The age of the Android had descended.
She, always a good ten years behind the moment, was ever the last to know.
Now, emitting from her phone, the luring words of an astrologer. Today’s topic? the Moon Sign.
She remembered reading about this, awhile back. Unlike the Sun’s vague profiling of character and propensity, seems the Moon Sign was the real marker for actual, motivated behavior.
The voice, likely AI, prattled on, knowing as it does in the world of preconceived algorithm that the longer it held forth without relent the greater the likelihood the hopelessly impressionable human would take its bait.
Perhaps to prove herself a real person, and with reluctant acknowledgement of her own weakness, she plucked the fruit from its tree.
What was her exact TIME of birth? This was the key to unlocking the all-knowing.
Well, that would be its own story.
Mum, wide of pelvis, already having endured the truest of natural births at home ( marched in circles around the oak diningroom table by a first born sister during that which the latter’s narrow hips were sure was just phase one of labor, only to plead to be allowed to give her impending child birth ) had all too vivid memories of which stage her now second born was presenting as she lay in the hospital, flanked by a flock of nursemaids. The year, 1957, the obstetrician having delivered an entire generation already, this scene was as predictable as a day in the life of an episode of Happy Days.
Except that it was night, on a Friday, at primetime, and raining; the doc, at the bar; and, the clamoring newborn was crowning.
She, that hapless infant, would finally see natural light a good fifty minutes after cranial compression in the vaginal canal had suffocated the entire lobe responsible for numeric application. The doctor ultimately appearing, gurney raced to the delivery room and she was out, screaming bloody murder, her grandmother later describing a baby completely covered in “dark hair”, the harbinger of as yet unrealized import, a caul*, never to be acknowledged by the Christian Fundamentalists.
Said Christians would, however, have plenty to say about astrologers -soothsayers all, demon-infested, poison in its purest form. Having raised her to be above all God fearing, she now fulfilled her latent visit – pungent of residual trepidation – with the significance of the Moon Sign.
Rather removed from the glowing attributes of the Taurus Sun Sign, her Moon Sign was Aries – and, appeared a totally different mammal. Passion; anger; a struggle to both form and maintain human relationships; the driver of all action, the bearer of opinions and insights pronounced unpopular, and the leader of everything worth any effort. Even the sight of a waning, crescent moon was the least likely to draw a crowd, that final phase before disappearing entirely from the eye’s capacity to see.
How familiar obscurity had become. Once a life lived under nearly constant public eye – from the stages of orchestral performance, to the fields at half time, to the classrooms of hundreds of singing and dancing children – hers was now expressed seated well inside her own domain, either through written word, recorded offering, or framed within the precious teacher-student private music lesson scene. Now, with this new awareness, her potential for passion, anger against injustice, and independent insight finding a new context for both realization and display.
All now rise and rest in the blue glow of radiating technology. Contrived voices and devised apparitions fill the firmament. Gazing up to the sky, she would still ponder the physical universe, within the only dimension currently apprehended, and wonder how it could be that revolving orbs were in place to both describe and influence every thought. Perhaps both thought and intention had a single source, and she were just their open vessel.
What would the Android say, to that?
Time to ask the waning Moon.
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* Margaret Fletcher, unsolicited, confirmed this many years ago. She has since passed.
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Copyright 11/21/24 Ruth Ann Scanzillo All rights those of the author, whose story it is and whose name appears above this line. No copying – in part; whole; or, by translation – permitted without either written request of the author or by blog sharing link. Thank you for maintaining intellectual honorability.
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