| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1 |
Resi doesn’t answer the girl’s question. He lies back on the cot and tends
to his pain. He’s starving and exhausted too. As if they read his mind,
someone wearing black walks up to him with a cart of food. Resi reaches up,
and grabs the first thing his fingers touch. It’s two slices of cheese. He
stuffs them in his mouth like a toddler, and carelessly chews. Some of it
falls off of his face. He just reaches for more. Plain bread this time.
The girl appears over him, her dark hair hanging down from her head, making
her look like a Japanese ghost. “It’s not too terribly urgent, but we don’t
have forever either. I need to know what happened in your vision.”
Resi keeps chewing, not looking her in the eye. “Can’t you people watch
people’s Kidjums on the dream recorder, or whatever the hell tech you have.”
“I don’t have access to that tech,” she explains. “I’ve gone rogue.”
“You and your grandfather?” He asks. He accidentally pulls one of the
platters off of the cart. A granola bar lands on his chest, so he begins to
eat that. “Or just you?”
“Just me,” she answers. “He’s not actually my grandfather.”
“I don’t really care.” Resi tucks his legs in as he turns to the side, away
from her. His hand finds a churro on the cart, so he munches on that. What
an odd sort of spread.
“Please. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I believe that it’s a
matter of life and death. We weren’t honest with you regarding your original
Kidjum. There’s more to it. We’ve been trying to help you reach your
destiny, but it’s not working. You keep making decisions that we did not
anticipate. If it looks like we’re flip-flopping, it’s because we disagree
with each other on how to move forward. The Speaker is a figurehead for the
Assembly. They are not always the one in power. It shifts frequently.”
“I don’t care about that either.” He finishes the churro. “If there’s a
drink up there, I don’t want to spill it.”
The girl moves over to the other side of him, and starts making sounds. She
pushes the cart out of the way with her hips and kneels down with a mug of
milk. She guides the straw between his lips, and holds it there while he has
his fill. “Better?”
“What you did...” he trails off for a moment. “...was wrong. You hurt me.
You tied me up. You drugged me. You forced me to hallucinate.”
“They’re not hallucinations, Resi. They’re visions.”
“What are you even going on about and is there cake?”
She picks up a saucer of chocolate cake, and sets it on the cot in front of
his face.
There’s a fork there too, but he flicks it onto the floor, and eats with his
hand. “Don’t judge me,” he says as he scoops more into his facehole.
“I’m not,” she tells him. “I’ve never gone through Kidjum before. I have a
lot of respect for what you people do. Your dedication, your hard work;
admirable traits.”
“You’re acting like you’re older than me.” He rolls over to his other side.
She follows him over there, and gets on her knees. “I am. I’m
a lot older.” She sighs, preparing herself. “Look at my face, Resi.
It is a face you have seen before. We normally switch forms as necessary,
but my transfer was unplanned, so my only option was my own clone. You saw
me before that. You saw me when I was older.”
Resi stares at her. He’s sleepy, but he can’t pull his lids down. There’s a
tingling fatigue amidst the headache that he still has, screaming at him to
turn off the lights and go to sleep for real, but his eyes won’t cooperate.
Tired but wired. She looked familiar when he first saw her, but he had no
context then. Now he knows what he’s looking for. There’s only one person
she could be, even if she looked different. This is Speaker Lincoln. Well,
she’s no longer the Assembly Speaker, but she probably will be again one
day. “Lincoln,” he says quietly. He tries to shut his eyes again, but they
pop back open.
She nods. “My given name is Kartika.”
“You’re Kinkon,” he guesses. “That’s why you have mind transfer tech. The
Bungulans gave it to you. Why? Why would they do it? Why are you hoarding
it?”
Kartika shifts her position to sit cross-legged. “When Mount Tambora erupted
seven hundred and thirty years ago, I was a little girl. I listened to my
parents. I did what I was told. I believed that we had died and gone to
heaven. But then things started to happen that didn’t make any sense. People
injured themselves, we got sick, old people died. If this was the afterlife,
where did they go? Some other level of heaven? Or no, we were just on
another planet. Aliens, or whatever, had saved us, for whatever reason. It
was decades before we ran into the Bungulans and confirmed the truth, but I
saw it for a long time before then. I was skeptical. I rejected my family’s
beliefs. I rejected our traditions. I accepted the Bungulan way of life. A
few of us did. We were pushed out of our new home, exiled to what we now
call Anchor Island. Then a plague spread throughout Yana, and suddenly, they
wanted our help again. So we gave it, for a price.”
“Undying loyalty and devotion,” Resi assumes.
“We didn’t frame it that way, but we were more knowledgeable than them at
that point. We had the tech. We had the medicine. If they wanted our help,
they needed to listen to us. It was only fair. Over time, people kept
turning over to death, and my people kept jumping to new bodies
whenever necessary. I can’t even remember what I used to look like anymore.
What we truly were was lost to time. We didn’t try to hide it from the
subsequent generations. We just stopped talking about it, and people back
then had trouble grasping the concept anyway. We looked different, so we
were different.”
“But you keep doing it. You keep jumping to new bodies, growing up, and
getting the power back. You know how to run a campaign, because you’ve
already run thousands.” Resi gets up to drag the cot out of the spotlight
that’s still on him.
“Well, four times for me, going on the fifth. Others have done it more. They
don’t like to get old, so they switch more often. It has only been a couple
of centuries. ”
“Oh, only a couple? Pshaw, that’s nothing.”
“For everyone else, that is nothing. Someone on Castlebourne just
celebrated their 600th birthday. I think they’re literally the oldest person
ever, but still...”
“What do you want from me?” Resi questions. “Why am I here, Kartika?”
“I need to know what you saw,” she reiterates.
“What does it matter? It’s not real!”
“Yes, it is. That’s why you were selected to be First Tongue of Aether. That
wasn’t just a Kidjum for you. It unlocked the power of your mind. There’s a
name for people like you, who don’t experience time linearly, or can choose
not to.”
“Oh yeah, and what’s the name?”
“They call them choosing ones, and they’re the reason we’re on
Bungula in the first place. They’re the ones who brought us to the future
from Earth.”
He studies her face. She’s not lying. She may be wrong, but she believes
what she’s saying. So maybe he should say what he believes too. “Death. All
I saw was death.”
