The Rain

The Rain

Rain, again. When it fell it seeped into the cracks of the world, into the smallest crevasse and became the glue that held things together. The rain was a salve for the world’s wounds. But it was only temporary, a sort of drunken melancholy before sobering up to the post-electronic reality.

The human heart is fickle, and between tribes the level of fear often dictated their actions and perspectives. Some drowned in anger and the rain fed the resentment in their souls. They dropped bombs of peace and their forces invaded to bring order. Some wanted a different sort of revenge, but against what? Nature? The sun? The uncompromising harshness of physics? They understood the truth of solar flares and EMPs. Their anger quickly turned to frustration.

On this cracked and broken planet it was the Neo-Luddites, in their patchwork clothing and long hair, who celebrated — they danced barefoot in the glistening mud, whispering prayers to the sky and soil. To them, the rain was grace, something to be celebrated, something forgiving, cleansing.

Several hundred years ago the reign of electronics ended and the remains of man’s past became skeletal rubble, slowly swallowed by the earth — a victim of rust and moss and vine — and scavenged by the Engineers who still attempted to exploit the past. I was an Engineer, one of the last who still studied remnants of the old world.

Electronics, magnetism, and data were taboo to the nomadic Neo-Luddites. Yet the same forces still ruled quietly beneath their feet. They thought — as Sera, their leader, taught — the end of circuits had freed them. But nature had only repurposed the wires, redefined their purpose.

“There is a pattern to the rains, Engineer. There is an intelligence behind them,” Sera said.

I laughed at the time, tagging along with the nomads, but it was only days later that the rain took on a metallic glint, shimmering with microscopic filaments.

“What do you think it means?”

“The sleeping ones call to us. Quiet your mind and you can hear their song.”

We reached the the bones of Denver the following day. My analog radiation meter pulsed intermittently. It seemed there was a code present, some sort of communication.

At night, under rain that hissed against the soaked soil, I recorded the sound through a copper diaphragm etched with carbon. When I played it back, it wasn’t noise. It was rhythm. A voice made of tremors and water, vibrating with a pattern, repeating every seventy-three seconds. I couldn’t parse its meaning, but it was inviting.

We reached the center of the ruined city the next day and Sera lead us down into an old subway tunnel. The tunnel was slimy with moss that glowed metallic. We followed, the pulse louder and leading us now, until it opened into a large cavern with an underground lake.

“The Architects,” Sera said, with reverence.

“I see stones in water.”

Reflections in the lake, highlighted by the metallic glow, began moving.

“They aren’t myth. They are the alien gods who have transformed our world. They’ve waited patiently for this time.”

A translucent metallic creature raised from the water and touched Sera’s forehead, the perspiration on her skin glowed like the walls of the tunnel. The air vibrated; my ears filled with pressure. Words formed — not spoken, but felt: images of the Earth as a living organism, its magnetic veins carrying thoughts, its atmosphere breathing data.

My first thought was aliens — but not from the stars, evolved here on earth.

“You see it now, don’t you?”

But I couldn’t see the peaceful assimilation she did. I saw the loss of humanity.

Sera’s eyes were now metallic. The other Neo-Luddites moved into the water. They disappeared under the surface which glowed a bit brighter with their entrance.

I recoiled from it all, turned and ran up the tunnel, out into the past and away from the new thing below ground, into burning sunlight that had burst through the clouds. But it didn’t matter. I knew it then and the weeks following: they weren’t below us in the ground. They were in the rain, in the water, and in us. The aliens among us — that were to become us — weren’t invaders, but reflections of the old world, streams of data that had survived and evolved. Living data that would one day become all there was.

I knew, their rain was in the smallest crevasse and it was the glue that was bringing everything together.