Reward

Two months ago, Nai and I had gotten a glimpse inside each other’s brains.

It was fascinating on good days and bone-chilling on all the others. I’d been giving myself amateur psychological charting every few days since then, just to see if there were any drastic mental shifts.

But it turns out, the difference between amateur and expert psychological evaluation is all in the quality of the questions asked.

‘On a scale of one to ten, rate your overall level of patience today’ was a good place to start. Most of my questions were like that, charting drift in the numbers that would hopefully show any large effects on my mental state.

Unfortunately, nowhere had I included a question about ‘Have you suddenly acquired a new language’ in my tracking.

“Can you tell the difference?” Nora asked eagerly. “[Like, can you tell when] I switch from English to Starspeak?]”

“I…almost…” Nai said, “… Fuck , this is bad.”

“Probably,” I said.

Wait.

“Say that again?” I asked her.

“Fuck, this is bad.”

“[Nora, can you repeat what she just said? The exact sounds?]”

“[Sure…she said] fuck/vras, this is bad.”

I heard it…almost. She hadn’t said the word in English. I’d heard the sounds, and my brain had immediately translated it, before I could even fully realize it.

“Say something in Speropi,” I asked Nai. “Anything.”

Her eyes narrowed at me. Yeah, she was ahead of the curve.

“Can you understand me?” she asked. It sounded like English to my brain. Except…I could tell it wasn’t. The sounds were all wrong. If I tried to dig at any of the actual sounds, the meaning started to fall apart.

But for the overall phrase?

“[Yes I can…]” I said darkly.

“[Oh come on!]” Nora stamped her foot. “[You too?]”

Okay Caleb, deep breaths. This is just more psionic nonsense.

Hah.

It was so much easier said than done. I wanted to punch a wall, I was so frustrated.

“[…Shit… keeps blindsiding me,]” I muttered.

The worst part was, I could almost imagine Nora running into the same sequence of reactions in a few months. Right now she was a little bit behind me. This was all new, so she was still adjusting.

Not having to worry about psionic nightmares like Daniel or Nai worming into her brain had to help.

…That’s really unfair, I knocked myself.

“[Is it bad that I’m super jealous?]” Nora asked.

That reaction wasn’t helping either.

I couldn’t say I didn’t understand it though.

“[Kinda,]” I said. “[I’m pissed. You know how much I put into learning Starspeak the hard way? And I just pick up Speropi?]”

“That begs the question why something similar hasn’t happened with… with…[wit Nora,]” Nai pointed out, then frowned. “I can hear English, but I can’t speak it.”

“[Testing…]” I started. The words…I couldn’t quite imagine how to sounds were supposed to come out of my mouth. Never in my life had I so painfully felt a word on the tip of my tongue. But still, the words failed me, even as I reached for them.

“T…e…s…t…i…n…g…” I said, stumbling through the Speropi word one sound at a time.

The muscle memory was all wrong. The word didn’t start with a ‘t’ sound, and my mouth hadn’t made one, but my ears were insisting otherwise.

“[Muscle memory,]” Nora guessed. “[Habit is a huge part of language. Psionics can transfer the interpretation of the words, but not the muscle memory to actually speak them.]”

That was as good a theory as any.

“So is this actually anything new?” Nai asked. “We already traded a few memories. Depending on your perspective, this could actually be the least of whatever exchange has occurred.”

I walked to my room and grabbed my phone from where I usually kept it.

Pushing my cascade into it, I tapped into the spare psionics I’d stashed in it. Just like they would be in a brain, the dormant constructs were stable, abstractly embedded into the phone’s battery. I folded up the spatial processor I’d copied for Nora and retrieved the still new psionic detector.

“At the risk of exacerbating this,” I said, “we can test it at least.”

“Detector?” Nai asked.

I nodded. Our work to perceive psionics that weren’t attached to a mind made slow progress, but not zero.

There was no way to know how long it might be before we had a functional version usable by one person, but as long as Nai and Nora were both here, we could still use the family model.

