Night of the Fireflies
At just after nine on a warm midsummer night, Raymond Hollis dotted a final “i,” crossed two “t’s” with a single flourish, and set aside, with his antique ballpoint pen, the work of half a lifetime. Sighing, he lifted the final page, turned it face-down atop the manuscript, and squared the edges. Then he sat for a moment, gazing pensively into his dim study. Beside him, atop a bookcase stuffed with crumbling aromatic volumes, a small lamp burned; on the desk, six fireflies battered at the walls of a plastic jar.
Hollis let his gaze wander to the open window. More fireflies—dozens of them—whirled and eddied there, tracing oddly formal patterns in the dark. Occasionally, one bumped against the screen, staring in at him.
“Telephone, please,” Hollis said.
Circuits chittered and hummed. A watery column of light dropped from the ceiling. “What number, please?”
“Oh, anyone. Anyone who would be interested.”
Silence. The house was immune to irony; it clothed and fed him, would sing to him or rock him gently to sleep if he wished, but it could do nothing more. Nothing that mattered.
“What number, please?”
Hollis spoke the number aloud.
The light flickered. Instantaneous connections fell into place. A phone uttered its cicada rattle, and then a face appeared, three-dimensional in the column of light.
“Done,” Hollis said. “Blake, it’s done.”
“Done? Really done?”
“That’s right. After all these years…”
“How does it feel?”
Wonderingly, Hollis said, “I… don’t know.” Then: “Would you like to see it?”
“I can be there in thirty minutes.”
The light flickered and deliquesced. Hollis gazed at the manuscript for a moment; then he lifted the jar of fireflies and started down the hall. He paused at the door to his second office, the one where he made his living—a bright space with terminal and chair and shining liquid crystal walls—and thought of the work that awaited him: images and sound bites and snippets of disembodied text to be arranged and indexed into the web of other such fragments, themselves arranged and indexed by other such men in other such rooms in a thousand different places around the world.
Hollis turned away.
At the front door, he stepped outside. The moonlit dark murmured with air conditioning and the thousand rustles of mechanical mice, grooming lush grass. In the neighboring houses, remote on immaculate squares of green, blind windows flickered with phantoms from the liquid crystal walls.
The neighborhood—the street, the houses, the lawns themselves—projected a bland identity. It was the miracle of the age that geography—language, culture—no longer mattered. Turn on the walls in Spain, in Australia, in Niarobi, and navigate the same scrolling nets of information as your neighbors in Brazil and Romania and Japan. Jump on the web in the city of angels and jump off in Addis Ababa—it was all the same web.
But tonight—Hollis gasped—tonight, magic!
