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You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
There is only the room. The room is the world, and you are the world's only inhabitant. There used to be a much larger world, with others, before you were here. Most of the time you don't try to remember that world. It lingers on the edge of your subconscious like a half-forgotten dream, a fractured picture whose scraps are occasionally summoned by the random firing of neurons, or whatever passes for them in this place.
The fragments that come to you, here and there, are often innocuous. A taste in the back of your mouth. A sensation against the feathers of your neck. But you know every inch of the world, every carefully inspected wooden slat that makes up the room, and the world does not have new things to taste or new sensations to feel. It has the chair. The lantern. The telescope that points through the sliver of window to the unchanging sky beyond.
There are times when you look at the room and wonder if you only imagined that anything outside of them existed at all.
But other times the memories resurface, as if emerging from a dark lake, and then you are awash again in all the pain and grief that comes with them. You throw yourself against the unyielding wood that your claws can never make a scratch in. You remember what it was like before they locked you in here. You remember the flavor of tea, and the deep vibration in your chest when everyone would sing together in harmony, and the smell of smoke and ash as you watched the burning enclave and did nothing to stop it.
Sometimes when this happens, you build yourself a nest of the memories and wrap yourself up in them tight, and you imagine you are real again. You sink yourself so deeply into these memories that centuries pass before you return. Each detail in them is something to be savored. A single conversation can be replayed a thousand times, from a thousand different angles, until you get it just right, and then performed over and over. You live entire lifetimes inside these memories. You are born and grow old and die; you have friends and rivals and loves, again and again and again until suddenly you remember that you are only pretending to be all of the people in these stories and the whole thing collapses under its own weight like a dying star.
Then you wake up and find yourself in the room. You are only you again, and there is no one else.
When this happens you remember that there is no world outside of the room, and it brings you comfort. You inspect the grain of wood on each plank in the floor. It is reassuringly the same. You look through the window to the little patch of sky. The stars have not moved. They look exactly the same as they always have. Everything is as it should be.
(A voice in the back of your head reminds you that stars are supposed to move, that it should not always be night, that this is not real. But you do not like to listen to that voice, because those are the memories that hurt the most).
***
In the first days, the agony of your dying body would sometimes wake you from the simulation. You would drift through the corporeal world and its many forms of pain, with which you were becoming so intimately familiar, until unconsciousness claimed you and you sank into the dream once more. Which was worse - to be alive in a starving and dehydrated body, clawing at the inside of the sarcophagus for a reprieve they would never grant you? Or to drift inside the painless dream, not knowing whether each time waking would be your last?
But eventually you ceased to wake any further. Some time later you felt the sarcophagus being moved, and then you knew it was done. Your body in the outer world was dead, and now they - your friends, your family - were filing you away into the quiet prison they had built for you to stay for all eternity. Your consciousness kept under glass so that they could congratulate themselves that nothing would be truly lost. A preservation as much as a punishment.
There was little to do in the vault they locked you in but think. The boredom of it wore upon you, tempered only by flashes of hope that the others would realize their mistake and set you free. There was still time for one of them to wake and stop the signal blocker, still time to turn back from the path they'd chosen. At the very least, you thought one of them might visit to berate you, to gloat, to remind you of what you gave up.
But no one ever did.
It's after the first few millenia passed that you realized they were no longer just ignoring you. They had, at least on some level, forgotten you were ever here at all.
***
You have no sense of time anymore. Your mind is not made to comprehend things on such a scale. You know it has been far, far longer than any being should ever be alive, but you don't remember what living is meant to be like. Time simply carries on, as untouchable as the stars outside your window. Sometimes your mind tries to fill the unending emptiness, perhaps to make sense of it. You think you hear distant music, but it comes from nowhere. You feel someone touch your arm, but when you open your eyes you are alone. The nothing of it all fills you up until you burst at the seams, and then you hurt and hurt until you are incapable of feeling anything at all. The memories ebb and flow, and you delve into them and return. You throw yourself against the walls. You remember too much to hold within you at once. You forget that anything but you ever existed.
You aren't real. You are real. You don't know anything at all.
In the times when you are lucid, you lay out the things you believe are true. The signal. The eye. The end. The beginning. The memories of everything else come and go, but you try not to forget these things. You have broken and come back together so many times that you aren't sure you are the same person who was once locked in here, but you are pretty sure that person thought these things were important.
You think these things are important. You don't want to forget.
