In the crook of an old oak tree she had worn a smooth patch in the bark, making it into a giant wooden hammock. Leaves in the canopy rocked back and forth in the afternoon’s lazy breeze. Cybil shifted herself to get a swaying bit of sunlight out of her eye. The buzz of the cicadas that had been growing all day now drowned all the other noises in the woods near Providence Cove. Cybil held a cast-off molting of one of the insects and turned it in the light.
In her youth she’d always looked forward to pulling them off the pine trees every year and chasing her little sister around. The feet on those things would stick to pretty much anything. At one point she put seven or eight of them on her face and woke Mai in the middle of the night, pretending to be a zombie. Mai became a special effects makeup artist when she grew up, Cybil always took credit for inspiring that. It was the only real conversation she still had with anyone in the family; Mai was always the golden child, Mai’s job was exciting, Mai got to rub elbows with real stars. Far more fun and appropriate to talk about Mai at family gatherings than the older brother that somehow built a career studying abnormal reproductive development. Ravi just made everyone uncomfortable. As soon as they hit 1.0 on the new project, he was walking out. Seventy three years was too old to be a glorified lab tech and he needed some more good memories. He hadn’t been home, hadn’t heard the cicadas, since Mai passed away in ’58. Didn’t know why it seemed important, but it was.
The sound of rotors faded in under the din of mating calls. Dr. Ravi Chatterji looked up from Cybil’s resting spot and saw the little drone landing on a limb above her. She fell sideways out of the tree and bounced off of the roof of the old car that it had been consuming for the last hundred years. After a sideways roll off the car and around the tree she launched herself up and snagged the quadrotor from behind. There was an LED matrix display soldered on between the two tiny cameras on the front. She spun the thing around to get a look.
Tim fell backwards out of his chair in a coffee shop a hundred and fifty miles away.
“OH SHIT, FUCK!”
He ripped his glasses off and pulled himself back up on the table. The remnants of his coffee puddled around his tablet. His hands were shaking when he asked the barista for a refill. After sitting down again he slid the frames back over his eyes. She was still staring at him. The two cameras gave him a perfect 3D image of two intense blue eyes less than an inch from his face.
“Yes.” Her voice crackled, tinny through the cameras’ miniscule microphones.
“Cybil.”
