Static

The television woke up wrong.

Soren had found the knob that did it, way around the back, and when it caught, the gray screen filled with a roar of black and white snow. No picture. Just speckle, jumping and crawling, the loudest quiet thing in the attic.

"That's it," said Maya. "That's all it does?"

"It's not broken," Soren said. "That's static. Grandma's old TV catches the channels that aren't there anymore." He leaned close. The snow kept moving and never repeated. "Some of it is leftover light from the beginning of the universe. I read that. A tiny bit of this is the Big Bang."

"A tiny bit," Maya said.

"A tiny bit."

They watched it crawl. Maya hated it and could not look away, which was a feeling she got around things that were almost something.

"Squint," she said.

"What?"

"Squint at it. I keep seeing faces." She pointed. "There. A dog. No. Gone."

Soren squinted. "Okay, yeah. A hand. It's not a hand." He laughed. "My brain is making it up."

"Out of nothing," Maya said. "Out of the snow."

They sat with that for a second, the television hissing.

"My cousin's phone does the opposite," Soren said. "You type words and it draws a picture. You type a fox in a teacup and it just makes one. A real-looking one."

"From nothing."

"From noise, actually." Soren reached for his notebook and wrote a line down, the pencil scratching almost as loud as the static. "He showed me. It starts as snow. Just like this. Then it clears up into the picture, step by step."

Maya turned and looked at him.

"Say that again."

"It starts as static. The fox comes out of the static."

"No," Maya said. "Backwards. You said it backwards on accident and it was right." She was up on her knees now. "Run a picture backwards into snow."

Soren frowned. "What do you mean."

"Take a photo. A real one. The fox. Add a little snow." She flicked her fingers at the screen. "A little more. A little more. Keep going. What do you get at the end?"

"This." Soren looked at the roaring gray. "You get this. You get pure static. The fox is gone."

"Anything turns into this if you add enough snow," Maya said slowly. "A fox. A face. Grandma. Everything dissolves into the same snow."

"So they're all the same at the end," Soren said. He had stopped writing. "Every picture in the world ends up looking like this one screen."

"So how does the phone go the other way?" Maya said. "It can't. If everything ends in the same snow, you can't get back. You can't tell which snow was a fox."

That was the wall. They both hit it at the same time and sat there.

The television hissed and crawled.

Soren spoke first, carefully. "What if you watched it dissolve a million times."

"Watched what."

"Every picture. Millions of pictures. You add the snow one speck at a time and you watch, really watch, what a picture looks like one speck before it's gone. And one speck before that." He was talking faster. "You don't learn the whole way back. You just learn the last little step. How to take something almost-snow and make it the tiniest bit less snowy. The tiniest bit more like a picture."

Maya got it. He could see her get it.

"One speck," she said. "You only ever learn to undo one speck."

"But you learned it from millions of pictures. So you know what one-speck-less-snow looks like for foxes, for faces, for water, for everything. You know what the world tends to clean up into."

"And then you start from snow," Maya said, "any snow, fresh snow, snow that was never a picture at all." She put her hand flat in the air in front of the screen, not touching it. "And you undo one speck. And one more. And it doesn't know where it's going. It just makes the snow a little more like the kind of thing pictures are."

"Every step it asks, what would make this less like noise and more like something."

"And a fox walks out," Maya said. "A fox that never existed. Out of snow that was never a fox."

The attic was very quiet except for the thing that was not quiet at all.

"It's not remembering a picture," Soren said. He said it like he was holding it gently. "It never saw this fox. It learned what less-snowy looks like, in general, from everything. And the picture is just where the cleaning-up ends."

Maya looked at the screen, at the snow that was crawling and jumping and never once repeating.

"Soren," she said. "There's a fox in there right now."

"There's no fox in there."

"There's a fox and a face and Grandma and the ocean and a city that nobody built yet. They're all in there. In this exact snow on the screen. Every single one is one careful speck away." Her voice had gone small. "We just can't undo the specks. The phone can."

Soren stared at the static. He had stopped seeing snow.

He was seeing all of it, every picture that could ever be cleaned out of the noise, layered into the same gray roar, waiting for someone who knew how to take away one speck at a time.

"It's not empty," he whispered.

"It was never empty."

The television hissed its leftover light from the beginning of everything. Maya reached out and turned the knob, slowly, watching the snow the whole way down, until the screen went black with a soft electric pop.

In the dark she could still see the afterglow of it, gray and crawling, fading on the inside of her eyes.