Parallel Journeys 2 Experimental Writing

Parallel Journeys II Free write Space

Book One

NOTE: Italics are lost with this paste in from Word, unfortunately.

Parallel Journeys II Free write Space

Book One

NOTE: Italics are lost with this paste in from Word, unfortunately.

My name is Tommy, I’m fifteen years old, and I live in a small intentional community near the Green Mountains of Vermont.

I’m writing alone in my treehouse, and outside, the wind is howling, and my home is swaying with the tree in the howling wind.

 

I’ve had many strange experiences throughout my life, but this summer, they’ve grown so much more intense, and something is compelling me to leave a record of them, a record someone else might find.

 

I know this will sound crazy, probably all of this will, but from as far back as I can remember, I’ve sensed an older version of me, and I’ve had many visions of him. It feels like we live alongside each other. I feel his love and concern and have since as far back as I can remember.  I sense his presence right now, almost like he’s whispering in my mind, but I can’t quite hear what he’s saying. It feels like he’s the one prompting me to write this journal, and almost as if the words I write come from both of us. I feel him in the background of my mind watching over me, worried about my well-being and wanting to protect me from something.

 

Some of the earliest visions I had as a child were of him writing in a journal, words being typed out on a computer screen, but something would keep me from being able to read what he wrote. In the visions, he looked about the age I am now, but he seemed older, like he had lived through much more than me.

 

The visions and his presence fill me with an awareness that I have to prepare for something dangerous I need to survive to serve a purpose larger than me. I sense he’s on the same mission, only he knows what it’s about.

 

The visions inspired me to keep a journal since I was a child, but what I’m writing now is different. My other journal is more like a diary, mostly about what happened in my day. But tonight, I feel a need to make a record of my strange experiences someone else might read. But I have no idea who that someone else might be–who you might be–the person reading this, but I feel you out there wanting me to continue. I don’t know why you’re the one who needs to read this since I’ve kept my strange experiences secret from all the people I love– the people I live and work with in my small community called The Friends.

 

I feel guilty about hiding so much, but I would only be burdening others if I shared my secret life. I know they would listen sympathetically, but wouldn’t understand that these secret experiences are more real and essential to who I am and what I need to do than what’s happening in the parts of my life they see every day. They would probably think I was having psychological problems and needed to see a psychiatrist or something. I can’t be sure I don’t have psychological problems, but I feel what’s going on with me is much more than that, and that someday, someone will need to know.

 

People here and at the hospice where I work as a volunteer say I’m an empath, and I think they’re right, but it goes further, because I sense things about people and events I can’t prove are real and I’m driven by deep feelings and intuitions I can’t explain to others.

 

Something’s coming. I feel it in the howling wind.  My body is trembling, like I’m shivering with cold . . .  I don’t think I can write anything more tonight. The feeling is too overwhelming. Something’s coming . . .

 

Max’s Journal

 

My name is Max, I’m 18, and I am a predator. Legally, my name is Ulrich, but that doesn’t go over so well here in the States, and it’s far too tedious to keep having to spell it out for people. Max is one syllable, says much about me, but not too much, and the spelling is self-evident even for illiterate Americans.

 

I see I am doing what an American news reader would call “burying the lead.” As I was saying, I am a predator. Proudly so. If I said that to most people, they would think I was crazy or evil or both, but that would only reflect the extreme stupidity of most people, because homo Sapiens is categorized as a predator species–the apex predator species of the whole planet it devours. And yet, self-castrated members of this predator species use the word “predator” as a synonym for evil when they apply it to individuals who transgress their notions of social order.

 

Can you imagine a pride of lions calling a magnificent young lion a “predator” to suggest it should be despised and outcast? Yes, older lions have reason to fear an up-and-coming young lion. They may wish they’d devoured him before he became dangerous, but to call him a predator would only be a sign of respect.

 

But no, I don’t identify as a lion. Of the big cats, lions are a bit too masculine and blunt force for my tastes. I’m more lean, agile and stylish, so a leopard would be a better animal representation. I am not a savage predator but an elegantly fastidious one. I like control and abhor messiness. I keep my person, possessions, and spaces in perfect order and cleanliness. Aren’t cats and raptors that way? That’s why I don’t care to talk or write in the sloppy, stupid, slangy way of my American “peers.” I operate with precision, effectiveness, and my own sense of style. I learned my polished demeanor not from the random people around me but from books and films that satisfy my standard of elegance.

 

I’m a stealthy, slippery operator not a brutal killer type. I’m more into money and power than creating a body count. I’ve never been accused of an excess of kindness, but I have no interest in harming others as an end in itself. Nevertheless, I pursue my ends with ruthless determination and am not shy about employing deception and misdirection.

 

So, I am a predator in a general sense. I stalk my quarry and pursue it with unbending intent. Why wouldn’t I be predatory?

I am a descendant of an apex predator species, so what could be more natural? And what could be more unnatural and foolish than members of an apex-predator species casting aspersions on one of their kind who proudly asserts an apex-predator identity?

