”, added Elly.
“You live… down here?” Asked Trino, finally noticing the exposed pipework, dark sludge-puddles, and grime-covered surface of the tunnel, now illuminated by the group’s shared light.
“Tau steals food for us at night!”, piped Mu.
“MU!!”, shouted Elly, rounding on the girl as if to strike. Mu flinched, but held her ground.
Elly turned back to Trino, her bright eyes pleading. “Please don’t tell, miss. We doesn’t have any place to go.”
Trino said nothing.
“See, our father was killed by a glob attack”, continued Elly. “And then, our house was evicted to build the wall. We doesn’t have a place anymore. Neither does Zee and Bee, but they helps us, they’s been surviving here a long time.”
“And mother ran away!”, added Mu. This time, Elly sustained the comment.
Trino realized just how tired she was. At about this time on a normal workday, she’d be checking in at the FyberCom lobby, ready for a full day of fyber engineering. Today was not a normal day. It was hardly mid-morning, and she’d already experienced a broader range of emotional and physical states than she thought could exist.
Trino thought of the ludicrous thing above the city, with its foreboding red script. She thought of all the panicked people up there, unsure of which way to run when the horn-blast had sounded. She thought of today’s commute on the B-Line, of her many past commutes, and of her long aversion to the orblings who called this city home, riff-raff or not. She thought of the war that was disrupting so many lives, a war she’d managed to avoid confronting, favoring her lonely climb up the power-structure—and the physical levels—of FyberCom Tower.
Her thoughts moved to the five brilliant orblings standing before her. Just a moment ago they’d unwittingly gifted her with the heart-opening surprise of their light, which even now mingled with her own light, illuminating this small portion of a forgotten tunnelway. She took in their waiting faces, all similarly transfigured, but each intimating a unique depth of story and emotion. Their luminous eyes conveyed sadness, fear, and mistrust, but also sparkled with expectation, and perhaps friendliness.
Trino thought of all of these things, and then she burst into tears.
“I don’t really know how to help you”, she was finally able to say. “Except, here”, and she reached down to scoop up the headcaster. “You can have this. Maybe you can sell it for food. But first, lets check if there’s any information about all this craziness.”
The squad’s predawn maneuver was proceeding quickly and quietly, but the air was bitter cold. Not for the first time, Jinko found himself wondering why the standard-issue anti-glob vests didn’t cover more membrane. Yes, they preserved the mobility required for active combat, but the things really didn’t offer much warmth, let alone any true guarantee of protection if you were caught directly under cannon-fire. Stars winked out above them as the squad crept down through the rocks, and Jinko resorted to repeating basic training mantras to himself in a vain attempt to take his mind off the cold, and the sickly knot in his stomach.
“WHUMP, WHUMP, JUMP TO COVER.” For anyone who’d heard it before, the telltale double-whump of an active glob cannon required no special explanation. Since the war had started, the sound was known to any Zorb citizen with a caster unit, and Jinko had often been wrested from uneasy sleep by its distant pulse. Nonetheless, this was a good reminder to be alert to your surroundings and ready to dive for cover, which in his case would be the nearest boulder.
“POINTY HEAD, SHOOT IT DEAD.” Should be easy enough. The squad might be lacking in the vest-coverage department, but the laser weapon they each carried was fully-charged, accurate, and deadly. Those pointy-hatted Florbs wouldn’t know what hit ‘em. Jinko wondered why they didn’t just take off their pointy hats to make things that much harder for the Zorbs, and then shook his head, remembering… false religion.
Jinko looked up. The group had come alongside a craggy ridge-line, and Squad Leader Bert’s voice—tinny but still coiled and commanding—came through his combat earpiece: <<Halt! Two minutes for rest!>>. Keeping his head low, Jinko peered through a gap in the rocks at the dimly-lit expanse below. The ridge dropped down only a meter or so before becoming a shallow scree slope that spilled out into the plateau floor.
And there, just past the bottom of the slope where the rocks gave way to rippling grasses, was their target. The enemy was encamped over the remains of a destroyed fyber farm, just like the briefing had said. It couldn’t be much more than a kilometer away, almost inside minimum cannon-range. Jinko could make out the blackened hulks of heavy plows and the ribbed shells of burnt greenhouses, now interspersed with the white splotches of Florb tents and pavilions. Not unlike mold growing on your crops, he thought, disgustedly. Difficult to remove, except with fire. There was no obvious glob cannon setup, but that shouldn’t be a factor anyway. The enemy would have to resort to slinging glob-dipped rocks; still a threat, but no match for the range and precision of laser shooters.
