The Core: The Dark Enemy

15. The broken clock

Our first week together went by in a flash. Ess and I enjoyed the same hobby, sharing an insatiable curiosity for exploring space and the mysteries it held. She was always mimicking me, asking me what I was looking at and why I found it interesting. I tried to mimic her once and ended up learning something amazing about her. She always seemed to be looking at things differently, with her head tilted at angles seemingly at odds with the orientation of her body. When I tried it, finding nothing special about it, I decided to ask her why she was doing it.

It turns out, she can feel and see light in more ways than I expected. Not only could she see it, but she could see the direction that it was coming from and was highly sensitive to any fluctuations, almost like a person could hear sound and notice extra noises in 3D. She described it to me like someone would describe looking out over the ocean, as though she could see the waves and watch the patterns that would indicate rocks just below the surface.

I asked Tutor how she was doing it and she explained it like Ess was using her whole body as a lens, making her able to catch and filter the waves of light touching her.

To me, a being that only tended to use a limited spectrum of sight, talking with Ess who used almost all spectrums and who understood it more fundamentally, was crazy. It almost seemed like I was the blind one in the conversation, simply how she tried to describe what she could sense and see.

Meditati and Tutor also seemed to learn a lot from Ess about Leva during these conversations. I gathered from Tutor that the Tela had initially used the Leva as mine detection pets back when they were running away during the war. Meditati said that it answered the key bit of information that they were missing about the Leva's secret extra sense, as though they could see what even the most advanced technology missed. When I asked why they hadn't tried to see if they could get a Leva to talk like Ess did, she simply gave me a curious look and told me that they actually had tried under experimental conditions.

"The fact is, Kevin," she had told me, once she managed to get my attention to pull me away in VR. "No Leva has ever, in all of our history files, ever shown this level of intelligence. The only ones that come even remotely close are those that are super ancient and living in the heart of galaxies. Something about Sublimis makes her special."

I thought about it for several moments before something clicked. The Leva King had said that they were his offspring. What if they existed in a starved state on this side of the dimensional divide? Only those who managed to absorb massive amounts of energy, in this case, the energy from the next dimension that was only accessible by being close to the core of a star, ever matured enough to become as smart and as wise as he was. Ess's egg had fallen deeper inside the star that I had found her lost in.

"She was in direct line of sight to the core..." I muttered aloud.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing yet. I may need you later to test something though if you are interested." I said, knowing that she was addicted to knowledge and would jump on any new secret.

She rolled her eyes at me before vanishing, leaving a funny bit of text for me to read before I returned to exploring with Ess.

"He knows that I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I love to know."

Yup, she knew.

Ess and I stayed away from clearly inhabited systems, choosing to steer clear of the LOW and Tela space highway that ran through this galaxy, and instead chose to path our way towards strange systems and places that might have once held life.

At first, flying through space like a superhero was exhilarating, but that changed after a couple of hours. I ended up hollowing out and shrinking much of my body so that I could make a couch and the shell of a small spaceship around us. It felt better this way, as though my body belonged, rather than my legs always seeming to be pointing off towards nothing.