I’ve heard of people who see sounds as colours. And of brain tumours pressing in places they shouldn’t be and causing problems. The question of what that injection did to me has gone beyond scary now.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s still night-time. It was day before the storm, but I haven’t seen the sun since. Possibly I’m on a different world again, maybe. Is the gravity less, or do I just feel more energetic than before? Has it been night for a day straight, or did I just sleep when it was light?
Thursday, December 20
A shot of words
Escorted again to the greysuits, and OW! They had me lie down on another dentist-style chair, this one with its own little helmet. I can’t say I was keen, but the greensuits were waiting just outside. Is it better to be a dignified test subject, or a defiant but battered one?
I was just noticing that there was a green dot in the centre of that room too when they turned their evil torture machine on and all these words began to squiggle across the back of my eyes. If I’d thought my head was going to explode before, that was nothing to having a dictionary injected into my skull.
Someone really has to explain the concept of painkillers to these people.
I think I had convulsions. It was a bit hard to tell, but I remember them holding my arms. There was some blacking out going on as well, and a long hazy time after where they were talking about my heart rate and stuff. After a while I must have passed out properly, and now I’m back in my box.
There’s a thousand thousand words sitting in my skull. They murmur at me whenever I look at anything. As I’m writing this there’s an awkward echo giving me a different set of sounds, and an image of strange squiggles which I presume mean what I’m writing. I don’t think I know this language, but sounds are suggesting themselves to me in response to things I look at and even things I think. So I could on one level understand what the greysuits were saying, in the way you half understand those garbled train announcements, where you get the gist and guess the rest. It’s not like having an English-Alien dictionary.
I can even read the squiggles I’m hallucinating around the room, in that I’m sure they read No Access when I glance at them, but if I look at them closely they’re not letters I recognise, let alone words. Trippy. Still, having a language poured into my skull will save a lot of time, and I’d be 11/10 pleased if my head didn’t hurt so much.
Infodump
I was given a few hours to recover from dictionary-injection, and another meal, which helped a lot. Then off to a meeting-type room to talk – actually talk! – to the first greysuit and a new one. Since my internal translation service doesn’t automatically make me able to pronounce their words or understand their grammar, I mainly listened and tried to understand what the hell they were going on about. Non-literal phrases especially throw me, just as anything like jump the shark would surely confuse them. They spoke very slowly, and had a plastic sheet on the table which acted like a computer screen and handily showed pictures to help me along. First screen I’ve seen – all the rooms I’ve been in are incredibly bare.
The echo in my head had already let me know that the Ista part of Ista Tremmar is a title, a bit like Doctor. The other greysuit was Sa Lents, and I think Sa is a general honorific. He’s going to be my sponsor.
Centuries ago people called the Lantar lived on the planet I was on. It’s called Muina. These people were very learned and in touch with the Ena (which, confusingly, seems to mean spaces). These Lantar triggered a disaster which shattered the spaces and caused thousands of mutant monsters called Ionoth to show up and eat people. So all the Lantar ran away and went to a bunch of different planets. This one is called Tare. They didn’t find it a very easy planet to live on, and sometimes the Ionoth things would show up here.
Recently the Tare people started to move between planets again to try and find a solution to the Ionoth problem. They found other worlds where people from Muina survived, but they consider Muina still too dangerous to live on. All the people in uniform I’ve met are part of Tare’s research and defence against the Ionoth organisation (called KOTIS, which must be some kind of acronym, or just doesn’t translate).
Remember I said no-one was really surprised to find me at that town? Well, they weren’t. They estimate that at least twenty people each year get accidentally whisked off to somewhere else through something which sounds like wormholes: either to Muina or to one of the known worlds or just totally somewhere else. They find about half of them, some alive, some dead, and if they’re from one of the known worlds they send them back.
Earth – you probably figured – isn’t one of the known worlds. They asked me a bunch of questions to try and figure if I was from a world they’d had a stray from before. They call people who accidentally wander through wormholes strays. Sa Lents is some kind of anthropologist and he says that my description of Earth doesn’t match up to the lost worlds previously described and he’s looking forward to learning and writing about it. Good for him, I suppose.
Anyway, I guessed right when I said they weren’t at that town to rescue me. There’s a particular kind of Ionoth called Ddura (massives) which are really rare and from what little I could make out are something like the whales of the Ena. REALLY massive, if that was what was making the incredible noise before I was rescued. They’d detected one on Muina and rushed out to try and study it, but were too late and only got me instead.
I find it hard to believe that the people from Earth are from some other planet. For one thing, you’d think we’d have legends or stories about Ionoth and this Ena place and Muina. And though they talked about this happening thousands of years ago, modern humans have been on Earth for at least tens of thousands. So, not convinced, though since Tare people look just like Earth people there’s probably some connection.
Strays count as a kind of refugee, and other than representing a slight curiosity for being from a new world, I’m not particularly unusual. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like Tare has a refugee policy like Australia’s, since I wouldn’t enjoy mandatory detention. Although they are trying to find all the worlds that the Muinans went to, and so are already trying to find Earth in a way, they didn’t seem to think I should get my hopes up about it. Apparently the Ionoth have been really bad lately and they’re doing a lot more defensive work than exploration.
Sa Lents is going to be my sponsor. After some more quarantine and testing I get to be integrated into society, and that means a couple of years at least of living with Sa Lents and his family while I learn the language and enough skills to get a job, and he conveniently does a little research project on Earth. He has two daughters – one older and one younger than me – and the older one has just left home.
They started talking about how long it would take me to learn to use the Kuna (a word which also seems to mean spaces), and we had a really confused discussion for a while until I finally figured out what the injection to the temple was for. I don’t quite understand the whole spaces thing, but the nearest I can make out the people on this planet are several steps ahead in terms of computers and networks and virtual environments, and before they could give me this internal dictionary, they had to set up an interface in my head.