Florb banners flapped in the chill breeze, but nothing else seemed to be moving down there. Good. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. The squad was a full twenty-four well-trained Zorb troops. Their superior weaponry and the element of surprise should easily overwhelm a Florb village of sixty, only half of whom might be “active-aggressives”, according the briefing. Jinko wondered about the implied presence of “inactive-aggressives”…unarmed villagers? children? Their orders were to destroy the village, and everyone in it. Just like the Florbs had done to the farm. This was about justice. Even if a minority of the orblings down there were warrior-types, it was at least passively aggressive to camp there, and Jinko knew that wasn’t good either. He pushed the thought away, but his stomach squirmed.
S.L. Bert ordered the group to begin moving down the slope. They’d have to move swiftly, using the scattered boulders embedded in the scree as cover for the final advance. Jinko checked his wrist. The timing was right. The day would dawn behind them any minute now, and if the enemy put up any resistance, they’d be fighting blind, and with primitive weapons at that. This was it! 100 days of anticipation, all for this moment. Jinko’s stomach fluttered with a strange mix of excitement and dread, and he dropped over the ridge-line.
He’d nearly made it to the first cover point—a cluster of jagged boulders roughly a hundred meters down the slope—when the battle began.
Jinko reacted to the WHUMP WHUMP with near-clinical clarity. That’s the sound of a glob cannon, he thought, dryly. Basic training kicked in. He dove and rolled the final ten meters into the shelter of the rock he’d been aiming for. The ensuing seconds, however, were anything but clinical, as the acute wrongness of the situation forced itself into his mind and gut. This isn’t supposed to be happening! Aren’t we under minimum range? *We’re* the ambushers, not them! How did they know? I didn’t want to die today!
“GLOBS! TAKE COVER!”, someone behind him was yelling. “GLOBS!! NO…AUGHGH…!!!” Black stuff was thwapping down not two meters behind where Jinko was furiously pressing himself into the rock. Whoever it was had been caught out in the open. The screams continued, but he dared not look back. The stuff continued to rain down, and the air turned acrid. Then silence. Jinko waited, tensed.
<<FORWARD!>> S.L. Bert’s guttural command voice sounded in his ear. <<They’re in the rocks ahead! MOVE!!>>
“HAVE NO FEAR, FIGHT THEM NEAR.” Another point hammered home in basic training was that if you could engage the enemy in close combat, you were safe from cannon-fire. Florbs didn’t risk globbing their own, and the vests were serviceable against sling projectiles. Jinko moved.
One terrifying scree sprint, several boulder positions, and some time later—it could’ve been five minutes, or five hours—Jinko found himself in the thick of the first real firefight of his life, and he fiercely hoped that it would be his last.
The drills had ingrained the rhythm of battle-time actions: offering suppression fire, dashing to the next cover point, sweeping a new position. What they hadn’t taught him, what they couldn’t teach him, was how to do these things repeatedly, while facing literal death. Lasers cut and sizzled. Glob-covered projectiles thwacked into boulders around him; if Jinko were to take one of these to the face, that would be the end for him. He’d already taken two hits while advancing to the current position. The vest had absorbed most of the stuff, but he could feel trace amounts of it stinging his exposed membrane. Others hadn’t been so lucky. Orblings were down, on both sides, and Jinko had seen their withering faces. The drills certainly hadn’t prepared him for that.
Zorb and Florb were locked in combat, dug into their positions behind immoveable rocks. The day was now bright, but the passage of time had become irrelevant. All that mattered to Jinko was getting off solid laser-shots, while continuing to not die. Although he knew the Florbs were generally downslope, it was impossible to tell for sure whether a given rock hid an enemy or a friendly. The boulders all looked the same, and the shouted commands and positions pouring in through his earpiece just confused things even more. You looked for pointy hats, or slingshots, or the lack of an anti-glob vest. Whatever identified the other side. You listened for their war cries, and tried to ignore the screams; the screams had no identity. If there was any doubt, you shot anyway.
What was the point of all this guesswork? This fatal masquerade behind rock faces? It suddenly seemed to Jinko like a giant waste of time, and energy, and orbling life. If each one here was fighting for a worthy cause, they should all come out into the open, and get right to the point of dealing with the other side! He tried to remember the worthy cause that had brought him here today, but was coming up short. The healthy fear of a simple enemy was like a distant childhood memory to Jinko’s combat-aged mind.
Amidst the din of battle, he slumped back into the shelter of his personal boulder, its cracks and contours familiar as old furniture by now. He was beyond exhausted, his egg-shaped body pumped many times through with dwindling stress-response hormones.
I’ll just rest here a minute, he thought. Shut my eyes… remember why… worthy cause…
Why were the Zorbs attacking the Florbs? I’m Zorb. We attacked them. Right. Because the Florbs had attacked the farm. The fyber farm, yes. Worthy cause. Why had the Florbs attacked the farm? Why? Because the Zorbs had attacked the land first. With the farm. Yes. No! Just growing fyber! Whose land was it, anyway? Who lives here? Forbs. In the old stories… those are true… Book of Zorbs… false nonsense… yes… worthy cause…
He felt his body slipping into numbness, and the sounds of battle faded away…
Jinko’s eyes snapped open to harsh mid-morning light. His body buzzed all over in the strangest way, and the sounds of battle had actually ceased. The earpiece was silent.