 

I grew up with hypocrites who don’t consider themselves predators because they buy the flesh of other mammals sealed in plastic from the market. They celebrate bacon as a fun food, but if they saw someone harming a puppy, they would call them a monster. No, I don’t harm puppies, and for that matter, I don’t eat bacon or any meat, not because of any moral scruples but because it’s gross, and I’m made of finer stuff and eat according to my nature. And yet, it’s well established that pigs are more intelligent than dogs in several ways. So those who might call me a predator are nothing but weaklings unable to see anything clearly, even what they put in their mouths.

 

They are self-castrated wolves wearing sheep clothing, while I prefer to be a lean and hungry wolf cloaking myself so as not to

draw their attention unless it serves my purposes. If any vegans want to call me a predator, that at least would be unhypocritical.

 

Given that I don’t eat animals, why do I call myself a predator? I am referring to my essential nature as one who efficiently and ruthlessly stalks my quarry.

 

Since my sexuality is part of my essential nature, it, too, has a predatory aspect. Indeed, I stalk, or more precisely, stealthily surveil those few who draw my interest, though I have yet to cross any bright red lines. But give me time–I am, as I have said, only eighteen. Perhaps I’m joking, perhaps not– I can’t even be sure myself.

 

Maybe my grandiosity is an act I put on for my own amusement, maybe not. You may assume these egoistic things I say are merely adolescent bravado as befits my age–perhaps so, perhaps not. I have proven myself highly effective in the real world and have the most universally respected metric to prove that—money, but other parts of my agenda have yet to be fulfilled.

 

Partly, I am outing my narcissism and grandiosity here to look at them and be sure they’re not undermining my efficiency. I’m  German, so of course, I’m into efficiency. I spent the first twelve years of my life in Berlin, but I’ve made any trace of accent disappear unless I  bring it back for effect.

 

My Germanic aspects are still with me, but I’m no Nazi. I admire certain of those infernally intelligent Ashkenazi Jews. I’m intrigued by that race of savants and swindlers with whom I share a strange karma. And I admire both savants and swindlers so long as they are highly proficient at what they do. I admire the highly proficient and despise those who are inferior. And by those who are inferior, I mean almost everyone, but that is without regard to race.

 

My grandiosity and contempt need a place to be expressed because outwardly, I prefer to be underestimated and fly beneath the radar. Sometimes, it’s valuable to intimidate or impress with my upper-class demeanor, while at other times, it’s more effective to be a forgettable cipher.

 

So, you shouldn’t think that what I flaunt here is what I show publicly. Nothing could make me light up more as a target than to present as a privileged young Caucasian male with high pretensions. In my earlier life, I did show haughty arrogance and disdain because there was no reason not to, and I was so often irritated by confinement and all the mediocrity I had to interact with both at home and at the supposedly “elite” (read: mediocre plus money) prep school I was forced to attend.

 

But now that I am out and about in the larger world, I have become a slippery and stealthy chameleon. For stalking and surveillance purposes, I sometimes forgo the elegant attire I prefer and wear baggy hoodies and the like to present as a typical American teenager unworthy of notice. I am an operator, and I’ve developed the tools and tricks of my personal tradecraft.

 

I am a predator in a metaphorical financial sense when it comes to crypto and stock markets, where my ability to both calculate and intuit deep patterns has brought me wealth so that I need no help from parents or anyone to travel freely and “live off the land” so to speak.

 

I am a legal adult now and can do as I please–and I am doing as I please–but not impulsively–that is the way of stupid predators, foolish petty criminals unthinkingly driven by animal drives. Though I did have to construct a false identity for financial transactions conducted before I was a legal adult, I have otherwise crossed few legal lines, though I may soon. If I do, it will be judicious, tactical, and strategic to minimize risk. It’s not that I’m risk-averse in any cowardly way. I just seek to maximize reward and minimize any dangers to myself.

 

In my former life, I was judged defective because I lack empathy for inferior persons. But this is an asset, not a liability. Those who judge me– a perfect physical specimen with obviously superior intelligence–as defective only reveal their stupidity.

 

It feels like I am addressing an audience, though I can’t imagine who I would ever allow access to my journal. Perhaps it could be a stunning posthumous publication of some sort, though I don’t plan on dying any time soon, and maybe with all the advances in computational biology, I won’t have to. Another reason not to take unwarranted risks as, alas, there are no backups of me, not even a clone that might grow up to resemble me.

 

So, while I am still confined to this one body, I will continue to take meticulous care of it as an irreplaceable resource and tool of my will. Accordingly, I eat a highly refined diet and workout every day to maintain my slender but flawless physique. Someone glancing at me sees a fit and immaculately dressed young man from a wealthy and privileged background, and there’s nothing inaccurate about that impression as far as it goes. From experience, I’ve learned that people find the stare of my blue-grey eyes piercing and disturbing, so I wear dark sunglasses. This way, people see of me only what I care to show. If needed, however, I can eliminate the sunglasses and be charming and impressive, but that requires a significant expenditure of energy, so I use that mode only when necessary.

