Conn was afraid.

Fear was not something that the starborn usually experienced on a regular basis, and when he had lived with his own kind emotions had been remote, experienced through the lens of others and the collective consciousness they had shared

But now, alone in his own thoughts and feelings.... He was afraid, an emotion familiar to all species but one that brought itself to a horrible crescendo with his familiarity with humanity, and the way they experienced emotion so poignantly.

He had seen something, he wasn't sure what.

From the minds of humans, he had come to be familiar with bright flashes of light and loud noises that blind the senses, and he would compare his earlier experience to that, being exposed to such a vast well of..... something , that he was both blinded and deafened to the world around him.

For the second time.

When he awoke he found himself floating in the ship's infirmary. As a starborn he could not detect the brightness or dimness of light, but only its presence so understanding only the blue of the room around him as he was unable to peer into any thoughts close by. Reaching out with his memory, and trying to latch onto the nearest thing familiar, he finally found his first living being down the hall asleep in their bed. He flicked through their dreams like he was thumbing through a deck of cars.

So colorful, and so confusing, a landscape of single images stitched together into a veneer of reality, though it was simply a scaffold of thought that could be torn down in an instant of the human in question was to simply notice how strange the logic of their dreams were.

But they accepted it and moved forward their minds functioning as if the dream realm was a real place.

He took solace in these strange dreams, not because they were familiar or something he could easily understand, but because they were calming and soft and take, and couldn't hurt him. Even the humans felt nothing in their own dream despite the frustration of being unable to run without great effort, as if they were moving through water or syrup.

Conn lifted his head and floated gently out into the hallway.

Fear tingled like fire through his limbs, but he was calm, and let the calmness of the sleeping humans seap around and past him. He didn't really know what he was doing but he followed his fear down a thread and through the ship. No one saw him go, and no one knew that he was awake, most of them still slept and that was alright by him.

And so he followed a familiar thread to a familiar mind, not sure what he expected to find, but sure that he would find something.

He paused outside the door billowing this way and then that staring inward at the delicate veins of the human brain. He could see it almost as if it were a visual phenomena, the sparking electrical currents of thought that ruptured across the outside of the brain like a net of brightly lit thread.

WIth each spark, he could easily predict the path of the thread and connected it to the wider neural process of thoughts. He couldn't have pinpointed an exact source or what an exact neuron was doing, there were far too many of them, but he could still sense them there, he could still sense the thoughts and their connection to everything around.

The human brain was a strange and wonderful thing, and for the longest time he had considered it his playground to do with as he would, to dance on those strings of light and pluck at threads of thought like someone plucks at the strong of an instrument.

But now, now he wasn't so sure.

He really shouldn't have been here, meddling with things that he shouldn't be meddling with.

But that was hardly his nature, and so he threaded his mind into the shape of a probing needled, and plunged delicately inward.

Funny how the human thought process could be traced to a specific region of the brain.

Images flashed before him melding together with sounds and memories, which rolled over the surface of the brain like great waves on an electrical sea. He watched as decisions were made in the frontal lobe based on those sensations in the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe.

He watched as the movement center of the brain fired despite the paralysis that locked the limbs in place.

He plunged a little bit deeper, felt the veins of emotion, and the welling of fear, he knew that if he stroked long enough at those places, he himself could cause a sense of unease to grow up in the mind of the human, perhaps waking him from his strange and restful slumber, but the last thing he wanted to do was wake the sleeping creature, and so he stole forward like a thief steals through the darkness of a silent building.

He was deep inside now, not entirely sure where he was, memory was such a hard thing to understand, and he sometimes found trouble pinpointing the origin. He knew it was.... Sort of all over the brain, from the brain stem to the cerebrum, though how it all connected was too complicated for him to figure out. Perhaps if he had more time or inclination he would have taken a look, but he didn't really care,and thought it was best to leave the study of human brains to the humans and other extraterrestrials

If they wanted it, they would have to come and find it themselves.

