January, Part 2

Time moved slowly in January. It was like the year was just waking up, procrastinating the very passage of time. Each day came scraping, inch by inch, hour by hour. At points it felt like time didn’t move at all, the winter air hanging stagnant around you, the world at a dead stop until a gust of wind chilled you through to your bones and reminded you that time and space were very much still moving, and that they would cruelly leave you behind if you didn’t march forward along with them.

And march along with them I did. For today, just around my neighbourhood. I made a point to go for a walk most days; the only thing more stagnant than the world around me was the atmosphere at home.

It had been cloudy for a week or so now, obscuring the Eye from view. I always wondered how it could see us when we couldn’t see it. I supposed on its scale even the clouds were just little things, misting up its vision like cataracts.

In the end I handed in a vague, non-committal answer about my interpretation of the Eye; something about it being an amalgamation of different cultural values I’d absorbed from the media and the people around me. Basically a very fancy way of saying “I have no idea.” It was extremely unsatisfying. Not for Mrs Cook, she quite enjoyed it, but for me. I didn’t realise how much that question interested me until after I had half-assed the essay. Even now I find myself thinking about it.

I’d always been drawn to it in a way. I was never religious, or even spiritual, but it was always present in the back of my mind, popping up in my idle thoughts. I could never just take it for what it was, as so many people around me did.

Especially now, while I still couldn’t identify it fully, something was happening physically to the Eye. I caught a glimpse of it the week before, and now I simply couldn’t unsee it. Most people didn’t notice, it was so subtle, just the smallest suggestion of an eyelid cresting the top of the heavenly sphere. I couldn’t be certain if it was anything more than a trick of the light, something to do with its position relating to the sun, or a minor rotation due to some gravitational forces far beyond my understanding. I only knew that it was there, and that in the week since I had first noticed it it had crept ever so slightly forward…

I would find out later that I was far from the only person aware of this. Across the world investigations were already breaking out, every observatory and university spending sleepless nights theorizing and observing. Particularly in the north and the south, where views of the eye were at their most extreme. While I simply found it to be an oddity, they had already grasped the true weight of the changes in the Eye.

Fritz Schrodinger was the man leading the investigations, a young upstart who had gained recent acclaim for a paper on quantum superposition, a field pioneered by his great-grandfather. As a man of science the Eye had often been an interest of his, but only recently had it developed into an obsession. Even before the eyelid had shown itself he was spending his every waking hour trawling through masses of old papers, historical documents, even religious texts. Far from his usual scientific affairs, he was after one thing and one thing only; evidence of someone leaving the Eye’s view and returning.

Most of his colleagues believed him to be a fool. Rightly so. Nothing could ever leave the Eye’s view, it was a fact of life. Anything that existed outside of the Eye’s view simply ceased to be. It was why humanity only populated part of the planet. The ancient Greeks knew that much, managing to infer from the rotation of the earth that the planet’s mass was far greater than what was habitable.

This understanding developed further throughout the age of exploration, in which the borders of the habitable world were discovered and marked on maps. Graveyards of half-ships had long existed around these boundaries, their crews erased from existence, split perfectly down the middle with a precision that could be nothing but the work of God. Even their momentum ceased to be; the invisible boundary would not let even kinetic energy pass through. This territory was only formally identified and mapped in the 1400s, giving us what we now know as “No Man’s Land.”

In the 1600s we came to understand the Eye’s nature as a body that orbits us, and by tracking its movements (or lack thereof) we learned that we populated only approximately half of the Earth, and that the rest was, presumably, barren. No Man’s Land became the stuff of myths and legends, every culture came to have its tall tales of what lay beyond, the stuff of campfire stories and pulp fiction. I was always fond of them personally, the idea of a land of infinite possibility being so close, yet just out of reach. It was a profoundly tragic idea, and one that humanity never seemed to accept.

Even now, certain madmen would make journeys to No Man’s Land, thinking they would be the exception, the man who would defy the rules of this world and step beyond human limitation… We don’t know any of those madmen’s names anymore. Such is the nature of leaving the Eye’s sight. Death is one thing, but the Eye at least sees you when you’re dead. You still exist in other people, in memories, in thoughts, pictures, and dreams. But if you leave, everything that you are, were, or ever could be is lost.

Naturally, anyone who sought to defy these centuries of history and human discovery and pursue the impossible dream of going beyond the Eye’s purview was deemed insane. So naturally in the minds of the scientific community, Fritz Schrodinger was a madman. A fool who was wasting his potential attempting to deny the basic facts of reality. He might as well have said the earth was flat, or the sky was green.

However, Fritz remained undeterred. Ever the eccentric, he cooped himself up in his study and devoured every source he could get his hands on. He found very few results, but he was not deterred. Panning for gold was about quantity, not quality, after all.

That was six months before the initial changes in the Eye had been observed. For half a year he was the laughing stock of the scientific community, but as soon as the world’s leading minds saw the eyelid begin to show they realised just how valuable Fritz’s research, and indeed mind were.

It was around then, nearing the end of January, that he was brought into the fold. Governments across the world were pooling their resources, and they wanted him to direct them on how to use them. It was urgent, it was extreme, unthinkable, insane even, but that was the scenario they were in. They needed a man just as insane to match the situation. They needed Fritz Schrodinger.

The public had no idea, but in January of this year government productivity dropped significantly. Roads went unpaved, laws went unmade, international trade slowed. Resources were being pulled away from individual nations and toward something far, far bigger.

Reflecting on it now this was a portent of what was to come, the tumbling of stones before the landslide that would follow. They had realised it where the masses hadn’t, had measured and thoroughly investigated what went unseen to our naked, unaware eyes. The Eye was closing. Day by day, week by week, its eyelid was falling at a consistent rate and eventually, it would close.

I hadn’t yet grasped the implications of this, so I returned from my daily walk to my daily life as if nothing were wrong with the world, and for the time being there was nothing wrong with the world. It was a flawed place, full of war, famine, disease, but compared to what I would go on to see it become there was nothing wrong whatsoever.