Long after I’d expected the thing to reach me, it looked even bigger—two or three times as large. Then my eyes discovered exactly where the squid was, aligned their focus, and everything became clear.
The squid hadn’t started as little. It was simply far away. And it was huge. Planet-sized huge.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered into the darkness.
My voice was swallowed up by the void. I felt my heart pounding in my chest and my breathing become rapid. Somewhere from my memories, my training reached out and bitch-slapped my brain. It told my body to remember what it had learned. This was a hallucination. There was no such thing as flying squid. The really big ones had gone extinct long before my grandfather had been born. There weren't even any aliens we’d discovered that looked anything like that.
This was a hallucination, and I needed to stop feeding it.
I inhaled, closed my eyes, and calmed myself. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. When I opened my eyes again, I had to crane my neck to see the upper edge of the huge, glowing, blue eye that stared at me through the darkness. I tried to remember a holovid or book I’d read where something like this had happened. When I came up empty-handed, I mentally patted myself on the back. I didn’t know I could be so creative.
I wondered if I was dying. Scientists said that the mind could outlive the body. When it did, chemicals were released as part of the dying process. Those chemicals, like the drugs the escape pod had injected into me, caused what some referred to as the “light at the end of the tunnel” or the phenomenon of their life flashing before their eyes. I decided that I must be dead, and this was merely my brain’s way of saying goodbye. My only regret was that the last thing I would see was a big, ugly squid, of all things.
Something accompanied the giant invertebrate. It wasn’t a feeling, because feelings could be controlled, and I felt no fear. It wasn’t a smell, a taste, or anything else I’d experienced. It was a sense I didn’t know I had, and I sensed power.
Another giant blue orb appeared in the corner of my vision. When I turned to look, my whole body turned as well. It was another eye. I continued to turn and saw more eyes than I could count. A few were huge. Others looked small but could have been far away. It was tough to tell, considering the weird rules of the universe my hallucination had established. Overall, I was the center of attention. I’d had dreams like that before. They weren’t so bad.
I found the weird sense of power the squid radiated interesting. I felt as though I could sense each of them, even ones I couldn’t see, like a radar at night on a dark, stormy sea.
I sensed feelings from them. Most seemed curious. A few were hopeful. But the overwhelming feeling was anger. These products of my own mind were angry. Not at me, but at the universe. I didn’t blame them. I’d probably be angry if I’d been born so ugly too. The thought made me laugh into the darkness.
Void Gods, my mind whispered. The Dark Ones. Ah, yes, I realized. That was where these creatures had come from. I’d spent hours listening to the colonel speaking of the gods of his weird religion. He hadn’t described what they looked like, only that there were a lot of them. They existed in a plane, a dimension, adjacent to our own—whatever that meant.
The place I was seeing now was void-like. There were no stars, no sound, and no smell. I could breathe, but I felt no air passing into or out of my nose. That had to be where the hallucination was drawing the images from. I reminded myself to thank Colonel Goswin for his inspiration later, if the subject ever came up. Then, again, maybe not. He might not appreciate me describing his deities as big, spooky, black, tentacled squid-things.
“The Dark Ones,” I whispered into the void.
We are known by many names.
I reeled from the sensation. A thought, bigger than my own, had poured into my mind like hot syrup forced through a keyhole. It took my breath away and forced all other thoughts from my imagination until I could absorb it.
We are the Lakunae. We are many. We are one.
The thought had a voice, a mind that forced itself into my brain. The first thought seemed too big already, and the second one threatened to split my mind in two. The sensation was unpleasant, but I still felt no pain. Don’t feed it, I reminded myself. Just go along for the ride. It won’t last forever.
But something about the word “Lakunae” seemed familiar, as if I’d heard it before. I reached into the depths of my mind, drawing on my memory, and touched something I did not expect.
It was a collection of memories, dust-covered and heavy like an old tome buried in a storage room in some long-forgotten library. It opened before me, and though I’d never known anything in it, I suddenly remembered it all. Experiences that were not my own. Words of languages I’d never heard. First kisses I’d never experienced. Memories of ancestors from a distant past.
We have brought you to us. You are in our realm, our domain. Our universe. It is ours, and we own it, for we are Lakunae. We are many. We are one.
The thought was bigger the third time, but the sensation of discomfort wasn’t as profound. It was as though I were growing accustomed to it, or that my mind was stretching, making room for thoughts, feelings, and ideas bigger than anything it had experienced before. I felt good, malleable, and
