AURORA

ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES

FEBRUARY 2020

"Can I come live with you?”

My mom’s question vibrated through my cell phone and out into the stagnate air of my tiny camper, reverberating so fiercely and loudly that I imagined it breaking through the walls and crashing out into the street like an out-of-control semi truck. I hadn’t been prepared for this question, not today, not tomorrow, maybe try again in a month? A year or 10? I didn’t know, but it seemed to be happening now.

“Your mother’s cancer has progressed to the point that she is now in Stage IV,” her oncologist, Dr. Rob, a man I had never spoken with before, tried to explain. “But we can’t say for sure how much because we need to get a biopsy done to determine if there are any treatment options with which we can move forward, but your mother is refusing the biopsy.”

“Mom?” I asked. “Why are you refusing the biopsy?”

Over the phone, my mom broke down in tears.

“I just don’t want any more pain. I don’t want any more needles. I am tired,” her voice quivered. “I’m alone over here and I just don’t think it’s worth it. I want to come live with you. We can get a house together and watch television together and it will be fun!”

I pictured the scene she had set: My 72-year-old mom, a tiny but needy speck of a woman who had always demanded my total attention while also making it clear that if we had nothing nice to say, we were to say nothing at all. Over the years, we’d spent a lot of silent time together. I pictured her sitting on my couch in silence, watching the tv in silence, working on her puzzles in silence, and me, pulling out my hair, wanting to scream and turning the Spotify volume up to 100 to tune out the deafening sound of two people who fought every time they spoke.

Fun.

“Mom, I -”

Dr. Rob broke me off.

“You also need to know that your mother’s mental condition has deteriorated to the point that she can no longer care for herself. Your mother had to call 9-1-1 several days ago after she fell in the middle of the night. I had a social worker perform a wellness check on her apartment, and the stove was on, the cupboards were empty, she is having a hard time driving and keeping medical appointments. Right now, I have your mother staying at a rehabilitation facility for the pneumonia but her insurance will only pay for two weeks. After that, you will have to find a long-term care solution for her, whether that is with you or at a nursing facility.”

“What the fuck?” I said. I stood up from my work desk and walked through the camper toward the door, out the door, where I grabbed a half-smoked cigarette from off a tiny table in my landlord’s backyard and tried to light it, one strike, two strikes, three strikes. My mom hadn’t been picking up the phone as much lately, and I had been a little worried, but living 1,700 miles away from home, I kind of had just passed off all the missed calls as her sleeping, or being busy, or just not noticing the phone ringing. The last time I’d been home, she’d been mostly fine - or what was fine for my mom. She’d fallen down once or twice and watching her drive had been absolutely terrifying: she’d stopped traffic trying to make a left-hand turn and I’d made her promise to only take right hand turns from then on. But I just had never expected this phone call. I don’t know why.

“I’m sorry that is a lot to take in,” he said, sounding truly apologetic. “You need to know that without treatment, your mom has less than six months to live, though that last test actually happened about two months ago now so … I’ve really grown attached to your mom. She is a really great lady and I think these decisions need to be made for her as soon as possible.”

“Mom has pneumonia?” I said, still holding the unlit cigarette in my hand, my hands both shaking too much for it to catch on fire.

"She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“It’s been going around here lately,” he said. “That, coupled with the effects of her last round of cancer treatments, made her pretty sick. She was hospitalized with pneumonia a week ago, and then released three days ago, but came back in two days ago when she fell trying to find her medicine.”

I closed my eyes, hard, and started rubbing my forehead, like those things would keep back the roaring-dragon-level anxiety I felt coming on.

“I’m sorry, but not with this mental deterioration she is experiencing,” Dr. Rob said. “Your mother’s dementia is progressing —”

“I DO NOT HAVE DEMENTIA!” My mom cried out, angrily. “I just have trouble managing things all on my own. But I could come live with you, and we can have fun!”

Fun. There was that word again. I tried to picture something Fun and came up blank.

“What do you want to do together, Mom?” I asked.

“Well, we can work on quilts together and go on walks together and go to the stores together,” she said. “And watch NCIS together.”

I pictured it as idyllically as it had been presented, like it was an advertisement on television: two people who looked like each other but decades apart, smiling as one pushed the other in a wheel chair around the lake, feeding the ducks.

“So you and your Mom hadn’t discussed this before?” Dr. Rob asked. “She had been telling me you were already planning on living together.”

“I mean… we definitely hadn’t talked about it like this?” I said. “A year ago she had thought about moving down here but then she decided to stay where she was instead, and we hadn’t talked about it since.”

“Oh, Aurora,” my mom said. “This was always the plan. Can’t I come live with you?”

“No.” I sighed. The answer had escaped immediately, impulsively, wistfully. That’s what I had said, what my first response had been. No. Are you kidding me? I could barely take care of myself. I didn’t know the last time I  had eaten, let alone cooked someone dinner. I lived in a one-room, 480-square-foot tiny house that barely had room for me in it. Emotionally, I was barely scraping by — my horse and my dog had both died in the last few months and I was crying a lot in public, in places where I shouldn’t have been crying, and I knew that living with me wasn’t what she actually what she needed — or at least, not alllll she needed.. She needed someone to take care of her. Can I take care of my mom dying from cancer? The thought of it almost made me laugh. I’d never even been able to keep a house plant alive! No, I Cannot seemed like the most reasonable, logical, honest answer in the world.

“Why not?” this time her voice came out like both a demand and a cry, and I pictured her at her doctor’s office, face crumpling up and body unable to pick itself up off the floor, and suddenly I knew that there was no excuse I could ever give that would make sense to her, no way to ask her to just live longer, to take care of herself better. She was alone, and she couldn’t be. She was alone, and I was all the family she had, other than my brother who never in a million years would agree to such a thing, and this had always been the plan.

Or at least, it had always been her plan. Literally, the entire reason I’d been born, all the obligations I’d ever made in life signed the second I’d been conceived in the moment of a terrible betrayal of trust — it was all right there, in that question.

“Well, mom, I really am not in a good financial —”

“I have money saved,” she said. 

“I don’t know anyone in Toledo —”

“I can live with you in Austin. We can find a big house to rent to live in together, close to your friends and I will meet them all and we can hang out in the nice weather down there and I don’t want to stay in this hospital one more day. I want to die at home. Please don’t make me die alone.”

I realized she wasn’t sitting at her doctor’s office, where my imagination had put her — she was in a hospital. A hospital? I was having a hard time processing what was happening. My mom hated hospitals though. Hated. And she was sobbing. “Please get me out of here. Please. Why can’t you come and get me?”

“Okay, okay, okay!” I said. “If you can cover the rent on a house for a year you can come live with me. But you need to stay in the hospital until I can come get you. And, I mean, we’ll need a house to move in to. I need to find a house for us to stay in. I’ll buy a ticket for as soon as I can, but it’s not going to be today. It’ll be tomorrow or the day after.”

“Are you sure?” Dr. Rob asked. “Moving your Mom to Austin will be a pretty large undertaking —”

“It’s fine. I can make it work,” I said.

“Okay. You should plan to move her as soon as you possibly can,” he said. “And I’d love to speak with you in person more about her needs. Please let me know as soon as possible when you’ll be coming to town so we can schedule an appointment.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It was good meeting you,” Dr. Rob said. “Call this number if you need anything.”

“Okay, I will. Bye, Mom. Love you.”

“Love you too,” she said.

PANIC

Every minute since that phone call has been a devastating miracle, in a way. I hung up the phone with my mom and bought an airplane ticket for the next day. I called my ex and told him what had happened and asked him if he could watch my dog for an unknown amount of time, and he said yes. I called my realtor, a friend, and told him I needed to have a 2-bedroom house near a hospital leased as soon as possible and that I had to leave town so he would have to find it. He said okay. I emailed my bosses and told them I needed to work from Ohio and might need to take FLMA for a few weeks.

And I packed my bags.

The next two — three? — weeks are a blur I can barely remember. I met my mom in the rehabilitation facility; she wanted out as soon as possible. I told her I still needed her to stay there while I got my bearings but that I’d take her home the next day. She cried but eventually agreed. I got the key to her condo and went grocery shopping and called my brother, my dad, my uncle. Life just became a tornado. Planning. Packing. Mom, crying for my meds. Planning. Work, just to tether my sanity to something normal. Packing. More packing. Mom, saying good-bye to her friends for the final time, trying to be happy about the time we were finally spending together, too little and too late and too fast. Swirling. How much of this is true? I do not know. How much have I forgotten?

I remember spending a Friday night going through my mom’s medicines, trying to make sense of what she was supposed to take, how often, and for what. She had a literal mountain of pills. She had them for depression, for anxiety, for her heart, for diabetes, for pain. I couldn’t even remember to drink water every day, and she was supposed to remember to take all of these each and every day or just when she needed one?

I remember one night, sleeping on the couch, Mom woke up screaming, SCREAMING, for her gabapentin, and when I told her she’d already had one, she demanded I give her another.

I remember how happy she was when her cousins all came into town to see her and rescue me from this impossible task I’d undertaken, and at seeing my brother, who came into town for a day.

For a long time, I tried to hold on to everything. Every single thing, all the pain of it, all the guilt of it, all the everything of it, because I was lucky enough to know what was happening when it was happening. But it was just too much. And now? I don’t know how many seconds are missing, or if they’ve just folded themselves on top of each other to become one gigantic second, stuck forever, like acrylic paint one of those resin glass balls. Some seconds stretch out into infinity. Some seconds are ever-lasting.

Like that moment at the airport, finally standing with my mom at the terminal after having gotten through security, when my mom spotted a McDonald’s and decided she wanted a slushy, and I told her no because I couldn’t imagine having to carry all our luggage across even one airport terminal at that moment, and I just needed to sit and rest. For just one minute. I just needed a minute to — my mom was walking away. I guess she hadn’t been asking about McDonalds, she had been telling me she was going to McDonalds. She was walking her walker further and further away. I watched her, intently. The airport was crowded. I wondered if I should try to go get her, because she looked weak and lost. But she made it into the McDonalds, and disappeared for a minute. When she reappeared, she came out into the busy lane of foot traffic, and headed in the wrong direction.

“Mom!” I yelled across the airport and waved, desperate for her to see me. “Mom! MOM!”

Someone else saw me, and saw her, and put the pieces together. He ran up to my mom and turned her around, and I kept waving until my mom gave a sign of recognition and started walking back to me, and I finally breathed a long sigh of relief.

And then the airport speaker crackled to life.

“Attention, airport passengers: The South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas has been canceled due to the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. The City of Austin is asking festival ticket holders to cancel their travel plans and to avoid traveling to Austin at this time. If you need help canceling or rerouting your travel plans, please see a ticketing agent.”

DYING

APRIL 2020

NANCY!” my mom’s voice summoned me from my daily pity party, and I dutifully scraped myself up off the couch I had been lying on to go to her, even though it wasn’t my name she had called. I was the only one here, almost always, but she didn’t know my name so much anymore these days. I told myself that was okay, maybe, and maybe even better in some way, some how, because she wouldn’t know that I was the one failing her so badly right now, the one who couldn’t manage to figure out a way to get the roof fixed, who was struggling to understand the line between too much pain killer and too little, the one who had no idea what to do next at any point in time, other than the one thing I had to do all the time: give my mom her meds, now finally supplied for free by the State of Texas Hospice Program as she had recently, officially,  crossed the line from Barely Living to Dying in Six Months or Less, Guaranteed. The Stage IV Lung Cancer Deaths doesn’t make the daily news.

I walked into her room, old photos from my grandmother’s house covering the walls, vases and vases of dried flowers, ferns and rocks and anything else beautiful, natural and free from the backyard and the 5-minute circle surrounding our home covering hoards of collected nightstands and folding tables leftover from a lifetime of thrifting and keeping — all of it an attempt to make the room look more like a poor-man’s throne than the death prison it really was when looking at it from the dark side of the coin.

She lied in her adjustable twin-sized hospital bed, on loan from the Hospice program, looking at me in despair and misery.

“Yeah, Mom?” I asked her. “What do you need?”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “And I need my medicine. RIGHT NOOOOWWWWWW OWWWWW!!!!” she cried out, grimacing in pain coming from her stomach, her arm, her ankle, her tooth, her brain, her everywhere.

I checked the clock. 2 p.m.; her last pain meds had just been 2 hours ago and were supposed to be every 3 hours but the RoboDoc on the Hospice Line didn’t seem too concerned about giving her more; it promised me time and time again the drug supply was endless, until the end. God, I missed Koreanna, the home health worker my mom’s Medicaid had supplied for us once a week until the shortage of people willing to do the work in person eventually became so severely compromised that they’d all been replaced by Telehealth phone calls and text messages.