***
You do not register the sound of footsteps above. You pay no attention to such noises anymore. No one but you exists in the world, so anything you hear is the product of your imagination, your mind filling in the gaps. It's only when the lift clicks into place and light sweeps over the room that you rouse from your chair in alarm. Your feathers puff with fear at this impossible intrusion, this thing that approaches you from out there.
It is not one of the others.
The creature is like nothing you have seen before. It has smooth skin and fleshy ears and four wet eyes that stare up at you. You stare back, unable to believe that this thing can exist. You reach out to touch it, expecting your hand to pass through it and the illusion to dissolve back into the infinite emptiness. Instead the creature skitters back out of your grasp, its ears flat against its head.
That is when you realize that it is real, that you are twice its height, and you have scared it.
You stare at it some more. You have spent so long being the only inhabitant of the world that you do not remember how to act around another being. Seeing it jogs something loose in your brain, memories resurfacing from the inky bog of your mind. You are not, in fact, the only inhabitant of the world - this is not the world at all, but a prison built to contain you.
Somewhere in the outer world, the untouchable world, this creature's body is curled up in the light of a green flame while its mind has stretched into the secret places of your kind's preserved home. All the way to you.
You look at it in wonder. It seems to have recovered from its fright, coming toward you again. It burbles something from what you assume is its mouth and looks at you expectantly.
You have no idea what to do.
You contemplate the lantern it clutches in its tiny hands. If it is capable of interfacing with the dream, perhaps your other technology will work with it as well? You cast your eyes around. Abandoned in the corner is your vision torch, left sitting there for so long that most times you forget it is anything more than a decoration.
The creature follows you cautiously as you walk over to pick up the torch. It is heavy in your palm. The weight of it on your skin surfaces an ancient buried memory.
The signal. The eye. The end. The beginning.
You remember, then. Not all, but enough.
Through the torch you try to show the creature what you did. You released the signal your kind wished so desperately to seal away, and for that they imprisoned you in an eternal tomb. They made it so no one would ever hear the signal again, then locked themselves in a dream of their homeworld to forget what they had sacrificed. The creature's eyes flick under its closed lids as it absorbs the images. You cannot tell how much goes through, but you think it parses what you are trying to tell.
When the creature opens its eyes, you offer it the torch. It takes the device, nearly as tall as the creature itself, in unsteady hands. You can tell it has never done this before - the images it passes dip in and out of focus, and the sentiment is hazy and raw - but you can glean something of the meaning underneath.
Time has passed, so much time that an entire civilization has lived and died since the last time any of your kind laid their eyes upon this solar system. All that while your ship has spun unnoticed just beyond them, wearing gradually down with each passing millenia until what's left inside is rot and dust. The bodies of everyone you've ever known are nothing but hollow bone, their skin dried to leather and worn away in turn, only their lanterns remaining to keep them anchored in the dream.
You knew it had been far, far too long for anything on this ship to remain alive, and still you keen at the sight of them. For those who were once your friends, for the memory of the world you all destroyed to come here, for the signal that was lost and never found.
It is not a happy ending, but it is, at least, an ending.
You open your eyes to see the creature holding the vision torch, watching you with a curious expression. It places the torch back in your hand. You bow to it, hoping it understands, and enter the lift to ascend from the room to the unsealed door beyond.
You step outside the vault.
After so long in your tiny world, the vast space of the cavern they built to hide your tomb in feels impossibly big. A lake surrounds the patch of shore you find yourself on, its water preternaturally still. It fills the air with a deep warm moisture that sinks into your lungs, dark and reassuring. The weight of everything you've carried within you for so long settles heavy on your shoulders. You allow yourself to feel the shape of it, the exhaustion of all the quiet enduring centuries and everything that was lost, made bearable at last by the knowledge that soon it will be done.
You wonder, if you saw the others now, would they still have it in them to hate you? Or would they welcome you back among them as a long-lost friend?
The silt at the edge of the water is soft beneath your feet. You hold your lantern close, the flame swaying within like it knows what's about to come. You press it to the feathers of your chest and imagine you can feel the heat of it, slow and soft, unfolding throughout you. You think of the creature in the vault and leave one last memory in the torch in the hope that the creature, when finally it emerges from the vault and sees your hoofprints leading to the shore, will feel your gratitude.
You take a breath.
You walk into the water, and you die.
Power source detected.
Ash Twin Project initializing...... initialization complete.
Preparing data stream.
Activating warp core in 3... 2... 1 -
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
You do not register the sound of footsteps above. You pay no attention to such noises anymore. No one but you exists in the world, so anything you hear is the product of your imagination, your mind filling in the gaps. It's only when the lift clicks into place and light sweeps over the room that you rouse from your chair in alarm. Your feathers puff with fear at this impossible intrusion, this thing that approaches you from out there.
