There is something off about the sky. Strange colours streak the horizon at sunset – just subtly enough that you wouldn’t notice unless you looked — and the stars that roam the night sky are doing so off cadence. A certain rhythm seems to have jolted. But it’s possible I am hallucinating; that the apparently transforming elements are nothing more than the imminent effects of War on a simple mind.

I used to look at the stars, 86 billion sparkling orbs, to feel awe, magic. In a radically inconsistent world they are the only things I know to be true. But today they loom large and sinister, and I begin to wonder which one of them the assailants call home. It is impossible not to think of them everyday; of the alien souls that found themselves among us, and continued to cripple our kind. We realised, almost too late, that their intentions were nefarious — but since then, we’ve fought long, and we’ve fought hard.

And now, we’ve won the war; we’re healing.

*** At a higher scale of time and space, separated by a few layers of biological boundary ***

Leia’s head pounded. Beads of sweat dotted her face as she rocked back and forth, as if trying to expel the sickness from her body. Unable to produce material change with either intense focus or Vedantic breathwork, she lay quiet, resigned, and stared at the single sunflower perched on her bedside. The seeds in its center swirled in spirals, as if trying to escape from the flower’s center; she wondered what it would take for them to escape from their cyclical, bounded universe.

“Knock knock!” Leia was jolted to reality as Doctor Q. Rius’s smiling face popped around the door. “May I come in?”

She nodded weakly and Q entered. “Good news — it is slowly receding from the brain.”

She sighed, “Slowly.”

“This virus is unlike any we have seen before — we’re learning more about it every day.”

“I understand.”

Q turned to leave, but Leia said, “If it’s alright — a personal question?”

“Yes?”

“You’re here without PPE… you’re infected with the virus as well?”

Wistfully, he nodded. “I caught it yesterday. There’s no onset of symptoms yet, so I’m here, working.”

She said, “I’m sorry,” and then, “Are you able to talk for a bit? I’ve been struggling to process this sickness.”

“Of course,” said Q, and sat down on the wooden chair next to Leia’s bed. “How can I help?”

She began: “I’m always so sick… I feel like there’s a hundred wars being fough...

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