Too Little

Somehow, I didn’t pass out.

I really wish I had. Everything hurt. Why couldn’t I just spend some time unconscious?

At least they got me out of the way quickly, the Casti carrying me relegated me to a temporary pavilion. The other one helping Tasser carry me had been called away, so they’d set me down on the spot. A few minutes later they needed the slab I’d been put on, so I sat on the ground and leaned against a crate. At least they’d cleared the snow here.

The Farnata from the quarantine earlier came by. It sprayed something on every open wound it could find on my body. It stung viciously, but I’d been through this part before.

I leaned forward, doing my best to not let my bloody face drip too much; it had to stop sooner or later. At some point, some bandages got wound around the arm that had been stabbed. The other leaks I’d sprung were wrapped too, at least the big concerning ones. My left hand still wouldn’t move. Even trying to wiggle a finger sent shooting pain up the whole limb.

That would probably be concerning in the morning.

I’d given up on trying to stay conscious, but I was in too much pain to rest and not enough to shut down entirely. Sitting motionless was all I could do.

The fighting was over, but it was still utter chaos. A hundred Casti and more were swarming all over.

Bodies got carried away from the entrance roads, both Casti and Vorak. It was easy to forget I hadn’t been the only life on the line today. Why were these aliens fighting?

I didn’t really know. At the end of the day, I didn’t even know why the Casti had helped me, especially Tasser. I wanted to figure the alien out. We’d certainly come through for each other.

He’d been the first.

Back on the space station, before any of us had known what to do with each other, Tasser had pulled me away from a blast that had torn through the wall.

Everything from then on…

I was a very small boat, carried uncontrollably by some very large waves. But Tasser had been the one to work most with me. Talking, fighting.

Four days, I’d known him, and I couldn’t call him anything less than a friend. That even disturbed me a little. He was effectively a stranger, but there was also no denying what had happened to us.

That was because of Tasser more than me, I felt. Caleb the human wasn’t the only alien Tasser was friends with.

There was a small commotion, some raised voices, and I saw the Casti who was probably in charge talking with Nai. They weren’t quite shouting, but Nai wasn’t very happy.

I was too tired for terror. So when Nai stormed over, I didn’t even have the energy to tense.

The Farnata was too tired to be standoffish either. Judging by the smear of purple blood they wiped off their arm, combined with the smell of burnt fur, it didn’t seem their Vorak fared any better than mine.

Tucked off to the side of the bustle, the three of us watched the aftermath of the battle. Trucks moved heavy barricades, different machines were hauled out to the ground’s perimeter, tarps were put up over the holes torn in buildings.

They didn’t put me back in quarantine this time. I guess that cat really was out of the bag. I was surprised though. Very few Casti stared at me. I only counted two or three out of at least a hundred, maybe twice that.

Eventually the other Farnata, the doctor, came over again. Flecks of orange blood clung to the alien’s cheeks. Casti had died defending this place.

I tried to focus on that. Strangers as they were, these aliens had proven to be my allies. Most of them had no idea I was here. How many of them died without knowing why the Vorak had attacked?

Why couldn’t I focus on them?

It was the dead Vorak that I kept picturing.

It sickened me to remember the image of their body going limp. A bullet had torn right through its skull. It was impossible to see the event without a cold shudder going through my own head. Watching the life just vanish from their body…

Why was Chief’s death so awful?

I’d killed them. They had been trying to kill me.

“” I rasped to no one.

The words tasted like ash. They were the same ones I’d thought to myself on the ship, when Daniel had died.

I shuddered at my own thinking. Even now, I’d thought to myself ‘when Daniel died’, not ‘when I killed him’.

I’d been adamant with him, I wanted to understand what I was doing and what the outcome would be. I didn’t want to be helpless.

Didn’t everyone want agency?

But I couldn’t bring myself to hold onto it. Every small thought I had was distancing the responsibility. I did want it though.

I wanted to be the one to steer my fate exactly because of times like this, so that I could know I did everything in my power to keep an event like Daniel’s from happening again.

Panic took energy, and I was all out of that. So I didn’t panic.

But I couldn’t keep a grip on my thoughts.

My imagination ran rampant, scenes and images wandered through my mind.