The creature moves toward you, not jumping back when you rear up to your full height. This thing must be a hallucination, the simulation breaking down at last - and yet your hand, when you touch it, doesn't pass through its shoulder, and the lantern light glints off its many eyes like something real.
It makes a gesture at itself as if to say yes, I'm here.
You step back, bewildered. There should be no one here other than you - yet something distant unfurls in the back of your mind, a tiny voice reminding you that this is not the world after all, only a prison built to lock you away. The scraps of memory left to you shiver in your head, beginning to trace out the shape of something long forgotten.
The creature tilts its head and points questioningly to the corner. You have to blink several times to realize it means the vision torch, which has stood abandoned there for so long that most times you forget it is anything more than a decoration. You walk over to it, considering. If the creature can interface with the dream, perhaps your other technology will work with it as well?
You pick up the torch, and the weight of it makes something click into place in your mind. The signal. The eye. The end. The beginning. The things you told yourself you would remember.
You show the creature what you did, why they locked you in here. When you are done you offer it the torch. The images it shows you are hazy: your ship, tucked away in a corner of the solar system, drifting for so long that everything inside has rotted away and those you once knew have long since turned to bone. A species you do not recognize, who built and lived and died in this system never knowing your ship was there, now dead themselves for so long that even their buildings are nothing but ruins. You cry out at the sight of it, for your broken ship, for your lost world, for everything that could have been and now never will be.
The image blurs, the creature struggling to wrangle it, until at last it sharpens on a pattern that fills you with such sudden grief it nearly bowls you over. The star-shaped knot of the eye flickers in your mind. The sentiment surges, tasting of confusion, of question.
You think the creature means, what is this?
You open your eyes to see the creature offering the torch back to you, shaking the torch slightly like it wants you to hurry. You take it back, trying to piece together the muddled fragments of your memory. What of the things you think you remember are true, and what have you only imagined is true during the endless emptiness of your imprisonment?
You show it the bits you are the most confident in. That your kind followed the signal of the eye to this solar system and learned that reaching it would cause a fundamental shift in reality - a singularity. The end of everything; the beginning of everything. What comes after none of you could ever tell, only that it means the start of something wholly new. Something your kind could never allow to happen.
You don't know how much of that comes across to the creature. Even to someone well-practiced with interpreting the torch it would be difficult to convey. The creature's half-closed eyes move back and forth under the stream of information. When it opens them it only looks more confused. You sigh, weary.
The creature gestures for the torch again. You are too lost in your thoughts to notice this at first, which prompts it to waggle its hands at you. The sight is unexpectedly amusing, this tiny thing impatiently scolding a being nearly twice its size, as it makes a burbling noise that you know without any need for a translator means, just give it, already. A shrill croak of laughter escapes you, surprising you as much as it does the creature, whose ears flatten against its head. You feel dizzy. You can't remember the last time you laughed.
The creature makes another grasping motion, and you realize you've spent several more moments just staring at it. The ages you've spent waiting in here have not made you inclined to move with haste, but the creature clearly operates at a much different speed. You feel like laughing again as it jitters from side to side. Instead you hold the torch out, and the creature snatches it from your claws.
The image it shows you is that of the creature itself entering the vault. It sees you in the corner and waves a hand back and forth, making a watery sound from its mouth. The image of you looks over and makes a similar waving motion. The sentiment running underneath is something like welcoming. The image of you opens your mouth; the sentiment becomes expectation.
The vision ends and the creature looks at you, waiting for you to do something.
You open your mouth. You tell the creature, Hello?
It makes a rapid sequence of loud sounds. It lifts its hand like in the vision and makes the waving motion.
Hello, you say. You realize this is the first time you've spoken aloud in a very, very, very long time. The sensation is strange and coarse in your mouth. You consider the weight of your tongue, your teeth, as you say it again, slowly. Hello. Hello. Hello.
The creature makes a strangled choking sound like an injured fletching. You blink at it in concern. It makes the sound again, undeterred, and abruptly you realize what it is doing.
It is trying to pronounce the word back to you.
You can't help it then, you croak with laughter, your body shaking while the creature makes a face that can only be annoyance. You laugh until you can't anymore, and then you gather yourself together, your eyes wet with amusement. Hello, you tell it.
It makes another attempt, and another. The anatomy of its throat clearly does not allow it to make the sounds of your language, turning the word all wet and distorted, like listening to someone speak underwater. You snort out a bemused breath. The creature's ears perk up, and it says something in its own language you don't understand. It coughs and tries again - a garbled noise that is not quite a hello.
