Rigel

Rigel decided that he wasn't going to tell his students that people were materializing from thin air. It had been his experience, back on Rigel C, that people didn't learn well when under duress, and if the films regarding alien invasion had anything to say about the topic, it was that the sudden appearance of even more extradimensional aliens would cause humans to panic. The form of alchemy he was teaching them required intense focus, so it seemed best not to have the fear of alien takeover as a distraction.

He wished he could teach them faster. On Rigel C, they would have been surrounded by people who could passively reinforce what was being taught. Here, no one else even knew how to use alchemy, nor did they radiate the knowledge. That last bit had other, more serious side effects that he was struggling with.

Over the months Rigel had been on Earth, he found that his memory of home decayed quickly. It was unavoidable: Rigelian shared memories were continually renewed using every mind as a repeater. They stayed comprehensive and sharp, so long as one was in enough company to keep them circulating. But here, he was alone. He was sending, and maybe someone was receiving, but nothing was being sent back.

As the sun peeked through the bedroom window of his apartment, he began to doodle on a notebook Kimia had given him. Photorealistic drawing was one of the skills he had picked up from the collective, and it had served him well as an educator. Like he had done thousands of times before, he began to sketch a face. In the past, the subject of the sketch wouldn’t have been important; drawing a person’s expression always served some other educational purpose, often just to demonstrate something obscure that would otherwise never be visually represented. Rigelians, too, learned more efficiently when the knowledge had an image attached to it.

He wanted the image to be of someone specific, but every time he tried to recall the face of someone from home, they weren’t in his memory. That joy he had shared with the whole of society, the thrill of bringing up new generations, had been so distributed that he only carried a piece of it with him. The people of Rigel C had all lifted together: every good feeling was amplified by everyone who felt it. Not having that now felt like suffocating. Intellectually, he knew there were thousands of Rigelians who remembered him, whose lives had been lifted by his own…but without the mind of the masses, the memories were just a formless, vague, undefined series of events in his memory.

The face he had drawn wasn’t a face. The structure was there: the slim jawline, dimpled cheeks, small, tight ears and petite nose were those of a young woman, but the eyes were missing, the mouth was incomplete, and there was only a shadow where the hair should have been.

“Someone. Anyone,” He thought to himself. There wasn’t supposed to be so much him in his brain, and so little of everyone else.

When he started drawing again, the face wasn’t that of anyone from home. He watched the drawing become complete, as though it was being done by someone else. It was a face he recognized, but not from Rigel C. Instead, as his hands drew, rubbed and erased across the page, the mirror-perfect image of Kimia’s thin, shy smile and Gianna’s determined, vigilant eyes appeared on the page.

He sighed, and he didn’t know if the sound was one of quiet contentment or melancholy.

Flipping back to the front of the notebook, he read the notes Kimia had given him on his own abilities. It was still a surreal experience, obtaining knowledge this way. Information on Earth came in hyper-distilled pieces instead of the broad, nebulous cloud of experiences and interpretations that Rigelians tapped into. He found it inefficient and easy to forget, but soon understood that the point was…consistency? He hadn’t fully mastered the art of language in the six months he had been on Earth.

Centralization. That was the word. Rigelian knowledge was distributed: everyone had a piece, and they knew where the other pieces were, so everyone had it all. Earth’s knowledge was all in its symbols, constant and unchanging, if no attempt to change those symbols was ever made. There was probably more to it, Rigel knew, but the puzzle metaphor was close enough..

“Hydrogen,” he read aloud, “One proton, one neutron.”

This was his element. In a literal sense, identical to almost every other unit of matter in the universe, but it was the one he could feel, the one that he could move, and which wanted…no, which naturally joined with others, and would split without much provocation. Through means unknown, it had made the crossing with him.

“Matter can become energy, and though it doesn’t often go the other way, it is possible,” Kimia’s notes said. She had been kind enough to write down her observations, along with her best interpretations of what could have caused him to suddenly, uncontrollably displace the mind of another person…from a chemical perspective, at least. She had no answer for the properties of the exotemporal axis, which was fair; he wasn’t sure what he knew was even reliable. Even the origin point of that knowledge, a thing that was usually preserved for all knowledge in Rigelian memory, was unclear.

“Matter and energy are always preserved, never created, nor destroyed. For energy to be imparted to one object, it must be removed from another.”

It was why Moving and Joining always made the area around the alchemist colder. That energy had to come from somewhere.

It was why it had gotten so cold on the beach a few days ago, Rigel thought. The energy needed to pull an entire person across the exotemporal axis…

Can't think about that now, he chided himself.

"Learn, so you can teach," He said to himself.

The feeling of learning, of the expanding of the mind to accommodate and understand new information, felt as good here as it did on Rigel C, with the added benefit of being far more abundant. So much was known, and had been known on Rigel C for millennia, and most days, it seemed there wasn't anything left to discover.

