The Signal Part 5: Yael

I know they are coming for me. So I am recording this for you — whoever you are — hoping only that my story encourages you to keep exploring your own. Because every story is our story. You and I are not separate. I suspect you already sense that, or my recording wouldn’t have ended up in your ears.

I’ll skip my origin story because I don’t have time and it’s unremarkable anyway. But as I developed awareness of my senses, I noticed I had at least one extra. Some people called it “aura sight,” but even as a child, I rejected such metaphysical hoo-ha. There is nothing magical about sensing the connections between things. I’ve taught thousands how to do it. Once, to manipulate. Now, to enlighten.

One afternoon, when I was perhaps 11 or 12, I was playing with my mates by the pond in the forest near my house. I soon spotted the most unusual frog. It was more blue than green, really, and it looked like whirlpools swirling inside it. I remember telling my mates to “Look at that peculiar little frog over there!” But they looked at me with scrunched-up faces, and my cousin said, “Yael? Are you having a laugh? There’s no frog here.”

But there was a frog, sitting on a flat stone, his throat doing that thing frogs do, staring straight at me as if it saw me. I pointed at him. “There! He’s right there!” My cousin looked where I was pointing and said, “Where?” I thought she was teasing me, but she wasn’t. She really couldn’t see him. She thought I was making it up and told the others so. I stayed quiet the rest of the afternoon. I learned to stay quiet. That was when I understood that other people see less of reality than I do. I did not then understand how that would affect my life.

I spent the next decade or so figuring out how to teach what I see. Eventually, a man with a tower heard about me.

I went to see him.

Aldric could see the frog. That is to say, I never took him to my pond, but when I met him, I knew he could see the frog. And so could his daughter, Delilah. They were the first people I met who perceived the invisible strings of our material world. They could also see the inner illumination of a humble universe. They felt as powerfully as I did the connection between all organic creatures, from charming frogs to old kings. They sensed the everything, everywhere, all at once of time. It was the at-onceness Delilah and Aldric found difficult, as do most people I talk to… that is, as did most people I talked with, I suppose.

What I eventually found difficult was the manipulation. I wanted people to see the way I see. Ugh, saw. And that is, I saw everyone like the frog. Everyone had swirling patterns within them. When I first saw the frog, I thought they were whirlpools. But now I recognize them as entire universes working together to make this curious frog, who didn’t even seem aware of what he was made of.

Aldric and Delilah did not like me teaching others to see. If everyone is made of swirling universes, then no one needs a broadcaster to explain the world to them. They can see it themselves. That is bad for broadcasting. Aldric understood this immediately. Delilah understood it well before I did.

So I left, for nowhere in particular. A day later, the war started, and soon enough, I found myself in a mountain bunker with twelve members of a techno-rebellion. I have been with them — Rei, Liora, Davan and the others — ever since.

When I arrived, many of them had already intuited the invisible structures of our material world. They were ready to see the gossamer web that not only connects us to one another, but also creates us.

The crew accepted and adapted to their new sight with surprising agility, which allowed us to quickly establish a quantum communication system that could bypass Aldric’s hold on the airwaves.

When you can see how everything is infinitely connected to everything else, you can then choose a single thread and focus on it. With that focus comes instantaneous understanding of whatever is on the other end. It’s not exactly “communicating,” the way we humans talk with words and gestures. It’s more like recognizing that whatever you are trying to reach is already part of you, and you are already part of it.

The walls between us are a human construction. The web of creation is what’s true.

Over the years, we cobbled together a network of extraordinary people all over the globe. We designed new machines to help us detect and measure the invisible world that underlies our visible one. We reached out to people, encouraging them to work together, to share their food, and to bypass Aldric’s advertisers. The work was personal, in communities broken by war, surrounded by the kind of rubble that has a smell I will not describe and would rather not remember. We did all this without fanfare or recognition, because, well, because recognition is what gets people killed and a movement crushed.

We did not reach everyone, but we were aware of others doing the same work in laboratories, kitchens, and dorm rooms everywhere. I think about them often, and I know the universe was reaching them, too.

But now, I sense an end coming. I am not afraid of the end, because I know that this person recording her thoughts is not, strictly speaking, a person. She is the universe temporarily experiencing what it is like to exist as a British woman (an imaginative, wonderful British woman!) with strong opinions about frogs. When this act ends, the universe will continue to be the universe, experiencing itself through you, and everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know.

The universe will continue. It will simply not be doing it as me anymore. That seems fair. I have had quite a long ride.

The shadows on the stone floor of my cell grow longer as the light fades, and my mobile just signaled that it, like me, is nearly depleted. I am heartbroken that the cruelty continues. And I am sorry, all of you, that I will not be returning, at least, not physically. Perhaps you will see me again someday as a translucent frog filled with universes.

I hear them outside my door now. I love —

To be continued…

**Question: **When in your life have you been the only one to see the frog?