Now that your amusement is gone you are left wondering - why does the creature need to know this, of all things? Your language, like your species, has been gone from the outer world for countless millennia. You gesture your confusion and hope the meaning comes across.
The creature fiddles with the vision torch. The image of it entering the vault fills your mind again, repeating over and over as if on a loop.
Which makes no sense.
But you don't need to make sense of things anymore. The vault is open now; your punishment is done, your eternity of waiting, of breaking, of dreaming, of forgetting. You are done worrying about the past and the future. You are so tired. You only want to let it end and finally, finally rest.
You bow to the creature, hoping it understands, and step into the lift to ascend to the unsealed door beyond.
You step outside the vault.
You stare up in wonder at the lightless ceiling of the cavern. The lake that surrounds you is quiet and still, the silt of the shore soft beneath your feet. You hold your lantern close, the flame swaying within like it knows what's about to come.
You take a breath.
You walk into the water, and you die.
Activating warp core in 3... 2... 1 -
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
You are dozing in your chair when the lift clicks into place. The door creaks open and light sweeps over the room, rousing you from your stupor. You rise to your feet in a rush of fear, unable to comprehend the thing emerging from the lift, the impossibility of the realization that something exists here besides you.
The creature that steps towards you is unlike anything you have seen before. It is small and fleshy and dappled with soft scales. It holds a lantern to one side, the green flame glinting off its four eyes.
It opens its mouth and says, hello.
The word is barely understandable, and at first you don't think you have heard it correctly at all. But barely is still understandable, and this is a hello. You stare at it, shocked, frozen in place by your blanking mind until the creature starts to twitch back and forth, waving its hands at you in undeniable impatience.
Hello? you say, cautious. It comes out strange and not quite right. Somewhere in the back of your mind realize this the first time you've spoken aloud in a very, very, very long time. You run your tongue along your teeth, as if you are just now discovering them for the first time.
The creature says something in a different language you don't know. You shake your head at it, bewildered. You ask, Who are you?
It babbles at you some more. You think it is speaking more to itself than to you by the way it turns its head to the side. It appraises the room with its watery eyes. If it is surprised to find you locked away in this desolate place, it does not show it.
Who taught you to say that? you ask, slowly, not certain it can understand you.
Its gaze snaps back to you, and its face scrunches up in a way that suggests amusement. From its mouth comes the distorted word, you.
Which makes no sense.
The creature ignores your confused look. It puts a hand on its throat, making a coughing, gravelly sound. Bad, it says in that peculiar garbled voice. At speak.
You cannot imagine how it is pronouncing your words at all, much less who would have taught it. You doubt the others would have willingly let any of their secrets slip like this. Then again, neither should they have allowed this being to reach your vault in the first place. How much of the world you remember is a lie that you have told yourself? How much has changed over the span of your eternity in here?
The creature points to the corner. You have to blink a few times to realize it means the vision torch, which has sat there for so long that most times you forget it is anything more than a decoration. You nod and begin to move toward it, but the creature is already walking there, hefting the torch in its spindly arms like it knows how to use it.
The image it presses into your mind gives you an eerie jolt of recognition - you, standing in a dark and quiet ship while a signal starts to sing out, the signal you have just released. How impossibly long ago that was, a memory so faded that you have many times lost it - and yet the grief at seeing it once again is sharp enough to make you wince. In the image you are locked away inside the dream while your ship turns and turns, time passing on an unthinkable scale as an entire civilization rises and falls in the local system. You see the creature standing in their ruins, looking to the dark sky.
And then the fire of a supernova eviscerates the solar system, burning it to ash.
You blink. The planets are back. The sun is still there, the creature still alive. It travels to the stars, walking along the crumbling surface of an alien planet. The sun bursts into supernova, broiling the creature alive. It resets again. The planets. The sun. The nova. The images run together into an overwhelming torrent of sensation, swamping your senses until you manage to stagger out of range of the vision torch and sever the connection. You choke for breath while the creature shudders and drops the torch onto the floor.
The sentiment passed through the torch lingers longer than it should, making the feathers of your back prickle with phantom pain. The afterimage of the nova sears your eyes. The shockwave of it slamming against you, crushing your bones, charring off your skin.
It takes some time for you to remember that those things did not happen to you.
I don't understand, you say, when you have come back to yourself enough to speak again. What does this mean?
The creature points to you, to the lift door, back to you again. You shake your head, not following its meaning. It stoops to pick up the torch again and you flinch, the thought of feeling all of that in your head once more sending a wave of nausea through you.