With Nora acting as a spotter, Nai and I could dip our toes into this mystery a bit more boldly. Was this exchange like the memories we’d traded already? Were our minds connecting to each other’s skills and experiences? Moreover, were we in danger? Some exchanges were probably okay: glimpsing each other’s memories while we dreamt wasn’t that alarming. At least not next to the prospect of our personalities warping in response to the other person.

There was only one way to find out quickly. If anything started to go wrong, Nora would be watching closely with her corner of the detector.

The detector’s components were just a little too dense to pass via signals. But bless our breakthroughs, transferring psionics by implanting them in solid objects circumvented that problem neatly.

If Nai ever managed to tug apart the radar without shattering the whole thing, I might even get it back some day.

I materialized some marbles, embedding the detector’s pieces into them, before tossing them to Nora and Nai.

“[Nora, you’re the control so if neither of us picks up on anything, you need to double down and try to sense even the tiniest thing.]”

“[Got it,]” she nodded. The two of them took up the detector and their seats.

I settled back into a chair and crossed my legs. It wasn’t quite meditation, but the parallel felt appropriate as I turned all of my focus inward.

“Alright, Nai, talk to me,” I said.

she said.

<[How about now?]> I asked. Whatever connection existed had let her understand English. So maybe more English would light up anything associated with what we were looking for.

she said.

I did.

Every consciousness seemed surrounded by a void, like an infinite sea of dark clouds, where minds were the tallest peaks, prominences spearing up even above the sky.

The Speropi words stirred a familiar portion of my brain, and something started to rise through the void between my mind and Nai’s.

No.

It was already there?

I only had a split second to recognize my original superconstruct roar to life in my mind. More of it activated than I had ever seen before, pouring mental energy toward the parting gap between our minds.

And then I was gone.

·····

“That…was not what I was wanting to happen…” I muttered to myself. There was no one to talk to. No one real anyway. Just faceless figures milling about across a creaky wooden floor.

Perceiving my own mind was trippy, as always, but not unfamiliar at this point.

When I first started to grasp psionics, the trick had been using a decent metaphor.

Some of the notes Daniel had left in my head described how my mind had imposed certain filters on how he perceived our connection. Sometimes he’d been riding shotgun in a car with me at the wheel, others it had been like he’d been watching what I went through on television.

Psychic landscapes like that had cropped up before while I slept. Not all of my weird dreams were from Nai’s psyche. Some of them were Caleb originals.

So, had I fallen asleep?

Didn’t seem like it: normally I wasn’t really in control of dreams. Just along for the ride. I felt too self-aware for this to be a dream.

Back home, any time TV, movies, or comics needed to have something psychic play out for the audience to appreciate, it would always be some abstract inner journey through a mindscape of some kind.

What do you know? They were right. Although…it could also be a case of life specifically imitating art, rather than just by coincidentally accurate guess. I had a mindscape because I was familiar with the concept in fiction.

The right metaphor indeed…

For me, I would have expected a baseball game to be a decent metaphor for my own mind, maybe an aircraft carrier instead.

But to my chagrin, it was my high school's theater unfolding around me.

Seriously, why couldn’t it have been one of the other two? How cool would standing on an aircraft carrier be?

“Plus, if it’s all in my head, it could have been a Star Trek-themed carrier…” I muttered.

I wasn’t quite here . But if I had been, I would have been standing in the of the apron with stage crew bustling around me all dressed in black.

They wore no discernable faces—thank goodness—but to my surprise, I caught a glimpse of a few faceless Casti and Farnata milling about along with the humans in my brain.

That was new.

“Clear the stage,” I said to myself, organizing my thoughts. The words had come out before I could wonder why I would talk to no one in my own dream. Diving this wholly into my own mind, I needed to stay goal oriented, or I could lose track of time easily.

The stage hands shuffled off to the sides behind curtains, dragging the odd idea with them, until it was just ‘me’ in the middle of the stage. It really didn’t feel like me though. Something was missing, but I couldn’t be sure what.

Something like this had happened once before…I’d had a conversation with Daniel in a dream. And when I had lived through some of Nai’s memories, the dream had fallen apart when I pushed back on it.

I was pretty sure if I did so now, this would just dissolve and I’d wake up. Was that my goal right now?

