Oh?

“Why would you assume I can do it all?” I whispered, “I know my memory isn’t great, but I would remember creating things with my mind. I’m pretty sure it was just you.”

“Plenty of time to kill right? Do we need to wait for you to wink out again? There’s literally no one else who could talk me through this.”

I held my hand up and tried to imagine what it was like to create matter from nothing.

Actually…

I realized I was becoming more aware of Daniel in my head when I recognized the feeling he gave off: he was pondering something.

As he described it, I thought of another point against my own theory.

< I’m willing to bet the idea still holds up in the end. If you don’t know how chemical bonds work, burning fuel to get heat looks like it makes energy from nothing. >

I supposed there had to be rules about this stuff I wasn’t aware of. It was terrifying and exhilarating. Even if Daniel had already done it, I felt like I was sticking my toes into a very deep dark pool.

It was how I imagined Oppenheimer felt when he first thought the A-bomb was possible.

I said and thought at the same time. No sense in dragging my feet.

He said. < It takes a huge effort, but I can’t really describe how it works. Just… ‘try’ I guess?>

The symmetry of it was fitting if nothing else. I’d given him the same advice when he first materialized the speck. Daniel had described it like moving a heavy weight through a pool of molasses. Whenever he made the speck, I imagined a network of even tinier pinpricks bonded together in a lattice.

Between those two concepts, I felt like I might have a good place to start.

I held up my hand and tried to imagine a little grain of material appearing between my fingers.

<…anything?>

Nothing so far. Was it a problem with—one moment I’d been trying to imagine a fleck in my hand. The next I’d noticed a question drift into my mind; what was the actual distance between my fingers?

Not in inches or centimeters or microns. What was the actual perfect mathematical expression of infinitesimally small space that could be measured? And how much of it was between my fingers? Centimeters, to millimeters, to nanometers, to picometers. I didn’t remember what was smaller than that. But I knew it existed.

Just like I didn’t hear Daniel with my ears, I didn’t see this with my eyes. But between my fingers, I could feel billions of microscopic explosions going off. I could feel the very space itself tingle like a limb that fell asleep.

The supernova in my hand winked into existence, and I was suddenly pinching a golf ball sized lump of… salt?

It looked like a compacted ball of faintly green tinted kosher salt, or maybe a dangerously sized piece of hail. As much as the question crossed my mind, I didn’t taste it.

<… Whoa. > Daniel said.

I thought.

It hadn’t at all been the ‘weight’ that Daniel had described it would be.

It had felt heavy and had taken real exertion to create, but more than that it had felt fragile. The creation process had given me the overwhelming impression that at any point if I had lost composure, the whole thing would have collapsed back into oblivion. It also seemed like it might explode. Each ‘atom’ I’d felt created was like a small star ready to blast apart if someone breathed on it wrong.

The salt ball felt stable enough now, but I couldn’t help but feel it was how holding a grenade would feel.

I’d always known atoms were small. But for a moment, I’d felt some of what that meant in some part of my mind capable of perceiving it.

It was wrong to think there were billions of atoms in my salt ball.

There were trillions of atoms in the tiniest slice of the tiniest crumb of the speck Daniel could make.

Daniel asked.

I did feel exhausted, but it had felt like a sprint. If I took a few minutes, I’d be fine.

The salt ball dissolved by itself a few minutes later. When it did, I got another glimpse into how these creations came to be. It didn’t feel like what I’d made had disappeared. It just… went back to wherever it came from, like a sandcastle sinking toppling over and being smoothed back into the beach.

We went back and forth over what the implications of my possession of this power meant for the next hour of the car ride. Tasser and the other aliens hadn’t even noticed my experiment.

They didn’t notice the next few either. Daniel had me make shapes with detail that hadn’t been possible to notice at the size his specks were.