An otter pressing a button, signaling a dark alien machine to snatch a teenager off a dark sidewalk, rocketing him skyward, uncaring while his eyes bled, and lungs popped.

The same otter, shouting to its underlings while they pinned down a kid, stabbed a needle into his torso and pulled out whatever they wanted.

A Vorak in glittering orange armor doggedly hounding a weary human, seething in rage while it gave chase.

They had abducted me. They’d abducted Daniel. He was dead, and I was a killer because of them. They’d wronged me and others to earn every ounce of suffering that visited them.

So why was I sick to my stomach when I thought about killing Chief?

I knew why killing Daniel tore me up. He’d been a friend. The one spot of company in weeks of misery. Killing him was an exercise in literal madness. Chief was the enemy. A hostile alien hunting me down, determined to kill me or haul me back to an even worse fate.

Their deaths were apples and oranges.

But no matter how hard I tried; I couldn’t think of the sight of one of them without the sight of the other.

I almost wished I had the energy to be more upset. Maybe I could have powered through whatever grief this was.

But I knew this would stick with me.

Right then, I knew in my bones, I would never get used to seeing the utter final stillness of a corpse.

All I had left of Daniel was our notebook, and the piece of himself I’d recovered from the Phantom.

I was all alone.

Again.

The full weight of Daniel’s absence sunk in. In the moment, danger had demanded my attention. But I was safe now, more or less. There were no more distractions.

“I know you can’t understand me,” I said, “but…I don’t have anyone else to talk to anymore.”

Nai glowered when I spoke, but Tasser looked at me intently. His gaze didn’t falter even the slightest bit. For a second, it seemed like no matter what I said, he’d understand the words.

Totally ridiculous, of course.

But the idea was appealing.

“I know some words,” I said, “but how far can we go before we find something we don’t like?”

“I killed someone today,” my voice croaked from behind the mask. Tasser still only looked at me like he understood. But maybe I just wanted him to understand. At the very least, he was willing to listen.

That felt like it meant something.

“I killed a friend a few days ago,” I confessed, “He didn’t even hold it against me. I want to be angry with myself, but I know he’d want differently. But I’m angry at myself anyway, so I’m angry at myself for being angry.”

“I…I don’t know what to do. My friend was the only thing helping me stay engaged with reality. He was helping me, saving my life even after I killed him. And now, I killed someone who deserved it, and I’m still breaking down from it, and I’m angry that I’m this upset about killing someone that would have killed me! I—I just don’t what I’m supposed to do.”

I was blubbering. Hot tears threatened to melt and dissolve the blood that had dried and frozen to my face. Any kid in school would have laughed at a display like this. Except, I’d never laughed at anyone crying. And now that I mentioned it, I’d never seen other kids really pick on someone because they were melting down.

When someone cried, people whispered, and asked questions, but I had never seen anyone try to add to visible suffering.

Most of the time people didn’t know how to react.

That was how Tasser had been when Daniel had encouraged me to cry in the truck. Not good. Not bad. Just, present and unsure.

Saying it all out loud helped. There was some part of letting my own ears physical hear myself that helped the rest of my brain wrap around what I was feeling.

“I’m so angry with myself, because I hate the idea of seeing any of this through. I didn’t ask for this. I’m going to suffer because of it, maybe even die. I want to just give up and make it someone else’s problem…but I hate that idea even more. Daniel is dead because of me, and if I check out, then even worse will happen.”

I wasn’t even making sense to myself. But that felt good. Necessary.

“It’s utter hell that I have to deal with this. I feel stupid just saying it, but someone else did something horrific to me and a bunch of other kids, and I’m the one who keeps having to pay the price. I’m a victim in all this, and I hate thinking about it like that…that doesn’t even make sense! I’m talking utter nonsense, and I can’t even articulate why I’m twisted into knots! And that’s just the ordinary mental crap without even looking at this stupid thing in my head, which I somehow made! ”

My shoulders were trembling, my whole body was shaking.

I had to take a confused moment. Was this the cold, was this me? Both?

No answers came to me. Not even about the small stuff.

