On the Spectrum
—Begin Log, K-1217, 2014 Years After The Fifth Flood—
Static bubbled somewhere behind my eyes as I carved out the hole in the wooden number six. Teacher, trying to get me to Telepath again. I scratched my ear and hummed. The static went away. I finished my clock and looked it over. I’d failed every other test assessing which of us atypical Koinos could handle cognition-enhancing medication. This time, I’d make them notice.
A second wave of static came. This one held a faint scent of coconut. Whereas Typicals identify other Typicals by codes, IDs, the texture of such telepathy, I knew April by the shape of her face, the pitch of her voice, and the smell of the conditioner that kept her tight curls from knotting up. I turned to see her walking over from her own finished clock.
"You could at least try to buzz me back," she said.
"I prefer talking," I said, unable to bring myself to tell her that I had been trying. "The vibrations help me think. Besides, we won’t need it on Koinos Island.”
“You trying to get us Nefratoled?” A fresh push of coconut as she playfully slapped my arm. Koinos Island was a place April had dreamed up where neurodisadvantaged people like us lived independent of Typicals. The now-shared fantasy included a plan to elope there and live in speech-based harmony.
“Teacher’s not listening. You’ll listen when you go Typical, right?”
“Me? Typical? Not a chance. You seen Rocky’s clock? He’s next up for sure.”
“They almost picked you on the Download exam. What if this is it?”
“I’m more of an islander myself.”
April touched the slabs of wood still leaning on the foot of my workbench. Though April and I had been friends since forever, I still learned more every time I looked at her. The way her eyes widened when she was amused, the whites of her eyes expanding against her russet brown skin.
“Extra parts,” I said. “But it works. Check it out.”
April did. The final test had us recreating, from memory, a three-dimensional mechanical clock. We got five minutes to inspect the model. Its “second hand” mimicked a spaceship's voyage starting at Osiris, curving past one of the moons, and slingshotting back around Mars. Most higher functioning Koinos could at least pull up slivers of living memories, exactly as they happened. For me, memories were more like ghosts. So, I improvised.
My clock’s solar system was U-shaped, as if giant hands had folded space onto itself. April turned the cogwheel mounted on the back. Hidden cogs carried the crudely-carved space shuttle from the twelve on our planet, past the four on the Moon, and toward the eleven on Mars. April's eyebrows peaked as the shuttle fell towards the red planet. A faint, distracting murmur rumbled between my ears. She was speaking in that way her mother taught her, the way my own brain was incapable of. I imagined her perception of telepathy was similar to mine, only with some of the static cleared away. Her teeth clamped over her lip, emphasizing her small gap. I had no clue what she was thinking.
Then, when it looked like the spaceship would crash, a hole opened up in Mars and the shuttle fell through. With the solar system’s curve, Mars was one level above Osiris. When the shuttle popped out on the other side, April jumped a little. The spaceship started back from home, exactly a minute into its trip. She smiled.
In that moment, all of my deficiencies seemed worth it.
"A hole in space. Where’d you get that idea?”
“Nowhere. Why?”
“It’s interesting, is all. You think a real ship could jump around like that?" She looked me in the eyes as we spoke, which meant she was further my way along the spectrum. "You have to show Teacher. It’s genius.”
“AmLit worthy?”
Amliterone was the new medication that promised to push high-functioning Koinos to Typical. April had let it slip that Society needed more minds to prepare for ‘something dangerous from space.’ She refused to say more, but the fear in her eyes spoke volumes. It had spread across her temples, down to her pursed lips, and into my daily imagination. Mind-eating creatures; boiling meteorites; an exploding sun. Ponderings about the end of the world kept me up at night.
“You wouldn’t be the same on that stuff.”
“That’s the point. I’d be better.”
“Remember what happened to June?”
“The medication is safe by now. It has to be. Besides, if I could Telepath we could talk all the time.”
“I like not knowing what you’re thinking. This clock was an awesome surprise. I’d be bummed if I just automatically knew about it, for sure.”
“I bet space would cheer you up.”
