The Echo

Michael Mirolla

The forest collapses into dust. I stand knee-deep in the grey ash and feel elated. Slowly, with no further movement, the dust in the air settles and everything becomes clear. Not twenty metres away, on the crest of the mountain, set in a slight hollow, impossible to miss or mistake, the giant one-eyed machine whirs. I blink. It blinks. The eye, filled with mucous membrane, re-opens lazily. In it, I stand in the middle of a wondrous green forest, on the top of a mountain, in a slight hollow, looking at a giant machine. No lights flash on this machine, no switches, no wires, no electrical outlets or signs of antennae. Only dull grey metal and the huge eye. It squats in the centre of the collapsed universe talking in its undecipherable language, in its tuneless monotony.

I sit down before it, feel the electro-magnetic force align me. The machine’s eye re-lives my past, tracing the patterns of my choices from the moment I was conscious of them. And I observe and note, without hysterics, that the machine is going beyond the present, is, in fact, plotting my future. It flashes through my mind that I might be perverse and not follow this map. But that is being childish. In fact, the machine has already recorded my intended rebellion.

Mathematical symbols and figures roll across the eye, explanations of some sort. I understand very few of them: simple arithmetic signs, perhaps, delta increments, integration. I arise and, with no apparent anger or malice, strike the eye with my spear. Inside the eye, a man with one good arm strikes the eye of the machine. And another within that. Nothing happens. The multitude of eyes simply blink — one after the other in a sequence that eventually brings back the original eye. There isn’t even the hint of a scratch. I search for an opening in the metal in the hope of prying it open. Nowhere a seal, bolt or rivet.

I sit down again, prepared to stay there until the machine opens or I too turn to dust. But that isn’t to be. For the forest begins to re-grow, at first shimmering in and out of existence but then firmly re-established, firmly rooted. Perhaps it has never decayed in the first place. The birds resume in mid-song, not missing a note or a worm; the dust quickens to earth; the stars come out again; creatures spring out fully formed as if through an invisible curtain. In the distance, a woman comes out of a cabin, tosses out a chamber pot and goes back in. I knew her once. Will I know her again? In front of me, the machine stops whirring. For a moment, it and the forest balance, balance perfectly. But then it is gone. Trees sway in its place.

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