Someone Else's Sky

She decodes the alien signal by dreaming in it. The dreams are memories. The memories belong to someone who might still be waiting.

Neri Kassar is the fourth xenolinguist assigned to the signal. The first three are listed as psychologically compromised. She's read their files. The last one wrote eleven pages of flawless alien grammar before she forgot her own name.

The generation ship Enoch changed course forty years ago to chase this signal. It arrives at the source in ninety days. In that window, Neri has to finish what three people broke themselves attempting — full translation of a transmission that doesn't behave like language, doesn't store like data, and doesn't process through any waking analytical framework ever developed.

It processes through sleep.

When Neri dreams, she isn't dreaming. She's remembering — standing in rooms built from materials that don't exist in human chemistry, watching light move in spectrums her eyes shouldn't register, holding a hand that fits inside hers wrong in exactly the way that makes her not want to let go.

Every night goes deeper. Every morning she wakes up with more of the signal decoded and less of her own memory architecture intact. She's losing things. Small things first. The smell of her mother's kitchen. The sound of rain on a rooftop she lived under for twenty-two years. Her first language is becoming her second.

The ship psychologist is supposed to pull her out if she destabilizes. Instead, he's watching her become someone extraordinary — someone fluent in a way of thinking that makes human cognition look like arithmetic — and he can't stop himself from being drawn to whoever she's becoming. He isn't sure the woman he's falling for is Neri. She isn't sure either.

A previous linguist — the one who officially went mad a decade ago — has been living in the ship's maintenance sublevel. She didn't go mad. She integrated fully. She thinks in the alien language now, dreams in it, and has been waiting for someone else to get far enough along to read the notes she's been leaving for ten years.

The notes say: Don't finish the translation. They aren't waiting. They're already here.

Ninety days. One signal. Two women who carry pieces of alien memory inside their skulls. One psychologist caught between who Neri was and who she's becoming. And a question the ship was never designed to answer:

What if the signal wasn't a message? What if it was a door — and dreaming in it is how you open it from the inside?