Franklin looked at the incredible object that he had stumbled upon, and witnessed the splendor that is reality. Here, on this mountain, he was alive. Every antecedent moment was merely an image from a vast, hazy dream. Now that he had ascended the mountain, Franklin had achieved that which he had sought for all his fifteen years of life: wonder. Soon he would experience his own birth.

The trail was at least a mile away; his parents would not find him. These mountains were woody, dense, and they smelled of pine. During the ascent, Franklin ran ahead of the hiking group and out of view. As he stared down at the man-sized marvel which lay on the grass in from of him, he did not worry that others might worry. They probably had just assumed that he was far ahead of the group, rushing headlong in his eagerness to reach the summit.

Now that summit didn't seem so lofty to Franklin. Not since he heard the noise, and rushed towards it against all better judgment in his eagerness and curiosity. Over root, rock and log he rushed towards the high-pitched whine. Then, after a few minutes, the sound faded, leaving Franklin lost in the dark forest and wondering why he ever choose to run towards the weirdness.

Weirdness was how Franklin defined himself. As a child, he would collect insects and keep them in jars. When he was older, he would catch snakes and frogs and keep them in terrariums. Science Fiction was his primary pre-occupation, and he had always wondered why humans in the real world never experienced anything truly strange; to Franklin, the ordinary was incomprehensible.

No one paid attention to him. His teachers saw him as a quiet, attentive student, nothing more. In school, his peers would either tease or ignore him. The few friends he did have were little more than playmates. Sure, they played video games with him, cracked jokes with him--they were amiable most of the time. Then when Franklin would talk about those things that were closest to his heart, they'd listen but never commiserate.

"What would we do if aliens were real?" he would often wonder. "Our lives would change forever if we even just knew they existed."

Franklin eventually stopped asking these questions, and looked within himself for the answers he sought. He began keeping an extensive journal chronicling his thoughts. Most other teenagers his age would write about girlfriends, school anxieties, but Franklin would write down his observations of humanity as an alien character. Within the bindings of his journal, Franklin was known as Pryler Eunix. He created this character as a means of being objective in his view of mankind.

Every day that he went to school, he went as Pryler Eunix. No longer were the faculty the oppressors, and his fellow students pawns in petty games of popularity. They were all simply data to be analyzed. The process of analysis took over two years, and when he finally reached his conclusion it depressed him.

"Human beings," he wrote, "do not have enough imagination to solve the problems of the 21st century. I recommend that we study these beings while we still can and collect a breeding population for relocation to a suitable planet."

After pondering the ramifications of his analysis, Franklin retired the alien and wrote about mundane matters of everyday life. He started dating girls, then was rejected by same girls. There was still too much of that alien character still alive in him. Other humans couldn't help but detect this, and it frightened them.

"So, what are the kinds of things that you're into?" a girl once asked him in a mexican restaurant.
"Well," he replied, "I like computers, and unix-like operating systems. Playing with computers helps keep me from being too worried about how we're all going die, you know, as a species. I really don't think it'll be global warming, though; instead, I think we'll run out of food and starve."

The evening was quite awkward from that point forward. What was to Franklin an observation he wished to share, was to the girl a horrible, evil thing to suggest. So went most of his dating experiences. No matter how far along he would get with a girl, he would eventually say something that would destroy the nascent relationship. After a while, Franklin eventually gave up on being accepted into society, and withdrew into apathy.

He'd stare into his computer screen late at night while playing Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing games; a meaningless repetitive task to numb his frustration. Something for him to do to distract him from the fact that he was really doing nothing at all.

Then summer came, and his parents decided to take an interest in his well-being. They planned a two-week vacation to British Columbia. As despondent as Franklin was, he still reveled in the opportunity to investigate something new. On this particular hike up this particular mountain Franklin had felt energized. The object was calling him, even then.

The object was egg-shaped, glass-smooth, with a myriad of shapes and colors undulating beneath the surface. Franklin has spotted it from trees and rushed across a plateau towards it. Now that he had found the object, he wished that he had never ascended. The cool wind rushed over his short brown hair. Birds chirped merrily in the trees. The normalcy of this moment made it all the more bizarre.

"What shall I do with what I've found?" asked Franklin, to no-one in particular. From behind, he sensed a familiar presence.