As he went he experienced smells and tastes and colors and light and dark. He felt happiness and fear and joy and sadness. All in one moment he could have rent the air with a scream or his heart might have burst out of his chest in joy. Either he was floating on a cloud or he was descending into the budapest depths of depraved sadness from which it felt that he could not crawl.

But it all passed as he pressed deeper and deeper into the human's unconscious mind, searing and searching, sifting through folds and memories, trying to find.... What?

What was he trying to find.

He thought he had searched everything here, but he knew that could not be the case.

He knew he had gone to far when he made his way down and ran headlong into the brain stem. It was strange to think that there were parts of a human body they did not have active control over. For a moment he sat, watching as the brain ignited the beating of the heart and the slow expanding and contracting of the lungs. He felt as the brain initiated digestion through the lower body, and even felt in his own limbs as blood pulsed through the human's fingers. No, he did not think he would find it here.

Whatever he was looking for was... somewhere in the unconscious, he was sure of that, but where?

Memory perhaps.

But memory was such a large palace? The human mind, and even his own held onto so much that to look through it all would have taken a lifetime. But what kind of memory was he looking for anyway.

He pushed to think, and then delved further.

He saw airplanes and vast open sky. He saw faces and people and heard little snatches of conversation like you might walking down a hall past open doorways. Again he felt the welling of emotions rolling over him like waves in a sea, though he ignored them for the mostpart. He could almost visualise the human's stored memories as if he was walking down a very long hallway that grew darker and darker the longer he went, and the closer they got towards the end the more fleeing and confused the memories became until thy were nothing more than shadows and flickered memories of color and light, but still.... There seemed to be something beyond.

WIth trepidation, he continued his way down the proverbial hallway, until he had made his way towards the end and finally stopped just before the widening blackness.

There was nothing here

Nothing here but a single hair-thin thread that ran back into the darkness.

He looked at that thread, looked away and then slowly began to back his way out of the human's mind. He did not want to follow that thread, did not want to know where it might lead. A horrible feeling was welling up inside him, and he was not interested in finding out despite his general proclivity towards getting himself into other people's business.

He continued to back away until he found himself back inside his own head sitting there staring at the net of electricity that crisscrossed the human's brain. And from there he turned musingly, away from the sleeping figure and back towards the rest of the ship.

He had to know.

Conn had to know that it wasn't just a fluke, but wasn't sure what it would mean if he did discover it.

He needed another human.

And he found that human lying flat on his back in one of the shared rooms, mouth open and drooling rather theatrically. Conn almost wondered if he was pretending to be asleep, but upon seeing the activity of his brain he knew it wasn't faking.

He picked this human specifically because of his straightforward he was. He wasn't confused, he wasn't complicated, and he wasn't holding some deep dark secret – Conn knew he had already checked.

So he leaned forward and into it driving down through his thoughts and emotions until he reached the haway of memory. It was just like before, in the same general place. Stepping inside he could hear the sound of laughter, see faces, and heard the sharp cutting of metal over ice. Spotlights danced in the distance, and music played from somewhere unknown.

And there he went down the years, listening to the strange babble of human language, two of them overlapping and conjoining in this human's mind. He could see the darkness at the end of the hallway and paused. What did he expect to find there? That same strange thread that led into nothing?

Did he expect to meet something other than himself wandering the maze-like hallways of the human head.

He wasn't entirely sure.

A pat of him wanted to turn back, but he kept moving forward, watching flickering lights. Someone was singing happy birthday in the background, and he watched a little flame flick over a cake before he passed by. The next few memories were fleeing, and based on their edges he could see that they were slowly beginning to decay, as if the darkness was reaching up to grab it.

And there he stopped.

At first he sensed nothing, just the flat blackness where memory terminated into a vast void, and he was relieved, but then, not moments later he saw it. A silver thread of light so delicate it might have been a hair cut in half, but it was there, and as he stared at it, he could see where it vanished into the blackness.

He stepped away.

This was.... Something strange, something.... Wrong

Did all the humans have these.

