Red Horizon Light

Her mind was tangled again. Trudging through the ice-cold sand, dragging her feet so as not to lose the trail the others had left, Exa was trying to keep up with those ahead of her. She knew she was falling behind and couldn't seem to pick up her pace, already bracing herself for the scolding she'd get for lagging. Her mind was tangled because she had seen the light. A light drifting down from the sky. Stranger still was the shuttle that had landed with it. She had watched it, stunned — a witness, perhaps, to something no one else had ever seen. Just as she was about to tell the others, the figure stepping out of the shuttle noticed her watching and cut the lights. Everything sank back into pitch darkness. If only the elders beside her had turned their heads and seen the shuttle too — then she wouldn't have had to feel like she owed anyone an explanation. But they hadn't. Whatever had happened in that brief span of time, she alone had witnessed all of it. Others had been there, but their attention, their whole interest, had been elsewhere. Their only concern was burying the body they'd carried out of the cave — the price of survival in the middle of the desert, a task performed so often between them it had become routine, unspoken. Bury it, then return to the cave. Outside was nothing but desert. There was little to do out there, and the cave was something they couldn't do without.

"Exa," a voice called from up ahead.

"Exa, you've fallen far behind. If we lose you, we won't find you. Please try to stay with us."

It was Raven, the one who led the cave-dwellers, who had called out. He was one of the few in the cave who looked after Exa closely, who worked to see her grow.

"I'm coming," Exa said. "I'm coming, it's just that my feet are frozen. I can't move as fast as you."

…

Exa and the others answered to a master they called the wisest among them — the eldest of the group. He would slip into dreams and bring back word from somewhere else, somewhere far. They used to listen to him with fascination. But now everything felt different. He had taken to telling the same things, over and over. With nothing better to do, they simply watched him, pretending to listen.

Exa had tried, many times, to slip into dreams together with her friends. She had even succeeded. But she could never do what their master did. He could dive into a dream and narrate what he saw; she could not.

Exa and her friends always saw different places in their dreams. They had never once seen the same place twice, nor had one of them ever seen what another had. But that their master always saw the same thing was, to them, both tedious and strangely fascinating. How could he keep seeing the same thing over and over — and stranger still, tell it to them each time as if it were new?

Exa, the last to enter the cave, threw all her effort into sealing the door shut. Raven, seeing her struggle with trembling hands, came back to help her, then returned to his own room.

Once Raven had gone, Exa headed toward the corridor that led to her room. Her friend Akuji was waiting at her door, and had brought the others along — Darcy and Lisha. They were all close in age, the four of them each other's closest friends. They loved gathering together, always occupied with some project of their own.

"Welcome," Exa said, greeting each of them in turn.

Some time ago, they had started working together to dive into dreams and see the same place. Every attempt had failed, but it was clear they were growing more skilled with time. Today, though, would be different.

Exa, buzzing with excitement, lays out the plan in her head:

"Friends, today we're refining our method and trying something new. We'll choose the place together, and each of us will dream of that same place as we fall asleep. Not led by anyone else's words — by our own will. The way each of us does it alone."

What they wondered about most was where their ancestors — the ones who had left them on this planet — were now, and what had become of them. Together they slip into what the elders call dimension travel, and what Exa calls dreaming. Each of them longs to see where their ancestors are. This time, Lisha leads.

When Lisha opens her eyes, she finds herself on one of many terraces set into the roof of an enormous concrete structure. The building beneath her stretches on like a fortress wall. Where are you all? she calls out — the sound not from her own ears, but rising straight from inside her mind. A strange and fascinating answer comes back from Darcy, Akuji, and Exa; their voices arrive the same way, surfacing in her head as if they were fragments of her own thoughts. Each of them says they're standing on a concrete structure too. The voices weren't coming through the ear but straight through the mind — as if, unable to see one another, each had pried open a door into the others' inner voice. Hearing each other this way, they all grow excited together, certain this time that they've succeeded.

I'm on a terrace. I've never seen a building this big, Exa's voice says inside Lisha's head. The others are on terraces too. This is a huge day for them — they've finally done what no one else has managed. But then a question occurs to Darcy. Wait — if we did it, if we're all in the same place, then where are you? There's no one here but me.

Exa looks around and realizes Darcy is right. Maybe, she says, maybe we're in the same place, but on different terraces. We need to find each other.

I'm not sure we can find each other, Lisha says.

"Why not?"

"Can't you see? We're on the same terrace."

"How can you be sure?"

