A Meeting

An infant, if you can call it that, toddles into the ground floor of a broken skyscraper. The child is naked, but it carries in its hands a white tennis shoe. The infant-creature is warped, misshapen, its skull distended and bulging. It walks on tiptoes as if to be stealthy. It is drawn by a voice just ahead, a female’s voice that booms across the city over the public broadcast system.

Somehow, the infant-creature is immune to the devastating power of that voice. Where most of the world died at hearing it, this child merely mutated, changed by the sound of the voice. The child doesn’t understand the words the voice is speaking, but it is attracted to the voice as though a personal invitation has been issued.

A few more steps and the floor drops away into an auditorium, rows of seats on each side with three aisles dividing them from back to front. The infant-creature finds itself standing at the top of the middle aisle, staring down at the divine creation currently speaking into a microphone at the front of the auditorium. With a cry of glee, the infant-creature flings itself down the aisle and approaches the little girl as she speaks.

The child speaks just one word. “Ava!” it exclaims. And the little girl chops off her public broadcast, looking over at the child.

The child speaks again, holding out the shoe in both hands. “For Ava!” it says. The little girl reaches out and delicately plucks the shoe from the child’s hands. She says nothing in acknowledgement. She merely inspects the shoe, then tucks it into a baggy pocket in her skirt.

Ava speaks again, this time directly to the child. And somehow, these are words that the child can understand.

Ava whispers, her voice still overwhelmingly powerful even at that level. “Go find others. Bring them to me.” And like a shot, the child is off, running on stubby little legs and tiny feet, back out of the building and into the devastated city.

Ava whispers once more, this time to herself. “We have work to do.”