“Which do you need first?” I asked her, one arm holding on to her back to support her sitting position and the other reaching for a cup of ice water I’d left sitting on one of the tables, trying to balance both the heavy and the fragile at once. Not once in my life had anyone ever said caring for others was my forte, but here I am, trying and getting an automatic F for Fail as water spilled out of the cup and onto my mom’s nightgown, the back cut apart with scissors so that it wouldn’t be impossible to take off and on when necessary. “Can you drink this?” I asked her.

She delicately accepted the cup to the tip of her lips, barely holding one of her hands up to the cup as if she were pouring the water down her own mouth and it wasn’t me doing it for her, like she didn’t even know I was there holding it up. She looked into my eyes but past them.

“Where is Nancy?” she asked me. “I want Nancy.”

“Nancy’s not here right now but we can call her later if you want,” I said, talking about any one of her cousins, wondering if we would be gifted with five minutes of lucidity so that someone else, anyone else, could take over just the emotional cost of caretaking duties for just a few minutes on the phone.

“Well, where is she?” my mom asked. “We were supposed to go to the Mall later.”

I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so, Mom. The Malls have been closed for a while now. There isn’t any mall around here to go to,” I told her. “The doctor says you’re supposed to just stay in bed as much as possible.”

“Doctor?” she asked, looking around her room. “Where are we? Are we in a hotel?”

“No, Mom. We’re just at home relaxing, just like you wanted. You said you really just wanted to be at home, remember?” I didn’t know if I should tell her about the cancer again. I didn’t want to mention it, or the virus. Instead, I held the cup of water back up to her lips. “You need to go to the bathroom?” I prodded her gently.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I need to go to the bathroom.” And she suddenly tried getting out of bed, like a normal person would have.

And promptly fell to the floor.

I closed my eyes, the sight of her sprawled there too much to bare. Darkness take me. I prayed for just an instant that I would open my eyes and still see nothing, but I opened them and still was not blind.

“Nancy, I can’t get up!” my mom, defeated, not for the first time, her body having aged 20 years in the last year, her brown hair curling around her pale face that just a few days ago had seemed so much more colorful than it was now. Maybe it’s the lighting. “Can you help me up?” I get on my knees pull her hands out to my shoulders, holding on to her wrists as I slowly pull myself up off the ground, giving her all the strength of my back and shoulders, wondering how many times this exercise will keep working, and ten minutes later we are in the bathroom, finally, for a change of diaper, holding it open, one leg then the other and then the meds. Repeat as necessary until the end.

Remember hospitals? Looking back, those places were so nice. They were, actually, a bit like what I’d imagine heaven to be like right now, at this very minute. The heaven of my invention is a hospital room circa 2018. Clean, sterile, doctors and nurses walking around everywhere, charts and graphs of health and medical information, unlimited options for medicines, decades upon decades of experience treating common diseases and illnesses, bright-eyed geniuses who didn’t mind blood and wanted to save lives.  Even the machines were happy back then, well-cared for and maintained and not so tired, neglected, battered.

I need a new heaven. I picture the ocean and my knees sway. The breeze blows my hair, the salt opens my nose, a seabird flies overhead, swooshing and wooshing before landing, the cool powdery sand collapses between my toes and I am in heaven again.

Except this is all as real as it gets, and suddenly I am in a hell of my own making. Every. Fucking. Time.

Where was I? The part I was going to skip. Right. God what I wouldn’t have given for a functioning hospital. I leave the door unlocked at night and pray for someone to shoot us both but every three hours my alarm sounds and we are still both breathing, for now.

I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess.

SURVIVAL

THE NEXT FIVE YEARS

I had tried to re-enter the world after my mom died. I really had. But the first year had been a total failure. I spent that year on the couch. I worked on the couch. Slept on the couch. Worked on the couch. Slept on the couch. Watched television I couldn’t remember watching on the couch. Watched the news from the couch. Regretted having watched the news from the couch. Pet my dog from the couch. Somehow, occasionally, I made it to the grocery store, which proved my will to live wasn’t completely gone. I cried, a lot. I tried calling friends and seeing friends, but I would wind up crying. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t get on their level. The world terrified me. Everything seemed to be crumbling, and I was always panicked that I was sick. Every cough that came, every tickle in the throat, every single beat of headache that came from staring at a screen — all those things came tinted with the sensation of ohshitamIdying? It wasn’t as present as it had been — there were days when it felt like the worry had dissipated into the atmosphere, something that was always there but never fully felt, like violence on television. I tried to avoid it the best I could, but everything about the world and the virus seemed to make it impossible and the days just kept getting more impossibler, on average. We kept track of averages these days, knew them as numbers, though it all really just felt like One Number: Pandemic deaths. 5,000 a day by March 2021. 10,000 a day in August. Steady as she goes at just now, more than 3 million people a year. And even that just doesn’t seem to matter any more, thanks to this newest twist — who knew Nature was such a horror writer? Mankind likes to think it has no predators, but nature finds a way to make us prey.

Anyway. My mom died and the world is so fucked up that literally it happens every single day, and it’s actually always been that way but people underestimate the power of extent — the sheer supply of death we have coupled with the trajectory with which we are cruising toward it creates some kind of mathematical equation with catastrophic consequences. The Simulation Cannot Compute Itself. We Are At The End.

The second year, there had been warning signs that things were even worse than we realized, but we all ignored the hell out of them to try and celebrate any and every victory we had. There were vaccines that came out. Good ones… until not enough people took them. Half the country seemed convinced the vaccines were some kind of government mind-control implant. The entire world became polarized. Everything was black and white but so much was unclear. But even when the first vaccine ultimately failed, and deaths started spiking again, we thought there’d be a new one. We thought we would try again. We thought that we still stood a chance.

The reality: Not So Much.

The third year, the ultimate failure of the first vaccine absolutely destroyed the already strained coexistence we shared after the insurrection and the SCOTUS takeover and the Newsroom Bombings, which destroyed any remnants of the free press, such as it had been. Nobody trusted anything. Nobody understood exactly what had happened. Nobody could put it all together. There were scattered reports from unnamed scientists on social media that the virus was present in semen, but not even the scientists knew what that meant, exactly. Just the rumors were enough to fuel Elitist concerns about low birth rates and the nationwide criminalization of abortion immediately. Suddenly every advertisement in Aurora’s life was a pregnancy campaign.

The world just kept falling into chaos. Wildfires spread across California and into Oregon. A super tornado destroyed 500 homes and 50,000 acres of crops in Kentucky. Flash flooding killed 10 people in Texas while drought decimated the state’s cattle ranches. A heat wave killed 1,200 people and caused a 7-day blackout across the entire Southeast. Vaccines came and worked for a while and then stopped working again overnight. Schools closed down because nobody could protect the students from gun violence. Businesses closed down because people couldn’t afford child care, let alone new clothes. Orphanages filled up with children whose parents had killed themselves, or died from the virus, or been shot, until someone from the Census came through and demanded that every family sign up as foster parents.

Someone on YouTube actually kidnapped, tied up and began to eat the disgraced social media millionaire Mark Rodgers, who had started a recent conspiracy chain about demonic cannibalistic leftist celebrities who apparently believed in eating the blood and body of their peers would bring them closer to God? Anyway, an F.B.I SWAT team went in and shot him dead with a spray of about 400 bullets when the whole thing was still streaming online and it was all anyone talked about — for. a. day. And then it was Some Other Mother Fucking Thing and I don’t know, I got lost outside of it, which was the only saving grace of my life at the time.

I wasn’t the only one sliding down an avalanche of never-ending bad news, not by a long shot. There were millions of us traumatized from all the dying, according to the news, which got one step better and two steps worse day by day by day by day until The Day when President Pence stepped up onto the podium and told all of America, hey, you know that disease we all got but pretended didn’t even exist? Turns out, it’s actually making us all infertile. Please, if you are pregnant or think you may be pregnant, see your doctor immediately, and if you’re of child bearing age, you must see us for immediate insemination treatments to help ensure the Continuation of All Mankind. Turns out, I really could not get pregnant.

And OH WAIT! We aren’t done yet! Floods and fires and poison air tunnels and the Last Bee on Earth Died, Can Science Bring them Back?

The apocalypse isn’t one event but a series of them. The apocalypse is what happens when bad things stop coming in threes and start coming in multiples of threes — in nines and fifteens and twenty-sevens, when they all turn into a timeline of 102,000 things that all happened Yesterday, and it happens when people stopped caring Long Ago. There was just no way to keep up with the news of the hour, no way to stand and hold up a system so fallen, no way to keep fighting against all the things we couldn’t even really see — until there one day, there was. An emergency notification came across my phone, a video of  President Harris speaking, headline in bold: WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES POTENTIAL ‘MIRACLE GENE’ STUDY. A flash, then: AMERICANS SEARCH FOR INFERTILITY CURE.

I had ignored it. Miracles? At this point?

Some things along the way had seemed like progress. NASA launched a new telescope into space; it got discovered by an alien race of artificial superintelligence beings — I’ll call them the God race — that, it turned out, didn’t want to be discovered. But of course, we didn’t know that at the time, when the telescope was focused on light billions of years old, capturing the most beautiful images of space — of God — the world had ever seen.

ISOLATION

There were times I was not on my couch. Times where I was able to get up and paint, or managed to cook myself dinner. But mostly I hung on to the memories I had left of my mom, stewed on the guilt I felt for not having done better, for not having been stronger. Mostly I cried myself to sleep and tried to think of reasons to live through this never-ending mess happening in the world. I couldn’t think of a single one.

Friends seemed a thousand miles away even though they were all over town. My significance to anyone else in the world bordered on zero, and some implied it was in the negative. One time, I drove to a friend’s house just randomly, because I missed human contact so much, and messaged. them outside. I was sobbing. There were cars everywhere. They told me to come in and hang out. They were having a party. Everyone was doing shrooms. They laughed at something when I walked in, and I burst into tears. After that, I was always “too much” for people to deal with. They couldn’t handle me or deal with me. I was nothing more than negative energy and I wanted so badly to just disappear. To become a gas and dissipate. That was my happy thought — what it would be like to be weightless, formless. The consciousness of existence without name, without shape.

It was the painting that kept me going. The painting that got me off the couch, that forced me to remember the places and things I’d once loved and that eventually got me back to those places and things and existing again, at least on and off. A good day would be followed by an okay day, followed by a bad month until I had a day where I forced myself to be okay again.

But even on my good days, I was too tired for miracles.

One day, I really, truly, intended to kill myself. It had taken me months of planning, of bargaining with myself, of research and failed teletherapy sessions. After my Reason for Even Existing died and my Purpose had expired, I had driven out to my favorite secret spot, remnants from an abandoned botanical garden on the outskirts of town with winding trails sprinkled with sculptures. The owners had died of covid without a will. Fundraising had dried up as more and more people began suffering long-term effects of repeated covid exposures. Fewer and fewer people had the energy to leave. their homes or the money for luxury as jobs for the chronically ill dried up and took the health care that had gone with them down the sinkhole, too. Still, it was a beautiful place even when not maintained for anyone wanting and willing, and I had been out here often to try and keep the trails visible and walkable.

My favorite spot was between two Japanese maple trees next to an old koi pond, dragon flies buzzing all about. I loved it out there and I wanted it to be the last thing I ever saw when I closed my eyes for the last time. But Joey had already been sitting in the shade there when I’d gotten there, short and skinny, wearing lightweight khaki pants and a t-shirt with a rainbow-colored “Love” scrolled across the front, their brown shoulder length hair messy and curly. Everything about them was both masculine and feminine, from the way they sat on the, their arms wrapped around their knees and the way their dimples deepened their smile. They’d been sitting there, a stranger to me then, all alone, relaxing and taking in the rolling clouds as they moved across the sky. I hadn’t been expecting to run into anyone on that hill, it’s a little off the regular path, so I hadn’t had any other plan of where to go or what to do. And when they’d smiled and waved at me to welcome me to the hill, it just seemed awkward to leave.

“I’m Joey,” they lifted their chin up with some amount of friendliness as their hand patted and waved at the grassy patch next to them. “I’m glad you’re here, this shouldn’t just be witnessed by only one person.” They gestured toward the clouds, which were playful today. “This is the only moment that will ever be like it, you know? This sunset? It’s completely unique.” They noticed my hammock, hanging off my backpack. “Do you come here often?” They asked.

I felt the uncomfortable, odd shape and weight and nature of the supplies I was carrying.

“Yeah, I needed some fresh air and a good walk,” I said. “It’s been a while since I’ve made it out here. I’m Aurora.”

They nodded. “I think I’ve seen you here once or twice before,” they said. “I recognize you. But I normally see you when you’re busy focusing on something else.”

”Yeah, I’ve been coming same time every few weekends for a few months now.” I said. “It’s a peaceful place to escape to.”

“What are you escaping from?” they asked.

I laughed and shrugged.

