tug of the gravitational fluctuations from these events.
Lisa spent that time mourning the dissolution of a wave named Samuel she had known since her birth. They had overlapped for nanoseconds and nanoseconds, and his death had been very hard. Much of him had been lost to noise long since, and the little bit of him that had been left expanding with Lisa was not enough to truly sustain his identity.
You see where this is going? I’ll tell the story of some human relationship colored by the alien. It will be some sort of metaphor or allegory. If I do it right you’ll care when these wavefronts intersect some object which destroys their coherence. Maybe they’ll hit the thick skin of one of those mutant North Koreans, and they’ll turn out to have been generated by the nuclear holocaust. That’s a twist, I suppose.
But there are not twists in this story. My father is dying. Metastatic colon cancer. A real pain in the ass. Ha ha. He lost a length of his bowels, one of his lungs, half his liver, and his future.
Give it a name, give it a context, tell its story, use scene as much as possible, avoid adverbs. Get it down.

*

What if we could lose our bodies without forgetting? Be embodied as software? When we wanted to love we could forgo the motel room for our own private Cartesian box. The line of your jaw could be the line of the horizon, could be mountains, sea, silk and burlap, could be the smell of roses, furniture polish, hot as geysers, distant as stars and at the tip of my finger.
What if we could be embodied as a swarm of infinitesimal robots?
These questions are not for the poor, not for the starving or illiterate or plagued or war torn.
What if?
The air would flow through us, and we could build new things from the atoms on the breeze. We could reach the bottom of the ocean or deep space. We could be inside each other. Abandon shame and pride and live, fantastically, impossibly, reality our play, joy like a switch. We could create life, or leave it behind, just by making a choice.
God? We only have to live long enough to see our brains burnt onto circuits.

*

There is a sound to be heard deep in the ocean, so loud it can be detected three thousand miles from its source.