That had been an illusion. The very words he was reading - and in fact, words themselves - were like the musical notes for masterpieces he could not have experienced before, because he had lacked ears to hear them.

He wished he could go back to Rigel C with this knowledge made material…then remembered again that he would probably never go home.

For not the first time, he searched his mind for answers on how it had happened. He had been at home with…something. He hadn't known what the stuff was. It had given him glimpses into…not here.

Well…some of them were here. He remembered the voice of a man, a father. The man had been laughing and smiling, and Rigel had felt…an odd kind of joy. He had felt tears coming to his eyes, though he felt happier than he ever had before. Something in his chest had felt like the rising of a warm balloon.

It was all he could recall. The meditation techniques Keola taught him were helping him keep his new memories, but bringing his old life back into mental view was frustratingly slow. He wanted to remember it all. Understanding had become an addiction, and he couldn't understand what he couldn't remember. Knowing there was more to learn, but not knowing what it was, it was like an itch that couldn't be scratched.

This wasn't working. He decided he would go looking for the man who had fallen from the sky.

Gianna

"Alright. Today, we're learning about illegal border crossings," Sergeant Turk said. Everyone groaned: this would be another lesson on the joys of interorganizational coordination. Long story short, we'd have to memorize even more form numbers.

"Can't we just put them in the Border Patrol after hours box, Sergeant?" A male cadet asked. Several of the other cadets, mostly male, chuckled quietly.

"Sure thing, Tumanski. Nearest box is 300 miles out into the Sonora Desert. Let us know when you're ready to make your next run, and we'll load you up," Turk said flatly.

Tumanski smiled and shrugged as the cadets laughed, a little louder this time. The sergeant did not so much as smirk as he started his PowerPoint. 

When the first form popped up on the pull-down screen, I drew a two-column table on my notebook. This was going to be another set of forms with names made of one number and several letters. I hated those; they were always the hardest to memorize, and questions about them were always on the tests.

I stifled a yawn, having stayed up too late the previous night to digest what I had seen…felt…whatever sense I used to detect…whatever I had been doing.

In many ways, I envied Keola and Kimia. Kimia was a woman of science, and often seemed to understand what Rigel was doing better than he did. Keola, on the other hand, seemed to always respond to the magic show by saying "whoa that's awesome," trying to do the thing Rigel had done, and somehow doing the thing upside down. They were both built to accept the impossible, in their own ways.

But what I saw was impossible. Even when I did it, altering the course of lightning was impossible. It was one more thing I couldn't make myself accept.

Trying to fly hadn't done me any favors, either. It didn't take a physical toll, but that was probably for the worse. With all the gym time I'd been putting in for the academy, if flying was a physical endeavor, I'd be space shuttle status by now.

But no, it just had to be something you did with your mind.

"...which uses which form," Sergeant Turk scanned the room to see who wasn't paying attention, "Bales?"

The blonde-haired surfer dude cadet shook awake, green eyes wide in obvious panic. He knew he'd been caught napping, and to his credit, he didn't try to hide it.

"I'll uh…just take my extra 200 push ups, Sarge," Bales said, voice still slushy from his interrupted nap. Everyone but Bales smirked, preparing to witness another Sergeant Turk glare. He was never a man that had to yell to get his point across; you just looked into his eyes and knew he was planning something memorably nightmarish for you. 

To our surprise, he just sighed and lowered his head. We gave each other nervous, confused glances as he remained silent for almost a full minute.

"I will be scheduling classes this weekend. 12 hours, Saturday and Sunday," Turk said. A few brave (or foolish) souls down front groaned loudly.

"You need to understand something. All of you. This is not a job that you can do by muscling your way through everything," Turk began, quietly, almost monotone. We all seemed to lean forward to hear him more clearly.

"This city, this state…this is not a place where the uniform is going to earn you any automatic respect. Maybe some of you are under the impression that with your big biceps, a shiny badge on your chest, and a 9 mil on your hip, you're gonna tame the west like Wyatt Earp. This job? It ain't that."

Many of the cadets in the room looked forlorn, like Turk was rebuking them personally.

"You want to crack skulls in the name of freedom, go join the Marines. Maybe they’ll put you behind some sandbags in a desert outpost where you can kill a teenager manning a machine gun in a Toyota Hilux, make your bloody dreams come true. Here? There's a way to do it - the way you will do it. It involves first aid, learning Spanish, changing diapers, negotiating lawyer visits, and liaising with the Fed for asylum requests. If that's not for you, if that doesn't sound important enough to spend more time in the books than in the supplement aisle, you know where the door is."

Almost everyone in the room looked like their mothers had just shown up with paddles. This was not what anyone expected from the instructor who crammed more knowledge into our heads than we thought could fit, who ran us until we thought we would puke, then pushed us to go even harder. There was another side to him, apparently. A warrior, and a poet. 