“Oh, I don’t know. The past. The present. The future,” I said. “It’s all just pretty horrible in this timeline, you know?”

They laughed back.

“Timeline?” They said, pointing their finger at a dragon fly and attempting to trace its flightpath in the air. “Like the timeline of a dragonfly’s flight? Random and standing still and then light speed ahead? You want a nicer timeline than this? What if this is the best one, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard?”

I sat down. “Wow,” I pondered aloud. “Those are some thoughts to think about that I hadn’t had on my own. What if the timelines aren’t exactly straight? What if they are random with the wind, looped together into infinity? What if they get knotted together over and over and over again and we never know what timeline we’re on as we move from moment to moment to moment and that’s why it’s all so confusing?”

Joey nodded in appreciation.

“That makes a lot of sense to me, that knot thing,” they said. “Our decisions are like turning points, which get knotted together and as we’re trying to follow along, we can get lost like I got lost trying to follow that dragon fly just now. But we can always get unloose again. We can always pick up at a new knot, or where there is no knot.”

“Yeah, I get that feeling all the time, that I’m knotted or lost or don’t understand where I am or why I’m heading down this timeline when there must be someway out,” I said. “That’s how it feels watching the days unravel, like on Monday I’m in timeline A and everything is horrible and I’m trying to figure out if I should fight the system or hide in my mind and on Tuesday it’s a beautiful day outside and I’m motivated and on Wednesday it seems like it’s both, like everything is horrible and I’m just doing my best to get by but it’s all horrible and I just don’t want to watch it all unfold.”

“Well I don’t think we have to. They say in physics that every possible outcome of a moment exists, and every possible moment leading up to this one exists, so I believe in theory, anyway — and I’m not a physicist, I could just be spouting bullshit as I try to understand real shit — but I believe that every moment is full of infinite possibilities. We just have to push the wheel in the right direction,” Joey mused.

“Oh, there’s a wheel in this analogy now?” I asked. “Is that like, the force that moves along the time lines? Free will? Our spiritual journey as it interweaves along the timelines?”

Joey laughed.

“I don’t know,” they said. “This is kind of all coming to me on the fly, you know how that goes? But yeah. What you said makes sense again. But I think maybe instead of being the force, the wheel is more like the world in which all these timelines exist.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, exactly, not for a while, so we sat in silence for quite a bit, listening to birds chirping and getting lost in the dragon flies’ flight paths.

“I wonder why their paths are like that,” I say at last, allowing the wheel to take a backseat in my brain while the thought simmered somewhere in my soul.

“Should I Google it?” Joey asked, reaching for their cell phone. “You want me to Google it, don’t you?”

I shrugged. "It might be rhetorical? How would we ever know?”

“Yeah,” Joey answered. “There are no answers. But did you know dragonflies can operate all their wings independently? And that it’s really amazing, actually?”

I laughed and watched as a toad popped his head up in the pond, sending glistening ripples across the water.

“I did know that, yeah,” I said. “And I knew it’s amazing, too.”

“Sometimes it’s easy to forget about all the amazing things out there,” Joey said, twisting their neck from east to west. “But they’re out there, everywhere.”

I ran my hands through the grass, feeling it for what suddenly felt like the first time.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been so focused on trying to hold on to all these horrible things lately that I guess I haven’t had much time to focus on all these other things… but I guess that’s why I came out here today, to remember.”

They looked at me.

“Why have you focused on horrible things?” they asked, surprised. “Most people who do that do it on accident.”

I laughed.

“Sometimes it’s the most horrible things that matter the most,” I said. “My mom died and a lot happened and… I don’t know. I want to remember. And I need to forget.”

The wind picked up a little and blew my hair into my face; Joey reached over and moved my hair out of my face.

“Why do you need to forget?” Joey asked.

"It’s too much. It’s too much weight. It’s too much guilt. It’s too much sorrow. It’s just, too much for me to bear,” I said.

Joey nodded.

“So don’t bear it,” They said. “Let your soul bare it for you.”

“Isn’t that the same thing? Am I not my soul?” I asked them.

“I don’t know,” They shrugged. “Perhaps our souls much bigger than we are individually? Perhaps there are some of us who share the same soul. Perhaps God is our soul and everyone shares the same soul, and perhaps there is not one God but many Gods with souls and some of us have a different God and a different soul?”

I laughed.

“Perhaps. You know, I’ve been in such a dark place lately. But you just made me remember the happiest thought I’d ever had.”

They widened their eyes and smiled. “Ohhhh, what’s that?” They pried. “The longer you take to answer, the more I’m dying to know.”

“It’s that I’m an avatar for my soul,” I said. “Like Mario in Mario’s World. We’re all just down here, avatars in a video game, collecting points to help our souls grow, and when we die, all that happens is we start over from the beginning. Over and over and over again, but as someone slightly different in a different time, and we try again.”

“So you think all this is just a simulation?” Joey asked.

I laughed and caught sight of a dragonfly flying from waterlily to waterlily.

“I mean, just a simulation? Look at how incredible it is! Whether it’s just a simulation or not shouldn’t take away from the astounding beauty and how incredible the algorithm is, now advanced our souls or our Creators must be,” I said. “Everyone’s so afraid of dying, but not me. I think death holds so many answers. Maybe it’s a dark void of nothing, but it’s the one thing that ties all of this — all of it — together.”

“Woah, there, for someone named after the Northern Lights, you’re pretty dark,” Joey said. “If death holds the answers, that means we’re not supposed to have them, and I’m guessing there’s a pretty good reason. I don’t know what it is, but your soul needs you right here. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

I nodded.

“You mean, you wouldn’t have been here.”

Joey suddenly looked at her more intensely, their hand coming up to brush my face. “I don’t know why, exactly,” they said. “But I have an overwhelming desire to kiss you right now.”

I hadn’t kissed anyone in years. The pandemic had made it so dangerous, too dangerous to even consider. But suddenly I was starving for human contact, and my hands moved to cradle Joey’s face.

“Me too,” I whispered.

And we kissed. For eight long seconds that stretched out and out and out…

Eight seconds can change your life.

RECONNECTION

The next day, I couldn’t get my mind off Joey and our conversation, the night-and-day difference between how I’d been feeling yesterday and how I felt today, all because some stranger I’d never spoken to before had shared their thoughts with me, had had a real conversation with me. Had had real intimacy with me. 

They didn’t feel like a stranger anymore.

But we hadn’t exchanged numbers. After those eight seconds, Joey’s phone had buzzed with some kind of notification about something, and Joey had gotten up. “I’m sure I’ll see you somewhere again soon,” they’d said. “Probably right back here.” And I’d said okay and watched them walk way, somehow sure of it, too.

Now, for the first time, I didn’t want to stay on the couch. I didn’t want to cry and I didn’t want to sleep. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do, either. It had been so long since I had done something. Should I go back to the spot I’d met Joey already? No, that would be wishful thinking, and I would wind up disappointed. I needed to go somewhere else. Remind myself of more of those things that I’d forgotten about, that had only seemed to cease to exist. 

And that’s how I ran into my old friend Meadow on the Greenbelt. 

I didn’t notice her at first. I was lost in thought, and she came up jogging from behind me. 

“Aurora?” she started walking when she got to me. “How have you been? It’s been a while!”

“Yeah… I was…. I’ve been… I’ve been pretty busy with work… and I guess I kind of… stopped doing much else… with everything going on… ” I looked for a fitting explanation but burst into tears instead. “It is really great seeing you here.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay! I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” she said. “I know things have just been so hard on everyone. So much has happened. The only way I’ve kept going is by coming out here on my days off.” He swept his hands across the empty landscape. “I love this place, and think about you every time I’m out here. It’s been good but hasn’t really been the same without you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have been out here. I don’t know why I stopped coming, I just … I guess maybe just the summer was too hot? And then I got too lazy… how have you been?”

"It’s been a little rough, you know… Clark’s dad died from the virus over the summer and that was really hard on her, that’s kind of why I disappeared for a bit, and then we were actually going to have a baby for a brief minute but then she miscarried early and we wound up breaking up, it was just too much to deal with…”

“I am so sorry,” I said, my voice cracking and nose sniffling, taking a right so that we’d be walking next to each other on the wider trail with the sun on our backs. “That sounds incredibly painful and … traumatic… is she okay?”

“It was rough there for a while, but she’s living with her mom in Nebraska. We talk about once a week… she seems happy there,” she said. “What about you, how have you been?”

“Well, ummm…. you know, it’s been a struggle. I guess I didn’t realize why you, uhhhh, disappeared over the summer, everything you guys were going through, and things just got so … shitty… lonely… I tried searching for my dad through one of those ancestry kits and found out he had died of the virus just two weeks before and then I lost my job last month because I couldn’t concentrate and was making too many mistakes…”

We walked around a corner and I stopped, Meadow stopping in lockstep with me. Ahead of us, a deer that had been leisurely walking across an abandoned lot spotted us and ran, and another deer eating grass in the empty thickness of the winter woods picked up her head and looked directly at us. The three of us stood, frozen in silence, waiting for something to happen when the oddest thing did happen: The deer started slowly walking toward us.

“What is happening?” Meadow whispered under her breath my way. “Should we, like, turn around?”

“I … don’t know…” I said, quietly so as to not scare the creature. “I’ve never had a deer walk toward me before. I’ve only ever seen them run away?”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a deer in person before,” he said.

I smiled. The deer kept walking toward us, down the path, the gap between us closing to 30 yards, then 20, then 10…

“I think we’re gonna be alright,” I whispered. “Just, you know, stay calm. Be cool. They don’t normally attack.”

The deer stopped at four feet away, so close we could almost touch her — almost. Her presence took up the entire space of the trail and she stood stock still, unmoving.

“I’m cool,” Meadow said. “This is cool. We’re cool.”

“Hey there girl,” I said. “What do you want? What …. are you doing?”

“Maybe… we should back up?” Meadow said. “Go around her? Turn around?”

She took another step toward us, the brown and white hairs on her face coming into sharp focus, her dark eyes large and wary, like wild eyes always are. She stared us down, waiting for us to make our first moves.

“Let’s… go around her?” I said, moving slowly beyond the trail’s edge and into the dead grass next to it, one step at a time, as Clark moved to the other edge, giving the deer the middle and inching along until we were finally on the other side of her.

I turned sideways to watch what she would do next.

And did the craziest thing I’ve seen a wild animal do, ever: She turned around, too. She followed us for the rest of the day.

At first, Meadow and I became pretty quiet, our earlier conversation on hold. It was like she was some kind of magical magnetic field I didn’t want to break; Meadow later said he was too terrified of being stalked by a wild animal to speak until I broke the silence, but even he agreed that there was something almost mythological in the way she followed us — “stalked us,” Meadow had insisted. But eventually, we started talking again, first in a low quiet whisper as if she might overhear our secrets and then normally when it became clear that this deer wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t going to hurt us, was just … following us.

“She probably thinks we have some kind of food?” I wondered out loud. “This is why you’re not supposed to feed wildlife.”

“Maybe… or maybe she’s curious?”

“Humans are a shitty thing to be curious about,” I said. “Half of us would murder her for dinner if they could.”

“Probably more like 90 percent these days,” he said. “You’re not the only one out of work. People are hungry.”

“Shhhhh….she can hear you!” I admonished him, hit him across the arm jokingly, the first time I had physically touched another person in months, and laughed out loud, a laughter that he joined in on and turned into something more, until I had to stop walking for just a minute to catch my breath.

“I promise I’m not dying or anything,” I said. “I think that was maybe the first time I’ve really laughed in … a while.”

“Me too,” he said.

We hiked all the way until the hill over the creek, the one where I had planned to end things on just less than two hours earlier. The one we used to sit at when we came out here after my mom died, as the world was just starting to get crazy, when we had still been trying to find some kind of acceptable Normal. The deer took a spot drinking water from the creek, and as we sat there watching, four others emerged from various spots over hills and around corners and came to drink from the creek, too.

“You know, I haven’t seen many deer out here yet, but I have noticed this kind of thing happening to me more and more,” Clark said. “Last week I saw a whole family of rabbits hopping down the trail, a mom and eight babies. I counted. I thought that was wild.”

“Weird,” I said. “Did you start using a new cologne or shampoo or something? Are you carrying herbal snacks with you? Maybe it’s something they are smelling?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m starting to think maybe it’s my enhancement, or something to do with it.”

“Your enhancement?” I asked, surprised. “You got the shot?”

“Yeah, I got it,” she said. “I’m living at The Laboratory now. They give all of us our own studio suite. I was just so low after Julie left me that I didn’t know what else to do, and it seemed like a good way to try and help stop the craziness. You never know if an enhancement will somehow lead to a cure.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it… what was it like?”

