Stolen Moments

The first one was easy, so easy that Magellan almost couldn’t believe it. The girl was sitting in the window as he was passing by, and it was the work of a moment – literally – to catch her attention tenderly in his grasp and redirect it to that middle space where nothing existed. Her eyes glazed over, and he could feel the way her mental energy shifted from thinking to absence. If Magellan had been corporeal, his heart might have leaped, or his stomach might have fluttered, or his face might even have split in a grin of delighted triumph, but he wasn’t, and so they didn’t. He watched the girl watch nothing until something in the room behind her made her start. She climbed off of the window seat and disappeared, but Magellan collected the three tiny golden specks that she had left behind in that middle distance, and because it was as much of his dimension as hers, he carefully pocketed them in wherever it was that his noncorporeal form pocketed things – he had very quickly become too afraid to keep asking his master questions, and sometimes you just had to trust the physics even if you couldn’t explain the physics – and blipped away to add it to the collection that his master had started some time ago.

The second one was just as smooth. This time, it was a man on the subway on his way home after a long shift, and when he finally blinked and rose to get off at his stop, muttering something under his breath about how he had managed to lose so much time, Magellan was able to collect seven entire specks. I bet I could get even more next time, Magellan thought as he gleefully snatched them up. There’s almost nothing to it.

“Only seven??” his master cried when Magellan returned and showed him his treasure. “At this rate, you’ll still be collecting these grains when the Sun explodes and swallows up the Earth! Use your training, boy, or what use do I have with you?”

Magellan wilted. “Yes, sir.”

“You can do this, my boy. Remember, it is all for the good. They need us to save them from themselves, and we can’t let their time run out.”

Magellan nodded fervently, and he went out to try again.

On his third try, he caught a child at a playground, swinging and dreaming of flight. Magellan caught the boy’s attention and squeezed four more specks out of the middle distance while the boy’s momentum slowed to a stop. As another child ran up to the swing set, Magellan grabbed her attention, as well, and was astonished to find that he could captivate both of them at the same time. Thirteen specks in total went back with him.

“Better, but still not enough,” his master grumbled, inspecting the tiny glinting bits before carefully pouring them into the vessel with the rest. The collection formed a decently-sized mound at this point, mostly collected by his master, a sort of brownish-golden hillock of grains that dislodged and trickled over one another as the new specks were added to the top. “This won’t even stop one ice cap from melting, or one reef from bleaching. We need more. More!”

“I can get more,” Magellan promised. Here he was corporeal, and his heart did leap and his stomach did flutter and his delighted grin of triumph did quite nearly split his face. “I learned a new trick.”

However, the fourth one was, Magellan imagined as he became more and more flustered, what it might feel like for a human who was just starting out to be a one-man band. Catching two humans at an outdoor cafe and sending their attention into absent space for a stretch of time that would never be known to them was easy enough, now he had done it once. But when he tried to grab the third person, he lost the first one to the distraction of a bright flag that lifted suddenly in a gust of wind, and when he tried again for three humans at once, he lost the second and third. He released the last person with a huff, cursed his lack of coordination, and blipped back to his master with a measly twenty specks. Grumpily, he dumped them into the vessel.

“I know,” he said testily as his master started to open his mouth. “Not nearly enough.”

The problem with humans, Magellan grumbled as he thought about where he might next find a suitable gathering of idle or wandering minds, was that they were so easily distractible. The issue with the last batch hadn’t really been an issue with him, though certainly he could stand some more practice at coordinating his efforts. What made them easy to catch for his own purpose made them almost as easy to lose to something or someone else. He needed them to be bored somewhere in large numbers, and where distractions were limited. He thought, and he thought, and for a while he despaired, and then he had it.

The university lecture hall was truly enormous. Magellan circled the room, listening to the professor drone on in the background of his consciousness, and then placed himself at the front of the room. Most of the students in the first rows were paying attention, but some of the students in the middle and back rows were subtly playing on their phones or having whispered conversations with their neighbors. Phones, Magellan huffed, and with a click of whatever he had in his noncorporeal form that acted like fingers – physics still continued to work even despite his ongoing ignorance of the mechanics – slowed down the wi-fi and data signals until they were entirely useless for loading anything in a reasonable amount of time. Humans were also so impatient. If he had had heels, they would have been drumming gleefully against the edge of the stage as he watched the humans first glare at their phones, then make disgusted faces at each other, then irritably tuck their phones away. Magellan got to work. When he was done, he had collected so many specks that as he was pocketing them to take back to the vessel, he had to very carefully not think about how the physics was basically turning his whole body, if he’d had one, into a pocket.

It was gratifying to see how wide his master’s eyes popped when Magellan blipped back and…well, upchucked was really the most accurate word – all of the specks into the vessel.

“Very good, my boy!” he crowed, clutching the clear sides of the vessel and watching greedily as the grains rained down. “More like this and we shall have it all in no time!”

Magellan belched, blew out five last specks, and collapsed to the floor. “In no time,” he repeated, and giggled drunkenly.

He collected and collected and collected. Airplanes and airports and business offices and even freeways and busy city streets when he learned how to send the humans’ attention away at a distance – anywhere people were mindlessly going through the motions of their day – all became his to command. He blipped back to the vessel gorged on all of the grains he pocketed, and the vessel filled and filled and filled. And one day, he went to collect, and everyone he saw was frozen in place, staring fixedly into that middle distance, and there was nothing left for him to collect.

Magellan blipped back and reported to his master what he had found. “Even the clocks are stopped,” he concluded.

“Aha! We have done it, my boy!” his master crowed, rubbing his hands together and gazing beatifically at the enormous vessel. It was an odd, sort of figure-8 shaped container that was wide at the top and bottom and narrow in the middle, and it was stuffed so full of those golden grains that none of them could shift or trickle past one another anymore, even if the vessel had been turned over. “Now we have put a stop to the humans doing any more damage to the rest of creation, and we will be able to send in crews to undo all of the damage that they have already done.”

“That seems like it could take a while,” Magellan hedged.

His master chuckled and patted the side of the astronomical vessel fondly. “It may,” he agreed cheerily. “But that’s all right. We have all the time in the world.”