The time dragged on while the Casti shuffled around us. One hour turned to two, then three. Trucks with armed Casti rolled out, maybe to pursue fleeing Vorak. Others marched by carrying long rifles not quite like Tasser’s.

As my attention settled more and more on events around me, I irked myself more and more.

Sobbing about what I was feeling had actually made me feel better. I was frustrated that helped at all. Why?

“Because you’re lost in every sense of the word,” I whispered to myself, “nothing short of bringing Daniel back somehow will help you at all.”

I ran my mind over the piece of Daniel I’d pulled from the Phantom.

‘Thinking small’ had saved my life.

He’d never stopped encouraging me. Down to the last second, he’d been ready to help. It was impossible not to admire the guy.

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Why had I been able to pull this piece from the Phantom? Why had it remained? I didn’t have the finest understanding of the thing that had devoured my friend, but it seemed, intuitively, that the piece should have been ground down to nothing.

Could there be others that had been preserved like this?

The closer I looked, the harder it became to put off for later. I couldn’t move a muscle in my body, but rummaging my own mind took nary a thought.

What I found was horrifying.

After what it had done to Daniel, I worried my mental creation might come after me next.

But every time I cautiously examined the tiniest piece of the Phantom, nothing happened. It didn’t react to me at all. It was, absolutely motionless to me.

After failing to produce a reaction from it every other way, I pulled at a loose piece of the Phantom—what might have been a thread.

It felt like I’d split open an animal; every other part of it was thrown into disarray. But it didn’t lash out at me. The cacophony it unleashed was regular, almost like an alarm rather than a beast’s cry. It seemed… mechanical . Organic—made of strands of thought and mental cells—but mechanical, nonetheless.

It contorted, trying to patch itself. It even tugged on the string I’d pulled, trying to put it back in place. Bewildered, I let it go and the Phantom spun itself back into the dormant form it had taken since finishing Daniel.

The way it had pulled on the strand I’d taken…it had been timid. Like it needed permission to fix itself.

Daniel had told me I’d created it. I agreed with him.

But neither of us had really parsed the implications of that.

Every other creation in my head depended on my understanding of its function. But the Phantom was the first thing I’d created. It seemed to defy that pattern.

Except now that I was looking at it unobstructed, I did find myself understanding it.

The Phantom had countless sub-sections, each one specialized for something different. The journal was tied into the ones dedicated to… visualization and memory, seemed like. The mirror was tied into the visualization section too, as well as half a dozen others. I couldn’t even count the number of sections the radar was tied into.

But all of them weren’t just tied in. They’d come from the Phantom. I found the same tools I’d used to recreate the mental mirror. The journal and clock had similar patterns in my head

Everything I’d built actually had two components in my head, the mental version of the object, and the pattern I’d made it from.

The Phantom wasn’t just connected to the things I’d made though. It was connected to me.

The point where my mind ended and the ‘Phantom’ began seemed almost like a touch screen, some incredibly fine control-surface, sensitive to even the slightest changes. Except it didn’t just work in one spot at a time.

So maybe instead of one touch-surface, it was like a million of them all strung together. Every single point of connection affected something different. The overwhelming potential of this thing in my mind was staggering.

It didn’t have buttons or levers, but it did have controls, every single one of the countless million connections. Just like the sensation of creating matter, I didn’t have the words to describe the process, but I understood it anyway.

It was a mental tool for making other mental tools, mental machines .

This was the thing that let me keep a consistent and accurate journal in my head, what let me have a clock ticking in my brain even while I slept. Something about it allowed my fallible unsteady meat brain to achieve results that otherwise demanded machine precision and consistency.

I could destroy it if I wanted. The knowledge was instinctual. All I had to do was think, and I could pull it apart at the seams. But that same knowledge told me why it would be pointless.

The Phantom had devoured Daniel, torn him apart and pounced on every stray piece of him that floated around my mind.

But it was just a machine, doing what it had been designed to do. There was more to it, I could tell, but a huge part of its design was to make other machines, other mental tools like the journal and radar.

But I hadn’t really had my hands on the controls. I’d been able to interact with the journal, add to it. Even the stopwatch had functioned just fine. Daniel had been the one to make them though. The journal, the stopwatch, the mirror.