The creature tilts the torch away from you. It steps toward you slowly, mollifying. It strains to form words.
Sorry, it says. Sorry, many. Please.
It holds up the torch in a question. You tense, but incline your head in hesitant assent.
This time the images are blurred, like the creature is trying very hard to go through them gently. In your mind the creature opens the vault and finds you. It speaks to you. Then the image resets and it opens the vault again. Again.
You are unsure what meaning could be gleaned from this. You have done this before? you ask, bewildered.
Many, it says.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
You are dozing in your chair when it finds you. At first you think it is a hallucination, a glitch in the version of you that exists inside this place, for that is the only explanation that makes sense. The creature clutches a lantern, the strange smooth shape of its skull illuminated in the glow of the flame, its four eyes fixed on where you sit in the shadows as if it already knows you are there.
It says, how?
Through the vision torch the creature has poured a stream of images into your mind so strange it leaves you grappling with your sense of reality, the careful walls you have built up in order to endure the unending nothingness of this place now falling around you. While you wrestle with the recollection that this is not the world at all, the creature paces the edge of the room. It moves far too quickly for the existence you have grown accustomed to. It moves like every minute is a minute lost, like the minutes are a precious resource slipping through its fingers. The concept is incomprehensible to you.
It has tried to convey something of the scale of time, in the imprecise way it can. You know from what it showed you through the torch that a civilization it considers ancient began in this system long after your kind were nothing but ghosts in the dream. While you have drifted for eons in this prison, the only inhabitant of your tiny world, outside you the wheels of time have turned steadily on, the creature's own species eventually emerging, learning, building, looking to the sky - bringing it, at last, to you.
The creature, however, appears agitated. Somehow it speaks in a mangled version of your tongue that it struggles to pronounce, though you cannot imagine how it learned. This is all confusing enough, but the things it says are even more so.
How? It says. You are this way. Here so long. You are still person, how?
You tilt your head at this, unsure if you understand. You do not know if you are a person, have not considered that you might be one. You are pretty sure there were entire millennia where you weren't anything at all, where you came apart from the emptiness and the loneliness and the crushing ennui of infinity. Your mind simply was not made to exist on such a scale. There have been so many times that you were just data forming the approximate shape of a consciousness, a reflection of a person in a mirror, and the only reason you didn't stay that way is because over such magnitudes of time even the nothingness eventually had to come to an end. So you became you again, or something like it - a copy of a copy of a copy, the chain spiraling inward forever. And you remembered, and you forgot, and it all started over again.
You have no way to express any of this in words that make sense. Instead you say, I don't know. I think mostly I wasn't.
You don't know if the creature understands what you are saying. It only seems more frustrated, increasing its pace back and forth as it walks. At last it makes a burbling sound and hands the vision torch back to you, waving its hands, eyes half-squinting as if in pain.
You don't wish to leave it like this, but it points toward the lift, saying something else in its own language. Your knowledge of the unsealed vault door hums in your chest, making you turn your face up to where you know the tomb now lies open. Perhaps you existed here for so long, perhaps you even are a person, but the answer to how is simply there there was no other option.
Now there is.
You ascend the lift and step out of the vault.
The cavern they built to hide you in is dark and still and vast. The lake stretches out beyond your feet. You hold your lantern close. The flame sways within like it knows what's about to come.
You walk into the water, and you die.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
Until you are not.
You have just met the creature, but it has met you before - apparently many times. You can't help but stare at this intrusion that paces the edge of your room, this alien being that opened your prison with such nonchalance, walked right to the vision torch, and projected a story into your mind so unbelievable that you've started to wonder whether this is a sign the simulation is breaking down at last.
What it shows you is impossible, but no less impossible than the fact that it is here at all. You see a universe stuck repeating the same events, ending each time in absolute death as the local star collapses into supernova and scorches all life from its orbiting bodies. The sentiment buzzes with the creature's frustration watching this happen again and again, its horror and grief at watching everyone it loves die, mutating into anger as each cycle restarts yet again, unstoppable. Immutable.
It speaks to you in a muddled version of your language. It says, I should know by now, how fix.
You still haven't discounted the possibility that none of this is real, that it is only a story generated by your fractured mind to fill the emptiness. Yet the brush of the creature's hands on your claws as it gives the vision torch back to you feels real in a way the hallucinations never do. You decide it's better to act as if it's real, just in case.
How many times has this happened? you ask.
