Chase didn’t know where he was.
He could almost piece together everything leading up to it. After dinner, he’d coaxed the location of a nearby laundry room from Tom and set off to fetch some borax. A bit of setup and half-remembered elementary school science later, he had some straws hopefully collecting borax crystals. Everyone else was asleep by that time, so he had dutifully set an alarm on his phone and laid down in bed, only briefly playing around with the mysterious picture frame before dozing off.
Now? Now he was in something that resembled the lab dorm with a much different interior decorator. It looked like their method was to cram an entire art history course in a blender, then pour the resulting mixture over a laboratory framework and let the bits settle where they may. The floor was now dominated by a Roman mosaic, while the geometric gold patterns on the wall screamed art deco. Corinthian columns had popped up like mushrooms after rain, sharing space with harsh concrete brutalism. Chase’s bed now looked like it belonged in a French chateau, while the ceiling extended far upward in a multicolored onion dome. It was incredibly surreal.
“Okay, hallucinations. That or I’m dreaming. That’s new. Never got warned about this in school. DARE didn’t exactly cover the dangers of picture frames.” Chase muttered to himself, making his way to the living room door, now reminding him of a medieval castle. “Either that or Kayla put some seriously strange spices in those rice and beans.”
The living room offered the opposite of respite to his eyes, loud colors strewn about in huge blocks on one wall and a series of splatters on another. It was exhausting just to look at, so Chase did that as little as possible, feeling along the wall to the sliding glass door that now led out into the lab proper. The hallways seemed a little more tame, futuristic chrome plating broken up by Renaissance portraits every few feet. Chase didn’t exactly know where he was going when he left the dorm, but quickly found himself retracing his steps from earlier in the day. Back to the employee parking lot. Back to where he’d found the frame.
The usual glass outer wall had been reshuffled with a rustic log cabin, so Chase had no idea what was waiting on the other side as he threw the door open. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t for the aurora bubble to simply be gone. Of course, like everything else he’d seen so far, it had dragged some manner of vaguely equivalent replacement in, so he was left looking at the twinkling expanse of the Milky Way reshaped in dome format. He had to pause for a second to take in the majesty. Going two weeks without ever seeing a night sky was rough, and even if this one was still clearly unnatural, it filled some void he didn’t know existed until that moment.
Of course, a moment of peace was clearly too much to ask for when the overarching theme of this environment was chaos. No sooner had Chase’s eyes flitted down to where he’d picked up the picture frame earlier than a fresh sense was assaulted: his hearing. During his freshman year, Chase had lived next to two very stereotypical frat bros who loved throwing raging parties every weekend, blasting their speakers with whatever top 40 hit was popular that week until the bass made the windows rattle. This was that soundtrack turned up to 11, with an undercurrent of buzzsaw and a heady overlay of children’s recorder chorus. Chase immediately slapped his hands over his ears, or at least he attempted to. One of them instead smacked his temple with a picture frame.
“Ow, ow, ow, fuck! Where the hell did you come from and how do I turn this off!” Chase screamed. He recognized that screaming at inanimate objects wasn’t a great sign for sanity, but was banking on dream-rules applying. If this chaotic assault on the senses kept up, he couldn’t imagine and very deeply did not want to know what taste and touch would be like. Nothing good could possibly come from finding out.
“Off, off, off!” An echo of his own voice joined the discordant symphony, displacing the buzzsaw layer. A moment later, it continued. “Come from hell ow I turn how!”
“What?” Chase spoke before it hit him. The echo, for that’s what it was, was using his own words. He still had no idea what, if anything, it was trying to say, but each word it used reduced the volume of all the other dross, so he’d take what he could get. “Okay, turn down the music, let’s be calm, yeah? We’re all friends here, friends don’t blow out each other’s eardrums. Do you have a name?”
“Name? Hell ow friends music calm, yeah? Eardrums down?” It was disconcerting hearing his exact words and inflections cut up and parroted back, but true to its word the music was fading as the echo’s words became more prominent. He just had to keep talking and hope it became coherent enough for him to get some answers.
“Thank you. That’s much better. Are you connected to the frame in my hand here? Can you tell me how to use it or where I am? Or are you just an echo?”
“Connect-frame! Name? Echo. Tell me you better music hand where I am.”
Chase had to ponder that one for a second. Whatever was behind the echo, it was trying to communicate but had obviously limited vocabulary and what seemed like a completely different understanding of some basic things. For convenience’s sake, he would call it Echo for now, and Echo sounded like a child in some ways. It was trying everything to get his attention at first, but learning quickly as he spoke. But how did he tell it a better music hand where he was? Or did it mean where it was? Either way, he needed to feed it more vocabulary if he was going to have a chance at understanding it
“Okay, Echo. My name is Chase. I think we’re both a little confused. I’ll just start spouting some words so you can pick and choose the ones you want, alright? The last thing I remember is going to sleep in the dorm holding the frame you said you are connected to. Is that what brought me here?”
“Chase alright? Frame connected to Echo, brought you here the ones I want. Sleep is remember.”
Well. That was mildly disturbing. Whatever Echo was, it had brought Chase here in his dreams, if he was interpreting that right. That would explain some of the chaos around them, and Echo’s fumbling for a way to communicate could explain most of the rest. But what was the purpose?
“I am dreaming? This does feel a bit like a dream. It’s very chaotic. If you want to talk to someone and have them understand you, you might want to put things in a better order. Try using a subject, then a verb, then an object. Like ‘I spoke to Echo’. Do you want to try that now?”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Try. Echo connected to frame. Frame connected to Chase. Echo connected to Chase. Chase dream, frame brought here to Echo. Chaotic now order.”
