For once I'm lost for words / Your smile has really thrown me
This is not like me at all / I never thought I'd know the kind of love you've shown me
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
Plath, Sylvia. (1963). The Bell Jar. William Heinemann.
__________
From her upstairs bedroom vantage point, Kaitlyn Johnson starred out upon her family's vacant front lawn, disquiet in her eyes. Something with the world wasn't right. Her brother Jacob was out with his best friend Michael. That was certainly normal enough. Kaitlyn herself was, once again, in the proverbial dog house with mom – the subject (as usual) her supposed lack of dedication to the fine and noble art form that was polynomial functions. Bah! As for everything else – the neighbor girls were still a pair of ditzy, blond bimbo cheerleaders. Nothing new or different about Ashley or Emily. At least Kaitlyn didn't have either of those two airhead floozies for a sister. So what was disturbing?
“The world isn't right,” she frowned.
It was these uneasy dreams that had nightly been haunting her.
Probably ought to see a therapist, thought Kaitlyn (only half-joking).
Though she would never talk about such things with her by-the-book, neat 'n tidy mother (nor would she ever with that popularity-is-everything, overachieving meat-head jock of a brother), Kaitlyn yearned to discuss her bizarre nighttime visions with her father. He might understood. He'd always been more of a dreamer, a kindred spirit – less firmly attached to the flawed physicality of a world of outrageous slings and arrows of suffering misfortune in a turbulent sea of unopposed troubles. There was more to everything than what we see, what we hear, what we taste and feel and smell … more than what we read, even?
“Dad would understand,” she said aloud, but immediately began doubting the veracity of her own words.
Maybe thirty years ago, Mr. Johnson would have understood. Today, the weight of “adulting” had converted a onetime romantic escapist and fantasy-prone idealist into a seasoned, trustworthy, conscientious grownup. UGH! Walter Mitty had become Hank Hill. At least that was the facade he wore, applying a thin veneer of respectability to the wild-eyed dreamer hidden within – that was something you could never change.
At least that's what Kaitlyn believed.
But only being thirteen, she lacked the requisite courage to confront her own father concerning his supposed shortcomings – especially when said shortcomings were wildly perceived by the civilized world to positive attributes and not flaws at all.
And so, Kaitlyn Johnson kept her quiet concerns about the fragile nature of reality to herself.
It all had something to do with the Toroid: a ring of metal somehow thrust into this universe by scientific wizards of another universe. And those techno-philosophers, alchemical engineers, and sage mathemagicians came to her nightly in dreams. These weren't the standard, run-of-the-mill dreams were you think you're falling and then wake up on the floor, having clumsily rolled out of bed a moment earlier. And these weren't the juvenile nightmares of being asked to stand up and give a presentation in front of the whole class only to look down and discover you forgot to put on anything more than underpants this morning when you left the house. No; mere, innocent nudity could go take a flying fuck and fall to bedroom floor here. These dreams weren't so much dreams as they were messages from beyond. The word angel comes to us from the Greek ἄγγελος meaning messenger. And that's what these nocturnal visions were: messengers from another plane of existence.
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou comest in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee.”
But the spirits, goblins, and blasts of airs only came at night, when Kaitlyn was deeply unconscious and unable to speak back to whomever or whatever was struggling to make itself known unto her. Each dream was simply a disjointed stream of conscious litany of random thoughts, symbols, and images that often seemed to have no connection to one another. It was surreal, and yet very important; absurd yet factual. The oneiric visitations assured her there was a massive multiverse of nested realities and forked gardens: multi-layered D-branes extending over many spatial dimensions, echoing gravitons through the closed vibrational states of strings unseen and unknowable by the ants crawling about at right angles to a reality richer than they could ever suspect. But where did the bizarre yet familiar night creatures fit in? And why was Kaitlyn so firmly certain that a long-lost, copper cyclotron from a psuedomagical steampunk universe was responsible for disturbing the natural balance of her own reality. The poets, mermaids, witches, pin-heads, and bearded women that haunted her dreams spoke of these things (and more). A shining, polished world of lustrous, gleaming chrome and steel: an empire of skill, discipline, and arcane knowledge. So much better and brighter than …
“Than what?” she mused aloud. “They're only dreams. Nightmares. Visions. Signs that I'm schizophrenic.”
She ought not place such faith in dim, dark, incomprehensible shadows, lacking purpose and speaking with haphazard absurdity.
“Perhaps I am going insane,” she sighed. “But my brother isn't my brother, and the girls next door aren't themselves. Either I'm mad, or there is a very real riddle here, waiting to be unravelled.”
The Toroid of Transformation existed … and it had been found.
Kaitlyn was sure of it.
But what, precisely, had it done to Jacob – or to the bimbos next door?
And how could Kaitlyn be sure it hadn't altered herself as well, without her ever even realizing history had be re-written? Such was the insidious nature of reality-warping powers like those possessed by the magical particle accelerator known to another world as The Toroid of Transformation.
The world was becoming infinitely more complicated, and Kaitlyn was beginning to get a headache in struggling to keep up.
“Maybe this is why Dad just gave up and accepted being a husband, a father, a businessman, and boring mature sad-sack,” she said.
Immediately she regretted the slur against the old man. He deserved better. Even if Mom and Jacob refused to take notice of the fact, the old man was so clearly beaten down by the responsible weights of an ignorant, dull, stupid world that was somehow heavier than it had any right to be. It made Kaitlyn's heart ache to think of it. He'd struggled, probably. She chose to believe he'd not gone down without a fight. Every so often, she'd catch a glimpse in his behavior of that very familiar fire of insanity that kept her going. He'd been mostly defeated. But quite frankly, that was probably Kaitlyn's own fate. Be sparing with the criticism, but be generous with the forgiveness.
“I've just got to find the Toroid. That's the only way I'll resolve this … whatever that's going on,” she said. “But where to begin?”
1. Someone had found and began using the Toroid.
2. Jacob (and the two neighbor girls) had somehow been affected.
3. The changes to reality were accompanied by rewritten memories that rendered the conscious, logical mind unable to recognize transformations … but the intuitive, emotional mind could still sense when something was awry.
And this was all Kaitlyn knew at the moment.
So where to begin?
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