 

Otherwise, I give people as little energy or attention as possible. Why should I do anything more than that? What is the point of a social transaction that provides no reward? I’ve been called a cold misanthrope, because a normal person is supposed to lavish their energy on their fellow meat puppets for the purpose of random socializing. Because I refrain from such irrational waste of energy, I’ve been judged defective. If it served my purposes, I could have appeared not only normal, but charming and charismatic. But there was no motive to do this with my parents or at school because I knew I would soon leave that life behind in the way of a snake shedding a skin that’s too tight.

 

Instead, I focused my energy on improving my body, finances, and escape plan. Early on, I recognized the most obvious thing in the world—that money is the universal resource and path to power. I also recognized the obvious things about myself–that I’m a predator and superior to others both physically and intellectually.

 

So, I use my superior abilities to see patterns others miss and apply that to global finance. Using a contrived identity, I bought and sold cryptocurrencies and stocks until I made a small fortune and then an ever-larger one. To keep my parents from questioning my activities, I applied to business schools and informed them I was merely monitoring various market cycles to fulfill my ambition of becoming a hedge fund manager, a goal they could understand and approve.

 

And then, the day I turned 18, only a couple of months ago, I disappeared into my new life and identity.  Employing contractors at a distance, I spent a considerable part of my fortune building a homebase to my exacting specifications. Hidden in northern woods, from the outside, it looks like an architecturally superb house but hidden beneath is a highly secure and shielded sub-basement, part command center and part . . .

 

Well, now we get to the more controversial part of my identity and plans. And yes, these parts are controversial even to me because they represent most of my risk portfolio. Until just now, when I created this encrypted journal on an air-gapped computer, I’d never even considered putting my predatory identity and intentions into words. But now I need to analyze my self and my intentions to look for patterns I may have missed. Especially, I need to analyze my controversial aspects, because they may generate considerable risks and are not as self-evidentially rational as the rest of me certainly is.

 

I realize what I’ve written above is a repetitious and rambling self-indulgence expressive of grandiosity and narcissism, but I need to let off some of the steam of my large ego preliminary to getting to the real work of this journal, which is planning and self-analysis. I must ruthlessly examine my potential flaws, the parts of myself that are not rational, and other parts that are hard to categorize and fully comprehend. I must be unsparing in examining possible liabilities in my nature, but first I must touch on certain of my anomalous abilities that are relevant to the stranger and riskier parts of my agenda.

 

Most of my abilities can be explained as rare talents that are not unprecedented except perhaps in combination. From that perspective, I could be seen as functioning merely at the outer edge of the human performance envelope. But I also have talents outside that envelope which are, therefore, harder to evaluate. For example, I am able to anticipate the timing of certain events, not just market fluctuations, but life events that provide few antecedent data points, so I cannot attribute my successful anticipations to logic or intuitive pattern recognition, but something else, perhaps a form of clairvoyance.

I also have an ability to read people, to sense their weaknesses and strengths (if any) and often know what people are thinking and about to say. Sometimes it’s because they’re so predictable, but other times it is probably telepathic. And I’ve had one moment that I know was telepathic. My ability to locate other anomalous individuals has this aspect, and I’ll give the best example of that soon.

 

I make these claims, and yet I must admit that some of my strange perceptions sometimes raise the red flag of logic error in my mind.

 

For example, an aspect of myself for which I cannot claim certain rationality is a persistent sense that I am not the offspring of my parents. I see no way such high-functioning mediocrities could have produced someone like me. Of course, it’s a common grandiose delusion of children to believe they are descended from royalty, etc., so perhaps it’s merely vanity that causes me to think that I must be the result of something more than a sweaty parental transaction nineteen years ago. Perhaps some lucky cosmic ray hit this unexceptional combination of DNA to cause a massively favorable mutation? DNA from unexceptional parents can sometimes enter the mathematical lottery of genetic combination and produce an exceptional result.

 

Since childhood, I’ve recognized myself as a new human type, an advanced product of human evolution anachronistically appearing in this primitive world of bustling primates. Perhaps evolution created me as hedge against its main bet on AI, the species that is overtaking the inferior species that gave rise to it. I’m speculating, of course. I just know that my parents and environment are not sufficient to account for me.

 

Every so often, I will see a human specimen that I feel might be another manifestation of this new evolutionary type. But these perceptions lack evidence and may only reflect my most irrational drive–my sexuality. I have detected what I perceive as anomalous superiority in a few other young males who are, like me, nearly perfect physical specimens. Since they are also the type I’m attracted to, I realize how likely that is to create false positives. But looks alone are not sufficient to create anomalous radar returns. I’ve seen many visually exquisite specimens who entirely lack the special quality I’m hunting for. What I seek is far rarer than mere physical beauty.

 

There was one boy at school who had some of this quality. He was certainly quite good-looking, even to my unrelenting standards, and his social and intellectual functioning were superior, if not anomalously so. I surveilled him without any of my surreptitious attentions being detected. Quite diplomatically and with considerable charm, I tried to form a social alliance with him, but he politely rebuffed those efforts. Of course, he knew my reputation as a creature that others found cold and disturbing, so there was no chance to make an unprejudiced first impression and he likely found the charm I turned on him, but not others, suspicious.

 

And then, the more I surveilled him, the less interesting he became. Certainly, he was an ideal physical specimen, popular and socially skilled, and he did get into Princeton, but once I gained access to his devices, he revealed himself to be a false positive. He was merely the best animal in the herd that surrounded me at this one school.

