by Kaylim
The fractals don’t have the texture the drawings did, but she wants to call them art anyway. She’s never seen anything like them.
The different types of fractals morph then, turning into leaves, clouds, snowflakes, ocean waves, bolts of lightning, blood vessels, and DNA. Things Ajita has only briefly studied or dreamed of. They fade, going black, and she and Yallie are left in the dark…until sparkling galaxies grow out of the gloom, exploding in size and shape and flowing over Ajita’s body. She holds out her hands and watches as the galaxies ripple over her. The images slow down and Ajita and Yallie look at each other in the same moment.
They’re covered in stars.
Ajita’s lips curve upwards, and she wonders how long she must have been doing it, and if she can remember doing it before.
“I didn’t know numbers could do that,” she says.
Yallie’s expression mirrors her own.
“What I don’t understand,” Yallie gestures languidly with the pointer, “is why you waited so long to say anything.”
Ajita shrugs one shoulder, “The Instructors didn’t care, so neither did I.”
“Hmm,” Yallie says, and it sounds awfully like the hum Ajita was making earlier.
Ajita concentrates on working with her own pointer. Click. A black dot shows up. Ajita sneaks a look at what Yallie is doing on her side of the kiosk. They’ve split the screen, and text streams over Yallie’s side. She’s going through too fast for Ajita to read, but Yallie’s eyes zip over the words as she reads all about art and drawing. Apparently Yallie doesn’t need to see drawings to figure out what they are made of. Ajita bites her lip. She wishes she could tell her about her dreams, and describe for her the texture of the drawings, and then maybe she would understand better.
Ajita adds another click and the seventh black dot appears. She sits back, satisfied with her rendering.
“These are the stars of the Rasjaurom the Great Bear,” Ajita says.
Yallie leans over to squint at the series of dots.
“Do you see the shape of Rasjaurom?” she asks hopefully.
“How did you decide this was a bear, then?” Yallie asks, nose wrinkled.
Ajita shrugs, wondering if anyone ever told Yallie stories of the stars like the villagers told her.
“I can only see it because I’ve seen your previous drawings,” Yallie says.
She leans back over to her side of the kiosk, curls bouncing, and Ajita wonders if she could draw their springiness.
“We have spent a long time in here,” Yallie announces, “and it is nearly time for you to report to the bunk room.”
“Oh,” Ajita blinks.
She still hasn’t reported her Task as complete. Not that she finished her Task. But who would notice? The scanners were always so clean.
“I will send a bot to clean your mess in the scanner room,” Yallie says.
Ajita flushes slightly because she had forgotten about that. Yallie begins to shut down the kiosk and Ajita hands her the spare pointer. She likes the warmth of Yallie’s hands when she takes it from her and her lips curve when Yallie twirls it in her fingers before putting it away.
The kiosk shuts down and the room is half-lit. They stand. Yallie tucks a blonde curl behind her ear.
“I trust that your questions about the Chaos Game equation have been answered.”
Ajita nods and looks her in the eye, “Yes. Thank you for your assistance.”
Yallie leans, as if she is going to walk to the door, but something holds her in her place. She tilts her head to the side, inquisitive eyebrow raising.
“I have a question,” she says, like it is some sort of admission.
Ajita nods again, silent. Her heart is loud in her chest.
“You said you did not care before, so what was it that finally made you ask for assistance? Why do you care now?”
And that is an easy question, an answer blank that Ajita knows how to fill in. She thinks of the questions, the research, the definitions, the star charts, the growl of the bear and information at her fingertips, the need and ability to find answers.
“I started to care because you did.”
The night in her dream is dank, brushed with a cold chill that makes her clothes feel damp. A rocky surface encloses her. It grips her fingers when she touches it, shockingly cold and rough. Crack. Bright light slams over the gritty wall and a deep clap follows, rocking into her body, causing vibrations to tingle in her fingers. She looks down and her fingers are no longer clean. They’re dripping.
Pitter patter pitter patter. Her world is encased in a gentle sound and a rumble from the sky makes her think of Rasjaurom. Something flares and crackles and the jagged walls are illuminated with a crimson glow. She rubs her fingers together and realizes that they’re red. The paste feels good, smooth with a few pieces of dirt. She likes the texture.
She can hear murmurings from behind her, muted by the pitter patter. Shadows play on the walls. She is unable to turn around, but soon her attention is captured by something else. As the crimson glow grows brighter, and she can feel heat against her thighs, the walls become brighter and brighter.
Hundreds of figures adorn the walls, individuals made of ochre and dirt and paste and lines. It’s a tableau of strange beings, creatures with horns and spots and tails she is sure she hasn’t seen before. She finds the two-legged figure and traces it. It’s much less detailed than the ceiling drawings and the man made of hard dirt. It could be anybody.
Another flash of light draws her eyes away, almost as if leading her to another painting.
It’s a bear.
She breathes out, breath misting over the wall, and presses her hand against it, stroking the fur. Rasjaurom is surrounded by three people, each of them holding something in their hands, arms aloft. She wonders what they’re doing, but the light flashes again—and she wakes up in the bunk room, blinded by the lights above her as the Instructor rings the morning bell.
The Instructor paces back and forth, farther out than he’s ever been; the Students hunch over their kiosks, numbers flashing over their eyes.
