Life

by Michael Akerib






Life was there under his eyes. Moving. Teeming. Reproducing.

She was peering intently at the images the microscope was sending to her.

Switch off the light, she told her assistant in the softest of voices who obeyed silently.

‘Look at all this life. Look at the movement.’

Then she stopped looking and her mind strayed. Into her very self. Into her deepest hopes and fears.

‘Lucy?’ she vaguely heard the voice of her assistant say. She was inviting herself into her world. She shrank back into herself. Into a ball in a void.

‘Lucy?’ the voice repeated. ‘Are you done for today? There is a real world out there – life too in the shape of flowers and children. Let us go.’

None of that can be as interesting as what I seeing here thought Lucie. Primevial life. The starting point of evolution, right there under her eyes. The seed of everything to come, from frightening dinosaurs to killer humans.

‘You can go,’ she told her assistant. The soft voice again. The foreign accent just as what she was looking at was foreign to the modern world. ‘You can go.’

Lucy as as montionless as the life form was active. The world’s uterus right there in the microscope.

‘Come with me Lucy. Come on!’

This could not be the same voice. It was too distant, too little feminine.

‘Come on!’

It was definitely another voice. Another voice.

It was a full moon. Very white, its features very visible. Very round. The exact opposite of the protozoan life that was taking shape under her eyes. Ever changing shapes. Constantly imagining new forms.

The light was back in the room.

‘Why?’ she asked, but there was no answer.

A very bright light. Dazzling. It had never been so bright.

‘Switch it off! Switch it off!’

‘NO!!’

‘Off! Off! Do as I say!’

The protoplasmic mass had grown. Its color was changing. Perhaps it would grow to fill the room.

‘Switch off the light, Goddamit!’

The assistant’s voice, suave as ever, answered. ‘Come with me. Enough work for today. Let us go!’

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps if she stayed long enough, she thought, she could be absorbed by the mass, become one with her, share the creation of all life forms.

‘Let us go!!!!’

‘YOU GO!!’

The mass slid out of the microscope, silently. Did it have a purpose or was it a random movement, wondered Lucy. She pulled her eyes away from the screen and looked at the now visible mass spreading on the floor.

She bent and touched it. She spread some of it on her face. Her body would dissolve into an indistinct mass that would created all forms of life. From abstraction to form.