Point Zero by Aer-ki Jyr (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

if they were in silent mode and had let their hearing adjust to the point where a mere rustle of clothing was as loud as a waterfall.

With the hatch sealed, he sat down crosslegged on the padded floor and relaxed further, finding a pose for his arms that wasn’t distracting, and opened himself up to the Saiolum, with him immediately feeling the energy field around and inside him, with various currents flowing between high and low pressures like an atmosphere. Everywhere there was a biological lifeform, whether it be person or plant, that was a high pressure that was actively creating the energy, and it clung to the person like water clinging to a rock before gravity overcame the cloying effect and pulled it off.

But for the Saiolum, gravity wasn’t involved. Rather it was the depth of the field around the biological source. Only so much could build up before it got too far away and ‘evaporated’ off, spreading out like mist and free floating through the environment. But put multiple lifeforms together and their ‘gravity’ held what they produced together into a much larger communal sphere of energy, and even the tiny bacteria in the soil produced their own tiny outflows.

Earth was covered with biology, so the entire planet was a giant ball of cloying energy, though the center of the planet was lesser so, because it was uninhabited. Still, it was close enough to the surface to benefit from the proximity and create a massive ocean in which the currents swirled more in some places than others, and Paul was getting better at sensing them away from him the more time he connected with and just let his awareness of the Saiolum drift and explore.

He could see miles around him now, unless he hit on a specific current or strand, for two lifeforms near one another would create a higher density strand between them, making an ecology like Earth’s appear as a spider web if your sensitivity was high enough, and Paul’s was just barely getting to that point within close proximity. Yet when he mentally latched onto one of those visible strands a few meters away…enhanced by the fact that he had several potted trees in his meditation room to aid this…he could follow the strands further out, and where they connected to others he could choose a single pathway and follow it further out, seemingly without end.

Range didn’t matter as long as there were connections, and he’d previously been able to reach all the way down to Antarctica until one of his link threads moved too far away from another and it snapped, cutting off his vision and forcing him to start over again entirely.

Today Paul was just lazily looking around and exploring the planet without having to leave the confines of Atlantis, and when he did so he didn’t see people or places hardly at all. His vision wasn’t good enough for that. He just got little glowing lights with bits of images or emotions or memories when his mind landed on them, and it was almost as if just traveling through the Saiolum like this was leveling him up, for each time his connection and skill seemed to grow despite the fact that his body didn’t produce any more of the energy field than it had before. That part was constant, but it was his connection to it that was growing, though how he didn’t know.

It wasn’t his body doing it, and Azoro hadn’t been too clear on what produced the energy field in the first place, but this was real regardless and Paul was quite content to pause his training for a few hours each day and just explore…though the tendrils connecting Earth to the other planets in the Solar System were far too weak for him to even register, though he could feel a little sucking action where they existed.

For when you had ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ you would have flow between them. The Saiolum energy wanted to cling to something rather than evaporate and float out into nowhere, so if there was even the slightest tendril connecting to a single lifeform further out and the host sphere was too large to contain all the energy being produced, you would have a current flowing to the ‘low’ that would quickly fill up its sphere and push beyond it, with the excess ‘evaporating.’ This should have then created an equilibrium and stopped the flow, but it didn’t, for the flow had momentum and continued to hit the ‘low,’ causing a surge that would knock off more than the sphere could hold in sort of a tidal wave effect, thus creating more room afterwards to absorb more flow…which would then hit and overload again, creating a constant river of Saiolum from the larger spheres to the smaller ones.

And on these rivers Azoro could travel from one place to another without effort if he wished, or he could actively ‘swim’ through them, up or downstream, but the mist beyond the spheres he could not exist within, where that line was around each sphere was his boundary, but not the end of his vision. He’d told Paul that he could sense the incoming mist from distant places and get a sense of where it had come from, and from what. Including across the gaps between galaxies.

Death also created a ripple just before the body stopped producing energy. New life did as well, along with growth. So everywhere in Earth’s forests where the trees and plants were growing Paul could feel little ripples coming off them as the amount of energy they created increased.

But where people were involved it was much more dramatic, and his fellow trailblazers in training produced the most vivid ripples he had encountered. He wasn’t sure why yet, and was waiting for the next time Azoro contacted him to ask, but their physical movement adjusted the position of their ‘highs,’ thus creating ripples,