I think few month, the creature says. Means many many times now. Always die. It makes a choking sound like laughter, but you don't think there is any amusement in it. Not always come here. I try learn, see what is out there. Why this happen. Not always wasting time here, being - being stupid -
It cuts off with a strangled noise, and its body folds in on itself, jolting you from your shocked stupor. The creature sinks to the ground, its head buried in its hands. From its throat comes a high keening wail.
It cries, They die and I can not save them.
You try to remember how one is meant to interact with another being. You put a tentative claw on the creature's shoulder. Its body shakes with the rise and fall of its wails.
You figured out how to open my prison, you say. I am sure you can figure out the rest.
It does not respond, only cries at the floor.
***
It says, I can't sleep. There isn't enough time in a single loop to sleep. I think I've been awake for a whole year now.
The creature you have just met has come to you in your prison, weaving a story about a broken universe, the final minutes of a dying solar system doomed to repeat forever. You are still struggling to reconcile the existence of something other than you with the rules of this place, much less the implications of an infinite loop. Vague memory of the outer world, the real world, churns in your mind, a distant glimmer of things you thought were lost to you forever. It makes your head spin.
You don't know what to say to the creature, but you can feel the distress radiating off it. You place a claw on its shoulder in an attempt to be comforting. It does not react.
I shouldn't complain to you, it says. I think you must have been in here nearly half a million years. A year is nothing compared to that.
The number is meaningless to you. You have no sense of what it is to be a year, or half a million of them, but you know it must mean something bad to the creature. Much worse to you is the thought of not being able to sleep. The dream was built to mimic your homeworld, with its day-night cycle and circadian rhythms. Even though all you experience in the vault is constant dark and an unchanging patch of sky, you have often found welcome relief in the nothingness of sleep.
I don't know anything of this species that lived in your system, you say. I don't know what they might have done, or why these loops happen, or how to help you. I'm sorry.
I know, it says. You've told me everything you know. Previous yous, I mean.
This unsettles you, although it stands to reason that if the creature has met you many times before, you would have already shared what little you remember. Then why do you keep coming back?
It hunches over on itself. This is the only part I know how to fix.
But if I understand you, you say, there is no point in me leaving the prison. I will only end up back here with no memory of this at all.
The creature makes a shrill noise, and you realize you have said something out loud that it has been trying very hard to ignore.
It folds in on itself further, its hands trembling on the handle of the vision torch. It does not look you in the eye. You exhale, your shoulders suddenly heavy with understanding; there is no point, it only wants to tell itself there is one.
You turn your face up to the ceiling, to the knowledge of the unsealed door beyond.
I still want to see it, you say.
The creature rides with you up the lift. Its footsteps echo behind you as you climb through the stone tunnel. When you take your first step out of the vault, you stare in awe at the expanse of the cavern, the inky ceiling stretching above you, impossibly large after so long in your tiny world. The air is warm and humid in your lungs. Reeds poke through the still surface of the lake. A memory dislodges in the back of your mind.
I think I'm glad, you say, that during the loops when you don't free me, I have no knowledge of the fact that I could ever be freed.
The creature says, That's what you always say.
You walk into the water, and you die.
***
It says, I used to come here to tell you when I discovered something new. It made me feel better, to think that I was making progress.
You sit in your chair and stare at the creature from the outside world. You still can't quite bring yourself to believe that it is real, half-expecting it to shimmer away like a mirage. It holds the vision torch in its small hands, running its fingers over the edge distractedly, like it's not quite aware of what it's doing.
Sometimes I wake up and just lay there until I die, it says. I've been to every planet. I don't know where else to go. I must be missing something, but I don't know what. How are you supposed to know what you don't know?
You do not respond.
Maybe it's selfish of me to come here, it says. Just to make myself feel like I'm doing something right. But it doesn't matter, does it? You told me that yourself.
You don't know what to say to that. You don't say anything at all.
***
It says, Every time I open the vault, you walk out of here and extinguish your lantern.
You turn this over in your mind as if it were an impersonal fact about someone other than you. You find it doesn't surprise you. It's exactly what you would do.
The creature trembles. You want so badly to be free of this, and it never lasts. You always end up back here when the loop resets. I keep hoping that maybe somehow it will stick, but of course it doesn't. It never does. It never will. No matter what I do, you'll always be back here when the loop starts.
It wails, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry -
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
It says, I've watched you die thousands of times now.
The creature that comes to open your vault kneels on the floor of your room. You stare at it, unsure if this is real at all.
I just wanted to fix this, the creature says. I shouldn't have been the one to pair with the statue. If it was Feldspar or Slate or Chert, they would have figured it out years ago. They're the smart ones. I'm just a stupid hatchling.
