Sparks

My generation really was addicted to our phones. I’d been grounded before, or forced to go without media or technology for a spell, sometimes even for school. Every time before, there had been a hard-hitting, but fleeting, adjustment period. After a day or two, you didn’t miss it.

This was different though. It had been months since I’d seen even a picture of my parents. I was missing different things compared to all the other times.

I had eleven phones taken from the effects of twice that many abductees. Most of them were cheap brick phones like the kind I’d had when I was younger, low tech, unfashionable even ten years ago, and durable. When I had a device like them, it had been for emergencies only and other dedicated circumstances where my parents needed to be in contact with me.

By the time I’d rolled around to high school though, I’d upgraded to smartphone I’d bought after saving up my allowance at first, and later my pay working for the handyman next door.

In high school there had been some mild contention over what brand of phone was better, and I was furious that those stupid differences were mattering now.

“No, I mean we used two types of electricity.”

“So do we,” Nai said impatiently. “But which type were these designed to use? Linear or oscillating?”

Linear or oscillating? Those had to be the Starspeak terms for direct and alternating current, right?

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“I can’t tell you much about the inside that you don’t already know, everything inside is too compact.”

Nai dropped the smartphone toward the table, and I snatched it out of the air on reflex before it could crack against the surface. It was one of three devices I’d brought. It wasn’t what I wanted to start with though.

That honor was reserved for the brick phone we were struggling to devise a charging setup for. I figured this one would be the most durable and tolerant of mistakes.

“ Don’t drop them,” I still told her. “They’re fragile and they’re not mine.”

The Farnata hid a frown, like she didn’t quite believe that the phone was actually fragile.

“You said everyone with you died,” Nai accused.

“They did. That doesn’t make any of them mine.”

Nai walked away from the table in a huff, leaving me to examine the phone.

“Both of you calm down,” Tasser said. “I don’t enjoy my friends fighting.”

“ I’m not fighting, her/him” we both said simultaneously.

Tasser blinked, and I got the acute sense he was holding back laughter.

“Anyway…” I said, dragging our attention back to the subject at hand, “I think the device itself uses [direct cur-]-linear current, I mean. But I remember the power infrastructure back home being the other kind.”

“…In lieu of other transmission methods, oscillating works better over distance,” Nai said. “But if the device is portable, then it needs to carry its own charge. If it’s anything like our portable electronics the internal battery supplies a linear charge.”

I grimaced, trying not to let myself get lost in the technical terms she was using. We were talking about electricity. Physics. I knew those, though it had been a while since I’d been quizzed…The concepts and principles remained the same, no matter what language we were speaking.

“Okay,” I said as Tasser nodded along to Nai’s explanation and fiddled with the configuration of the power unit. “Second problem; is it going to matter which line in the cable gets the charge? I think one of them should connect to ground.”

The selection of phones I had today was not random. They all had the same charging port. Specifically, I couldn’t remember if it was mini- or micro-USB, but the name didn’t really matter.

We couldn’t just plug the charging cable into an outlet though. Aliens, of course, didn’t have standard USB connectors. So I had to strip the end of the cable and sort out how to wire it into the power unit’s leads. Even looking like a bland 60s sci-fi prop, I knew enough about wiring to not relax around it.

You could be electrocuted in a dark room and depending on how it happened, there wouldn’t even be a spark. It didn’t need to be flashy to kill you.

“It’s off right?” I asked Tasser, looking at the deceptively ordinary looking power unit.

“Yes,” the Casti confirmed.

“Because, you said it was broken, and I don’t want to get electrocuted.”

“It was broken,” Tasser confirmed. “I fixed it with Nai. That’s why Quartermaster let us borrow it in the first place.”

“He could have lent us a functional one; I could have gone over his head to Ase Serral,” I replied.

“You might have had some trouble with that,” Tasser said. “The Ase is off base until tomorrow morning.”