“For me it was easy,” she said. “But I definitely saw some things that were not easy. Some things that were scary. Twelve people in my group didn’t make it. One guy, his body turned blue and froze, then shattered when the researcher touched it. Another guy, his skin started melting. A janitor had to peel his body off the floor.” He shuddered. “It was … grotesque.”

“Did they scream?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“They put us under for it,” she said. “They never seemed to wake up. But I woke up fine. No discernable changes yet. There’s testing every other day. It’s pretty tedious and time-consuming but nothing’s been painful. I think they really want people to sign up.”

“Should I sign up?”

She smiled.

“If you did, we could be rookies.”

I nodded my head and thought again about my backpack and its contents, what I had been planning on doing and everything that had happened in the last two hours.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. “I think I will.”

She shook her head.

“On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t,” she said. “Half of us don’t make it. I’d feel too guilty if something bad happened to you.”

I nodded and started to unzip my bag but paused. I opened my mouth, then closed it. And then I sighed and smiled, a little sad.

“I feel like I’ve already been through the worst,” I said. “Every day now is a gift.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean…You just never know what’s going to happen,” I said, and shrugged. “But when the universe pulls you in a direction, there’s no use fighting it. I was looking for direction, and I found you.”

JANUARY 2024

Signing up had been easy, at least at first. An online questionaire asked started by asking how how old I was: 35. How many dependents I had: 0. How many living family members I had: 0. How much money I had in my bank account:  >$1,000. Whether I had health insurance: No. When I had last had the virus: 18 months ago. Whether I had any lingering effects: No. Whether I had any pre-existing medical conditions: No. Whether I had ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder: Yes. Check: PTSD. Bipolar. Depression. Anxiety. Whether I was aware that more than 60 percent of animals that had gone through the gene enhancement procedure had experienced negative consequences, with more than half of those dying within two weeks.

I checked that box, too.

Immediately a new screen popped up, inviting me to a video chat with a Department of Health and Medicine research scientist whose name flashed across the bottom of the screen: Dr. Sunil Chadha. He sat close to the screen, welcoming me full-faced; dark-skinned, handsome with a deep smile and colorful eyes.

“Hello Aurora,” he said, smiling at me through the screen.

“Hello,” I said back. “That was fast.”

He nodded.

“Science doesn’t have time to waste,” he said. “And neither do we, I’m afraid. I’m happy to be meeting you. You seem to meet all our initial requirements for our Gene Enhancement study and we’d like for you to come into our offices this week for further evaluation. But first, I wanted to give you a chance to ask any questions you might have about the benefits, the risks, the process and the requirements of the study.”

“How much do participates make?” I asked.

“All participates will receive $1,000 added directly to their accounts once they have checked in for their initial evaluation. Once you’ve completed the evaluation, we will send another $2,000 directly into your account whether or not you’re accepted into the program. If you’re accepted into the program, you will be provided with your own on-site suite, a fully-stocked kitchen and delivery menu, a cleaning service and other lifestyle perks. You’ll also be given a monthly stipend of $4,000,” he said. “The community offers swimming pools, hiking trails, a gym and other community benefits — whatever participants need during their stay.”

"How long is the stay?” I asked.

“Participants who survive the initial Gene Enhancement process must agree to live and stay on-site for at least the next 30 days and up to 30 years at the behest of the government,” he said, while photographs of the campus flashed across one side of the screen. “While you will have freedom to move around the facility and perhaps off-campus at your leisure, you will be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week by our scientific and security staff. Your entire life will transpire over our live social media channels to offer complete transparency to the American people. You will be subjected to daily testing for up to four hours a day,” he said, photographs of the serene-looking stone-grey facility still taking their turns across the screen: A well-tended sculpture garden in a central rotunda. The beaches of a remote island where the facility was located. A state-of-the-art gymnasium with an Olympic-length swimming pool. “Once in the study, there is no getting out without the approval of the Health Research Board. Anyone who tries to leave the facility unmonitored will face punishment.”

He paused, then smiled.

“I know it’s a lot to take in, but do you understand?” he asked. “This is a dangerous procedure. We do not know what will happen to you as a result of the procedure, and we must monitor you very closely in case you become a danger to yourself or others. This is cutting-edge science that, until it became clear that most recent infertility challenge poses an existential threat to mankind, was deemed much too dangerous to move forward with. But it could also lead to the breakthrough that could save humanity from collapsing and you will be surrounded by the best scientific minds the nation has to offer.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Why do you want to do this?” he asked me. “The survival rate is ugly and the unknown is terrifying to most people. Why aren’t you terrified?”

I shrugged. I felt him studying me, his eyes moving along my face, trying to read my mind, to get at a truth. Always a scientist, I thought, and I felt at ease. There was something about him that I trusted, something about him that excited me, something about him that made me think the way out of everything was through him.

“Because it seems like the easiest and most selfless way to die,” I said. "And because I need the money.”

I thought about Meadow. 

“And because a friend believes it could save humanity.”

Taking the Shot

A month later, I walked into The Laboratory for the first time. The Laboratory was the newest, most advanced human genetics tech medicine company in the world, built in Austin as a joint adventure between tech giant Neuron Lusk and the pharmacueticals giant Fisher. Why? Neuron Lusk was worried that humanity would be wiped out before its technology was ready to move humanity onto the Cloud. The four blue-whale shaped buildings were spectacles in of themselves, surrounded by a reflective pond on all sides. They sat on the south side of Lady Bird Lake where Auditorium Shores once was and were the tallest in the city, each coated in glass mirrors that reflected the old Austin skyline sitting across the lake.

Security across the campus was tight. I had given my name at the front gate, where a valet attendant had taken my luggage and my car and called for an escort to usher me toward my final destination. I willfully fought through the panic that came with knowing that all my possessions had been confiscated to be pilfered through by strangers, that my transportation had been locked up for safekeeping until someone else granted me the freedom of having car keys again. What was I doing? Where was I going? But Scott, my usher, had done this walk before, and as we crossed the campus he did what he could to put my mind at ease, pointing out a floating pollinator garden on the right (“We aren’t just trying to save humanity here — we’re trying to save the world”) and the state-of-the-art aquarium on the left with its huge coral landscape that stretched across the north side of the pond, distorting the view of downtown Austin.

“We’re discovering that a number of the Enhancements survivors receive are common to sea creatures, though we are still studying why,” Scott told me. Like everyone in the building, he was wearing two layers of surgical masks on his face, and I focused intensely on trying to hear what he was saying. “But it turns out that many sea creatures are incredibly adaptable to their surroundings and can recover from disease quite well. Many of our residents consider the aquarium their favorite place on campus. We don’t have time to check it out yet, but you’ll see it soon enough.”

He put his hand on my back and steered me toward the Great Hall, a tall, triangular sail of a building with mirrored walls outside that reflected the gardens and the clouds. Inside, the main lobby was 30 stories high, built of marble and granite, with moving walls showing videos of the Earth’s most beautiful locations. Waterfalls tumbled from the ceiling to the ground and birds chirped over the intercom. Ferns and grasses surrounded a koi pond in the middle. Scientists and researchers of all stripes walked around in white coats, while other participants ambled about in blue uniforms. All were masked.

“Masks are required everywhere on campus except your individual dorm room. No more than four people are allowed in any dorm room at any one time, and masks must be worn in the halls and common areas. If you have a problem with that, you cannot participate in the program.” He looked at me, and I nodded. “We deliver 10 masks to each room three times a week.”

Scott gave the security guards at the door my name, and I was given an official name card, which he stuck on to my shirt with a warning to never take it off. We made our way to a glass elevator and Scott pushed a button for the top floor, floor 42.

“Everything in here has meaning,” he said. “There are 42 floors just in case the answer we’re looking for is 42”

“42?” I asked.

“Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” he said. The elevator sped its way to the top like a roller coaster. “You’re entering a whole new world.”

The doors opened into another lobby, this one crystal white — white walls, white chairs, white couches, white tables, white, white, white, though every wall had four-foot tall mirror running across its length. Six people sat in various chairs, waiting, like at a doctor’s offices back when doctors had offices and our health care system was working. They each had tablets and headphones and looked to be filling out forms.

“These are your fellow classmates, if you will,” Scott said. “We try to start everyone off in groups of 10, not too large or too small. We’ve got three more participants coming today, they should be here shortly. In the meantime, we just need you to verify the information we have about you and to answer some questions about your personality, spirituality, upbringing and the like. It’s all just so that we can understand who you are as a person and track anything that might be determining the Enhancements our participants wind up receiving.”

“I thought I already did all of that online?”

“We just like to verify,” he said, “and many of these are a different question.”

He handed me a tablet and gestured to an open couch. “Make yourself comfortable and if you need anything, just press this button and I will … reappear.” A smile and a laugh crossed his face momentarily as he stepped back into the elevator. “I’m a magician that way.”

I sat down on the couch Scott had directed me and snuck a look at the other six people in the room, all of whom were looking at me to various degrees — some outright and others out of the corners of their eyes. There was a man with blonde hair who looked to be in his 30s and another man about my age, obviously good-looking with tan brown skin and jet black hair. There were two women in their late 20s or early 30s, one with messy hair and glasses and the other, a black woman who looked like a long-distance runner, athletic through and through, not an air of anything feminine about her. And two younger guys sat together in the corner, wearing tattered clothes and holding hands tightly.

I gave a small wave to the group and turned my tablet on. There were 5 parts to the form: History, Personality, Spirituality, Vision and Goals, and an Intelligence Assessment. But the questions weren’t the standard multiple-choice questions, or ranking something 1-5. Instead, they were a long branch of scenarios and options, “what would you do if…” And the last question for each set was open-ended: Please tell us why your history/personality/spirituality/goals/intelligence led you to sign up for the Enhancement procedure.

Four hours later, done with the forms and with the other three participants — two women and a man — having joined us, a woman finally came out from a hidden door in the room’s central wall. She was tall - maybe the tallest woman I’d ever seen, and she wore thin heels that made her another five inches taller. She had curly brunette hair and wore a red lipstick so bright that its color shined through the mask fabric, which somehow added to her commanding presence. There was just no way she’d ever been ignored.

“Hello everyone. I’m Melody and I’m your Intake Advisor here at The Laboratory. If y’all will just follow me, our team has read through your intake answers and we are ready to answer all your questions and help prepare you mentally and physically for next month, when you will all receive The Shot.”

There was no natural light inside the Laboratory but every room was quite bright. As we walked up a spiraled ramp, textured and patterned wallpaper helped to hide the tiny cameras present throughout, and some kind of projector shone a series of numbers of moving lines and numbers across the walls in all different colors, and I realized I was walking through a giant body scanner that seemed to be measuring my brain waves, heart beat and other vital signs every step of the way. Melody led me into a large room in the center that functioned as the spine of the whole building, it’s towering walls rising 100 stories to the top, filled with plants of all kinds raining down, the most spectular waterfall of plantlife I had ever seen.

“Is this for real?” I asked, looking up so steaply my neck hurt.

Melody laughed. “What is real, these days?” she asked, gesturing toward a seat at the large circular table made of glass in the middle, at the center of which electric-looking flares of lights danced about inside a clear tube the shape of an octopus, eight tentacles directing the electrical currents from the center into different areas of the building.

It took a minute to take in the number of seats at the table — about 40.

“You’re saying all that is fake?” I asked.

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “It isn’t real or artificial, as we say. It’s the perfect combination of both.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “I guess it is.”

“Ladies, gentlemen!” Melody said. “It’s time for some introductions! Though of course some of us need no introduction,” and she nodded to the two men seated across the room in the largest chairs — Nueral Lusk and Stanford Price, two of the richest people on the planet and two people who I had no trust in at all, but who were unfortunately but objectively the best chance available to save all of humanity, if that was even their real intention.

Neural was a longtermist - rumors were circulating that he believed only in saving the most intelligent people so that he could upload their brains into an immortal supercomputer that was supposed to allow its formerly human inhabitants the freedom to manifest any thought into a virtual reality that felt as real as our own world felt. And Stanford Price was a fundamentalist Christian who had just the other week given an interview on Daytime Soup about how he believed only Christians should remain standing when Jesus came following the next Holy War, which he believed we were on the brink of beginning with Russia and China. “This isn’t about economics or trade or communism,” he had said. “This is about the right to exist in God’s world and being His chosen ones to inherent the Earth. We must follow God’s plan for us."

I almost hadn’t come here after that, but I knew I didn’t have a real choice - all the money in the world had been funneled to these two regular-looking men now citing before me, dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts. We’d given them the control long ago, trusted the entire universe to their two super-charged brains just because they knew how to generate a profit better than anyone else. If there was one thing these two knew how to do, it was making a product that generated a profit, and saving humanity would certainly generate an unbelievable profit for them, one way or another.

I realized by brain had wandered again when I noticed that Melody was now five chairs down from Neuron, introducing a powerful-looking woman I didn’t know if I had ever seen before. I was about to give up control of my entire life to this group of people, and I had missed her name, and the name of. 4 others at the table. What was wrong with me?

