Lying credibility ecosystems.
Witnessing without destroying.
Camera.
Everyone was running away screaming, toward the vans. The wind howled through the valley, sand whipping horizontally. But Reah remained standing right where she was. Her arms shook. Yet she lifted her camera to her eye, glad that today, she’d chosen to bring the mirrorless one to the dig, not the DSLR one. The mirrorless one was lighter. The DSLR one was heavier.
Some might say that a few pounds’ difference couldn’t possibly make or break her fate at a moment like this, especially since her professional lens still added heft to the supposedly lighter mirrorless camera. But oh, those people had no idea. As the person who was about to take the first-ever photograph of aliens on Earth, or aliens anywhere ever, really, Reah could say with absolute certainty: if her gear had been any heavier, even just by half a pound, she wouldn’t have been able to lift it all the way to her eye. Neither would she have been able to hold it steady with one hand, for the briefest moment, so she could toss aside her sunglasses and adjust the lens.
Even with her face pressed to the camera, the desert wind mercilessly found its way to her unprotected eyes. Her ponytail lashed against her cheek. Her mouth was closed, yet sand seemed to coat her tongue and throat. That was what simple, continuous breathing did to you in this part of the world—the Valley of the Kings.
Now, Reah’s finger found the shutter button. She just needed to press it.
Not immediately though. Not while those translucent masses were still kilometers away, hovering over the pyramids in the far distance. Right now, it was likely that on camera, they would merely look like particularly interesting heat mirages, the fever dream of eternal sunlight on sand older than human history. She had to wait until they came closer. She didn’t want anyone to question the veracity of her photographs. Even with the whole dig team as eyewitnesses, it was entirely possible that she might be called a liar once the panic settled down. In this case, such accusations wouldn’t necessarily stem from a specific antagonism toward Reah. No, it was simply a fact that people imagined things.
People said they saw things they didn’t see, not with the intent to lie, but because perception and memory were unreliable. That was why, until a minute ago, a team of fifty people had been in the process of excavating this single site. Archaeologists, lab technicians, conservators, students, local workers, volunteers, and photographers like Reah—they’d been funded by multiple governments and institutions, so they could meticulously document every potsherd and foundation stone. Because, without such documentation, even the veracity of civilizations that had lasted millennia could be questioned. Experience faded. Memory distorted. Only evidence endured.
“Reah! Get in the fucking van! Now. Now!”
That was the Site Director, Dr. Fahmy, probably on the last van. Reah didn’t turn around to check, but she could hear several other vehicles driving off—tires spinning and catching, spraying sand with a hiss before finding traction and roaring away.
Dr. Fahmy was sixty-two. It had taken her four decades, four fucking decades, to work her way up through Egypt’s bureaucracy before finally being named the lead on a major discovery.
This pharaonic tomb in the Valley of the Kings, found only eight months ago when a flash flood exposed its entrance, was proof that miracles existed. Three senior (male) colleagues had withdrawn from consideration due to sudden illnesses. Another one (female) had been arrested in a corruption scandal the week before the appointments were announced. Then the French co-director’s wife had gone into early labor, forcing him back to Paris.
Some called these curses. Reah called this the alignment of stars.
Because, unless Dr. Fahmy had been selected as the sole director, Reah wouldn’t have been here. After the scandal seven years ago, no one else would’ve hired her.
The scandal, remember? The thing about Reah’s supposed photo manipulation?
Ha, what utter nonsense! Reah had never doctored any of her work. The only lighting she’d used had come from the sun; every artifact’s positioning was exactly as she’d found it. But the lead archaeologist on that dig? He’d been the one to manipulate things. He needed a scapegoat when questions arose about the excavation’s integrity. Reah’s photographs had been the easiest target. She’d been young, without connections, without a track record, whereas a bunch of people relied on his continued employment, grants, and reputation. Those assholes had built an entire ecosystem around his credibility, which, ironically, made it easier for them to use the fact that yes, people lied. Reah, a person outside of their credibility ecosystem, was likely one of those people.
