(Related to “Tabby Eyes")

The warble of the Humvee's engine clashed with the chipping of tire spikes along the ice. Through the doors she felt the invading Antarctic breath chill the metal around her thin wrists.

“Radie, you are to tell us what it wants. That’s it,” Agent Cooper said. Charlotte nodded.

She missed the ants.

As long as she could remember– since they took her from the orphanage– there had always been ants. They marched across every land they dragged her through.

How good they were, she thought. She cried when one was stepped on. The men in black suits beset a torrent of anguish over her life; chained wrists and tattooed numbers. The ants paraded kindly to a song: "food," "home," "mama.”

They were little blips of precious morse code; her only companions.

Although, the forests they took her to oozed with talk of stretching leaves to the sun, hippos steamed with mucky rage and monkeys pulsed with chipper tongues, she cared only for the ants.

Even now her hand, glazed in bacteria, rippled with a tiny, scintillating chorus: “alive,” “alive,” “grow,” “grow!” For she could hear them all, the mind of any living creature. It was why they took her and and used her.

From the expanse of the ghost-cold void at the bottom of the world, a mind older than any tree grew louder as they ventured into the measureless tundra.

Rotting fear oiled off of Agent Cooper; Agent Cooper who called her “Project Radar” and kept her hidden away from the sun.

Charlotte hated the human mind, for something else resided in that infinite lighthouse. It was unlike ant thought, or tree thought. It was evil. It hurt her.

Then she saw.

The sky misted over it a tint of blue. Its body was unbounded columns of stone, its head a great pyramid, housing fathomless eyes. The creature slouched onward miles away, shivering the ice with its steps.

It was a Biblical terror.

“Alright, stop. We’re far enough. She can read well outside of 100 kilos.” Cooper said.

“Start the recording. Radie, you know what to do, don’t ya girl ?” said Agent Porter.

He was right about one thing. She did know what to do. What Porter didn’t know was Charlotte had grown.

She was no longer a radar. She was a telephone.

She shouted at the gates of the leviathan mind; a vast palace of eon-long halls.

She poured into it every fragment of suffering; each torture inflicted by her captors, tugging the coattails of the titan: “help me,” “help me,” “help me.”

Her whole life. All at once. As hard as she could.

She was red and crying.

Cooper’s screams were washed over by a bottomless, doleful lamentation.

For the Angel heard the pleas of the ant; a precious blip of morse code.

And the very Earth trembled.