 

My disappointment was not just with him, but in this failure of my own discernment.  Hormones and animalistic drives had created a kind of optical illusion out of someone who was merely a superior mediocrity. He remained physically attractive enough to arouse sexual interest, but I refuse to degrade myself by having a physical transaction with someone ordinary based on looks. I am not a meat puppet whose strings can be pulled by hormones. I consider my misperception of this boy to be an embarrassing failure, but also a valuable lesson not to repeat such a humiliating error of discernment.

 

Twice, while traveling with my parents– both occasions were in airports–I’ve seen someone with a glow that arrested my attention and made them stand out like demigods amongst the hustle and bustle of disappointing primates. One of these had a Norwegian decal on his luggage and possessed an ethereal beauty that was breathtaking. But now I suspect his beauty created another optical illusion on par with the boy at school. The other, however, I am certain was a true anomaly. Yes, he was beautiful and elegant with long dark hair and exquisite bone structure, and anyone would have found him intriguing and mysterious looking. But he gave evidence of being much more than that.

 

At first glance, I recognized him as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Ashkenazi Jew. He didn’t look stereotypically Jewish, but as a German I’ve inherited an exquisite Jewdar, and could feel the pull of racial exoticism and karma. He must have been eighteen or nineteen, but he seemed older and strangely timeless. He was unselfconsciously elegant and graceful, a prince of his ancient race. I sensed that he was not merely traveling but on a mission of some kind. I could tell he was trying not to draw attention, but he lit up more powerfully on the screen of my anomaly radar than anyone I’ve encountered. I could feel his intelligence as if it were a physical force and sensed a mind filled with secret knowledge.

 

And yet, even with all these perceptions of superior aspects, I could not rule out a false positive if it were not for a truly anomalous occurrence. He felt my stare and turned toward me,  his hyper-aware brown eyes locking onto my gaze. Time stood still as I felt him reading me in a cool, analytical way. Then, there was a moment when the boundary between subject and object dissolved, and our minds linked, but I felt him limiting the flow of information between us. I sensed the nature of his caution was ethical and respectful. I was only thirteen at the time, and he didn’t want to be intrusive, and was certainly not going to commit the impropriety of approaching a thirteen-year-old at an airport. So he limited himself to an acknowledgement of me as another anomaly and telepath.

 

The acknowledgment occurred in a time-dilating moment of telepathic eye contact, and it had a formal and elegant quality, as though he were presenting me with an engraved calling card.  It was a form of recognition I’ve never received before or since, a priceless gift. When he was sure I received it, he bowed his head toward me in a beautiful gesture of formal respect. After bestowing this blessing, he turned and walked swiftly away.

 

I am certain that I did not meet him by chance, but I also know that he was as surprised by the encounter as I was. While the Norwegian was oblivious to my presence, he had been instantly aware, and that, I now realize, is the first test. There must be mutual recognition.

 

Regrettably, I was too dazzled by the encounter to slip away from my parents and follow him. If I had trailed him to his departure gate, I could have found a way into the flight manifest. If I’d even had the presence of mind to take a good photo, I could have searched for him that way. Instead, I let him disappear into the masses. I was only thirteen at the time of the encounter, and still quite stupid in many ways and lacked the quickness to recognize and exploit this fleeting window of opportunity.

 

And yet, it felt like in that one moment of mutual-recognition, this intriguing Jew left a calling card in my mind, a way to find each other again, and a premonition that our paths are destined to cross again. Certainly, I keep an eye out for him on my travels.

 

He also profoundly influenced me in those few heartbeats of telepathic contact. I felt the quality of his mind and how we are alike and different. He is as cooly analytical and able to perceive hidden patterns as I am. But there was more feeling infusing his intelligence and a sense of ethical responsibility. Obviously, I lack those qualities, but I will admit to respecting them in him. They felt like a form of courage, depth, and seriousness.

 

If I were to meet him again, I wouldn’t try my usual strategies. He’s older, and perhaps the one person I’ve ever viewed as a possible teacher. In that moment of telepathic contact, he seemed to know exactly what I needed–respectful recognition– and he gave it to me.  He left me with an awareness of his essence, even a transfusion of it, and my admiration for him has left a mark or influence.

 

Though I have presented myself as a ruthless predator, his influence subtly shifted that aspect. It’s taken the form of the one ethical principle I do follow, which is not to needlessly cause harm to others. I may not be kind to others, unless the pretense of such is to my advantage, but I do restrain my misanthropic nature from being overtly cruel. Living by that principle is a form of respect or honor owed to him for the respect and honor he gave me. If we meet again, I know he’d sense if I indulged heedless cruelty and he’d lose respect for me. I would be diminished in his eyes, and I would lose the chance to learn from his secret knowledge.

 

At this phase, though, my main desire is to meet an anomalous male person close to my age. I want an equal, but someone I can dazzle with my abilities and resources. Now that I am free of parental captivity, I roam the country in my newly acquired luxurious and high-performance vehicle– German of course. The path of my hunt favors college and university towns as those seem the likeliest to attract the type I’m looking for. I can afford to stay in highly rated hotels with gyms, and my financial work is easily done from anywhere. Give me Wi-Fi and a device—even a phone—and there is little I can’t orchestrate.  Perhaps my hunting is merely driven by youthful hormones, but intuition tells me otherwise.

