by Adams Massey
-In the sim, I was working through my issues. One of them you have no doubt pieced together. But there are others, namely anxiety, panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, and discomfort with my body as a whole. And now, I have even more. I don’t have any clue what I’m doing. Most of the time, I am running on instinct and intuition and I don’t understand how it is I do the things I manage to do. I don’t have the schooling or training any of you do. I have tripped and fallen into situation after situation where I’m in so far over my head that I honestly have no idea how I keep making it out. I’m scared. Terrified of what will happen if or when I fail.- she explains and clutches the back of her head as she lets things out, the emotional dam starting to crack and leak as she does.
“That’s… I’m so sorry Alex, I had no idea, I should have seen it but, I didn’t.” Nicole says lowly in a concerned tone.
-No, don’t feel bad, You didn’t see it because I hid it, though unintentionally. I’m too used to hiding my problems and bottling them up, I’ve done it most of my life. I didn’t even realize at first.- she lets out a simulated sigh and pulls her legs close as she curls up in the chair.
“Well, the research hold is still in place, and with your trip to space, you have saved up paid vacation days. Why don’t you take a few weeks for yourself. The lab will still be here when you return, as will we.” Robert suggests as Alex looks up, uncurling slightly to nod.
-Thank you, I could use the break, I still have things to work through, but time off will give me the chance to find someone who is better suited to help. I have someone in mind already, but I know she isn’t available.- she trails off.
“Things aren’t as dire as they seem. You’ll always have help should you need it. We may not fully understand, but each of us knows what its like to feel like a fraud. Its somewhat common among the successful.” Amy says with a playful grin, subtly lightening the mood.
Alex smiles as well as she notices the gentle reassurance. -I’m glad I finally got that out. If its ok with everyone, I think I will take that vacation now.- she states, getting a reply of silent nods before she packs up her things and heads back to her apartment.
42: Schism
After stopping by the university's HR and verifying that yes, she was taking her accumulated vacation days starting immediately. Alex learned a lot had changed while she was away. Namely, she was a unique resource, and as such, was given extra benefits to persuade her to stay. Including proper employment status rather than being documented as an adviser, including the pay increase that came with it. The sum total of which, came out to a hefty chunk of change and nearly two months of vacation.
She retreats to her apartment to take full advantage of her hard earned time off to find the apartment just as she left it, lights off and everything powered down, though covered in a fine layer of dust. She flicks on the light and stows what little she had brought from the lab before getting to work, spending the rest of the day cleaning to transform her home into a sanctuary before relaxing and combing the web for a qualified therapist nearby, to help her sort though her emotional baggage. In a way she kinda missed the station already… ok so not the station itself, but the resident shrink who was already familiar with her baggage. Explaining everything to a new therapist was going to be time consuming, and more importantly, mentally draining.
She sets up the entry appointment and returns to relaxing, browsing for a new hobby to relieve stress, only to return to one she had in the sim, puzzles. With her accumulated earnings from her excursion, she dives head first into the hobby once more. Over the course of a few hours, filling her cart, comparing prices and pruning down to not go overboard she has her final selections.
Several puzzles in the piece count and size range she remembered as well as a few strange ones that were three dimensional clear plastic with a completed size of a baseball and one from a specialty puzzle maker that was closer to the 500 piece range than the 1k-3k range the others in the cart were. That one was blank and rectangular on the outside, but transitioned to a spiral in the center. She also added a few accessories, like a work table and other bits and bobs around the hobby. After submitting the order, and spoiling herself for expedited delivery, she makes another mental note, adding yet another entry to her list of known baggage and issues that should be addressed.
She spends the next few days catching up on various papers and findings not yet published from the university to fill her now abundant free time. And stumbles on a handful of interesting findings that were held from publishing due to the unexplained findings that had yet to be verified by other labs.
Among these was a strange collection of data points from the multiple LIGO satellite arrays that seem to have ALL detected ripples in the fabric of space, starting at the surface of Earth itself, dotted around the planet that thus far, could not be explained away as an error in calibration, a fault in procedure, or anything else. When compared to things that have been known to cause such ripples, like earthquakes, tides, tsunamis and other things, the selection of data points failed to line up in any meaningful way. The result was some poor intern or grad student tasked with sifting through the data came up scratching their heads and had gathered the anomalous data in a single digital folder. Then they had done the digital equivalent of marking it with a bold interrobang, scrawled with a large red chisel tip marker on the cover.