April gave a half smile I couldn’t quite understand and fingered one of the levers on my clock. I knew she wanted to see the other side of the sky even more than me. But she had already been part of Society, back before she was diagnosed as Koinos. From her tellings, Society was a beautiful labyrinth of ideas, collaboration, instant feedback, and shared experiences. But April often found herself lost in their web, unable to grasp their rebuttals to her fanciful and often abstract views of the world. Eventually, she was cut off.
“Naw,” she said, finally. “When’s the last time you seen a Typical look up at the sky?”
Before I could respond, a metallic clang made both of us jump. Clang, clang, clang, coming from my clock. It took a second to remember. I had used scrap pieces of metal to build an internal sound-based mechanism to signify specific times. Now that alarm was going off nonstop. To me, such a sound was a gift in an otherwise quiet world. To Typicals, however . . .
Teacher came. A gritty static wedged its way behind my eyes, blocked out the sound of the chime, and made me wince. I scratched my ears; mental chatter made me itch.
"She wants you to stop it," April said.
I tried to shut the clock off, but the switches weren't working. Whatever I did only made the clanging worse.
"Tell her it tells time just—just like all the other clocks,” I said. “Tell her the spring must have come—it's just a little thing, really." I moved my hands as I spoke, something I did when I was excited or the words came out faster than the thoughts behind them. I searched for paper and pens to draw out what I meant, like Therapist had taught me, but of course there were none. Teacher put a hand on each side of my clock. "Tell her to give me a second!"
Teacher gave me two. I watched, helpless, as her milk-white fingers swirled around my clock in a calculated blur. In seconds my creation was reduced to its parts. Her fingers paused a heartbeat, as if considering to torture me with a second chance, and then proceeded to build. She soon handed me the finished replica.
I looked up at Teacher, my hands shaking. I hated the way her face said nothing, blank as the spare slabs of wood. I hated the static coming from April, undoubtedly explaining the intent of the poor, Koinoistic fool, and the return static from Teacher, undoubtedly explaining that there’s correct and incorrect and no in-between. I hated how my imagination had allowed even a second's thought that Teacher might have been impressed by my clock's originality.
Most of all, I hated my ability to hate. That, too, slowed me down.
***
Mother worked in Exploration and took frequent short visits out into space. Father worked our family's plot of The Farm at the bottom of the hill. He spent his days surveying miles of greenhouses until every ripe fruit or vegetable had been picked and shipped for processing. I learned later he had been raised Explorer. Usually neurotypical children independently tended a family’s portion of The Farm as soon as they could walk. He’d been grounded for my insufficiencies.
I tried helping once. Biting an apple was the first time I'd experienced taste—real taste—and it had been like someone trying to speak to me through my tongue. Father’s co-farmers found me sitting in the middle of one of the fields, destroying produce with my teeth. I simply couldn't help myself. Father banned me from the farm. I was confined to his modest garden, where the only harm would be our own.
There came a period of time when Father took me on daily trips to have tall people watch me play a variety of games. I didn’t know they were tests at the time. Some made me laugh; others were boring. I remembered one vividly, however. The one that taught me what I was.
I sat in front of a screen attached to a writing pad with a color-changing pen. A picture of a satellite orbiting Osiris appeared and flashed away after five seconds. My job was to replicate what I'd seen as perfectly as possible. Photographic memory was usually well developed by the age of three. I was five.
I could remember only fleeting details of the photo; my mind quickly flew in different directions. I drew a sailboat with wings, dancing to the moon. My imaginary friends loved it. Up popped another prompt. I thought Father wanted to see more of my creations.
And then, Mother's static. The crackles were too uniform to ever make anything of them, but they smelled like her skin; I could always tell when she called. Father's static intercepted. Thick waves of radiation roiled around me.
For the first time in my life, something got through. The culmination of Father’s frustration, the heat of his anger, and the slow expanse of exhaustion coming from his cortex lightly touched the shores of mine until its meaning was cold upon my skin. He'd yelled at Mother, but I alone felt the sting of his words: "I don't understand him."
He took me home and to my room. He didn't try very hard with me after that.
I don't understand him . . .
I desperately wanted him to.
