Blue Rose
November 10th, 2005 | brainjuice
She had off-the-grid eyes, the kind of deep black you only saw in night skies outside the cities. Suddenly I was eight years old again, MIA from my hard little bed in the rented room of a farm in the back end of beyond, laying on my back in a cold field far from my parents’ shouting, seeing the stars for the first time in my life.
“Keep looking,” she said, moving closer with a dark creak of latex.
There was a fine ring of something sapphire, slender as spun silk, around her corneas. I looked deeper. There were tiny spidery lines of electric blue in her eyes, arcing out from vanishing points.
As I looked, the lines multiplied. They were blossoming from invisible buds, sketching themselves out into strange ghost-coloured flowers.
Blue roses were opening in her black eyes.
“Contact lenses,” she smiled, watching my face. “Hooked into the web. It’s night here, but morning in Europe. It’s a realtime representation of the internet waking up. Millions of connections activating for the day.
“Imagine if you were an alien, watching Earth from space, looking for signs of advanced life. This is what you’d see. A dark world with blue roses opening all over it.”
( (c) Warren Ellis 2005 all rights reserved — written back in March, mostly just expressing/roadtesting an idea/image)
is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as 
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