Jo-el

Начало книги

A strange man’s face appeared on my laptop computer while I was skimming the internet. It was early Tuesday afternoon, too soon for a Scotch and I was trying to find something of interest to arrest my boredom. Nonchalantly I used alt-tab to return to my browser, but the face wouldn’t go away. Nothing I did would remove the image from the screen.

I was annoyed and on the brink of closing the lid. I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with a computer problem. I gaped inanely at the man’s unusual features and as I did so he slowly opened his wide mouth, his beady eyes seemingly staring right at me and said in perfect English, “David, the people of Cirion have selected you to rescue the people of Earth.”

My right elbow, solidly planted on the kitchen table was holding up my sluggish head. A moment passed, my head raised slowly to the upright position, my right wrist was still bent backwards, I felt the pain as I straightened it out. He called me by my name, that was weird, how could he know my name? My first thought was I’d been hacked and the little piece of viral software had picked ‘David’ as my most likely name from my emails. Very smart. But then I realized that most of my friends used ‘Dave’ and not David to address me. Was the software so clever that it converted the name to my given name? That thought amused me enough to continue listening. What was this guy selling? Damn peculiar looking dude, too. His eyes appeared too big for his face, however closer scrutiny indicated they were simply bright and almost cylindrical. It was as if he could see me through the screen. His ears were flat and perfectly round; his nose scrunched in, like a boxer, but sort of small, while the nostrils were larger than seemed proportionate to the rest of the nose.

Читать дальше →