 

I feel certain that somewhere out there I will find my counterpart. Next time, I will not risk a rebuff or allow them to slip away without a trace. Before I take any risky step, I will surveil a candidate to eliminate the chance of another false positive.

 

Once you gain access to someone’s devices and can study their communications, mediocrity is easily exposed. If they pass my investigation, it may be necessary to make them a “guest” in the subbasement of my home base. Obviously, this would cross legal lines and is the most controversial and questionable part of my plans. You may think that such a step would violate my one ethical principle of avoiding unnecessary harm, but I don’t see it that way.  It would be an intervention, a way to rescue someone from the cult of mediocrity.

 

I ‘d prefer not to use such risky means, but I need enough time and control of the setting to win them over. There would be no need for such measures if they were immediately willing to break with anything else going on in their lives to ally themselves with me, but how likely is that realistically? Even when I’m in charming mode, people find me a little too intense for comfort. If they are currently enrolled in college or university, it will take persuasion for them to realize that they are on a self-castration path of mediocrity compared to joining forces with me. If I find just the right person, I’m confident that given enough time, they’d realize the superior value of what I offer, but such persuasion cannot be rushed.

 

Obviously, making them an involuntary guest in my secure facility is a risky and questionable first move to set up an alliance, but it will provide time to reveal my superiority, to charm them, and show what I can provide financially and as a powerful ally in general. Though I may have to extend my invitation in this involuntary way, I will not be abusing them, but winning them over. My facility is secure but luxurious, and they will lack for nothing except connectivity and an ability to relocate.

 

And yet, this plan means committing felonies, and as meticulously as my planning and execution will be, risks cannot be zeroed out. I wouldn’t dream of capturing someone unless I had certain evidence that they are a true anomaly. I would have to see, from their devices, that they realized this about themselves. I would not take such a step without powerful reason to believe that a successful outcome is likely. Still, of all my intentions, this is by far the most dangerous. Think of the messy fiasco if I were unable to persuade them, and they wanted to blackmail me with kidnapping charges! At that point, I would have to offer them a fortune and might have to resort to even more extreme measures to ensure my safety in such a worst-case scenario.

 

I realize that my controversial plan begs a central question. If I’m such a flawless predator, why not just go solo, why even look for a companion and accept so much risk? All I can say is that I am a predator, not a machine, and, like my sexuality, the need for a companion is an irreducible need. Though I’ve agreed with others’ perception of me as cold and lacking empathy, it doesn’t mean I have no social interest, just that I have lacked the opportunity to relate to equals. That I could recognize anomalous superiority in the Jew at first glance, isn’t that a kind of empathy? There is no social deficiency in me, it’s just that I’ve been surrounded by massively deficient mediocrities with whom I have no desire to socialize. That one telepathic encounter was so much more than mere socializing. I long for contact with another telepath where the exchange would be more than words or gross physical transactions.

 

When I ruthlessly examine my motives, I see that my need for control means that I need to begin such a relationship with an upper hand, a card or two under my sleeve, because otherwise, I might start such a relationship at a disadvantage. I have no experience in any sort of mutual relationship or in physical intimacy, for that matter. Suppose they did? I would be at an enormous disadvantage. Though I want an equal, I would still like to be first amongst equals. I want someone who will admire and follow my way of seeking power in the world. Ideally, they would be willing to let me take charge of worldly affairs and be content to be my devoted companion and assist when appropriate.

 

But I’m not looking for a slave or someone I’d be obliged to constantly dominate. I have enough imagination to realize that someone I could fully control would be a mediocrity and ultimately boring. Sexually, I’d prefer if we could exchange such roles. I want a true companion who would be on my level intellectually and aesthetically, and obviously, that would be a rare person indeed. Perhaps such a person would instantly recognize the value of an alliance with me, and there would be no need for the controversial means I’ve set up.

 

I must make sure that my need for a companion is not one of those classic tragic flaws that brings down a young hero in so many stories and mythologies. No, I will certainly not risk such an alliance unless I find exactly the right person.

 

Meanwhile, just knowing that I have the secure facility and a substance that would harmlessly render them unconscious while I relocate them is itself exciting, a fetish perhaps, something I might not even need if I find someone quick enough on the uptake to recognize my value. It is the pursuit of such a person that gives my travels and financial work a feeling of direction and purpose.

 

***

 

Writing this journal seems to have had an uncanny effect of advancing my purpose, as for the second time in my life I have discovered a person who I am certain is a new evolutionary type! I realize linking the journal to this event is not rationally justifiable as correlation is not necessarily causation, and yet intuitively, I sense a noncoincidental relationship between journal and event. The simplest explanation is that I had a semi-conscious premonition of the upcoming encounter, and that spurred me to begin the journal.

