The four of us, acting as one, stood up, hands reaching for the tablet that was now whole again. There was nothing, not even a faint seam, to indicate that it was ever broken.
When my fingers reached its surface, an electrical discharge went through me. Instead of pulling away, I held on. We were all holding on. If my friends’ dazed faces were any indication, they were as out of it as I was. The house, its walls, its windows, all of it was the same and not the same. It had transformed into a better version of itself—too real, colors saturated, sounds enhanced. Everything, from a lonely fly buzzing in the corner to the roaring of the distant waves on the beach, was magnified to the max and then some. What are you really? My mind formed the question, my intent spreading to the rest of our group, as we were all connected.
Suddenly, while I was still present here, in the company of Tommy, Lori, and Rowen, I was also up there, in the vacuum of space. I was the lonely spark as well as something else. Something bigger, infinitely more complex. And I was moving. Fast. Through space. But then I was dragged off course by the gravity of a strange world, which I knew could mean death, but also the opposite of death. I couldn’t die. There was no death. I was death. There was nothing but death, and in this dying, there was life. As I approached this alien world, it welcomed and rejected me at once. It hurt so much, the pain of entering this unfamiliar atmosphere eating me up whole. Though infinitely diminished, I was still alive, my entire essence now packed into this one little piece. And I fell and I fellandIfellandIfell. The only thing I knew for sure was that I still existed. Reduced to a little fragment of the former whole, one out of thousands of plates covering my outer body, each hexagonal form green with life and breathing and thinking. I was now my own prison. But I learned to exist—by shaping this foreign world to my specifications. I found a way to sustain myself.
The longer the moment lasted, the more I let go, allowing the tablet’s essence to merge with my bloodstream, my cells, the very core of my being. Now that we knew the tablet’s past, our hive mind was complexifying, growing layers upon layers upon layers. I could recognize individual thought patterns in the way different ideas formed in my head. There was Lori, her brain waves punctuated by impatience, by her urgent need to have things go her way—and also by her fear of loneliness. There was Rowen, self-satisfied but also, surprisingly, hiding some feelings of inadequacy behind his easygoing facade. And there was Tommy, his brightest light being his hunger to belong, to be needed, to be a part of something bigger. Torn between these three, I tried to focus on my own consciousness, to know myself. And what I saw there, deep inside of me, was that I strived to make my own meaning, to create, to breathe life into things, be it a friendship between people who were seemingly too different to be friends or a blank page begging for words. I thrived on that, but it could also be my undoing, broken relationships leaving me alienated from the people who cared about me, and from myself.
It dawned on me then that the tablet, this alien mind that thrived on human interactions, did so because it couldn’t create anything new. Rather, it made things clearer for its host while it fed on the host’s thoughts and feelings.
And so in our moment of communion, we knew everything about ourselves and about one another. We knew every possibility. Every deep secret. This everything included the lonely spark and her secrets. But as its dark doings were revealed to us all in one infinite instant, we felt no anger. She was our tablet, our oasis, but also the Queen of Giants to me, a monstrous shadow to Lori, a dark pair of angelic wings moving in the wind to Tommy, and a sentient tree to Rowen. She appeared to us all, filtered through our perception, our experiences. As she took many shapes, she kept whispering into the ears of those willing to listen. She made me poison our only water source in the oasis because she wanted us to fight over it and for me to torment myself with shame. She showered Rowen with food because she wanted him to feel guilt—and for us to judge him. And she tormented Tommy with an impossible choice—to sacrifice Rowen or to watch Lori do it to me instead. Perhaps, in an alternate reality, Lori succeeded in saving Rowen from the pit. But it didn’t matter now. We felt no vengefulness toward our queen. She was our lonely spark, just trying to survive. Weren’t we all?
Lost to our shared trance, time became twisted and turned inside out. We floated together, and in this moment everything was right in our closed-circuit world. But then … something else pushed in, forcing itself into the mix of our combined thoughts. A burning desire to be important, to matter, to lead, and to be respected. A desire so strong, it was violent in its velocity. And then there was another something—a yearning to make a difference, to do the right thing, even if the thing in question was going to break you. Neither of these felt like evil aspirations, but nonetheless the tablet didn’t react well to these new additions to our hive mind. My fingers were burning against the cold as my stomach coiled. The tablet was resisting—buzzing in protest and lifting off the table again.
No, not lifting—being taken away!
The tablet’s abrupt absence was like a vicious attack on my body. My skin, joints and muscles, rib cage wrestled wide open, exposing my heart to the world. I heard the others crying out and realized I was whimpering in pain and loss as well. I could no longer hear and see everything at once. I was deprived. Empty. Inadequate.
“It’s Minh and Luke! They took the tablet!” Lori croaked amid violent coughs.
