Breadcrumb #47
RUSS BICKERSTAFF
From all outward appearances, it was the classic image of a kite. It looked exactly like one might expect a kite to look. It was the perfect diamond shape. There was a long tail flowing behind it in the sky it found to inhabit. Perhaps that’s why everyone was looking at it the way everyone was looking at it. Or maybe it was the fact that it was floating along high in the sky untethered to any line. Maybe that was it. Or maybe not.
“Somewhere through some strange alchemy between the wind and the lift and the golden light of the moment, the kite had started to think in the way most people assume that kites don’t.”
Certainly no one watching could have guessed why it was worth watching. None of them knew that the kite was self-aware. None of them knew that the kite was thinking to itself at that moment. (How could they?) Somewhere through some strange alchemy between the wind and the lift and the golden light of the moment, the kite had started to think in the way most people assume that kites don’t. No one on the ground knew this about the kite. As strangely fantastic as the moment was, there was no one there to observe how truly strange it was, as no one present could read the mind of a kite from this distance. There were a few there who, unbeknownst to themselves, could read the mind of a kite, but only when they were close enough to it to be able to do so. This kite was out of range as all kites with any kind of consciousness are.
Of course, the kite didn’t exactly know that the people who were watching it were thinking either, so it was just as oblivious to the real miracle of the moment as anyone else. Just like those who could have theoretically read the mind of the kite, the kite could have read the mind of anyone there once it had lifted itself to consciousness. By the time it had gained enough lift to find the right perspective for psychic kite activity, however, it was well out of range of its ability to read anyone else’s mind.
This sort of thing is happening all the time. We are always encountering things which gain consciousness and the ability to communicate directly without minds. We always end up just out of reach of real connection and communication, though. Sometime’s you’ll get an idea and know that it isn’t yours. It’ll be the distant whisper of something inanimate realizing it can think and then realizing it has something important to communicate to you, but getting far too far away to manage anything more than a vague thought. You might think the thought might be yours but you know it’s not.
The kite knew it was in a strange position flying along without a tether, but it didn’t know that the lack of tether was the reason why it was in a strange predicament. It had no other kites in its immediate surrounding to attempt to model itself after, so it thought of the tether it originally had as something of an umbilical structure. It figured that it had probably needed to gestate a bit as a pre-kite before it could surface into the clouds to go off and live the kind of life that kites live once they’ve found their way off of land once and for all.
The kite met up with a few clouds in the golden twilight as a cool breeze gusted into it, coaxing it along toward the future and all that it held.