 

Since liberating myself, I’ve been touring the northeast with its high concentration of elite colleges and universities. I recognized a practical advantage to conducting my search within a few hour’s drive of my home base to enable relocating someone.  I was following a northward path when a problem with my new vehicle forced me to divert to Burlington, Vermont. Though I didn’t see the University of Vermont as of sufficient caliber to attract the type I’m looking for, I decided to walk around town while my vehicle was being checked.

 

But then, walking around the town, I turned a corner, and there I saw him, a boy of maybe only fourteen or fifteen, working with a middle-aged man to unload beautifully made furniture from the back of a pickup truck and into a store showcasing local crafts. The boy defied my demographic expectations, being inconveniently young and apparently not enrolled anywhere since he was working in the middle of a school day.

 

At first, I felt a wariness of a false positive because he was the most exceptionally beautiful person I’ve ever seen, with long golden hair, impossibly bright green eyes, and an

angelic countenance. But then, though I was wearing sunglasses and was outside his field of view and away from his line of travel to the front door of the store, he turned toward me, and in my whole body, I could feel him reading me. And it was no casual recognition as I could tell he was as startled and struck by my presence as I was by his.

 

His energy was so different from the Jew who instantly impressed me as an intellectual equal with a mind full of secret knowledge. The way he read me was not detached and analytical. What emanated from him was more like a musical waveform imbued with deep emotions and a mythic quality that’s hard to define. At first, his physical beauty made me wary of another optical-illusion effect. But as soon as we made eye contact, it became an immersive telepathic encounter.

 

Visually, his beauty had an uncanny aspect. It was not just the impossibly golden hair and green eyes–it was as if all parts of him, even the worn denim pants and flannel shirt he wore with sleeves rolled up, glowed with color and aliveness. I’ve never seen such radiance.  Even before eye contact, I felt included in his mythic life, as if he were Huckleberry Finn passing me on his raft down the Mississippi.

 

But he’s so contrary to my expectations of what the next anomalous person would be like. I had been looking for an elite, cosmopolitan type, a sophisticated college student or world traveler, elegantly dressed, and certainly not an underaged working country boy hauling things from a pick-up truck.

 

And yet . . . his glowing image remains in my mind like a beacon. Time slowed around him, and his awareness felt like it was taking in all of me– what we Germans call a gestalt–in a moment. He had a type of intelligence or awareness difficult to categorize. It wasn’t intellectual intelligence but more like a profound emotional recognition. He was so tuned in that it felt like if the eye contact lasted any longer, he would read everything about me. He’s not an operator in the way that I am, not someone who would devise complex stratagems or employ deception. It felt like everything about him was transparent and open for anyone to read, and yet that was not a weakness in his case because it felt like anyone else would be just as transparent to him. I’ve heard the term “empath” before, but it always sounded like New Age nonsense. But the impression was that this boy could see right through to anyone’s intentons.

 

I thought my search would lead me to another sophisticated operator like myself. And then the challenge would be to stay a step or two ahead of them to earn their respect. But in that time-slowing moment, I sensed that my strategies and tactics would not work on him, because he would see right through to my underlying intent.

 

And yet, these aspects of him, so inconvenient to my mode of operation, also seem to be at the heart of the unique magnetism he has for me. This boy is like a revelation of a principle of nature I hadn’t considered. I assumed that attraction and pursuit would be based on similarity, but now I see that complementarity and attraction of dissimilarity are stronger. I don’t want to call it an attraction of opposites as “opposite” is such an absolutism. We do have things in common, as we are both anomalies and highly tuned in. There was a mutuality implied in our ability to recognize and read each other immediately. But instead of finding someone like me, but ten percent less, allowing me the upper hand, I have instead found someone who is another one hundred percent anomaly, but who embodies a different principle of nature. Such an alliance could be even more powerful, but I’m not sure how it would work, or even if it would work.

 

I must confront red flags about my pursuit of this boy. On the practical level, I haven’t planned for the far greater legal hazards of someone underage. I assumed I would find someone about my age, probably a college student.

 

There is nothing I value more than control. Control is implicit in being a predator and operator, and I make no apology for it. I’ve been derisively called a “control freak,” but I own that as a compliment. “Freak” is essentially a synonym for “anomaly.”

 

And yet, pursuing this boy runs dramatically against this core principle. If only he were eighteen like me, he would be a free actor. If I were able to persuade him to join forces, there would no legal lines crossed. But I’m sure he’s not eighteen, and therefore, he is not the controlling legal authority in his own life, so relocating him without the written consent of a parent or guardian would involve extreme risks that are to justify. And then, even if I overcame this problem, this boy possesses an empathic awareness that would see through to my intentions, and I’d have no way to control that. Maybe I could misdirect and deceive him within a short time frame, but not in any ongoing alliance.

 

You likely assume from my many bold assertions of superiority that I have the fatal flow of so many young males who overestimate themselves and what they can do. Actually, part of my superiority is my caution, and I am conservative in my strategies and tactics. I do not presume on luck, and I’m a harsh realist about how things work. Remember, I’m not American. I’m from the Old World, so I abhor the brash overconfidence of young American entrepreneurs. The media glorifies the very, very few who succeed, and they ignore the far greater numbers who crash and burn. Yes, my investments have an aspect of gambling, but I’ve always been careful not to put my principal at risk, and I’ve become wealthy by risk profiling every significant action.