We were trying to better perceive whatever psionic connection has traded languages between our heads…

I hadn’t dived so deep like this before and remained lucid.

This wasn’t alarming or unfamiliar enough to raise the alarm yet.

There was no proof anything had actually gone wrong yet…it had just gone different.

“House lights up?” I asked.

I wanted to perceive Nai’s mind first, and past experiences with this metaphor said other minds would be visible in the audience.

To my chagrin, the lights only came up partway. Something nagging at my own brain, keeping them that way. The seats were mostly empty, with a couple dozen Noras clustered in the back rows.

Ugh… I didn’t much enjoy plodding through my own brain like this. Was my subconscious trying to teach me a lesson? Why did my own mind have to grate on me so much?

Dispensing with the metaphor was tempting, but it was hard to focus on following through with tearing it all down. I couldn’t say why, but it felt like there was work put into the illusory theater I was standing in.

Fine. I could play along.

To a point.

Okay, think it through… Nora was the only one in the audience. So where was Nai?

Nora was supposed to observe…okay, duh. Nai should be onstage too, then.

“Nai?” I asked, voice echoing around awkwardly with nothing else onstage.

My stomach started to wrench, but old practice kicked in and I tightened my gut. Ignore it all. Let it mess with you later…not never…just later…

I was beginning to understand why my brain had picked the stage for today. Was I in a scene? Scenes had goals, scripts. The goal was clear, but not how we got there. No script.

“Oh come on…” I complained. “I hate improv…”

Nai still hadn’t appeared though.

Then I needed to tear at the edges of this metaphor. This was my mind, whatever abstraction I perceived it as.

And my mind came with extras.

Onstage, I squeezed the button for a walkie-talkie I hadn’t been holding a moment earlier.

my voice spoke.

she replied. Her voice was nearly silent too.

Oh that was good. A little tension went out of my breath.

“Enter Nai,” I cued. Impulse had seized me with the relief I was still in contact with Nai.

She emerged from the wings, walking tentatively onto stage with me. Her Coalition uniform was neatly trimmed and without any of its usual wrinkles. A costume version? To fit the stage?

Focus, I forced myself to keep from getting sucked into the dream’s pace.

“

“Loud and clear,” she said. “…What do you see right now?”

“My school theater,” I said. “What about you?”

“The same, I think,” she replied. “But a moment ago, I was…somewhere else. I can’t remember now.”

“How do you not know?” I asked. “Is your memory impaired?”

My questions seemed to bleed the color from the edges of my view, and Nai looked like she didn’t understand the question.

The walkie-talkie sprang back into existence in my hand, and I squeezed the button again.

The Nora’s in the audience all immediately shouted, “No. All normal so far.”

Okay…

The unexpected was not…unexpected right now. Something had progressed with my and Nai’s brains.

“What can you remember then?” I asked, turning back to Nai onstage.

“I…I remember this scene,” she said. “Except it’s not a scene. There was no script. Right now…I’m playing…Paul? Except…”

“Except Paul was the other actor,” I said, recalling the moment too. “He and I were doing an improv assignment.”

Nai nodded. “Yeah…yeah, he/I kept things verbal…minimal blocking.”

“There’s no blocking in improv,” I said. “That’s the whole point.”

“Then what’s the whole point of this scene?” she asked, gesturing to the empty stage around us.

“…You aren’t Nai,” I said, narrowing my eyes. Her responses were off. But a hurt look flashed across her face for a moment, too real to be forced. “…At least not all of her…”

I had the odd sensation of ‘smallness’ wash over me. What if ‘I’ wasn’t all here either?

Duh. It had been the first cogent thought to go through me, standing on this stage.

So where was the rest of me?

Another stage? Talking to another Nai?

…Maybe some of them were…that answer felt wrong…incomplete.

Nai had talked about being somewhere else, and winding up onstage with me. So what if some other part of my mind had done the opposite? Gone to whatever place the rest of her mind had imagined?

Maybe that’s why it was becoming harder to stay lucid within the dream. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t more alarmed by this new and uncharted psionic territory. My panic could be divided amongst all the pieces of my mind, each one of them underestimating the danger I was in.

It was hard not to keep going though.