#
The sun had set just enough that its rays shattered into a blanket of rainbows as they filtered through the clutter of sky-traffic. A distant rocket carried a space shuttle silently out of our atmosphere. The satellites and way-stations orbiting Osiris were so numerous that the daytime sky sometimes rivaled the night's for constellations. My own dreams of flying had been short-lived. My brain couldn't work fast enough to travel at their speeds, and the world had no intentions of slowing down.
April stood quietly with her arms wrapped around herself. Her eyes were red from tears. My heart swelled. Another failure for both of us. We were stuck together.
I wanted to say something, but we shared a campus with Typical children. We were already labeled by where we stood, waiting, as if a minute or an hour or a day of our short lives was insignificant enough to waste. Talking brought unwanted attention. So I took out a piece of paper and began to draw.
A long, slender orb of light detached itself from the lines of flight overhead and descended from the sky. The flying vehicle stopped soundlessly a few feet in front of us and the door slid open. April's mother looked over and waved. It had taken many of these brief interactions to realize the grimace on her face was an attempt at a smile. I liked April’s mother. We understood little of each other, but she had a way of making me forget that.
As April passed, I pressed my note into the palm of her hand. I caught a sliver of her eye. Then she was gone.
I sighed. The world moved too fast.
Another thickening line of light came down to materialize into a vehicle that was somehow familiar even though it was exactly the same as all the others. Mother looked straight ahead as I fastened myself in. Her skin was as white as Teacher's and just as hairless. She wore the same thing as all Exploration Typicals: gray overalls with white shoes. Her static crackled against my distracted mind. The ground speeding away and the tall buildings shrinking to toy-sized blocks fascinated me every time.
The buzzing intensified. With some effort I opened my mind a little to Mother's probes, something I worked on extensively in Speech Therapy. She knew of my failure through Society. What she didn’t know is if I’d tried.
Of course I had tried. Of course I wanted to talk to Mother in that way Brother could, to feel her ubiquitous, loving embrace that had soothed him as a baby even when she was in orbit. Of course I wanted to know April’s thoughts instead of agonizing over the millions of possibilities behind her eyes. Of course I wanted Father’s understanding. AmLit, these tests, all of it—just hopes, wishes. And I failed.
Before I processed any of this into a proper response, we were home. Time was another great separator. For me, only the length of a fleeting thought had passed. For Mother, the time wasted had been much longer.
I followed Mother into our dwelling and halted at the sight of her now naked skin, softly reflecting the grayed sun-rays filtered by our home’s screen protectors. I looked away. Though my family never wore clothes in the home except for sun-alert days, nudity continued to make me uneasy. Perhaps it was the vivid memory of Mother and Father creating Brother in our communal area while casually connected to Society, shown by the glassy look in their eyes and the slight tilt of their heads towards the heavens. I thought Mother was attacking Father with her hips. My distress didn't cause them to stop, but rather to disconnect from Society and try to soothe me while continuing their act. April's amused explanation only worsened my modesty.
I retreated to my room and reassembled my clock, without an alarm. It didn’t take long. I put it with my collection: buildings that transformed into bridges, two-headed beasts with parking lots in their stomachs, structures I saw outside my glass walls, in my school, and even floating in front of the moon on a clear night.
At seven o'clock, Father brought my daily Nefratol. Instead of three pills, there were four. I almost tried to ask why, but I knew. I handed Father my clock. He looked it over so quickly I didn't even see his eyes move. He placed it on top of one of my constructions and left. No confusion. No disappointment. No, “I don’t understand him.” Just indifference.
I spat the Nefratol out. By blunting my taste, blurring my vision, and slowing my thoughts, the medication eased the stress of a home not built for me. Instead of waving my arms when words weren't sufficient for meaning, I simply didn't speak. Instead of drawing on my bedroom walls to combat the confusing uniformity of everything, I sat and watched sky-traffic. When I was on Nefratol Mother would talk and I would listen. I often wonder if, for her, those were our best times together. For me, it was like missing a part of life.
I didn't want to talk to Mother that night. I wanted to talk to April.