Nai gave a startled cough that she covered badly. It was suspicious…judging from her small reaction, she’d already known, but… ah. She hadn’t expected him to tell me.

“Is that the kind of thing that usually gets kept secret? That a military commander isn’t present on the base he’s commanding?” I asked, half watching Nai to gauge her.

“It’s still First Contact, as long as you’re in our custody it’s pertinent for you to know if the commander is absent,” Tasser shrugged. “Besides, who would you tell that didn’t already know?”

That was a good point. Certainly not the Vorak.

“Even if you think someone already knows, don’t say anything,” Nai ordered me. “Information is powerful.”

“Oh believe me,” I said, wiggling the smartphone in my hand. “I know.”

I turned back to the power supply and looked at the stripped head of the charging cable. “Alright, let’s get it connected and we’ll turn it on.”

Tasser just laughed. “ …no, no, no,” he said emphatically. “I just wanted to you to strip the cable; you’re not going anywhere near hot wires with this. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’d get in if you were hurt? It’s still First Contact.”

Oh, that made sense. That same thought had just gone through my head a minute ago. I’d managed to avoid being killed so far; it would just be embarrassing to die in an accident now.

“Me or you?” Nai asked.

“I want to press the button,” Tasser said frankly. “Besides, you can insulate your hands.”

Nai waved me aside and talked with Tasser while they argued over how to connect the wires. Nai shook her hands and a pair of gloves materialized out of nothing, already on her hands.

In the end, we couldn’t decide if it mattered which wire in the charging cable we supplied the electrical load to.

I almost said something snarky about our setup, but thought better of it. Nai wouldn’t take it well.

“Alright, we’re set for power,” Tasser said. “Last thing is how much charge to deliver.”

“Well, if it goes properly, it won’t charge immediately. It’ll take a few minutes before we can turn the [phone] on,” I said.

“Start with the minimum,” Nai said. “We can always add more if it’s not enough, but that thing is tiny . It’s going to be really easy to fry the whole thing if we start too high.”

“Okay, minimum load. Four, three, two— ” Tasser flicked the switch and the connection from the charger’s wire sparked. In less than a second the smell of ozone filled the room, permeating even through my mask.

At first, I thought it might work despite the smell because the brick phone’s display lit up from a dead black to that odd backlit black when screens had to display dark colors.

Buy a few seconds later smoke curled out from the device, and another loud pop was accompanied by an arc that ran the length of the charging cable, melting the plastic sheathe around it in a heartbeat.

The spectacle convinced Tasser to kill the power supply without checking with me.

Which was probably for the best, I thought we should have waited a second longer but all it took was one look to see we’d failed.

The phone was a melting pile of plastic and circuitry. Tasser started to object when I reached out to touch it, but it didn’t zap or burn me when I gingerly poked at it. I focused my attention on what I felt through my hand, trying to extend my sense of touch into the ruined device.

Maybe I could feel what was different? Maybe some part that had melted first, or…

It was fruitless. I wasn’t experienced enough with the tactile sensing to perceive any kind of precise detail. According to Nai, that would change with time, but I couldn’t glean anything aside from the plastic meeting the glass screen.

The charging cable was almost fused in place, and I had to forcefully yank it free of the scorched block. I tossed the phone to Nai.

“Can you figure out what when wrong on the inside?”

She caught it at the last moment and stared daggers at me.

“Throw something at me again and I’ll leave,” she said.

I raised my hands placatingly. “Sorry,” I said, not feeling that sorry. It hadn’t been a violent throw at all. She turned it over in her hands a few times before shaking her head.

“It’s too melted,” she said. “I could barely make out the circuits before, now it’s all just slag.”

She held the phone out in her hand pointedly for me to come retrieve it.

I quashed the urge to roll my eyes, but took it back.

We’d started with this particular phone in anticipation of this exact outcome. If something went wrong, and something had, then it would be the least important one.

