You'd never forget it if you'd been there. The day the clouds came to life. Everyone laughed at first. Thought it were a big joke. Didn't last.
Happened all
down the west coast they said. Got stronger nearer the sea you were. So picture
yourself. You're down the beach with your kids, paddling, building sandcastles,
eating egg sandwiches. You try firing your kids' imaginations, pointing up at
shapes in the sky. "Look Tommy, choo-choo train." "Good boy,
it's like a bear isn't it." "Aye, very like a whale." But
looking on you see that that vague collection of shapes looking a bit like
Tommy's best teddy bear starts to look more and more teddy like. The clouds sausage
and balloon to resembles arms and legs and a body and head. Sunlight spotlights
down upon the stomach and other tricks of shade leave the surface bathed all in
brown. And as his fluffed up ears drift in on a strong south-westerly breeze,
his head shifts and his arm lifts and he turns to wave at you.
People saw
that kind of thing all the way through the first day. Favourite childhood toys,
Spitfire squadrons, flocks of car keys crawling past Cardiff Bay. A procession
of photo frames descended over the sea, seen for miles, each a different design
and containing a different image. There were holiday snaps and honeymoon
pictures and drunken nights out. They were random and yet each one meant
something to someone within view. And as people continued to watch, each frame
dissolved from oak and gold to white and grey and drifted away like smoke. The
images were freed and they expanded out of their confines, spreading out across
the sky. Smaller images soon succumb to grander designs. Machu Picchu became
the dominant image over Cumbria, the mountain tops hanging high on the horizon,
row upon row of stone buildings beneath them and set around a grass centre that
glowed in eerie green. They said the TV images didn't do it justice, but you got
vertigo enough even then. The way you could be looking at the horizon and feel like
you're hanging a hundred miles in the sky. Knocked people sick.
It was an
amazing effect and strangely few people felt bothered by it at first. There was
a lot of chatter on Twitter and iMargin and Facebook saying it were a publicity
stunt. Some new top secret technology that had been invented and this was how
they were showcasing it.
Still, even
then odd things were happening. Like one frozen image would collide with
another and merge. The results were dynamic and played out in real time for all
to see. Two events in particular, the wedding congregation that got hurled at
Machu Picchu, and the Malibu beach party that was inundated by a team
attempting to climb Mount Everest, will never be forgotten by anyone who
witnessed them. The images are burned on to your eyelids. Thank god they didn't
have sound yet.
Towards the
end of the first day, they seemed to fade. There was still some summer in the
air and towards evening the sky opened out on to this sheet of blue glass that
was made to fit the skyline. But as blue became black and faint shapes drifted
across the canvas, that's all that remained. People, no matter how much they
wished for it, no matter how they spoke aloud, what they thought they could see,
they couldn't make the indistinct take shape.
But then,
just as the last light faded and the horizon began to diminish, a thousand
exact copies of Michelangelo's David flew in formation down the Mersey and out
to sea. Night brought only the stars.
You'd have
been forgiven for sleeping in the following day. You'd have been forgiven for
thinking that the previous day's nonsense was just one of those things. The
kind of thing had been happening all over for months. You have been forgiven
though you'd been dead wrong.
By ten next
day dozens of Facebook groups and #hashtags were in operation and they'd been
busy.
Up and down
the coast, amorphous shapes writhed to find something better formed. Heads had
tossed and turned in the night. What if, they had thought, a group of people
thought about the one thing at the same time? What would happen then?
They soon
found out. Local groups would issue their instructions and everyone in the
group would concentrate on the image and stare at the sky. It would start out
straightforward enough, simple shapes, prime colours, basic animals and the
like were fine, but the troubles started when they tried anything more
complicated. Anything as simple as a chair proved tricky until the commands
became more descriptive. #chair resulted in a mess in the sky. #brown-plastic-school-chair
did better.
It were
worse for tables, beds, cars, even if you could pin it down to a dinner table
or first motor, the choice was still different person to person. Some groups
included artists and sculptors and these groups benefited from having a guiding
hand to focus the aggregate of ideas into something more refined. Most of the
others were obsolete by lunchtime.
The dog
lovers were fine. They'd separated down to their pedigrees groups early in the
morning and the skies became like Crufts by afternoon. Cat owners could agree
on nothing and so in a nation of animal lovers, the dogs reigned supreme in the
skies. Terrier, herder, hound, each breed was rendered in perfect detail
drifting down a runway of cloud. That and an occasional irritating Batman
signal. They were the first sign that things were about to go wrong.
