Wyxie's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Wyxie was cataloguing a woman's grief-blue thoughts through the sanctuary dome when the door below slammed open. Boots pounded up the ramp. Dr. Mateo Corino climbed onto the observation deck, chest heaving, his glasses fogged. Wyxie liked him. He was the only human who had ever asked before Wyxie touched his mind. Now his own thoughts poured out unshielded, a sick yellow spiraling into black. "Wyxie. I need you." He set a data slate on the rail and did not look at it. "Jordan Jenkins. Something is wrong inside his head. He talks about colors nobody else sees, and yesterday he stopped mid-sentence and forgot his own name for eleven seconds. I timed it. Then he laughed. I have run every scan I know. The scans say he is healthy. He is not healthy. He is coming apart like wet paper, and I can measure the tearing but I cannot see it. You can see it. Please." Wyxie followed him down to the clinic at the edge of the sanctuary grounds. Jordan sat on a low bench, huge red hands folded, grinning at the ceiling. His thoughts hit Wyxie like a shattered window. Most human minds were puzzle-boxes, feelings tucked inside feelings. Jordan's mind had no boxes left. Every drawer was open at once. Joy, terror, wonder, and a dull gray leak underneath that Wyxie had never seen before. The gray was eating the edges of the other colors. Wyxie pressed closer with their mind and found the source: a thin thread of thought that kept trying to say I am Jordan and dissolving before it finished. Each time it failed, more gray spread. Wyxie understood then. It was not a disease. It was the shape of his new sight tearing the shape of his old self. He was seeing too much and remembering too little, and the two were pulling against each other. Wyxie told Dr. Corino, slowly, exactly that. The words came out clumsy. Wyxie had never had to translate a color before. Dr. Corino wrote it down. He asked three careful questions and wrote those answers too. Then he thanked Wyxie plainly, the way he stated everything, and said he could build around the tear now that he knew where it was. Jordan looked at Wyxie and said, "Oh! You saw it, didn't you, the gray part, the part that keeps forgetting?" and then his grin faltered and he asked who Wyxie was. Wyxie stood very still. They had named a human feeling out loud and a human had used the name. The arc goal moved one notch closer. But Jordan's gray was already wider than it had been ten minutes ago, and Dr. Corino was writing faster, and Wyxie understood that seeing the tear was not the same as closing it.