The Record of Lives

He stood immobile in the middle of the busy city sidewalk. People walked past him, seeming to narrowly avoid colliding with him, but failing to take any notice of his presence. It was a small bubble of quiet in a city of noise, for while the sounds reached him physically, he paid no mind to them. They were trivialities to his kind, just things that existed but had no consequences for him. So he continued to stand their amidst the cacophony, unaware of anything except the one thing he was here for.

Had any of the passerbys been consciously aware of him, they might have thought he was people watching, or perhaps surveying the crowd, seeking a target to pickpocket, though admittedly doing he would be doing a poor job of it, since his inhuman stillness and the eerie way the crowd instinctively moved around him made him more than just a little conspicuous. But as it was, none would pay any attention to him, and he wasn’t, in fact, people watching.

There was a human a mere dozen or so paces ahead of him who was the reason for his presence here, yet his eyes weren’t focused on her. They were glazed over and flicking ever so slightly from point to point, examining, analyzing, calculating. What he saw around him were the millions of threads of interactions connecting the humans around him to each other. Some threads were thin, transparent, barely spanning a few feet to link two humans together for a brief few minutes, before they were stretched too thin and dissolved away again. Other threads were thick and bright, nearly anchoring two nearby humans together, or perhaps they were stretched a little longer, connecting to a more distant partner, but still vibrant and strong. Woven between the shorter threads were much longer ones, some bright, some dull, in a range of colors, connected to one human and disappearing out of sight to some unknown human far away. So thick were these multitude of threads that when he let himself see them, they obscured completely the physical reality he stood within.

But seeing these threads was his purpose here. This one human had come to their attention as an anomaly. A few too many threads connected to her, making her stand out as an unnaturally bright conglomeration in the chaotic tangle of lines. Despite the concentration of threads around her, his sense of her energy told him she was too drained for it to be normal.

His kind weren’t the only ones who could manipulated connections, and while his own usually sought to let the threads play themselves out untouched, there were others who were not so benign, and he suspected one of them had been preying on this female. It was now his job to find out what it was, and where it might be hiding itself so others of his kind could deal with it.

He reached out and meticulously tugged one thread coming from the female, letting his senses follow it to where it connected with another human, then repeated the process with several more of the longer, yet still very bright, threads. He found nothing at the other ends of them but humans.

Changing tactics, he reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a small black book. He rifled through the pages with his thumb until it splayed open in his hand on what appeared to be a random blank page about halfway through the little notebook, but it only took a moment for the page to fill suddenly with dense, black handwriting. He read through the notes about this particular human. They documented every minute detail of her life and the many connections that had formed and broken to make her life what it was today. He thumbed through a couple pages related to her recent past, searching for anything that seemed out of place for her normal patterns.

It didn’t take him too long to find the suspicious activity. Looking up from the notes, he quickly located the thread he needed. A sharp yank snapped the thread and it quickly dissolved away into nothingness. Several other treads began fading out almost immediately as well. It would take a few days for the imbalance to completely correct itself, but without the leech siphoning through her anymore, things would eventually go back to normal for her and those around her.

While the network of threads would return, that didn’t correct the drain that had occurred on her, and while subtle, in the long run that small difference in her options and possibilities in what threads would pull her and to where could lead to much larger imbalances down the road. He could do something to fix that however.

He snapped the small black book shut, only to immediately reopen it to another once again blank page. The page soon filled with more tightly packed writing and he sifted through it, flipping page after page, looking for another human with a little too much excess compared to this female. He eventually found a suitable candidate and after pocketing the black book again, quickly wove a new thread between his hands. This one was brighter and denser than any of the naturally formed threads. It would be hard for anything to break it other than himself.

He attached one end to the unsuspecting female and then trailed the other end behind him while he went in search of his soon-to-be donator. He located the man in a posh office, talking with several other businessmen about ideas for marketing proposals. He secured the free end of the thread to the businessman and stood back to observe his handy work. Other threads were already forming as the new one took hold, and soon the man was proposing a writing competition to drum up some attention and hype for their new endeavor. The prize would be twenty thousand dollars.

Satisfied that he’d done what he’d needed here, he left the men to their planning and headed back to the female, still standing on the sidewalk, handing out samples for the small family run restaurant where she worked as a waiter. Several new threads had also sprung up around her, beginning to reconnect more naturally to the world around her. Soon she would stumble across a flyer for the businessman’s writing contest and would enter it and ultimate be announced as the winner. That twenty thousand dollar prize would go a long way towards replenishing her depleted resources, making sure the attack on her didn’t leave residual repercussions.

With the problem solved, his work here was done. He fished out the black book once again, this time letting it fall open on its own in his hand. It settled to a page toward the back, this time not blank, but displaying writing only half-filling the page. New words appeared, as if they were being scrawled on the page as he watched, which was exactly what was happening.

Apparently one of his coworkers was in need of assistance documenting another human’s many life adventures.