And Worlds Hung in the Balance

And Worlds Hung in the Balance

She was discovered 20 years ago. A woman in decaying clothing staring intently at a brick wall, remarkably realistic but unmistakably not human. After all, she hadn’t moved, didn’t respond, and couldn’t be moved. There was a small furor, of course, until the government stepped in. They closed the area off and subjected her to every test known to man at the time. They learned nothing. So far as they could tell, nothing entered her body and nothing left, except light in her eyes. No one could find anything odd about the wall either, except for some crackpot psychics who swore that a certain brick was staring at them. And so they forgot about it and left her. After all, she hadn’t harmed anyone except for the idiots who shattered an industrial drill bit against her head and had been killed by the shrapnel. Despite what the conspiracy theorists might think, the government was far too bureaucratic to cover up something that couldn’t be categorized by normal channels and didn‘t pose a threat. So the city council put new clothes on her every time concerned prudes complained about her nakedness, at least until they eventually decided to simply paint clothes on her and ignored her as much as they could. There was a small attempt to turn her into a tourist attraction, but all that did was make the tourists uncomfortable. And so, in the end, no one saw it. Slowly, calmly, inscrutably, the brick blinked. The strange motion seemed to take weeks, most probably because it did, and no one noticed, or if they did thought it was anything more than a fever dream or a LSD flashback. So, with an air of deep personal vindication, she smiled, stood up, stretched, and calmly walked away.