ZapOracle.com Zap Oracle
It’s happened—the thing I sensed coming last night.
I’m out in the woods picking blackberries. My basket is nearly full when a wave of slowtime passes over me, and with it, an intense sense of déjà vu like I’ve been in this moment before.
I need to be alone when slowtime happens. Slowtime forces me to see into other people more than I want to—behind their thoughts and feelings. And that fills me with shame and anxiety, because I’m seeing private things they wouldn’t want me to know. So, I take my basket and disappear deeper into the woods to hide out in my treehouse.
From its high cedar deck, I look out over the sea of leafy branches and rolling hills that form the valley I live in. Gusts of wind rustle the canopy of leaves around me. The wind calms as the sun breaks through the clouds, lighting up the forest with its golden rays.
The warmth on my skin melts my uneasiness. I lie back on the deck. The grain of the cedar planks against my back and the smell of the newly sawn wood make me feel like I’m on an old ship sailing under the sun.
The wind carries the evergreen scent of fir trees from deep in the valley, bringing me back to where I am. My sensations become intensely vivid, like I’m feeling everything for the first time. I reach into the basket, wanting to taste the blackberries.
They’re sweet and smooth, almost bubbly, sliding on my tongue. My senses cross, and their flavor becomes a deep purple light flowing into me.
Slowtime stretches every moment.
A great horned owl soars into view. I can see the brown and white stripes of its wind-ruffled feathers in perfect detail. The owl is like a banner rippling in the sky, bringing a message. It passes overhead and screeches, sending a current of fear through me.
As the owl flies off, a strong gust of wind pushes dark clouds across the sun. I hear a distant rumble of thunder coming from the western part of the valley, followed by more gusts of wind. The sudden chill forces me to sit up and hug my knees to my chest for warmth.
The howling wind is making me shiver. The shivering builds until it becomes violent. It’s almost like a seizure or being electrocuted.
And then I become the electricity.
I erupt from my body into the howling wind, swiftly ascending toward the dark clouds above.
I look down and see my body still sitting there on the deck of the treehouse, shrinking away as I rise higher and higher. The windblown tree branches continue swirling chaotically around me, but it’s too weird to view myself this way. Intense vertigo overtakes me, like I’m about to plummet. A dizzy panic, and I drop—
Suddenly, I’m in my treehouse in the dark, sparks of fear crackling through my body. I hear gunfire in the distance. It’s where I’ve been in my nightmares, but this time I’m not asleep. I hear my mom speak with great urgency, but she’s not beside me—she’s speaking in my mind.
“Tommy, everyone else is gone, but you must live. You’re needed for something important. There is one who will help you survive, but you must leave. Now!”
The urgency of her last command propels me into action. I feel the horrible truth of what she said.
Everyone is gone, but you must live.
I realize what the gunshots mean. The Friends have been murdered, and I’m the only one left. The killer knows where I am, and he’s coming toward me.
There’s no time to even dress or put on my sneakers. I open the hatch, race halfway down the rope ladder, and jump onto the ground, ready to run, sensing death is almost upon me.
And then I look behind me and at the edge of the woods . . . it’s the robot I’ve seen in my nightmares—but now it has a more humanoid body. It’s holding a gun with a scope in a two-handed grip, aiming at something I can’t see.
Somehow, I know the robot is the one my mom said would help me survive. I hear a shot ring out—a kill shot—and it jolts me out of my body.
I find myself back on the treehouse deck, and it’s daylight again.
Was I killed by that shot? Killed in the vision? Is that my future?
My arms are wrapped around my knees, and I’m shivering.
The sound of the shot still rings in my head.
The wind settles. The sky is overcast, but no longer darkened by thunderclouds. The warmth of the humid air stops my shivering.
I sense someone is with me, watching. I can’t see anyone, but I feel their gaze emanating from a point suspended in space about ten feet beyond my treehouse deck.
I stare in that direction until an outline of light forms. From its center, a boy about my age begins to appear.
He’s glowing and not quite solid in the way I am. As his body takes on definition, I discover something terrible has happened. His clothes are burnt, and much of his skin is charred. I try to hide my shock at the sight of his burns. The fire hasn’t touched his face, and I’m drawn to his eyes, their sorrowful intelligence looking deeply into me. I’m struck by how calm and aware he seems, even though he’s so badly burned.
I think of my volunteer work at the hospice. I’ve been with old people as they transitioned at the edge of death. Sometimes they communicated with me. Other times, they’d just look back at their body and depart.
But he’s my age. He needs to live.
As I gaze into his eyes, it’s like I’m being seen for the first time. Understood for the first time.
I want him to live. I need him to help me understand what just happened—what’s coming—it feels like we’re needed for something important.
Like knowing in a dream, I realize certain things about him.
We’re so different.
He’s grown up in a city world with books and complex ideas. His dark hair and eyes against his pale skin suggest an ethnicity I can’t name. We’re from different backgrounds and even different bloodlines. And yet, there’s a bond of brotherhood between us.
Whatever’s coming has brought us together. I sense he understands much of what I do about our encounter. His dark eyes hold secret knowledge, and I want to know the depths he’s seeing. It’s the moment to say something.
“Hey.” Despite the strangeness of the situation, I keep my voice calm and friendly. “I’m Tommy. What’s your name?”
“Andrew,” he replies.
“Andrew,” I repeat. The name lights up in my mind as though I knew it already. “Welcome to my treehouse, Andrew. Can you—would you like to sit with me?”
He looks at me uncertainly. I smile and pat the deck to invite him to sit. He flickers for a moment and suddenly is sitting across from me. Closeness makes him seem more solid, and I realize he’s not only my age but almost exactly my size. I want to hug him, my usual way of greeting people, but I don’t want to shock the fragile sort of body he’s in.
