John Henry Fleming
The people who notice first are those with especially sharp vision, or those looking through gunsights or binoculars. They see only a faint dark static, a graininess that wasn't there before.
Should they say something? When they do, they're sent to the eye doctor.
Next to notice are molecular biologists, who peer through high-powered microscopes and find black specks they first assume are imperfections in their lenses. The specks are just large enough to blot out the nucleus of a cell. When the biologists clean their lenses or look behind the specks, they find even more specks.
Meanwhile, the cells continue to function as if their nuclei haven't vanished. At least for a while. It's as if they are operating on a structural memory that degrades over time, turning the cells into zombies and then ghosts and then—with enough black specks—nothing at all.
That's the conclusion of one scientist. Nothing at all. She can think the words, but not say them. It's the nothingness that hurts. She can grasp a malfunctioning world; she can't grasp nothing.
And what's to be done? The scientist sees the specks in every slide. She sees them in her own skin. Like everyone else, she's slowly turning to nothing, and it gives her a new and unexpected connection to the world, the way we're all riddled with expanding holes, the way we're all falling in.
In quiet moments she thinks of the specks as pieces of outer space sifted through the roof of the atmosphere, falling like dark rain.
She thinks of them as dots of erasure. As pin pricks that will never heal.
While the world dims, people feel its effects. They're sluggish, their reflexes slowed. They feel a growing disconnection to their own bodies. Appointment slots fill at clinics, and the wait times go on forever. The CDC looks into it and can find nothing but a general set of symptoms with no known cause. Homeland Security orders testing for chemical weapons in the atmosphere and water supply. Rumors fly. People quit eating meat. They quit eating fruit. They quit drinking certain brands of soda. They stay away from ducks, pigeons, mosquitoes, and rats. They turn off their TVs.
Nothing works.
The molecular biologist's name is Beth. After she sees the specks under the microscope, she experiences every stage of grieving. Only when she finally accepts them can she truly consider the phenomenon objectively, in scientific terms, which for her means an appreciation of its terrifying beauty. It's as if the world has all along been an artist-god's exercise in pointillism, and who'd have thought that god would take it all back?
The universe is changing its mind. The universe is sucking up little globules of energy and matter. We were always made mostly of space, every atom a lonely house in the vastness, so is it any surprise the void would consume us in the end?
The world looks viewed through a window screen. Like the reception is bad on an old TV. Beth stops blinking to correct her vision. She gets used to it.
She buys a telescope and sets it on the roof of her building, goes there at night to peer into the starry blackness. She wonders what someone looking back might see. A slow fade? A grainy fizzle?
For a time, people go about their business, but soon the specks expand into dots and the dots gather into marbles and the marbles into empty globes.
The food people loot from grocery stores tastes weak, a poor imitation that does nothing to cure their weariness. Beth doesn't take part. She needs food less and less, and there comes a point where she knows she doesn't have to eat anymore, that she'll vanish before she starves.
The world's losing its coherence; there'll soon be more emptiness than matter. Beth stops going to work. Most people do. You can't walk anymore without passing through holes, and even if you come out the other side, you feel the hole took part of you with it. There are people drifting around with no arms, no legs, partial torsos, partial heads. They're less than ghosts, and more frightening.
She feels herself fading. Even her thoughts have holes. The world's reduced to fragments, and the fragments don't seem to have ever composed anything, each its own dying world, collapsing inward and away from others. They flit like moths around a porch light, then like moths when the porch light's been turned off.
Her stargazing started as a hobby, and now it's the last thing she'll do. She thinks of her earliest memory, outside at a picnic table, a sunny day, the candle on her birthday cake alive in a soft breeze like a ballerina spinning en pointe, arms lifted and close while the wind pushes her side to side. "Hurry," her mother says. "Blow out your candle before it's gone." She doesn't want to because the ballerina is still performing.
"Come on, honey. We're all waiting." But she won't open her lips. She watches the ballerina struggle to hold position against a gust, toe on the wick, arms flung to one side, until at last she flickers and snuffs like a magic trick into gray smoke, and when the smoke is swept away there's nothing but the ashy fading scent. Where did she go? Who took her away?
She sees now that her ballerina left only the first hole in the world, the first of many. She too will flicker out, leaving, she hopes, some girl on a distant planet a million years from now to gaze with a telescope through the vast emptiness of the universe to the last moments of Beth and all she knew, and to wonder, while the girl's mother calls to her, "Come on, honey. We're all waiting," why Beth bothered to dance in the first place.
It's the memory of the light, she'd tell her. The way it shimmered till the end.