megatronix

unsleeping, eryse stares at the sky, the sun is about to rise and the twilight shifts to pitch blackness. she sighs. another failure. she’s been here for forever. she just wants to go home. she’s never going to get control over her powers. she’s going to be here forever. a freak. giant thumbs erupt out of the land in front of her. red and peeling, like sunburnt cactuses.

the weight of failure sits heavy in her lungs, like marble. pain devours her lungs as her powers try to shift them to stone, her immune system fights and her lungs stay as they are.

she needs a distraction. she calls home.

“it’s eryse! eryse is calling!” the screen quickly fills with her guardians. “how’s it going?”

she turns the screen towards the monolithic digits. “see for yourself.”

“oh sweetie, you’re doing amazing.”

she turns the screen back to herself, incredulous. “can you not see the thumbs?!”

“i see them. i also don’t see much else, which means you’re not manifesting most of your thoughts; you’re controlling your powers most of the time.”    

“most of the time is useless. it’s not going to get me home. i’m going to end up on clyreex with all the other people who never learn to control their powers.”

“you need to be patient. you’re a lot better than you were three months ago. in another three you probably won’t be manifesting any of your thoughts accidentally.”

eryse hates the pressure of that timeline. it feels insurmountable. and she wants to go home now. she misses her family. she misses her friends. she thinks about one girl she knows who took two whole years to learn. everyone will have forgotten she exists.

“doubtful. and even if i do manage it, then i’ll have to learn how to use my powers deliberately, which will take even longer.”

“maybe you should think yourself up a nice house, living in that cave can’t be good for your mood.”

“i like this cave.” she’d accidentally vanished the house her first week here and had been too scared to create another one. this conversation isn’t helping like she hoped. “i’m tired, i’m going to go now.” she hangs up before anyone can respond.      

despair sits in her like rot. she’s not good at this. she can’t do this.

she gets a call from an unknown number. it will be one of those weirdo radicals, they’re always trying to recruit kids like her. she never answers, she knows better. but now, she thinks, why not? it will kill some time in the endless forever.

“how are you faring?”

 she shrugs.

“i know, no fun, i bet you want to be home?”

“i do.”

“you know, in the old days, we never had to leave children on other planets when they came into their powers.”

“i know, in the ordered thought times.”

“yes, we just want to return to those times.”

“well, this is all i’ve ever known, and no offense, but having to control what i think sounds really horrible, definitely worse than just controlling my powers.”

“we didn’t control what we thought, we just thought a different way.”

“yeah, but that’s gone now, we think differently now, if we tried to go back we would have to control thoughts to do it.”

“maybe. but don’t you want to go home. don’t you think it’s unfair that kids are left alone like this.”

“there isn’t a choice, we would wreck the world, and there are a lot of very smart people working on other solutions so this won’t happen forever.”

“things didn’t used to be this way. you don’t have to listen to the people telling you this horrible thing is necessary.”

she shrugs. it does feel horrible and she does want to go home. “what’s the other option though?”

“we teach only ordered thought, like it was, purge chaos thought from the world.”

“that sounds crazy.”

“i know it does, chaos thought sounds normal because it’s all you’ve known, but before we met the humans, we had ordered thought only and things were good. chaos thought has brought only bad things. you know, in those early days, ‘step on a crack, break your mother’s back’ swept through the world like a plague. and then there was, ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’, the devastation was profound.”

she did know, of course, she’s never heard these arguments, only the opposing ones, and they suddenly sound fresh and tantalising. it is ridiculous that kids are abandoned on other planets. after a lifetime surrounded by reasons why chaos thought is good, she can’t think of a single one of them. she wonders what her guardians would say if she ran off to join a cult.  

“i need to think.”

“of course you do. i’ll call again tomorrow.”

it only takes a few moments to come back to her senses. after all, running away would only leave her further from home. and millennia of ordered thought couldn’t do anywhere near the level of healing ‘kiss it better’ could. she can’t really comprehend the world before ‘when you wish upon a star’, a world of poverty and disease and pain.  

she stares at the wine-dark sky, trying to twist despair into determination, a whisper sits in her soul, “is it worth it?”