From Cassy's diary
I and Toq had a lot to talk about, but everyone else at home was asleep already at that time and I didn't want to risk waking them up. I didn't know exactly what to expect, but there was the serious risk I would have had to rise my voice just a little bit. You know, my dear diary.
So we just walked across the street to reach dad's old library. I haven't been there for a while, come to think of it.
That conversation may have been one of the most difficult ones I'd ever had, even just being there with him made me remember all the bad moments of those last few years way too well... But, after all the time I'd spent trying to figure out what the heck might have passed through his head, I have no intention of running away.
Cassy: Well, here we are.
Toq: I suppose you want to know where he's been all this time.
Cassy: Well, of course I do. Also, getting half an idea of what went through your head before deciding to disappear like that wouldn't be bad, actually.
Toq: Uhm.
It took him a while before deciding to answer. I guess it can't be easy to find the right words to explain something like this.
Toq: (hesitant) The last time we met I told you that I needed more time to understand.
Cassy: I remember that well, but what the heck did you mean, Toq?
Again it took him a while to formulate his answer, as if he was trying to put back together all the pieces of an incredibly complex story. From his expression, I also believe that he has already spent a lot of time racking his brain over these matters, but that he is still worried by many unsolved points. I was about to try initiating the conversation again, when he finally decided to say something:
Toq: Life here on Earth is very different than on Sixam. Has anyone ever told you what the original sixamians were like?
Cassy: (perplexed) Ehm, I asked you a few times, but I can't say I caught all the details.
Toq: (thoughtful) I see. Well, for starters, you have to know they were completely different from any of us. They reasoned as a large single entity, quite the opposite of your local societies. Single individuals were not important and had to perform their tasks to the best of their capabilities for the collective well-being, each of them was in constant communication with the others via telepathy, and every choice was made by putting together the information processed by the collectivity. They were extremely efficient and rational, to the point where their technology advanced at a rate unheard of for the rest of the universe.
I listened without interrupting him, both perplexed by the direction taken by the conversation and surprised in hearing him talking so much. Clearly, over all these years, he became much more talkative than he used to be.
Toq: You already know that the sixamians decided to conquer this planet the moment they realized that life on Sixam would soon become impossible for them. The original sixamians pondered the matter for years, but found no alternative: they had to find a new home, and they had to evolve in order to be able to survive under the unhospitable conditions of the new planet. So they found the Earth, and then people like me began to be born, and then the ones like you.
I admit that I was rather confused, I didn't understand why his explanation was starting from something so far both in space and time. But my perplexity was certainly clear to him too, he always noticed that kind of thing just by giving a look at the most shallow thoughts emerging from my mind. With an expression that seemed to say, "I'm getting to the point, be patient", he then continued with his story:
Toq: I already told you that we grew up on Sixam, and not on Earth like those you remember as your ancestors. We were expected to have the same rationality and efficiency as the original sixamians, as well as to never question any order coming from them. What we thought never mattered, we never got to decide anything.
Cassy: (Perplexed) This sounds a bit like being a working ant, so to speak.
Toq: Roughly, if you want to look for a parallel from this place.
Cassy: And you were all working to conquer the Earth.
Toq: I would rather say that the conquest of the Earth was a means for us, but our goal was to give our civilization a planet where to thrive and grow in the future. But the substance does not change, after all.
Cassy: I see...
Having said that Toq went silent again for a few moments, trying to sort out the rest of what he wanted to tell me. That speech left me surprised, he had never managed to be so clear in his explanations before. In retrospect, I only spent with him the very first months of his permanence on this planet, but now whole years have passed since then. Apparently, in all that time spent living on his own, he had learned how to share his story in a way that was more easily understandable also to us.
Toq: I covered many different roles on Sixam, exploring the space and searching for elementary resources was just one of many. If it had not been for that malfunction in our transporter system, I would have likely gone on living my whole life like that, without ever questioning our way of living.
Cassy: ...
Toq: But that accident happened instead, and all the members of my crew ended up living in a place and at a time that we never even expected to see.
He hesitated again for a moment, before adding:
Toq: You still remember that time we abducted a few inhabitants of this Country for gathering more intel about the current situation, is not it?
Cassy: (sarcastic) That would be really hard to forget.
Toq: Well, in our crew I was the specialist in the use of telepathy. I was instructed to dig into those people's minds as carefully as possible, to gather all the data we could need to make a new action plan. I thus looked for information on the language spoken, on the geopolitical situation, on how many other sixamians lived on this planet... But it actually was the information I was not looking for that left me the most perplexed: in the minds of those people I saw that here on Earth you lived in a completely different manner from us, so different that it was impossible for me to understand in such a short time...
Maybe I was starting to understand where this was going. When reading someone's mind, you don't simply see a list of data, but whole memories full of images, sounds and emotions. And those memories are often so vivid that it's hard not to empathize with what you see in other people's minds.
After all, even people like Toq have quite a lot human genes, this was part of the plan of the original sixamians to colonize the Earth. But what the original sixamians evidently hadn't considered was that by interbreeding with humans they would not only have taken on appearances that would have made it possible to resist the local environment, but that the differences would have been much deeper.
Human emotions are mostly innate, after all, and also he is likely to have realized that the first time he read an Earthling's mind.
Cassy: I guess you didn't manage to explain what you saw to your crewmates right away, isn't it? Is it why you were the first to try to interact with us?
Toq: Well... I had never considered it from this perspective, but it sounds like a possible interpretation.
Cassy: I see (Cautious) And so, with your story, we have come to the moment where we met.
Toq: Yes.
Cassy: ... back then you never talked much. Can you explain to me what was passing through your head?
Toq: I was trying to understand how you think, what drives you to do what you do. I few times I tried to discuss about it with my crew mates as well, but even the ones which seemed willing to listen to me did not seem to understand what I meant. I honestly never thought before that I too could... That I, I mean...
At that point he shook his head with frustration, before snapping and saying:
Toq: Why has to be so difficult to explain?
Cassy: If you agree, I can try to read your mind. I may not be as good as you are, but I've been told I'm not that bad either.
Toq seemed almost relieved hearing those words. Here in New Sixam reading someone else's mind is considered very unpolite, but that was the norm for him after all.
So I finally got to see what was on his mind. And I also immediately realized how much moving from planet Sixam to the Earth had been much, much more destabilizing for him than I had ever remotely suspected.
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§HermioneSims§ corner:
I know, I know, another ending right at a cliffhanger... But what comes next is another very long section which deserved its own chapter. Also, this time the POV will be Toq's, so stay tuned...
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