“You kept your voice really loud,” I said, recalling the drama class with Paul. “You taunted me, tricked me into raising mine too. So I didn’t get points marked down for mumbling.”

“It was the first time you went on stage without throwing up,” Nai said. “You got an A on the assignment.”

She was speaking English. But only as I perceived it.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“So why reenact the scene now?” I asked. “If we even are. I quit theater, and I can’t tell what it has to do with why we’re here now.”

“You need to get an A now too,” Nai said, falling deeper into character. “If you throw up now, in front of everyone, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

“Try again,” I said. “I’m not throwing up today. It’s been a long time since I got stage fright.”

“Not long enough,” Nai said. Her intonation was just like a human’s would have— had been. She was acting out Paul more closely. Was that good or bad?

“The stakes are higher now,” I said. “So I just want to figure out what the hell is going on with our minds.”

“We are doing that,” Nai whispered to me in an aside. “Just keep playing along.”

“Playing along with what?”

“Oh perfect! Just like that,” she winked.

A few chuckles rippled out in the audience. More seats were filled now, faceless humans and Casti.

“Cut!” I yelled, frustration getting the better of me.

In an instant, Nai’s posture dropped.

“What the heck, man?” she said. “We had a good rhythm going there! We’ll never get this scene right if you keep interrupting us every time we’re about to get to the good lines.”

“It was improv,” I repeated, “there are no lines.”

“You’re out of control,” she said. “You just need to chill…out…”

Nai stretched the word out like a surfer dude.

Sonofa…

She was still acting!

“Meta-theater is for hacks!” I growled.

“Isn’t that a little ironic coming from you right now?” she asked, gesturing around us. “Try playing along. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“Why are you playing along?” I asked. “We have actually good reasons to be worried here—real danger! And you’re doing your best to become the first alien Rastafarian.”

“I learned,” Nai said, affecting a drunken stagger as she crossed the stage. “You put a mirror up to my head, and I got a look at who I was, and who you wanted to be. Projector? Cue projector!”

She snapped toward the lighting booth, and an image flickered to life on the stage wall.

An exaggerated image of the two of us sitting across from each other around an air barrier machine.

“We’re not friends. But we don’t have to be enemies. Make a deal with me,” my image said.

“A deal?” past-Nai asked.

“We’re not friends, and we can’t just avoid each other, so let’s make a deal. You help me when I’m missing critical details, and in exchange I’ll help you figure out better ways to...persevere.”

“This is me,” Nai onstage said, voice dropping to an icy whisper. “Me, persevering.”

“Then hold up your end!” I said. “Because I’m missing details right this instant. And you can help me catch them.”

“No,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because our deal is moot now.”

She snapped her fingers again and the projector changed.

An image of Nai and I next to a window on a spaceship. She held a gun, twirled it in her hand and offered me the grip.

“Friends?”

“Friends,” I’d answered.

My heart felt like it was racing. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this. None of it made sense. Just like our latest psionic development. Just like this stupid drone. Just like getting abducted.

“H-help me out,” I asked. “I’m totally lost, and I’m at my wits’ end.”

“All you had to do was ask,” Nai grinned.

She snapped her fingers again and the projector image wound forward a few minutes.

“Hivivi,” she’d asked.

“Hivivi,” I’d answered.

“That was a good moment,” I said. “But…it kinda feels like it’s biting me now. Psionics are…” I swept an arm out at the theater, “…dangerous. I got you into this, and now the genie is out of the bottle. People could die by the millions because I screwed up!”

“It takes a little ego…” she said, almost like she was quoting someone. “We are meat, and little else.”

I’d said that. Was she quoting me?

No…

“You’re quoting my memories,” I said. “Maybe not everything you say, but…a lot. How much of you is connected to my mind? How?”

She stamped her foot on the stage, throwing her arms up and spinning around like she was trying to hug everything around us.

“I don’t know anything more than you right now,” she said. “I’m just…doing my best and whatever feels right.”

…She was connected to my mind, right now, as we spoke.

How much of this was coming from me?

“So am I,” I said. “Aren’t I?”

“I think…you are determined to bear everything you possibly can upon your shoulders,” she said. “I learned from your mind. And you learned from mine.”