I felt a little guilty. As much as I’d talked up how much these phones weren’t mine, I wouldn’t risk my phone. It was the strongest connection to Earth I had left. Thinking about the pictures and music I had stored on it…

Frustration reared up in my chest, but I had to clamp down on it. This was our first try. There would be more. We could figure this out.

It still stung though. I’d let myself think I might see some pictures today.

“So,” I began, forcing a calm that I didn’t really feel, “can we tell what actually went wrong?”

“Well, it melted,” Tasser said. “What makes circuits heat up?”

“Current does, a lot more than charge.” Nai said, “you want a quick and easy way to figure this out, but the reality is you might have to hook one of them up to a tiny current and just wait a few days.”

“Can we not at least explore other options before giving up? I’d hate to come back only to find that it hasn’t charged at all,” I said.

“I would have thought you’d hate it more to melt through however many devices you have with no results,” Nai said.

“Fine,” I snapped. “How do we get a lower current? Our unit was already on the lowest setting, can we just add resistors, or is something going to catch fire again?”

“I will talk to an engineer,” Nai said. “This communicator might be small, but I refuse to accept that it’s more complex than a fusion reactor.”

“How quickly can that happen?” I asked.

“We can revisit this in a day or two, hopefully with a more… measured setup.” Nai said, rising to leave.

“There has to be something we can do in the meantime…” I said, “resistors aren’t that complicated…”

Units were still a problem. Just like I didn’t know how volts and amps converted into itsera and lemuech , I was equally clueless about their equivalent of the ohm.

Strictly speaking, you didn’t have to make a circuit out of metal. It was just convenient to do so because of its properties as a conductor. A lot of resistors were just made out of oxidized metal. We could do a bunch of resistors in series, and remove them one by one to bring the current up to a level that could charge a phone instead of fry it.

We didn’t need the units as long as we made enough resistors and kept them in series.

In the half-dozen times Nai had been willing to tutor me in Adept creations, I hadn’t managed to make more than a kilogram or two of mass. But resistors didn’t need to weigh much.

I pictured what I needed in my mind and reached for the strange sensation of matter coming forth. Two ends of wires bridged by a powder, with the whole thing wrapped in something like resin or clay.

When I was done, a small pea sized ball of rubber had two wires sticking out either end.

“NO!” Nai said.

I gave a jump, and she snatched my resistor right out of my hands.

“Hey!”

“Are you crazy?” she hissed.

“No, it’s just a resistor. I—“

“We just told you to stop taking stupid risks.”

“It’s just a resistor!” I repeated. What was so risky about adding a resistor to what we’d already tried?

“What’s it made of?” She asked sharply.

“What…?” I fumbled, “I don’t know, metal and—”

“What will happen if it melts?”

“I don’t know, it—”

“So your plan was to run a current through a creation that you don’t know how it works, you don’t know what it will do, or what the risks are.”

“Again, it’s just a resistor, I do at least know that much.”

“You know what it’s supposed to do, but you don’t know how it will do it. It could catch fire, it could explode after a few seconds, it could produce toxic fumes. The problem is you don’t know , and you’re trying it anyway.”

“I can’t tell if those are real risks or if you’re just trying to scare me,” I said, trying to be braver than I felt.

“Decompose it,” Nai said angrily. “Now.”

I did so, and it vanished from her hand.

“Did you have any plan when you started this?” Nai asked sharply.

“As a matter of fact I didn’t,” I told her. “My gravest apologies if I don’t know all the rules to this stuff. But in lieu of anyone willing to teach me…I can only experiment.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“This isn’t an experiment,” Nai said, ignoring my barb. “It’s a travesty. If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t believe you could be the same alien that survived against four different Adepts! You clearly didn’t hear Tasser when he asked; do you have any idea what happens to us if you’re hurt?”

I bit off a smarmy response. Because even if she was hostile about it, she did actually have a point.

“Alright, I get it. I’ll be more careful.”

