"Did you see that?" he says, breathless.
"I don't know." I stop the recording, press the replay button at a ten-second index, then move the action forward in slow time.
"There!" he yells, and points.
I do see it. With my own eyes-just as my mom had written in her notes.
"Bri, is there any way to enlarge the picture?"
"This isn't live action, Ryan. You can't zoom in. It's just a vid-recording." I sense him squirm. I know I'm shaking too. Some things are just too hard for your senses to accept. On a scale of ten of unbelievability, this is a twenty. Off the charts.
I hear Debby walking around upstairs. Our relic of a house, built in the late twentieth century, has terrible insulation and the old wooden floors squeak. I know exactly where she is by how each board groans under her feet.
We watch as a number of lab workers hurry over to my mom. She echoes my own thoughts.
"Dave, did you catch that on camera? Let me see it on the projector."
I can't make out anything being said; such a commotion erupts in the room. I hear my mom's voice raise insistently. "No, I was not holding a pencil. I don't have a pencil on me. It fell out of the air, right here. Hold on." My mom gestures everyone to calm down while she looks at the camera. The lens goes dark, then we see the replay. Ryan gets his wish as Dave adjusts the projection and we see the event repeat, up close and personal from the camera's view.
With the action honed in and slowed down, we watch my mom walk over to the dark hanging screen. As she stands waiting, perhaps for the laser to fire, a mechanical pencil appears out of nowhere, hovers in the air for a split second, then falls with a quiet clack on the polyurethane floor.
Ryan stands mesmerized, listening to the volleying of voices. A room of scientists arguing the impossibility of empirical evidence witnessed by a half dozen people. I pick up the vid-binder and quickly peruse the next few pages. My mom speculated plenty over the following three days, but when I come to the next entry and read what happened, I rush back over to the disk box, pull out another holo-disk dated four days later, then put it in the player.
This time we both stand in complete silence. Perhaps the shock renders us speechless, for what we see boggles the mind.
My mother, again standing in the same spot. The laser firing up, the sound of electrical current, humming, buzzing. Six people off to the side, observing. My mom giving a nod, the camera swiveling to show the path the beam would take. I recognize the setup of the Bose-Einstein condensation vacuum used to slow down a light beam as it travels. The camera swings back to the target and, there, a small prick of light bores into the dark screen. Whoever holds the camera this time zooms in close.