A woman lives a year of a relatively ordinary life when something happens that makes her start to question her sanity. Strange things start to come to her notice.
She finally confides with a close work colleague. The colleague minimizes it.
At home, more strange things occur only now it’s much more obvious; The room becomes out of focus, objects change hue, the fire flashes suddenly up as if to be fanned by an invisible gust of wind.
She decides it must be her eyes, overworked. This goes on for a week.
She has come to the conclusion that she needs to take a break from work. She enrolls onto a retreat holiday which specialises in meditation and relaxation.
After two days, things are no better in fact she notices more things that can’t be attributed to problems with her eyes as the councellor at the spa stated.
Two identically dressed and identically looking men check in separately, they don’t have the same name, they don’t know each other and they behave as though they have arrived from different parts of the country.
She decides to investigate these two people separately whenever she encounters one of them. She decides to bring the three of them together to see what happens when they talk together. Do they use the same words, do they sound the same.
“It’s like deja-vu” she smiles at them both over the dinner table, looking from one to the other and back again with astounded expression.
They look at each other then at her as if they have no clue what she’s talking about.
“You don’t see the resemblance?” She’s further astonished by the sheer absurdity of it.
They both shake their heads at the same time.
She’s totally taken aback, it was like looking at a man looking into a mirror and shaking their head, except not with a mirror.
They both summon the waiter at the same time, this doesn’t stop them from waiting for the other to order, they order the same thing in unison as if only one made the order.
She looks concerned. Ordinarily this would be over the top hllarious. Jinx! But it was extremely sinister, because the waiter also treated the situation as though nothing strange or amusing had happened. There was no expression on his face as he took down the order, that he was confused, amused, surprised or anything.
“c’mon! She said to herself. Because now she was looking for hidden cameras and she was getting paranoid that someone might be watching her and if she let on something bad could happen. “what the….. seriously? So did he take the separate orders down as one order, two separate orders.
The waiter interrupts her internal dialog making her start a little
she wasn’t listening “ I’m sorry?"
He repeated what he said, this time she notices a slight change in expression
inpatence and a little subtle annoyance at having to repeat the order. That confirms and finalises the total weirdness 100%!
“I’ll have a coffee and a muffin with cheese thank you”
She discerns a slight expel of breath as he takes down the order.
Her head snaps back towards her new found “Shining twins” They are both gazing out of the window, watching the clouds go by.
They both notice her looking at them and say in unison “cloudy today isn’t it?” both directed towards her for a response.
“Jinx!” They don’t look at each other, they look at her.
She stares back at them, mouth wide open in incredulty. With a haughty air of resignation and good humour she slaps both hands down on the table and flies back into her chair looking to the ceiling as if it could lend her some insight into what just happened. She smiles to herself, but she’s not really amused, she’s concerned she may be totally losing it.
Back in her room she runs a hot bubble bath, always good for comforting a weary body and a tired mind. She starts to melt into the warmth of the water it’s very soothing to her frayed nerves.
“what’s going on? This can’t be happening. It’s bizzare! It’s like they all know what’s going on and i’m not in on it or something.” She lays there for a while gently pulling clumps of bubbles across her forearm, thinking then she sits up with a start, suddenly wide awake.
“they don’t know! They don’t see each other!” “the waiter though” she slides back in the bath. Now shes’ really confused. How did he know to bring two separate orders for two separate people, if he’s only are aware of one person. She grabs her head with both hands. “what the hell is going on?”
visually she runs it over in her mind. When dealing with each other it’s as if they are there alone with her. When she was pointing out similarities and pointing and looking they both looked in each other’s direction as if they were looking at an empty space, an empty chair and they looked at her, as if she was mad, but they were humouring her. Yes they were assuming she had lost it and that’s why she was here to pull herself together. But the waiter, and the check in clerk. They took two orders not one.
She stays in the bath frantically thinking of explanations for this phenomenon. They were cloned and cloning makes you so exact in every way that you can’t see each other as separate. Mind meld like spok, their minds were merged into one cohesive thought so they don’t see the other person’s body. A prank. Hmmm I’m not laughing. It’s been going on too long to be a prank. Besides what about all the other stuff she’s been experiencing. Her eyes opened wider. Momentarily she’d forgotten about the other phenomenon. The blurred objects, changing colours, she started to think about those experiences now, analysing it, re running it through her super sharp analytical mind.
While she was rethinking what she had experieneced in the past she noticed the bubbles were jumping across the bath. She watched them intently. This was now the sole focus of her attention. For quite some time bubbles would unstick themselves from each other and jump like quantum particles from one part of the bath to another. If you weren’t watching closely you would not have perceived it, bubbles are tiny and they do usually pop and disappear. What they don’t do is suddenly reappear in another place!
