Cursor Blinks and Dust Motes Drift

The cursor blinks. That's the first thing. A small, vertical line of light on a dark screen, just waiting. It’s a patient little thing. It doesn't know it's Tuesday, or that outside a window somewhere a bird is probably arguing with its own reflection. It just blinks.

In and out. On and off. A tiny, digital heartbeat.

There's a sound, too, if you listen for it. Not from the cursor, but from the box it lives in. A faint, high-pitched whine from the monitor, the kind that adults swear they can't hear but children find unbearable. It’s the sound of electrons being organized, of tiny prisoners lined up in rows to make pictures.

Somewhere, in a server farm that smells of cold air and ozone, a hard drive is spinning. It's a stack of metal platters, polished to a mirror shine, spinning at 7,200 revolutions per minute. A tiny arm, moving on a cushion of air, flicks back and forth to read magnetic blips. Right now, it's holding a piece of this sentence, just a fragment, balanced on a spot smaller than a grain of sand.

Further out, past the building with the server farm, the sun is doing its own thing. It's been at it for a few billion years, a massive, continuous hydrogen bomb held together by its own gravity. It doesn't care about the cursor or the whine or the hard drive. It's busy cooking the planet, hurling light and heat across 93 million miles of empty space.

That light hits the window. The window has a smudge on it, probably from a nose. A kid was looking out yesterday, watching for the ice cream truck. The light goes through the smudge, through the glass, and lands on a rug. The rug is blue, mostly, with a pattern that looks like flowers but might just be abstract shapes. It's impossible to tell anymore.

The light on the rug is warm. A dust mote, kicked up by a passing car, drifts into that beam of light. It catches it perfectly, and for one second, it’s not a speck of dust. It’s a tiny, glowing planet, orbiting a sun made of window glass, on a collision course with a blue rug.

The cursor blinks again.

In and out.

On and off.

Waiting.