Road
I’d been on worse road trips.
Granted, none of the ones I’d taken with my family back on Earth had involved anyone trying to kill me. But still, I’d found the long hours in the alien car more familiar than not. Even when we’d passed through more densely populated areas and I’d kept myself down and out of sight, I’d still been able to look upward and out the windows.
The foliage and sky were different colors from what I was used to, but the feeling from staring out the window as they rolled by was the same as it had been back home. Our route quickly took us deep into the mountains.
We didn’t stop driving until we reached the tunnel.
I’d never given road construction any thought. But having little else to do while we delved deeper into the mountains, I’d realized that road making would probably be a universal constant. Any civilization, alien or otherwise, that built wheels would build roads. One naturally accompanied the other.
And while Daniel was determined to try and think of an esoteric circumstance that would qualify as an exception, the difficulty he had in imagining some species making wheels but not roads was good enough confirmation for me.
Roads that go through mountains had to duck and weave through the valleys instead of constantly sloping up and down like roller coasters. It was just easier to build the road a little longer and have it follow the contours of the topography. But sometimes it was most optimal to just drill right through a whole mountain and make a tunnel for your road instead.
Once, out east in Colorado, I’d been through the Eisenhower Tunnel. It was more than a mile long, and I’d tried to hold my breath for the duration we’d passed through it. I didn’t even make it halfway.
This one had to be at least twice the Eisenhower’s length. I tried to imagine what colossal machinery could have hollowed out a tunnel like this through multiple miles of solid stone, much less what engineering still bore the weight of the mountain above it.
Nai collapsed it in ten seconds.
I’d noticed when we’d made our escape from the otters that it hadn’t used its teal fire against them.
I understood now, it had been saving its strength.
When Tasser had first stopped the car at the far end of the tunnel, I’d thought about getting out for a few minutes to stretch my legs. Tasser and the Nai had exited, but made it wordlessly clear I should stay put. All the blue alien had to do was look at me and I didn’t dare follow.
Daniel had winked out of existence a few seconds later. Another few moments after that, I’d felt a massive wave of something pour off Nai in thick heavy waves.
In the moments before the alien actually created anything, it was like I sensed Nai scooping up lava imbued with lightning. Invisible, raw energetic weight, accumulated and amassed to be used.
When she finally used the teal energy again, I couldn’t rightfully call it ‘fire’ like it had used before. This version wasn’t gaseous or sparking. Shaped into two curtains the height of houses, the massive gouts of teal plasma surged and bubbled like molten metal. They gouged into the walls of the tunnel and the sound of massive slabs of stone splitting in two cracked and peeled through the mountain valley like the thunder of an angry Greek deity.
And I thought I’d been scared of Nai before.
The sounds of mountain shuddering and collapsing were still audible as our tires squealed. Nai had collapsed again—its power didn’t come without a price it seemed—and Tasser had gotten them back into the car and we’d been off before any of the collapse spread and caught us with it.
I hit the button on my mental stopwatch and timed how long it took Daniel to reappear.
One hour, nine minutes, two seconds.
“Holy shit.” He said, flickering back into presence.
He hadn’t even seen what Nai had done. He’d winked out just when it began to gather power. And I didn’t think that was a coincidence. I had a theory, something in common with Daniel’s absences.
He picked up on what I was thinking, which I was glad for. It was awkward to just talk out loud to him. Even with the air mask on my face, it felt odd talking to him with three aliens in the car listening to my half of the conversation.
But this would require some detail. I whispered as quietly as I could and hoped he could tell what I was saying from the shape of my mouth. He’d been aware of all my other senses before, so it stood to reason he could tell what I was mouthing at least.
“I think I know why you keep disappearing. Or if not ‘why’ exactly, at least what triggers it.”
“I had my own idea to share, but you go first. ”
“You pop out whenever one of the aliens tries to create something. You can last a bit through the smaller stuff, like the otters’ flashbang and halberd. But Nai’s ‘blue blaze’ scatters you to the psychic wind.” I said.
“Funny you should mention ‘psychic’, because I’ve been thinking about how you hear me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter how much your ears can or can’t hear, no matter what you always hear me right? Doesn’t that strike you as odd that physical failure of your hearing doesn’t seem to affect me?”
“It’s all my perception anyway, isn’t it? When you talk, I don’t actually ‘hear’ anything. My brain just thinks I do.”
“I’m not so sure. Because loud overwhelming noises like the flashbang still leave you with that ringing in your ears while you adjust right? You don’t actually hear ringing, it’s not a real sound. That’s your brain tricking itself into perceiving something.”