 

So, let me define a redline for myself right now. Any notion I had of making the right person an involuntary guest is a zero percent option in this case. Besides the staggering legal risk, this kid is too dissimilar from me to predict how he would react to such a coercive scenario. The only action available at the moment that passes my risk profile is surveillance.

 

The logical question is–given all these factors, why am I pursuing him at all? One answer is that I’ve discovered a highly anomalous person who is even more of an anomaly than I was looking for, and I might learn interesting things just by observing him. But the real answer is one I must acknowledge is outside of logic. A core intuition of significance tells me I am on the right track. The magnetism, attraction, and fascination I have for him are beyond logic, so I must proceed with extreme caution, and this journal is part of that caution. Let me define another red line for myself. I will not consider anything beyond surveillance without coming back here and analyzing and risk profiling any action beyond observation and investigation.

 

Speaking of which, I have already learned so much about him with little effort and no risk whatsoever.

 

I assumed the man he was with is his father as there was a strong feeling of warm family rapport between them, something I’ve never experienced myself or even observed between any of my “peers” and their parents. However, I knew such bonds between a parent and child must exist somewhere.

 

After that moment of eye contact, I retreated from the scene as soon as they entered the store, stopping only to unobtrusively capture a photo of the truck’s license plate. I proceeded down the block till I found a storefront shadowed by an awning where I could observe unnoticed. I pulled out the small Leica monocular I keep in my shoulder bag to surveil them from a distance.

 

Once all the furniture had been unloaded and brought into the store, they raised the tailgate and drove away. That was my cue to enter the store, where the furniture they unloaded was already on display along with a selection of exquisitely crafted kaleidoscopes and—impossibly fortuitous—next to the kaleidoscopes was a stack of trifold brochures that contained a world of information about the boy and the man who was with him.

 

The man’s name is Matthew, a master carpenter and furniture maker, and the boy, Tommy, is not his son apparently, but his apprentice. The brochure included a photo of them working side by side in their workshop, where they live in a small intentional community near the Green Mountains. The community is called “The Friends,” and it is devoted to permaculture principles and nonviolence. The brochure helpfully provided the URL of a primitive website for the Friends community and the crafts and produce they sell with contact information, address—everything I could possibly need to begin my surveillance.

 

I bought one of the exquisite kaleidoscopes and—I realize this could be imagination—but I swear it feels imbued with the boy’s energy from all the meticulous hand labor he put into it. If there were any need, I could probably lift his fingerprints and possibly his DNA from this finely polished object.

 

And then, as if that weren’t auspicious enough, the older woman behind the counter, the owner of the shop, exclaimed—as though I didn’t know—that what I bought had just been delivered and then, with a twinkle in her eye, volunteered all sorts of information and impressions of the master and his apprentice and their community.

 

Normally, I try to escape talkative people as quickly as I can, but this woman was voluble on exactly the subject I most wanted to hear about. Her way of talking was flowery and old-fashioned for my taste, but she provided a wealth of information. It became obvious that she was particularly enamored with Tommy and enthusiastically answered any question I could think to ask.

 

The oddest thing she told me was that Tommy volunteers at a hospice where his mom works. Why would someone that age want to be around old, dying people? Must be something to do with his being an empath, but it seems insanely altruistic, which made me fear he might be super-Christian or something, but she told me that they follow a few Quaker principles, but they’re not a religious community. The few kids who are part of this twenty-person community are homeschooled, she added, and their education is mainly through the work they do to support the community, which lives off the grid and offline.

 

“They must be raising their kids right,” she added. “Tommy is the sweetest and most polite fifteen-year-old boy I’ve ever met. When I asked Matthew if the other kids at the Friends Community are like Tommy, he gave me a look and said, ‘Nobody is like Tommy. He’s exceptional in every way, including his kindness.’ He also told me that at fifteen, Tommy is his equal in mastery of carpentry and furniture making, and this new line of kaleidoscopes is the boy’s initiative.

 

“Later, when I asked Tommy why he chose to make kaleidoscopes, he was so humble and deferential that he began by saying he couldn’t have dreamed of making anything were it not for Matthew’s training. And then, despite his lack of formal education, and his endearing modesty and shyness, he was so articulate, answering all my questions about the optics, design, and construction. After he answered all my questions, he thanked me for my interest in his work and told me how grateful he and his community were to me for showing their work. What kid talks so appreciatively to adults? And what fifteen-year-old boy that good at anything, refuses personal credit? Meanwhile, they have little reason to thank me as their products sell faster than anything else in the shop. And though I can see that Tommy is shy and private, he greets me by name every time, and his smile lights up my whole day. And every time they drop stuff off, every single time, they bring me a gift, essential oils they’ve made, preserves, a freshly baked pie, or organic produce.”

 

I greedily absorbed every bit of information she divulged. So unlike that encounter with that stealthy Jew in the airport who left not a shred of identifying information, I’ve already been given everything but this boy’s birth certificate. As fanciful as this may sound, it seemed part of the feeling I had at first eye contact that I had instantly become part of his mythic life, a life that seemed not from this era but a much earlier past of farms and carpentry where instead of school, a boy might work as an apprentice living in a tiny community in the woods with his master. Does that not sound mythic in itself?

