<< Fish Out of Plan

In the morning, you wake up. You get out of bed. Eyes resist the sudden load of input processing.

You turn around. You stare at your questionably extant spouse, made fuzzy by the dark except for where arms grow like utility pole branches. You head out of the bedroom, sighing.

In the lifespan of a single moment before leaving, you think that your sweetheart looks a bit strange.

Out in the common area, or lobby, or living room, or perhaps a gigantic shadowy cavern, you go to the refrigerator. You scratch an itch on a buttock. You take out a bottle of clam juice, which needs to be kept chilled after being opened. You eat an apple, because you’re vegan. You eat a steak, because you’re a carnivore who consumes only protein for those major gains. You decide to eat nothing at all since you’ll be smoking and beer-ing your breakfast in about half an hour when you get to the worksite early.

Outside, a figure walks by. It’s not one that you should be seeing.

The world flickers.

Suddenly the metaphorical feet of Hermes metaphorically lift you by the nape of your hairy-yet-balding neck and metaphorically carry you over to the literal window, the literal garage door, the literal gap in the tent flap. You peer the direction the figure walked, clothed only in your underwear and the stink of unwashed self. You move to a better vantage and see the figure vanish around a corner, catching just enough that you aren’t able to confirm exactly how this passerby looks.

“You got the time?” asks a voice of a jogger clip-clopping up from the other direction.

“Quarter after five,” you say, checking your wristwatch.

“No, sorry,” you say, running a hand from the inside of the arm up across armpit stubble and ending at that place where your bra keeps poking you.

“Half past a freckle!” you say, chortling and stroking the scar below an eye where The Incident occurred. You like impressing people with your juvenile humor.

“Thanks,” mutters the jogging soul, in a long hoodie and jeans. They keep going until they disappear through a front door on the road’s opposite side. That posture as they open the door is the first thing that really makes you stop and PAY ATTENTION.

This newest bit of attention-payment means you catch just the barest glimpse of the individual. Three seconds later, you are turning toward familiar surroundings – but wait, no. Confusing; you jump a solid four feet backward and begin to tell yourself to focus. Well known settings, discomfiting details. You have two eyes, and they’re playing tricks on you… or something.

Your spouse (or child, or parent, or something) is standing there, wiping the sleep from under nose and eyelids.

This other person sharing your domicile, along with that figure you spotted, and almost certainly that jogger at whom you didn’t get the best of glimpses but whose body shape you know very well – all of them are familiar.

All of them are you.

Now, as you consider, you need an idea. You need a decision of consequence. What do you do, scout?

[Milestone 1: Who Am I?]

I was… hmmm. Julia Lomadar, secretary. I made not-enough-per-hour as a secretary. I tied the ribbon with my darling Roland some fifteen months ago, which was fifteen months after he said something about my umbrella at the supermarket checkout, and ten months after we first went out together. Our little home was a neat place when warm inside, which often wasn’t the case starting halfway through the winter months and continuing until spring’s late maturity. Those times, it was “accommodating” at best.

Roland and I got the screaming backaches every so often, like when rent was due or when the muse ran dry for painting and woodworking and other fast-found-fast-lost projects. No time, or no motivation, or something in that branching quandary-tree. The last few months had begun finally ironing out, between Roland’s new floor manager giving out raises and my firm celebrating a new partner joining the pantheon. Rarely is everything in life easy all at the same time, but our lot was improving.

Now? Now the agenda needed throwing out, because sometimes clouds part to admit sunrays and sometimes the sky delivers baseball hailstones.

[Milestone 2: Orientation]

I could think. This body which was my body had the sense and structure which I remembered coming along with me on a hundred thousand thoughts. Since I existed, logic followed. The rest of the details would come into clarity, with enough attention being paid in the right places. Reliability of those details’ perception might not have been perfect, but that was a truism since the first human to unwittingly pick up an angry snake.

As often goes unsaid, better to humor unrecognized dreams than scoff at unrecognized life.

Am I in danger of losing myself? No, probably not. Am I in danger of getting put away for a lunatic? No.

I wasn’t a mental giant, maybe, but even I could work under those conditions.

I definitely married a guy named Roland. I wouldn’t stop remembering Roland for quite a while; definitely I would have recalled any sort of attraction to a woman, and doubly so if that woman happened to look identical to myself.

“Heurhanh…” yawned the figure coming from just outside the bedroom into the rest of the apartment, aiming for the shelves with the oatmeal and the old toaster which couldn’t even thaw cold hands anymore. The dim pale of the walls could almost – almost! – substitute for nightlight glow. In the moment, my doubt wobbled. A confident unsureness became an unconfident sureness, and after the overhead lights began their quiet whine, the glow massaged that unconfidence into certitude. My husband’s attire, my body, moving with the creaks and jerks of recently exited sleep.