"Every terrace has a number. This one says 133."

Mine says 133 too, Exa says. She looks around — the building is enormous, but the terrace she's standing on is small. She walks up to face the number 133 and says, Wherever you're hiding, Lisha, come out. This isn't the time for games.

Lisha, despairing, says: Exa, you don't understand. I'm on terrace 133 too. Standing right in front of the number. You're supposed to be here. We came to the same place, but I can't see you.

Darcy and Akuji, who had been listening in silence, finally speak up — they, too, are on terrace 133.

This situation, so unlike anything they'd known, frightens them badly. All at once they want out of the dream — today has brought them more strangeness than they can stomach, and it has scared them. Lisha commands the others to wake, to return, but nothing happens. They're all still exactly where they were, unable to open their eyes back in the cave. They are trapped in this place.

Darcy notices a door to the side. She opens it and steps into a wide corridor. No one is there. After walking for a while, she reaches what looks like a hangar door. Beyond it waits a great surprise: past the door, a platform juts out from the building like a balcony, and on it sits a spacecraft. Everything about the place says it's used as a landing strip. She steps out and approaches the shuttle. No one is inside. She calls out to her friends that she's found a shuttle. Following her directions, the other three take the same path and reach it too. They still can't see each other, but everything around them is identical — as if they had each arrived at the same place, only at different moments. This is incredible, Exa says. I've never used a shuttle in a dream before. Maybe some force we can't see, somewhere in this place, is what's keeping us from waking up. If we get in and fly far enough — away from this area, even off this planet — maybe we can wake up.

Each of them sits in the same pilot's seat of the same shuttle, and they lift off. After flying far from the planet for a long while, exhaustion overtakes them, and they fall asleep inside the shuttle. The shuttle, meanwhile, keeps flying on.

Exa wakes, bleary-eyed. She looks around — she's in her room. Her room in the cave. She realizes her friends are asleep beside her. She wakes them all. They stare at each other, eyes full of fear. Because all of them had shared the same dream, and all of them had, for a time, been trapped inside it together. They sit for a while, letting themselves recover, and agree not to tell anyone what happened. After all, they're back in the cave now, and the problem has resolved itself.

The next morning, Raven heads for the door, meaning to step outside — even if it's only the desert, he wants to see the world brightening into a new day. He turns the handle, but the door won't budge. He throws his weight against it again, but it still won't open. He remembers helping Exa seal it shut the day before. We really did a thorough job of it, he thinks. He calls for help from the others passing in the corridor. Together they all push against the door. Still, nothing — it won't move so much as an inch. Raven gathers a group, Exa among them, and heads for the door on the far side of the cave. After a long walk, they reach it. Despite going unused for a long time, it opens. They step outside and make their way toward the main entrance. They need to find out what's keeping it shut.

Outside, under the newly risen sun, they make their way through the desert toward the main entrance. As they draw near, their eyes widen with disbelief. A shuttle sits parked directly on top of the door. While the adults exchange stunned looks, the younger ones break into a run toward it. There's no one around. Nothing inside, either. When Exa reaches it, she can't hide her shock — the shuttle is identical, down to the last detail, to the one from her dream. A thought crosses her mind: what if this is the shuttle from that dark night? What if the pilot is still out here somewhere? She can't be sure, but the unease inside her keeps growing. Raven climbs in and steers it away from the cave door. Once the door is clear, the rest of the group hurries outside, curious. Everyone is astonished — this is the first time any of them has ever encountered a shuttle from outside. Exa's friends join her, and they share in her astonishment too. With one difference: unlike them, Exa has seen a shuttle on this planet before. And with its pilot, no less.

As the whole group, now out of the cave, argues over how the shuttle could have gotten there — and how it found the cave's door, ordinarily hidden, and landed square on top of it — three more unfamiliar shuttles suddenly appear in the sky. They're heading straight for the group, and one of them is already beginning its descent.

Some of them flee back into the tunnel in fear and seal the door, but it's too late to hide. Whoever is aboard those shuttles has already found them. And with the others still outside, and the shuttle sitting right there on the ground, their location is impossible to miss.

One of the three shuttles lands while the other two hold their position in the air. Five people step out of the one that landed. An unknown number of remaining crew wait inside. The five approach those who had come out of the cave.

"Hello. I'm Harun, an officer with the unit responsible for the planets in this part of the galaxy. We had no idea people lived on this planet. How have you managed to live here undetected?" he asks.

Startled, Raven steps toward Harun. "We assumed we'd been forgotten on this planet. We live in this cave. Our ancestors thought it best for us," he says.