Someone made
the simple genius idea of tweeting a photo of a chair or YouTube clip and getting
people to mentally project it on the sky. Never occurred till then. Started to
work. We formed cats playing piano and the Crazy Frog and the Mad Hatter's Tea
Party, with a dozen celebrity guests fading in and out of focus. Celebrity pics
were a bad idea. They were the quickest to get vandalised and then downright
abused. I shouldn't laugh, and I know a lot of people sent picies of their
favourite celebs out to share and enjoy with others, but if you posted a famous
face and you and a few like minds made that image sharp in the sky, you were
just asking for some cunt to come along and jizz on it. It was only a matter of
when.
Folk
returned to children's characters. They were harder to ruin. Wallace and
Gromit, Kermit the Frog and the Muppets, an enormous Animal playing the clouds
like cymbals and the rain coming down in torrents with every crash, bang and wallop.
Everyone got soaked, but god, it were amazing and no one seemed to mind and no
one seemed to notice they'd dropped way down in the sky. They merged into one
thick edged bank of cloud and as the sun sank, showering it last rays, the
shelf caught fire and poured away, straight-up, into space. The last wisp
curled away like water down the plughole. It left a deep blue dome and a kinda
green glow on the horizon.
In St Ives
they had a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark down on the beach. A bank of
cloud came out of nowhere, whipped itself up into a ball and rolled down the
beach in time to the boulder on the screen. It kicked up sand and some people
screamed, but it rolled harmlessly over them and most saw the funny side. And
when the spears started flying minutes later, many greeted them with open arms,
not knowing they were tipped with ice darts. Seventeen people died. More got
killed in the crush to escape.
They had us
by first light. The clouds came down and stuck fast to the window frames. You
went out only in emergencies and even then you pulled your hood down tight and
you closed your eyes and you found your way from memory, not through what the
clouds wanted to show you. That's how you ended up miles away. Months away.
It was
better than night. No one wanted to be out at night when the groans started and
the moans and the screams and the faces would appear at the windows. The
displays in the daytime were often entertaining, even if not always pleasant;
deathbed confessions, remembered sexual encounters, episodes of Dad's Army
reconstructed over Twitter and broadcast into the ether and watched like watching
live theatre from behind a curtain. You really got to know your neighbours over
time.
No such joy
at night. Put cardboard up over your windows and pull your curtains tight and
wait for the lighter shade of grey that came at dawn. Don't step out at night.
Not if you ever want to come back.
It took weeks
to crack it. The same groups on the same sites had been probing the clouds for
days with shared experiences, trying to find a way to make the mist disappear.
Someone, we don't know who, figured out it were our own fears that made the fog
to descend upon us. In the first days there'd been plenty of attacks, Bat
Signals and swastikas getting plastered all over people's efforts. Pricks. When
groups could operate free of trolls, combining wills on to one thought, they
made great dents in the volume of the cloud. A clustering of groups on the west
coast came together to focus on one image all together at an agreed point in
the day. The image decided upon was the deep blue of the cloudless sky.
Internet companies interrupted service to known trouble makers. The major
faiths called the faithful to prayer. Everyone else crossed their fingers and
concentrated at the appropriate hour.
A dark blue
sky shone in the minds of hundreds of thousands of people on the west coast.
Songs would be sung of this day. New allegiances would be formed because of it.
The Cornish would become brethren with the Welsh; people in Southport would
swear blood oaths with those in Kilmarnock. Some closed their eyes, fingers
gripped, blue light filling up the dome of their imagination. Others stared out
of the window or went out the front door and tried to force the fog back with
their eyeballs. There was a standoff that lasted more than three hours.
Then people
started reported seeing shapes in the mist. Those reports were quickly followed
with confirmation that the shapes were other buildings. The mist was
evaporating. People were urged across every medium available to concentrate,
concentrate like you've never concentrated before. Samuel West was drafted in
to read prose that waxed lyrical about the colour blue. And the cloud thinned
and the reports multiplied and shortly before sunset the fog dispersed to
nothing and we got to witness a fireball of gold that exploded in the west and
disappeared beneath the horizon. And the blue that we had all wished for shone
in the sky like cobalt glass. Cobalt faded to ultramarine to midnight blue to
black. The stars came out at the fading of the day. Beach parties sprung up all
over the west coast. Camp fires were lit, guitars strummed, balls kicked, the
alcohol flowed. And soon everyone had returned to their own troubles.
And then the
ships came and landed and the aliens came and now the only difference between
genders is the ones who get decapitated before getting fucked in the ass by
scaly lizard dicks and those who get decapitated after. We are dying down here.
If there is anyone else out there, help us! By the mercy of whatever gods you
believe in, please, please help us.
* Νεφελοκοκκυγία - Cloud Cuckoo Land
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