“What’s your name?”
This was the sixth time Ke’er had asked that question.
The girl sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her thighs. The Magnetic Handcuffs around her wrists were only five centimeters apart. Her lower legs dangled over the edge, unable to reach the floor. Her pale little feet swung gently to some rhythm.
“….” The girl tilted her head, showing no reaction.
“—” Ke’er let out a low, slightly agitated bird call and raised a claw to smooth the feathers sticking up on her head.
She was nervous.
Four hours earlier, while the other crew members had excitedly examined a black box they’d just salvaged from the Debris Belt, Ke’er had already sensed something was wrong.
The thing had no ports or controls. It was a completely symmetrical, three-meter-long, silver-white, spindle-shaped octahedron, its surface reflecting the light patterns of the universe.
Aside from reflecting the black box program’s scans, there was no way to interact with it.
They’d fiddled with it for two hours without getting anywhere. They were about to give up, toss it in the cargo hold, and sell it to an engineer when they got back to port….
The thing had shattered on its own. Other than the little thing before them, there had been nothing inside.
“What’s your name?”
The girl’s gaze fell on Ke’er’s beak, then shifted to her eyes, then back to her beak. She frowned slightly.
Still no reaction.
“Ke’er.” The ship’s first mate, Selin, gently pushed open the infirmary door and came in with a stack of papers.
“Is your machine broken?” She set the stack down in front of Ke’er and spread it open. “Carbon-based aqueous solvent, primate, bone age of around 16 standard years.”
“As for the rest,” she said, pointing a long finger at the information below the report, “the genetic sequencing and origin match are all gibberish.”
“…..”
Ke’er glanced at the report, then gently swept it aside.
The girl silently watched them talk, her legs swinging back and forth. She glanced at the report, then looked back at them.
An organism of unknown origin.
Selin let go of the report and turned to look at the girl, too.
Long, misty blue hair, round, pale purple pupils with geometric patterns like cut gemstones, and small, delicate features.
Even the pirate first mate, with her discerning eye, had to admit the little thing was beautiful. Even wearing Ke’er’s industrial-style white coat.
“….Native language?” Selin studied her for a moment, then asked softly.
“Maybe she doesn’t have one.” Ke’er scratched the feathers sticking up on her head and sighed. “She hasn’t made a sound in an hour.”
“By the way, what did the captain say?”
“What do you think?” Selin gave a cold laugh. “She came out of a black box, and you can’t get rid of her. Of course we’re selling her to an engineer.”
“They’ll cut her apart.” The feathers on Ke’er’s neck puffed up.
“Well, aren’t you a wonderful doctor?” Selin laughed coldly. “You’re practically too poor to afford Nutrition Paste, and you’re worried about some thing that might not even be self-aware getting cut apart?”
Ke’er opened her beak to argue, but when she looked at the silent girl before her, the words died in her throat.
“At least…. Let me try again.”
“Fine, try again.” Selin turned around and leaned against the storage cabinet. “We won’t be back at port anytime soon. There’s no rush.”
Ke’er took a deep breath and turned her gaze back to the silent girl.
“What’s your name?”
Selin burst out laughing beside her, but in the end, she said nothing.
“……”
“What’s your name?”
“……”
Selin sighed beside her.
“All right, take your time asking. I’m heading back to the bridge.”
Just as Selin’s hand came to rest on the doorknob, the girl’s clear voice suddenly sounded behind her.
“Name,” she said.
Her voice was soft, her pronunciation precise, and her tone completely flat. She had simply put two syllables together.
Ke’er froze. Selin paused at the door and turned around.
“What is your name?” Ke’er repeated, speaking extremely slowly and separating each syllable, as if a mother bird were feeding crumbs to a shy little bird from somewhere else.
The girl stared at Ke’er’s beak. Her slender throat seemed to quiver faintly with each syllable Ke’er spoke, despite their vocal cords having nothing in common.
“….What.” She opened her mouth, then paused for a long time. “….Name.”
The girl’s mouth hung slightly open. Her tongue tapped lightly between her pearly white teeth, then retreated.
“What name?” Her intonation rose slightly.
Ke’er took a deep breath. Her feathers began to tremble.
