I didn't tell anyone, but my time on iG's home world had given me the ability to travel to other parts of the galaxy. While it always felt like a hazy dream, I knew it was my mere consciousness had been untethered and while my physical body slept, I could freely travel on the limitless void. I soon became adept at pressing on the strings to send me wherever I so pleased and could visit a thousand worlds in a single night.
And by some unknown method, time slowed down and I spend what seemed more like days on each of those new worlds. With each of my trips, I felt greater confidence and noticed my dream form resembled the colorless bodies of iG and the other Alpha Centauri. On all the worlds I traveled to, there was little trace of their existence, with only a few still harboring crumbling ruins and for reasons equally unclear, I could not find my way back to iG's home world.
I yearned to reach out to another, but felt it selfish to awaken them who would quickly succumb to the disease. I did not need to wait long as it seems eventually, they each reach the terminal point and decide to awaken on their own to briefly see this world once more.
She reached out her hand, nervously and was startled when I grasped onto her. She must have not expected a traveler on this now lonely highway and she was happy to spend time with someone. We walked for a while on some lush garden world she remembers fondly and still remained as she once experienced in her youth.
She shared somehow with her thoughts or memories how she was still only a child, but on a magnitude and scale beyond our comprehension. She showed how she could completely transform everything around her, disassembling entire mountains into its individual atoms and reverting it back as it was. She let them dance in a spiral vortex and crushed them into the size of a tiny speck of sand that carried its entire weight, placing it in the palm of my hand and she let me unfurl that speck back as if painting a landscape and brush with my fingertips each mountain top.
And as the sun was setting, she felt fear and huddled near me. She yearned for her mother who she knew was long dead. The pull of an eternal slumber nagged at her brain as she felt the crawling things slowly unraveling her existence. I tearfully held her like my own child and lay her gently on her side. She was happy to not have to die alone and closed her eyes.
I violently snapped out of this dream and felt a terrible throbbing pain. Blood was dripping from my nose and had drenched my bed sheets. I tried to sit up and staggered out of bed, falling and fell unconscious.
I came to in the infirmary with Pei holding my hand. She said I had been in a coma for 5 days and Kallos found me in my room after I failed to show up the next morning. The doctors found a small tumor on the left side of my brain and while it was not malignant had grown to a size that it was causing increased pressure and the source of my painful headaches. They had reduced the swelling by cutting a hole in my skull and instinctively I gingerly raised my fingers and felt a round tube suctioning blood.
I told her of my many dream adventures and my most recent encounter with a young Alpha Centauri girl. Pei told me to rest and said I should stop with the dreaming and believed the tumor in my brain was likely the result of me spending too much time in that toxic void and these brain worms may have found a way to infect humans.
Pei was probably right and something so wonderful usually had a costly price. We were not meant to travel so freely and experience many lifetimes, our feeble brains could not handle such an experience compressed into a single night. I was more cautious and for a time avoided dreaming, but the temptation was hard to resist and I promised myself I would only heed the call if another of our ancestors was taking its last stroll.
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