Chapter 17 #2
“I don’t want it to be over,” I said, voice quiet.
“There’s too much left in the world that I want and need to do.
I want to see the next Pokémon game. I want to find out what happens with the X-Men.
I want to see my baby brother grow up, and know that he’s a cuckoo with a sense of ethics, just like our mom.
I want to see my friend Mark reunite with his little sister, and I don’t want to make the people who love me deal with losing me.
They’ve already lost so much in the last few years.
It’s not fair to ask them to lose even more. ”
The collective’s face contorted immediately into a scowl. “You act like you have an actual choice in the matter. We were trying to be polite.”
“I’m not interested in being polite. I’m just interested in going home.”
“You have committed crimes against the collective, Sarah Zellaby. You have acted against your own kind; you have killed without concern or discrimination for the innocent and the unwell. You are a criminal by any measure of the term, and for the sake of Johrlar’s treaties with our surrounding realities, you must be held accountable for what you’ve done. It’s nothing personal.”
“Really? Because it feels pretty damn personal.”
Between one breath and the next, the collective was gone, and I was alone with my whiteboard once again.
I turned back to it, but the math had lost some of its allure; it no longer beckoned me quite as openly, no longer seemed like a fractal flower caught in the moment of unfurling.
It was just numbers, pressed flat as insects under glass.
I still uncapped my pen and tried to go back to work.
I had to finish this equation.
I had to find a way to get us all home.
My life—my mind—might very well depend on it.
I barely noticed when the white began to fall apart around me.
I was too deep in the math, focused on the task at hand, and not paying attention to my surroundings.
Anyway, when the world is made of a single unrelenting, unadorned color, having spots appear in your peripheral vision will eventually become enough of a distraction to be worth noticing.
I turned toward the spots. They were gray and black, dissolving the edges of the void.
“Huh,” I said, replacing the cap on my pen. “Would you look at that.”
The spots continued to spread, nibbling away at everything.
There were already limits on my void, reducing it from an endless expanse of nothingness to a floating disk about the size of a carnival’s central ring.
If I closed my eyes, I could almost see the walls of the big tent surrounding me, keeping me safe from the oncoming collapse.
But they weren’t really there. None of this was really there.
I was deep in the recesses of my own mind, trapped in a rapidly disintegrating mental prison, and when it finished falling apart, I was going to wake up and need to deal with whatever was going to happen next.
I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding in the depths of my own thoughts, but I also didn’t want to wake up and deal with these people.
I didn’t like my distant relations very much.
Being the same species wasn’t enough to make us family, and they needed to stop acting like they got to have a say in how I or any of the members of my actual family lived our lives.
And at the same time, I knew I needed to be the face of whatever came next, lest they go looking for someone else to blame.
There weren’t many cuckoos left on Earth for them to accuse.
I didn’t want them going anywhere near the survivors.
I especially didn’t want them anywhere near Mark or Isaac.
If they didn’t already know how to find them, they could easily pull that knowledge from the minds of my family.
Thomas and Sam didn’t have any natural resistance to Johrlac telepathy.
They would crumble, and they wouldn’t even realize they were doing it.
No. I needed to wake up. I eyed the encroaching dissolution, sighed, and closed my eyes again, folding my arms across my chest like a vampire in a horror movie, then fell backward.
I didn’t hit the floor. Instead, I plunged through a substance that felt like thick foam on top of a cup of coffee, then kept sinking, down into warm, viscous fluid that surrounded and enveloped me in a softness like I had never known.
I could still breathe in the sea of whatever it was, and so I just relaxed, letting it take me wherever it was going.
When the softness faded, taking the sensation of rocking in the tide with it, the transition was almost jarring.
I kept my eyes closed, cataloging everything around me.
I could hear the same distant buzzing that had been present since I arrived on this world, now split into only three bands of sound, like competing swarms of cicadas.
I smelled flowers, floral and sticky-sweet and somehow more appealing than any flowers had ever been before.
And that … that was all. There were no other sounds, no other scents.
I opened my eyes, finding myself looking up at a ceiling made of the gray-brown papery substance that was their dominant building material.
I pushed myself into a sitting position.
I was on a bench crafted from slotted-together bamboo boards, in a small white room no larger than the pantry back at home.
There was a single door, more like the doors I knew back home than the sliding doors I’d seen so far: the hinges, if there were hinges, were on the outside. There would be no jailbreaks here.
I took a deep breath and pushed outward, looking for another mind.
I struck resistance almost immediately, running into invisible walls that stopped my reaching thoughts cold.
They hurt, in a way that was and was not pain, like the idea of pain was being weaponized against me.
I withdrew my thoughts, furling them back into themselves, and rose to pace the dimensions of the room.
It was eight by eight, roughly, and the walls were approximately as tall as they were long, making it a perfect cube.
Mathematical precision was exactly what I would have expected from these people, and yet somehow it managed to be almost surprising despite that predictability.
I returned to the bench, sitting down, and realized for the first time that I was no longer wearing the jumpsuit that had marked me—erroneously—as a municipal assistant.
Instead, I was wearing plain white pajama-type slacks and a matching top, all woven out of some sort of thin linen that barely felt like wearing anything at all.
I plucked at the fabric. It was perfectly temperature-regulating. I was neither warm nor cold.
It was like the entire place had been designed to synthesize the experience of being held in stasis, or to recreate the white void without the ability to summon anything I wanted.
Just to test that theory, I concentrated for a moment on how much I wanted a whiteboard, how nice it would be to get back to work.
Nothing happened. The room remained exactly as it was, and I was left without even a pencil.
Charming. I took another look around, taking note of the silence, which wasn’t oppressive, but was probably horrifying to someone who was accustomed to existing inside the comforting rhythm of a hive mind.
I was alone inside my head. It was pleasant, in its own way.
This was the sort of silence I’d been seeking since puberty, the kind that was normally only accessible in rooms that had been specially warded with anti-telepathy charms to keep my thoughts inside and the rest of the world outside.
I liked it, and I continued liking it as I closed my eyes and drifted into a natural, void-free sleep.
It was oddly restful, sleeping in the silence. When I yawned and stretched, I felt refreshed in a way that I hadn’t for years, which raised the question of why I had woken up in the first place. I paused, eyes still closed, to consider my surroundings.
The silence had changed.
It was still heavy as a blanket, covering and smothering everything around me.
The droning cut through the silence without actually diluting it, and it hadn’t changed in the least, but the silence …
oh, the silence was profoundly different now, in a way I couldn’t quite define.
I tried reaching out, experimentally, and physically recoiled as my mind brushed against two others, one to either side of me.
Their presence was a shock severe enough to almost make me lose my grasp on what I was trying to do.
I withdrew. The silence had changed because someone had removed or modified the dampeners that had been keeping my mind in and all the other minds out. I reached out again, more cautiously this time, and touched the two new minds I’d discovered.
They reacted, both of them, by pushing what felt like the mental equivalent of business cards at me. I picked them up, reading their pronouns—female—and positions—civic assistants—before I found their names. It wasn’t much of a shock when I did, but it was something of a relief.
Fetch, I said. Carry. Are you all right?
There was a long pause, long enough for me to start worrying that the break in the silence had only been large enough for me to push my thoughts out, not for them to reply. Then, in a mental voice that was barely above a whisper, Fetch asked, Sarah? Is that you?
It’s me! It’s definitely me. Are you all right? What are you both doing here?
I got the distinct impression that Carry had started crying. She wasn’t answering in words, only in a feeling of despair that broke over me like a wave, threatening to wash my own composure away.