The Signal

By ShinyBug

~For all the Browncoats like me, counting down.~

It was night, or what passed for night out in the black on Serenity. Everyone was asleep—Jayne murmured sweet nothings to the gun in his arms, Kaylee drooled onto her pillow and dreamed of strawberries and nimble doctor’s fingers, Wash clung to Zoe while Zoe shifted unconfortably on top of a plastic stegasaurus, Book’s hand curled loosely over the spine of the Bible still on his chest, Simon mumbled orders to a dreamverse operating room team, Inara pressed her cheek against red silk and dreamed it was a worn brown leather coat, and Mal dreamed of Serenity, one hand outflung to touch her walls.

A pair of silent feet padded through the ship, up the stairs past the kitchen and the bunks, to the empty bridge. River Tam rested her fingers lightly on Serenity’s control panel but did not take the pilot’s seat. Cool recycled air ruffled the hem of her cotton nightgown. “Can’t sleep,” she whispered. “Signal’s too loud.”

No one was there to answer her. Serenity continued to sail through the spaces between the stars, autopilot engaged. River looked from one distant light to the next, picturing worlds spinning around the far suns, imagining what people might be on them, wondering if they were all sleeping too. She thought about that peculiar state of being—sleeping—and of dreaming, and of waking up.

Long ago, a professor of philosophy had posed the question to River—‘what if you exist only as a character in someone else’s play, and those around you are only fellow actors, and your world only a stage?’

She had countered, with all the cockiness of untainted youth—‘then we had better make sure we’re working with a good script.’

“You know where we’re going, don’t you?” River asked of the ship, who continued to hum at a constant frequency around her. “You know who’s watching.”

She crept forward as far as the tempered glass windows would allow her, pressing fingertips and forehead to the cold surface and stared out at one star i