And an idiot.

Not everyone in the room was stunned into silence. Bales was, but as he had just bought us all weekend classes, his instinct to duck and cover was understandable. Glancing around, though, I saw a handful of others who looked…not angry, but perturbed. 

Perhaps they were like me. The looks on their faces might have been expressions of the same scorn that I felt for the "officer of the peace" mentality. Cynical as it sounded, our authority came, first and foremost, from the barrel of a gun, and from our license to use it. Everything else we did, good or bad, right or wrong, was built on that foundation.

And in my head, I could hear Keola agreeing with Sergeant Turk.

"Nobody ever got less homeless with a gun in their face." His apparition was just as annoyingly peaceful as he was.

Keola

I was no good at cooking, so if genetics had anything to do with that skill, something had gone wrong. My dad could work an oven like a culinary harp, and my ma was master of the grill flame, but I had never even gotten the hang of toast. And so, one of my first thoughts upon seeing Rigel's alchemy was, "I bet this will let me summon food out of thin air!"

But it turns out, food is complicated. When I tried it, a sandwich did not assemble itself at my command. Kimia later explained that food was a complex assembly of materials, themselves formed by…I don't remember the exact words. Lots of confusing pieces, made of smaller, more confusing pieces. She had said that trying to make food with our powers was like trying to make the Mona Lisa with a hammer and chisel.

"Well then…let's hammer," I mumbled.

"Hmm?" Gary asked, still looking down at the old saucepan I had given him. I was Moving my oxygen in sweeping, vibrating motions through the bottom of the pan, and the water was beginning to boil.

"Uhh…" I stammered, "Talking to myself. Sorry."

"Hey, I'm supposed to be the crazy one," Gary said with a laugh. He joked about being a crazy hobo all the time. The jokes always made me uncomfortable.

"You're not-"

"I know, I know. Trust me, Maui," Gary pointed to his forehead, "I know what I am."

I didn't want to tell him I was actually from Kaua'i, because that word sounded like a Japanese word that was being used to describe something more perverted these days. The old Navy puke would doubtless jump at the opportunity to say something lewd if I said it aloud.

"Oh, let me…" I trailed off, extending a hand as he started to open the pack of instant Ramen.

"I know how to open Ramen, surfer dude," Gary said, feigning insult.

"No, it's just…your hands are-"

"You plan on eatin' it?"

"Well…no, but-"

"Then let me use my dirty hands to cook my cheap food, magic man."

Gianna had cautioned us to keep our powers secret, warning that we'd be dissected in a CIA lab, or something, but that seemed cynical. And besides, this was Gary. I had been friends with the homeless Navy man before Rigel gave us powers, and I wasn't about to hold out on the guy.

"How do you do that, anyways?" Gary asked. It wasn't the first time he’d asked me how I Moved, but I had always struggled for an answer.

"It's…you know how when you rub your hands together, and there's friction that warms it up?" I said. 

Gary raised an eyebrow, but nodded.

"It's like that, only smaller. Like I'm doing it to the pan," I said.

"How…" He said, pausing to emphasize his doubt, "Is it like that?"

"I don't know, man. I still don't know how it works, I just know what it feels like."

"Think you can teach me to do it?"

I sighed. He needed this power more than I did. If he could boil water with his mind, he'd be able to drink clean water during the burning summer days, shower every day with distilled ocean water, and even make a little bit of air conditioning with the energy exchange.

"Wish I could. I barely understand how to do it myself," I said quietly.

"Is it even a thing I could do?" Gary asked. This caught me off-guard.

"Uhhh…sure? I mean, I learned. Pretty sure if I can do it, anyone can."

"I just need the right teacher."

"Yeah," I said. I lowered my head. It was just as well that he was looking at the aircraft carriers across the bay; I couldn't have made eye contact with him if I wanted to.

"Well…why not try?" He asked. I was feeling more and more guilty for my incompetence.

"I mean I'm sure I could teach you to move your…familiar, if I could show you how to get one," I replied, knowing I must have sounded like a nerd for talking about something that sounded like straight up magic, "You…know what a familiar is?"

"A magical demon pet, yes. Lots of Dungeons and Dragons on deployment in a sub," Gary said, sounding neither enthusiastic nor judgmental about the holy grail of nerd culture.

"Well…it's not exactly like a summoning, but I guess the principle holds?" I shrugged.

My oxygen, moving at ridiculous speeds through the field of alloy that made up the bottom of the pan, did and didn't feel like its own creature. I always felt it: it was like an extra finger that was unattached to my body, or like a smell I had gotten used to, but that never completely went away. If I left it alone, it Moved and Joined and Split without any kind of mental push on my part. But even when I did something to it, made it go the way I wanted, it was more like opening a door than it was like giving a car a push.