The question appears on her screen just as she knew it would.
She bends towards the kiosk, rests her hands over the console and keys in her answer. Row after row of letters fill the answer box. She hits submit.
“Apparently what you draw on matters just as much as what you draw with,” Yallie says.
Ajita picks up a packet between her two fingers and inspects it. It’s a faint red color.
“So you could draw on the walls,” Ajita says, thinking of the red beings on the rocky wall.
“Yes, but there are other surfaces as well, made from trees and cloth. Each medium reacts differently with whatever you decide to draw with. Drawings can be made from many things such as eggs, milk, and oil.”
Ajita sets the packet down, “What are those things?”
Yallie’s expression flickers for a moment, her mouth tightens. Ajita drags her hand through the supplies laid out before them on the floor. Packets, tubes, cylindrical flasks.
“I cannot believe you know of imaginary bears in the sky, and not eggs.”
Ajita sticks her tongue in her cheek, thinking. Were eggs something the people in her dreams should have told her about?
“Eggs, milk, oil, those are things that are…natural. They come from creatures and plants, like fur comes from a bear.”
Well that was relatively hard to believe. How could one draw with something like fur?
“Why have I not seen eggs, milk and oil before?”
“We do not have them here,” Yallie says, and lines up the packets that Ajita had disturbed.
Ajita rolls her lips into her mouth, frowning, “Like bears?”
“Like bears.”
“If we do not have these things here, where do they exist then?”
Yallie puts her chin in her hand and crosses her legs. Ajita mirrors the position. It’s uncomfortable, lying on the floor, but she also thinks it’s something she has never d
one enough.
“They exist in the databases,” the blonde answers eventually.
“What do they look like?”
“Eggs are oval and white, milk is a liquid and is also white, and oil is yellow and comes from plants. They are all edible.”
“You can eat them and also draw with them?”
Yallie nods, “You can make paint out of them.”
“Paint?”
“Yes, like how you made your blue puddles. Only paint is supposed to be adhesive and sticks to the surface you are drawing on.”
Like the red paste on her fingers. She rips open a tube and squeezes the liquid out a bit. It’s blue.
“So we make something sticky, dye it a color, and then draw with it?”
Yallie nods, curls bobbing. She seems pleased.
“Do we have something similar to eggs, milk and oil?”
“I thought of what you were doing earlier,” Yallie says, “and decided we can use water for the base, packets for the color, and the liquid tubes can act as the adhesive agent.”
She pushes forward a flask. Ajita pulls up the lid and looks at the clear substance. Dragging her tray towards her, she rids it of the cleaning supplies. She takes the red packet of food, makes a fist, and begins to crumble it over the tray. The fragments bounce everywhere, and she presses down on them with her fingertip to break them up. Yallie watches her with a raised eyebrow, but does nothing to assist. By the time Ajita thinks the packet is crushed enough her hands are stained red.
She grabs the flask and tips a bit of water onto the tray. It hits the pile of red crumbs with a splash and runs everywhere. Using the flask lid she herds the water into a puddle. The water becomes streaked with red, but it looks nothing like paste.
“I think I have to mix it more,” she says.
“The packet crumbs are dissolving,” Yallie points out, her nose wrinkled.
Many of the crumbs have become engorged and float on top of the water aimlessly.
Yallie rifles through the tubes, picking them up and squeezing them, “Some of these are old.”
“Where did you get them?” Ajita asks.
The dispenser only ever gives her enough to eat.
Yallie pops one open, “This looks gummy enough.”
“It’s not red.”
“Does the paint have to be red?”
“No, I suppose not,” Ajita relents.
She hands over the tube and Ajita squirts the blue liquid onto the tray. She stirs it with her finger, and the mixture becomes a bit brown, but the gummy pieces don’t combine with the water and the crumbs still float, fat and squishy. She’s not extremely fond of the texture. Picking through her cleaning supplies, she finds the sanitization patches and rips one open. Yallie leans forward on her elbows, eyebrows raised.
Ajita squishes the patch so that corner becomes a point. She uses the point to pick up some of the blue chunks and holds it up for Yallie to see.
“It looks like paste on the patch,” Ajita explains.
Yallie gingerly takes it and squints at the texture. She doesn’t touch it. Taking back the patch from Yallie, she uses it to draw a line on a clean section of the tray.
“It works,” Yallie says, and her lips curve.
Ajita murmurs her agreement, but she’s busy watching a curl dangle in front of Yallie’s eye, a delicate ringlet that shines in the white light. The texture looks glossy and fine. Ajita takes the blue-specked point and draws a loop on the tray.
Yallie watches, her chin resting on her fist, and Ajita scowls at the wobbly loop. The delicate twist is fraught with unsightly blobs of paint.
“What are you going to draw?” Yallie asks.
“Nothing yet,” Ajita answers, and smacks another patch against the thick misshapen curl.
Yallie breathes out through her nose, a sort of scoff, and Ajita flushes, pulling away the patch with substantially less vigor. As she peels it back, the mush where the curl was turns into something else…a mirror image begins to form, and dark blue branches stretch out over the patch and tray. The branches gradually break up into tinier and tinier rivulets.
“It’s a pattern,”
