Karia Vitalus

From the beginning she was watching. At first she watched merely because she was curious and because, if she was perfectly honest, there wasn't much else for a planet to do except spin around and around all day getting dizzy. She watched oceans bubble up and freeze, then melt and shift around. She watched continents playing their games of bumper cars, bouncing on tip toes across beds of hot magma. She watched bacteria fizz and eat and multiply and diversify and start piling on extra cells until some of the cells on the outside started getting crispy and hard and they turned into trilobites.

She watched trilobites for a long time. What is it about them that they stick in the fossil record so... adamantly?

She watched fish and reptiles and algae and plants and insects. Sometimes, though she hoped they didn't notice, she napped. She took a long snooze through the cretaceous. Despite what most young boys believe, dinosaurs are not that interesting.

She watched ice come and retreat, and come and retreat again dozens of times. She watched births and deaths and usually she had a hard time telling the difference. She watched a lot of things, but through all of it she was watching indifferently; watching only because the cosmos had seen fit to put her here and give her something to watch. It wasn’t much of a show either.

Until lately.

Lately she hadn’t just been watching, she’d been positively glued to the screen of her own cosmic drama. It started when the tall lithe ones in the masks suddenly began whispering, and staring at scrolls, and shaking their heads, and pointing to the stars. Then, just as suddenly, the stars were multiplying, and then they were falling and the sky was full of fire, and the forest was burning and life and death and safety and doom were passionately dancing a tango across her view.

She observed transfixed, for though the literal fires were extinguished, the conflagration became an inferno and these little creatures, these little people, they cared. They cared and they were dying, and living, and fighting (and there was a difference between birth and death!) and more and more she realized that they cared, not because they were selfish and afraid, but because it mattered. It mattered who died and who lived and for how long, not just to them, but to everyone and everything.

Everything. She knew it wasn’t just hyperbole. It really did matter to absolutely everything. When she looked out across the cosmos she saw the sun and the moon and the planets, and the stars all standing on tip-toe to peek over the head of the person in front of them. She wasn’t just the one watching, she was being watched! They were watching her, because what was happening right now, on her little islands, in her little oceans, was the most important thing in the whole universe.

Bursting with pride and trembling with fear she scanned and she delved and she tried to discover the future, but it was stubbornly opaque. If there is one thing that watching for billions of years makes you good at, however, it is being observant. For though the future refused to yield its secrets, she could see the past working its way out in her present and she began to understand.

They would come. All of them. From everywhere. They would come and they would be there, all of them, together, in one place, her place, and when they did it would matter who was there and who was living and who was dead. It would matter in that moment and it would matter for all time. And because it would matter she would not be content just to watch, she could reach in. She could see and she could act.

She would give gifts. And curses. But the gifts would be cursed and the curses would be gifted. Then she would watch. Not because she had to, but because she could not resist.

They’re coming.

They’re here.

She’s watching.