She finally understood what the girl had been doing.
Observing, then breaking things down, building a vocabulary from their conversation, extracting phonemes and mapping them to the movements of lips and teeth.
If she really understood the meaning of the syllables, she was learning faster than any known language-decoding model.
“I,” Ke’er said, pointing at herself. “Ke’er.” Then she pointed at Selin beside her. “Selin.”
The girl’s gaze followed Ke’er’s wing-membraned hand. She looked at Ke’er, then Selin, then lowered her eyes to her own hands.
Her fingers were long and graceful, her nail beds pink beneath neat fingernails. Her hands were cuffed together, the silver metal rings reflecting a harsh light.
“Ke’er.” She raised her head, and her voice now indicated something.
She was using that syllable to refer to the feathered, winged creature with orange eyes and a drab white coat before her.
“Selin.” She turned to look at Selin, who was looking back at her.
“……” Selin didn’t answer. She’d seen intelligent beings, and beings capable of speaking fluently with many different species in their own languages without relying on a translator. But this wasn’t intelligence. It was a phenomenon she couldn’t classify. And she hated things she couldn’t classify most of all.
“Yes….” Ke’er’s voice was softer than she’d expected.
“What’s your name?” Ke’er asked once more.
The girl lowered her head. Her long gray-blue hair spread over the mattress beneath her like a deep ocean.
She stared at her hands, her lips moving soundlessly. Ke’er watched her mouth for several seconds before realizing what she was doing.
She was filtering through the structure of the current language, analyzing every sound it could produce, then combining them into the word that most resembled her name.
“I.” She turned one palm upward, curled her fingers, and pointed at herself.
“Yes, you.” Ke’er bent toward the girl, bringing her face closer. “Your name?”
She was silent for a long time, her slender throat moving faintly.
“……Moli.”
Her voice was so soft, like a stringed instrument brushed by the wind. It was so faint that Ke’er even wondered if she’d heard it correctly.
“What?”
“Moli Yeflaisi.” The girl spoke again, this time clearly.
After saying it, the girl herself seemed to freeze for a moment. Those two words weren’t something she’d learned in this room. They’d been there all along. She’d simply dredged them up.
Selin abruptly turned and crouched beside Moli.
Moli stared back at her. After speaking her name, something had changed in her otherwise empty pupils. Deep within the amethyst-like geometric patterns, something tiny and starlike seemed to flicker.
“Moli,” Selin said slowly, though still much faster than Ke’er. “How do you know your name?”
The girl lowered her head again. After a long while, she gently shook it. The motion was small but unmistakable.
A clear denial.
“Where are you from?” Ke’er asked.
The girl shook her head.
“What species are you?” Selin tried another question.
She shook her head again.
“Why did you come here?” Selin pressed.
The girl was silent for a moment. Her lips moved slightly, but Selin couldn’t make out what she’d said.
“What?”
“……Home.” Moli’s voice was a little clearer than before, but still barely more than a breath. “Want to go home.”
Ke’er and Selin exchanged a glance. One looked confused, while the other had a hint of wariness.
“Where is home?” Selin continued.
The girl was silent for a long time, her lips moving without a sound. As if she’d thought it over, she slowly raised her cuffed hands and pointed at the infirmary wall.
She pointed “outside.”
Beyond the porthole lay the boundless universe.
Ke’er followed her finger. Outside the window was space, a dangerous region made up of countless wrecks that had become space debris and asteroids.
No.
It wasn’t just the Debris Belt.
Ke’er narrowed her eyes slightly. Before she could make out what it was, a burst of urgency came through the comms.
“Ke’er, Selin, what did you do?”
“There’s a Jump Signal approaching us.”
“…?” Selin instinctively turned toward the porthole.
A white light abruptly flared in the distant vacuum.
In the next moment, all sound seemed to fall silent. The mechanical hum in the cabin faded, replaced by a vibration deep inside their eardrums.
Boom—
As translucent white light flashed, a massive dark gray ship emerged from a rift in the blink of an eye. The force of its jump erupted through the vacuum, sending nearby wreckage flying.
“That thing doesn’t look friendly,” the gunner’s voice came over the comms.