Chapter 54: Crisis

My Admiral,

Only eight days have passed since my previous message, but we have gone through a series of unusual crises.

As you know, the Drift consists in moving by freezing our ship in relation to the universe, which itself is in constant motion. This movement is not linear-in fact, it is highly chaotic. One could imagine our ship as a piece of bark in the middle of waves: the waves move it in all directions, but its average absolute position changes very little.

I use the analogy of the sea because, a few days ago, we entered a zone we called the Psychic Ocean. A bubble in the universe. Here, the void is not quite void. We believe that on the order of the Planck length scale, there exists here-and only here-a mesh of unknown origin that allows for a local alteration of physical laws. Thus, gravity does not weaken as one moves away from a planet. It remains constant. The speed of light is also constant in all media. Life forms that may have evolved here defy our imagination, but it turns out that the dominant form of interaction is psychic influence.

As soon as we entered the Psychic Ocean, we were accompanied by large creatures resembling transparent pilot fish that clung to our ship-even though we were in maximum Drift.

I am uncertain of this conclusion, but it appears that amid the chaos of the gases of immense stars, evolved life forms have emerged and may also have communicated from star to star through psychic energy-a form of electromagnetism common to a frequency usable by living beings.

Usually, a human being uses their neurons to think. These neurons function through very weak electrical impulses. But electrical impulse means the emission of an electromagnetic field. It is with this field that, since the twentieth century, medicine has probed the brain, and since the twenty-second century we have been exploring psi potential. When a normal human thinks, the very weak electromagnetic field decreases in power with the square of the distance; basically, at one meter, nothing can be detected. But that was no longer the case in the Psychic Ocean.

At first, we couldn’t concentrate. We received each other’s electromagnetic fields, which were retransformed into electrical impulses in our brains. A crewmate would drink a glass of water, and you would mimic the gesture in the air. Disoriented, the crew, by order of the Captain, lay down on the ground. All our thoughts, fears, and hopes blended together. It was not a pleasant experience: no one was themselves.