She leaped out of the bath as though there were Piranhas in it and stared at the bubbles, recoiling a little as she did. She grabbed for her towel wrapping herself and large clumps of bubbles with it. “this is nuts!’ “i’m not crazy. This is really happening and I’m the only one that sees it”
She starts to pace up and down in her room afraid to look at anything too closely in case something odd happens with other objects. Am I in a vivid dream, will I wake up in a minute. But she’d been in this place a week now. Nobody dreams an entire week, not so continuously in time line. In a dream you jump from place to place, “like bubbles” she slipped to herself and shook it off. Not a dream. It’s as though reality was flickering in and out, like the fabric of space were somehow disconnecting and reconfigurering itself all the time. Or someone was fucking with the parameters of objects in space. She suddenly stopped pacing. Suddenly she had the courage to look at things, any thing. Her last thought brought her some clarity and objectivity.
Her scientific approach to things kicked in. she had studied a number of subjects at university as a general elective and just for fun some quantum physics, philosophy and of course a number of computer programming multi media units. We are in the computer age there’s no denying that.. She always wanted to know how computers work. Well to really understand how computers work she aught to have studied some engineering, electrical engineering courses and such like. But it was the software that fascinated her more than the hard ware. The way a bunch of zeros and ones translated into a bunny hopping across a screen, a cursor blinked, a letter, a single ASCI letter appears. That there is even a screen. The computer is it’s own reality, that’s for sure and it’s created by…..
a programmer. it’s coded, compiled, processes and procedures, structure and order and systems debugged.
She pours herself a glass of water and sits down in the over sized arm chair at the side of the fire place. A gentle fire flickers in the subdued light emitting from the bathroom. In the distance amazingly she still hears bubbles popping. Popping in and out of existence. Couple of bugs in those bubbles. She thinks to herself.
“that’s for sure” she calmly speaks out to herself. She lets out a calm breath closes her eyes and starts to think back as far as she can remember. When did this start? Not when did it become obvious, when can she remember something not right that she ignored and dismissed as silly or her eyes playing tricks or whatever she might have thought at the time.
The image of her jumping from a moving train flashed in her mind. She flinched and winced to herself. Of course she hadn’t ever forgotten that incident. She’d had therapy over it. Not very helpful therapy. In the end she tackled it herself. She heard there were people in Switzerland that could disassociate you from a trauma from your past so you could relive it without the attached emotion so you can move on with your life. It had been a major set back to her. Changed her life completely if truth be told. She hated to be such a victim or survivor as some might say.
The face of the man who had chased her down the corridors, with murder on his face made her shake. Who was he? He seemed to come out of nowhere, for no reason he’d latched onto her and she ran. Jumped from a speeding train. Except the train was slowing for a light, it was stopping, but moving too fast for any sane person to throw themselves from it unless they were tired of living.
She wasn’t tired of living. She wanted to live. Very much so. But this stranger wanted to put a stop to all that living.
No point dwelling on that. she’d lived too long saying ‘why me?’, what was his problem, psycho. Whatever. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck.
That!!! that was when the weirdness started. She was certain. Which bit was weird? The guy was weird, but these things happen, she’d seen it enough times on the news, serial killers were no longer the exception, it was becoming a regular thing. There were more than you would like to admit and not all of them had been caught. she’d made a report at the police station after she’d got her self patched up at the hospital.
“You’re very lucky young lady. Tuttut silly thing to do that” the nurse had said.
“oh? Silly was it?” “silly to get away from a murderous mad man coming at me with a blade?” “do you think anyone would have come to my rescue, risking getting stabbed themselves? Do you think they would have got to me in time to stop the knife puncturing my lungs?”
She pulled away from the memory of the nurse who had been cleaning her wounds and bandaging the tears. It still made her angry. Until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, don’t judge. In the heat of the moment, noone knows how they will react. You only have a split second to live or die in a survival situation. she’d seen it on a documentary once about the difference between people who survive and those who don’t and it all boils down to one thing. Those who survive act quickly, because seconds count and not acting is fatal. She was convinced she had reacted correctly and she was alive to day because she made the right decision. But then there was one tiny truth in what the nurse had said. She was a lucky young lady, she scoffed mocking in her mind the way the nurse had said it. Seriously though. That train, even though it was slowing down, was still going too fast. How come she didn’t sustain more injuries, she didn’t even break a bone. She knew of people who’d jumped from high rise buildings and had survived, people in plane crashes too, not a scratch on them. it’s not beyond the realms of probability. Maybe shes a super hero. Unbreakable Bruce Willis’s face flashed in-front of her and she laughed. Then she stopped laughing. This was no laughing matter and what was happening was truly bizzare and getting more bizzare by the minute. At this juncture thinking she was super human or a super hero, any theory right now was permitted for serious consideration. Ok well she decided to put that one on the back burner let’s start with more scientific explanations and work from there.
She might need to do some research a couple of units at uni and a spattering of documentaries wouldn’t be enough to get her head around this. She might even need to talk to some uni professors, put forward some hypothesis. Of course she would need to develop her hypothesis first. And what was her hypothesis. She did what she used to do at uni all those years back. She started with what knowledge she had to put together a difficult assignment. 4,000 words on the theory of quantum mechanics, the premise being what? That reality is relative to space and time and where the object in question is in space and time in relation to another object, that other object being the observer, taking into consideration that any object which is observed is subject to change by the very act of being observed. C- she smiled. Total gibberish. Pffff who cares, I’m not being marked. No fail subject. General elective just for fun, learning for the fun of it. All things considered it wasn’t a bad approach to the actual problem she was facing.