Okay. Okay. That is me and also not me right there. I am me. I am… surprisingly alluring from this angle. Is that being gay or bisexual? Is that being a narcissist? People say that just about everyone would – if they met themselves – either kill or make out with their double almost immediately. So if I’m feeling confused like this, does the same apply to my clone, or doppelganger, or whatever she is?

My face cramped under my fingers. It wasn’t an animal completely recognizable to touch alone, but also had no defects on ready tactile display. Mouth believable, nose with roughly the right area and location. One large mole sat left of the right eyebrow. The ridge of forehead scar on Roland’s face appeared nowhere.

The strong refutation calmed me. It also hotted up my blood. Maybe “sanity” had departed for warmer weather – but in total, I was me. My body wasn’t just meat I wore. It WAS my body.

The noise of a familiar bowl-filling redirected me to the right.

Staring at Roland – who I had to think of as Roland for now, or I’d collapse – a few gambits suggested themselves. Sadly, these odds were more roulette than poker. Still – if I now had to deal with copies of myself, what kind of entities were they? Were they actually other-mes with my same thoughts and values, or other-mes that might have been, or a mental projection over top of other people, or…?

“Do you want some milk with that?” I asked.

Roland blinked sightlessly before looking back.

“Hnnnnggg,” said a voice of utter and true misery. “Noyourssscereal. LeeEEeave it aloooooone.”

Just as simple as that, a memo began drafting in my head: “Husband swaps bodies, retains essential horror of dairy. Get more orange juice next time out and about.”

“Only teasing,” I sighed, and then I slumped into one of the barstools we used as chairs.

Looking outdoors, the sun began the slow dye-stain of the sky. Birds didn’t grace the clouds. Quiet leaves menaced the street in a way function-designed to underscore the emptiness. Mornings were beautiful impositions that I preferred happening to other people.

Roland made a noise that sounded like “hunch” or maybe “humh” under his breath, running a long fingernail across the side of a sunken cheek, from mandible joint to chin. Unlike the move usually displayed by my husband, this one didn’t end up going for the chin cleft… after all, this would require the presence of a cleft chin, and my jawline couldn’t have represented something further from “cleft” without entering concave country.

Another curiosity atop the overflowing pile of curiosities.

A banana teleported into my hand from the fruit bowl. Loathsome things, but couldn’t be helped. Today would need a LOT of fructose and potassium. Time to explore a terrifying frontier: the battlefield of habitual life.

[Milestone 3: Discovery]

I was finishing the last of the Fruit Eugenics Crescent when the first couple of ideas collapsed together into halfway useful blueprints. The banana strings were shaken off my fingers by the time the blueprints got sorted for construction.

“So remind me, what is your sister’s birthday?” I asked.

This was an especially weird question because it was completely genuine, even though Roland had only ever had a brother named Sorrel. It felt like the words “brother” or “man” or “dude” had grown sea urchin spines, though. Poking them to see if they’d inject a venom didn’t seem wise. Hopefully “sister” was now correct.

I struck gold, or at least failed to strike a gas pocket. Roland’s head gave one of those muscle spasm jerks, then the curve of the jaw slurred open wide, and fingers fumbled after a paper towel napkin.

“She’s doing okay,” said Roland at first, blinks progressively slowing until they became noteworthy incidents. “Cake day is the fifth of July, right after the fireworks stop.”

On the first hand, glad my mouth stayed shut initially. Have we not all said stupid things in our turn, the equivalent of “What do you want on your sandwich?” being answered by “Good!” or similar? Also, Roland’s mornings had always carried a Lewis Carroll aura, socks backward and shelves groped rather than browsed. On the second hand, I felt a sluicing run my veins: manic energy and paralysis and nervous gentle warmth. Roland wasn’t ME, but rather Roland in a me-shaped suit prepackaged with various -isms.

On the third hand, what in God’s name was happening?

Multiple books I’d finished last year came to mind over several minutes. Each of them had a plot where one or more characters got airdropped into an environment or life with profoundly different parameters from their normal operation. Thoughtcrime by Jonah Legwhite was probably my favorite. “Bad contemplations make bad, good deeds make good” sounded so brutally childish it wrapped back around to mature wisdom. Lowicker’s The Bottle Floor and After Cryosleep by Rainy Prasivh also had some strong recommendations. Prasivh describing Jamie coming home to find the same family members, but wearing different faces, hooked me by the spine and reeled me in.

However, it was a line from Maryah Enpo’s Dead Abstemious that swam out of the depths.

“The past is a nation of jealous policy, extraditing those who want to stay and imprisoning those who want to travel.”

That certainly felt accurate. Losing grip, getting passed a new schoolroom paper airplane from the future, then handing it further down the line after drawing a face and mustache and horns on the nose. Though maybe she was oh so wrong, Past Me agreed completely with Future Me about whether we’d see home again – and the answer wasn’t “we’ll be spontaneously standing next to a handsome cashier man again any minute now.”

