by P. F. White
“Don't panic, and don't try to fight it either,” advised Sven. She gave him a dirty look, but then yelped when she realized that he was now mostly translucent as he floated beside her. She held her left hand to her face (her right was still gripping Sven as hard as she could,) and saw her hand begin to fade out before her very eyes!
No wonder it isn't getting dark, Claire thought, I'm turning invisible or- oh. OH.
And that was when it happened. She breathed deeply, watching her fingers fade away and with it the room. She somehow managed to relax enough- just barely- and before she knew it she was somewhere else. She felt somewhere else too. Weird did not even begin to describe it.
Below her by about twenty feet was a field of grass just as bright and green and beautiful as she could possibly imagine. The field wasn't uniform though: it had rocks and little hills just as a real place would. In the distance she could see bigger hills, forest, and above her clouds as milky white as ever there existed on a summer day. There was a breeze, and a smell like...lilacs was it? She laughed and was amazed to hear herself so clearly in so vast a place.
She couldn't see herself, of course, she had known that going in. The technology was still too new for that. Some part of her was rambling on about exactly what was actually happening, but the rest of her was starting to delight in everything around her. She felt free. She felt alive. It was like the most beautiful dream, but it was also real.
The sun above was shining, the world seemed to stretch on forever in every direction, and here she was flying above it like some kind of ghost. There was a swirl of dust, a breeze moving the blades of grass softly. There were patterns in the clouds. There was beauty. There was freedom. There were a thousand smells of everything good in the world.
“Oh my god,” she whispered, even whispering felt too loud. “I can't believe it. I just-”
“Do you smell that?” said Sven beside her. She smelled everything. She nodded, but then just giggled at that. He couldn't see her.
“What's amazing,” continued Sven, “is that the artificial scent dispersals aren't even installed. There isn't any scent in here...but there it is anyway. Our best guess is that the brain is so overloaded with...well this, that it just makes up its' own scent!”
He breathed in deeply.
“My god it's glorious.”
“I can't,” Claire was literally shaking with delight. This was- this was better than sex! This was...heavenly. She laughed in utter delight.
“Try to move now,” suggested Sven. She felt his arm draw a bit away from her and in a sudden panic she pulled him close to her. His body impacted hers and she clung to it, feeling his strength and his muscles pressed against her through clothes she couldn't even see. He felt male, and strong, and certain. He felt good. She reveled in it.
“Hold me,” she whispered, but he already was. His arms had wrapped around her to cradle her and she sighed. Slowly, and gently, he began to move them both. No, move was too simple a word: They flew.
Beneath them the grass field gently accelerated away. The hills grew nearer now, and Clarie could feel the cool breeze and hot sunshine on her body. The trees seemed to sway with it, bird-song and a small stream coming through to her as crisp and clear as anything ever had. Sven took it slow, not changing altitude or moving at faster than ten or twenty miles an hour. It was lazy, unhurried, but why was there a reason to hurry? The beauty below them was seemingly endless. There was simply too much of it. She couldn't ever take it all in. She didn't want it to stop.
“I- I just-” Claire couldn't seem to find the words. Part of her was responding to the closeness of this man, his scent and the feel of him. The rest of her was lost in the world around her. She couldn't even see him after all.
“Start to relax more,” suggested Sven, “You're too tight. The more you let go the more real it will all seem. Try to breathe deep. There...just like that.”
They gently flew together for an eternity. She couldn't tell time in here, she couldn't even guess. Eventually he said: “Here: I'm going to let you out from me a little bit.”
She felt him slowly start to increase the distance between them. She missed his warmth, but the feel of floating free- really free was too much to resist. She tried to rise a bit, to get a better view and explore the clouds. It was easier than she thought. Everything here was. The two of them rose high into the air, moving through clouds and basking in the sunshine effortlessly.
Above the fields was an entire new landscape of clouds. The ground below shrank, the sky above swallowed them. Everything seemed to shine.
“There you go!” said Sven, his voice was happy and so she smiled, though he couldn't see it.
“Want to try faster?” he asked.
“Do I?! You are fucking kidding!”
She dove and together the world accelerated at them in increasing speed. She pulled up, but kept the pace at somewhere probably closer to sixty or seventy miles an hour. The world rushed by, hills and valleys and streams coming and going as she reveled in the ease of perfect dream-like flight. She could feel tears on her face and laughed at that. It was too cliché, too sentimental, but she didn't care. Surprisingly, Sven laughed with her. They rose, then accelerated again, diving low to look in the crystal clear streams and skim over a lake surrounded by trees. She didn't have a reflection of course, and couldn't feel the stream even when she passed close enough to touch it, but it was still amazing. They moved through the forest next: passing through trees as if they were ghosts and marveling in the play of light and shadow that turned the whole world into some marvelous abstract creation.