“It’s not just today, Caleb,” Tasser said. I turned, surprised he was stepping in. “ Ase Serralinitus wanted Nai to coach you on Adept stuff, why?”

“So I didn’t—”

Oh…

Nai saw the look of realization on my face.

“Most Adepts learn slowly, carefully pushing their boundaries because there’s the knowledge that if they slip up even once, they could die.” Her voice was unforgiving as she spoke, “there are no built-in protections for yourself. You haven’t learned this, but I’m understanding you need to. Why didn’t I use my ability to burn the Vorak that hunted us from the inside?”

I said nothing.

“It’s because most living flesh resists having anything materialized in it, with the sole exception of your own. Your own body will prevent other Adepts from making anything inside you, but it won’t stop you from doing the same by accident.”

“I killed one of the [dogs], the animals that attacked us, by creating something inside its throat…” Didn’t that not agree?

“How close were you?” Nai asked.

“It was biting my hand, so I jammed my arm down its throat so it couldn’t clench its jaw.”

“Aksi mani an sraie…” Nai swore, looking aghast. That maybe wasn’t the best thing to bring up when they were talking about my dangerous choices.

“It’s not the same,” Tasser clarified, “You didn’t create anything inside its body so much as you did from your own hand.”

“If you want to take this seriously, then stop creating things off guesswork or a moment’s decision. When you create something, you should know exactly what you’re doing in advance. You need to know it so well that you understand precisely what it will do once it exists. Otherwise the next time you have to make one of your flashbangs, it’s going to light you and everything around you on fire, or worse.”

“If you’re willing to share what you know, I’m more than willing to learn.” I said, trying to keep from showing my anger.

Nai stared harshly at me before looking at Tasser, who was sitting quietly to the side of our spat.

“Fine, you were right,” she said to him, before turning back to me. “Two days from now, dawn. If you want to learn, you are going to listen to what I say.”

“You aren’t going to be ‘too busy’?” I asked.

“No,” she said, her voice dripping with finality. She walked out of the room without another word.

I stood still while her footsteps echoed away in the hall.

“So,” I said, “why do I get the feeling you knew that would happen?”

“Because you know me decently well,” Tasser said simply.

“I feel pretty manipulated here, like someone just tricked me into sticking my hand into a [bear trap]. Maybe that’s not such a big deal to Casti, but from where I come from, it’s not a good look.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not that big of a deal to most Casti,” Tasser said. “Socially, most of my people’s cultures place an obscene amount of importance on ‘propriety’ or ‘fittingness’. Usually that involves a lot of posturing and deference to suitable authority. But in this case, I decided you needed to hear it from someone else.”

“That I’m being reckless.”

“Dangerous,” he corrected. “I’m not Adept. I can’t tell you about the risks the same way she could.”

“Today was supposed to be about charging [phones],” I said. “Was it really that much of a risk?”

“It’s not just about the resistor, Caleb.” Tasser said, “It’s like you forget where you are sometimes, that you, and all the rest of us, are in real danger, every day.”

“…I do,” I said quietly. “I need to forget sometimes. Because if I let myself think about where I am, and where I’m not…I won’t stop. I’ll trap myself feeling homesick and never do anything that might help me get home. It’s gotten too easy to move past the risks of something because everything I do has risks.”

“I don’t understand,” Tasser said simply. “Maybe Casti don’t think the same way humans do. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not trying to resolve my own alien abduction. Maybe it’s just a shortcoming for me. For whatever reason, I don’t think I have the tools to understand.”

Tasser was honest. It stung. Even if I considered us friends, we were fundamentally different in some ways that neither of us would probably ever understand.

“…but I wish I did.” He finished.

My gut turned over, and hearing him say that made me think our differences wouldn’t be so hard to understand after all.

“…How do you know so much about Adepts?” I asked, “It can’t just be knowing Nai.”

“It’s my job,” Tasser said. “My specialty in combat situations is fighting Adepts.”

