Nested Minds

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must contain the words: dictionary, mind and circle

Nested Minds

They floated down the empty streets of New York, surveying the damage.

They had been too late. Not by much, but too late just the same. The damage had been done. The current condition was irreversible.

Originally, they were to be part of a Prevention Team. As such, they would have stepped in and taken action as needed to prevent the otherwise inevitable fall. Sometimes, a Prevention Team arrived too late. When that happened, they became a Rescue Team.

This time they were too late to rescue anything.

Meet here, appeared in the mind of each of the widely dispersed team members. It wasn’t the actual words. They had no need for those. It was the feeling that they were to be at a specific place designated by the team leader.

Immediately, each surveyor stopped whatever it was doing and headed towards the thought. Soon, hundreds of them hovered together in their social circle. The junior members made up the outer ring while other, more senior members made up the interior nested rings. At the very center were the team leader and the one survivor they had been able to find.

This was a very important moment. This one individual held, perhaps, the key to the planet’s demise. Given the backward nature of the creature, the team leader would not be able to use telepathy. Instead, he had his survey ship download the appropriate thought-to-verbal dictionary.

The entire nested group sent positive thoughts to its team leader. This had to go well or they may never know what happened here.

The team leader slowly morphed a mouth, lips and a collection of other parts needed to create sound.

He then chose a “greeting” phrase. Lowering himself down to the alien’s eye level, the team leader said a perfect - “Woof.”

Word count 299