Camp Sunrise: Senselessness
Posted on 15 Mar 2023 @ 5:25pm by Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri
Edited on on 15 Mar 2023 @ 5:36pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Korix, Camp Sunrise
Timeline: MD08 Morning on the island (following Camp Sunrise: Creek Road)
1402 words - 2.8 OF Standard Post Measure
Sitting cross legged in the dirt alongside Ikemba, Ibis picked at her own slim share of breakfast. With only herself and Wallace remaining and having to split up their labor time to look after the kids, they had fewer rations to go around for the four of them and less successful forage than when there had been more hands to gather and process together. On days when they couldn’t pick up work, then there was only forage and no meat at all. Today she took the smaller slice, a couple of ounces, and even felt guilty about that as Ikemba finished his own.
There had been a time when she’d made efforts to imagine the meager fare was something more appetizing. There was a vague recollection of the taste of uttaberries and cream, but she couldn’t decide if the memory was accurate. Taste and smell were elusive like that. Strong when you experienced them, but hard to call up on demand.
She’d thought a lot about her remaining senses since her telepathy had been stolen away the first time she caught ill on Korinn. The illness had lasted a week and come with fever and dizziness. She’d slept in a fitful sweat and by the time it lifted, she could no longer sense anyone around her. Since childhood, she’d had an above average aptitude with her telepathy, such that she had to learn restraint or else her feelings and daydreams would be unintentionally pushed on others. She even had a kind of sense of animals. As a twenty-something, she had leaned into her telepathy in all of her relationships— a string of quick burn matchups that she had gotten into a pattern of churning through and accepting the impermanence of. They were fun. While they lasted. And her telepathic gift had been a big factor in that pleasure. Ultimately losing the sense was like going deaf, dumb, and blind all at once, all while no one else in Camp Sunrise at the time could relate to her, never having had the experience themselves to regret the loss of. Although they regretted it for their own reasons.
The loss of telepathy was more than just a personal blow. Initially she had been a very key advantage to the stranded survivors of the Sunrise, telepathy having made talking to the Korinn without a universal translator immediately accessible; at least accessible to a small degree, being complicated since conceptually Korinn thinking seemed to have some different essential framing abstractions than land dwelling people typically organized their thought patterns in. The Korinn spacial experience of the sea was closer to how birds experienced the world than to the land-fixed races that had to overcome the landscape they were bound to. And their voices meant that pitch was as important as diction and their range of volume allowed for communication over relatively long distances. She had her doubts about how easily a UT could handle the language even if one had been available. Although they had picked out some meanings of porpoise speak, UTs hadn’t really translated whale song which was the closer equivalent but she thought she remembered researchers said that was because animal talk wasn’t actually language with abstract representation but more like signals and emotions, and could differ dramatically from pod to pod and between species. Still, she’d be surprised if the UT could manage Korinn entirely without a great deal of supplemental input from her compatriots in the sciences with specialties in fields like anthropology and linguistics, and maybe even someone with an advanced degree in music education.
Aside from the leg up with basic communication, her Betazoid gift had helped very early on to identify friend from foe. She had been pivotal to everyone in that capacity. They even hoped her telepathy could serve to sense a future rescue operation in orbit, since the scatter effect of the mineral mining would prevent their UFP races’ life signs from being detected should someone happen by looking for them. The Sunrise had been destroyed in a neighboring system, so there were no traces of it in orbit to tip anyone off to look for them here. Hence, when she lost it, the survivors lost their signal flare, and she felt as if she had let everyone down, despite everyone’s reassurance that she shouldn’t feel that way. She knew it had been a blow to morale beyond just her own and if she was honest, she knew that she still hadn’t forgiven herself for going telepathically deaf and dumb. Every now and then, over the years the others would inquire if she’d been starting to sense anything again. She knew they had every reason to be curious, but it hurt every time it had come up in conversation. Up until she herself had passed on, Laura had continued to reassure her that sometimes senses lost due to illness could recover. But It hadn’t happened.
At least if she had the good sense to have lost her capacity for taste instead, she wouldn’t have to resent eating fish and boiled sea grass every day.
Besides the ghost reflex to extend the telepathic sense, Ibis knew in her gut it was truly gone to her forever. Patterns of old impressions remained in her memory, in the way she would imagine a person who had gone blind might still understand color, even if they could no longer see it. It meant a great deal to her when Wallace shared his raw feelings, any feelings, outloud. It was lonely enough in her head and worse yet in this ghost town of empty shacks.
Ikemba put his tin plate in her lap, bringing her out of her reflective self-pity.
“All done?” Ibis asked him, not because she didn’t know he was finished and not because she had anything else to offer him, but because he spoke so rarely that she hoped little speech prompts might bring something out of him.
Ikemba gave a nonverbal nod.
She put on a brilliant smile worthy of a children’s program holo presenter and clapped her hands. “Say, ‘all done! All done! I’m all done now!’ ”
Ikemba smiled and clapped too, his dark curls bouncing.
Putting the two plates aside, Ibis brought the boy into her arms— one corner of her eye monitoring the still closed door of Laura’s old house with Olivia presumably sulking in the dark on the other side. She took his little hand and folded his fingers so he had his pointer out. He was too bony for a little boy. Ibis knew he should have had some kid pudge in his fist of fingers. She moved his pointer finger through the sand to draw letters, pronouncing each one for him and giving him the letter name, the sound, and a word for each of something that Ikemba might be familiar with in the Camp or out walking with them on the island to gather. He laughed and smiled but repeated nothing back. Ikemba always liked this game. As she got halfway through the alphabet with her happy sing-song voice, a tear hit the sand next to the letter ‘N’. Ikemba twisted around and put both of his hands on her face, studying the emotion with his crystal blue eyes and searching her intently.
She tried to keep on the smile, but as he held her face to his own she just knew. She knew it no longer mattered. Nothing Ikemba could say in standard would matter if he would never speak to another federation humanoid again. She should be teaching him what she had managed to learn in general Korinn, so he could maybe survive on after she and Wallace couldn’t be there for him any more. Maybe N’to’s family could make special arrangements to take him in when some day, sooner or later, they joined everyone else, and there was no one left to even put the last of their bones in the ground. Wallace wasn’t going to like talking about it, but she knew it was giving him nightmares already and had to be said soon.
Alphabet left incomplete, she hugged the boy tightly and smothered his head in kisses and tears while Ikemba patted her, comforting Aunt Ibis.