My brain stopped heading down that side road and started coming back on track. I asked it what I ought to do with this contemplation of how future becomes past, which wasn’t exactly a novel proposition. The brain responded by raising a picket sign with the words TIME MACHINE and numerous question marks. Opposite that side was a more helpful declaration.

“Maybe ask about your spouse’s sibling?”

I told my brain that my time machine needed fixing, and to get back in my skull where it belonged. It did, right after reiterating the importance of circling back and asking about Roland’s brother. As a result, I got a sudden sense of facing a bull wearing my-and-not-my face, and waving a toreador cape embroidered with Sorrel’s appearance. It struck me as incredibly funny, right until I thought of the bull running me through.

A shudder struck. The universe of today didn’t seem like it would enjoy references to distinctly not-me characteristics, like masculinity.

You feel a special kind of aversion when contemplating a huge mistake someplace close to home. Think about it; distancing toilet and bed is a compulsion for nearly every living creature. It’d be best to try this as a hypothetical, rather than smack Roland in the face with a flat question.

A sigh and a squeak came from my lungs.

“So I was watching a movie recently,” I said, trying to be as offhand as possible.

“Hmmm.”

Cereal crunched with throat-clogging dryness.

“It was about a brother and sister reuniting after being separated for years. The brother reminds me a bit of you.”

A moment of locked diary tension. The room turned both boiling and freezing as a familiar differently-mirrored face tilted my way. I half expected the mouth to empty of cereal and bark a sheet of lightning, and half expected to see the face return to neutral position without word or rearrangement.

Instead, the face crumpled like cellophane on a stovetop.

After a little more pointed chewing, the mouth cleared enough to admit: “Like as in ‘imaginary’ or like as in ‘returning from absence?’ Obviously not a man, and don’t think I’ve been on extended break since those days last summer.”

I started scratching at my scalp. Play it right.

“When was the last time you met a man?” I asked, balance entirely off.

When you work through the truly big qualms of life, you shouldn’t deceive yourself or others about them. You should keep composed, eloquent, and – unless your inquiry’s attached to a reasoning chain dangling from “shall likely get identified as an utter lunatic” – upfront about how important you think your problems actually are.

“Last week,” muttered Roland, deliberate and wincingly specific as a buzzed drunkard in pronunciation. “Right after I ate an elephant and bought you that red and yellow dress.”

Hands traced the shape of a dress profile, in a long frilly wedge. I remembered it well. Roland had exclaimed wordless horror when I’d pointed it out at the department store years ago, and every so often we referenced it as an ideal joke prop stand-in of monetary excess and utterly ludicrous fashion. Maybe the world had changed not just now-then, but then-then, or-

My brain started hissing under the pressure of drafting new English tenses for relative times.

“You DIDN’T buy me that red and yellow dress, did you?” I asked, and this time couldn’t hide the honest fear and dread of uncertainty. To Hell with subtlety and caution.

“No,” said Roland, in a way that suggested laughing aloud was a needless indulgence.

Well, unless that was deception or sarcasm (sarcasm about sarcasm…?), it meant my life hadn’t gotten knocked off its entire axis. Spouse? Recognizable personality-wise. History? As remembered, at least on the whole. Poking the bear by drawing attention to the changed parts of the world, using the changed parts of the world? Less than terrible.

My shoulders didn’t exactly relax, but it didn’t feel like sneezing the word HUSBAND would trigger a berserker rage in my ex-husband-current-wife either.

“Good,” I said, and began to contemplate the world from a less panicked and far more bothersome yet intriguing vantage.

After several long moments, I realized that an out of place noise had hidden beneath the greasy worry slope. A tapping sprouted, somewhat tinny. I looked down.

No, that wasn’t my foot anxiously fidgeting. It was, however, coming from one of the stool crossbars. Specifically, the foot with the gray hard soled slipper, not sending Morse quite as fast as some feet can manage, but in a way that had been familiar as a mannerism in precisely one member of our household.

Maybe Roland wasn’t just my husband wearing a me-shaped suit.

[Milestone 4: Deduction]

So after a tremendous internal debate, an idea: call in sick to work.

I picked up the electronic brick with the colorful flag patterns up and down both sides, woke it from sleep, and dialed my firm. My first hint that the shape of the past did not match the shape of the present came in the form of a label. No longer was there “Frames, Sung, and Barney” in my phone.

Instead, it showed “Julia, Julia, and Julia.”

Another abnormality, though it slipped past notice at first. The line’s answering machine helped there.

“Hello; offices of Julia, Julia, and Julia. If your question is a general inquiry, please leave a message after the tone and we will answer it as soon as time allo-”

After a moment of listening to my own sort-of voice, I preempted the upcoming menu, hitting the “3” key. A beep.