***
Before I met April I didn’t know I had a voice. Two Typicals held me down in an empty room during Break while a third taped long wires to my hands that were connected to small boxes emitting an alien hum. Static swung heavy between my captors. With no way of communicating, I could only squeal against their grips.
I felt April’s static before I saw her. My fear rose; more Typicals meant more experiments. When she walked in I immediately placed her keen eyes from some of my classes. She always wore colorful clothes that stood out against grays and blacks.
She casually removed the wires from my skin while the Typicals looked on. I stared at her, open-mouthed, as broken static flitted by me. She grabbed the small identification screen Mother clipped to my belt each morning and held it up to her head, then showed one of the Typicals.
The boys looked at me, then April, and left.
"Your name's August.” She held up my ID and pointed to my date of birth. "See. Awe-Gust." Though I didn't understand the words at the time, I never forgot them; they were the first I'd ever heard.
April taught me how to speak. When she was first diagnosed as Koinos, her Historian parents hired a speech therapist specializing in vocal sounds. I often hummed to fight off the quiet, or to drown out residual static. April showed me hums could be words and words could have meaning.
A room with shelved walls filled with fragile artifacts called ‘books’ crafted by Koinos-like minds, long before telepathy or Society existed, became our new playground. I marveled at April’s history lessons. The art, the creativity, the very fabric of their Koinos civilizations, so different from Society. What’s more, I understood them. I understood how different parts of the world could choose disparate ways of life. I understood how people could choose partners based on feelings rather than genetic compatibility. Sitting there, drinking April’s words, for the first time I felt what Mother and Father and Brother must have felt linked to Society.
I even understood the vices that brought Koinos their own destruction. Conflict, wars, poverty, famine, the permanent damage to Osiris’s atmosphere that turned our only sun into a brutal tyrant. Writings on this great change and the resulting Flood were scant, and mentions of Typicals (referenced to as ‘special’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘savants’) even more so. One brief text on the history of modern civilization commented that only spread out patches of people survived after the Flood; genetic drift selected for the once ‘extraordinary’ ability to communicate over vast distances.
When I could speak in a full sentence, I finally asked April the long-burning question awaiting my voice: what had she said to the Typicals?
"I told them you didn't want to be part of their experiment."
"That's it?"
"That's it. They didn't realize you had wants. Once they did, the only logical thing was to stop." She laughed at my look. "Typicals aren’t so bad once you understand them, or they understand you. Their whole life is just one big equation. If you change one variable, you can change the way they think."
I asked April to explain what the word 'variable' meant. She did, and I smiled. Maybe it wasn’t so bad being atypical. April made me proud of the way we saw the world. I thought we'd see it that way together forever.
***
East Lake sat lost in the shadow of the City. It was too shallow to act as a source of water, the land around it too soft for farming. To any logical Typical, it was useless. That's why it was perfect.
April was waiting for me on the shore, soft waves cresting her half-buried feet. "I got lost," she said. "I thought you drew a swimming pool."
"I'm a builder, not an artist."
"Next time try building some directions. Or even just, 'the lake in the east.’” She kicked a clump of mud into the receding water. “I talked to Teacher.”
“Oh?”
“She felt bad about the clock. She thought she was helping.”
“Big help.”
“Were you able to put it back together?”
“I was.”
“Good. They’ll be more tests when they make a stronger med. There’s always new meds.”
“Good news for one of us, at least.”
April smiled a sad smile. Before I could fully place it, she moved her hand toward the water, prompting my gaze to follow. "Is this where you come to think?"
I picked up a flat rock and skipped it over the water's surface, trying not to look at how the setting sun fell on her brown skin. "This is where I come to stop thinking."
Once the last sliver of sun succumbed to the horizon, April laid her clothes in the sand and stepped into the water. She waved me in. I hesitated. Refusing would remind her how different we were. I stripped to my underwear, hoping that was normal enough, and followed her into the lake.
Wrapped in my thoughts, I lost my footing and flailed to keep my head above water, splashing April in the process. She shrieked and, before I could apologize, a retaliatory splash broke against my face. We spent the next ten minutes—an hour, maybe an eternity—chasing each other with walls of water, clumsy and falling over ourselves, delighting in each other. April ran onto shore. I pretended to untangle my leg from lily-pad vines to give her time to dress. I dared a look; she was still exposed, only drier.