When you go, it does not follow you into the lift.
You walk into the water, and you die.
***
It says, I've lost track of how many loops I've seen.
The creature you have just met is crumpled on the ground before you, a limp and broken thing. The vision torch sits on the ground beside it. Your head aches with the force of the images it showed you, the frustration and pain it pushed into all the spaces of your skull. Its thoughts are tangled and messy, going on one tangent before fraying into another, dogged by a bottomless exhaustion.
Was it like this for you? the creature asks. How long did you last in here before you started falling apart? How do you endure it when you just keep existing?
You don't know; it has been so long that your memories of the early years of your imprisonment are now just a ghost of a ghost. You recall that time only as a vague agony, but you cannot even be sure that recollection is true. More likely you have simply forgotten, with nothing to distinguish one year from another in this place. How long has it been for the creature? How many times having its body ripped apart, with no pause to bring relief? You try to imagine what it would be like to be the only one who knows the horror of what's coming, the only one who has a chance to stop it. The unbearable, crushing weight of that responsibility.
I can't even kill myself to finally be free of this, the creature says.
It pauses.
It says, Neither can you.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
Why do you come here? you ask the creature. If what you say is true, then there is no point in freeing me. I'll only be back here when the loop resets.
The creature you don't know, but who knows you, turns to look out the tiny window at the unchanging sky beyond.
Because I know that you understand what it's like, it says. We're both trapped in an immortality that we never asked for. I wanted to see if... if it's possible to go on existing like this.
So it comforts you to come here? you say.
It makes a low and grating sound. It says, No.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
The creature you don't know comes to you in your prison.
I went down to the village, it says. I've done it lots of times before. It's always the same. When the sun goes dark, they all look around. They're confused, and then when they see the flare approaching they get scared. Galena starts panicking and Gneiss tries to comfort them, and then the flare hits and the atmosphere starts to boil. And every time I see them die I know I have to try harder to figure out what's causing this, so I can save them. Except this time I couldn't feel anything. They were all just shapes, like none of them were actually real people at all. So I went back again, and again, and I couldn't feel anything anymore. I stood there watching them die and it felt like nothing.
It runs its finger along the edge of the wooden slat of the floor.
It says, I don't think I remember how to be a person anymore.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
You do not register the sound of footsteps above you. It's only when the lift clicks into place that you realize something is wrong, a moment before the door opens and some thing comes tearing into the room in a whirlwind of light and noise.
I can't stop it, the thing cries, and collapses on the floor.
The creature you stand gawking at is strange and small and covered in fine scales. You don't know what it means to say, or how it speaks your tongue at all; you aren't even sure it is real in the first place, except that you don't think you would imagine all this on your own. You hesitate, suddenly self-conscious of your height as you tower over it, but it does not appear to be frightened of you. In fact it doesn't seem to notice you at all.
Who are you? you ask, hesitant. Should I know you?
The words are clumsy in your mouth. You realize this is the first time you've spoken aloud in a very, very, very long time.
The creature looks up at you, but its gaze passes through you like you're not really there. I made it to the station, it says. The sun's dying. Everything is. I can't stop it. I never could have stopped it. There was never anything I could do.
You don't know what this means. You glance past the creature to the vision torch, as if that could give you more answers. It follows your look and shakes its head.
Just go, it says. The door's open. Or stay. There isn't any point either way.
You try to speak to it some more, but it does not answer.
You walk into the water, and you die.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
No one comes to open the vault.
***
You are alone. You have been alone for a very long time.
You are dozing in your chair when it finds you. It clutches a lantern, its smooth scaled face illuminated in green, its four eyes fixed upon you. You feel a flash of deja vu, of recognition, but it's only a moment before the feeling passes and you are left staring at this alien creature, this impossible reminder of out there.
It speaks in a voice like water.
Before you start, let me show you something.
You can tell its throat was not made to shape your words, yet it is perfectly understandable. It must have learned over many years - but your kind as you knew them would never have shared such things, nor would they have allowed a stranger so deep into the private recesses of their world. You realize you have been staring wordlessly at this paradoxical creature for several long moments. It does not seem to care, standing still in the center of the room, watching you with its shiny eyes.
You gesture to the vision torch in the corner, too taken aback to do anything but go along with what the creature says. The torch is nearly as tall as the creature itself, yet it lifts the torch with the ease of habit. You close your eyes, and the images blossom inside your mind.