“…But I heard you clearly, even through the ringing.”
It didn’t seem right that I’d still be able to hear simultaneous, competing auditory illusions. They should have jumbled together, or interfered with one another somehow. But I shouldn’t have been able to ‘hear’ both the ringing and Daniel. Unless…
“Unless you don’t need any auditory part of your brain to ‘hear’ me.”
“You think I’m somehow psychically reading whatever you want to say?”
“No need to say ‘somehow’, I think we’re both out of our depths here. But, yes.”
“What set you on this?”
“I first got the idea when I was trying to figure out why we can sense some aliens and not others, but the biggest supporting evidence is that I’m not moving my mouth right now.”
I turned to look at him, my hallucination of him was sitting halfway through the car window staring at me.
“See?” He waved his hands in front of his face, but the image of his lips stayed shut. He was still perfectly audible.
Or… no , he wasn’t audible at all. No part of this involved sound. But I could receive what he sent anyway. Then his image disappeared entirely, and for a second I thought he’d fizzled out again.
“I’m still here ,” he said. But now that my attention had been called to how he ‘spoke’ I began to tell that he wasn’t quite making ‘sounds’ as my brain knew them. It was just… thoughts. Thoughts shaped and molded to be very similar to sounds, even inspired and derived from real speech and language, but not anything that I actually heard.
He hadn’t said, “I’m still here.”
It had been
Once I really thought about it, I was amazed I hadn’t noticed sooner. The image of Daniel I had wasn’t solid. As a matter of fact, did the image even exist when I wasn’t looking at it? ‘Daniel’ clearly had some kind of physical limit—he could only generate matter within a few yards of me. We didn’t have any evidence that Daniel was dependent on the image I hallucinated.
I think I understood what he was trying to tell me. It felt a little like I was a toddler trying to mimic the sounds my parents garbled at me. Only this was a way of formatting thinking instead of formatting sound.
“It might just be easier for me to talk to you normally.” I said out loud. Tasser looked up at me.
“Mo loen? ”
From the Casti’s perspective, I’d just said something completely unprompted and without indicating anything else.
“[Loen.]” I said, nodding. It meant ‘good’. At least Daniel and I were pretty sure that’s what it meant. Tasser returned its attention to Nai who was still recovering from collapsing the tunnel. Nemuleki stayed focused on following the twisting road.
“Yes.” I said, quieter again. “I dismissed the idea earlier because the first time you disappeared and came back.”
“I’m thinking whatever sensitivity we have to the creation ability roused you or something. But when it was something bigger. Like the teal fire, you winked right out.”
Oh?
“Why would you assume I can do it all?” I whispered, “I know my memory isn’t great, but I would remember creating things with my mind. I’m pretty sure it was just you.”
“Plenty of time to kill right? Do we need to wait for you to wink out again? There’s literally no one else who could talk me through this.”
I held my hand up and tried to imagine what it was like to create matter from nothing.
Actually…
I realized I was becoming more aware of Daniel in my head when I recognized the feeling he gave off: he was pondering something.
As he described it, I thought of another point against my own theory.
< I’m willing to bet the idea still holds up in the end. If you don’t know how chemical bonds work, burning fuel to get heat looks like it makes energy from nothing. >
I supposed there had to be rules about this stuff I wasn’t aware of. It was terrifying and exhilarating. Even if Daniel had already done it, I felt like I was sticking my toes into a very deep dark pool.
It was how I imagined Oppenheimer felt when he first thought the A-bomb was possible.
<“Alright.”> I said and thought at the same time. No sense in dragging my feet.
The symmetry of it was fitting if nothing else. I’d given him the same advice when he first materialized the speck. Daniel had described it like moving a heavy weight through a pool of molasses. Whenever he made the speck, I imagined a network of even tinier pinpricks bonded together in a lattice.
Between those two concepts, I felt like I might have a good place to start.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
I held up my hand and tried to imagine a little grain of material appearing between my fingers.
<…anything?>
Nothing so far. Was it a problem with—one moment I’d been trying to imagine a fleck in my hand. The next I’d noticed a question drift into my mind; what was the actual distance between my fingers?
Not in inches or centimeters or microns. What was the actual perfect mathematical expression of infinitesimally small space that could be measured? And how much of it was between my fingers? Centimeters, to millimeters, to nanometers, to picometers. I didn’t remember what was smaller than that. But I knew it existed.
Just like I didn’t hear Daniel with my ears, I didn’t see this with my eyes. But between my fingers, I could feel billions of microscopic explosions going off. I could feel the very space itself tingle like a limb that fell asleep.