As I made my way back, I noticed the neat, tight curls of her hair. Her coconut conditioner caused it to glisten in the dusk. Right before my hips broke the surface, I felt myself swell. April waited; if I stopped she'd know. I focused past her and on the City. I brought up images of Teacher dismantling my clock. Though blurrier than anything a Typical would produce, emotion filled the cracks. That helped.
She pushed me, playfully, before I could reach my clothes. I made after her; she jumped away. We ran, continuing our game from the water. We pretended I was a merman and she an evil sailor trying to sell me for cash, then that we were the last two people on Osiris, destined to save the world.
"Koinos Island,” April said, her breath heavy and harsh from running on the wet sand. She spread out on the ground. I lay beside her, pushed my shoulder softly into hers. "Just you and me.”
“It would be paradise. No more itching. No more quiet.”
“Can we go?”
I made to get up. “Let’s go right now.”
“I’m serious, August. I didn’t make it up. Koinos Island, it’s real.”
“Can’t be. They’re all dead, remember?”
“Some Koinos survived the flood. They’re still around. I thought finding it was the fantasy. But maybe it’s not. A place where everyone talks like us, creates like us.” She took my hand. “Can you imagine?”
I couldn’t. Koinos, living independently? How could anyone ever get anything done when they could spend the day lying in the sand, wondering what the person beside them was thinking?
“The world is passing us by. And with…” April bit her lip, glanced up to the sky.
“Tell me. I can handle it.”
"Society is trying to get everyone off Osiris. All of us. They say what’s coming will destroy the planet."
“Aliens?”
“Worse,” she said. “Way worse. A hole, in the sky. In the stars.”
The air had been thick with static lately, a world buzzing with excitement out of my reach. Was that it? Was Society scrambling to save itself while oblivious Koinos like me tried to reinvent the clock?
“What’s any of this have to do with Koinos Island?” I said.
“I bet they’re trying to figure it out, too. What if they can beat it?”
“No way. Whatever is coming, Typicals will figure it out."
“Society dissected every idea I offered before I knew I even had it. I was like a rogue ant, wandering off the path, going against the colony.” She shook her head. “Your clock was brilliant. What if we could escape through that hole?”
“Illogical.”
“To Typicals, yes. But on Koinos Island? We could be a part of something. I need to be a part of something, August. I can’t live in the in-between like this. What are you doing?"
I stopped snapping my fingers next to my ear. "Sometimes the quiet gets to me.”
I picked up our clothes to busy my hands. Something fell and rolled in the sand. I froze when I saw the blue plastic casing and the pills shifting inside.
"You passed?" I said. I picked up the bottle of AmLit, the miracle cure for Koinoistic Spectrum Disorder. The pills were so small. So lifeless. Yet each of them had more power than I could ever possess: they could give April what she truly wanted.
By the time I held it up for my only friend to see, we were both crying.
“Congrats,” I said.
"I was waiting for the right time to tell you. I don’t want it."
"What do you mean you don’t want it? This is it. You can be happy.”
“You make me happy, August.”
Then, just like that, her lips were on mine. She tasted of tears and something more, something indescribable. I pressed back, my body more sure than I was. I didn’t know what it was like to connect to Society, but I imagine it felt a little like that. Images flew through my head. I felt a million things at once.
"Run away with me, August," she said again. I searched her eyes as she searched mine. She was serious. If I said yes, we'd go, right then, and never look back. "Please."
"I'd love to." I handed her the AmLit bottle and stepped back. "But there's nowhere to go."
***
Run away with me.
There's nowhere to go.
I spent that night lying in bed, wishing I could take my words back. April’s revelation had come while I was lost in a sea of my own emotions, trying to grab on to the flotsam of fragmented thoughts about islands and speech and the sky opening up. When I saw the pills, my heart was stunned with the horror of being --truly alone.
Thinking through emotion is like running blindfolded. When she asked me to leave the safety of Society, fear led me the wrong way. That blindfold now lifted, I saw the truth: anywhere would be better than here. Better than AmLit. And we'd be together.