The whole thing was confusing to think about. It was easier to make analogies, think of weird crap to do with heat and wind, then start pushing metaphorical buttons until that thing happened.

"Ahh, don't worry about it. Probably break my brain anyways. I still know how to make a fire; I'm good," Gary said.

"I'm-" I began. He made a sound and waved me off.

"Forget it, Maui," Gary said, "Water's good, you can stop now."

While he cracked the sheet of Ramen and put it in, I slowly pulled my oxygen from the pan bottom. Not difficult work, but tedious to keep it from latching on to one of the iron atoms. At least, that was how Kimia had described it. To me, it felt like pulling a drowning swimmer to shore while they flailed. 

We were quiet while he ate the noodles out of the pan. He liked them without the flavor packets…well, "liked" is probably too strong a word. All the sodium was bad for his heart, and made it harder to keep the pan clean. It always seemed sad to me, the little things he had to give up just to survive. I never heard him complain, and honestly, he should have complained. He didn't deserve to waste away on the street like this. If I were him, I'd have been camped out in the mayor's front lawn, piss jug and all, until I got the city to…I don't know. 

Just wasn't fair.

"You still hanging around with the uh…" Gary made a thinking face, noodles still hanging from his mouth, "With that cop lady?"

He had caught me off-guard while I was feeling sorry for him. Maybe there was a lesson to learn there?

"Uhh, Gianna?" I asked. He shrugged wordlessly, still chewing his food. It took me a few seconds to realize that he either didn't know "cop lady's" name, or care to use it.

"Yeah, we're friends. Saw her last night, actually," I said. He smirked and raised an eyebrow.

"Not…like that. Dirty old man," I laughed, "Why you ask?"

"Well, saw a few people walking up the 5 over by Dairy Mart a few nights ago," Gary said through a mouthful of noodles.

"And…?" I dragged out the word, "You think they were illegals? Want me to have her arrest them? Ignore them? You know she's a cadet, not an officer yet, right?"

"Did not know that," He said, putting another forkful of noodles in his mouth, "Nah, I'm…mmm, don't know. They had torches. Were…hmm, wearing pea green trash bags."

"For the love of god, swallow, man," I said, smiling to let him know it was a joke. He flipped me off anyhow: sailors will be sailors.

"Pea green trash bags, though?" I asked.

"That's what they looked like," Gary said, gulping down his bite of noodles.

"I mean that's weird, yeah, but what does that have to do with Gianna? You want her to look into them?" I asked. 

"Now that I'm saying it out loud, not sure. It's just…hmm," He went quiet, staring into his empty pan. I furrowed my eyebrows.

"They just looked strange. Got a…weird feeling from 'em," He continued.

"Like, suspicious?" I asked.

"No, like all of a sudden, I had stomach cramps like crazy, and had to take a huge dump."

"That's why you need to wash your hands, nasty."

He flipped me off again.

"I don't know, man. Not really seeing how those dots connect," I said. He shrugged, sloshing the pan by accident and spilling a bit of hot water on his legs. He drew a sharp breath through clenched teeth, but didn’t make any other sound.

“You OK?” I asked, jumping up to help, but he waved me off.

“Yep,” He said, half groaning the word, “Yep. I’ve bathed in worse.”

He took an old hand towel from his torn sea bag, using it to wipe the water from his hairy legs, then to wipe out the pan he had just used. I grimaced at the disgusting sight, turning to look away and making an intentional gagging noise.

“Really, Gary?” I groaned as I glared at him, “You could have…”

I saw something…impossible behind him. I shook my head to clear it, sure that what I was seeing was some kind of weird hallucination.

“Uh…Gary? The people you saw near Dairy Mart? Did they look like…” I trailed off again, not sure how to describe what was in front of me.

“Spit it out, Maui,” Gary said, still cleaning the pan with his dirty rag. I pointed at the apparitions behind him.

“That? Did they look like that?”

The eight people in front of us were wearing what looked like form-fitting plastic ponchos, colored a dull shade of green mottled with brown, tan and black splotches. They all looked too skinny, save for one man, whose belly jutted out so much that he had to have some kind of disease. The woman leading them as they walked towards us was tall, at least a full head above my height, her blonde hair cut so short that she looked bald at a distance.

She waved. Her hand was glowing a hot white, and I could feel the air around me growing colder as it brightened.

"Yeah. That's them," Gary said, “Side note, my stomach hurts again.”

The closer they got, the more wrong they looked. The skin on their faces looked undefined, like there was no hard boundary where the skin ended and the air around them began.

“Neat trick with the pan,” The tall woman said. Looking up to meet her eyes felt like the view from the bottom of a well we were trapped in.

“Thanks,” I said nervously, “You too. With the hand…I mean.”

“I’m Melia,” She said, apparently done with the small talk, “Need you to show me how you did that.”