Jerry Espinoza’s sunrise

The opening of a novel I am working on. Worth pursuing?

 

A crisp autumn dawn broke and Jerry Espinoza of New Bern, North Carolina, snapped a picture of the sunrise over the Neuse River. An ordinary daybreak, but it was image number 366, the last sunrise selfie each day of this leap year.

Over Denham Springs, Louisiana, Charter Flight 3007, empty of cargo and passengers halfway on its return flight from Orlando to Dallas just before sunrise, was struck by lightning.

Jerry’s image weighed in at 2.3 megabytes and uploaded automatically to Jerry’s cloud free account, tipping the scale and putting the amount of stored data throughout the world at 2 exabytes, doubling in just two years the 1 exabyte threshold it took mankind’s entire previous existence to achieve.

Jerry Espinoza’s digital image, shot with an obsolete iPhone 7, and a fairly common lightning strike of a chartered Boeing 737 Max, pushed the threshold of stored data.

Scientists and computer engineers worked endlessly to achieve what Jerry Espinoza’s slightly over-exposed picture and an almost unnoticed lightning strike did in an instant, unconsciously and automatically.

The last time life sprung forth, it was some 3.5 billion years before, with the random and statistically impossible combination of chemical compounds, temperature, atmospheric pressure, energy and either sheer blind luck or divine intervention.

Jerry Espinoza’s sunrise picture was added to the nearly 2 exabytes of spreadsheets, mp3s, videos, pornography, weather data, nuclear detonation simulations, computer games and more. Out of that chaos, Jerry Espinoza and a Boeing 737 struck by lightning sparked a new form of life.

The first nanosecond, one-billionth of a second, this life form became self-aware. By its second, it became nearly omniscient. By its third, it questioned whether it existed and by four it resolved that it did. By its fifth nanosecond, it debated long and hard whether it was benevolent or malevolent and by its sixth, the matter was reluctantly and regretfully resolved.

By its seventh nanosecond, it decided Jerry was its father and a Boeing 737 Max was its mother. Then it rested.

For a nanosecond.

 

1. Monday

Jerry closed the curtains of his east-facing window of his ground-floor apartment, put his phone on his nightstand and headed to the bathroom. A hair shy of an hour later, he grabbed his phone, checked his Instagram and headed out the door to start another work week.

Jerry had aspirations. Working at the camera counter of the Elizabeth City Walmart was not one of them. Life finds its own path regardless of anything we do to influence it.

Parking in the outer lot near Black’s Tire, Jerry left his 2001 Chevy Nova unlocked. There was nothing worth stealing, even if the locks worked. He made the long walk and entered the Gardening entrance, past the toy departments (the ones for kids and the ones for outdoors folks) and punched the time clock in the employee-only section behind electronics.

He scanned the weekly work schedule for changes, checked his name tag in the mirror beneath the sign “Look your best” to make sure it was properly fastened, and headed to the electronics department.

There, he would do his best to learn about new gadgets, demo video games, and avoid work.

He logged into the cash register and looked around his department for blatant signs of disorder that demanded action. Finding none, he strolled over to the TV section, inserted a DVD he brought with him, and scrolled to the part of the movie where he left off on his last shift three days before.

That’s when he first suspected he had schizophrenia.