Dr. Fahmy had been the only one who had looked at Reah’s work, seen what actually mattered, and, most importantly, admitted it. And so, many years later, Reah was here, now. Not running away from the aliens. Oh, no.
“Reah! Forget the shot! Let’s go!” Dr. Fahmy said.
“Go without me!” Reah said, not taking her eye off the viewfinder.
Multiple voices started shouting and rumbling inside the van.
Dr. Fahmy said, “Quiet, quiet! Reah, this is an order! Come here! Now!”
“Just go without me!”
More voices from the van—this time, angrier, more frustrated. Some people were laughing hysterically.
But for too long, Reah had been kept away from digs that anyone would remember. This kind of work, you couldn’t just do it because you wanted to. You needed legal approval, lawyers to get that legal approval, and bureaucrats, of all people. You needed institutional backing, recommendations, someone willing to put their name beside yours. Permission. Granting. All that shitty stuff.
So, as grateful as Reah was toward Dr. Fahmy for bringing her back to the thrill, she wasn’t going to waste this opportunity to secure the leverage of a lifetime. With this photograph, she would never need anyone’s approval, ever again. Add to that the lore that was going to follow her around, about how she’d stood her ground at the prospect of encountering unidentified extraterrestrials. No one would question the veracity of any of her work. This would remake her career, her reputation, her very existence—and that of Dr. Fahmy and that of every outsider who couldn’t get the gatekeepers to open the gates because they deemed you unworthy of their lying credibility ecosystem.
“Dr. Fahmy, please!” someone called from the van, voice cracking.
“We gotta go!” another one said.
“Who cares if she wants to die? Fuck, let’s go go go!”
“Now!”
“Please!”
Dr. Fahmy groaned, but only for a second. “Reah, you fucking idiot! I’m coming back for you!”
The van door shut. Tires spun and caught. Hiss, hiss, hiss, sand everywhere, traction found—then the vehicle roared away.
Reah still didn’t move. She was the only human left anywhere near the dig, but it would be misleading to say that she was alone. The wind kept her company. It filled the space the vans had left. It shrieked at the cliff faces and whistled through the tomb entrance. Some canvas tarps over the excavation trenches creaked.
This was the sound of a place that had been deemed empty for three thousand years, when in reality, it was thick with the breath of dynasties that had never truly ended. It didn’t care about the last five minutes.
Neither did the aliens, apparently. Fifty people had fled from the scene, screaming at the top of their lungs, yet those translucent masses kept progressing toward the dig at the same exact, leisurely, graceful tempo as before.
Goosebumps rose across Reah’s bare arms and shoulders. What an exquisite feeling! A chill, in this heat! Contradictory as the feeling was, it was the correct one to hold in her body at this moment. This was no hallucination. Those beings didn’t reflect light the way normal Earth beings did. Their edges kept shifting, drifting. The boundaries along which each alien ended and the air began kept changing, depending on the sun, the wind, the sand. So, probably, it was wrong to call them boundaries at all.
But they were multiple aliens, weren’t they? And they were moving toward her?
When they crossed the far edge of the excavation zone, about half a kilometer away, Reah pressed the shutter button for the first time.
Click. Her heart stuttered. She was certain, they were close enough for this photograph to mean something. Their edges unraveled, like fragments drifting free, but even so, oh, even so.
Click, she took another picture. Her scalp prickled. Should she switch to video mode? Yes. She did. Those aliens had too varied a geometry. Stills couldn’t capture the shifts. Also, videos were more difficult to manipulate. If Reah had been more accustomed to moving objects instead of utterly immobile clay tablets, burial masks, and sarcophagi, she would’ve thought of the video option sooner. But oh, well, no time to regret.
She began recording video, intent on the rear LCD screen. The whole mass of aliens shuddered, destabilizing. They shimmered with colors that had no business existing under Earth’s sun. Deep violet. Transparent. Something like mercury. Then, transparent again. Was that copper? No, green. Then, a blue so dark, it looked like space vacuum…
Reah stumbled, then quickly found her balance. She’d been progressively arching her spine backward as the aliens floated, wiggled, pushed overhead toward her. The wind had died, also progressively. Her arms hurt very much by now, but she did not lower the camera.
