Empyrean Iris Story Collection

Loneliness

There was nothing but blackness, the distant, cold stars winked softly from the inky expanse of nothing. Against the light reductive layer of his eyes, that distant illumination barely made an impression on his consciousness. Even the slight infrared-sensing rods of his eyes had trouble picking up such a detached source of illumination. The filaments at his back streamed out behind him in slow undulating waves billowing behind him in an attempt to catch light. However, with illumination so distant, his only source of mobility was reduced to all but uselessness. It was a strange feeling, to be immobile in the vacuum to patter along like the helpless humans forced to drag himself by way of the ship to actually get anywhere.

Without the powerful glow of his origin's blue light, he was nothing more than a piece of space debris caught on the rudder of human pity and compassion. It was mildly frustrating, but it was a fair price to pay for the solitude of thought.... the beautiful silence. Once upon a time others had invaded his thoughts knowing his every intention able to guess his every action. They knew him as well as he knew himself, and they had no right to do so. They had persecuted him for his wish, his desire for secret things. They had tried to destroy him for how different he was, but then came the humans, seeming to fly from nowhere on fates own wings to whisk him away from the noise and into the silence.

Gliding slowly with only the grace born of a creature from the blackness, he glided to a slow stop peering in through the observation deck, a silent observer on the outside. He could hear them, just barely over the sound of his own thoughts. Human thoughts were quiet, delicate and difficult to distinguish like trying to hear a conversation through a closed door, but if he was quiet enough, if he was still enough, he could hear them. He could hear their inner dialogues, but those weren't half as loud as the feelings. Human's spoke quietly, but their feelings were broadcasted on powerful waves from their brains as if they wished for the whole world to know. It was a wonder than not all sentient species could hear them, they screamed their feelings so.

He wasn't so used to understanding the human feelings, and so had not noticed them at first, but here, now they seemed so obvious once you payed attention. In the stillness of perpetual freefall, the convict turned slowly onto his back hands cradled behind his head as he closed his eyes and listened. The multitude of human voices flooded through him throbbing in his chest. The feeling was exhilarating like riding some kind of high. He could only manage such an exercise for so long before becoming overwhelmed, but the humans lived like this every day.

He could feel them now one by one popping into his consciousness like the winking of stars in a night sky. If he could have taken a breath, he would have as they washed over him. The first feeling he felt was distant and warm, the ability to know someone without having to be inside their head, the desire to have someone understand you, and knowing that they desired the same thing. It was quite beautiful really, the idea of giving someone consent to view your inner most thoughts to understand your inner most feelings. Conn could only imagine what such a desire meant. Coming from a society that understood your every thought since birth it struck him deeply that such a secretive species with private thoughts would want to share with someone else. It must mean something very important if that was the case. Not only did they have to open up the inside of their heads, but they had to find some way to communicate it using their horribly inadequate language without the ability to broadcast the emotion that went alone with it.

The next sensations was.... Was something he couldn't describe but for his access to the human memory banks. He recoiled at its chill. He didn't understand what cold was, he had never felt it, but the feeling itself was piercing, rending like being picked apart by a thousand needles, but not into his skin, into his very head like torturing his psyche into submission. The cold froze him, made him feel like he couldn't move, couldn't think he was so sluggish, so cold, so isolated. He recoiled from that spot and opened his eyes glancing in through the window. All of the humans he saw there appeared to be happy, they bared their strange white teeth at each other, they laughed, silently to his ears, and they continued about their way. He couldn't imagine someone, someone there, moving with the terrible immobility of that agonizing cold inside them. He drifted away cringing from the feeling, from its total disconnection from the scene before him.