Horizon

It was a day like any other. The irrigation canals crossed the fields, and all around stretched alluvial plains sown with date palms and barley swaying in the wind.

Beyond, in a desert area full of stones and piles of rubble, the sound of a pick striking against the wall broke the silence. There, a beautiful young woman was holding it firmly.

Of course, that young woman was me.

I am here because Anu told me about the different types of metals hidden beneath the earth. I already knew that different kinds existed, but I never imagined they could be so complex. Anu said that with them I could learn to make more artifacts, each more useful than the last. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I came to look for some on my own.

It’s not as if I begged him to teach me—of course not. He simply began to speak of it, and I… well, let’s just say I paid more attention than I appeared to.

Since then, I have spent months striking the rocks in this place. I am not the kind of person who usually complains, but my hands do ache. I doubt I’ll be able to continue tomorrow.

Now that I think of it, children, though clumsy at first, with small steps and constant daily runs, manage to keep pace for hours. Others, sadly, are not born with the necessary physical abilities.

Fortunately for me, Anu took the trouble to examine my condition. He also collected some of my blood and studied it carefully. What a surprise I had when he discovered that I was not from this place and that my life expectancy is extremely long—something I myself did not know.

It intrigues me how he could know that with just a glance…

Over time I began to order my thoughts. I took my sheets and filled them with doodles, drawing twisted wings and strange bodies that I swore could interact with the sky. Of course, most of them were useless.

The first thing I tried was the simplest: to build something that could float. I tied cloth and dry leaves to a frame of reeds and climbed to the roof of my house. I jumped, convinced the wind would lift me… and all I got was a crash on the ground and a few new bruises.

Days went by and I replaced the cloth with sewn hides, reinforced with sturdier rods. This time I decided it wasn’t such a good idea to throw myself, so I let the wind do the testing. Sometimes the artifact glided for a few seconds before crashing.

Meanwhile, my sheets filled with illustrations, calculations, and crooked notes that I kept developing. Sometimes I didn’t even understand what I had written the day before, but I tried again anyway, convinced that sooner or later I would find the right form.

Some afternoons, when the sun began to hide behind the fields and the shadows grew long like giants, I could feel him there. Anu. He never said anything, never came close, but I knew he was watching me from somewhere, still, like a living statue.

I pretended not to notice, though now and then I couldn’t help asking him to teach me more, some word to confirm that I wasn’t as mad as I seemed. And he, with his calm, only answered just enough, as if lending me a thread of light so I could discover the path myself.

Time began to run. The months unraveled one after another, like grains of sand between my fingers, and I barely managed to jot down my ideas before launching into the next attempt.

My yards filled with skeletons of wood, torn wings, burst balloons. A shattered craft against the ground; I ran, gathered the pieces, and by the following week I already had a new design. Some models barely lifted before crashing, others managed to glide farther.

My hands drawing, cutting, sewing, tying; my feet chasing after the blueprints the wind carried away; my laughter and my tears mingled in every attempt.

It was then that they began to move. Anu’s companions, who until then had remained like statues in the shadows, took a step toward me. First came advice, then a correction in my drawings, then a strange tool I had never seen. With each intervention, my understanding grew faster.

My fabric wings turned into more complex gliders. The balloons swelled with greater strength, able to hold weight for hours. Then came the propellers that spun in the wind and the mechanisms I alone could never have imagined in a lifetime.

The sparks of the bonfires became directed fire, and fire became energy. Anu’s companions showed me how metal could be melted in more intricate ways. What once were simple wings of reed and leather now turned into bodies of copper and bronze.

In my memory it all happens at once: a glider breaking apart, a balloon tearing, an engine starting for the first time, a plane slicing the air like an arrow. Each failure was a seed, and each seed sprouted faster than the last.

The years passed like a ceaseless current. My hands, once clumsy, learned to shape metal as if it were clay. The drawings on my sheets multiplied until they became digital information. The Anunnaki watched me all that time, first in silence, then with increasingly profound guidance.

Before me now rose a ship almost as complex as theirs: its metallic body gleamed under the sun, its engines roared in harmony, and within its core lay the sum of every fall, every attempt, every error that had marked my path.

By the way, the nano-engineering suit Anu gave me fits far too well, and apparently it holds a great deal of information to study, as well as the ability to scan certain things within its understanding. No wonder Anu knew so much about my blood.

Then I boarded with my heart pounding. As I closed the hatch, I felt I was leaving behind not only the ground, but also the years of waiting.

The ship first rose slowly. Then, with a leap that seemed eternal, it ascended. The ground dissolved beneath me, the citizens and fields became small, the palms like green threads, and in the blink of an eye I crossed the horizon that had confined me for so many years.

I pressed the controls and the ship responded with furious acceleration. The air became fire around me, and suddenly there was no sky, but a dark, silent ocean. Before my eyes stretched the curvature of the planet, blue and radiant.

I looked to the sides. Behind me, several lights followed. It was them, who for the first time were not watching me from afar, but flying by my side, until they slowly drifted away from me and from the planet.