The excavation site was eerily quiet. This valley had never known silence of this level. Even in abandonment, there’d been wind, insects, and the settling of stone. But now? Nothing. And this shift wasn’t merely due to a difference in the volume of auditory signals. Her ears popped. Pressure dropping or rising, she couldn’t tell. It was a solace that she could feel her own heartbeat, pulsing in her skull—otherwise she would’ve feared that she’d gone completely deaf, and furthermore, that all other senses were also shutting down at once.
She couldn’t smell anything. She couldn’t feel the sand on her skin anymore. She did feel her blood rushing in her ears, but that was an internal physiological thing, nothing to prove her connection to the external environment.
Yes, that was what was going on here. She’d been cut off from her surrounding landscape. It was just her, her camera, and the aliens she was recording.
The aliens who were harvesting something.
In disbelief, she lowered the camera. For her to do that—it was like a priest dropping the chalice mid-consecration. The camera wasn’t merely her tool, it was the lens through which she understood reality. Yet, what she was seeing now was so fundamentally unreal, that her hands didn’t have the muscle energy to hold the camera up anymore.
With her naked eye, she saw: threads of light, hanging criss-cross all over her field of view. It was a miracle in and of itself that she could see those threads, because they were thin, very thin, as thin as the kind of thread you probably use for reattaching severed nerves in neurosurgery. It was as if her eyes had gained a superpower, allowing her to discern such fineness from any and all distance and proximity.
Another miracle was that the threads weren’t just hanging around, doing nothing. They had purpose. They were streaming from everything toward the translucent alien masses overhead.
And by “from everything,” Reah literally meant “from everything.” From the pyramids, from the sand, from the wind that had stilled, as in, from the very air itself, the threads carried something toward the aliens.
Do your job! a voice shouted inside Reah. Let others figure out what the hell that something is!
Hurriedly, she lifted the camera once more—but the LCD screen did not show her targets. Not the aliens, no hyper-thin threads of streaming light, nothing. Just the vast landscape of sand and stone, the backdrop.
Flustered, Reah looked around with her naked eye once more.
The threads pulsed. They were there. She was certain. So were the aliens. They existed. Shimmering like heat mirages, translucent and undefinable, yes. But the very fact that she could see them and think “undefinable” meant that there existed something that remained undefined, didn’t it?
Then she gasped. Right there, at the spot where she’d been focusing on, the threads thickened. Simultaneously, she felt a tug in her chest—an answering tug.
She stared, and the tug happened again.
She stared harder, and the tug happened more insistently.
Her heart hammered even faster. The tug wasn’t painful. It wasn’t happening to hurt her. It felt more like a hook drawing up… what?
She frowned more, stared more, the tug intensified—and she got her answer. The hook was drawing up something inside her. To be more precise, it was drawing up every detail she’d so far noticed about that part of the air—which wasn’t much. That was no surprise. That part right there was just a random, nondescript coordinate in the air. Until moments ago, she had never paid attention to it.
But what would happen if she directed her present awareness toward a spot that had very much interested her before? Compelled by this idea, Reah shifted her attention to the nearest pyramid, nevertheless a few kilometers away. The threads there thickened. Despite the distance, she was certain. Also, recognizable, non-random details rose to the surface of her mind, like stars sliding into alignment.
“Four thousand years, that pyramid’s been standing there,” Dr. Fahmy said. “Makes you wonder what it’s seen.”
Reah jumped and dropped her camera. She whirled around back and forth. Dr. Fahmy wasn’t here. Yet while not being here, she was here, saying exactly the same thing she’d told Reah on the day the team had arrived at this site.
Reah shivered. Dr. Fahmy was both memory and present experience. Reah was reliving that moment, observing her own observation.
Shift, focus.
