The Figure in the Frame: ch. 5 chicago

 

5. chicago

Everyone remembers the day The Bean hatched.

The photo is dated 2016, roughly thirty years before the Hatching took place. Many millions of photos had been taken before this one, and many millions more had been taken after. But this one is special. This one harbors the secret of why the Hatching took place at all.

Scientists have pored over this photo for years; government officials had kept it redacted until the Carson Case blew everything wide open. This was in 2035. Since then, internet warriors have dissected every single pixel of that frame to the enth degree. Theories couldn't stop popping up fast enough. Every person who took it upon themselves to figure out the secret of The Hatching thought they had the answer—thought they could win their chance at notoriety, at political sway.

None prevailed.

Instead, theories were debunked almost as quickly as that first round of ideas mounted. "The clouds in the sky reveal this.." some theories suggested. Others portended the placement of the people before the landmark as the key. Many more still looked to the Bean's reflection to draw suspicion from the crowd. Still, no solid answer has been documented. And to this day, the greatest minds of our time—from government officials to Nobel Prize winning thinkers—can't figure out how The Thing burst forth from the oddity, and how it's been hiding in there for so long.

A quick Google search will tell you The Bean—officially titled Cloud Gate—was constructed in 2004-2006 by Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor. Both India and England were under suspicion for a time, not that there was any credibility to the wild theories that stemmed from their involvement in placing The Thing in there in the first place; almost every nation at one point was pointed at, from Russia to Canada (hah!). But with no reliable argument, and the complete and utter astonishment from every official in the world, it was quickly decided that information and resources must be pooled instead of compartmentalized.

At least we had that going for us.

The only thing we have to go off by way of evidence is this photo—projected across all screens around the world all at once by the brethren of the entity that spilled forth from the Bean. Chicago seemed as good a place as any for the phenomenon to take place; gone were the grandiose proclamations of world domination set forth onto Washington and New York and Los Angeles; London and Australia and Russia and China were spared, also. However, The Thing took anyone and everyone from everywhere to keep it from destroying the rest of the state. Seven grueling days passed before the powers of the world finally destroyed it, two million perished. At first the world watched in awe as the anomaly crept from the base of the structure—and then we watched in horror as it crumbled everything in its path.

The key to defeating it was power. Like us, it's body held a combination of blood and bone, relatively easy to pierce and annihilate. But the key to preventing this from happening again lies in that photo. What scientists had managed to ascertain was a link between The Thing's brain and the control center from which it was operating. There, we were able to ask a series of questions: who are you? being the chief query. Where did you come from? was another. 

But the most important: why did you attack us?

It was this last question that garnered a response. While the initial questions were met with silence, this final one came with a resounding quake across the globe. Everywhere from Nunavut to Auckland felt its incredible power. Many more structures fell, this time well outside Chicago. The ground shook, the waters were met with an aggressive tremor, sending typhoons across the world. Technology went dark. Then, after a period of uncomfortable silence, a high pitched scream echoed from every machine in every country. People were known to lose their hearing after The Echo, maybe not at first, but years later when their eardrums finally gave out. This was them reaching out to us, and what they said remains a mystery to this day.

What they told us came as a complete shock. We wanted answers, yet it wasn't in their power to answer us in a language we could fully understand. Hence, the photo. What came across our screens—on every screen in every part of the world—was this image of a woman standing in front of The Bean before it hatched. A world before our understanding of the universe exploded in front of us. 

Better minds than mine have studied the image and have put forth clues in our struggle for survival. I don't claim to be one of those better minds. I look at that image and I see a tourist gasping in awe of what could be a profound city attraction—others walk hand in hand, couples, families and lovers, all enjoying everything life has to offer them on a fairly typical Chicago day.

What you see could change the course of history forever. What you see could very well save our species from extinction.