We were trying to get onto a train. The station was busy and there was a package on the island. It was a the size of a toolbox and wrapped in plain paper. When it suddenly emitted a complex series of high-pitched tones a few people turned to look at it. Then it started to hum furiously. A threatening, forceful vibration that was overwhelming. I think it was heating up because the atmosphere around it was warping like it was hot.

Then it exploded. Well, actually, what it did was inexplicable. It began to explode. There was a mindshattering percussion, but it stuttered… and seized. When we looked back upon the object, it was frozen in the first phase of explosion, as though time had locally ceased to pass in its vicinity just after the explosion began. You could see patterns of debris — pieces of whatever it had been — suspended weightlessly in a domelike chaos of light and exhaust. Bits of burning paper in frozen fire. Most of us were so surprised to be alive that we didn’t notice it at first. The change.

Every piece of glass was ‘playing’ a scene. As if each separate piece were transmitting what was being seen through living eyes. There was a light almost, coming from within the glass. The images were alive, in motion, and shed… a kind of light. It was impossible. You could -sense- that you were seeing through living eyes.

The windows on the trains, the glass in the frames of standing advertisements. People’s eyeglasses. Anything with glass. Everyone was confused, but mesmerized. They watched scenes through the eyes of a flying animal whose sense of color was inhibited. A child in a crib. Something moving through trees high above the ground. A check-out clerk at a grocery store. Someone in prison. Each piece of glass was another living window on the world.

Some of them started taking photographs or filming it. But I knew what I was looking for. I began to scan the windows for the general signature of what I hoped to find. I searched all over the station as the clamor ascended. And then I found it. A window that showed what someone dreaming was seeing. And what I saw there remade my mind. It’s over. The world we believe in, the world of our expectations… what we think is going on… we were wrong. Almost completely. This changes everything. When they see what is in this window, everything is going to be different after that. Forever.

There are more windows I haven’t even found yet.