So. If Chase wasn’t off the mark, Echo lived in the frame and had brought Chase in for a tour in his dreams. Echo’s natural state was chaos, but now that Chase was here things were calming down a bit and ordering themselves more along the lines of how he thought. It was flattering, that the ghost of the picture frame was imitating him. Also he was definitely gonna tell Jess that the ghosts of the aurora were living in his picture frame. Her expression would be spectacular.
“Thank you, Echo. That was great. So I am dreaming, that’s a relief. Things have been weird enough without the entire history of art and architecture vomiting everywhere. So, is it just us here? None of the others, like Jess? Just you and me, Echo?”
“Just you and me, Chase. Others none, connected off! Art weird here?”
Chase took a pointed look around, raising an eyebrow. He wasn’t sure how or even if Echo could follow his physical movements or what they meant, but it felt like the right thing to do. To be fair, as Echo had refined their speech from literally every sound at once to repeating specific words to some semblance of grammar, the physical environment had seen a few shifts as well. It still looked like the Milky Way was wrapped around the lab, but the asphalt of the parking lot wasn’t tie-dyed anymore and some of the minarets that had been serving as support columns had retracted their unnecessary flying buttresses.
“Yeah, Echo, it’s pretty damn odd. Usually people tend to stick to one theme rather than throw all of them out there at once. It gets real confusing real quick that way.”
“One theme confusing. All at once great and real, others yeah.”
Chase wished he wasn’t forced to play this combination of telephone and mad libs to get information out of Echo, because he was pretty sure they were doing a lot of talking past each other. That last sentence spoke to something fundamentally different in how they experienced the world; Chase was overwhelmed by all the styles going on at the same time, where Echo seemed to view that as the natural state of things. Which definitely had some implications for Chase’s next line of questioning.
“Agree to disagree there, Echo. I think we just see things differently. But as long as I’ve got you here, can I ask if there are more like you? You are connected to the picture frame, are there others like you connected to different objects? Have there been others brought into dreams to talk to you like this?”
“More, disagree like me. Echo odd. Others connected to objects, none talk to you into dreams. Order quick understand.”
“You’re different from the others? You want to talk to me so you brought me into this dream, but the rest just want order, something they can understand?” That certainly had some implications, as Chase immediately remembered just how the stilted movements of the people in the break room had become a little smoother after the blank 34. Was that why the researchers had started isolating themselves? The other ghosts, the greater society that Echo was referencing, had they somehow possessed the core staff? Echo had said they did things differently than the other ghosts.
“Echo, buddy, I know we’re working with limited words here, but this is something I really need to know. Help me out here. What’s the end goal of the others? You’re different from them and want to talk to me. Do they want to control the researchers? To take over the lab? That’s pretty much already happened if you all are the source of the barrier and the blank 34. What’s the use of trapping us all here and taking us over?”
“Others want use, want control but limited. Different from take over, want to use lab as source. Others use barrier and blank 34 to help.”
Chase’s mind was reeling. Okay, in order this time, one thing at a time. Whatever Echo is, it is sentient and there is a greater society of them. Echo is a bit of a rebel and wants to talk to me, which is nice. They clearly don’t experience the world in the same way that we do, if Echo was being literal they experience everything at once somehow. The others have some agenda that involves limited control of the researchers to use them somehow. Use them as a source? A source for what? Something that the barrier and blank 34 are supposed to help. Something that the others can’t generate on their own, probably.
Chase froze, then slowly rotated on the spot, taking in the slowly refining but still bizarre artistic landscape. Echo can change this environment, and has been since I started talking to it. But everything is something I can at least vaguely remember. Never seeing all of it in this configuration, but it all seems based on things I’ve seen before. My memories. Nothing from Echo’s side of things, nothing undeniably alien and different except the way the pieces are juxtaposed.
“Echo, yes or no question time. You and the others, your species experiences time differently than we do, yeah?”
“Yes, differently.”
“And because of this, there’s a lot of problems that you’ve never had to deal with. Perspectives that are new to you.”
“Yes, new perspectives and experiences goal!”
“That’s your goal? New perspectives?”
“Yes and no. Goal to others and goal to Echo.”
“Similar goal then, different methods. Fair enough. So why do you need us? Wait, yes or no questions, let’s narrow it down. Do you need us for ideas? Outsourcing creativity?”
“Yes, but others.”
“Part of it but not the whole answer. Do you even have physical form?”
“No, not as you do.”
“Kinda suspected, good to have it confirmed. Is your species a threat to mine?”
“Yes.”
“A flat yes, no qualifiers. That’s great. So whatever process you need us for, it isn’t good for us in the long term?”
“No. Others take over source, vomiting perspectives for new others.”
That was an image and a half, but Chase did his best to bear down on the relevant details. So the others, this main faction of Echo’s species, want to take over the researchers. They probably won’t stop there, either. They want to take over and use us for our problem solving and creativity. I guess that makes some sense if they experience things so differently compared to us. But then they want to take over the source and vomit new perspectives for new others… fuck. Oh fuck.
“Echo,” Chase’s voice had dropped to a trembling whisper. “I’m going to make a guess here. Tell me yes if I’m close. Your species, the others you’ve talked about. They’re not corporeal, so this taking over won’t be immediately obvious. It will be something subtle, like their behavior changing, isolating themselves, maybe hyperfocusing on one or two things. They’ll work tirelessly on a problem to the point of obsession. Once the others have gotten enough use out of them, once they’re fully hollowed out, they get used as an incubator to create more others. And the cycle continues.”
Echo’s reply was soft, lamenting, the first time in the whole conversation it wasn’t a perfect reflection of Chase’s own tone.
“Yes.”