Daimones - Book 1 of the Daimones Trilogy. Booktrope Publishing Edition

The Click

Virtual Presences

Easter Sunday. For all Christian communities it was a date to celebrate with family and friends. Easter Monday would be, too, and Annah enjoyed the holiday from lessons. Taxi and Tarantula profited aplenty from Annah's freedom. Dates, celebrations, and recurring events were vital to observe for, in a sense, they were all that was left, the last tie with everything that was no more. Ephemeral things, days on the calendar had more meaning for us now than they had before.

Mary opened the window in the home office that morning and yelled. "Dan."

Annah and I were in the yard taking care of—or playing with, to be honest—Taxi and Tarantula.

"Dan. Come upstairs, quick." She sounded thrilled, not frightened.

"What the... Mary? Mary!" I shouted from down below. From the window on the top floor, she waved her hands excited. "The Facebook ads!"

She didn't need to say more. Both Annah and I rushed upstairs. When we arrived, Mary, triumphantly, pointed at the iMac screen. It showed the dashboard for the campaigns we launched back in February, with all the data collected into graphs.

Of all the details about reach, target, and others statistics, only one meant anything to us: the number of clicks... One!

The enormity of the event is difficult to explain or describe in words now. One person; one concrete, unquestionably real and strikingly present survivor. Someone saw and had clicked on our message.

One click. With one single click somewhere in the world, our world had abruptly changed again.

We checked all our email accounts. The last messages received were the usual automatic emails acknowledging our initial attempts to post into moderated forums or subscribe to mailing lists. No human beings involved. Now, it had to be just a matter of hours before we would be contacted by whoever had seen our message.

The phones. I checked again to see if all were working. We had used them recently but they could die at any moment. Maybe we had a recorded message we had inexplicably missed. Nothing. Our voicemail was empty.

"It will happen. It will happen. Any moment now," I told Mary, more to reassure myself than anything else. She and Annah watched as I verified again the campaign target details. "Twenty-five countries. That one click could come from anywhere."

The dashboard had no details as to when the connection happened, not the date or the time. "Yesterday morning the click was not there. I'm sure because I went through the campaign ad details. If it happened during the previous night...could that mean it is from someone in the U.S.? No, wait, maybe someone in the Far East? So many time zones separate us. Mary, did you check the page yesterday?"

I accessed the dashboard in the mornings, and it seemed impossible I had missed it. Wait a second; indeed the click could be from someone in Europe. Maybe someone had checked our message during the evening, and we missed it because no one had verified the page before going to bed.

"I don't remember." Mary noticed my anguished expression as I opened my hands. "How could you not remember?"

"I don't remember exactly, okay? I think I did." She took a deep breath. "Yes, I checked before dinner."

Admittedly, with time, we had started to believe we'd have no luck at all with the Facebook campaign. We were no longer systematically following the initial scheduled check routine. I believed the probability that someone could actually see our message, and react, depended on so many factors that the whole thing had started to have only an emotional value, a faint hope.