Young Writers Society

~1065

Throughout the day Everen’s mind kept jumping between her weird dream and the murders. She couldn’t seem to figure anything out about either of them, but her mind wouldn’t let her stop obsessing over them. Usually, she was able to spend most of her day talking with all the people on the ship, but today she was too distracted and ended up sitting in silence.

Wendie—one of the engineers stationed in the control room—glanced over her shoulder back to where Everen was sitting. “You sure you’re alright hun?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Everen said, brushing off her concern. She yawned.

Wendie turned around in her swivel chair and folded her arms. “No, you look sick. Maybe you should take it easy today. Get some rest.”

“No, I’m fine I swear!” Everen protested, but Wendie had rolled over to her and was shooing her out of the room. When Wendie had pushed Everen all the way out into the hall, she pushed a button on the doorframe and the door slid shut with a gust of air.

Everen stared blankly at the door before deciding to take Wendie’s advice. She really was rather exhausted, and although it was early in the evening, only about 7:30, it wasn’t unheard of to go to sleep that early.

When she finally got under the covers of her bed, she debated for a while about following what Kerra had said or not. She'd suggested that Everen try sleeping again with the connection open. But that sounded like a second night of poor sleep and weird dreams. But maybe whatever these dreams were would go away if she shut them out. At last, she decided that she would try it again, just to see if the dreams would even replicate. When she was just on the cusp of sleep, an idea came to her.

She didn’t understand entirely how the connection worked. It felt as if there was a thread connecting her to Kerra, and there had been a thread connecting her to Shandi, but now that thread was gone, like it was severed. If she focused on Kerra’s thread, she could communicate with Kerra. But what if she didn’t focus on Kerra’s thread? What if she communicated just with the ambient world around her?

It felt a little silly, almost as if she was just thinking to herself, but harder. Nevertheless, Everen began to communicate to no one in particular. Hello? She sent. My name is Everen. I feel like there is someone trying to communicate with me. Is somebody there? Then, thinking back to the dream she’d had, she tried to line up some emotions to convey a similar message, although she didn’t know how to mix all of the emotions into the intricate cocktail she’d felt in her dream.

She tried to use emotions that she’d felt in the dream, because the dream seemed like it had first echoed some of the things that she and Kerra had sent to each other. First she sent a feeling of friendly entreaty. Then a feeling of questioning confusion, and finally a sensation of probing curiosity. She repeated her message and the emotions until the lull of it finally sent her to sleep.

And she dreamed again. The dream began with a complex mixture of excitement, frustration, and impatience, almost a mirror of the emotions she’d been feeling most strongly in the past few days, though excitement had waned after she realized just how worthless her clue about the different units had turned out to be in regards to actually finding the killer. After that emotion, the dream moved on to echoing Everen’s own garbled voice, but after a while, the sound solidified into a word. Everen. More garbled sounds and then: Hello. Hello Everen. Even in her dream, Everen suddenly got chills. It seemed just like her own voice and completely different all at once.

The process of hearing garbled sounds before they eventually coalesced into a word was long, slow, and agonizing. It repeated until the dream, or whatever was responsible for the dream, was able to construct what seemed to be its whole message. Hello Everen. Communicate with me. Somebody there. It repeated this a few times, and then dropped another emotion on her.

This one was far more complex than the other emotions she had felt thus far. She couldn’t even identify many of the emotions in the mixture, and some that she could recognize, didn’t seem to fit as “emotions” at all. For example, Everen got the distinct impression that it was now “her turn.” Other emotions she was able to recognize was hope, want, caution, and curiosity. The emotion was far deeper than that, but there were feelings that Everen didn’t know how to label or even distinguish as positive or negative emotions.

Everen waited for more, but it seemed as if more was not forthcoming. She was about to settle in and hopefully get as much of a good night’s sleep as she could, when the emotion she could only classify as “your turn” came again, the time paired only with impatience and entreaty. And the emotion came so forcefully that Everen woke up. It was as if someone had yelled in her ear.

She rubbed at her eyes. It was as if she hadn’t gotten any sleep at all. She was exhausted, and she wanted to close the connection right then and go back to sleep, but the… dream? force? being? Whatever it was, it had seemed so insistent.

She tried sending another message. Sorry, I’m not that good with emotions. I don’t know all of what you were trying to communicate. Who are you?

She was about to go to sleep again to try to get the answer when she realized: she could hear the garbling already. The process seemed somewhat faster this time, though it seemed to still need to practice every previously-unlearned word a few times before it could say it. In the end, though, it sent, I communicate with emotions. I'm trying to Communicate. Everen, you communicate with what?

Everen dissected this, trying to understand what it was asking. Hesitantly, she sent, I communicate with… words?

A little bit of garble before it practically shouted, Words! It sent a feeling of excitement. Words! Words!

Do you want me to teach you more words?

More words! I want you to teach me more words!