I had hardly any energy left, and only moments to choose a course of action. With seconds before the shard hit, I swept up every human on the island and deposited them safely in my core.

The island was destroyed. But the people were saved.

Their physiologies weren’t suited to teleportation, though, and the trip rendered them unconscious. They were asleep on a ship that was slowly dying, slowly crashing, and nothing I could do would wake them up.

Because they were dreaming.

Using my unique capabilities, their minds had created a shared mental construct. They dreamed of their island. Of being the only people to survive a cataclysmic event. They’d been awake long enough to see me explode, long enough to see my shards suspend in orbit, but had no way of knowing what had happened afterward. Their unconscious minds rendered that unknown as fog—a vast bank of it that stretched from coast to coast, with no one left alive but them.

Weeks went by. I was using more energy than I could spare to keep the humans alive, and they were siphoning off even more to maintain their construct. I sifted through their memories and built them escape pods so they could return to Earth, but they refused to wake up and use them.

I had no control over the construct. It was maintained by the humans’ shared memories and expectations. And because their island was so stable, because there were so many people’s thoughts contributing to making it feel lifelike, their brains believed the dream was real.

So I tried to reach them from inside the dream. I couldn’t change anything within the construct, but I could attempt a moment, a single split second, of communication. I could try to show them an exit.

It manifested in the mirrors.

It made sense. People trusted mirrors to reflect reality; if the mirrors reflected something else, perhaps the people would understand that the dream they inhabited was not reality. All they had to do was accept that, and step through the exit I managed to create with what little energy I could scrape together—and they would wake up. They could go home.

But I didn’t anticipate the fear.

When the humans looked at the mirrors, my attempt at communication came as a rainbow wash of colors—the language of my makers, like the colors that danced on my floor. This startled the humans, who feared the unexpected and the unknown. And in a dream where a city’s worth of humans believed malicious aliens had murdered the rest of the world, the unknown was dangerous.