“That sounds dangerous. Nai could kill me in her sleep, and I can make explosives with my mind.”

“It is dangerous. My role, most of the time, is to tell the rest of my squad to retreat. Or, if there’s a chance we can win, what our best odds are. But, since every Adept is different, it’s useless to counter individual abilities. It comes down to exploiting the weaknesses all Adepts share.”

“Which is why you know the risks…” I finished. “Okay, that’s on me. I should have listened.”

“Yes, you should have,” Tasser said sagely.

“I got caught up hoping,” I admitted. “Seeing my family again, even just a picture…I let myself rush.”

Tasser, sparing me, did not say ‘yes you did'.

“Alright, then take what I tried to do today? Nai talked like the creation might explode or turn into poison, what do I do to prevent that?”

“Well, she already said it. Don’t improvise.”

“What about my flashbang? I more or less improvise that. Just like the resistor, I don’t know what it’s made of either.”

Tasser nodded, “You’re only slightly covered on that one, for two reasons; none of the material sticks around long, and it’s already doing something that you would ordinarily be risking. Since it’s supposed to explode by design, it’s less likely to fail in some other way.”

“What about the sticking around? If I tried to make an inert version, one that didn’t go off right away, how would that go?”

“Badly,” Tasser said simply. “You’re flashbang falls under what we call an ‘acute’ ability. Whatever you make begins to decompose immediately , even if something goes wrong the material doesn’t stick around long enough to affect enough to be a concern. It’s an explosion, once it goes off, nothing really needs to stay in existence. Change how long it stays, and you start getting riskier outcomes.”

“What if I make something inert?” There were several times I’d created something that I could ephemerally tell wasn’t reactive.

“That’s a bit of an exception. When you say ‘inert’ you mean something that won’t catch fire, won’t make a magnetic field, won’t spit out radiation, right?”

I nodded.

“Something inert, as you would create it, is something that doesn’t change. Think of it this way, unexpected change is the risk you’re looking to avoid. So if you intentionally create something that won’t change, then your risk is minimized.”

“Minimized? Not eliminated?”

“No such thing as completely zero-risk,” Tasser said. “You create meta-microbes completely unconsciously. Technically, there’s a chance one could fatally misfold a protein, or be made out of a toxic metal. And there’s nothing you could do to prevent it.”

“That chance...” I said, “It’s not large, is it?”

“Trillions to one,” he reassured. “Zero confirmed cases in almost a century.”

“Why can I just ‘try’ to make an inert material relatively safely, but I can’t safely do the same for something else?”

“Because inert materials are simple enough you intuitively know how they should act. Let me guess if this sounds familiar, when you make a flashbang, you don’t totally understand how it’s made, but you understand what it needs to do.”

“Yeah, it’s like I’m filling in a mold, but what I understand only fills it up so far. But the rest of it gets filled in when I focus on the outcome.”

“In Nai’s native tongue,” Tasser said nodding along, “their word for Adept literally translates to ‘negotiator’. When you make something, your intent and expectations help shape the result. But conventional physics argues back, and tries to force the result into abiding by, well, conventional physics. You want a flashbang, and physics doesn’t want matter to spontaneously appear and combust. Physics and the Adept negotiate back and forth until you get what you want.”

“Only, I might get something extra if I’m not careful.” I finished, connecting his dots.

“The more you can understand about what you’re making on the front end, the more you can control the outcome. Forces beyond your control ‘fill in’ that difference, and the smaller you can make that difference, the safer and more efficient your creations will be. Experienced Adepts typically don’t improvise any kind of energetic creation if they can’t help it. There’s something called ‘iterative formation’ that helps you learn to make things consistently. Talk to Nai about it.”

Consistently.

“Tasser,” I said slowly, “The more you understand something, the easier it is to make? Right?”

He nodded, “If there’s something that you understand in extensive detail, you should be able to answer virtually any question about it without even creating it. The more you don’t know about it, the more room there is for catastrophic failure.”