“Hi, it’s me. About…”

I looked to the clock and relayed the information on its overly cheerful readout. It gave me a strong poke, like a kid learning how a pushpin goes into corkboard. A moment’s sticky introspection, then I continued. The world’s protoplasm quivered as bits and pieces of it stopped being a barrier and started being air again. That – weirdly enough – marked the instant I started feeling normal (“normal” in the widest sense, but still a valid one). Accident blocking traffic? Significant but soluble problem. Business suing the firm? Unpleasant, bearable ordeal; has happened and likely will again.

Human civilization becoming a hall of mirrors? That’s very odd, let’s get the bifocals and take a gander.

“I’m calling to let you know I won’t be in today, sadly. My cell is on, though, and if some major cancellation or update comes along, it’ll go into the schedule with plenty of notes.”

My phone went back to the same pocket where I always kept it.

A deep sigh; it felt like putting on armor. The day got a bit brighter, even if it didn’t get any easier. Learning wouldn’t be a challenge this same way again. Either I’d look back upon the here and now as a teaching moment, or an inspiration.

“Gotta get moving,” said suddenly-dressed Roland, or maybe the afterimage of Roland, just as the front door slipped shut. I didn’t know when the world had jagged forward, but the lurch wasn’t disorienting so much as a bit annoying.

Seconds later, “Love you!” came through the door, a bit muffled. I replied in kind, loud enough to be heard in the street. My ex-husband-current-wife went to do good honest work.

I returned to the phone screen, and looked at “Julia, Julia, and Julia” carefully. I hit the button, listened to the tone, paid attention to the answering message, and felt my lungs hiccup.

The names were different.

Yes, “Julia” obviously formed a theme, but there was different accenting and emphasis. The Julia that came second – Sung, probably, possibly – came across as a monotone near-whisper. Barney had gotten replaced with a shed-skin ragged lilt, like a bullet holed ballgown.

“Julia,” I said, trying to match this not-Barney label; it didn’t work.

The next time it came out differently wrong. The following attempt sounded drippy, wrong again but differently different in its erroneousness.

Then I thought of Thelonius Barney, the man with the best slow cooked beef tips in history and the WORST jokes – delivery, content, timing that included placement in client meetings – and how I would not see him again… and said “jûliǎ” just perfectly.

A few dense minutes of tentative fondle mouthing later, it became clear that concentrating on the identity – what I knew of the personality – of each “Julia” allowed proper recital. From the person flowed the true name. The same applied to Roland-Julia, and my near acquaintances.

As it happened, though, that process didn’t work the other way. Hearing a name said right gave no sense or confirmation of individuality, just a distinction from other Julias. That felt kind of good. A stranger couldn’t hear my name and suddenly intuit my every characteristic and nuance; knowing a person meant meeting and talking and bonding, not merely absorbing data from a “Julia” shaped paper airplane tossed through an earhole.

I got on the Internet next. It was surreal.

Presumably everybody in the world now had the name “Julia Lomadar,” almost universally preferring merely “Julia.” Three news outlets from overseas were staffed entirely by Julias. They told stories of Pope Julia decrying the harm done by Julia’s pogroms at pinpoints ranging from western Turkey to middling Mongolia. They explained an altercation between a Duchess of… the locale’s name passed in one ear and out the other; some Julia of England was assaulted by her spouse Julia after being found in flagrante with pop star Julia, the Duchess’ life being heroically saved by fortuitous off duty constable Julia.

Comments sections got a couple additions here and there, me composing questions that other site visitors answered within the hour or so. From the responses, a few observations became clear. First, evidently everybody else did hear “Juliea” or “JooLIA” or “… jul-ya” with just as many variations and commonalities as my ears detected. Second, my senses were also reporting honestly for visuals, voices, and everything else in addition to the oddities of names.

Third, while some individuals found this universality of identity abnormal some of the time, they usually needed me to highlight the fact for them to reach that realization. The impact also lacked permanence. “We all look subliminally identical… why…?” jostled a couple individuals into steep contemplation of environmental adaptation, and species biology; it did not lead to a doctoral paper or even tabloid headline proclaiming “Weird Human Phenomenon: We’re Coincidental Clones.”

An idea occurred.

I got up, walked over to the little end table under our window, and looked at the books laid across its unsanded middle shelf. Six titles all by You Know Who; each of them originally under distinct names. Without thinking too much about it, I grabbed the last one, which was a cowboy romance called Smith and Wesson and Refuge. The fact it retained its name intrigued me. There might be other reasons for people to put “Smith” or “Wesson” on a company, even if the makers were named neither Smith nor Wesson.

I briefly wondered what reading the Bible might be like now, and decided that might overload me.

