Visions Softly Creeping

The depthless darkness surrounded her in a weave of invisible shadows spreading out into the infinitude of nothing. A numbness encased her: she floated as a mind divorced of body, incapable of any action except thought. For a while, she couldn’t even do that, lacking substance with which to form her ideas. Memory too, evaded her, and with it any remembrance of why she was here. Then from above, from somewhere far away, breaking through the timeless void they sent her a message, a short electrical zap: the five minute warning, she suddenly knew.

The others, the thought softly floated through her mind, find the others.

Trying to feel their minds, as she had done so often before, she started calling their names: Daniel, Isaac, Victor, Josh. There wasn’t even an echo, and the following silence seemed redoubled, growing like cancer over the impertinent disruption of its ageless swell. That was when she first felt it: a mind—like theirs attuned, able to hear and speak without words—listening, watching, aware; a mind at home in the eternal darkness.

Who are you?

Who are you? The thought echoed back.

It didn’t respond with words or language, or pictures or thoughts; she just suddenly understood, a revelation like a neon sign splitting the night. She started screaming. Above her body, the doctors and scientists watched as the EKG’s needle danced off the chart, her panicked heart nearly bursting in agitation. Before they could wake her, she woke herself, desperately grasping at the nearest arm, one belonging to a young doctor, before shattering everyone’s mind with the senseless horror she’d witnessed. She regained her composure by the time the soldiers burst through the double doors, sitting up straight in her gurney surrounded by inexplicable medical devices, and a frothing, convulsing medical staff.

“I need to speak to the general,” she said. “We have a problem.”

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