The next person, I caught. His name was Steven Larking, and he was the Vice President of Research and Development, the lead scientist at the Laboratory. “This is the most advanced scientific study of the human genome and medication ever attempted,” he said. “Truly, every day here is a gift to the future. We’re learning things about the human body and the human mind every single day thanks to this genomic trigger sequence. It’s the most exciting thing happening in the world, and it wouldn’t be possible without you all.” He paused. “We appreciate your bravery and your complete devotion and dedication toward the continuation of humanity.”

“Thank you, Steven,” Melody nodded and took a step toward the next person, another guy but this time I was guessing he was in his late 20s. He had long wild hair that seemed to have a mind of its own and the mannerisms of someone who drank too much coffee. “And this,” Melody said, “Is Bruce Planters, the head of our algorithm and technology division. Bruce makes sure all the data we take and keep stays safely in our hands and does what we want it to do, and that we are able to learn as much as possible from it as fast as possible.”

Bruce nodded. “That’s me, alright, controlling the technology so that it’s used for good instead of evil in this quest of ours to save humanity.”

Melody moved on to the last of the Board, as I had already taken to calling the heavy weights staring at us all intently from across the circle. It was another woman, one of only two in the group. A Black woman, she was tall, curvy but also thin, her hair pulled back from her face in a carefully styled pony tail, if you could call the hair on someone so put together a pony tail. “And last, but certainly not least, this is Dr. Alexandra Brooks, the chair of the Joint Task Force of the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Disease and Disease Prevention. She serves as the liaison between The Laboratory and the the federal government.”

Dr. Alexandra Brooks had piercing eyes, and she took a moment to look at each of the 30 people before her individually and momentarily, one at a time. For a minute, nobody said a word.

“Hello, and thank you for coming,” she said. “I started my career as a soldier in the United States Army, so I know a little of what it is like to agree to the idea of giving up your life to your country, to the greater good, to the mission. But never did I face the odds any of you are facing. Among my many duties, I am here to tell you your country appreciates your service and sacrifice, and we will honor you as heroes. The future is uncertain, but it will owe you a debt of the highest magnitude.”

After that, all the participant’s names and faces became an immediate blur to me as my mind absorbed the details of my surroundings and this situation. How had I, of all people, just an ordinary girl without a family, nothing at all extraordinary about me, wind up in this room with two of the richest, most powerful, most scientifically intelligent, perhaps most evil men on the planet, offering to sacrifice my life up in the hopes that I, an absolute nobody, might hold one of the keys in this apparent equation for saving all of humanity? What was I doing here?

Meadow.

SIGHT

March 2024

After the shot, I slept. And I slept. And I slept. I slept in the middle of a small domed room made entirely of two-way mirrors, every inch of me reflecting back to myself and on display for whoever gathered on the other side to watch me as I slept. And while I slept, the Laboratory monitored every aspect of my body and brain function, watching as dreams unfolded inside my head, collecting the brain waves and striking neurons as datasets of ones and zeros that their algorithm then uncoded into a timelapse of artificially generated pictures that showed interpretations of all the things I had dreamed about.

At first, I was dreaming about my mom. In my dreams, I would be back sleeping again on the floor of her room, being woken up in the middle of the night to her pain-filled screams, of sleep walking, of fumbling for the morphine that was designed to both sooth her pain and kill her, of having her body crumble to dust and turn to wind before my eyes, of having her floating around my apartment afterward. I dreamed of her spirit watching TV with me, of her ghost pulling me out of bed and dragging me to my computer to start a work day, of her watching me lay sobbing on my old couch for hours at a time after she died telling me that it wasn’t so bad, that she didn’t mind, that not having her body any more had turned out to be a relief, not a pain. I dreamed of conversations I had never had with her, but had had with myself after she died, as if they had actually happened.

Normally I don’t remember my dreams, but when I woke up from The Shot, I felt like I remembered the whole thing, and as I recollected my dreams to Dr. Horn, a kind older man with circular glasses and a balding head who reminded me of my high school English teacher, the pictures generated by the brain wave interpreting imaging machine flashed across the mirrored glass walls, repeating themselves everywhere I looked.

“This figure right here, that accurately resembles your mother?” Dr. Horn asked, stopping the scrolling timelapse of images on an older woman with short curly brown hair, graying and falling out, weak and unmoving, transforming second by second as the generated timelapse aged her again before my eyes.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s how I remember her.”

The memories were still so vivid, it had been hard to remember her any other way.

“And what about this?” he pointed toward a white fluffy, semi-transparent swirl that had started taking form on the images after she died. "What’s this swirl here?”

“That’s… that’s her, too. That’s what happened, or at least, the visualization of what I felt had happened, and how I had visualized it at the time in my thoughts or, I guess, my daydreams, my imagination, when it was happening.”

“So are you saying that after your mom died, you saw swirls in the air?” he asked, skeptical.

“No…. I’m saying I imagined swirls in the air after she died. And I, like, felt them, but more of an internal type feeling than a physical feeling,” I said. “Or at least, I think.”

“So would you say these pictures are of a dream?” Dr. Horn said. “Or are they of a memory?”

“I mean… can’t it be both?” I asked. “I was asleep, wasn’t I?”

“Oh yes, but we can certainly remember things in our dreams,” Dr. Horn said. “I’m just wondering if this dream took creative license or if it was more of a play-by-play of reality.”

“I’d say it’s pretty much a play-by-play of what reality had felt like to me, but kind of an exageration it actually looked like,” I said. “I mean, she didn’t turn to dust before my eyes the way she turned in my dream,” I said, flipping to that part of the timelapse. “But that’s certainly what it felt like, and what it still feels like.”

Dr. Horn nodded, considering my answer.

“The brainwaves during your post-shot sleep were the strongest and most active we’ve seen,” Dr Horn said. “They appear to be the only abnormal anomaly following the procedure for you. Do you feel you are normally an active dreamer?”

“Ummm… I don’t normally remember my dreams,” I said. “But I’ve always been a pretty active daydreamer? I feel like I’m always in my head and my brain never rests.”

Dr. Horn nodded.

“Okay. That could be ADHD, which you never mentioned on any of your forms, but a lot of people who have it are undiagnosed. And it might not be anything, but it’s possible the shot could have affected your brain waves in some way that will become more and more apparent, so we’ll be watching them pretty closely,” Dr. Horn said. “Of course, it could have just been a vivid dream, and your enhancement may be related to something else entirely. But congratulations, you’ve survived the most dangerous part of this unprecedented project so far with flying colors.”

I nodded.

“How many of us made it?” I asked.

Dr. Horn sighed.

“The survival rate is almost always the same,” he said, twisting himself so that he was no longer facing me. “Of the 30 participants for Trial 9B, 15 survived.” He lowered his voice and looked down at his lap. “I’m sorry to say two others received Enhancements that made them too dangerous for the general population here, so they will not be returning to the group. They are in Quarantine. So there are 13 of you left, and you’ll join the other 280 or so participants very soon.”

“All signs are good, but I need to ask you how you are feeling. Are you feeling rested? Are you feeling hungry? Are you feeling anything strange at all?” Dr. Horn asked.

I considered the question. I had just arrived to live in a technology-driven corporate artificial-intelligence-lead scientific laboratory and gone through with a procedure that could have very well killed me, but hadn’t. Was I still in a dream? I wiggled my toes and focused on the feeling of them touching each other, then noticed the goosebumps that had formed on my arms. Would I be cold if I was just dreaming? I guess if it was cold in the room, I could dream of goosebumps….

“Hello?” Dr. Horn’s voice seemed to be coming a mile away from me, but I shook my head and snapped back to it. “Hello? Aurora? Are you feeling alright?”

Was I feeling alright?

“Sorry,” I said. “Sometimes my brain wanders. I guess… I guess… I’m still feeling a little bit dreamy?” I said. “Like all of a sudden, none of this is feeling real. Maybe it’s just … the whole thing, catching up to me now that I know I survived it. I hadn’t really let it all sink in before this, maybe,” I said, as if to convince myself.

“It is a lot to take in,” Dr. Horn nodded. “A lot of patience describe the experience as a whirlwind that feels like it’s never going to let go. But it will let go. For the first 30 days, your life will be monitored in every single way you can imagine, and your time won’t be your own. You’ll be surrounded and watched and poked and prodded by laboratory assistants all day long, just doing their jobs. But just keep in mind, it should only be for 30 days, and then we will all come up with a game plan for you moving forward, depending no whether your enhancement has appeared and what it is. So know there is a light at the end of the tunnel to this first phase of the process.”

“30 days of constant monitoring in every way possible,” I said. “And then there is the chance I’ll somehow be the cure to human infertility.”

“Human infertility, human aging, human regeneration… there are many paths this solution could take. We are open to any and all of them,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll be the fountain of youth, or you’ll carry the cure to all coronaviruses. It just takes one gene and one genetic anomaly to make a difference, and we changed 2 percent of your genome. That might not sound like a lot, but the human genome is 6.4 billion letters long, so 2 percent is still 320 million chances at getting it right.”

"You really need that many chances?” I asked.

Dr. Horn shrugged.

“They don’t call humanity’s existence a miracle for nothing,” he said. “Go walk around and relax for a while. We need you back here in two hours for your first Interview.”

Walking around the Laboratory’s Campus was like walking around a beautiful bubble. The 42-story main building was whale-shaped, thinner at the bottom and wider at the top, a true feat of 21-century engineering. It’s surrounded on all sides by water gardens, with a perfect view of the city of Austin skyline — far enough away from downtown to hide the degradation that permeated the city, the rising poverty, the depression from having lost so many loved ones but close enough to pretend that downtown Austin is still just right there, as buzzing and as lively as ever.

The Laboratory had been built in record time in the old Zilker Park, part of a buy-out private-public partnership agreement between the Laboratory’s corporate partners and the bankrupt City of Austin, which had been hard-hit in recent years by a combination of right-wing terrorist attacks (blamed on “Antifa”) and natural disasters. Instead of open greenspace, which encouraged too many dangerous get-togethers, the fields surrounding the water gardens had been planted with trees and turned into wildflower fields. The whole space was only open to Shot participants and Laboratory employees, but almost everyone in Austin was one or the other, these days. Man’s Last Chance was a huge operation. There were laboratories just as large scattered all across the country, in the parts that were still livable: Pittsburgh, Asheville, Nashville, Austin, Portland, Boston.

My room was located in a dormatory converted from the old Intel building, about a half-mile’s walk from the main building but fully accessible by footpaths and golf cart rides, one of which I flagged down in the interest of time. I hadn't actually seen my room yet, and I was curious about the accommodations. Other than the opportunity to save humanity and get a super power and a paycheck, we hadn’t been promised much at all. How much space would I have to myself? How much sunlight would the windows let in? How many people were sharing a kitchen? I’d signed up without having any idea.

Getting dropped off, the building was entirely made of shaded glass. I could see plenty of shadows moving around on the inside, but nothing too clearly. Still, there were no blinds or curtains on any of the windows; rooms had been separated by flex walls made of rectangular plexiglass windows that rolled out, which worked to create rooms of different sizes. Privacy was of nobody’s concern here; there was no right to it. Immediately, I registered the ways in which everything was set up for surveillance, from the doormen to Tenant Services Desk to the metal detectors and facial scanners and 360-degree cameras clearly mounted on the ceiling every 15 feet.

I can’t believe I willingly signed up for this.

I approached the Tenant Services Desk.

“Hello, I’m Aurora Starling,” I said. “I just finished up my quarantine period and am ready to move into the dorms? I don’t know my room number yet though…”

A woman at the desk typed my info onto a keyboard and immediately all my vital signs showed up on the wall behind me: my heart rate (102 at the moment), my blood type, my height, weight and eye color, brain scan imaging, facial bone structure, a list of the last three places I’d visited, a personality chart — all just displayed on the wall for anyone passing by to see.

“You’re in room 437,” the woman, dressed head to tow in uniform and not wearing a name tag or any other identifying information, told me. “Your bags are already waiting for you on your bed. The elevator is 30 feet down on the left, take it to the forth floor, take two rights, and it’ll be right there. You’ve got three other women in your quad room. There are four quads, eight bathrooms, and one large living and kitchen area to your section.”

I did some quick math. That meant there were 16 people in my section that I would be sharing meals and experiences with for the next 30 days.

“Thanks,” I said, and stepped away from the counter, still trying to take in all the data on display about “How long would it stay up there for?” I asked.

“Until you’re five feet away, I type in another name or Robin detects a new person.”

“Robin?” I asked.

“It’s the name of the artificially intelligent surveillance system monitoring all our vitals and whereabouts,” the woman responded. “Don’t worry, though, it’s not really punitive. Nobody cares if you hook up with one of your quad mates or stay out past curfew, since they already know where you are. The rules are just the rules so that you know what the expectations are and so that everyone gets along. The data collection is just being done for science.”

