Yabbies - a novel

Developing the skills

Have we seen this girl before?

She's perhaps fourteen, and at first we see her only from the back, sitting in a chair in this cluttered place – an electronics lab, by the look of it. But there's a sense of familiarity about that slim body, the scruffy jeans and loose sweater-top, the birdlike stance: we know this girl.

Perhaps we shouldn't.

There's an air of uncertainty here, of tension, of strangeness beyond comprehensibility. A faint hum pervades the quiet focus in the room, but that in itself seems no cause for unease. There are two other people here – a middle-aged woman beside the girl, also birdlike, tall, thin, all emphasised by the circular wire-rimmed glasses; and a younger man, off to one side, intently watching the dials on a simple fascia perched amongst a tangled nest of wire. A twisted rope of ribbon-cable leads away from the rack to the helmet the girl wears: once an ordinary industrial hard-hat, it seems, but now adorned with extraneous electronics, including a standard sensor-mike and a bare see-through projection-holograph display-panel seemingly pulled out of a discarded laptop and tacked into place with hot-melt resin. Another cable threads its way to a well-worn joystick crudely clamped to the chair-arm below the girl's left hand. A typical lab-prototype lash-up, in other words: a little odd, perhaps, but nothing that much out of the usual there. Still no explanation as to why this all feels, well, just plain weird...

And then, as our hidden eye moves round, to the side, toward the front, we see it. A small wooden ball, no more than four or five centimetres across, each quadrant painted in different bright colours, red, blue, white, black, yellow, green. And floating in mid-air, with no visible support, gently quivering, directly in front of the girl, and perhaps half a metre from her face. Something that clearly should not be possible; and yet, here, now, in this place, clearly is.

Madness.

Certainty falls away, as the ball stays firmly in place. Is held in place.

In a calm, certain voice, the woman murmurs quiet instructions to the girl.

"Good... that's good... now rotate left... good... and right..."

At each command, the girl's knuckles whiten, as she adjusts the joystick in her hand. A moment later, the ball twists slightly, as if on some puppet-master's hidden wire. Except there's no wire there: we know this now.

"Now up... rotate up and away from you... very good... now stop the rotation... now ten centimetres to the left... twenty... thirty... and back to the centre again... very good..."

Seemingly following the words alone, the painted ball performs its matching pirouette in the empty air...

An urgent beeping comes from another instrument-rack off to one side. The young technician quickly reaches out to silence it, but too late. Distracted, the girl spins round – and the ball instantly drops to the ground.

"Blast! Sorry, Jeni, my fault, you were doing really well there."

"Can you get it going again, Marko?" asks the older woman.

"Yeah, give me a minute, just need to reboot the VR server."

The girl lifts up the visor on the helmet, pushes a wayward strand of dark hair out of the way.

"I can do it without the bender, Cory – look, I'll show you...?"

Without moving from the seat, she reaches down toward the floor. A moment's pause, then the ball leaps up, seemingly of its own volition – but bounces off her outstretched fingers, hitting the window-pane with a crack. Cory moves to retrieve the wayward object before it rolls underneath another cluttered desk.

"We know how much mass you can move, dear. And you're getting better every day. But you also need practice with precision, and that's where the bender will help right now." She smiles. "If Marko can get it going again, that is."

"Just a mo'... nearly there... yep, we got greens on all channels. When you're ready, Jeni?"

The girl pulls down the visor again. Cory gently throws the ball toward her; it stops in mid-air. And does not drop.

As this strange, impossible practice-session continues, we make our silent, invisible way back out of the room. The image fades, as if in a dream.

Was it just imaginary? Or real?

And if it was indeed real – and it certainly seems that way – just who are these people? How is it possible they can bend our everyday reality so easily in this casual-seeming way?

Andwhere do they come from? Or when, perhaps?