He turned and fled from the marine's brain, and down the hall to where Dr. Katie slept. He didn't even bother going slowly, but plunged into her mind rolling with facts and figures as she slept. In her memories he passed by medical school, and high school, and her childhood until he drew to a skidding stop just before the blackness, where he found the same razor thin thread.

What did this mean?
Where did it go.

He might have followed but he was too afraid with what he might find to look. He backed out and found himself floating in a dead and silent hallway surrounded on all sides by the blazing inner life of sleeping humans.

He shrunk back not sure what he was fleeing from but backpedalled until a door opened at his back and he slipped inside.

He stared at the door waiting and listening.

"Conn, is everything alright."

He turned on the spot freezing in palace as he saw the human staring at him from behind his desk, face awash with delicate yellow light from the lamp by his side. Dr. Adric sat, hands crossed in front of him, pen resting on the desk beside him.

Conn went to back away, but ended up bumping into the wall.

Dr Adric didn't move

Conn could see that the man could sense his fear, as easy as sunlight on a cloudless day.

"Is this about what happened last week Conn, you've been asleep for a while now. Perhaps I should call Dr. krill."

"No."

Conn's own mechanical voice was rather strange as heard through the doctor's head. Conn couldn't hear in the traditional sense, but had to read it through the minds of others. The translation gloves on his hands lit up with his response and then went dark again.

Dr Adric paused, tilted his head, frowned, "I'd ask you to sit down, but thats not really something you do, is it?."

Looking into the man's head Conn cut him off, "I'm not a human, your psychology won't ork on me."

Adric smiled, "I have trained in alien psychological crisis prevention as well, but I am sure talking to me for a few minutes won't hurt."

Conn stared, and doctor Adric stared back

Usually , Conn wouldn't have said anything preferring to keep his secrets, just that, secret.

But he was too confused and too frightened to continue like this, so he floated closer to the human, knowing that, somewhere deep inside, it was holding some sort of secret.

"Something is wrong with you."

Dr Adric frowned, "Me personally or-"

"No, all of you humans, ever last one of you. I can see it. Hiding something inside your heads just past the barrier of memory. There is something in there."

Dr Adric leaned back in his seat and frowned, "What makes you say that."

"Because I looked."

Dr Adric frowned, "I knew that you looked into people's heads, but I didn't know that you dug that deep."

"Your moral outrage does not interest me Dr. Adric. I want to know what I saw. Past the barrier of memory, I saw a thread leading into blackness. I do not know where it went and I do not wish to go looking.'

Dr Adric frowned, and crossed his hands, "I assure you Conn that I do not know what you are talking about. Memory is a strange thing for humans, every time we recall a memory that memory is changed and corrupted by our current mood, or even other memories that we recall it with. None of our memories are perfect representations of what happened. They degrade and fall apart over time, and sometimes they change to be completely different from the actual events. Unlike you, I am unable to walk my way down a hallway of memory, I can only recall the memory into my conscious mind and then send it back to be recorded into memory. I cannot visit the areas of the brain like you can."

He paused and chuckled suddenly, "Isn't that funny though."

"What's funny." Conn demanded.

"Perhaps you have finally found the palace where the soul connects to the brain." He began to laugh, a bright smile spilling across his face. Upon seeing conn staring at him, he waved a hand, "Sorry, it was a joke for psychologists and philosophers. For thousands of years humans have been looking for the exact location in the body where the soul meets the brain, all nonsense of course. I personally don't believe in the soul, unless you can equate it to consciousness, but in that case we are nothing more than a net of electrical signals running along a bowl of fat and grey matter." he leaned forward in his seat, "I encourage you to stop digging into people's minds if you would, and perhaps you might find yourself more relaxed."

Conn disagreed greatly, but the human didn't have to know that.

He sat floating at the center of the room, staring at the man as he glanced back at his work, dark brown gold eyes flicking over the holoprojection below him.

How strange, nothing SEEMED sinister about him, at least not from here.

But perhaps he was the only one who could see it.

Humans.

It was always the humans.

Perhaps it was just these humans, but for some reason he doubted it.

Something was gong on here, and he was too afraid to find out what.