“The rules?”

“They’re posted in your room. Everyone has their own schedule they are expected to follow as closely as possible to ensure smooth living and the most accurate research results. We encourage people to dress in Laboratory-provided clothes becomes conformity makes most people feel more comfortable and connected, but there’s no law around wearing your own clothes, either,” she smiled. “It takes time for people to adjust, but we try our best to make sure everyone is happy here, and it’s only for 30 days.”

“Great,” I said, finally stepping away from the desk. When my data finally disappeared off the wall, I relaxed and smiled over my shoulder. “Thanks for the pep talk. I will do my best to not cause any problems.”

Aurora starts having extremely vivid recollections from her recent past. Researchers determine that her Enhancement is a type of hyperactive photographic memory, and she starts daily memory sessions where her brain is hooked up to a visualizer and broadcast live in the name of scientific transparency. The sessions gain a huge internet following from people obsessed with the latest vaccine trials. Her power is called The Sight, and it's an enhancement of picture-perfect recollection. It starts at first with her own memories -- her legs feel wet and start to sway thinking of crashing waves on the beach. But then the recollection just keeps going, and Aurora is having picture-perfect recollections of memories from the extreme distant past and extreme distant space -- stored in her DNA from millennia ago and galaxies away. And what those visions will reveal will change the world -- if anyone believes her.

MATTER

My memories have started progressing backwards to things I don’t remember and that never happened to me: memories from my mom that I was never told but just know, memories from my dad, who I had never met, memories from my grandparents, who I had never known. But somehow, I knew we were related, and I knew how. I knew when I had a vision of my mom as a little girl getting her first communion that it was her; I knew it still and more later on in the vision, when I saw a priest talking to her as a young adult.

Her memories start progressing backwards to things she doesn’t remember and that never happened to her: memories from her mom she was never told, memories from her dad who she had never met, memories from her grandparents. Aurora’s memories become more and more intense, and from longer and longer ago until she remembers an undescribeable scene just prior to the Big Bang — undescribable except the entire world sees it, too, when NASA receives an unexpected photograph from the James Webb Space Telescope before it suddenly stops transmissions.

That dream-like feeling persisted. It never went away. I don’t know anymore if I’m awake or asleep, if I’m alive or dreaming — the dreams I have are so vivid that it all feels the same, and my life weaves in and out between reality and what I’ve come to believe is a universal memory so subtly that I no longer trust myself to know the difference between realities. The whole meaning of reality has changed for me. One minute I’ll be in my childhood home, walking through the forest in our backyard, cutting down brush and prickers while blazing trails so that I wouldn’t get lost. The next minute, all the galaxies and all the stars are moving through a dark space, dancing to a rhythm only found on a celestial date night. Nebulas commingle like polyamorous lovers, stars grow up and out from their clusters. I am watching the pre-party to our universe’s existence, 28 billion years ago, and I never, ever, ever want to leave. It’s the most magical thing I’ve ever seen. Don’t make me wake up. Don’t make me deal with the Present, which doesn’t feel like much of a gift.

Of course, the world has seen all my dreams, but they’ve never asked me what I think they mean. They do not ask me for an interpretation, because I am rarely awake enough to give one. I’m only awake then they wake me, purposefully, which they do not often do. The dreams are so vivid that even in timelapse form, they are mesmerizing and addicting, eye candy for the whole world. No one knows what kind of stock to take in them. No one else seems to see them as memory because somehow, even though they are measuring my brainwaves and video of my neurons firing and MRIs and the whole thing, they are missing something. They are missing the Narrator. There is this voice that has joined me in my dreams, a woman who seems to be telling a story of what is happening, who talks about the triangular love affair between Alpha and Omega and Trifid, and how Laguna always felt left out, but how they danced together anyway because it’s a requirement when the stars sing, and sometimes even the Celestials have rules they follow.

For some reason, the Laboratory wasn’t hearing this voice; the were recording both audio and video but they only recorded the actual audio from the dream itself, the ringing of the singing stars and the laughing nebulae and Laguna crying alone. Sounds that were recorded, but could not be interpreted in a human language.

Not understanding Aurora’s visions, researchers determine that Aurora’s super power is not, in fact, going to help with the world’s infertility crisis, and she’s released from the laboratory on an outpatient basis. meaning she’s constantly monitored and tracked. Aurora knows there’s no escaping Big Brother but tries to figure out what to do next. What was really happening to her? What did her visions really mean? Were they trying to tell her something?

Dr. Horn

Inside the Laboratory, business was booming. The Candidates were all discovering their enhancements, many of which were much more, shall we say, attention-seeking than Aurora’s constant spaciness and vivid dreams, which are being studied by a team of 12 researchers around the clock. Truthfully, I was so happy this was the team I’d wound up on, at least at first. Aurora’s dreams were certainly more beautiful than Ken’s crystal-clear skin, which was alarming and disgusting, indeed, though of course on some level you’ve got to realize what beautiful organic machinery it all is; and though it was difficult to interpret what was happening in her dreams as she seemed to seamlessly float between spaces and times almost minute by minute like she was slowly falling while the universe was rising and the wheel was spinning, it was much easier to actually keep up with Aurora than, say, Leslie, with the supersonic wings she grew, now she flies around the Laboratory like a giant dragonfly, more of nuisance than a help.

At first, many of Aurora’s dreams were easy to piece together. She dreamed of her childhood home for a while, a white farm house with a wide open field and a path down to a woods; she dreamed of riding a boat down a river with her family relaxing; she dreamed, even of being born. But then her dreams began to not make quite as much sense. She seemed to dream of moving colors, of rainbow winds and odd noises that we had had to call in a consult on. And her dreams, we discovered, weren’t Aurora’s memories any more, but her parent’s — of riding a motorcycle together along the Ohio freeway, her mother holding tight on to her father as they drove just to enjoy the country side; of getting married at a small Catholic Church; of meeting at a potluck in college. Some of the times, the dreams were but a minute long, like just snippets of a family video — perhaps something Aurora had seen recorded growing up? — I jogged down that note. Maybe they were memories after all.

But still, more and more, they are of the colors dancing, dreams of a fantastical imagination, fairies dancing in twilight, rainbow winds, alien creatures, coming and going, growing and disappearing, conversations nothing more than mere whispers.

Perhaps not dreams after all. Perhaps its over-active imagination?

I paused at that. How asleep was Aurora? It was hard to tell because the brain waves were all over the map; in all the MRIs and CT scans I’d ever done, I had never seen anything like Aurora’s. Perhaps she is more awake or more asleep than we think.

“Guys,” I called out to Sarah and Molly, my two shift partners, breaking the silence. I had told Sarah and Molly to listen and take notes but not to speak until the shift change, when all six researchers would share notes. But more and more now, the audio appeared less interpretable, more buzzy and more musical. Perhaps what we were seeing and hearing called for a more immediate discussion. “How are you each interpreting what’s going on with all the colors? Have either of you ever dreamed you were in an abstract painting before?”

“I don’t know, but the colors just move with such fluidity that It feels like I AM the abstract painting, that I’m being painted,” Molly said. “Like, I’m tripping. But I swear I’m not tripping,” she added quickly. “I’m not tripping, right?”

ANTIMATTER

DECEMBER 2025

And what would we be fighting for, anyway? What reason is there to live, now, exactly? Watching democracy fall to Christian Nationalism had been … traumatizing. Though there was no public education system for children to attend in-person, the online schools all required Bible Studies classes instead of English classes. Synagogues and mosques were seized by militarized police departments in full-on SWAT gear. I’d written a book of poetry about the spiritual connection to God I felt when walking through nature and was fined $20,000 for trying to let people read it online because it violated the country’s new Christian Doctrine.

Science hadn’t died, though, not completely.

Everyone who follows the science now knows we are actually, factually,  nothing more than one of infinite computer simulations running in an infinite world of computer simulations. We are as Real as Ones and Zeros.

Of course, most of the people who believe in Science are dead already, executed for “treason” by the government on behalf of the worlds’ religions and in the name of National Security. It was just like in the 1500s when we realized the Earth was spinning around the Sun, except with nuclear weapons, professionally-trained snipers and hunters armed with AK-47 assault rifles and built-in surveillance technology complete with instantaneous G.P.S. tracking. You know, the works. A taco with everything, Fully Loaded. Scientists persecuted en masse, scapegoated for nearly every problem that had ever been discovered, every technology that had ever gone awry — and you know what? Looking back…

I won’t say it. What happened was a god-damned avoidable tragedy, at least scientifically speaking, technically speaking, simulations running. Maybe that’s why They hated all three. Science. Technology. the Internet. Canceled overnight. One day? There! The Next Day? Gone.

Well, not the Internet. It just made a lot of content illegal. But it only took two days for the Army to through collect all the phones and computers, at gun point  and with government warrants but also bearing canned foods and toilet paper. And it only took hours for them to collect the scientists in their homes and offices and friend’s places, load them up on busses and make them disappear. They were, quite honestly, surprisingly and devastatingly efficient at that, and it made Aurora wonder who else had Disappeared.

For half of us, the world was Before Pandemic and Now. B.P. and N. For the other half, it was still B.C. and A.D. Before Christ and After Death.

And maybe those After Death people are actually right, at the very very very very very very edge of right where you realize that knowing the answer negates … everything.

We are just a simulation.

And it’s All My Fault.

LIterally, the weight of the whole fucking meaning and existence of life on this planet, gone, because of me. 

Now where the fuck was I?

Grabbing the gas mask.

I close my eyes, hard. Breathe deep. And look for something within myself to grab on to. Some idea to take hold of me and force me to put the gas mask back down. Something always does.

But my heart knows: All it takes is once.

Look, it’s not all going to be bad. But some parts you just want to skip over and when the whole thing is like that, it’s a short story.

The State of the World, in Four Words or Less:

It Was All Over.

This is The End.

And Nobody gets a tombstone anymore — everyone gets a Tree in one last attempt to save the Planet — but the leaves on my tree will read: It’s All My Fault.

I parked my car outside of the botanical gardens, abandogardens, as I’d done begun to affectionately call it, almost every Saturday since I’d first met Joey here, and surveyed my surroundings: ferns and grasses infiltrating the parking lot, nature’s littlest soldiers claiming the land from the weight of man. The towering pine and oak trees in the back towered over the old chapel building and the main entrance, where the windows to the old cafe were completely covered in clinging vines with trumpeting flowers. Clusters of colorful leaves clung to Maple branches and draping gangs of flowers fell from the miraculously faithful and unbreakable wysteria tree centerpiece as weeping willows waited in line all around a man-made pond for a chance to see her up close and personal.

No matter the season over the last twenty years, this place was home.

After my mom died, I did a lot of soul-searching. It was a terribly painful endeavor, living every day. Like you can’t really say this to anyone but don’t you ever just not want to wake up? Like every morning, maybe? I am not a morning person but I envy the people who still have a reason to wake up in the mornings, the ones who manage to enjoy it.

Not that there aren’t plenty of things to enjoy, while they are left. We do still have trees to look at, mountains to climb when there is time. Time is Running Out. TIme is Running Out. Time is Running Out. I’m hyperventilating. This happens every Time with Time and Time Again and I Know What to Do This Time —

There is no Time. Breathe Ooooooouuuuuuuuuttttttttt.

I’m sorry you have to deal with my crazy, but I’m not sorry because you are ultimately a figment of my imagination and I am ultimately a figment of you’re imagination and we only exist because of each other so … I guess you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Where was I? 

I’m really sorry, but you’re going to have to understand this Struggle with Time that comes from Seeing. It’s constant, as they say. It’s Always. It’s why it’s The End even if The End is The Beginning. Eventually it will make sense but … there is no middle, even if the middle is where we have to meet. That’s a paradox, right? I honestly don’t know. I was born to See but knowing… You don’t necessarily want that.

CHAPTER 11: COSMOS

June 2024

“Aurora!”

I’m staring into one of the reflective ponds outside the Laboratory, deep in muddled thought, whispers from last night's Narration just sitting on my mind like a coded puzzle that I must piece together.

“AURORA!”

The word is louder now, sounds familiar. I shake my head and look around and see Meadow walking quickly toward me, a big smile across her face as she reaches me and hugs me like she thought she’d never see me again.

“How have you BEEN?!” Meadow asks, nearly crying. “I’ve been so worried about you! I mean, I’ve been asking around and Dr. Horn and everyone assured me that you’re fine, but you’re always sleeping! Are you okay? I’ve missed you!”

I return her hug, squeezing her back and try my best to assess how long it’s been since I’ve seen Meadow, how long it’s been since I’ve had the energy or motivation to be out in the world when I could be watching Time unfold. I have no idea.

