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墨書 Inktalez
On the seventh dawn after the smoke had cleared, the scorched asphalt road still bore the diamond-shaped marks left by energy cannons. Martha, the owner of the grocery store, knelt at her doorstep, her trembling fingers brushing over the door handle that had melted into a glassy state from ion streams. Morning dew dampened the hem of her faded floral dress.
Hanging among the branches of the old oak tree at the east end of town was a severed mechanical limb, its metallic surface crackling with blue light. The twins from Tom's family held up their homemade insect nets, tiptoeing to catch the silver scales that floated down. Their mother stood by the clothesline, rubbing her reddened eyes and laughing—this was the first time in half a month that they had heard their children’s laughter.
"Be careful of electric shock!" Old Henry, the hardware store owner, called out in his raspy voice, startling a dove from the treetops. He clanked along the cobblestone path with his prosthetic leg, and the needle of the multimeter peeking out from his toolbox trembled wildly. As smoke began to rise again from the bakery at Street Corner, a strange aroma of caramel and pine resin filled the air.
Lily stood on tiptoe, wiping down the stained glass on the second floor of the clinic. The patterns depicting the era of Interstellar Colonization now only retained cobalt blue nebulae that still shimmered. Her father was downstairs applying varnish to a newly made oak sign, and amidst the sound of his brush gliding over wood grain came a sudden metallic clang—Arthur was placing three Memory Crystals into a lead storage box, dark purple halos flickering between his fingers.
"Are you really going to take this to the Federal Academy?" Lily leaped down from the ladder, colorful shards of glass falling from her hair onto Arthur's shoulder. The young scholar paused in his task; frost patterns suddenly appeared on the surface of the storage box—these were memories imprinted by seventy-eight townsfolk left behind from last night.
A muffled sound came from the church cellar where twenty-three sealed clay jars had just been buried by the mayor himself into the frozen ground. A limping Mechanical Sheepdog lay at the cemetery gate, its sensor lens fogged over; it played a shepherd's tune recorded by Old John before his passing on repeat.
As dusk fell, three hundred people crowded in the square to watch a holographic projection. When the first batch of Memory Crystals burst forth with a rainbow spectrum in the particle accelerator, eighty-year-old Grandma Erin suddenly covered her mouth—her husband, who had passed away thirty years ago, was seen in light and shadow polishing an astronomical telescope, which had been his last birthday gift for their daughter.
"This is not a weapon." Arthur stepped onto his jeep before the morning dew had dried, feeling warmth radiate from the storage box pressed against his chest. Lily shoved a picnic basket into the back seat; it contained a blueberry pie wrapped in radiation-proof tin foil, made with wild blueberries from the cemetery.
The sound of tires crunching over shattered glass startled an orange cat sleeping atop a mailbox. As the taillights disappeared into the morning fog, Lily suddenly noticed a wet handprint on the windshield—that was Little Jamie’s mark from last night when he had pressed his palm against it, still sticky with half-melted strawberry ice cream.
Three months later, Nature magazine featured an energy map resembling ice crystals on its cover. In the acknowledgments section of an appendix to a paper, there was a coordinate encrypted in Morse code. When deciphered, it pointed to Silent Valley; at that moment, an interstellar courier encountered Aunt Martha at town's entrance—she was holding a homemade rocket launcher with twenty Memory Crystals humming "Auld Lang Syne" in her bamboo basket under moonlight.
On the night of the first snowfall, Old Henry replaced Mechanical Sheepdog's sound module. As melodies from The Blue Danube mingled with falling snow sounds drifted into every household, three hundred sky lanterns carried charred mechanical remnants toward the galaxy. Leaning against the clinic porch, Lily saw one lantern adorned with crooked drawings of three-eyed aliens—those were painted by Little Jamie using glow-in-the-dark paint from a fire hydrant.
When federal envoys returned empty-handed for the third time, townsfolk were busy adjusting their newly completed Memory Museum. As Arthur's holographic image appeared on an explanation screen, eighty vintage radios suddenly played a weather forecast from thirty years ago simultaneously; amidst electromagnetic interference creating snowy static noise, one could faintly see a figure in a spacesuit planting blueberries on the far side of the moon.
In the early morning when Aurora appeared, five hundred children crowded around the clock tower's Top Level. The moment their tender palms pressed against the Memory Crystal, the entire town was suddenly enveloped in a rainbow bubble with a diameter of three kilometers. The patrolling Mechanical Sheepdog looked up at the sky, its lens automatically focusing on the swirling Nebula on the surface of the bubble—its pattern perfectly matched the Star Map depicted on the clinic's Stained Glass.
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