I’d made some rudimentary maps, sure, but really those were just derived from the notebook Daniel had come up with first. I’d just been adding and using mental constructs he’d laid the groundwork for.

But it hadn’t been until he dissolved himself that I’d been able to make something on my own, and even then, I’d copied his design when I made the second mirror.

Daniel had been the one in control of the Phantom the whole time.

Neither of us had known.

My gut wrenched as I realized where we’d gone wrong. Except…it had been Daniel’s mistake. I had no way of knowing about any of it until this very moment.

God, I hated that I was ready to think that about my friend.

I didn’t blame him. It was an honest mistake, compounded by an impossible situation.

But…I needed to accept that it wasn’t my fault. Daniel would have been furious if I found a way to blame myself.

He’d been too defensive. This thing in my head, this ‘Phantom’, had come knocking and it had simply scared him down to the core of his existence, such as it was in my head. The Phantom had taken some pieces of him, trying to figure out what made him tick.

And he’d become convinced it was out to kill him. And so, because that was what the Phantom found, Daniel had been right.

I shut the Phantom off.

It was simple. All it took was a thought.

The mental machine’s erratic shifting, and writhing ceased, and it lay inert. The things it made were still there, but they weren’t like the Phantom as a whole. They were passive. Still, I shut off my radar too, and I swear the pressure in my skull lessened just a hair.

Nai shot me an odd look too. They had the mirror in their head. I knew it interacted at least partially with the radar. Had they noticed its absence now?

The aliens could wait. I was too weary for anything outside my own head.

Turning off my mental monster hadn’t just been to spare myself the stress. I was experimenting. Learning. It was a familiar. Even if I was trying to comprehend a mental machine created in a fit of insanity, I was comfortable testing ideas.

Dormant like this, the Phantom was easier to analyze piece by piece. But still, the sheer intricacy of it was overwhelming. It felt like I could poke and prod at it for years and barely scratch the surface.

When it was active, the whole thing practically felt alive. But it wasn’t.

It aped personhood in some ways. It held onto feelings, it reacted to things, it even chewed through information and organized it somehow. But it wasn’t ‘me’ any more than my smartphone.

He’d called it a ‘Phantom’, but Daniel had personified it too quickly. It wasn’t even intelligent. Not really. It was complicated, sure. But not independent. He’d been absolutely correct when he thought I could control it.

I just hadn’t been able to see how. His own psyche had been in the way; interposed between me and the connections I needed to begin controlling the mental construct properly.

Well they were clear as day now.

It was hard to describe just how I perceived it within my mind. It wasn’t quite seeing, but it took no effort at all to understand how it connected to me. In fact, it felt like I could help myself along, like a cartoon character blowing the sail to their own boat. Just making the attempt to comprehend was refining my understanding of the mental construct with each moment.

If I pared away most of it and focused in on a single point, I could almost imagine what I’d been thinking when I made it in my head.

To Daniel, it had been this malevolent predator closing in on him. But now, to me, it was just a tool.

A wildly complex abstract mental tool, but still just a tool. If you were properly prepared, it could never hurt you.

Daniel had been attuned to my radar, the journal, and everything else he’d made with the Phantom. They were intelligible to both of us, but they were only safe for me. Intense lasers could burn things depending on the material. Balloons would heat up and pop, but a calibrated sensor could be used to decode volumes from a laser with no trouble.

He’d been tied into mechanisms that he wasn’t equipped to survive. ‘Inevitable’, he’d been convinced. He’d been right.

He hadn’t known he was in control of the very thing grinding him up, and that was why he’d been right.

God almighty, I wanted to throw up.

The tiny piece of him just sat dully in my mind. I wanted there to be some hint of his consciousness left. The hope that some scrap of his mind still remained in the piece consumed my attention.

I examined my mind’s contents until the Casti finally moved us. Two Casti soldiers got the attention of Nai and Tasser who, in turn, prompted me. It must have been at least a few hours, because I felt like I might be able to slowly limp now.

I barely paid attention to the room they dumped me in. There would be time later.

The speck’s survival baffled me. Surely if one piece of him had survived, then more could have? Was there a way I could search my own head, search through the construct?

