"Last Days of the Manta Rays"

by Dom B.
2002.01.24

On quiet winter nights like these I have an odd little habit, when the sky is clear and bright and the stars stand out in boldface type from black parchment sky, when the snow hypnotizes the world into dead silence. On these nights I go satellite hunting. It's easy, looking up, picking through the star-fields past the dead black fingers of the trees, searching for a star, not the brightest, not the dimmest, but moving across the night sky at a decent unwavering speed, a shining dot on a straight course across an otherwise chaotic landscape. Try it sometime, you'll be surprised.

Whether my dot is a billion dollar piece of communications hardware humming with data, or a tired old space dinosaur left over from the mists of the cold war, or even that international space station; I don't know, and I can't really worry about it.

They're lonely things, cold, made with great care in some clean sparkling lab, surrounded by immaculate entities in white suits; then cast off with immense violence into that freezing void to orbit their resplendent blue and green home. Freezing one moment and burning the next, bound in stillness except for the periodic firing of control thrusters and the occasional tiny impact of a micrometeorite.

Sometimes I imagine the satellite focusing its radar eye and microwave ear on my tiny figure on the ground, my tiny heat signal in the blackness next to the still warm, red, glowing engine of my car. Sometimes I imagine the satellite reading the thoughts in my head, looking at the files on my computer, logging the websites I visit, reading my credit cards through my wallet as I laugh a little at the ridiculousness of making a tinfoil hat.

Sometimes I imagine myself and my tribe after the apocalypse divining the shooting star of an old piece of space junk in reentry as a portent of evil, giving the shining deities of the night sky names in some twisted future tongue.

Sometimes I just watch the dot slide on towards infinity in the quiet night, and sometimes, sometimes I understand.