April’s square was empty the next morning in Math class. Was I too late?
Society knew. I was literally floating in their telepathic waves. I concentrated on tapping into those answers until my head hurt. It was like trying to see more stars in the night sky just by straining your naked eyes. You know they're there, you know their light can reach you, but no matter how hard you try you can't see them because your equipment just isn't what it should be.
***
I saw her after school, but she wasn't waiting for her parents. She crossed the grass in long strides, carrying a portable computer designed for telepathy. Maybe I had her confused. This girl wore all white instead of April's usual colors. But I knew that skin anywhere. The memory of her face was the closest my brain came to photographic.
"April!"
But she moved fast toward the gated parking lot designed to keep out wandering Koinos. Desperation pulled at muscles both physical and mental. I pushed all I had to get something out telepathically, to finally reach someone when I needed to most.
April climbed into one of the flying cars; her eyes swept over me like Father’s had over my clock.
And then she was gone, into the sky.
#
A year passed.
New medications ushered in new tests. I was never chosen, never understood. My Koinos classmates melted away. Soon the tests went away, too. One day there was no school. Only home, with Father and his farming.
Mother left for months; I had no clue why. The air grew frenetic with static. Sometimes I woke in a night-sweat, fully expecting Typicals had left me and any remaining Koinos behind to fend for ourselves.
In a way, they already had.
***
A pause, then static. Therapist always tried telepathy first. Sometimes I appreciated it; other times I felt like some broken thing that he kept trying to turn on.
When I didn't respond, Therapist took out his electronic canvas and handed me a pen and paper. He’d shown me that drawing was common to people across the spectrum. Sometimes, when Therapist drew something that couldn’t have been from a memory, I wondered if he was a little Koinos himself.
He drew a picture of April in Explorer white, mentally jotting down notes on her tablet inside the Mars space station. I cringed; she was all wrong. I took the picture and was meticulous with my edits. April had a glow about her, especially standing in the sun. Her eyes were not simple orbs that absorbed light. They were windows into her. The her no one else had gotten the chance to see.
Run away with me.
I showed Therapist the result. He looked at it briefly, set it aside, and then drew what looked like a satellite image of our solar system only with a dark, vast hole in the middle. Space seemed to bend toward the void. Therapist circled it, as if I was too dense to notice. This unknown menace was responsible for the fear that had driven Society to take April away. And for that, I hated it.
I responded with a picture of me and other Koinos children sitting in silence, ignorant and helpless. Then I wiped the canvas clean. What was the point?
Therapist drew a picture of me in Engineer blue. I puzzled over it, thinking maybe he was punishing me for my emotions, until he brought out a blue bottle. He opened it, took out two of the shiny blue AmLit pills, and placed them on the table. No, not AmLit. The coating was smoother, the sides angled. This was new.
My pencil flew across the page. Therapist let me have the moment. Then, not unkindly, he took the paper away. I had drawn a feverish depiction of a road, littered with my failures, leading away from Society. Therapist responded with another picture of me in Engineer Blue and gestured with the pills.
I considered a moment, then wiped my canvas and went to work. Sparing details for speed, a few minutes later I held up a crude drawing of a boy and a girl playing tag along a lake’s shore. "If I 'get cured,' will I be able to come up with this?" I said.
The silence that followed was so long that I thought the session was over. As I stood to leave, Therapist began to draw. The same image of me in Engineer blue, this time walking past a room with Koinoistic children playing. I recognized them by the wideness in their eyes and the joy on their faces. In the picture, I didn't seem to notice them.
His message was clear. If I got cured, I wouldn't want to.
***
What was I waiting for? April to come back? I rarely saw her. When I did, even in her rush to do Typical things I thought her eyes paused on mine. For just a second, like when a ball rolling downhill hits a crack in the cement. I wanted those eyes to save me from having to decide between losing myself and being alone.
I thought about those eyes as I sat in my room, popping the cap to the medication, pushing it back on, popping it again. Why choose me now? Was this some last ditch effort to expand Society by any means? Would this new medication destroy enough of me to ensure I wouldn’t be that ant leading the colony astray?