“I love it!” screamed out Claire, suddenly aware of just how loud her voice was in the enclosed space. Sven only laughed.
“Good,” he said. She smiled broadly, she drew him close to her again.
“You say this is lights?” she asked incredulously.
“Well...it's about ten million special projectors each the size of a pin, about ten times that many reflectors, and there are some other-”
“Sven, its light.” she laughed. He laughed with her.
“Yes min älskling,” he said. He didn't have to translate, she could tell by his tone.
“Let's see how fast we can go!” she cried out as she sped them both up. The wind was really roaring now and she felt like she was in the best possible dream. Sven was right alongside her, his quiet warmth and companionship perfect for the moment.
Everything was perfect. Everything was clear. She slowed over a vast plain with little grass on it and a stark sort of beauty. Just past the plain she could see the sea, a vast shining blue jewel with unlimited possibilities. Claire felt her heart was going to burst from joy. She drew in deep breaths, feeling drunk on it.
“Careful,” advised Sven, “You get too excited and the machine will shut down for your safety.”
Claire just laughed. She grabbed Sven, her hands fumbling with him to find what she wanted. She giggled. Then she found it. They kissed for what seemed like forever. She couldn't see him, or her, but she could imagine. She loved every second of it.
Then the world began to break down, slowly becoming less real as she felt her weight returning to her. It was, in it's way, something like waking up. She felt old as her earthly form returned to her. She felt weight and far too solid.
She saw Sven, shyly looking at her and smiling hopefully. He was scared, nervous, and also enticed. She knew that look already. Claire grinned mischievously. Along with her weight had come other...human desires.
She wondered where she could possibly find the nearest bed.
# # #
“About eighty years ago mankind first encountered a being from somewhere outside of what is commonly held to be reality,” said Miriam with utter seriousness. Adriana was incredulous at that claim, but held her tongue respectfully.
“At the time nearly no one believed the man who encountered it. He was a poor writer for the pulp magazines. He was both penniless and overburdened with imagination. Despit
e his artistic bent he was no fool though: he quickly had discovered the survival strategy of pretending the whole thing was a dream, or a product of his own imagination. People liked that better. He even got more publications because of it. No one takes a crackpot seriously, but a writer of fiction? He could pretty much pass it all off as a work of genius imagination...and people bought it. However that wasn't the end of Love- I mean the author. The one thing he couldn't pretend away was the very real artifact he had brought back from his supposed dreams...it was a clock. The clock didn't work, yet still just by looking at it you could tell it didn't belong here...I, I've seen it actually. It's still here. It's quite extraordinary. I've heard it told that such an artifact, in other places I mean, well...I've heard it has the potential to change everything. Here it- well, I'm getting ahead of myself.”
Miriam stood up and plucked something that looked like an apple from the nearest tree.
“So this apple is real right?”
“As far as I know,” said Adriana.
“Well, let's pretend that we can divide everything into two groups- humans love division and classification so I'm sure you are at least somewhat familiar with the idea.”
Adriana smirked.
“I may have encountered it in my travels.”
“Right. So the first and most basic division is between real and not real. I don't want to use terms like imaginary or anything like that as I find them counterproductive. Let's stick with real and non-real, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So this apple, and things like it here on this world are real. We can touch them and interact with them. We can perceive them and they can affect us and the various physical laws that govern us. That makes sense, right?”
“Miriam I know what real is.”
“Of course you do. So it follows that you know what non-real is right? I mean, by extension it should be all the things that aren't real correct?”
“Sure, I'll go with that.”
“Well here we had a claim by a supposedly rational man, well a writer so maybe not one-hundred percent rational, but still-”
“A claim about something non-real existing in his little broken clock,” interrupted Adriana.
“Oh it wasn't broken it was just...well, right. Now this sort of idea would probably get thrown out most places, and for good reason, but it just so happens that our little author knew a rich man, a young rich man. He was the son of one of the industrial giants of his day in fact. This young man has more money than sense, and he can tell there is something off about the clock when his penniless friend shows it to him: so he orders some tests on it. He keeps the whole thing hush hush because he is worried his father will find out and, well, he isn't completely certain he isn't just being foolish you know?”
“A reasonable precaution.”
“Right. So what is discovered when he gives this clock over to a lab for testing is that while it adheres to a lot of our physical laws, and seems to be affected by about 90% of the rest of the universe- the real universe I mean...There are parts that just don't match up.”
“Elaborate.”
