The golden rays of the westering sun soak into my fur, and I feel the warm sand under my palms erode as gentle waves lap at my paws.
“How long have I been standing here?” I wonder.
A whisper responds, “It doesn’t matter. There is no before, no after. There is only now.”
“Where is this place again?” I think to myself.
“It doesn’t matter. There is no elsewhere. There is only here.” says the voice again.
“Now what was my name again?” I ask myself.
“It doesn’t matter. There is no one else to call you by name. There is only you, there has only ever been you, there will only ever be you, forever blissful in this little world of mine.”
A panic rises in my gut. “Shut up, damn it all! My name is Ringlight! I was hatched on Pilgrims’ Rest to four… no, six sires and dams. Their names are… are…” I grasp futilely at distant memories, from another life… someone else’s life.
“Are you alright?” another voice drags me out of the abyss. I snap my head around to face its source and am met with a snowy visage. I hastily glance behind me, following her paw prints back to a bonfire crackling in the sand just out of reach of the waves, the rising smoke partially obscuring a stand of trees further away.
She smells worried. “You were starting to dissociate again.”
“Dissociate?” I try to reorient my mind, focusing on her whiskers twitching with concern. “Who are you?” I ask, “You look familiar.”
“He started fading again, didn’t he?” another yinrih, ruddy-pelted and black-eared, trots up to us from beside the fire.
“Come on, buddy, what’s my name?” he presses.
“S-Steadfast Friend,” I mutter hesitantly.
“Good, and the big guy over there?” He points his muzzle at a massive male lounging in a tree behind the fire, his blue-gray fur blending with the smoke.
“Lodestar,” I say, a bit more confidently.
“And this scrawn-job next to you?” He says, playfully gesturing at the diminutive white-furred female who pulled me out of my haze.
“I can’t help being the runt of my litter!” she retorts, but stops to await my answer.
“Iris.”
“What about ol’ big-ears? What’s her name?” He indicates another female walking along the beach toward the group. Her red pelage matches my interrogator’s, but her ears aren’t black like his.
“Sunshine.”
“Excellent, and where are we, really?” says the redpelt, tracing an arc with his muzzle indicating our surroundings.
I sit on my haunches and tug at my ear with a rear paw, trying to drag a long-forgotten memory out of the depths. “We’re… We’re on Sweetwater? wait… no!” I bark, causing Iris to jump. “This isn’t real! We’re not standing on a beach on Sweetwater. My body is floating in an amnion aboard a womb ship, hurtling through the interstellar void at relativistic speed. Every external stimulus entering my nervous system is the result of a simulacrum generated by a computer, all to prevent me from going mad from the lack of sensory input.”
“He’s back!” my questioner barks toward the tree. Lodestar hops down and pads up to us. An odor of relief meets my nose ahead of his approach.
“We just finished singing vespers,” Iris says, tossing her muzzle behind her at the liturgical bonfire. “I could smell your panic. This is the second time today that you’ve started to dissociate. You should really be singing the liturgies with us. It helps keep your mind anchored in reality.”
“I wish I could, but–”
She interrupts. “If you can’t pray, then just listen. Be present.” She pauses to choose her next words. “If we don’t make contact you’ll have another week of suspension, subjectively speaking, to go before we get back to Focus, and we’ve got to keep you with us.”
“When we don’t make contact, you mean,” I think to myself, my pessimism getting the better of me.
She backs up to face the four of us. “We all hear the voice,” she says, “and we’ve all been trained on how to combat it. I have faith in every one of you. We’ve all passed the suspension screenings, yes even you, Ringlight. I never misrepresented you to my superiors.”
“Wait,” I look around. “There was someone else, right? He has black fur. Stormlight, where’s Stormlight.”
“He went to check the ship’s comms. We should be arriving… soon-ish,” says Sunshine. “Well, a few years realtime, anyway.” Just as she finishes, Stormlight’s avatar coalesces into existence, shuddering slightly as his time perception contracts to match our own.
Every muzzle in the group whips around to face him. The melange of emotion wafting off of him overpowers everything else, the smokey wood, warm sand, and salty sea spray are utterly eclipsed by the aroma of elation and trepidation.
“I– you– It’s– OK, OK, OK,” he babbles, frantically lashing his tail in a “follow me” gesture. The beach flickers away like an extinguished flame. The warm yielding sand under my palms is replaced by what feels like cold metal. A neon purple grid stretches to infinity around us, embedded in an inky void. A teal-colored hue washes over Iris’s candid pelt, emitted from an invisible light source overhead, turning the fur of the two redpelts to a muddy brown. Stormlight is barely visible, the black fur on his back highlighted with a turquoise sheen.
We’ve been ripped out of our contracted time perception into realtime, from a simulation of a golden beach on Sweetwater to the spartan realm of the [i]Dewfall[/i]’s operating system environment.
By now the rest of us have begun to stink of excitement as well. Stormlight wordlessly executes a command gesture with his tail, causing a sphere of coruscating white brilliancy to materialize before us, an output interface from the womb ship’s realspace radio receiver.
At first only white noise meets our ears, the incorporeal light sphere flickering randomly to match the chaos fed through the ship’s antenna array into the signal processor. The exact same scene has played out countless times over the millennia for an uncountable number of missionaries, and for every single one of them, nothing ever emerged from the noise but the random perturbations permeating the blind uncaring cosmos. And yet…
Something faint, barely discernible over the rushing static, begins tickling my ears. A pure tone, sounding jerky and random at first, materializes into a pounding cadence…
dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah. Dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah. Dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah.
A SIGNAL!