“I’m alive!” I answer. “The enhancement has definitely had its … plusses and negatives. I’m tired all the time, always dreaming, being pulled into visions at all hours of the day and night… It’s been really hard keeping track of time.” I pause, wondering if I needed to explain myself further.

“It’s okay! I understand. The last six months have been insane for me, too,” Meadow nodded. “I’m just glad to see you in the flesh.”

“Did you ever figure out what your enhancement was?” I asked her. It was strange that so much time had passed when I had spent so little of it out in the world.

“Yeah,” Meadow said. “I’d rather show you than tell you, though…” She turned her head from side to side until she seemed to spot what she was looking for, and pointed at a few tiny yellow birds resting on the branches of a birch tree. Together, the birds all got up and started flying around in circles above us until they all landed on Meadow’s head and shoulders as if it was the most natural, normal thing they could have done.

I raised my eyebrows. “You… communicate with birds?” I asked.

Meadow nodded.

“Not just birds,” she said. “I’d call it… the natural world. Plants and animals, mostly. It’s like I can hear what the natural world is thinking, and like everything wild communicates using codes that I can somehow change and communicate. We’re still working to understand it, and why it doesn’t seem to work with humans at all.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s been a wild ride, but it doesn’t seem to be able to fix much so far.”

“Well, hopefully something fixes it,” I respond, as one of the birds starts flapping its wings a bit and I’m taken in by the sight of those birds resting so softly on Meadow’s body. “I wish I had a camera to take a photo of you right now.”

“Hahaha,” Meadow responded. “There’s more of this to see if you want to meet at the gardens later today, for the sunset? We need to catch up somewhere that isn’t so… public,” she said, nodding at a research assistant passing by. “Do you have the time?”

“I definitely want to! These dreams though, they are so… strong and uncontrollable. I’m always sleeping.”

“What if I come and wake you?” Meadow said. “You’re not stuck in Observations anymore, right? You got out of that?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Nobody seems to be taking my dreams too seriously around here anymore.”

“Well, I want to hear all about them,” she said. “It’s noon now; I’ll go to your room and make sure you’re moving around 4?”

“Yeah, that works,” I nod. “It’s good to see you. I’d forgotten what it’s like to be awake and amongst the people.”

And then we parted ways: Meadow walking toward the research lab and me, turning around to go lay down in my room, mulling over my latest dream until I fell back into it.

Here’s what I’ve seen: I’ve seen the speed of light running backwards in time, all the way to before the Big Bang. The visions from then mostly focus on two ethereal celestial beings, one mostly made of a playful light and the other mostly made of a heavy shadow; the Narrator calls them Antimatter and Matter, or Sunsung and Eda: Sun and Earth. They weren't the only two beings to show up in my dreams; they were just the main characters, as you will: just two celestial deities taking notice of each other. I’ve dreamed of their conversations, of Sunsung wanting to shine her light on Eda to see all her curves and crevices, and of Eda basking in Sunsung’s warm embrace, asking him to touch her in places she’d never been touched before. Over time, the two fell deeply in love, and their love started to change them both: Sunsung became obsessive over Eda’s appearance and tried to control her shadows just-so, forcing Eda to harden her shadow to protect herself from Sunsung’s burning gaze. But still, they spent every passing moment together in a string of just endless moments. They loved to dance, they loved having long conversations, they loved exploring the other’s intensities.

But then another celestial being, Chronosi, came across Eda and Sunsung: light and dark playing together. For a while, Chronosi watched, absolutely mesmerized, but after a while, Chronosi became bored and impatient with what was unfolding: it was just the same thing, over and over and over again. Chronosi was a diety of change and creation; she wanted to mold Eda and Sunsung’s love so that it could grow and transform. So Chronosi decided to approach the two lovers with an idea: a kind of tryst. The three dieties became so completely entangled that they could not separate themselves from each other. At the same time, they each began to change, to absorb the others into themselves, and the once-harmonious relationship between Sunsung and Eda became more and more volatile. And then one day, Eda asked Sunsung who he loved more: Her, or Chronosi. When Sunsung wouldn’t answer, Eda hardened herself entirely, gathered all her energy and exploded, with Sunsung exploding went right along with her.  Chronosi, left suddenly alone, started searching the Cosmos for the remains of her former lovers. She found pieces of Sunsung and Eda everywhere she looked, but as hard as she tried, she couldn’t get the pieces to go back together like they were. Instead, she organized the pieces into constellations and planetary systems and cried and cried and cried in her grief over having lost her lovers. Her tears made water, and eventually Eda and Sunsung’s pieces, kept together by Chronosi, began recognizing each other, revolving around each other once again.

And the rest, as they say, is history. The actual history of the Universe, the cause of the Big Bang, the events that started everything we know as the world.

“Wow,” Meadow’s been silently listening to my manic monologue piecing together the long dream sequence I’ve been living these last 5 months for 15 minutes, and her reaction feels like it might take a little while longer for it all to really sink in. Will she think I’m absolutely insane? Will be believe me? Will she brush it all off as a poor interpretation of the nonsense swimming in my subconscious? 

It’s the first time I’ve really told anyone outside of the Laboratory’s patient monitors about my dreams since they stopped broadcasting them over the Laboratory’s streaming network. The dreams got more intense after that, coming in quicker and quicker succession, literally leaving me a prisoner to my own imagination, it seemed to me. But for today, at least, it seemed like maybe I’d finally slept enough. Maybe now that I was beginning to understand the gravity of what it all meant, I could begin to live again, be awake again.

But Meadow’s slow reaction is giving me anxiety. 

“Yeah… What do you think?” I ask, needing her validation. “Am I crazy? Or are my dreams the key to finally understanding a real Higher Power, what and who God really is?”

“I mean…” Meadow covered her mouth with her hands. “I don’t know? Are they really telling you all that, or just showing you pictures? If we’re all just existing to keep Sunsung and Edo in orbit together, what does that even, like …. Mean? That people are completely inconsequential to the Cosmos?”

I shook my head.

I didn’t understand it all at first, of course. These visions, they wouldn’t have seemed like much else than light play, hallucinations of the mind, beautiful sights of glowing shadows, if it hadn’t been for the Narrator, who I’ve been able to deduct from various methods is most likely Chronosi. I mean, it makes sense, having developed the enhanced power of photographic memory from my ancestors, that I’d be somehow connected to the memories of Time itself. Even if the voice doesn’t belong to Chronosi, I feel like I have to trust it. It’s the only voice in there providing any explanation whatsoever for what I’m seeing, and without any explanation at all, it feels like I’m going mad, absolutely crazy, experiencing uncontrollable and lucid visions and hallucinations that keep me from being able to go to the grocery store without getting myself committed.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it means that we are all hold divine, celestial energy within us, but that energy is forever caught between wanting to come back together in a way that separates us as celestial lovers, and wanting to continue to see what they can make and feel as a trillion tiny pieces of themselves dance out in the universe. Like, the dream is trying to tell me that we are all more parts of Sunsung and Edo than we will ever comprehend. We aren’t just made from the love between Sunsung and Edo, we are the love between Sunsung and Edo, molded by Chronosi.”

“Really? You feel all that?” Meadow sounded relieved but still unsure. “I guess that is at least somewhat romantic. But nobody’s going to believe it. Nobody’s ever heard anything like it, I don’t think. And our country is pretty… adamant about there being one God these days.”

“I think you mean militant,” I said. “Unless things have changed in the last few months since I’ve been sleeping.”

“No change that I’ve seen,” Meadow said. “You’ll be crucified if you try to tell anyone that the Big Bang was caused by a loving threesome between three celestial beings. I mean… They won’t like anything about that. And if people actually do start to believe you, they’ll put you in a mental institution. Hell, they’ll create a mental institution for you.”

“I have been worrying about that,” I said. “I can’t say I’ve lost sleep over it…” I joked. “I have this powerful sense in my gut that I really need to be careful. But I also really have this feeling that what I’m dreaming of is important and purposeful and not a coincidence. I need to know why I’m having these dreams.”

“Yeah, what’s the point of knowing how the universe began when the world seems to be coming to an end?” Meadow said. “What’s the hope in trying to relay a celestial love story between three deities when the world sits on a tinderbox of organized religious fanatics trying to destroy each other? It feels like when human fertility dropped, everyone lost their collective minds.” 

“But this could change everything. I mean, people lost their minds because they couldn’t understand why so many bad things were happening,” I said. “Having all these scientific blackholes is what gave Christian leaders so much power. They could just blame everything on anyone who didn’t succumb to their control. If I could somehow share the evidence I have of who or what God really is with the world, they wouldn’t have any more power anymore.”

“You probably don’t even know how awful it’s gotten lately,” Meadow said. “Did you hear that the megapastors have started railing about female pleasure being to blame for the infertility crisis? They are saying that infertility was caused by toxic levels of serotonin, an effect of God’s anger over deviant sexual morality. The House passed a measure decriminalizing rape on the grounds that it could lead to more reproductive successes. It got stopped by the Senate.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked. 

“Something,” Meadow said. “We’ll come up with something.” 

TIMELINES

My name is Aurora Stelleperetti, and I come from an alternate world.

In that world, I was an artist and then I was a revolutionary killed for being a visionary. Humanity came to an end when the Coronavirus destroyed our reproductivity and corporate deregulation destroyed our air and our water. That happened when fascists took over our government in 2021, hanging Mike Pence in the process. We tried to save ourselves for a while and managed to keep fascism from rising to power. I played a roll in that: Suffice it to say, it wasn’t easy, and it’s a long, long story. Nobody has time for that.

So, no, I don’t come from the future, I come from the present, in a way, with an important message: Disinformation is a Cold War Weapon, religious extremism is fascism, and you, yes, YOU, dear reader, are in serious jeopardy. Your president has vascular dementia, and the cabinet must step up and declare the 25th Amendment to ensure that presidential immunity is used for all official acts necessary to protect our democracy.

 I know. I know. I know there are times when it feels like the world is just … unlivable. I don’t know how else to describe it. Why the hell am I here?! What is the point to all this?! The situation just seems to be getting more and more dire by the minute and the hour.

I cannot draw, I cannot paint, I cannot breathe at night. My heart lives in my throat, suffocating, and my mind is spewing out its guts like it’s suffering from radioactive poisoning. That’s the disinformation. It’s a technological poisonous gas, a kind of biological cyberwarfare. It is eating us all alive from within.

Sometimes I come back to that very first question: To Be? Or Not To Be. And now it truly stumps me. What am I, if the world tells me I am nothing? Can I be not of this world? Can I be the heroine in my own story? Can everything I write be labeled as fiction?

That’s a silly thought, the kind of thought I escape to when the weight of this catastrophe is about to smother me or I start to grab hold of the idea that it is me going crazy. Wouldn’t that be something special, if I really was just caught in a nightmare all in my own head, every headline and every comment and every bit of evidence to the contrary made up by me. Man. What a mindfuck that would be.

Forgive me because I’m having too many thoughts to put them all out at 90 characters per minute given the lack of minutes I possess. It’s tough sometimes when God speaks through you like this. I don’t have control of my fingers, I don’t know what I’m going to write next, I just know what I’m hearing. And I’m hearing alarm bells and sirens and sobs and silence. And these words.

Oh, God, this is so hard. And this is just too much. Where to even begin? The present. The present is what’s most important in this moment.

First, the threat of Christian Nationalism is real. That’s the scariest thing to me, and to God: God absolutely fucking hates it people use faith in God to commit atrocities, to take away Free Will, to interfere with life’s purpose and meaning when they have been so tempted by power and money. I think people need to understand: Christian Nationalism is not the same as Christianity. It's not just "oh the government's going to put Under God on everything but nothing will really change." It's not something that is "only going to affect Jewish people or Muslims or people who care about their religion and I only care about music and food". It's Hitler. It's a genocide on American soil waiting to happen. It's the destruction of freedom. Trump does not care about you. He's a power-hungry demonic force tempting you through your darkest thoughts. #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica #demonocracy #savedemocracy #freedomforall #justiceforall #agnosticnation #TruthMatters #formercatholic #godwantsmetotellyou

The Democratic Party, under Dementia Joe's confused leadership, has been extremely, pathetically, tragically, weak in this modern day fight against fascism. Biden has never been willing to call a spade a spade when it comes to Trump, and Harris has largely followed his lead. They don't sit down and talk about what Russian election interference really means at its core, they don't say disinformation is the new cold war, they hardly really say anything. "vote vote vote! vote vote vote! donate donate donate!" Like, JFC, DO SOMETHING. BIDEN HAS IMMUNITY.

