Day Five #2
The crystals were translucent—or at least, this one was.
The flashlight let out a warm white beam, and the blue crystal split and scattered it, bathing her in iridescent blue.
It was a simple trick but the effect, here in the middle of it, felt strong.
Zhaleh turned the beam this way and that, twisting the blue beam to meet the yellow-pink cube, the jasper, the feldspar, the moss-granite.
They glinted, each seeming to acknowledge the other. Kelli stared at them, fascinated.
“As the light passes through one crystal and meets the next,” said Zhaleh, “it forms a grid. As the grid forms, its energies pass through you; people are a little translucent, so technically the light is moving through you already. Some people say they can feel it—a light pressure, or a warmth, or a tingling.”
This was nonsense. It was like what a language model would say if it was prompted to come up with crystal-healing babble. But Kelli could swear that she did feel it, all of a sudden. A diamond lattice made of those stones and beams of light, humming around her, boxing her in.
She watched as Zhaleh moved to the pink-yellow cube, pouring light through that one. It prismed into a hazy golden beam, and Zhaleh methodically turned it to meet each of the adjacent stones. The turquoise. The jasper. The moss-granite.
The light swung down toward the black and irregular shadow stone.
Kelli was abruptly sure that she could not let the light hit that stone.
The shadow stone would swallow it all up.
It would swallow her. Something horrible would happen.
She could feel that, not just in the way she felt her normal fears, but physically, as the light slowly turned across her body and down.
She kicked out, scattering the stones. Instantly the diamond lattice vanished from her consciousness. She grabbed at a handhold and tugged herself into a corner, panting, barely able to explain herself. “No, that’s too much, stop, stop, stop, stop.”
With a loud click, Zhaleh switched the flashlight off. “Okay. I’ve stopped. You all right?”
“What was that?” Kelli demanded. “What were you doing to me?”
“Nothing that you didn’t see me doing,” said Zhaleh.
She sailed around the room, nonchalantly picking the stones up and stowing them back in her bag, while Kelli huddled anxiously in her corner.
“I waved around some stones, I shone a light through them, I talked. Has anyone ever told you that you’re highly suggestible? ”
Kelli glowered. She usually only heard the word suggestible when people were talking about hypnosis, which Kelli had never done. She could infer more or less what Zhaleh meant, though.
“If you’re trying to say I’m na?ve,” she bit out, “and I believe whatever anybody tells me, and you can just prompt me like a robot, then yeah, don’t worry, I’ve heard that one before.”
“Suggestibility isn’t quite that. You might be both. But suggestibility is a quality of the imagination. When you’re supervising a script, you picture the scene, don’t you? Vividly. Not necessarily in a visual way—people vary—but you feel it somehow. As if you were there.”
Kelli blinked at her. She’d never quite articulated that feeling to anybody. “Are you a writer, too?”
Zhaleh shrugged as she picked up the moss-granite. “Not a professional. I write for fun—mostly fanfiction. You’d hate it.”
“What do you think about style?” Kelli blurted, arrested by the sudden mental image of Zhaleh, beautiful and strange as she was, sitting down and writing something. Anything. Even an awful story like the one with the kraken.
Zhaleh raised her manicured eyebrows, as though she didn’t follow. “Style?”
“Of stories. They have style. AdventureVerse has one style, but apparently when you aren’t using the language model you can just write anything, from any of the weird depths of your own brain, in any style, and—”
She broke off, because the expression on Zhaleh’s face had just gotten very strange. Like she was suppressing laughter. And, at the same time, like she’d seen straight into Kelli’s soul.
Kelli was incensed. What was there in the depths of her soul that looked funny?
“You’re wondering if you’re on the right path,” Zhaleh said, so gravely that Kelli wondered if she’d imagined the little quirk of suppressed laughter a moment ago. “If the work you’ve done with Inspiration is worth anything. If you’ve really been that na?ve.”
“I am not!” Kelli snapped. “You’re not on the right path. You’re a criminal.”
“Am I?” Zhaleh languidly reached out and picked up another of the stones.
“Being suggestible goes both ways. If you don’t control it, then anyone can use it against you.
All they have to do is say something—that they know what’s good for you, or that the way you are is wrong and bad, or that six rocks and a flashlight are doing something profound to your mind—and even if you know it’s not quite right, you’ll still feel it as vividly as you feel your stories.
But if you do get control? If you know your own strength?
If you own it? That’s where visionaries come from.
People who can see right to the root of a thing, and see how it could all be different, and maybe even see a little of how we get there.
People who can decide for themselves what the future should be.
People who can hold on to a vision like that through any trial, because it’s as real to them as something they can touch. ”
Kelli wrapped her arms around herself. She didn’t like where this was going. Kelli had kidded herself, when she was younger, into thinking she was going to set things right. But everyone on that ship knew where thoughts like that led.
Flames licking the sides of the corridor, and people running. Dark smoke, and the blare of alarms, marker melting off the glass, and . . .
And nothing. No seismic shift to the world. Just two stupid teenagers, lashing out and making things worse.
“So, back to where we started,” said Zhaleh.
“Use that big, strong imagination of yours. Imagine why a character in a story might have done what I did. You’re seeing what it’s like to be forced onto a mission on one of Conchita’s little whims. Imagine what it’s like to work for her constantly, intimately, the way Rowan and I do, and not to be allowed to keep your own secrets or others’.
Imagine being one of her good daughters. ”
Kelli didn’t want to imagine that. But before she could come up with a good retort, Zhaleh had lightly pressed her toes against the ground and flown away.