Through her credentials, she earmarks the folder for her own curiosity, to start on as a project to look into… AFTER her vacation. Assuming it hadn’t already been solved by then. She liked a good mystery, and it would be interesting trying to solve it. As she had learned from her months on the station, boredom was the last thing she needed in her life… which reminded her of a few projects she had stashed on her To-Do list a while ago and had kept moving down the list as other things came up, but now… she had nothing BUT time…
She ponders for a moment and cements her decision, determined to tackle this subset of her To-Do. The next morning she starts readying her apartment for the project she had been anxious about and terrified of undertaking. In a nearly ritualistic manner, she shuts down her computer, draws the blinds and retreats to her room to set dim lighting and plug back in.
She closes her eyes and stows the majority of her helping programs before gently sifting past the files she had accumulated over the last couple years, right to the middle of the intricate web.
It was her mnemonic for her internal storage, while well organized it would still be an absolute disaster that makes it impossible for anyone to find anything they were looking for… for everyone but her that is. She drifts slowly to a dark void that all threads lead back to. She hesitates a moment to brace herself for what she had to do. She starts peeling back each of the protections she had placed around it, layer by layer to dispel the void. Revealing a tightly knit cluster that is… radiant wasn’t accurate, but is what springs into her mind, and is the very center of her being… no, it was far more than that, this was HER, and it was already giving her a sense of vertigo.
She calms herself and pushes onward, gently bringing the network into focus. This was as far as she had ever gone before pulling herself back. She had tried this only once before, and just like that first time, it made her anxious and pushed her to the verge of existential hysterics. Unlike last time, she was braced and ready for it and held it back. Barely. As she sifts through the connections, skimming the contained data in the nodes and how they interacted, not altering anything. Just looking for hooks or something similar where her incubation sim may have once connected. Sleep and dreams were among the small handful of simple pleasures she missed and was looking to regain.
She knew she had the capability to experience them because she HAD, but since it was lost when she was pulled, that meant that it was an interaction between it and herself. BUT, since her sim had been scrapped before she had the opportunity to study it, that meant the only answers were here, buried in her core code. A fact that was rapidly becoming an issue as a splitting headac
he builds before she ejects from her introspection and back into the world.
The essence of her soul, for lack of a better word, being cloistered away behind her protections. She glances at her time widget and then checks her phone to verify. Ten minutes, she had managed only ten minutes before she could no longer handle the mental strain.
-Ten minutes…. multiple PB’s of… me… to scan through, in under ten minute chunks…- she muses aloud to herself and lets out an extended sigh of frustration as she mentally recovers and adds that to the long term projects list that only had a smattering of entries.
Her headache dwindles over a few hours as she combs through the notes from her journey inward. She was able to discern an instinctual but vague understanding of what the node was involved in, and that nearby nodes shared a lot of those things with each other, though each slightly different. For starters, the ones she had inspected, were not remotely what she was looking for, but she had learned something.
She didn’t need to scan every node. A few random nodes that were spread out would give her enough to point her in the proper direction and save a bit of time and many headaches. That said, she wasn’t all too thrilled about having to do it again, but the ability to sleep and not just rest would be more than worth it. Honestly though, she didn’t think she would try that again for quite a while.
Her mind wanders to the upcoming spring, a mere month or two away, she had been in this world for 28 months, and still felt like an outsider sometimes, another item on the ‘checked baggage’ tally to bring up at her first appointment in a few weeks.
Her appointment leaves her drained, but content that she had made the right choice in professionals to help her. This had been one of the most important things in her eyes. That night, she once again indulges in the simple pleasure of a walk on a quiet night. She hadn’t done so in a while and it soothed her mind. She appreciated the stillness of the moonless winter night helping to calm her mind and allowing her to simply exist without any pressures, if only for a brief time.
The crystal clear night was bitter cold to anyone caught outside, save her. She had always been a night owl. The dark stillness helped to quiet her mind, wrapping her in a strangely warm serenity. It was several minutes before the reality of her situation comes flowing back to her, reminding her of why she had taken time off in the first place. All things considered she was far better off than she had been even before she left the sim. She had a job, and those she would consider friends. She was making a difference in some small way and was changing the world for the better. She had even found a project to return to after her much needed time off. Things were going much better than she could have ever hoped for.
She smiles to herself, delighting in the new life that had found her. She tentatively scratches a few things off her insecurities list as she strolls through the park on the campus grounds, it was absolutely vacant. It was midnight and she was still active, and as much as she may miss actually sleeping and dreaming, only needing a few hours to rest did have its perks. To her own surprise and dismay, she doesn’t make it home that night. Without anyone else immediately noticing, she goes missing, not that anyone would notice. At least not for a while... she was on vacation after all.
