She is my guardian Angel, and I know for certain that, without her, I would not be alive. I owe her my life, and finding Julian again. She is my mother and my Angel, my teacher, my redemption. Without Gabrielle, I would be nothing, just ashes scattered by the wind.
My first memory of her is of her standing over my crib, in the “cocoon”, the little place in which I grew up – or at least I grew to be myself again, thanks to her. I remember her smile, and her kind brown eyes through the thick glasses.
I only know of the circumstances of my death through the documents she helped me to uncover, old newspapers and pictures. There is a blank I cannot fill, although I expect she could, but she wants to protect me from the horror. She is kindness personified. Yet I do not doubt her power, her infinite knowledge. She does not age, and she said to me that neither of us need ageing. We are, in some ways protected. I think the truth is that she protects me, and she is immortal. I don’t think she is from here, from this world. She may actually be an Angel, in truth.
Since my teens, I have studied, and she’s taught me many things that few humans know about, like the Lagrangian mathematics that explain much of modern physics. One day, in the little house which is our home – where the “cocoon” was but a small part – I walked into her study, and she was not there. Or, at least, the short plump woman I knew as Gabrielle was not there. The room was full of diagrams and lights gyrating in the air. They were changing at great speed. I was amazed, the colours were so beautiful, but I did not understand the symbols that looked like strange hieroglyphs…
Then she appeared, her usual self, as if out of nowhere. “Oh, Melissa, my apologies my darling. I did not realise you were here: have you been here long?” I said, “No, I just entered the room,” which was not exactly true. I was there, long enough to know that it was her, computing, at a speed and in a language that defied human understanding. But she had no shape; she was a pure computing being.
Gabrielle smiled and gave me a hug. The diagrams had disappeared and she conjured up a computer screen, near the oak table in front of the window. “I am going to show you something”… She then opened a series of table, full of equations, which amounted to an explanation of Fermat’s principle in the Lagrangian schema. It was about how light travels. I just about followed the maths, the diagrams and Gabrielle’s explanations. It seemed to be important to Gabrielle that I understood those equations, and she finally said, “Later I will explain why this is the basis of the next generation of simulators, ones that will allow you to travel far.”
I asked: “Gabrielle, dear mother, do you mean me, little me, or the whole of the human race?” And she smiled, her kind smile.
The house we live in is real, made of bricks, wood and mortar, but it appears invisible to anyone else. From the street, only I, and I guess Gabrielle in her human shape, can see it. The garden is beautiful, and I can walk there in safety: an Angel guards me.
Picture: Grave of Louise de Block 1874-1878 in Glass Tombstone Graveyard
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