“So Nai, when she makes her fire, she knows it, inside and out? She knows exactly what it will do exposed to anything?”

“Yes. Or, if she doesn’t know for sure, she could guess. Or figure it out. She’s rigorously explored the concepts driving its behavior. She decided most of them.”

Something that had the tendency to change somehow… in order to control and predict that change, I had to understand the concepts of its behavior.

Learning how much I had to learn about the field of Adeptry was daunting, but that phrase in particular stood out to me.

Because, while it wasn’t an energetic creation…I did have something exactly like that.

I found the familiar shape in my mind. It was the first thing I’d ever imagined so vividly.

It wasn’t like my flashbang, or anything else I’d created before now. Before, I’d needed to reach for what I wanted to make, and inevitably not reach far enough. Those ‘forces I didn’t understand’ had filled in the difference, my creations were completed by knowledge of what I wanted, not understanding of how it happened.

But this was different. I didn’t have to let go of the creation at any point during the process. I understood it. I could turn the pages in my head as easily as if they were in my hands.

Pages split apart and flattened together, and lines of ephemeral ink drew across them. There were no gouges or dents in the paper from an instrument writing on it, the words came from only my mind. It was not even truly paper, I knew. Paper came from trees, living organisms made out of cells filled with chemistry more complicated than anything I knew.

But my journal merely aped paper. It had the same texture, but I knew bone deep that it wasn’t paper. I could picture what wrote on, a facsimile of the real thing. Made of not-cells, empty and plain. Only their shape, color, and texture mattered.

A few sparks arced off the pages as I turned thought into matter, and I closed my grip on the spine of the journal Daniel and I had started months ago.

“Caleb?” Tasser asked cautiously.

I cracked the faux-metal spiral spine, letting the journal fall open in my hands. Handwriting that wasn’t my own stared back at me.

The words had been completely alien then, but it had been a long time since.

‘ Tuen?’ ‘Nuto?’ ‘Iffin?’

I recognized the words. ‘Tuen’; ‘I’, ‘myself’, personal pronoun. ‘Nuto’; water, tangible noun. In truth ‘Iffin’ was probably ‘Neffun’; ‘to want’ or ‘to wish’, verb.

I still used nearly identical transliteration in the organized compendium version of the journal. I turned the pages and found the various things Daniel had written, perfectly identical to how I remembered the journal in my mind.

The map I’d made on the mountainside with Tasser, copies of the diagrams I’d drawn to try and communicate that first time, even a warped hand drawn Vorak on just the second page.

It was all here.

It was startling how suddenly I was close to tears. I could remember pretending to turn the pages of the hallucinatory notebook. My hand had passed right through the image until I’d committed to the pretense, really allowed myself to imagine the texture of what the pages would feel like if they were solid…

And now they were.

“What’s this?” Tasser asked.

“Psionic,” I said. “The notes I take in my head, they started with this.”

I handed him the journal, turned to the first list of words Daniel had first tried to translate with me.

“One of your lists, from our lessons. Pick a day, give me the first word and I’ll show you every word we did that day,” I said.

“… Sira ,” Tasser said, “would have been towards the beginning, first or second week?”

Before he was even finished speaking, the last iota of page finished materializing in my hand.

Tasser took the sheet and read it.

‘Sira’; big, spacious.

‘Etesi’; right (directional).

‘Okosi’; left (directional).

It went on like that, forty entries on that sheet. Every entry was repeated in Starspeak and English.

“I have them all, right here.” I said, tapping my head.

“Dira…” Tasser breathed, “I knew there was something to it, but when you said you just kept the list in your head, I didn’t realize how literally you meant.”

“I think I understand a bit of what you meant,” I said. My voice felt hollow. I was remembering an old part of me, one that hadn’t been ready to admit what was before him.

“About Nai, I mean. You said being Adept let her understand science in ways that others just can’t match.”