I made a cube. Then a rough ring, more of a tiny donut. Shaping the thing was difficult and sandcastles were quickly becoming my metaphor of choice to describe the experience. I didn’t have a bucket or trowel. It was more like drawing with a bag of sand. Once the material was already here, I couldn’t move it, so I had to stay ahead of it.

Spheres were easiest. I just had to concentrate on a single point and the matter grew outward evenly. Cubes were a bit harder. Limiting the growth to flatten the sides was hard to do for all sides at once. I’d cheated to make the donut. I’d kept my focus on the center point and made a bit of a disc, then I’d cut away at the matter in the middle of the disc. The donut’s ‘hole’ evaporated back into nothing.

But I was leery about pushing myself too far. I was rather acutely aware of how the start of my day involved fighting a few otters out for blood.

Nai might have blocked the road for anyone chasing by road, but I wasn’t convinced a team of otters might drop out of a helicopter any minute.

We rolled through the mountain roads for another hour or so before Nai finally put itself upright again. Both Daniel and I sensed the uptick in energy drifting off it. Having just used (presumably) the same power it used to bring down the better part of a mountain, I tried to imagine doing anything similar.

Nemuleki said something to Tasser who had an exchange with Nai. Tasser seemed to prefer interacting with Nai to Nemuleki. Like all my other observations about the Casti, I had no real basis, but I got the impression that Tasser was the common link. It knew both Nai and Nemuleki, but they didn’t know each other.

Daniel said.

He said,

The car got a bit more active as Nai seemed to wake up more and make conversation with Tasser and Nemuleki. They were discussing pretty actively. Tasser and Nai pulled out a map and were pointing out a few sections.

I would have liked to get a better look at the map myself, but I realized I wouldn’t have any way of knowing if the map was where we might be going or where we were. Back on Earth, I was spoiled by GPS.

Up ahead a much smaller avenue split off from the main highway to follow a small ‘U’ shape of buildings. Even as we pulled off, no other buildings or signs were visible. This was a tiny little alien village.

All four of us got out of the car, which surprised me. Nai, Tasser, and Nemuleki didn’t seem fazed about me being out at all. It quickly became apparent that they weren’t worried about any of us being seen.

The town was totally deserted. All the prefabricated buildings were locked down tight.

This part of the valley was especially deep. Every building would be buried if even a small blizzard came through.

All of those were road trip staples. But it got me wondering what kind of car we’d actually been riding in. We hadn’t switched cars and this one had taken us quite the ways. Surely it would run out of fuel eventually.

I still had most of one tube left. But Daniel was right. Topped off supplies were better. Tasser could help, surely.

The aliens weren’t content for me to walk around unsupervised anyway, so my chaperone and I went looking for…

“Nuto . ” I said, holding up my water bottles. “Nuto loen?”

Tasser gave me a look and then shot one toward Nai and Nemuleki too.

Those two were indeed standing at the locked door to one of the prefabricated structures like they might be trying to break in. Each one stood on stilts and their walls looked like thin metal. Not unlike a trailer park structure. None of it was wood though, all metal—aluminum was my bet.

Daniel hummed some form of agreement and I followed Tasser to one of the buildings that had a giant cylinder bolted to one side. It looked… well, it looked like a miniature water tower. But that didn’t mean it actually had water. It could have passed for a grain silo, or something similar.

It stored something though.

Sarcasm stung a bit extra when it came directly fed into my brain like that.

I thought, “Then shut up.” I muttered.

Tasser heaved its weight into the door building our storage silo was attached to, but the bar lock that fit over the door didn’t budge. A few dozen yards away, I heard the light crackle of Nai’s plasma—much smaller this time—no doubt to cut through whatever security feature had barred them.

My thoughts exactly, Daniel.

I gestured for Tasser to step aside. Daniel had managed to create his speck inside the glass window of the cell on the first try. That was my goal here. If I could make a disc from the inside of the locking bar, it should snap clean.

I put my hand on the frigid metal and shut my eyes.