My dream of being selected had become a living nightmare.
***
I'm taking the pill. April couldn't live like this and neither can I.
Will I be happy when I change? How could I be, passing April every day and not caring?
Indifference isn't happiness. But it's better than this.
—End Log, K-1217, 2014 Years After The Fifth Flood—
***
Engineer-1217 shut off the log. He took a minute or two to mentally replay the telepathically translated text a few hundred times before listening again. Despite being able to pull things from his brain like a hard-drive, he'd always found that nothing quite matched initial experience.
E-1217 had done well. As Head Engineer, he had advanced spaceflight tremendously. A thousand generation ships were set to leave the solar system and seek out a new home. There were potentials in various stellar systems, the closest several thousand light-years away.
When, twenty years ago, Society had detected the strong possibility of a wandering black hole appearing in our galaxy, the goal was to migrate Osiris's entire population. But with no habitable planets in the Milky Way and not enough time to terraform anything close, this was the logical end of the equation. All in all, one percent of the population would be saved. It was the best survival all their calculations showed.
So why did he feel like it wasn't enough?
The doubt started when the small but resilient Koinos colony living at 35°N, 139°E reached out to collaborate in building what they called a ‘stargate.’ Society knew about the lost colony well, along with their absurd ideas and fallacious understanding of basic physics. Unless the independent Koinos were willing to undergo treatments, any meaningful interaction was seen as a waste. Society needed strength in unity, not wandering ants.
This dismissal disturbed E-1217. As a Typical, he had become completely logical. He wouldn't be dissatisfied with Society’s plan unless something was missing. E-1217 waited until just after sunrise when the largest portion of Society was either sleep or tired of mind to run the numbers. Despite the current consensus, the increase in mind-pool alone couldn’t explain the benefits of adding Koinos. Even after medication, there was something inherent about them that improved the group’s cognitive abilities.
E-1217 pulled out the clock that had been stored with the log. It was an interesting design. He had failed a standard Replica task and instead had created a shortcut in the solar system to make up for a lack of speed.
This could save us, April had said.
Fantasies can’t save anyone. Society knew that. E-1217 knew that.
Why then, years later, was he so fascinated?
He replayed April’s words, well aware he sought more than meaning in the ghost of her voice. She an Explorer and he an Engineer, their paths never crossed after E-1217 joined Society. And without the legal ability to pass on their Koinos genome, there was no logical reason to pair. But they were always together. They explored the trenches of each other’s thoughts, replayed interactions from their past lives with deeper insight into themselves through another’s eye, and delighted in shared experiences. Remnants of their disability stayed alive through love; neither ever felt alone.
From his workstation, E-1217 was still with April during a routine fly-by of Mars. The duality of Koinos awe and Typical analysis from seeing the red planet through her eyes was poignant. It lingered long after the rogue asteroid collided with April’s ship and blinked her consciousness out of existence.
He replayed the moment a million times over. The error in the asteroid map, the kinetics of the inelastic collision, the dismantling of her biology all made perfect sense. Then why couldn’t he understand?
E-1217 spent days in this state of repetition. The medicine’s effect melted away; cresting emotion eventually broke over him. By the time someone found him, he was a dehydrated shell of himself, begging for meds to take the pain of her away.
He hadn’t missed a dose since.
But . . .
E-1217 listened to the log again. He looked at the data and opened the part of his mind linked to Osiris, felt its past, glimpsed its future. The wandering black hole was set to appear in the solar system some time within the next two to eight years. He looked at the clock. He went over their current plan. He tapped into Society, felt their peace with it, looked into himself, and wondered . . .
He was missing something. Society was missing something, even as they were missing nothing. But he couldn't find it. His brain just wasn't equipped to envision it.
Logic told him that only illogical thinking could get him there.
He stepped out into the garden, which had died shortly after his Father. He unscrewed the cap of the pills that had given him new life over the last twenty years, and threw the bottle into the night.
***
Released: September 15th 2021
Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer, psychiatrist, and a graduate of Clarion West 2015. Full Bio