"You must touch it, Frank," said Pryler Eunix, in his trademark monotone voice. This would happen sometimes; he would project Pryler Eunix outside of himself. Though in recent months he had all but forgotten about the alien character. He turned around.

Now he could see the gaunt, foreign creation of his own mind standing before him as real as any human being, and seeing him in this way terrified Franklin. "You weren't so scary when I felt like I was you," said Franklin before turning his attention back to the object.

"'Monsters' do not see themselves as others do," said Pryler Eunix as he walked up to the object and placed an angular, ice blue hand upon the surface. "By doing this, now, I just made you real; you must do the same to make me real."

Blood suddenly rushed from Franklin's cheeks, "What are you talking about! I made you!" he exclaimed. The alien stared back at Franklin with orange-sized, obsidian eyes.

"While it may be true that I made you, now you must make me in return. Touch the object, Frank, and you will understand."

"Do I really want to understand?" replied Franklin.

"I know you more intimately than any other being in the universe does, Frank. There is nothing you know that I don't know too."

Stunned, Franklin nodded, then slowly reached towards the object, feeling the surface with his squishy fingertips. He had to understand; Pryler Eunix was right about that. Few things were frightening enough to overcome his curiosity.

For a few brief moments, he knew nothing more than the unceasing wind upon his face. Then came the atom, the molecule, and even the very essence of consciousness. Franklin remembered the very moment of his own birth within a folded dimension of space and time. A creature which hitherto did not exist invented his entire life so that this moment could occur. Time was not as it once had been--now it was as clear and objective as any dimension in space. He saw the entirety of his life as if it were a building, an ordered structure that was crafted and honed by a skilled architect.

What Franklin had originally experienced as reality faded back into perception, and he saw an eagle flying overhead. "Why build me?" Franklin enquired as he fell back from the object onto the soggy ground.

"Because consciousness is the rarest thing in the universe," said Pryler Eunix while he fidgeted with a small, oblong device.

Franklin struggled to comprehend the enormity of the new information. "But why do you value it, Pryler Eunix?"

"So long as there it one conscious being alive in the universe," Pryler Eunix said while placing the oblong device on top of the object, "the universe exists."

"Like a tree falling in forest," Franklin mused. He observed the oblong device as it melted into the body of the object, becoming what could only be described as a rippling tetrahedron.

"That which is observed, is," Pryler Eunix said, "and whatever is not perceived somehow can never be . This mountain, for example, is majestic to your people, am I correct?"

"Yes it is--at least to some of us."

"Could it be majestic without you?"

Franklin shook his head and managed to stand on two wobbly feet, "No, I don't think it could."

Sitting down on top of the egg-shaped object--which Franklin now suspected was a craft of some sort--Pryler Eunix seemed to sigh. "My people do not know majesty. I did not now majesty until I came to this world a few moments ago and created you to see. You are one of the most intensely aware beings on this planet--I needed you to be. I apologize if this has resulted in a lonely life for you. My mission here was one of understanding. I shall bring the sense of majesty home to my people."

"But you didn't even exist a few moments ago!" replied Franklin.

"Neither did you, Frank. Keep in mind from this moment forward that even though you are a creation of our technology that you are no less real than any other living thing. You are an extension of myself, and I am also an extension of you."

Momentarily unable to voice his own thoughts, Franklin stared into the unfathomable black eyes of the skinny blue extraterrestrial. Slowly, he opened his mouth to speak: "This is the moment of our birth, isn't it? We're brothers, of a sort."

"Indeed we are, Frank. Now, I must depart, as this moment has fulfilled itself; I must go and deliver consciousness to my people. You must go back to your people and deliver consciousness to them."

"But I don't want to go ba--" Franklin suddenly found himself on the top of the mountain, viewing a good portion of the planet Earth. Like that, it was all over. No farewell, no extraneous information was exchanged; just a brief, necessary encounter. Turning around, he saw his father approaching, and wondered if he could ever give this experience a name. It was as alien to him as majesty had been to Pryler Eunix.

"Hey, Frankie, what can you see from here?" his father asked him, while grinning from ear-to-ear and sweating profusely despite the cold.

Taking a deep, cool breath of icy Canadian air, Franklin said in his soft-spoken manner, "I can see far more than I ever expected to."