“Well for one: the thing can't take on heat or cold. Like at all. It stays at the same temperature no matter what you subject it to. You can't freeze it and- well you can burn it because fire is one of the things that affects it...but the fire doesn't make it hot if that makes sense.”
“Sorta.”
“So they keep testing this thing because, well, the results are really weird. They keep discovering more too. Just as certain facets of our world don't seem to affect the object: facets of some other world do affect it. Among other things it is discovered that a proximity to mathematical concepts- writing and talk and even thought about math- has an effect upon the face of this clock. Even weirder still: there seem to be ways in which the clock can be used to solve math that don't appear correct in our world. Suddenly a lot of people get interested in this thing. The research lab explodes overnight- everyone is trying to get a hold of experts and rush them around the world. The rich man calls some of his rich friends for more funding. It becomes a matter both of secrecy and of extreme excitement. Word leaks a little-”
“It would have to,” said Adriana.
“Right. Too many people-”
“That are too excited-”
“Inevitably lead to leaks. Right. So word starts to get out, but just then the young rich man's father finds out about it. He sees the clock for himself, and that's when things get really interesting...”
She paused a moment and then took a bite out of the apple. She kept talking while chewing, too enthusiastic now to stop.
“See, this whole time everyone thought that it was the writer who had gotten this idea first. Somehow he had managed to turn non-real into real...but when the old man finds out he sets everyone straight on what actually happened.”
Miriam swallowed.
“See, it turns out: the old man had been dreaming about the clock for years. He had even started to go a little nuts from it. He had only told the writer about the clock about a month before, at a party that his son had invited the writer to. He didn't mean to he just, well, he was suffering from these dreams before. He wanted to talk to someone and so he chose the nice young man who seemed pensive and overburdened with imagination. Afterward, he said, he somehow felt better about it. He said that he claimed it helped to ease his mind. It was like he shared a burden. Soon after that the clock, well, it appeared.”
“I don't understand. Your implying that somehow this man placed the idea in the writer's head and then the writer imagined it into reality?”
“No,” Miriam smiled, “That would make too much sense. See the weirdest thing was: it wasn't just the old man. He had about a dozen different friends as obsessed with it as him. This wasn't the first party where he had had too much to drink and started running his mouth about monstrous clocks in his dreams. It turns out that they were all dreaming about it, and all somewhat ashamed by what had gripped them. They had, together, gathered entire books worth of information on the clock, the clockmaker, and the way it all somehow fit together. It doesn't make a lot of sense, I've seen some of what they wrote. Some of it is in English, some in other languages, some in...well it's odd because it isn't language but...you can still read it anyway. It's actually pretty neat.”
“Can you show me?”
“Sure!” Miriam waved that away, “Later though okay?”
“Okay. Please continue.”
“Well, these old men had, by now, created something akin to an entirely new set of imaginary physics. Nothing very collaborative but still: they somehow fit together. Apparently whenever two or more of them compared notes they noticed that their notes fit somehow. Not perfectly but, well, still to some degree. It must have been pretty scary. They all, to some degree, thought they were going crazy. A few doctors even told them that what they were doing was dangerous...but they just kept right on doing it. Some ideas, you know, are more dangerous than any mere disease. The writer was almost an experiment really. A somewhat unintentional one maybe, I still don't think the fellow was really meaning to infect others...but still an experiment. Some part of the old man wanted to see if he could share his dreams with someone completely unconnected to his circle. He wanted to see if it really was, as some psychiatrists had said: a foolish failing in the mind of the chronically idle rich. It turned out the old man could share it, and the whatever it was didn't give one fig about who it was shared with.”
“But that would mean that by sharing it he-”
“Just like love my friend,” Miriam took another bite of the apple, “One person could do it, but there wasn't any substance to that. A bunch of random people could do it, but it would get muddled and never come out quite right. When the old man finally figured out how to share it with someone really special, someone with imagination and creativity and spark...that's when it became real.”
Chapter Nine:
“I need some answers,” said Hank as he
sat heavily upon a chair in the security station. John Smith smiled knowingly and got him a soda from the little mini-fridge they kept nearby.
“Well, the answers are going to be a little-”
“I can handle it,” said Hank more forcefully than he intended. He grimaced and then added: “Please. All this mystery is killing me. From day one I've been at least a little on edge.”
“I know. I've tried to ease you in but-”
“Please. Just level with me a little okay?”
“Okay,” said John Smith. He sat down opposite Hank and opened another soda. He took a long drink and then said:
“So tell me Hank: what do you think I am?”
Hank half-smiled at the question. Nearly every night he and his wife and daughter had discussed that. Their answers ranged from robots to aliens to holograms and supermen. They hadn't gotten anywhere productive and Hank had started to treat it as just another little game they played.