She didn’t have to say what the four of us already knew from the brief moment Luke and Minh joined our hive mind while scrambling to tear the tablet out of our combined grip: their plan to destroy it. Or at least, that’s what Minh planned to do. Luke? I wasn’t so sure …
I was still reeling from the shock of separation when there came the unmistakable bang of the front door swinging shut. Everything wavered around me. The living room had floor-to-ceiling windows and, like in a fever dream, through the glass I followed the movement of Luke’s athletic shape as it rushed by outside. The tablet was in his hands. Minh was lagging behind him. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn on the plane when she collapsed, her hair was a mess, and her legs were thin and wobbly. And yet she was strong enough—or determined enough—to conspire with Luke, to come here and take our lonely spark.
Moving as one organism, the four of us left the table and ran after the thieves. As our weirdly coordinated group exited the house, Lori yelled after Luke and Minh, “You’re going to kill us all!” followed by a string of profanities.
I found myself at the forefront of our pursuit, my legs hurrying over the grass in long strides, practically flying, like in a dream. The wind was helping me one moment, pushing me back the next. When I saw Luke reach his car—parked a block away from the house—I knew I wasn’t going to get to him in time to free the tablet. But unexpected help came from Minh, who was near Luke. She surprised him with a kick in the knee and latched onto the tablet, grabbing it for herself. Luke’s cry of pain was swallowed by the wind. I guessed Minh’s unlikely partnership with Luke was over now.
I switched the trajectory of my pursuit as Minh raced away from Luke and toward the cliffs, her intent painfully clear: She was going to destroy the tablet. Whatever empty fumes her frail body was running on would expire soon. She was weak when I last saw her. It was a miracle she was even moving.
Trapped in Minh’s hands, the tablet was emitting a high buzzing that hurt me from afar—sending my ears pulsing, my eyes tearing up. Through our connection, the tablet was screaming in my head, its cry intensifying as Minh approached the cliffs. I could already see it—the shadows of my own demise in the foamy dark waves raging below the drop. They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re near death, but that wasn’t exactly the case with me. What I was thinking in that moment was that I should’ve been nicer to my mother, more forgiving maybe. I didn’t know where the thought came from, but the regret was crushing.
But if I got the tablet back from Minh, I could make it all right again. I could fix everything—I could beg the Queen of Giants for another chance. For me. For all of us. “Minh, wait!” I yelled, losing my breath in my mad dash. Others were right behind me, but it was up to me to stop Minh now.
Minh paused on the cliff’s edge, dangerously close to the drop. The winds were battering her from all sides, her hair wild and her body about to fly away. I was less than ten feet from her when Minh turned to face me. A mask of pain and struggle made her face unrecognizable. Who was this girl?
“Don’t come any nearer!” Minh warned, and I halted, Tommy almost bumping into me. The others must’ve been behind us—I could sense their combined tension with every bit of my skin.
“Minh, listen to me,” I said, struggling to speak against the wind whistling in my ears. “If you destroy it…”
“This thing is evil,” Minh cried out. She angled her body so she could hold the tablet in one hand, over the edge of the cliff.
“It might be the only thing that’s keeping us alive right now!” I begged her with my eyes to listen to me, to reconsider. “Noam Delamer is dead, and we all might be next!”
“This isn’t life,” Minh said, no longer yelling. I could hear her all the same, as if she’d said the words directly into my ear. Awkwardly, she shifted her weight again, bringing herself even closer to the drop. The dark desperation in her eyes was what moved me. Without giving it a second thought, I tackled her. I knew full well we could both end up falling, but I also knew I wasn’t about to let someone else decide my fate for me.
The world around me darkened. I grabbed on to Minh with everything I had, my hands going around her waist. There was a sudden pain in my stomach, the kind that I somehow knew came with stabbing—the piercing of flesh, with the blade burning its way in, disrespectful of internal organs, of bones. In our struggle, I looked down and saw a gaping hole in my stomach, blood gushing out. I couldn’t even scream. This was an illusion. It had to be. The tablet was misfiring, terrified. But I was weakening quickly. My feet were slipping on the wet grass. The yawning drop below me beckoned.
“Let go, Alif…,” Minh hissed as I kept reaching for the tablet, my fingers sliding against it.
Another chance … I begged the Queen of Giants. For me and my friends.
My thoughts were all tangled, a messy ball of yarn, all emotion, no logic.
And what are you willing to do to get what you want? came the answer, calm and quiet but also deafening. For a moment, I was back in the white-walled throne room without a ceiling, where a throne made of human bones and possessions towered over me. The Queen of Giants was there, seated on her throne, her head lost to the clouds. I could see myself through her eyes. She was always watching.
My response came easily, like the last piece of the puzzle falling into place; there was only one spot where it could fit. I’ll do whatever’s necessary.
Then came a sizzling noise, followed by a whooshing sound. The sensation of my ears popping. I was still holding on to Minh when the tablet slid out of our combined grip and fell into the watery abyss below.