The supernova in my hand winked into existence, and I was suddenly pinching a golf ball sized lump of… salt?
It looked like a compacted ball of faintly green tinted kosher salt, or maybe a dangerously sized piece of hail. As much as the question crossed my mind, I didn’t taste it.
<… Whoa. > Daniel said.
It had felt heavy and had taken real exertion to create, but more than that it had felt fragile. The creation process had given me the overwhelming impression that at any point if I had lost composure, the whole thing would have collapsed back into oblivion. It also seemed like it might explode. Each ‘atom’ I’d felt created was like a small star ready to blast apart if someone breathed on it wrong.
The salt ball felt stable enough now, but I couldn’t help but feel it was how holding a grenade would feel.
I’d always known atoms were small. But for a moment, I’d felt some of what that meant in some part of my mind capable of perceiving it.
It was wrong to think there were billions of atoms in my salt ball.
There were trillions of atoms in the tiniest slice of the tiniest crumb of the speck Daniel could make.
I did feel exhausted, but it had felt like a sprint. If I took a few minutes, I’d be fine.
The salt ball dissolved by itself a few minutes later. When it did, I got another glimpse into how these creations came to be. It didn’t feel like what I’d made had disappeared. It just… went back to wherever it came from, like a sandcastle toppling over and being smoothed back into the beach.
We went back and forth over what the implications of my possession of this power meant for the next hour of the car ride. Tasser and the other aliens hadn’t even noticed my experiment.
They didn’t notice the next few either. Daniel had me make shapes with detail that hadn’t been possible to notice at the size his specks were.
I made a cube. Then a rough ring, more of a tiny donut. Shaping the thing was difficult and sandcastles were quickly becoming my metaphor of choice to describe the experience. I didn’t have a bucket or trowel. It was more like drawing with a bag of sand. Once the material was already here, I couldn’t move it, so I had to stay ahead of it.
Spheres were easiest. I just had to concentrate on a single point and the matter grew outward evenly. Cubes were a bit harder. Limiting the growth to flatten the sides was hard to do for all sides at once. I’d cheated to make the donut. I’d kept my focus on the center point and made a bit of a disc, then I’d cut away at the matter in the middle of the disc. The donut’s ‘hole’ evaporated back into nothing.
But I was leery about pushing myself too far. I was rather acutely aware of how the start of my day involved fighting a few otters out for blood.
Nai might have blocked the road for anyone chasing by road, but I wasn’t convinced a team of otters wouldn't drop out of a helicopter any minute.
We rolled through the mountain roads for another hour or so before Nai finally put itself upright again. Both Daniel and I sensed the uptick in energy drifting off it. Having just used (presumably) the same power it used to bring down the better part of a mountain, I tried to imagine doing anything similar.
Nemuleki said something to Tasser who had an exchange with Nai. Tasser seemed to prefer interacting with Nai to Nemuleki. Like all my other observations about the Casti, I had no real basis, but I got the impression that Tasser was the common link. It knew both Nai and Nemuleki, but they didn’t know each other.
The car got a bit more active as Nai seemed to wake up more and make conversation with Tasser and Nemuleki. They were discussing pretty actively. Tasser and Nai pulled out a map and were pointing out a few sections.
I would have liked to get a better look at the map myself, but I realized I wouldn’t have any way of knowing if the map was where we might be going or where we were. Back on Earth, I was spoiled by GPS.
Up ahead a much smaller avenue split off from the main highway to follow a small ‘U’ shape of buildings. Even as we pulled off, no other buildings or signs were visible. This was a tiny little alien village.
All four of us got out of the car, which surprised me. Nai, Tasser, and Nemuleki didn’t seem fazed about me being out at all. It quickly became apparent that they weren’t worried about any of us being seen.
The town was totally deserted. All the prefabricated buildings were locked down tight.
This part of the valley was especially deep. Every building would be buried if even a small blizzard came through.
All of those were road trip staples. But it got me wondering what kind of car we’d actually been riding in. We hadn’t switched cars and this one had taken us quite the ways. Surely it would run out of fuel eventually.
I still had most of one tube left. But Daniel was right. Topped off supplies were better. Tasser could help, surely.
The aliens weren’t content for me to walk around unsupervised anyway, so my chaperone and I went looking for…
“Nuto . ” I said, holding up my water bottles. “Nuto loen?”
Tasser gave me a look and then shot one toward Nai and Nemuleki too.
