[Warning: End-game spoilers for the video game Subnautica]
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When he had first met her, his entire world had been shattered. Not because she was a gargantuan sea creature, no, he had seen his fill of those. What had shaken him was their interaction, their conversations. Was it the isolation? Would he have connected with her on such a profound level, had he not been the sole survivor of his ship? "A stranded and isolated human is more likely to bond with non-human companions", the computer on his wrists told him. That is certainly true, but something deep within him knows that it is not that simple; He knows that he would still have bonded with her if they had met on Earth, surrounded by billions of humans.
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Her melodious voice fills his head with warmth, unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He does not want the voice to stop, so he speaks back to her. He asks her questions, inquires about her life experiences, her dreams, her desires. He shares as well; He feels much inclined to do so.
She asks him for help; Her young cannot break out of their shells without the proper assistance. He agrees without hesitation. Their birth will also procure him the cure he needs to deactivate the planetary defense and leave this world. Does he still want to leave this world? He has toiled, survived, fought; He has left his mark on Planet 4546B, became part of its ecosystem. And now, he has met the Sea Emperor. She is completely alien to him, both in the literal and figurative sense, and yet there is nothing he yearns for more than to spend the rest of his life close to her.
He completes the mission, gathers the components and helps her babies. If not for himself, he needs the cure to stop the alien weapons from blasting any more human ships from the surrounding space. But as he does, she delivers one final gut-punch. To his great dismay, she announces that her life is coming to an end. Bringing her brood to life signaled the last leg of her long life.
He refuses, denies her end. She wishes him farewell, but he does not go. She senses his anguish, his distress; It baffles her. She had offered him a chance to leave this alien world and return to his own, and yet he cries; He cries for her.
"Why do you not rejoice? Was it not your utmost desire to leave this place and return to your kins?"
"It was at first," he thinks back, "but that was before I met you."
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She does not know how to respond. The precursors never treated her as anything other than a science experiment, nothing more than a potentially useful object. Her own species had been extinct for so long that she has almost forgotten what it feels like to communicate with an empathetic being.
There is something else in the human's thought; She could sense a strange feeling hidden behind his words. He had felt this way for a while, she now realizes, but he had hidden it, she does not know why. It takes her a moment to analyze the emotion, to put a name on it. It is unique and oh so fundamentally human.
Love
.
He loves her. Learning this does not make it any easier for her to respond.
"I want to stay by your side," he thinks. "I can keep you company until you expire, so that you may have a friend supporting you in those most dire moments."
She appreciates the gesture, but she feels bad to keep him away from his home.
"How long do you still have?" he ponders.
"Not long, a few decades at most."
"A few... A few decades!?"
She notices his perplexity. It suddenly dawns on her how her words might have sounded for him. She is dying, and will soon depart the world of the living. But,
soon
has a different meaning to her than it has to the human. Her kind lives over millennia, far longer than any other living being on this planet. Despite being in her twilight years, she might still outlive her new companion, even if he were to die of old age. Human longevity is a concept that she still does not master.
"I want to stay by your side then. I want to live down here with you and keep you company."
"What of your world? Certainly, you must have friends and family. Don't you miss the company of your own?"
"I've managed to get by on my own so far. And I am not alone here, I have you."
"What of the stars? The cosmos has so much beauty left to discover, you will not see its wonders if you lock yourself on this world."
"You underestimate the beauty that can be found on this world." He gazes up into her large luminous eyes, as if to say that she holds more beauty than she is inclined to believe.
She understands love, as a concept. At least, she believes so. She understands how affected the human is by this confounding emotion. But understanding is different from feeling, and she yearns to know exactly how it feels.
"There is a deeper form of communication amongst my kind, a melding of the mind" she informs him. "I did not share it with the Others that came before; I would not have wanted them linked so closely to my consciousness. You, however, are much different. I wish to share this gift with you, to see deeper inside you as you peer within my own mind."
He looks up with great interest. More than interest, but desire. She extends her antennas and he swims forward, meeting the bulbous yellow lights with his hands.
A flash of light, followed by a second of darkness. And then, two entities emerge as the landscape around them slowly takes form.
-----
"What is... Where are we?"
"This is a shared consciousness," she explains.
They are both present, facing one another, albeit without form, color or texture. At the moment, they simply
are
. Behind one entity, water floods the scenery, as a plethora of diminutive fish floats in every direction. Behind the other, varied ornamentations and backgrounds appear, shift, overtake and fade. The entity bringing those in does not understand the chaos, but the other does.
He is a neophyte within the mind-meld, and thus does not know the rules and the machinations. She has much more expertise, and materializes her world on her half of the communication. Were she to meld with a fellow sea emperor, they would fill their surrounding with a common vision of the sea, most probably a copy of a real place which they both cherish. The only common place between her and him is this prison, which she does not cherish.
She recognizes part of this planet in the vision behind him. She also sees metallic atmospheres, probably from a ship where he had lived before falling here. She catches glimpses of an alien world, with plants and beasts unlike anything she has ever encountered in her long life. Are these glimpses from his home-world? Could this be
Earth,
the planet he spoke of at length?
Slowly, he starts to grasp the working of this place. The world behind him stabilizes, taking the appearance of an overwater landscape. A plain covered in tiny green blades. Plants? But how can they survive outside of water? Other plants, much bigger, appear here and there. She uses the mind meld to acquire his knowledge, instantly learning the names of the form conjured by him.
Trees
.