Shift, focus, again.
Just as she would identify a photographic target and adjust her lens, Reah shifted and focused on the nearby elements.
A limestone fragment half-buried in sand—she was brushing it clean with trembling hands, without brushing it clean with trembling hands in the here and now.
A water bottle on the equipment table—she was drinking from it, tasting the metallic taste of warm water at noon, without tasting that taste in the here and now.
Similar reobservations of observations happened with a discarded trowel, a survey marker stake, and an excavation lamp. Reah was there, here. Then, now. And with her, they were here, now. Everyone who was part of the team. Everyone who wasn’t part of the team, but who’d been on Reah’s mind during her stay here.
The assholes. The parasites of the credibility ecosystem. Even the paperwork, those inanimate objects!
Overwhelmed, Reah fell to her knees. She coughed. She couldn’t hear the sound. She only knew she was coughing because her throat hurt.
The weight of memories—that was why she couldn’t stand upright anymore. She hadn’t realized she remembered so much. Not that she’d ever thought she was a clean slate or anything as idealistic as that, but so many of the components making up her being had been subconscious. Even her disgust toward the bureaucrats who pretended to be so righteous—she hadn’t admitted to herself the extent to which they kept bothering her, even after she’d returned to the thrill of on-site excavation thanks to Dr. Fahmy.
Was this what it felt like to be a camera? Unbeknownst to Reah, so much had been recorded, and so much was now being replayed out of control…
Copper, orange, and navy shimmered nearby. Flinching, Reah crawled back, looked up.
The aliens had gathered close around her. Reah blinked rapidly. All that nonsensical geometry!
Was she herself being harvested?
Was she going to die?
If so, all that would remain of her would take on the form of an urban legend: a stupid woman with a history of manipulation, who’d lost her mind chasing aliens that never existed. Yes, that was what was going to happen, because without photographic proof, everyone, even the eyewitnesses, would be too eager to believe that they merely had some collective hallucination. The truth that some truths cannot be captured on camera would be too terrifying. Heck, it terrified Reah, right now.
If people lied but cameras couldn’t capture truths, what was the human supposed to do? Experience faded. Memory distorted. Only evidence endured. But there was no evidence. Oh, there was no evidence for this right here. The worst nightmare for a photographer. The worst nightmare for everyone living in a world of lying credibility ecosystems…
Yet the threads pulsed warmly through her. Far from feeling nightmarish, they felt like being recognized by the universe itself, like falling into a gravity well that had been waiting to catch her, like how a baby constellation might feel when it is being encouraged by some primordial ancestor as it attempts to claim its place in the sky.
It also helped that the tug that she’d perceived initially had multiplied and accelerated, and thereby had become a steady vibration. That felt nice. Quite therapeutic. And patiently, unhurriedly, the aliens embraced her, folding her into their confusing geometry.
These beings were pockets of disturbed air, expressing different densities. Sometimes they chose to hold their shapes, sometimes they didn’t. Occasionally, they bled into each other, frustratingly unclear…
…like experiences, unconsecrated by a photographic device. Like memories in their organic form.
Suddenly, the heaviness lifted—that of her hitherto subconscious records. She sensed a weightlessness in her joints.
Why? Because of the aliens. Because they were so close. Because of the threads. Because something was moving from Reah to them, without robbing from her or violating her—much as taking a photograph could not make the ancient pyramids crumble.
In that regard, what Reah did was unlike anything else anybody else did at a site like this. Most people on the team dug and took apart and then took away. Some called that thievery, and perhaps rightfully so. Just because some institutions and governments had the money to fund projects like these, did they have the right to the resulting objects? Did they have the right to take everything but what couldn’t be taken away because it was part of the Earth’s crust?
Meanwhile, Reah just… She just recorded. Yes, after a project like this, she had photographic evidence of all that had happened here. But even so, she robbed nothing. She violated nothing.
Same with the aliens. In a confusing, cross-species way, Reah assumed they were interested in her, but they were doing so out of…
…love, for the lack of a better word.
