The islands dance their slow waltz above me, white stone and yellow grass swaying to music I’ve spent my life trying to hear. I mark another coordinate in my father’s journal, the leather worn smooth from years of similar calculations. Three degrees northwest since yesterday. Faster than usual.
This is the last quadrant he never mapped. The Last Drift, he called it in his notes, though his normally precise handwriting had turned shaky here, desperate. Manic. The other cartographers said he was obsessed, that mapping floating islands was simply about mathematics and patience.
They didn’t see what he saw.
What I’m starting to see.
I adjust my safety harness and check my anchoring spikes. Up here, one wrong step means joining the clouds permanently. And as pretty as they are, no thanks. I like living.
The grass beneath my boots glows its peculiar yellow, like someone spilled sunshine across the stone. When I was small, Dad told me the color was a gift from the islands themselves, a beacon to guide us.
The day he disappeared, his last transmission mentioned patterns. “They’re trying to show us something, Mali,” he said, his voice hoarse from years of yelling into the wind. “The movements aren’t random. They’re —” Static took the rest.
Aren’t random.
I spread his incomplete maps across the grass, weighing the corners with survey markers. I press my fingers into the back of my neck and sigh. I’m tired. I should make camp, but there’s more to do.
From up here, the local five other islands hang in the air, their white cliffs gleaming. When I overlay the movement charts from the past year… Wait.
The year before? And before that?
My hands begin to shake.
The islands aren’t dancing.
They’re writing.
I fumble for my tablet, fingers trembling as I input the coordinates. Each island’s position: one. Each empty space between: zero. My mapping program fills the screen with strings of numbers, and I cross-reference them with Dad’s old logs.
Four year ago: 01001000.
Three years ago: 01000101.
Two years ago: 01001100.
One year ago: 01010000.
Now: 01010101.
“Help.” The islands are spelling “help” in binary. And stopped with “U.”
My throat goes dry. I check the current positions again, watching the western island drift another fraction of a degree. The message is changing. Has been changing. Will keep changing. Like a cosmic game of connect-the-dots, played out over years.
“Dad knew,” I whisper to the wind. “He wasn’t crazy. He was translating.”
The question isn’t why the islands are moving.
The question is: who’s asking for help?
I look down at the yellow grass beneath my boots, remembering all those childhood stories about beacons and guides. About gifts from the islands themselves. I kneel and press my palm against the glowing surface.
It pulses once, like a heartbeat.
It’s asking me for help.
But since when?
Image made with Midjourney.
Prompt provided by NoGENver, GoOnWrite.
Flash Fiction written by S. J. Pajonas with assistance from Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Listen to this story at https://youtu.be/pc-qIZp209E