“I…appreciate the lesson,” I said. “You never wanted to be the Warlock. I…concede that I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself. It…feels like I should. Like I need to…but that isn’t what I want to focus on right now. We’re trying to study our minds, and if we’re in danger.”

“There is a difference,” Nai said, “between being under pressure, and putting pressure on yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah…I have plenty of the former,” I followed, trying to keep her on task.

“So do not add to yourself the latter,” she agreed.

“Then shut up and try to help me figure out what’s going on!” I said. “Something is going on with our minds, right now. And I’m having trouble focusing on bailing out of this stupid dream!”

“Just because you went looking for silver doesn’t mean you can’t find gold...I think this is supposed to be a reminder for you,” Nai said. “It’s not all in your control. It’s not enough to take it upon yourself. Putting everything upon yourself…it’s cruel. How is anyone important to you supposed to feel? Watching you break yourself, holding up what could be shared?”

The last word resonated, making the whole theater shudder.

She continued.

“So share.”

I found the walkie-talkie in my hand again. It was…my telepathy—the transceiver.

Looking offstage, some of my other psionic constructs were there in solid form too. A file cabinet, drafting table, as well as spiral notebooks and a heavy bound dictionary.

Those were all my psionics, some large, some small. Each one was a tangible object in this mindscape.

Then where was the big one?

“Where are we?” I asked.

Nai’s foot stomped on the stage again. This time, I paid attention to her face. She gave no indication she was aware of the stomp.

“The superconstruct…” I realized, poking at the edge of the theater. “We’re standing inside it…right now…”

It was all around us, adaptable in the extreme, capable of bearing immense information…

It wasn’t just for words…words were simple. It wasn’t even just for memories. Those too, were plain by comparison.

“Projector,” I whispered, and snapped my fingers.

The image on the back wall changed again. It was me, shivering against the wall of the mess in the A ship. Daniel’s unconscious body next to me, before he’d woken back up and it had all really gone wrong. I was inconsolable. Alone.

Alone, alone, alone.

I’d wanted to reach out. To anyone. To anything.

And so I had.

I’d built something from nothing but desperate thoughts and dreadful hopes.

It hadn’t just been hewn from loneliness. I’d known I wasn’t alone. Daniel had still been breathing right next to me. For all the good it had been.

No, being alone wasn’t the worst thing I could imagine.

Feeling alone, when you knew you weren’t…that was.

So my creation had reached out. It had built a bridge across the valley, a stage to bring characters and audience together.

It was more than just communication. It was understanding.

That was what I’d lacked, what I’d craved when I’d been alone on the ship. Your first Adept creation was often shaped by your needs and pressures at activation.

And that was what I’d built. Something to help me understand and be understood.

Without thinking, I held up my fist for Nai, and she bumped it.

Lightning ran down my brain, through my arm, and into Nai’s. The same energy flowed back from her too, connecting every scrap of my existence to hers.

Adeptry created things.

And within my mind, I’d created a bridge. But not some plain wooden bridge crossing a creek, not even a grand majestic structure crossing a whole bay.

I’d built a modular bridge. An advanced bridge. With crazy hydraulics, bells and whistles. I’d built a bridge that could build its own little bridges.

Energy filled every corner of my mind, drowning out the psychic theater just in time for Nai to breathe, “and scene.”

·····

A slap raked across my cheek, snapping me back to physical sensation.

“[Caleb!]” Nora wound back to slap me again, and my hand darted out to catch her wrist first.

“[I’m here, I’m here…]” I said.

“[Dude, what the shit was that?]”

“[Productive,]” I said, looking to see Nai was coming out of it too.

“[You guys stopped responding to me,]” Nora said. “[What happened?]”

“[…We were looking for the connection...]” I said.

“ And we found it, ” Nai muttered in Speropi. “Wow, did we find it.”

“[Putting it mildly,]” I scoffed. “You okay?”

“Yes,” she mumbled. “I…there’s so many…how many conversations did we just have?”

“[English or Starspeak, please!” Nora insisted. “[Seriously, you two are worrying me.]”

