Joseph found the binoculars on a Friday afternoon. The binoculars looked a little strange, kind of like some he had seen in a science-fiction blockbuster movie he saw once. He smiled as he picked the binoculars up from the park bench. It’s a good thing he was paying attention, he thought, he almost just walked by. But Joseph always pays attention. He is a sex maniac, after all, and is always on the prowl, looking in every direction for any sign of a possible liaison. So it’s good he found these, he thought, as he brought the binoculars to his eyes. He was in a major metropolis, in the city’s biggest park, on top of a hill on which he could see a good portion of the grassy hills on the East Side of the park. He could see a volleyball game being played by several young women near the bicycle path below. Admiring their forms, he whimsically wondered which of them are as horny as he is, and to his utter surprise four of them glowed a neon green, outlining them clearly.

Joseph’s intuition was that the binoculars were telling him exactly what he had wondered. He watched in amazement as they continued playing their game of volleyball, with almost half of them glowing an unnatural green. He wondered if his senses were accurate. He took the binoculars from his eyes and looked around him. Everything appeared normal. It wasn’t his eyes. He once again looked through the binoculars, but the green glow was gone. He concentrated. He wondered which of them would find him attractive. Three of the dozen or so women glowed the same bright green color. He smirked as he realized his new advantage. He couldn’t tell if any of the women now glowing were also glowing earlier, when he had wondered which of the women were as randy as he is. He concentrated on the two questions simultaneously: Are any of these women who would both find me attractive AND currently in the mood for romance? One of them glowed, and he smiled again. He kept the binoculars on her as he rose from the park bench, slowly walking towards the volleyball game. He examined her without the aid of his newfound toy, and wondered what he would say to her. He hid his magical binoculars in his gym bag and unabashedly began chatting with her about the weather, sports, their relative hunger levels. Neither of them were particularly self-conscious and within the hour they walked away to one of her favorite restaurants, leaving behind them a wake of her wisecracking friends.

As she gathered her clothes to leave Joseph’s apartment to meet her parents for dinner, he felt a special glow as he made sure his new binoculars were safely hidden from her. After she left, he quickly got his new toy out and ran to the window, concentrating on a new question: Who, now in my vision, just lied about having to met their parents for dinner? His new friend came into view but she didn’t glow green. Wow, she told the truth, he thought. He thought another question: Who was very recently just faking it? She glowed bright green as she walked out of his vision. No wonder she took off, he frowned and threw down the binoculars.

He wouldn’t let this get him down, though. He picked up his binoculars again and watched intently at the bustling throngs of people four stories below his window, and he concentrated on question after question.

Joseph had more sex, crazier sex, with more (and more attractive) partners than ever before. His binocular advantage was his secret. He found that the binoculars worked on photographs and filmed or televised images as well as live images. He eventually made his way as a gigolo to the stars, profiting handsomely off of appearing to know, and delight in, the innermost, kinkiest fantasies of the rich and powerful.

Until the day that his luggage was stolen on the way back from a secret trip to Belize with a pop singer from Brazil. She had no idea why he was freaking out so desperately because of something so petty as luggage.

“I’ll buy you a new set, and some new clothes. It’ll be fun!” she said.

He glowered at her with dewy eyes and continued checking the baggage claim for the fourteenth time. But it was gone. Forever.

Martin, a well-to-do heroin junky, had some cool new luggage. In the safety of his suburban home he put aside the pervy implements and fey clothing that he was too tall and skinny for anyway. Later he sold almost all of the contents of his bag at a variety of places. But he kept the cool spaceman-looking binoculars he thought was probably a movie prop for a science-fiction movie or something.

In his quest for heroin, crack, and various prescription pills, Martin eventually sold almost all of his possessions, but still had his job since he needed every last bit of money. Sales jobs aren’t particularly demanding, time-wise, but he had such a gift for selling things that his commissions kept rolling in.

It was when he found out the true properties of his binoculars that he quit his job. Incredibly high, he was looking aimlessly at the windows of his neighbors houses when he wondered who else had some “good shit” as he called it. The house directly across the street did. Who here is home? Many houses glowed, but not the one with the drugs. Which doors are unlocked? The sliding door in the back of the house-with-glorious-drugs glowed green. That night, he squirreled away several pounds of some of the most potent heroin he had ever tried in his life. For some strange reason, he didn’t leave his house at all for the next two months. Then he died of a massive heroin overdose.

The detective who examined the body noted the good condition of the middle-aged corpse, but changed his opinion when he learned the actual age of the dead junkie, Martin Kensit, age 27. He thought he was a well-preserved forty-something year old, given the neighborhood and the victim’s style of clothes, car, furnishings, music, etc.

Detective Adam Smith later grabbed the cool-looking binoculars from the maze-like evidence complex only because they looked like Luke Skywalker’s binoculars at the beginning of Star Wars. He thought his eleven-year-old would think it’s cool. But as he looked through the binoculars expecting to see Sand People, he instead saw Detectives Briggs and Mayfield walking out of evidence room 17. As he wondered in passing what they took from the room, a brightly-glowing green showed under a bulge in Briggs’ jacket. At lunchtime, Adam surreptitiously checked Briggs’ office, and in the false bottom of his bottom drawer (every Detective has one, he thought) Adam found a bulging packet of pungent marijuana, several ounces at least. No wonder Briggs is always so damn calm, he thought, as he slid out of the room, chuckling.

Detective Smith rose to Police Chief in just six short years. No one seemed to know how he did it. They also wondered about how he could afford the new house in the exclusive neighborhood, the boat, the vacations, the jewelry for his wife. He claimed it was the stock market, and after an extensive police corruption investigation, he was vindicated. It was true. Three stocks alone had made him a multimillionaire. But how did he solve so many cases all by himself, his co-workers wondered. They never did find out. He was murdered, most likely by Donald Caffrey, the real estate developer who Smith was investigating at the time of his death.

Donald had to kill that eerily effective policeman. That detective was taking out all his best operatives. Donald did it himself. His alibi was airtight and he burned his clothes and gloves afterwards, but as always he kept a single memento. The binoculars were like none he had ever seen before. He would use them at the Opera tonight, cementing his daylong string of alibis. He never got bored of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

But Donald never wondered about anything. He simply knew things. So he never did get to find out the special properties of the policeman’s strange-looking binoculars. He never noticed the transceiver in the binoculars, or the miniscule plug-ins for who-knows-what on the sides of the binoculars. He was always scheming and planning, but never at the Opera. That was for relaxing and feeling the music.

It was then that the Bajmicheans could clearly see that they should indeed annex system XY-442. It’s dying giant yellow sun suggested life, and indeed there was, intelligent at that. The relic they left for sentience testing on the third planet sent regular transmissions on its use as well as the images and sounds that surrounded it. The usage of the binoculars was the sole factor in deciding what the Bajmicheans would be doing with the system. The inhabitants of the industrial society of Earth had proven perfectly self-absorbed and were to be whisked away to Dyson Sphere #17 as slaves. The planets and star of system XY-442 would be collapsed for material resources. It had all been decided. Within the week, the skies of earth were black with slave ships. The total evacuation of Earth and the absorption of its entire solar system took ten days. But days would now be an outdated and irrelevant way of measuring time. And English would be one of hundreds of forgotten languages amongst humanity, which was only one of hundreds of enslaved species to the ruthless Bajmicheans and their species-measuring binoculars.

copyright,  © 2006 Jason Sayre.