Instead, back to the phone and its digital library of useful horrors: the continents named North and South America retained their identities; in contrast, a recently published book on physics now synopsized about “Julia radiation” coming from black holes. There wasn’t a firm place where this… reidentification, for lack of a better term, started in history – however, it notably dominated the lending of person-behind-idea or person-discovering-place names starting around the late 1800s. Alternative names came from somewhere like a cohesive strain of myths and folktales. The Gregorian calendar, for example, had its moniker taken off a fabled ruler. “Supposing that men had existed” serpentined a route into being a familiar hypothetical device. A comparable but less consistent trend drove other feminine names besides my own.

At some point I blinked. When my vision returned I lay backward and partway supine against the counter, two thirds of a sandwich beside me, the glow of the overheads leaving funny dark splotches every time my focus shifted.

“Weird,” my lips said, just to hear it, then it repeated more slowly and calmly. “Weeiirrd.”

Paranoia’s itch, fatigue’s warmth, and curiosity’s shakiness fought over my agenda. By the time Roland returned, they still went at it hammer and tongs.

[Milestone 5: Adaptation]

It wasn’t too long before our home needed a fixup in the shape of replaced roof tiles. Three days later came a beautiful summer morning turned gale simulation. Within twenty minutes, half of the street side shingles lined the yard. They sporadically took off for better accommodation. It turned out that flocks of roofing looked kind of similar to birds, but sick ones, incapable of meaningfully coordinating.

“That’s just-” started Roland, looking out the window, then cut off.

“Any desire to put rock roofing up as a replacement?” I asked, which got a giggly snort.

“Slate? Probably can’t afford it. Insurance will barely cover this, at a guess – not to mention the dangers of sharp falling weighty objects.”

Neither of us had known, then or later, how expensive putting up slate shingle might be; it was the sort of idle contemplation Roland and I did at odd hours before the reidentification. As we took in the lawn’s not-bird flock, I settled more heavily in my chair.

“You remember last autumn with the flowers?”

“All the droves from the yard piling up against our wall. Smelled great even if they were a royal pain to clean up.”

Inconvenience, when timed properly, gave the world a twisted delight.

After we cleaned up the yard later that day, I found a pad of paper and a pencil. Starting as the urge to make a little sketch of flapping shingle wings, I was seized and shaken by the need to set down thoughts. Pondering and I had always gotten along best when thrown out of nicely structured country.

The eraser tasted of soap while looking at that terrible blankness.

“What should I do?” went at the top of the paper pad. “Continue living as normal” appeared below it. In quick succession, this was followed by “Flee (home/country/continent) (with/without spouse)” – and “Learn about and enlighten the world as to this ‘reidentification’ event” – and “UNDO this ‘reidentification’ event (with whose aid?)” – and “Use unique knowledge of this ‘reidentification’ event for gain (how?/where?)” – and, for the sake of completeness, “Kill myself.”

If I had been going to a psychologist, firstly it would have been weird to talk to her now, and secondly she would have had a field day with this notepad.

A scribble went through the last line immediately. Mental stress definitely had my number and was sending solicitous messages at all hours, but nothing remotely approached the Poor Yorick Contemplation level yet. If anything, I felt supremely alive despite the low ambient perpetual confusion.

As for the others, I wasn’t a genius, and even if I were… what had happened? How had it happened? That type of inquiry was so many levels above me that, if given an unlimited budget and all the brilliant minds in the world, I couldn’t summon a good idea of how to proceed. Whatever this was, it had affected every living person, possibly every dead person, did something to history itself. Putting a shoe back into a shoebox couldn’t be done without at least understanding how boxes worked. Undoing this odd development? Not with all the heads in the world.

On the face of it, just learning substantially about this brave new world posed a challenge. None of the people online, on the news, in my day to day life, or who’d died showed an inclination to interrogate it. None-

A bad thought, shaped like a knot of bones, thunked into my head.

What if I wasn’t – hadn’t been – Julia Lomadar? What if I’d recently started remembering myself as Julia Lomadar, just like everyone else on the planet? Simply forgotten and now remembered wrongly?

Quite quickly, the knot changed shape.

“Hang on. I remember Roland. I remember my family, and my colleagues, who definitely were significantly-percentage male. I remember. That’s different from how everyone else tells it, which means either I’m different from how everyone else tells it, or everyone is different from how everyone else tells it. I don’t know which is more likely. Either way, don’t jump on that bandwagon until that jumping has reason to back it up.”

I relaxed the tiniest bit, spread out.

This was not going to be an easy life if heart attack by existential epiphany became a regular threat.

The paper pad rose before me again. Rapidly, I judged that figuring out the details of “why” as befit my new existence would become my life’s ambition. Don’t make plans too early. Also, fleeing elsewhere wouldn’t even make me feel less hunted; why I had slung that option onto the notepad I couldn’t say.