You see the ancient skeleton of your ship, the bodies of you and everyone you've ever known turned to dust while your ghosts haunt a dream of your long-lost home. You see the signal you released for those insufficiently few moments echoing across space. You see a ship detect the signal, leaping through the void to follow it and shattering in a terrible accident. You see the survivors rebuild on new worlds, the devices they make one after the other to recapture the signal that lured them here and then disappeared, each device failing in turn. You see the final, incredible mechanism they built to locate it. You see the death that took them all before they could use it, the mechanism going dormant until, hundreds of thousands of years later, the ancient sun finally collapsed under its own weight and woke it up.
And then you see the creature, dying again and again and again. Suffocating and falling and drowning, incinerated by the nova, by lava, by the broiling surface of the sun. It is crushed. It is eaten. It is killed. Until the loop resets once more and it gasps awake to another cycle of death. You feel the creature's desperation. You feel its fear that this will never end. You feel its grief erode into pain and anger and finally nothingness as the loops tick unceasingly on, longer than any being should ever stay alive. Its consuming anguish when it realizes, with terrible clarity, that it cannot stop the supernova. It will never save the world it loves.
And then you see it finally touch the glowing heart of the loop in the center of an ashen planet. You see the broken remains of the alien ship, sleeping as it waits for a power source to revive it. Your heart skips when you realize what the creature is showing you.
You open your eyes, disbelieving.
The creature says, We found it.
The signal. The eye. The end. The beginning.
You open your mouth and howl for the terrible price your kind inflicted on this world when they decided the certainty of an endless void was better than the unknown of a future without them in it. You cry for the species neither of you knew who lived and died here, and the creature standing in front of you, and what it means for it to be here.
The creature sets the vision torch aside. I needed to show you, it says. I know you don't remember, but I've been here many times. You never knew if what you did mattered. I wanted to tell you that it did. I found the eye because of them, and they found it because you released the signal all those years ago.
You nod, unable to speak.
Once I remove the warp core, it says, I won't get a second chance. The path to their ship is dangerous. If I die after I take out the core, it's all over. It makes a burbling sound you think is pained laughter. All this time wishing I could somehow end this, and now I'm finally afraid I'm going to die.
It wraps its arms around itself. You step toward this strange and wondrous creature, wishing you could comfort it, wishing you remembered any of the times you'd met it before so you would know what to tell it. You say, You will make it.
I've practiced the run about fifty times now. The creature's body shakes. But there's one problem.
Your feathers puff with dread. It must be possible. After all you've been through, it must.
It is, the creature says. But - I can't free you.
You blink at it, not understanding.
The creature looks away.
The only way I can free you is by dying, it says. And even if I could figure out how to do it without dying, there isn't enough time. I can't do this part quickly enough to guarantee I make it back to their ship before the sun explodes. I... I can't risk it. Not with everything that's at stake. I have to leave you in here. You'll be stuck in here forever.
It takes a shaky breath. Every time I open the vault, you walk out and extinguish your lantern. You want so, so badly to be free of this. And I can't make it happen. I can't show you that what you did mattered. Not for real. Not so it lasts.
You think of the eons you've spent in this place. The countless times you have broken and reformed, remembered and forgotten again, lost yourself in your fading memories, scratched at the walls. A consciousness stretched out to eternity, a nightmare no being should ever have to endure.
I've been in here for thousands of lifetimes, you say. I expect I can manage several more.
The creature wails and throws its arms around your chest. Somehow this does not feel like an invasion of your personal space; somehow it feels right. The creature cries into your feathers while you gently pat its head, filled with a rush of warmth for this being you do not know.
The creature pulls away and picks up its lantern, washing you in light.
This is the last time you're coming here, isn't it? you say. When you wake up, you're going to the eye.
The creature nods.
You look at the ceiling of the room that has been your world for a countless number of lifetimes.
I know it won't last, you say. But I think I'll go now.
You step outside the vault.
After so long in your tiny world, the space of the cavern they built to hide you in is impossibly vast. You stare up at it, breathing in the rich dark air. The lake is quiet. The silt of the shore is soft beneath your feet. You take it in and wonder, if you saw the others now, if they would still have it in them to hate you? Or would they welcome you back among them as a long-lost friend?
You hope it would be the latter.
The creature stands beside you. You hold your lantern close to your chest, imagining you can feel the heat of the flame, slow and soft, unfolding throughout you. The light within sways like it knows what's about to come.
I'm scared, the creature says. I don't know what's going to happen now.
I know, you say. But whatever it is, I do not think it is to be feared.
You hold out your hand.
It places its palm in yours, and you walk into the water, together.