Everyone nodded off, and when we woke up, things were different. The beginning is hard to narrate but something happened, like a cyber attack, but also everyone got really sleepy, there was some magnetic interference with our brains, a low droning sound that was heard around the world. It was unclear where we were at first, I know Tarquin was there, but after "waking up" we decided to go to Vermont.
There was a stone foundation that grew out of the yard in Wiswall but it was also Grandmother Loos's house, and those stones had been growing for months, like new teeth, but suddenly turned into a tree house, and people came to gather there.
When we first entered the house, we noticed that everything seemed off: the sinks were all too small, there was a dentist's chair in the shower, there were oddly shaped corners. This horrific dawning feeling that this house wasn't built by humans, but that it was for humans. Then we noticed the "theater room" which had rows of chairs with an electric hood apparatus, kind of like one of those perm machines you used to see at hair salons, and it kind of clicked in our minds, this is actually a spaceship built to resemble a tree house and it's where first contact will take place, and we've been chosen to conduct it via the helmet chairs. There was a sense of jubilation and self-importance. For a brief, shining moment, I was the anomaly, and everything made sense.
There was a timer counting down to something, we all thought it would be first contact, and we braced ourselves for that -- we felt it deeply, in the soles of our feet -- but it was actually a kind of synchronization event, a waveform that propagated and caused intense euphoria, boundless celebration and amnesia.
People kept gathering at the house and sat in the chairs playing with the helmets, but I started to feel uneasy. The synchronization hadn't fully worked on me and Tarquin, and we started noticing little things that were off about the timeline we were in. Common references, dates, and place names were different.Dartmouth Hall was abandoned, a parking lot for ghosts; horrible structures crowded the river. Something was revealed telepathically through the helmets about alien life but there was no direct communication allowed. Against my better judgement, I sat down in the chair.
There was a vision of people being herded into massive, hundred meter wide transport containers, in wooden boxes wearing gas masks. The families of man were screaming. A massive toy gun shooting a man's face from its mouth. Blue fetuses, alien fetuses, packed into crates by robots, but instructions were being shouted in Mandarin from janky speakers on their necks, as if they were actually just remote controlled from China. It semed like people were being harvested to produce a new race, but it also seemed fake. It just didn't check out for me. Something was very, very wrong.
I also had a vision of what life had been like in America and the UK under this new reality. It all looked mostly the same, except weirdly more patriotic, flags waving everywhere, lots of Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks, but it felt empty, and somehow the style of media was different, like I saw a famous clip of Adam Driver acting in a movie and it was more like Noh theater, really exaggerated gestures and it was bizarre and horrible. Everything made me shockingly sad and depressed.
I think at this point I checked myself into a psych hospital. You came to visit me and I tried to convince you about it and then it's like something clicked, you remembered too, and you got me out. You cried when the elevator doors closed, because you knew where I was, and it finally made sense to you. It was a choice I had made to go there, and even there, that place of all places, was better than where we were.
As we all became aware, slowly and strategically whilst playing along, we realized that it wasn't aliens, it was another dimension where the USSR had won the war, and now this timeline was controlled by China and it was a horribly different world, technologically advanced beyond our own, one where there had been no counterbalance whatsoever and everyone was very much on the same page about everything. And now they had staged an alien contact event to conduct large scale organ harvesting of the American and British "colonies."
We went back to find everyone at the house and tell them. No one would believe us, and became very agitated and accusatory. We ran from the alien treehouse and went into hiding.
Somehow and for some reason we went to the local Politburo office, and I remember hiding from an officer looking for me in a bathroom and then being saved by the communist double of Akalbeth and Jin, and I don't remember how but somehow then I finally "woke up," or fell back asleep.
There was an interlude with a hanging black bat demon with long curly geometric looking eyelashes that was trying to send a black vapor into my body. It was very strong but I was also just about as strong as it and I think I repelled it. It was terrifying and had a specific form, and also I remembered it. I knew this demon well.
Tarquin and I then woke up in Busan near the "beer street" and it was clear that we were no longer in the communist future dimension. Tarquin said he needed a beer. We went to a convenience store and checked that the products were the same. I remember thinking, "Thank God for the post-war neoliberal order" and then noticee what a strange thing that was to think. We ran over to some people we knew and asked them if they also remembered everything that had just happened; everyone was waking up and rubbing their eyes like Rip van Winkle. They said actually, it was just starting for them, but that it was a different vibe they were feeling, they said "I feel a little redcoat coming on" as in, no, we don't remember living for a few days in this alternate reality, but we can feel another phase shift coming on and it's further in the distant past and we're already remembering it before it overwrites our consciousness. Everything is overwritten, eventually.
Suddenly a plane flying over the beach began to wobble and crashed into the water. I believe it was a "Brazil airlines" flight. I looked in the opposite direction and all of the other planes in the sky were coming down, and we ran to the nearest building and braced for impact. The sky turned blue, bright blue, yet again, and we all forgot our names.