Wait. Yes, I could. Panic – even ambient brainstem panic – causes stupid things to happen.

I scratched some more scribble brambles onto the paper. Most of the words now sat under a plaque of graphite. “Continue” and “learn” and “normal” and “this ‘reidentification’ event” gleamed in the sets of bare text.

Still looking at that pad off and on a day later, I found my way into an especially contentious series of meetings, two of them pertaining to severance-related grievances and a third being a property dispute. Every time one of the voices said or asked the exact right (or wrong) thing, I blinked, and winced, and consulted my notepad.

“We’ll need to schedule an interview with Seacoast Reporting,” said the person I still thought of as Frames. “Julia’s given us some good direction to take on the character angle, but the opening statements need to be perfect. Can’t settle for settlement this time.”

One of the perks of reaching partner was that the firm wouldn’t summarily execute you for bad jokes.

A few minutes’ consultation showed four opportunities for doing interfacing for this case. The opening late-ish tomorrow allowed up to three hours of meeting time, and instinct said these festivities might demand a sudden extension. Roland would need an apology movie night, since that car mechanic horror flick was leaving cinemas in the next couple days.

Frames had always possessed the most immaculately cut suits, and a hundred percent of them came in “green.” Olive, pistachio, parrot, fern, pepper. Green had never been a top favorite color for me, but as I shook the verdant sleeved hand at the end of our meeting it gave off a glow of sunshine-meadow contentment.

“Take care!” said Frames.

“Certainly, si- ma’am.”

A tilted but congenial smile brushed off the day’s petty dust and dirt. It laughed at me a little, but laughed with me more.

“Don’t know where the world would be without you, Julia!” my partial boss told me.

Later in the evening, some lovely breaded baked chicken managed to make everything better, courtesy of marriage to someone who knew a few best offerings of a grocery store. Amazing feats can become possible with the right supper.

Before too long, I was in bed while Roland finished tooling around with a sudden inspiration on the easel we used (I didn’t use it so much, in all honesty; there was a very fine depiction of a pear colored cantaloupe on my dresser, though). It was the “this idea can’t wait and it must be indulged now” sort. Hardly the time to throw stones though, there was a little journal next to my side of the bed with oddments of brain fart text. The drowsy mind wobbles nicely, after all.

“Many consider it to be a transcendental development,” declared the warbly voice over my phone. “Parthenogenesis has long been an area of study in biology, but artificial insertion of an egg made viable – through the so-called ‘haploid rope’ technique – gives the medical community hope that Julia will deliver a healthy child in nine months. Her Bronx community certainly hopes so too.”

The low resolution video’s gang of doctors and nurses – specifically the perfect uniformity in height – made it feel like a movie set. Well, going into the hospital made sense as part of the reproductive process. Also, the lack of human Y chromosome complicated the giving birth thing. Engineering an egg directly with zygote… processes, characteristics, whatever; that sounded like a requirement for our species to continue. It did raise the question of how each Julia and Julia had been having smaller Julias pop into the world before now.

By the time I nodded off, the world had become an anesthesia bath, numb but fitting me just fine. I’d never known the exact molecular magic that took two people from “couple” to “parents” before, and another day or two still in ignorance wouldn’t end the world.

Several hours later, I sat up in the groggy dark.

“It’s a terrible, wonderful day,” I whispered to myself with a hairline fracture smile.

One day at a time.

[Milestone 6: Aspiration]

I knew a lot of things, like the capital of New York (Albany, as much as NYC people might argue otherwise) and the boiling point of water (one hundred centigrade, two hundred twelve Fahrenheit). I didn’t know a lot of other things, like whether to use “ordnance” or “ordinance,” or how to eat a banana without getting banana strings all over my fingers. In that second category fell the execution, planning, or even conceptualization of proving – or disproving – theories which affected the known universe… and whose rulebook sat locked in an unmarked unopenable box.

If this life were a movie, there’d be a resignation of a secretary at Julia, Julia, and Julia. There’d be an exit under cover of darkness, and there’d be some hyperintelligent philosopher physicist at Oxford or MIT or Tokyo suddenly visited by a scruffy unhinged lady shouting about how the world has gone wrong. There’d be car chases, and gunfights, and probably a scene of some speech that either had great quotable lines or pulled the tear ducts right out of the eyelid. There’d be competence under pressure. There’d be cathartic abandon.

For me, it wasn’t a movie.

I couldn’t go ask for a replacement for the character role life had handed out, or abandon my job and routine out of nowhere. I definitely couldn’t swing some roundabout scheme or heist to reach through the ether and miracle-reverse the… transfiguration, metamorphism, whatever happened to trade then for now. There were bills and comforts and my ex-husband-current-wife to think about.

So what happened with this big tangled knot? I cut it and moved on.