Just like attempting to figure it out, progress was slow. I could rummage through the simplest corner of the Phantom for hours and still not be sure if I’d found any pieces of Daniel.

Why did my head need to be so complicated?

But I kept scouring, and the further I went, the better sense I got of the Phantom’s relationship to my own mind.

The connections were messy .

If I paid attention to the thoughts that pulled each strand of the Phantom apart, they were indirect, inefficient. As if it was hard enough already, it would take ages to organize the connections. If I even could. Would I have to cut some of them and make the connections from scratch? Could I even do that?

I didn’t feel the need not to get sidetracked. Focus required energy, and I was basically exploring my mind via the path of least resistance.

But it was on one of those sidetracks that I found it, hours after I started looking.

A second piece, just as intact as the first. It was another piece of him filled with text.

‘ Don’t Fight’

‘ —t’s not hostile. -Caleb, if you read this, share with me, signed: Daniel- Every time we figure out it’s not actually killing us, the thing nabs that piece, because it can tell how important a realization it is. The Phantom (probably not the best name for it now that I put it down) is going after pieces of us in order of critical importance. -Caleb, if you read this, share with me, signed: Daniel- Caleb made the construct when things were going to shit on the ship, but he issued its current assignment in the moments after we fought, before we died. He somehow saw us about to die, and had his mind-construct try to save us. That’s what it’s still trying to do! We’re in pieces, damaged to shit, and it’s trying to triage! -Caleb, if you read this, share wit— ’

Daniel had written this piece for himself, trying to communicate with his pieces. It had that address inserted at regular intervals for me. I dared to hope.

Triage.

That single word gave me an idea of what had truly happened. If the Phantom hadn’t actually destroyed the pieces, but been trying to preserve each one…

Then it wouldn’t be treating them the way I’d expected it to. Those pieces wouldn’t be stored how I’d thought. But now I had a better idea of how to look.

I found the third piece less than an hour later.

‘ Radar Adjustment ’

‘ —you’re missing some of the best bits of the radar, I put in a lot of work on that! You’ve over tuned it. You’ve got it picking up just the Enumius aliens mind’s, probably because they’ve got special minds for that same Enumius shit, high energy or something maybe. But if you reset the focus, you should be able to pick up any mind the same way you pick up your own. Widening the focus will probably cut the accuracy, but the range should improve t— ’

Each piece of Daniel held a piece of text he’d recorded. He’d shown up in a dream, so it wasn’t surprising some pieces of Daniel had been at work in my subconscious, but just how much had he recorded for me?

And what did he mean? I could adjust the radar?

How many more pieces were there? Better yet, what was I doing searching through my mind manually?

There was a machine in my mind. Even if I didn’t have one yet, I could make something to search for the pieces.

The Phantom was what created the things in my mind, so I switched it back on.

It was trivial to come up with what I wanted now.

Each mental tool was based on its function. If I understood what I wanted it to do, then it could do it. And right now I wanted to clean house.

I imagined it as a hand broom and dustpan, but I could tell the truth was far more complicated. But the analogy appealed to me, and so that was the pattern it took in my head.

I swept through my own mind, a bizarre feeling, catching all sorts of small junk. Idle thoughts from previous days flitted through my head, vivid impressions from recent crises.

But I was scouring my mind for a specific set of somethings.

Pieces.

Every single piece of Daniel was still in my head, just scattered.

It was agony to see how easy they were to identify now that I understood where they’d been stored. Every one of them was wrapped up and protected beneath the Phantom—no… I shouldn’t call it that, should I? It really was just a machine. It couldn’t hurt me. Each piece was wrapped up in a thin layer to isolate it from the rest.

Rooting through the mental machine in my mind was slow work. I must have sat in the cold for two hours scouring my own psyche for pieces of my dead friend.

It wasn’t even difficult to put his pieces together. One by one, little flecks of glass came back together to form a person.

There were a few hundred in total and my heart plummeted well before I’d put them all back together. It was instinctively obvious what the problem was. What the problem still was.

It didn’t matter that I had all his pieces, even the ones he’d lost days ago. I put him together again and he came back.

His image flickered into existence in front of me.

< Hey, > Daniel said.