The thing is, Citizens United completely broke our democracy in 2010. It basically gave 100 percent of the power to billionaires while still preserving the appearance of elections, and this country has been at death's doorstep ever since because the parties won't admit to the damage that has been done. A) The Republican Party is totally against democracy, does not believe in the power of the people, does not care if it's in the minority or the majority, does not think women should vote, does not want all votes to be equal. Fundamentally. At its core. And B) the centrist Democratic Party has not been pushed toward change or progress. In fact, the extremity of the today's Republican Party has pushed the Democratic Party to the right. That's why you've got the Cheney's endorsing Harris. Billionaires have completely silenced the left these days. When you call Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi leftists, and every single person in the media just falls in line, you're erasing the true left. The progressive left.

But this is Germany in 1938, except in our time, in our turn, Hitler lost his power and is fighting to get it back. We absolutely cannot let him get it back. There is absolutely no problem we are facing that will be solved by a Trump presidency. Calling Trump and Vance "weird", while it seemed to work on social media, still downplays the danger. The Democratic Party, while injured and limping around after a cataclysmic event, is still not fascist. It is still full of public servants who believe in helping people and doing the right thing and basic human rights and using the government as a tool to help people instead of as a weapon to control people. That's what fascism does, uses government as a weapon.

This nation has always been a nation of immigrants. Immigrants have always been how we've grown our numbers in this country. That's not "replacement theory", that is ... America. But Republicans are now anti-immigrant. They believe non-white blood is dirty. Elon Musk is a Republican obsessed with population growth. Ask yourself, how do those things go together? Hmmmm? Maybe you think, well, it's one thing to force a woman to give birth if she "wanted it, should've kept her legs shut". You know, sex has consequences, women have to take accountability for our actions, blah blah yadda blah. But once you start forcing some women to give birth, it's not a stretch to force others to give birth, especially when so many Americans, in particular Christian Nationalists, seem to believe rape is a myth in the first place. They are more likely to believe in virgin births and divine conceptions. To them, pregnancy has nothing to do with men. It's God's will.

Christian Nationalists will try to remove women from the workforce. Women being subservient to men and staying out of the rooms with power and being financially reliant on men for survival are core Christian Nationalist beliefs. And maybe you're a guy who thinks, "good, more opportunity for me, let the women starve!" or "women suck anyways" or yadda yadda yadda, whatever dark thought you have about it, and I just think you haven't thought this one through. You want to go back to the "good old days", but on Earth, there is no way to actually go back in time. There is only forward, and it will not be the same. It will not be "the good old days." Women's rights are a Pandora's Box. You can't just put them back in the box and expect the world to function. They won't go back in the box. Women will be miserable, women will make your lives miserable, and you will be miserable without us.

You are allowed your dark thoughts. Life, survival, heartbreak, it's all complicated. We all need more therapy than we have access to. But when you let those dark thoughts rule, when you give them all your power, when you let them take over, when you don't have a kindness to give or a light on inside, you're not a man. You're not the protector, you're not a hero. You're the villain.

Maybe you don't believe in villains. Villains exist only in stories and in the movies, we are all just out for ourselves, it's survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, kill or be killed, etc. The Handmaid's Tale is just a work of fiction, Animal Farm is just a story about some mean pigs, Marvel movies have too much CGI. Maybe the stories don't inspire you, but stories are inspired by real life, and other people are inspired by the stories they hear. There is so much truth in fiction. Robert Downey Jr. recently called Elon Musk out for "cosplaying" Tony Stark, and it's about time. Elon Musk wants everyone to think he's some kind of Iron Man. But he's not Tony Stark. He's the fucking Joker targeting the working class (and Adam Kinzinger is Batman, but that's a post from another day).

So yes, even though the Democratic Party leaves a lot to be desired, #voteblue #pandorasbox #womensrights #fascism #ChristianNationalism #artistdiary #electionanxiety #countrybeforeparty

Best Case Scenario:

Man, I have to say this one little thing that’s going to make everyone hate me. It’s going to bring the “vibes” down. But there comes a time when too much optimism reallllllllly becomes a problem. It’s like, you really just believe everything is just going to somehow wind up fine? That sometimes sounds like the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Progress takes work. Suffering is everywhere. Between the rise of fascism, the climate crisis and artificial intelligence, we are in the middle of a perfect storm. This is the point in the movie where we need all hands on deck.

I can see all our souls sitting up there, watching us as we blunder, SCREAMING at the TV, about to change the channel to the next multiverse in the hopes that they did better.

If all goes perfectly, best-case scenario, both sides contest these results, Biden stands up and uses his immunity to remove the insurrectionists from office and declare Harris as the next president, Trump disappears from the ether, and we go back to saving the bees again.

I’m putting that out there. I hope to God that’s what happens. God prays to us that that’s what happens. Free will is a bitch like that. I can’t say I’m not choosing to be God’s instrument.

There’s a future that may be about to happen where I just don’t stand a chance, and that future casts a wide net. It’s not just if Dumbotron and his Russian bot army wins. There’s a lot that can still go wrong if Harris wins, if all the centrists and moderates in office don’t take enough actions to fit what is broken, if they keep putting band-aids on our giant gaping wounds, if they keep trying to negotiate with terrorists and people who declared war on us. There’s a lot that needs to get done to set the world straight, to continue with modern-day progress and to keep the hope and the ideal of freedom and justice for all alive. This is a narrow path I walk, where it pays to be alive.

My time on this earth might be so limited. You’ve got to understand, being silenced, having your free will taken from you, are the same as death. Some of us die many deaths in our lives: the death of our biology when we never conceive. The death of our passion when we never succeed. The death of our words when our ideas are banned. Life under fascism just won’t be the same as living. I fear the rising inequality and the ways in which trillionaires will destroy any and all working class equity or voice in our government, quickly leading us to become a feudalist fascist theocratic nation instead of the democracy I was so proud of.

Democracy, what a fraud. There hasn’t been democracy in this country since “Citizens United” in 2010. “Citizens United”. What a misleading name. Nothing managed to divide us as quickly as billionaire spending. I know we’ve always struggled to be a free nation, but now we’ve got fires in drop boxes and swing state lotteries and disinformation being used as a fascist cold war weapon, all being done in the name of GOD.

I know the narrow path I walk. It’s a thin alley of solutions. Trump ended the peaceful transfer of power in 2020; it does not matter that he did not win the battle. It was a declaration of war that the rest of us just didn't want to believe. That war has been ongoing, fought only by one side. Biden must use the Presidential Immunity SCOTUS "gifted" to presidents to fight the rise of fascism in the United States. The President takes an oath to protect democracy from all threats, foreign and domestic. This is not a voter responsibility nor should it fall to voters at a time when disinformation is being used as a weapon in a modern-day Cold War. All tools at Biden's disposal should be used or our government will cease to be a tool for the people but a weapon used against the people. Everything SCOTUS has broken in these last four years must be fixed before we resume elections in this country again. Starting from the first lie that the 2020 election was rigged all the way to Musk's swing state lottery, our elections have been totally tampered with and cannot be trusted, and the Democratic Party has been negligent in its duty to protect Americans. NEED I REMIND YOU THE PRESIDENT HAS DEMENTIA! Biden's cognitive capability to fully comprehend what is happening is clearly questionable. He stepped down as a candidate, but perhaps it's time for the Cabinet to take away the keys to the car.

I mean, there is so much happening right now. It’s impossible for someone at their peak to keep up with it when disinformation travels faster than the speed of light. There is no free press to say all this. I might have forgotten to mention that. It’s almost like, poof, one day it was there, and the next day it was just gone. The billionaires had put their foot down, fulfilling the prophecy that it all ends in ruins. When you want to explain how it can be that 20 years is also 20 seconds, think of the fall of newspapers. That’s what time is: a rubber band that stretches, a list of headlines each with different stories to tell. It’s a page in a book that lasts across time.

So I think now I’ve told you about everything, sort of, though the details can still only be imagined. Am I crazy? Or am I what sanity looks like in a crazy world?

All I know is they really are out to get me. They said so on TV, might as well put my picture up large on the screen. “RADICAL LEFT LUNATIC!” they chanted and they screamed.

I’m sorry, I have to hide now.

SYNOPSIS:

DRAFT CHAPTER OUTLINE:

CHAPTER ONE: FEBRUARY 2020: We discover that aurora's mother, Ruthie, has been given less than six months to live, and her dying wish is to live with Aurora. Aurora agrees to take care of her and everything in her world changes with one phone call.

CHAPTER TWO: MARCH 2020:

Aurora and her mother are at the airport, having packed all her bags and secured housing in Austin, when news starts spreading that the city's biggest festival was canceled due to the pandemic.

CHAPTER THREE: APRIL 2020

A montage of all the experiences encompassed with caregiving: The sheer exhaustion, the expectations, the disappointments, the failures, the loneliness, the pace and morbidity of end-of-life care. Clark is introduced; Aurora's mom dies.

CHAPTER FOUR:

A dark blank page. An empty space. Illustrations. Signs of creative mania mix with a desperate depression over months. Friends fall away as the consequences of a global catastrophe and a broken economy take hold and Aurora is unable to deal with her grief. Except for Clark ... until summer 2022, when he falls away, too.

CHAPTER 5: NOVEMBER 2022:

Vaccines have failed as the virus has mutated again and again. A montage of crazy news stories that haven't happened yet but could if things go wrong. (Maybe rewrite from Clark's perspective.) News that researchers are looking for yet another round vaccine subjects starts to spread, and Clark decides to sign up.

CHAPTER 6: DECEMBER 2022:

Aurora walks into the woods, lonely and depressed and on the verge of giving up, when Clark sees her in the parklinglot of their secret spot. They hike together and he tells her he took the shot. She decides to take it too.

CHAPTER 7: JANUARY 2023:

Aurora signs up for the shot and moves in to The Laboratory, a high-tech research facility where she adjusts to a new life of daily tests in preparation for her shot.

CHAPTER 8: Aurora starts having extremely vivid recollections from her recent past. Researchers determine that her Enhancement is a type of hyperactive photographic memory, and she starts daily memory sessions where her brain is hooked up to a visualizer and broadcast live in the name of scientific transparency. The sessions gain a huge internet following from people obsessed with the latest vaccine trials. Her power is called The Sight, and it's an enhancement of picture-perfect recollection. It starts at first with her own memories -- her legs feel wet and start to sway thinking of crashing waves on the beach. But then the recollection just keeps going, and Aurora is having picture-perfect recollections of memories from the extreme distant past and extreme distant space -- stored in her DNA from millennia ago and galaxies away. And what those visions will reveal will change the world -- if anyone believes her.

CHAPTER 9: Her memories start progressing backwards to things she doesn’t remember and that never happened to her: memories from her mom she was never told, memories from her dad who she had never met, memories from her grandparents. Aurora’s memories become more and more intense, and from longer and longer ago until she remembers an undescribeable scene just prior to the Big Bang — undescribable except the entire world sees it, too, when NASA receives an unexpected photograph from the James Webb Space Telescope before it suddenly stops transmissions.

CHAPTER 10: Not understanding Aurora’s visions, researchers determine that Aurora’s super power is not, in fact, going to help with the world’s infertility crisis, and she’s released from the laboratory on an outpatient basis. meaning she’s constantly monitored and tracked. Aurora knows there’s no escaping Big Brother but tries to figure out what to do next. What was really happening to her? What did her visions really mean? Were they trying to tell her something?

CHAPTER 10: As the visions begin getting stronger and stronger, Aurora uses the money from getting her shot to buy an old house, in an old neighborhood, on the old side of town, where she sets up her own modest artist studio to help her share her visions with the world in a way that MRIs and brain scans couldn’t understand. She notices her external hearing is beginning to fade, and that she’s getting lost in her visions more and more often. She gets manic inside of them and depressed outside of them.

CHAPTER 11: As Aurora begins to dissect her past, someone’s voice seems to take over in her thoughts - a narrator for her visions. The Narrator tells Aurora the visions are a love story between two great dieties, Matter and Anti-Matter, who fall in love but are driven farther and farther apart over time, one becoming air and the other becoming rock; one becoming death and the other becoming life; one becoming body and the other becoming soul. But no matter how far apart they were driven, they stayed forever connected and the love created between them became Life itself.

CHAPTER 12: Though magical and fantastical, the visions turn her life upside down; obsessed and addicted, Aurora will do almost anything to get another fix from her Sight, but her unique visions of time and space threaten the World as We Know It -- leading for her to be hunted and persecuted by religions and zealots the world over.

CHAPTER 13: As the world turns against her, questioning her sanity and reality -- some are calling her the antichrist -- and Earth's population continues its quick descent and she battles her newfound powers and addictions, she begins to wonder whether she's really seeing the past, or the future -- and if it's really all the same, what can be done to save humanity? Are there lessons from the past? Is knowledge really power? Do all powers corrupt? Can she forget what she knows and keep living in the World as She Knew It? A small group of people begin forming around Aurora, creating a protective shield around her that gives her the strength to keep going. They call themselves the Artist’s Collective as they wait to see, interpret and share more of Aurora’s messages.