That wasn’t to say I stuck cotton in my ears and began wearing special glasses that turned human faces into blurry ovals. In fact, there was a nice and somewhat unglued college professor at the soup diner just beside the practice’s offices. Under other circumstances, she would have gone unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. The as-is equation subtracted an ignored conversation and added a humming friendship.

I asked Professor Lomadar about her experiences with plants, and she said that she had a paper in the works about the speciation of the dandelion. I asked about a variety of extremophiles, and how a person frames the study of fantastic and unknown lifeforms. I asked for introductions to her colleagues who’d know about dragging open mysteries of subatomic particles – in particular, a Julia of leptons, and publications on supersymmetry by way of extremely expensive experiments – and got them.

So after a certain sense, a big quantity of attention got put aside and assigned to “figuring this out,” but as an amateur pursuit. That assignment had a passive trawling quality. What would be, would be.

Professors Lomadar and Lomadar and I became regular meetup chums. We each sat down with a steaming bowl and poked at everything under the sun. From the historical implications of interior plumbing, to whether the prisoner’s dilemma became more or less tolerable with the punishment of force-feeding a highly, highly allergic subject peanut butter – eventually we had a silly little sewing circle of witchy chatting soup fiends, who all laughed when anyone pronounced a word within a league of “fart.” It turned into a polymorphic friendship – with a lot of members coming to realizations about themselves and each other as frequently as any trivia. 

Going from there to home, the streetlights always glowed a stronger shade of yellow gold.

By springtime, I’d begun a Real Art Project: a single piece of deadwood, slowly getting whittled into an icon of Justice. Roland got a raise and a promotion, when the store realized they were looking at not only management material, but good management material. I broke a foot, learned how to use crutches. Some new neighbors moved in and started performing – not playing, performing – some zappy rock every Tuesday and Friday; Roland and I started listening during the evenings.

After a year, no inspiration as to the fate of the universe had come. After two years, I stopped looking. After three years, it started to finally feel “normal,” not comfortable or easy, but as though this was just life now, and if it would be so kind then Future Me ought to pick up some butter on the way home.

This begged a question. What should a “normal” person, in a “normal” life, want to obtain? A lack of overbearing anxiety, comfort in the fact of confidence about having enough sustenance, a good place to lay a tired head. In addition, a community that enriches and is enriched by such a person – local, and general, and global, if one can manage it – can stabilize where shakiness wants to invade, and can urge to action a sedentary mind.

All told, those were things that I found, and in that sense, the reidentification really didn’t change much of serious consequence.

Of course, the hardest changes to navigate lived at home, right next to you. Surviving those threatened to become a white whale at first. Eventually, though, day to day concerns stopped being an ambition and started being routine.

In retrospect, I guess I was gay, or bisexual, or something. Money on the “or something.” Roland was basically Roland, just with me as the performer playing the movie role instead of a rough-woodcut guy I’d long known. No, she wasn’t “acting.” No, she wasn’t “tricking me.” She still did the thing where each morning before work, she’d brush her teeth with the lights on and door open, dancing to some inaudible beat with zero embarrassment. She didn’t have the exact same slobbish charm I’d gotten used to, but she did have a cousin to it; a little laziness, and a lot of procrastination. Little physical tells abounded too, such as enough heft – with a little pudge – that my old Roland shone through, the way a warm cup of milk shines through the teeth of crisp autumnal nights.

Psychologically, coming to the conclusion I was wrong about how I could think about women (especially with the one I loved, had loved) felt less likely to cause a complete breakdown than “immediate celibacy, eventual divorce.” Also, Roland’s words switchbacked across my brain every so often – the first date we had, where he said something that really stuck like a cockleburr.

“Accept second chances when they’re given – but don’t take them, give them out yourself.”

And so that was what I did. That perfect contentment in his own skin, frankly, was one of the reasons I loved him. It turned into one of the reasons I loved her later.

Life had become strange. It never wouldn’t be. I thought I’d manage.

[Milestone 7: How Did It?]

Her name is Auntie.

Many places around the world have a need for liberty and justice. The nation led by her Illustrious Leader is one. Unfortunately, because “you” and “I” are different words, it is impossible to have everybody agree all the time without the external assistance of peace, and the Illustrious Leader can’t distribute peace on Earth at a whim.

Auntie assures him that his will shall be done. She exercises her powers to make it so.

In the eternally lighted depths of a lead-lined subterranean facility, many minutes of physical labor and many hours of research and many years of whiptongued toil all thresh a small army of physicists and prisoners and administrators and crooked-souled zealots. Their simple goal?

Make the world peaceful by filling it with only and always the Illustrious Leader.

He knows best. He’s wise and hardworking. He’s dealt with back room limp-spines and frothing fanatics alike. He has the fortitude of spirit to take a stand and never blink – especially when the majority is against him. Therefore, all people should emulate him. An obvious extrapolation: everyone should BE him.

