The Voice of Europa

by Edd

It started three days ago when the Statue of Liberty uprooted itself. Shaky camphone footage showed it shivering, gouts of broken concrete fountaining up around its base, then it simply floated upward, one hapless tourist from Indiana caught inside.

The same thing happened to the Great Pyramid of Giza a few hours later, a lone archeologist unable to escape with the rest. A small submarine on display at the Teknorama Museum in Stockholm was next. A sixteen-wheeler in Venezuela, houses in Milan, Osaka, and Capetown, Cinderella’s Castle from Hong Kong Disneyland.

Each of them with one passenger. It was enough, people said, to make you think it was done on purpose.
Telescopes tracked the Pyramid, the largest of the lot, as it sailed through space. Astronomers tracked its course, said it was destined for Europa, sixth moon of the planet Jupiter.

And then there’s me, Lydia Parkhouse of Melbourne, a City Circle tram driver. Two hours ago I was caught up with my streetcar and pulled across the solar system without so much as a how do you do. My car’s not airtight, but not a drop of air escaped.

Europa, at least that’s what it had to be, expanded in my windscreen. It’s grey, with ice at the poles. Red lines crisscross it like map lines that almost make sense. I land in a cluster of odd objects dominated by a pyramid at one end and a castle at the other. When I emerge, still breathing, the voice tells me, tells all of us, what comes next.

We look at one another, we lonely long distance travelers, before entering our vehicles once more.