“[We’re fine,]” I said, still recouping myself. The sheer intensity of the connection was overwhelming, and disorienting once it vanished.

And it had vanished.

The bridge was already being drawn back into its dormant state. Bridges, I saw now. Countless tiny strands working in tandem. I could make sense of it more now, having seen it from the inside. The superconstruct–was that really the best word for it? Whatever it was to be called, it coiled the bridges within itself. Eventually it would be ready to launch out again and explore another series of connections.

“We’re okay,” Nai confirmed. “What happened from your perspective, Caleb?”

“[I…was in my high school theater,]” I said. “[You showed up…]”

Except that wasn’t all. It had happened, more than once even. Parallel to one ‘scene’ there had been different stages with different Caleb’s and Nai’s. But that had only been my half of the connection.

For Nai…

“You were with your brother,” I said. “And your dad. I…was there too. It’s hard to remember what we talked about…there’s too many versions to remember any one of them…”

“There’s too many iterations to count,” she agreed. “How long did this take? How long has it been?”

“[Uhh…like…] two minutes,” Nora said.

Two minutes.

“Estimate,” I asked Nai. “More than ten conversations? More than a hundred? A thousand? How much time did our brains just spend, internally?”

“Hundreds, at least,” Nai nodded. “I can’t be sure about thousands, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

“Days,” I said. “We might have just spent days talking to each other. In just a few minutes.”

“Well, I think it’s safe to say we know what the superconstruct does now,” she said. “At least the basic aim.”

No kidding.

“Believe it or not, I think we were actually underdoing it,” I said. “I think conversations were just the simplest way it could get us to exchange information.”

Nora flicked me on the side of the head.

“[Quit that; start explaining,]” she said.

“I figured…[It wasn’t what we went looking for, but I figured out how I first made psionics,]” I said. “[I figured out the function of the superconstruct.]”

“[Well, don’t leave me hanging,] she said.

“Communication,” Nai said. “Or…no, that’s putting it too simply.”

“[She means it’s not limited to language,]” I said. “[Agh, it shared memories between us. How was that not a bigger clue?]”

“[…What has you sure about this?]” Nora asked. “[Because like you said, it’s not what you went looking for, and I got the impression you were still in the dark this morning.]”

“[It’s…hard to put into words,]” I said. “[It’s not just about sharing information—that kind of communicating, I mean. It can definitely do that…but also way more. That’s why I think we’re still underdoing it. We’re still just scratching the surface.]”

“But you weren’t even scratching it before,” Nai pointed out. “This is a huge step forward.”

I nodded. She was exactly right. And why wouldn’t she be? The bridge had been up when I had the realization. Of course she’d had it too.

“[Keep talking,]” Nora said. “[You seem really disoriented still. I think putting things into words might help you.]”

“[It’s…capable of processing information, even in esoteric formats. Sights, sounds, hunches, doubts. It doesn’t reduce data to code like a computer does. It’s…]”

The words failed me. I understood what it was for now, even if some of the adjunct and consequential applications still evaded me. The core idea was…recognizable. But simultaneously inexpressible.

The only way I knew how to express the realization was the construct itself.

“It’s for understanding, connecting…” Nai said, “Adepts’ first creations reflect the stressors and needs when they activate. Sometimes it’s not significant. Tiv says his first creation was a wrench. But other Adepts…those moments shape their finest creations. I wanted to burn something down, so I made vorpal fire. Caleb was alone in the void, isolated from everything, overwhelmed by new information, but starved for any way to comprehend it.”

“[So I created a tool to fix the problem,]” I agreed. “[Not just a superconstruct…a superconnector.]”

That made my heart clench for a moment. No wonder it had grabbed hold of Daniel so tightly. It had been supposed to connect my mind to his.

“[See…I’m losing the plot a bit,]” Nora said. “[Because when you first described psionics to me, you said they weren’t some abstract open ended telepathic abilities. Until now, they’ve all been…well, exactly what you said they were! Machines, tools.]”

“[This is a tool too,]” I reaffirmed. “[It’s just a different order of magnitude of…]”

“[Of?]”

“[Complexity, mostly. But also energy, I think. I’m not saying I know everything about it now, but I made the big first step.]”

