Moon Base Alpha Oneshots

Thinking at a Rock

Zan's POV

The one limitation of thinking yourself places is that there has to be something there with a brain in order to get inside of that brain. And so, for the creatures of Bosco, there were still vast unknowns much closer to home than Earth was.

But now Zan found herself on a committee of her peers working to fix this and go out and explore those nearby frontiers.

After her work saving Earth, Zan had spent quite a lot of time hinding her skills at blocking others out of her mind. Because as much as she tried to forget about Earth, it just wasn't happening, and so Zan very much needed privacy in her mind. This blocking out of others had eventually gotten noticed, causing Zan to accidentally become almost an expert on thought and been forced to join an experiment.

And so, now Zan found herself trying to get inside the mind of a rock. Unsuccessfully, of course, because a rock does not have a mind, and therefore cannot have thoughts. For a species so smart, Zan would have thought that this was incredibly stupid had this rock exploration actually been the goal, something she knew was not the case. They were just trying to give her a pointless task to distract her from any continued sharing. Because even though they couldn't ever prove it, it was clear that Zan had at least something to do with all the math Dashiell had come up with.

Eventually, Zan just decided to use her skill of hiding what she was thinking to pretend she was working on the experiment while in reality she went about her business as usual as a quiet radical, secretly taking up the causes of other planets, determining for herself whether or not they were worth saving. It was incredibly risky, but it was certainly more interesting than trying to read the mind of a rock.