The Cube and the Cantilever

by Rudi Dornemann

The cube, immense and radiant, just appeared in the middle of the Bonneville salt flat and hovered about half a mile from the rest stop on I-80, which was as close as FEMA and army would let any of us get.

The rest stop was an atomic modern sweep of shade-bearing cantilevered wings, its now-retro futurism rendered quaint by the appearance of the cube in its utter simplicity and future-changingness.

The military brought Iraq-tested tents; the television crews, air-conditioned RVs. Us net journalists sweltered and unfurled our bedrolls in the back seats of our dust-covered cars. By some unspoken covenant, the rest stop was left empty, neutral territory where we exchanged wary small talk between briefings.

Which was fine by me. I’d arrived the day before the cube to photograph the rest stop for a mid-century design blog. I was supposed to get shots every fifteen minutes–more often at dawn or dusk. Kind of a Monet haystack thing.

So I was the first one posting shots of the cube, and that got us an unreal number of hits. I filed reports every hour on the hour, and all the pics I could snap. By the end of the first week, they were paying me more per day than I’d made in the last month.

It all went along in a sort of routine for six weeks–I couldn’t leave, because the powers that be weren’t issuing any new press passes, and we wouldn’t have had a shot at them if they were. Every few days, the scientists tried some new ploy. After the first couple ineffectual beams, shorted-out robot drones, and spontaneously combusting probe gizmos, it got a little repetitive, but we still got decent hits.

Then someone–no one later ever wanted to admit exactly who–decided to level the rest stop to make way for a hypersonic echo-imaging array.

So I chained myself to the nearest column and waited to face down the bulldozer.

Which never came, because the aliens chose that moment to reveal themselves, levitating down in silver-foil spacesuits with ridiculous 50’s sci-fi movie antennae.

Mid-century modern, it turned out, bore an uncanny resemblance to the design of their holiest shrines, and the I-80 rest stop had become a place of pilgrimage via the teletransport temple inside the cube.

Which was how I became ambassador to another world, and never again lacked for blog content.