Aurora Borealis

“Welcome to our Northern Lights Sightseeing Tour!” said the captain as we left the small harbour. “Open your hearts to the flow of the universe!”

“That's why I am here.” I thought “I'm ready to connect with the Flow.”

But I'm not sure what I was really waiting for, standing on board on that small cruiser, watching the Lights as they slowly appeared and faded in the North over the horizon. What else could the universe show me? It had already shown me more than I had expected and even more than I could understand.

My name is Kevin, but this is the story of Annelis.

Annelis was my classmate at the Department of Probability and Statistics and she was one of the best students in our class. And also the prettiest girl I have ever known. We were very good friends and spent a lot of time together. We often went to the cinema, to concerts and exhibitions. Yet, she married one of my best friends, Steven, a fellow student at our Department. She probably thought that Steven was more mature for a marriage. Who knows? I'll never find out.

After graduation, I stayed on to do a PhD and then worked as an assistant professor at our Department. Annelis and Steven started working at a research centre, but we still saw each other quite often, maybe once a month or so. We always had lots of fun.

Less than a year after graduation, Steven called me one evening, his voice filled with despair.

“Annelis went jogging more than an hour ago and she is not back yet, and she does not answer the phone either.”

It was a tough night. We looked everywhere in the neighbourhood, followed the route she normally took, asked people still on the street whether they had seen anything unusual, but without any success. We also reported her disappearance to the police, but they said that similar disappearances happened from time to time, and that she might be home in the morning.

The next day I saw Annelis' picture in the local papers: “disappeared while jogging, wearing black leggings and a blue hoodie with ‘Santorini, Greece’ printed on her back.”

Later that day the police informed Steven that no one had seen her, she had not been captured by any of the surveillance cameras in the neighbourhood and that they could not even trace her mobile signal after she had left the house.

According to Steven, they were not fighting before she left. She was friendly with everyone. She had no enemies. They had already plans for the winter, skiing in Italy, and even for the summer, two weeks in Spain in a caravan. He did not think she had any secrets. She was a reliable person and that was even confirmed by her company. We simply did not understand. Where on earth could she be?

All that happened twenty years ago and her case is still unresolved. Steven remarried in the meantime, after she was officially declared presumed dead. The police investigation could not find anything unusual apart from the fact that no one knew where she was. No body had been found in the neighbouring river and lakes, no accidents had been reported, there were no UFO sightings at the time. So her case was closed.

If I’m honest with you, I’ve always missed her and could never forgive her for choosing Steven over me, but that’s another story.

One day, Steven called me. He was very excited. “I’ve got a message from Lis.” he said. “She got stuck somewhere in between. She needed twenty years to find a way to communicate with me.”

“Are you sure it’s from her?” I asked. “What do you mean by ‘stuck in between’?”

“Do you remember our dice-rolling experiments? Last weekend we played Backgammon with the kids and I found a funny repeating pattern in my dice-roll scores. It did not let me sleep until I decoded it and that’s how I found the message from Lis.”

“But wherever she’s right now, how could she possibly influence your dice-roll scores?” I tried to think rationally, but I also understood Steven. The idea of getting in touch with Annelis, after so many years, was something we had never expected.

“I know it sounds rather irrational, I still remember our debate about the correlation between the number of dice rolls and the expected value back at the university, but in this case I’m almost sure that there is a hidden message in the dice sequences. In Backgammon you roll two dices and I have translated the scores into letters. There were some parts that I could not decode, but the message is something like: ‘I can see her in the Northern Lights tonight.’”

“But you cannot possibly believe that a random dice sequence decoded into letters can be a message from somewhere we do not even know exists.”

“I do not think we have the technique to reproduce it, but let’s have a try. Come to my place in the evening and check it out together.”

I cannot say I was convinced, but I was curious to find out what it was all about. I also hoped to find out more about Annelis.

In the evening, I arrived sometime before sunset. Steven showed me the sequences from his experiments. More than five hundred dice rolls with a repeating pattern. I knew it could be anything and it would still be normal. A chimpanzee could write Romeo and Juliet if we gave it a typewriter and infinite amount of time.

We discussed the probability of having repeating dice sequences for a while, but when the last rays of the sun disappeared to the west, we took our glasses and sat on the balcony watching the northern sky. I got a little excited and I assume Steven did as well. First, there were a few lines like a sandstorm in slow motion, but later it produced a more compact form.

“It’s her, it’s Lis!” Steven got totally excited. To me, it was something that could have been a woman's face, but also anything else.

After a few minutes, the ‘face’ dissolved and thin lines were moving slowly in a way as if someone wanted to write on the sky using a paintbrush.

At the beginning, I was rather sceptical whether anyone from ‘in between’, whatever it meant, could send a message using dices and the Aurora Borealis, but as I watched the sky producing some cursive letters, I had to revise my attitude. There were three letters forming slowly, but quite clearly, in front of our bare eyes on the sky: ‘Lis’.

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