The feeling of a million pinprick explosions came as strenuously and delicately as it had before. Having a goal gave me a bit of confidence though.

Disc. Perpendicular to the bar. Should be easy.

But when I felt the material solidify, there was a problem. I’d been focusing on the interior of the bar. But instead of displacing the existing matter, my new addition had merely formed on its exterior.

Tasser gave me an odd look.

I waved him off. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it…”

A few minutes later I still couldn’t manage it. Something was just fundamentally different and like most road trip stops; we had a time limit.

Tasser pulled me back after my fourth attempt yielded the same result. It pulled out its gun and shot the point where the locking bar affixed to the structure. It didn’t blast clean away, but the metal deformed enough for Tasser to leverage it out of the way of the door.

Inside was mostly empty aside from what might have been a dead heating unit sunk into one of the walls. The other wall however, sported something almost familiar.

Daniel picked up on the rest of my thought, <…like the water unit from the space ship. >

It wasn’t exactly the same. All the small details were different, the nozzle length, the drain shape, and overall design taste were wrong compared to the one I’d destroyed during our extended flight through space.

But the overall layout was recognizable. “Nuto?” I asked, pointing at it. Tasser nodded and pulled out his own canteen.

Just like the one on the ship, this one operated entirely mechanically. Tasser pulled on one of the slots to reveal and inspect a colored meter strip of some kind. Satisfied with what it told him, Tasser held his canteen under the nozzle and pulled the lever that released a stream of perfectly clear water.

“Ijaroush ?” I asked, pointing to the water unit again. ‘Germs’ I was asking.

Tasser made quite the effort to try and shake its head back and forth. It was clearly not a gesture that came naturally to it, but it knew the gesture meant ‘no’ to me.

“La ijaroush. Ree.”

<’No germs. Zero.’> Daniel translated.

I huffed. I wasn't that hopeless with the language.

The water was ice cold though. Drinking it was physically painful enough that I seriously considered not slaking my thirst then. But there was no telling when I might be able to get more so I downed as much as I could reasonably tolerate before I started shivering.

I pulled my mask back over my mouth and nose and we went back toward the car. Tasser carried with him canteens that Nai and Nemuleki had lent him.

The other two aliens brought back their own spoils—another map. This one had much more detail than the previous one. It covered a smaller area too, small mountain roads and what looked like trails cutting through the hills were marked.

Nemuleki pointed to a small ‘c’ shaped portion of road that split off from a thicker line. That was where we were, this tiny nowhere mountain alien village. I did my best to commit the map to memory, and Daniel actually summoned the notebook and started doing his best to trace the map into it.

I noted. If everything went well, we wouldn’t need it, but I still didn’t forget how the day had started.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised when my ‘Nai-like-alien’ sense went off. I was alarmed, but not surprised.

I couldn’t tell precisely what direction it was coming from. It was relatively far away, skirting the very edge of my range. A small part of me raised the possibility it might not be hostile. After all, while I would never be comforted by Nai’s presence, we weren’t currently hostile anymore. But my own argument didn’t convince me. There was a reason Nai had brought down a tunnel behind us. There was a reason we were running.

The otters were chasing all four of us, not just me. It was an otter I was sensing, no doubt in my mind.

All three aliens recognized the change in my demeanor.

I took a few steps from the car, scanning the buildings, trying to get a fix on where this alien was.

“Cayleb?” Tasser asked.

“Bad. Uh… bad thing. That direction. Bad…” <’Gi’ is bad. I think.> Daniel supplied.

“ Gi. ” I said, “Gi. That way.” I pointed in the sixty-degree cone I sensed it from. Nemuleki and Nai spent a few seconds staring and glaring at me respectively, but Tasser got it after a second to think.

“Vorak.” It realized, and drew its gun.

Gun. Yes. That was correct.

I didn’t know what ‘Vorak’ meant, but Tasser had put it together.

We weren’t alone.