Raven, unable to contain his curiosity, asks the question that has been nagging at him.

"How did you find us?"

"Truthfully, we didn't find you. We were on patrol in our ship when we picked up an unidentified shuttle. It appeared on the radar out of nowhere. We assumed it might have been teleported in, so we followed it. When it landed on your planet, we came down after it with three shuttles full of men."

"And that's how you found us. Well, thank you, but I doubt you'll find what you're looking for in that shuttle. There was no pilot inside it."

"It's impossible for it to be without a pilot. That shuttle doesn't belong to any fleet we know of. It's foreign. It must be coming from somewhere unknown. Let us examine it."

From a distance, Exa and her friends watch Harun and his crew examine the foreign shuttle, glancing up now and then at the other two still holding position in the sky — foreign to them too, after all. "That shuttle down there is exactly like the one I used in my dream," Darcy says. "No difference at all. Should we tell them what happened to us?" Exa, with a tense look, warns them to stay quiet. "Not now."

Harun and his crew invite Raven and everyone living in the cave aboard their ships, offering to take them to a planet where they could live in comfort. For the cave's people, this is not an easy decision. Some feel that abandoning the place their ancestors entrusted to them would be a kind of betrayal; others are already worn thin by years of hard living. After a long silence, their master speaks: "Our ancestors didn't leave us here to be forgotten. They simply never found another way. Now, there's a way." His words are enough to sway even those who hesitated. After a brief discussion, everyone in the cave agrees to the offer.

After a short journey aboard the ship, they reach the planet Harun spoke of and settle there. It's a world of untouched nature, forests, and seas, and they're given homes already built and waiting for them. All of them are thoroughly delighted with the place — and the fruit, grown naturally rather than manufactured, only deepens their contentment.

Some time after settling on the new planet, Exa decides the moment has finally come. Together with her friends, she tells Raven everything they experienced in the cave. This time, she doesn't hold back the shuttle either — the one she saw that first night, with its pilot. Raven, shaken by what he hears, looks first at the children with fear in his eyes, then says they need to inform their master. When they tell him together, Tarık — who once served as a security officer aboard a spaceship — doesn't know what to do with himself.

For a while he stares at the ground, troubled, running back through his past. His voice, gentle and paternal only moments ago, slowly grows heavy — as if he were speaking something aloud, for the first time in years, that he'd kept buried all this time. He turns to the children and begins:

"You've pried open a door from the past and carried it here with you. Long ago, I was a security officer aboard a spacecraft designated TC-187. To seize the ship, space pirates reached remotely into the chips embedded in my mind and the minds of my crewmates, and planted a virus. All of us dropped into sleep at once, and began having nightmares."

Raven's face goes pale. Exa and her friends exchange glances; none of them dares to speak.

"They came from a civilization far beyond ours, from another dimension entirely, and in an instant they had control of everything we had, the ship included. After a long ordeal, they gave the ship back to us — but as they left, while cleaning the virus they'd planted in the ship itself, they forgot to remove the one still living in our chips. So we kept dreaming, over and over, under the influence of that foreign code. What we saw in those dreams was never really ours — it was the virus, acting on us from outside. When they left us on the planet where the cave stood, it was still a world of natural life. Afterward, something happened that we never understood, and that natural life vanished. We settled into that cave."

Tarık pauses here, as if gathering together something he's speaking aloud for the first time in years.

"You are our children, and you don't carry those chips. But the code passed down through your parents, took root in your minds, and the virus settled into you organically. That's why you've been having these dreams — and why we've been trying to control you. But it seems the virus that gave you dreams wasn't all that passed down. The software that let the pirates control electronics somehow passed to you as well, and through your experiments, you managed to switch that power on. No pilot brought that shuttle here. You did. I know that shuttle well. I could never forget it. You pulled it across from another dimension into ours."

The lights from that dark night come rushing back into Exa's mind. Maybe all of this had started long before she ever realized.

"You can't possibly grasp the scale of what you've done. Now the ones on the other side, who already knew of us, will trace that shuttle, and they will come to this dimension. I had built up a resistance to the different dreams my chip kept showing me — I had managed to trap it inside that one fixed memory it always returned to. Contrary to what I told you before, it was no longer controlling me; I was on the verge of gaining control over it myself. And just then, you opened the door to the other dimension. It's only a matter of time before they arrive."

With that, he turns and walks toward his home, fully aware that whatever peace remains to him will not last long.

To be continued.