Those two were indeed standing at the locked to one of the prefabricated structures like they might be trying to break in. Each one stood on stilts and their walls looked like thin metal. Not unlike a trailer park structure. None of it was wood though, all metal—aluminum was my bet.
Daniel hummed some form of agreement and I followed Tasser to one of the buildings that had a giant cylinder bolted to one side. It looked… well, it looked like a miniature water tower. But that didn’t mean it actually had water. It could have passed for a grain silo, or something similar.
It stored something though.
Sarcasm stung a bit extra when it came directly fed into my brain like that.
Tasser heaved its weight into the door of the building our storage silo was attached to, but the bar lock that fit over the door didn’t budge. A few dozen yards away, I heard the light crackle of Nai’s plasma—much smaller this time—no doubt to cut through whatever security feature had barred them.
My thoughts exactly, Daniel.
I gestured for Tasser to step aside. Daniel had managed to create his speck inside the glass window of the cell on the first try. That was my goal here. If I could make a disc from the inside of the locking bar, it should snap clean.
I put my hand on the frigid metal and shut my eyes.
The feeling of a million pinprick explosions came as strenuously and delicately as it had before. Having a goal gave me a bit of confidence though.
Disc. Perpendicular to the bar. Should be easy.
But when I felt the material solidify, there was a problem. I’d been focusing on the interior of the bar. But instead of displacing the existing matter, my new addition had merely formed on its exterior.
Tasser gave me an odd look.
I waved him off. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it…”
A few minutes later I still couldn’t manage it. Something was just fundamentally different and like most road trip stops; we had a time limit.
Tasser pulled me back after my fourth attempt yielded the same result. It pulled out its gun and shot the point where the locking bar affixed to the structure. It didn’t blast clean away, but the metal deformed enough for Tasser to leverage it out of the way of the door.
Inside was mostly empty aside from what might have been a dead heating unit sunk into one of the walls. The other wall however, sported something almost familiar.
It wasn’t exactly the same. All the small details were different, the nozzle length, the drain shape, and overall design taste were wrong compared to the one I’d destroyed during our extended flight through space.
But the overall layout was recognizable. “Nuto?” I asked, pointing at it. Tasser nodded and pulled out his own canteen.
Just like the one on the ship, this one operated entirely mechanically. Tasser pulled on one of the slots to reveal and inspect a colored meter strip of some kind. Satisfied with what it told him, Tasser held his canteen under the nozzle and pulled the lever that released a stream of perfectly clear water.
“Ijaroush ?” I asked, pointing to the water unit again. ‘Germs’ I was asking.
Tasser made quite the effort to try and shake its head back and forth. It was clearly not a gesture that came naturally to it, but it knew the gesture meant ‘no’ to me.
“La ijaroush. Ree.”
<’No germs. Zero.’> Daniel translated.
I huffed. I wasn't that hopeless with the language.
The water was ice cold though. Drinking it was physically painful enough that I seriously considered not slaking my thirst then. But there was no telling when I might be able to get more so I downed as much as I could reasonably tolerate before I started shivering.
I pulled my mask back over my mouth and nose and we went back toward the car. Tasser carried with him canteens that Nai and Nemuleki had lent him.
The other two aliens brought back their own spoils—another map. This one had much more detail than the previous one. It covered a smaller area too, small mountain roads and what looked like trails cutting through the hills were marked.
Nemuleki pointed to a small ‘c’ shaped portion of road that split off from a thicker line. That was where we were, this tiny nowhere mountain alien village. I did my best to commit the map to memory, and Daniel actually summoned the notebook and started doing his best to trace the map into it.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised when my ‘Nai-like-alien’ sense went off. I was alarmed, but not surprised.
I couldn’t tell precisely what direction it was coming from. It was relatively far away, skirting the very edge of my range. A small part of me raised the possibility it might not be hostile. After all, while I would never be comforted by Nai’s presence, we weren’t currently hostile anymore. But my own argument didn’t convince me. There was a reason Nai had brought down a tunnel behind us. There was a reason we were running.
The otters were chasing all four of us, not just me. It was an otter I was sensing, no doubt in my mind.
All three aliens recognized the change in my demeanor.
I took a few steps from the car, scanning the buildings, trying to get a fix on where this alien was.
“Cayleb?” Tasser asked.
“Bad. Uh… bad thing. That direction. Bad…” <’Gi’ is bad. I think.> Daniel supplied.
“Vorak.” It realized, and drew its gun.
Gun. Yes. That was correct.
I didn’t know what ‘Vorak’ meant, but Tasser had put it together.
We weren’t alone.