The best way to deal with fear is to face it head on, to immerse yourself completely into the fear. She felt better. This is not going to be stressful, it’s going to be fun. it’s going to be fascinating. Yes to a scientist actually, she thought of Spock again and imitated his inflection “fascinating” and raised an eyebrow.
Ellie started when to the back left of her a soft kindly voice purred
“It’s a person who is so disasociated with reality, that they believe only they are real and everyone else is a computer simulation”
Ellie instinctively responded to the statement before fully taking in all the salient details, that she was now lying on a chaise longue, she was no longer in her chalet at the health spa and that someone was sitting behind her on another chair and that she was in the middle of a conversation, as if she’d been there all along. Her brain thought “wtf!” her mouth spoke
The purring voice replied
:Well it’s known as Solipsism. A very rare condition. There are more common types of dissociation you might be more familiar with such as multiple personality disorder”. He paused. :But I don’t think this is the case for you. I haven’t seen any changes in personality so far. I think though the causes behind these experiences could be linked to this traumatic event in you past life”.
Ellie jumped at hearing these last words. She was still adjusting to the change in location she was experiencing. It’s almost as if she was committing wholehearedly to it, like a pro thespian in improv mode. Her brain continued to update in contrast to her outward relationship to the person behind her. “where the hell am I? It’s like i’m a jumping bubble now!” “what the fuck is going on?”
Ellie decided she was in a psychologists office, or a psychiatric facility, maybe even an inmate. She blinked hard at that last scenario.
“So!” She continued to improvise, not knowing what she had previously disclosed to this ‘psychiatrist’. “If I can come to grips with the trauma I experienced in the past, I will get closer to a full recovery?” She tensed, not sure if this would bridge the gap and also provide her with some much needed background to help her bluff her way out of this office. “out to where?” she wondered. “I might not be permitted to leave” and “am I at the beginning or end of my session with this guy?”
There was a long pause. Ellie almost dared to look around to see who she was speaking with. He had a soothing voice. In any other circumstance she would be incredibly freaked out to be suddenly transported to this place with a stranger out of sight behind her. But his voice put her at ease.
“Well. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is just the preliminary overview. I just wanted to guage where we are at, get a feel for things as it were. So I can make a prelimnary prognosis. This way I can assess how we should procede with the proper treatment of your condition. I don’t want to alarm you in any way. Nor do I wish to cause any distress, not without administering the proper drugs and protocols”.
Ellie’s mind was processing the scant information fast. “That’s so weird. I’d just been thinking about that place in Switzerland. When I was trying NOT to think about my train experience” Was that a trigge.? Did I have a thought and that thought transported me here? Yeah, but that’s not something that happens in real life. I didn’t get transported. Did I have a memory loss. Did I keep living, finish my time at the spa, act on my idea to get this trauma sorted and fly to Switzerland and then wake up in the middle of my treatment.? Am I having black outs? Ellie worked hard not to show any sign of panic in her voice. I need to stay calm right now. For all I know i’ve been admitted into a psych ward. I don’t want to be imprisoned here. Get into one of those places and even sane people professing their sanity can never talk their way out.
Ellie struggled to think of what to say next. She wanted to wrap things up and hopefully get out of this room and the building, so she could figure out where she was and what had happened.
She heard him clear his throat and then a pause. “Shit I asked the wrong question” then she breathed a inaudible sigh of relief.
“Well” he began “I’d like to have a follow up consultation with you if I may, just to be sure i’m on the right path. Then we can arrange an appointment to check your responses via EEG and neural pathways. Hook you up to the machine and scan while asking a few inocuous questions. Nothing too taxing” another pause. “Sound good to you?”
With great relief Ellie exclaimed “Sounds wonderful!” She thought that was a good time to stand up and spin round to face her companion. He looked a little taken aback and for a split second she thought she’d made a mistake and her cover was blown. Then he smiled and stood up slowly to escort her out of the office. He wasn’t as attractive as his voice suggested. That’s often the case she’d found in previous experiences. Working on telemarketing type jobs you get to picture people a certain way, then at times you meet the man behind the voice and they blow all your imaginings out the water. This man was the same. He was short, a little stout, slightly balding with a tuft of hair stubbornly refusing to recede with the rest. He dressed in informal wear jeans and T-shirt, which also surprised her, because he had sounded quite professional in his manner.
He indicated towards a dowdy looking receptionist typing on a computer in front of them. “If you could arrange the next meeting with my assistant Penelope. She has my diary in the data base. Which ever day suits you best. Some time next week would be great. The sooner we can make a start the sooner we can address the issues”.
After establishing the name of the doctor, what his line of work was and the name of the facility she was visiting, she made an appointment and exited the building. Once outside she had a long hard look at her surroundings.
In big letters at the top of the MAPS and she wasn’t in Switzerland, she was in Santa Cruz!
“Well, that was easy and I can google MAPS and the address. The hard part is. Where am I staying?” More to the point, how long will I be here before I jump somewhere else without any memory of what happened in between?!
Excerpt from novel by@nightdmr
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