Zero to One (G/t)

[1] Blinded with Science

(A/N: Picture/manipulation by me.) 

"Oh, my god. It worked."

Lauren stood the bustling center of Mesa Metro in the way of all passersby, jaw dropped and in complete disbelief that her sensors were telling the truth.

There was something there, hidden from the eye, seemingly too far to touch. All of those days of electrical issues finally made sense. Her homemade servers going in and out. Derivations appearing in her scans and captures. The occasional citywide power outage. Lauren had figured there was some kind of electrical grid sending signals to, from, and/or by some previously hidden force that they didn't want the common folk to see. She was absolutely right, but now she wished she wasn't.

Lauren's spectacles uncovered a matrix that blanketed the entire sky, painted in a gradient of green. As she focused her lenses, the opacity of the grid lowered in her direct plane of sight, exposing a binary lattice before eventually turning fully see-through and showing what was hidden even further behind it. Expecting to see something as grandiose as a Dyson sphere or an alien invasion, Lauren didn't know what to think when the window of her view cleared.

The expanse beyond held nothing more than a guy probably not much older than her writing in a dark library.

A huge projection screen, she figured it to be, showing this male visage. She would've put money on it being an obscure, arthouse film or some sort of subconscious advertisement with some underlying message that its producers wanted for the city citizens to absorb. Lauren waited for the punchline, the moral, or the product to appear on screen for what felt like forever. But, as the sun continued to set, he continued to write, looking almost like a perfectly looping gif.

If this was just a large-scale test for a future media path in Mesa Metro, then it didn't seem so bad. Though, some transparency between the creator and the consumer, particularly how in the world it was made unnoticed, would have been appreciated. But, as long as no one was getting hurt from it, considering no one else seemed to see it, then what was there to worry about?

Fate decided to show her, and that lack of worry soon went completely out the window and into the pseudo-sky.

Just as Lauren tried to find any hidden metadata with help from her watch, the monotonous media loop ended. The pen in the sizable screen subject's hand flew out of it, soaring across the firmament. Lauren followed its path with her eyes, believing she'd eventually see it fade out the view and finally know the bounds of her spectacles. However, the area of her vista stayed stagnant with her movement, just shifting to be aligned with her turning head. With every passing second, it just kept going further and further away. Despite that, as she watched the pen pass out of Mesa Metro's city limits and presumably over other cities, too, it never noticeably diminished in size and left no shadow on the ground.

The flight path eventually came to an end halfway below the horizon, eclipsing the sun, when the pen was stopped by the humongous hand that held it before. Yet, unlike earlier, it and the being using it did leave a mark.

As the pen was retrieved, sucked back into the upper atmosphere, its reversal unwound a pinching in the aerial array, similar to a black hole sucking and stretching space toward its singularity. With it, the buildup of almost abyssal darkness at the pen's pressing of the grid relaxed back to the now-normal green scheme of the sky. Its planes and laced numeric sequences rippled as the writing utensil and its wielder returned to their original positions – the latter resuming recording.

Lauren, through indirect angling, stared toward the sun, well, whatever that sun-like source of setting light was. She couldn't be too sure it was a sun after seeing the distant sky bend and bow like fabric... by an accidental drop of a pen. Before her very eyes, everything she ever knew about her existence – her place in the universe – was questioned, and no one else was the wiser as far as she could tell.

After a moment of self-reflection, she turned back to the face directly beyond her, distracting herself from the dominant yet diminutive plumes of smoke puffing near the same area where the pen came down. Through it, nothing stopped her from being able to see what or, most likely, who Mesa Metro had to deal with now... or had been dealing with for who-knows-how-long.

Whereas the immense, expansive form brought a weird sense of calmness in its nonchalant tedium – eyes shifting left and right, the occasional glasses adjustment or head twitch, the twiddling of that damned pen – Lauren was sent waves of distress, stopping her respiration upon catching a new sight that she had only just noticed.

A colossal connection had been made.

The same spread of green that her all-seeing goggles showed her correspondingly shined in not only her watch but also the almost invisible, wireless earpiece tucked over and in one of the seemingly celestial being's ears.

Lauren never set herself in a place under one particular religion if one at all, but there weren't many other, unrelated words for someone that literally bends the heavens at will except 'god'. It or, by the looks of it, he – He? – was in another world, and clicking her gadgets in her realm of existence somewhat affected what she saw in, of, and/or from his. There was no denying it now, just questioning and worrying all from something she made:

"It actually worked; what have I done?"