What happened? Who won? Am I dead? Jinko tested reality by setting his laser down and witnessing himself clap his hands together. He heard it. He felt it. His hands were bright, but so was everything on this exposed slope. He tipped forward onto all fours, and began a slow crawl around the rock to investigate.
The jagged boulders that had composed the morning’s theater were defaced with laser-lines and dripping glob-stuff, and the interstices held the expected litter of battle: dropped weapons, loose garments, and here and there a larger, crumpled form. Nothing moved, and nothing made a sound. The scene held no immediate surprises, but something was… off.
Jinko continued to observe from his discreet position, and then realized… the light was all wrong. At this time of day, all the shadows should be aligned downslope. But every boulder he could see appeared to cast its shadow toward him, or perhaps toward the open centroid of the rock cluster, which was not far ahead of him. For this to be true in broad daylight, each boulder must be backlit by its own small star. Impossible!
Then, the impossibility asserted itself, as small stars, each about a meter tall, began to materialize from behind boulders, and amble out into the open space.
Even as he gazed in stupefaction, and risked temporary blindness, Jinko was intuitively sure that these were orblings—the surviving troops and fighters of the morning’s double-ambush. What he couldn’t tell, was who was who! None of the emerging figures seemed to carry a weapon, and each shone so brightly that the ornaments of pointy hats and anti-glob vests were rendered invisible. Maybe the time for telling folks apart was past; they’d done enough of that earlier.
The star cluster continued to form, as one-by-one, orblings traded their former tactical positions for the open air. Jinko wasn’t quite ready to join them. Where is this all going? Incandescent egg-shapes milled and gestured and looked each other over. He could hear the sounds of their voices now; hushed, curious, astonished. The impossibility progressed. The figures appeared to be forming up into two lines. Jinko blinked. He wasn’t sure how they were sorting each other out, or whether the lines were being drawn up at random. He watched on…
—
And there, in the scintillating cold of a central plateau morning, with several kinds of starlight scattering off the scree, a battered group of orblings performed a long-forgotten ceremony: they all walked past each other and shook hands. Had they cared to, they might’ve first listened to each other’s accents, and sorted themselves into Florb and Zorb lines. But that would’ve been an absurd thing to do in their current state, each one being very tired, and simply happy to be alive, and an astral phenomenon.
After this, the group spontaneously engaged in another woefully rare activity. For no specific reason, they began to laugh. And the sound was so hilariously unexpected, and so triumphantly happy, that those few orblings who were still hidden among the rocks, including Jinko, finally ventured out to join the throng.
The self-styled “visitors” disappeared from Orb that same afternoon, just after all the orblings faded back into their normal dusty-white hue. Nobody knew who they were, where they’d come from, or where they were headed next.
Only orblings within the Orb City metropolis, like Trino and Mr. Fil, got the chance to see the mysterious toroid with their own two eyes. And only those within earshot of a live caster unit, like Mini and her family, heard the visitors’ broadcast in real time. Most orblings, like Jinko, and almost every Florb, had no idea that Orbland was in the process of being visited by a toroidal presence during the glistering time. In fact, Zorb scientists still haven’t been able to prove exactly how the visitors caused the phenomenon.
The most skeptical of orblings would go on to say that nothing had “visited” Orbland in the first place, arguing that the few surviving images and caster-recordings were fabricated by the Zorb military to manipulate the citizenry. But even these sour orblings couldn’t deny that for a few hours that day, something had changed within them, if only their ability to see themselves, and each other, with a little more clarity. Many orblings cited those few hours of transformation as a profound experience, and would live more compassionate lives because of it. Others forgot about the whole ordeal within a matter of weeks.
But a small minority took the glistering more deeply into their hearts. They saw “the one in the many”, and didn’t forget. These orblings became the artists, preachers, and politicians—as well as the neighbors, parents, and companions—who would begin the slow work of healing their world from the inside out. Their work is not done.
Some human beings have theories about the visitors too, especially since our world seems like it could use some help. There are two schools of thought. The first says that Earth can expect a visit from the toroid at any time, but there is some debate as to how exactly a glistering would work in our case. The second suggests that we’ve already been visited, and have just collectively forgotten the experience; these folks like to think about the possible forms the visitors may have taken in the past.
Either way, both schools have a shared practice of remembrance, and offer it freely to you:
When you look to the sky on a clear, moonless night, and catch a twinkling star, remember the orblings, remember their glistering, for the resolution of beings.