“[That sounds like a good thing,]” Nora said. “[Is that how you picked up each other’s languages?...And…if so…]”

“[Hit the brakes,]” I said. “[Yes, that’s probably what happened, but no, we don’t understand how yet. So unless you just want to connect to my brain and roll the dice hoping you pick up more Starspeak…]”

I trailed off, feeling guilty. I’d told Nora about my time with Daniel on the ship and about psionic exposure likely driving him mad.

But I’d kept it vague about him winding up in my head.

In retrospect, I hadn’t done a very good job informing people of the risks besides Tassser and Nai…

“You’ve been learning fast,” Nai agreed. “Don’t get lazy right after you start making big strides. Besides, Caleb is right, there’s real danger handling this many unknowns.”

“[Well…] thanks,” Nora said.

“[Nora’s not entirely wrong though,]” I said. “[It would be crazy to try reproducing it in someone else now, but we can still try to figure out how two whole languages got swapped between us. Ideas?]”

“You’re the one with the ‘superconnector’,” Nai said. “I’m not sure how much help I can be.”

“[But you have information from Caleb’s mind in yours,]” Nora said. “[Yesterday, you didn’t even know the languages had transferred. There could still be undiscovered exchange.]”

“That begs the question when the bridge actually formed, and when it’s up,” Nai agreed. “What if the languages really hadn’t been shared until today?”

“[Then why today? Is it a single cause, or did something accumulate over more time and finally reach a tipping point?]”

“All very good questions,” I said, interrupting the two of them. “But what if the language didn’t transfer at all?”

That stopped them both.

“That seems…unlikely,” Nai said slowly. “Seeing as how Nora is speaking English and I’m still holding a conversation.”

“The superconnector builds connections,” I said. “So I see two possibilities. The first is that there’s a connection still built between us that we haven’t been able to perceive. That is, the connection and the exchange of information is ongoing, even as we speak.”

“Like in Cirinsko,” Nai recalled, following my logic. “Your receiver got entangled into my mind, but you could still access it. Remotely.”

“The superconnector could be doing the same thing now,” I agreed. “Instead of us actually possessing the language—the acquired skill to speak it—we’re just borrowing the others’ capacity to do so.”

“Then the second option is that the connection really is momentary,” Nai said. “So it’s not ongoing, and the knowledge really was transferred.”

I nodded.

“And in that case…yeah, then we really might have traded languages.”

“[No, no, hang on,]” Nora said. “[You make a really good point about how language is a skill. It’s not one thing, it’s several things. Can she read English? Can you read Speropi?]”

Oh Nora, good question!

I flashed Nai a materialized card with a quote in English.

Life is not a spectator sport.

She frowned at it for a moment, but shook her head.

“It’s like I can almost start to focus on one word, and then I lose it. I don’t know which symbol makes what sound,” she confirmed.

“Reverse check now,” I said.

She materialized a placard too. It had a neatly scribbled phrase in looping letters with lots of extra dots. But not a single letter made sense to me.

“[Absolutely nothing,]” I said, a grin growing on my face.

Was it bad, that I was this excited about something that was likely screwing with my head? Progress just felt so, so good after being more and more frustrated recently.

“[Any clue why?]” Nora wondered.

“Actually…yes,” Nai said. “I know Caleb has a function for transcribing that can incorporate letters, as well as tone bleeding into the signal, but the transceiver telepathy is based strictly in sounds. The way we use it most is almost entirely auditory.”

“[We didn’t pick up the whole language,]” I grasped. “[Not spoken or written. Just the auditory interpretation part.]”

“You’ve talked about how the superconnector is tied into most of your other psionics,” Nai said. “Maybe it built, or added, to a connection with the audio telepathy.”

“That’s…completely plausible,” I said.

The superconnector’s ‘bridges’ were just another metaphor. As far as I could tell, it could build a connection from…anything, it seemed. But what exactly did that look like? What would different connections look like?

I had no idea.

“Whelp,” I said. “I’m not sleeping tonight.”

“[Gonna skip past bedtime playing with your new toy?]” Nora jabbed.

“You have no idea…” I grinned.