“Where are we?” he asks.
“Vermont. A valley in the Green Mountains.”
He turns to look out, but as soon as we break eye contact, his body begins to thin. He looks back in a panic, and our gazes lock as we realize something.
We need to stay focused on each other to keep him in my world.
I slow my breathing and surround him with my energy to help him stay solid.
“What happened to you, Andrew?”
“I was . . .” Andrew hesitates, and his vision turns inward. “I found myself looking down at the wreck below. There were two smashed-up metal hulks. Smoke was coming from the one that was once our—”
He stops talking, and his eyes fill with tears. They cast downward as if he’s still seeing the wreck. He’s trembling, and I sense him trying to hold back his feelings. He’s afraid they’ll disturb me.
I’m afraid he’ll lose solidity again, but he gathers himself, and when he looks up, his eyes are haunted, but his voice is calm and almost trancelike.
“There was broken glass everywhere. Flashes of red and blue lights from emergency vehicles lit up the fragments like rubies and sapphires. It all looked so strange, but eerily beautiful too. There was a feeling that everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. The wreck was just something that unfolded in time—like a flower bud opening its petals.
“I let go of it and ascended into space. And . . .”
He seems confused, and he looks down again. It’s like he’s realizing he shouldn’t tell me certain things. I keep surrounding him with my energy so he doesn’t fade out. When he looks up, his gaze steadies.
“I blacked out. And when I woke up, I was floating near your treehouse.”
“Well, I’m really glad you found me.”
“I’m glad you found me, too,” he replies. “At first, you didn’t see me. I watched you. I saw you shivering, and it made me feel cold. Then, when you rose out of your body, I went with you, almost like we were the same person. I saw and felt with you.
“You’re in danger, Tommy, your whole world, and I want to help you—there’s something we’re needed to do.”
I let out a breath, grateful that Andrew experienced the vision with me. But then I feel a pang of fear. I sense our time is running out.
“Where are you, in this world? I mean—are you in this world? How do I find you?”
He could disappear at any moment.
“I don’t think you can, Tommy—we’re not in the same time. But one day, I will find you.”
I’m about to ask him more, but something in his gaze quiets me. We look deeper into each other’s eyes and then . . .
We merge.
It’s like we fell into each other. We were still ourselves, only swirling together without our bodies. Two sides of the same being. I saw with my soul instead of my eyes, like a revelation.
It was a moment, or an eternity. A space outside of time. And then, we separate. We’re still sitting across from each other on the treehouse deck. Andrew gives me an intense look.
“Tommy—” he begins to say when an electric shock arcs through his chest. His body seizes, and he vanishes in a flash.
It happens so quickly, I can’t even react.
The empty silence he leaves behind is crushing, and I’m afraid I’ve lost him forever.
He was ripped out of my world, and I’ll never know—
What, Andrew? What were you going to say?
And then, I hear him.
“Tommy . . .”
His voice seems like it’s stretching across space and time to reach me. An echo of an echo.
“I will find you, Tommy.”
And then he’s gone, and only silence remains. I’m waiting for something more, sitting at the edge of the deck, listening like I’ve never listened before. But all I hear is the wind.
In my mind, the echo of his words trails off.
I will find you . . .
I stay on the deck for quite a while—an hour, maybe longer—searching for a trace of his presence, hoping he’ll come back. But he’s gone.
Before I climb down, I take a last look around. There are only treetops as far as I can see while the sun drops toward the ridgeline in the distance.
I don’t know if my words will reach him, but I whisper a promise into the silence.
“Andrew . . . we’ll figure it out.”
I feel the moment rippling in time.
I walk through the woods for quite a while, needing time alone to think about what happened. Then I climb back into my treehouse, where I am now, writing in my journal, my words pooled in the light of my headlamp.
The encounter feels like something I always knew would happen—and writing about it, the words flowed out of me with a strange déjà vu feeling, like I’d written about it before.
Should I warn the others? But warn them about what?
I know visions can be more like dreams and shouldn’t be taken literally. It was all so absurd—a robot holding a gun like a person when police and military robots have built-in weapons.
If I tell anyone, they’re just going to say I had a bad dream or some kind of episode.
But it felt so real, and when I saw Andrew, I knew I wasn’t dreaming or just seeing a vision in my head. Andrew is real.
But if I tell them, it’ll just sound like crazy talk, and they might think volunteering at the hospice is making me unstable. And if I tell them anything, I’d really have to tell them everything—slowtime, quicktime, and my other visions.
I can’t stop thinking about Andrew. He said we aren’t in the same time, but that he’ll find me one day. I believe him, but that time feels far away.
The truth is, Andrew left me with a lot of really personal feelings about him, which is a little embarrassing to write about.
Andrew seems like the friend I’ve always been looking for, someone who understands me and all my strangeness. We have a deep bond, like we’ve known each other all our lives. At the same time, we’re so different.
Most of what I know is what I’ve learned here in my little community and from working at the hospice, but Andrew feels like he’s seen the wider world. I could tell he’s from a big city like New York. I’m just a farm boy compared to him, and yet he seemed as interested in me as I was in him.
I need Andrew to help me understand what’s happening to me, and it feels like, together, we could figure out what’s coming and what to do about it.
His eyes had so much inner knowing—it felt like he could see through anything and understood me perfectly, and when we merged . . . I don’t even know how to describe it—I wish I could experience it again. It’s like we became part of each other. It’s left me feeling he’s more than a friend—like some kind of soulmate.