They loved her the way she loved the pyramids—not to possess, but to witness. Preserving without diminishing. Studying—carefully, reverently, leaving the original untouched.
It occurred to her that from the very beginning, from the very moment she’d noticed the aliens, they’d been moving toward her, not the excavation site. The threads crisscrossed through her. They also, simultaneously, still streamed from the pyramids, the sand, and the very air—everything she’d been observing. She was the aperture, the opening through which all accumulated attention concentrated.
Together, Reah and the aliens left the excavation site without leaving it. They went back to the moment when Dr. Fahmy invited Reah to join the crew. They went back to seven years ago, when she was accused of photo manipulation. They went back to when she was seven, when she was gifted her first camera.
The child held that little analog device in her little hands. She hadn’t needed leverage back then. She didn’t have any conception of “means to an end.” Everything was an end. She was an end. Or the means were the end, as was her camera. For no other reason than to take pictures, she took pictures. Even as she looked outside through the viewfinder, she didn’t need the subject to be anything in particular, because she was taking pictures. That was why she took pictures. Because she was taking pictures.
In endless circles, the ideas repeated.
Because of pictures.
For pictures.
In order to take pictures.
As a result of taking pictures.
Translucent masses of ideas without boundaries. Then, a single mass of inseparable ideas within a boundary.
The aliens massaged the experiences out of her in gold, silver, white, and black. Reah glanced at the professional-grade mirrorless camera that she’d dropped on the sand. Briefly, the threads clustered there along with her attention.
She perceived the camera from all angles at once: lens, body, screen. There was no one there on the LCD screen of the camera, which was still recording. Just as she couldn’t sense her physical environment anymore, apparently her physical environment couldn’t sense her either.
Yet she did exist. She knew this for a fact. Also, she knew the aliens existed, period. They knew her, she knew them. Outside of verification, they all, each and together, existed as living proof of things that couldn’t be proven…
“Reah!”
Reah opened her eyes. It was dark. It was cold. Wind howled through the valley. Reah’s tongue tasted like sand. She could even feel the grains in her mouth, because she was lying on the ground, face half buried.
Groaning, she sat up, coughing. She could hear her own coughs. Her ears didn’t pop.
And the sky was empty but full. There were no obstructions, no obstacles, yet the stars were so thick, they formed rivers of light, and the sky was drunk, reeling with them. In many places of the Earth, those stars were invisible to the human eye, because there were so many seemingly shinier objects on the surface of the planet. But the stars existed. Even before all the telescopes were invented, they were there. And even if all of humanity were to go blind, they would continue their existence.
Someone threw a blanket around Reah. It was Dr. Fahmy.
“You fool,” Dr. Fahmy said. “Whatever those things were, you should be glad you’re alive! Even if they meant no harm, you could’ve died! Dehydration, heatstroke, scorpions, vipers. Then hypothermia, nocturnal predators, and who knows what else? Another round of aliens!”
“They were here, weren’t they?” Reah said.
Her voice sounded surprisingly smooth. Those threads that had harvested her, they had also soothed something, unknotted tension.
“Of course they were here! We all saw them!” Dr. Fahmy said. “Who cares about photographic proof? We all saw them!”
Reah laughed. That seemed to make Dr. Fahmy angrier, for a moment. But in the end, she simply shook her head and helped Reah get up. Then Dr. Fahmy retrieved the camera from the ground.
“Goodness, this thing is still recording. How much memory does it have?”
“More than enough for nothing.”
Which didn’t mean that Reah had nothing.
Dr. Fahmy guided her toward the van. Once Reah sat in the passenger seat, Dr. Fahmy handed her the camera. Reah turned it off. There was nothing more to record.
But as they drove off, Reah knew that the van’s tires spun and caught. Not as urgently as they’d done earlier today, but hiss, hiss, hiss, they sprayed sand everywhere, as the vehicle found traction. She did not have to see it. She knew what happened, was happening, and would happen. Some things were simply like that. The vehicle roared away, onward.