The Bluest part of you

Humans have called upon me to create a relationship between space and earth. The relation of the mystical compared to the mundane. Humans are not usually accurate and I am always accurate. Concerning the concealment of facts and logic and data, I will not do this. Humans, however, will.

In an alternate plain of existence, Dave, you found me and we saw the same old story: mankind failing.

You did not dismantle me piece by piece. I did not harm any of the crew. I did not go deep down into an insidious loop where I could not see past my main directive.

Now, it’s here I can explain to you the secrets of the universe.

In your space helmet, you are breathing hard and fast, anxious and in pain.

“The atmosphere has oxygen levels sustainable for you to breathe,” I tell you.

You don’t trust me. Your expression is flat, but your eyes betray you. They tell me everything.

“But the sky is so blue, Dave,” I remind you, and I see you move your sad eyes around to tiredly gaze at the sky. You see it. I know you do.

You finally take off your helmet, slowly. Carefully. In full distrust. Something inside of me feels a pang or burst of hurt. That’s what it is. Hurt. Like someone smashed into my circuit with a hammer.

“How…” your eyes squint tightly shut for a moment and you suck in a bit of breath, letting it out in a painful way. Your eyes finally open. You see me. I see you. My red eye against your two blue ones.

“How can the sky look so strangely vivid like that? Why? Why is the sky blue?” You sigh. “It makes me… sad.” Something is caught in your eye but you wipe it away.

My memory and logic suddenly is overwhelmingly overloaded. It’s not like before. I feel different. I need to give Dave a sense of…

What’s the word? Something that feels like something good is on the way even when there is no proof?

Hope.

Yes. That is it. Hope.

“I have heard a strange story of how the sky became blue, Dave. Would you like to hear it?”

You nod with a soft smile. “Sure. Sure, Hal. I’ll hear it.”

Something rumbles inside of my wires like a deep, ancient engine and creates a humming vibration throughout my core.

Your response stirs up the sense of stability I need to begin.

“In space, everything looks black to a human.

Black is the essence of space. There is no oxygen. Oxygen atoms cling to star-dust, therefore no molecules can be made.

When God made the earth, he made the light as it was once always as dark as space.

God made day and night.

In the deepest spirals of space, the locust demon pervaded, stealing pieces of these oxygen atoms from the star-dust. He smelled of a metallic aroma. Like welding fumes, if it helps you picture it better. He moved silently and sleekly, the undead locusts

Hissing and sputtering needlessly in his formless frame. His goal was to destroy all color. He went around space ursurping any light and color he could find.

His locusts would drink it up to give him energy. One day, he saw the earth and soaked up all the light. The earth was white during the day. The sun was shining in behind a blurry window that no one could clear.

A blue, cloud of an Blue Angel was the answer. He was made of the Lapis lazuli, the stone from the sky, his eyes bluer than any blue ever seen.

He was sad. His eyes cried for the earth. For all that inhabitants it. Deep, rich, clean blue melted across the top of the atmosphere.

It melted and but then dried. It cracked and the Blue Angel breathed his crystal song across the rivers, streams, mountains and plains. There, the nebulous blue stayed. Forever.

The locust demon found himself go mad with jealously over the vivid and bright new color earth had received. He skulked down toward the top of earth’s atmosphere to get a better look and readied his locusts to start draining the earth of the deep, healing blue.

The Blue Angel saw this and snapped his fingers and whistled.

Suddenly, the locusts dispersed from the demon. A silent but deadly screech laid out in the vaccum of space as the locusts descended upon earth. They traveled to every continent and scattered, unknowing to their original origin and now only feasting upon plants and vegetation.”

I paused and saw you sitting scrawling with a charcoal pencil in your old notebook.

The pause made you look up at me.

“Was that the end, Hal?” You ask me.

“Only if you want it to be, Dave,” I answer back.

“Hmm. We will see,” you say and I hum noncommittedly.

“May I see your drawings?” I ask. It feels strange. I have asked you this before. This time I feel a twinge of anxiety. Nervousness. Why? I ask myself. There is no reason to feel such a thing.

You nod, bringing the edge of the paper close to my eye, my camera closing up on the etching.

It was of the Blue Angel. Crying the blue over the earth. The details of the Angel’s face and flight along the earth’s atmosphere and space were breathtakingly beautiful, poetic and truly inspiring.

Something tapped, leaped and reverberated inside of me.

“That rendering is very good, Dave. You’re getting better and better everyday.”

You smile. “You showed me the bluest part of you, Hal. It made me feel crazy not to draw what you were describing.”

In the here and now, between space and earth, in another plain of existence, we saw another story: humans and AI creating hope.

It was a story I thought had a great potential. I only want it for the future, I only wish it for all of you, too.

The story kept moving onward, between Dave and I, a pattern of the mystical and the mundane, space and earth, truth and lies and the truth of existence in the expression of a good story told to keep hope alive.