There was nothing in the way of a response… and then there was.
Images: vibrant, colorful, frightening images of collapsing stars and nebulae and black hole event horizons. There was light viewed from the perspective of a point in space, and a point in space from the perspective of a beam of light; a thing that looked like an amoeba pulsing in a sea of heavy gas; a hailstorm of aluminum riddling a carbon-dense planet; a civilization of squat humanoids developing tools on a huge planet with tremendous gravitational force; another civilization of light-limbed hermaphrodites dying in a conflagration on a planet that had previously never known fire.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Annie said.
A centipede-like creature the size of a commuter train roared expletives from a circular mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, at an airborne slug with gossamer wings. Annie could smell the ammonia-rich air and feel the rage of the giant centipede, and understand its anger. But she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with this understanding.
“Air. I’m going to suffocate.”
She was already running out, but whoever was operating this picture show couldn’t understand what she was saying. So instead, she started thinking about suffocation.
The centipede and the airborne slug began to choke, and then the picture changed to the humanoids on the gravitationally intense planet grabbing their throat areas and gasping. Then a human man appeared. He was a white human with light brown hair and a shiny white smile, in a blue polo shirt. The most generic rendition of the species imaginable—provided television was the source—this man appeared to have emerged directly from a toothpaste commercial, as perhaps he had.
Annie hoped he was a construct and not a real person who existed out in the world somewhere, because as she focused on him, he began to choke as well. He gasped and pawed at the generic room he stood inside of, clutching the back of the generic chair and stumbling over a generic cat to the generic floor. He twitched and screamed silently, and continued to do so until he stopped breathing.
“This shell… requires.”
The voice came from all around her, in the same way the faint blue light did. It wasn’t so much that there was no specific source; it was that whatever the source was, she was on the inside of it.
“Air,” she said.
“This shell requires atmosphere.”
“Yes.”
A new hiss sounded, an indication of a valve or pipe opening or unlatching or releasing, and then she could breathe again.
“Intake atmosphere exhaust waste.”
“Thank you, yes.”
Annie realized she’d arrived at this point with a certain number of preset expectations about this experience. The first was that there would be a presence in the spaceship, and the second was that this presence was Violet’s father. (Or, more exactly, “father”.) Given all she’d been told regarding how terrifying he was supposed to be, that she was not at that moment afraid meant either she had become very brave recently, or she was just too exhausted to be frightened.
Another assumption was that the alien she would be speaking to would have a deep, ominous-sounding voice. That expectation was colored by the movies, which were no doubt themselves influenced by humankind’s historic depiction of both authority figures in general and deities more specifically. Zeus on high, making sonorous declarations to cowering mortals at the foot of Mount Olympus, was always expected to speak in a voice as deep as thunder, and so on.
The voice she heard inside the ship was a man’s voice, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of voice that commanded awe. It was the kind that was trying to sell her something. It was what she would expect the suffocated white man from the toothpaste commercial to sound like if he’d managed to get a word out.
At least he has a voice now, she thought.
The picture show was interesting, except that it wasn’t really a picture show so much as an immersive experience. The longer it went on the more her other senses kicked in and she began experiencing what was happening instead of looking at it through a camera lens. These were memories, and they were being added to her mind. It was a peculiar way to communicate. It was faster, perhaps, than words, but had none of the nuance.
“You are not her,” the alien said, in his peppy sales voice. If it weren’t quite so life-or-death, she might find it funny. But if you buy this detergent you can be her.
“I am her,” she said. “I am the one you were looking for.”
“You are the one and you are not her. She is of you, you are not her.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You have… her smell.”
“Her smell? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Your words are so small. Her scent is in your mind.”
“You can read my mind?”
“I can taste your… yes. Your ideas. I can taste your ideas.”
“I understand. She is not me, but the idea of her is a part of me.”
“Yes.”
She was trying to pinpoint a source of the voice, so she knew which direction to face when talking.
“How are you speaking? Like, do you have a mouth?”
“I do not eat.”
“Mouths in humans are also for speaking. If you have a visual… I mean if you can see me, look, my mouth is moving.”
There was a terrible moment, just after she said this, when the thought came that perhaps her mouth wasn’t moving at all. She could feel it moving, but this was uncharted experiential territory, and she couldn’t discount the notion that everything happening to her was internal. She could be projecting a version of herself in her own mind that was speaking and looking, just like the way she thought she could smell the atmospheric ammonia of an alien landscape. Her senses weren’t necessarily trustworthy.
“I see, yes,” the alien said. “The sound of my voice is rendered from the archives collected in this… outpost. Mouth is an inefficient speech requirement. I would not mimic an inefficiency.”
“But so, you can’t read my mind. I’m really here, in the ship, talking out loud right now, and this isn’t just happening in my head.”
“Your ideas leak into this ship, but thoughts are… thoughts are… The words are crude. Thoughts are pieces. Fragments of unconnected… What is this?”
The picture show kicked in again. The alien had plucked an image of a cloth hanging from Annie’s own memory.
“That’s a tapestry. It’s from a medieval castle. I saw it when I was eight, when we went on a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”
She remembered liking the tapestry for reasons she still couldn’t explain. She spent a half an hour looking closely at it, until Mrs. Parris dragged her away.
The image zoomed in on a corner of the tapestry that was eye-level to an eight year old. It was a frayed edge. The indirect lighting of the room reflected off the glass case protecting the ancient cloth.
“These parts.”
“Threads. Those are threads.”
“Thoughts are this.”
The image jumped back to the full picture. It showed men on horseback in a tournament in the foreground with a castle in the background. Annie remembered liking the horses in particular.
“Ideas are this. Ideas are full things, contained. Endless but bounded, as a sphere. Ideas can be. Thoughts cannot. Even simple thoughts in a crude mind are threads.”
“So, no, then.”
“I cannot read your mind. I can exist in your mind but not read it. Only you can know your own mind.”
“But you can exist in my mind,” she repeated. “As an idea. I don’t like how that sounds.”