So much effort done with vaguest direction. “X is good, increase X” has the ring of earnestness, and also the barbed wire of selfless groupthink. The first six months of the Illustrious Leader’s nameless project have a rigorous hope to them, a militant generosity not unlike a parcel full of money held out by a smiling representative of a crime syndicate. By two years after that, the hope has ground itself into skin creases like so much sand. Four years in, the jollity causes chronic smiling. No doubt or unhappiness is permitted on Auntie’s watch; the belowground village cannot change or even seriously contemplate its own orthodoxy without a matronly hand and a matronly quirt falling on their shoulders.

Even so, some individuals question. Early on, a researcher suggests that their particle experiments’ results don’t have the needed scalability for this endeavor. He suggests an additional testing platform for the force carrier interactions with which they’ll be dealing. “Rigor! Rigor!” is his chant. It’s a regular chant, clay thrown into shape by the sort of thought process which delights in one brick laid solidly upon another, emphasizing the size of a dataset needed to help companion conclusions get through first infancy and then puberty.

A management specialist raises the question of human viability around the same time; if the species finds itself spontaneously with a complete absence of wombs, will it not prove… inconvenient?  It’s somewhat wheedling. It’s very parental, ironically.

Nobody is quite sure of the party’s identity, but – around the third year’s midgut – word gets out about a young woman who whispers. She asks about the morality of complete erasure. She raises concerns over whether they should pursue some alternative. She, in short, plants weeds.

Auntie merely does what is necessary. She notes how fortunate the human race is to have lasted this long and far. A world with only one biological human sex would complicate matters. If the Illustrious Leader sees fit, he can doubtlessly solve such an… inconvenience. She rewards the hysteriacentric worries of the management specialist by assembling the whole enterprise in the mess area, and putting a bullet in his brain. It’s quick and clean, which shows she values and encourages his concern for the welfare of the project, even if the implication that it is flawed goes beyond the pale. 

Similarly, the insistence on testing earns Auntie’s approval. Rather than peaceful release from the project, however, she lapels the scientists and carts them off to a new work area. They make the new testing assemblage within six days, and in six weeks it begins to yield fruit. Six weeks of shortfall then requires compensation; the scientists evaporate and recondense in mismatched technically-intensive roles.

The young woman is eventually revealed to be named Esther, when a line worker of that description disappears without a trace, and none of the personnel willingly acknowledge the fact of her past or present existence. The absence congests. Eyes begin shying away from shadowed corners.

It’s not confirmed, but clearly understood, by everybody that Esther (along with all the other XX chromosome workers in a suitable age range) is donating eggs to be put on ice under the facility. Esther simply makes a larger donation than others.

Eventually, Auntie announces the Promised Day. They’re going to hit the Button.

Tuesday, she tells them all, it’s Tuesday! Years and years dangling back like a dandelion’s stringy roots, meeting and finally sprouting into a hardy flower, something glorious and indestructible. At the northwestern chamber of the facility, they gather, bracketing a marble maze of wire and plates and switches and piping. A cage surrounds a special console overlooking a car-sized glass eye, containing something dark, something that glows. Within the cage, the Button.

Most of the workers startle as the Illustrious Leader makes an appearance that fateful Tuesday. It is not just “us” who will hit the Button, but that greatest of men. Everyone is motivated to celebrate with their whole being.

Unfortunately, Auntie finds her sleeve tugged by a man, one of the information scientists. He urgently whispers that certain reference tensors had been miscalculated.

Tears in his eyes work at cross purposes with the sparingly chosen gemstones of his explanation: precision accurately kept instance by instance but rounded down over iteratively stored operations, only just now confirmed because of rolling over-time record auditing. Reversible, it’s definitely reversible, but all their current figures are off.

He advises they wait. Not a scream, but he hisses with burning passion, staring terrified at the Illustrious Leader’s hand approaching the console. The scientist’s own hand briefly preempts its arrival by landing on Auntie’s sleeve.

Only the fact of the Button’s pressing keeps Auntie from putting a hole through his head.

As it happens, some very few places in the compiled code fail to match intention to action, and have slipped through testing – because production never, ever matches test conditions. Here, there, an untrimmed whitespace character, arrays counted from one rather than zero. Most importantly, a race condition that no amount of stress testing would have found. Offsets in meters suddenly expand and twist as quaternions fidget in their sleep.

These, plus the previously mentioned differences in reference models, collude in corruption.

Instead of the desired subject, the Button’s attendant hardware hones in on an individual above ground, some distance away, sleeping calmly, sleeping without any knowledge of a metamorphic hyperreality and the possibility it might calve a sudden child of other blood. Firm twists of time might spawn safe – alternate – harbors of their own will.

Who is the Illustrious Leader? No idea, never heard of him.