“The journal isn’t the only psionic thing you’ve talked about,” Tasser recalled. “What about the rest, can you materialize the radar?”

I turned my attention toward it.

“…No,” I said. “I can materialize the journal because, in my head, it acts like a material thing. But the radar doesn’t have anything like that. It doesn’t have size, or shape, not even mass. It’s just information…”

“Aren’t the contents of the journal just information too?” Tasser asked.

He was right I realized, but if I understood what I felt correctly…it still wasn’t possible.

“Yes, but the information in the journal only needs a flat surface to be displayed. I could change its form, I think, but I don’t think I could do that with the radar. The way it gets the information in the first place…I don’t know how to change its form. Even if I did, I still couldn’t make the radar, I could only make…”

“…a way to present its information,” Tasser finished. “I actually think I get it, at least a little.”

Even if I hadn’t gotten to look at pictures of home, getting to hold a memento of Daniel was its own form of victory.

It was bizarre feeling the surface of something that had only ever existed in my imagination and memory. Every detail matched perfectly. I got a tinge of nostalgia. One of the first things I’d wondered with Daniel was whether or not the mental journal stayed consistent.

I’d known so for months now, but it was different to hold proof in my hand.

But eventually, a device on Tasser’s belt buzzed. Looking at it, he winced.

“I have to talk to Ase , go see if Dyn has anything for you to do.”

I nodded and found myself helping out in the medical ward for the next few hours sorting paperwork and sterilizing tools.

Once the sun set, I still didn’t have a charged phone like I’d hoped this morning, but it wasn’t such a bitter pill now that I’d had some time to decompress about it.

Today had been a mixed bag, but they all were. Still, this one had gone longer than most. I was ready to pass out.

Most of the base personnel slept in a defunct garage converted into a barracks. But Ase Serralinitus wasn’t keen on having me sleep with the rest of his soldiers. Instead, one of the supply closets inside the main building, just down the hall from the security office, had been cleared out, and a cot had been set up.

I hadn’t done much to make the space mine, but Demon’s Pit had recently taken delivery of twelve outfits identical to the first one Byr had made for me. It was nice to put my new clothes on the shelves next to my backpack full of Earth stuff.

“Goodnight Shamo,” I said, nodding to the Casti on duty down the hall.

Shamo usually had the evening shift, and usually didn’t say anything back. Tonight was no exception; he gave a curt nod before returning his attention to the halls. Ours was a reliable interaction, if not a very amicable one.

I pulled the door shut behind me and felt a ripple over my skin as I approached my cot. The air was different.

De ja vu struck and my mind went back to Byr’s home. It was the same sensation I’d felt upon entering. I found the source of the sensation on the shelf next to the head of my cot.

A fat blue metal cylinder sat silently, making not even so much as click. But when I touched it and let my sense of touch cascade into its mechanism, I felt the device’s activity.

In almost a perfect one-meter radius, it affected the air, making a bubble. Oxygen gas could enter the bubble, but it couldn’t leave without more force than ambient air fluctuations could provide.

I pulled of my mask and took a deep breathe.

Oh… that felt good. Falling asleep without anything clinging to my face would be better. And not having to worry about waking up from accidentally having shifted my mask? That would be the best.

There was a note on the shelf next to the device.

Caleb,

Ase gave me an assignment, the short notice kind, so I’ll be gone tonight and tomorrow. Nai and I got the aerofilter working, hope you enjoy. Don’t unplug it without turning it off first. Dyn and Nemuleki should be able to keep you busy while I’m gone. Don’t fight with Nai.

Meisu Tasser

Beneath his letter, there was a simple diagram explaining the row of buttons atop the aerofilter. They all stuck up prominently like buttons on an old cassette player did. I smiled fondly. Home was a long, long way away, and I hadn’t gotten to see any pictures of it today. But it was good to have friends, even such as they were.

My head hit the pillow and I was asleep before even realizing I’d forgotten to turn the light out.