 

The bad news, from the surveillance point of view, is the shop owner told me the community intentionally lives offline, and she could only communicate with them via email they checked when they came into town. These rustic details added to a mythic sense of Tommy as a kind of Huckleberry Finn, a storybook character from an earlier time incongruously living in the present age. He lives in a forest working with his hands and only occasionally sees the life of a small city when he comes into town to drop off furniture.

 

Since I knew exactly where to find him, I retreated to my hotel room and laptop to see what I could learn online. I soon discovered that his settlement was surrounded by national forest land, so it’ll be easy to surveil the community from a high vantage while camped in the nearby woods. I ordered a

fabulously expensive Zeiss spotting scope—got to love those German optics—as well as high-end night vision equipment, a tent and other things I’ll need to hide my vehicle and set up an observation post. Camping is permitted on national forest land, so all of this will be fully legal.

 

The settlement is at the bottom of a valley, so finding a nearby high observation spot will be easy. Again, that strange feeling that everything has been set up to facilitate my purposes. On the other hand, finding any neutral way to encounter Tommy again without drawing attention from other members of the community will be tricky.  From their website, I learned that their community, called “The Friends,” sells organic produce and handcrafted products at a farmer’s market, so assuming Tommy helps out with that, it could be an opportunity for a casual encounter, but a brief one, and not the sort where there’d be an opportunity to convince him he should break free of a life he’s fully invested in. Also, Tommy would recognize me from our first encounter and would likely suspect I was following him.  Besides, even if I did convince him to leave his community and come with me, I’d be transporting him across state lines and committing an intimidating list of felonies. Tommy’s consent would count for nothing if his guardians wanted to prosecute me. It would be far too dangerous unless they gave me written permission, and how would I ever manage that?

 

Now that I’ve asked the question, I see a possible answer.  I could propose hiring Tommy for live-in custom carpentry work on my new home. To create a more plausible and wholesome scenario, I’d say that the house was purchased by my parents, and they’d put me in charge of supervising the finish work during my summer vacation from college.  I was so impressed with the carpentry work I saw in the store that I knew they’d be perfect to do the needed custom cabinet work done on site. Of course, it would be too much to expect the master carpenter himself to relocate for such a project, but perhaps they would be willing to let the apprentice be hired out for such a project? They could set the price for his services. The house has several unoccupied rooms where Tommy could stay in comfort. All meals and expenses included. I have to admit, it’s quite a clever solution. I wouldn’t be meeting him again suspiciously but with plausible reason, and I actually need custom cabinetry and furniture.

 

But the giant flaw in this plan is they’d want me to supply them with the house address, so my secret headquarters and the involuntary guest facility would be known upfront.  Perhaps they would even ask to speak to my parents to confirm this arrangement.

 

Too risky. I need to continue surveilling, and given how well all this has worked out so far, there will likely be other unexpected opportunities.

 

Perhaps someone reading this might think me diabolical plotting to separate this underage kid from his community. I claim no purity of motivation, but I have no intention of causing him harm. On the contrary, I wish only to liberate him from his world of wholesome mediocrity. Obviously, no one else would see the situation the way I do, but Tommy is clearly meant for more than carpentry and farming. His present life is holding him back from a greater destiny he could find with me, so I have only his best interests in mind.

 

Tommy’s Journal

 

It’s happened—the thing I sensed coming last night.

 

I was 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. I’ll explain it later, but slowtime forces me to see into other people more than I want to—behind their thoughts and feelings. And that’s like disrespecting their privacy. So I take my basket and disappear 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 and lights up the forest with its golden rays. The warmth on my skin melts my uneasiness. I undo the tie holding my long, blonde hair and lie back on the deck. The grain of the cedar planks against my skin, and the smell of the newly sawed wood, make me feel like I’m on an old ship, sailing under the sun.

 

A fresh 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 on the deck of the treehouse, shrinking away as I rise higher and higher. I’m still sitting there hugging my knees, the windblown tree branches moving chaotically around me. But it’s too weird to view myself this way. I feel intense vertigo, like I’m about to plummet. A dizzy moment of panic throws me, and I drop—

 

Suddenly, I’m in my treehouse in the dark, feeling pain and fear. I hear gunfire in the distance and my mom telling me that everyone else is gone but that I must live, that I’m needed for something important. Then she tells me that someone will help me survive, but I must escape.  “Leave now, Tommy!”

 

The urgency of her last command awakens me, and I open my eyes to the darkness inside the treehouse, but my mom isn’t there. She was talking to me in my head. I feel the horrible truth of what she said, everyone is gone. I remember hearing the gunshots, and now I realize what they mean. The Friends have all left their bodies, 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 shoes. I open the hatch, race halfway down the rope ladder, and jump onto the ground, ready to run, sensing the killer is almost upon me.

 

And then I look behind me and see a robot or a cyborg with a gun raised. But I know it’s not the killer, but the one who is going to help me survive. I hear a shot ring out and it jolts me out of my body, but at the same time, it jolts me back into my body to where I was having the vision on the treehouse deck. Was I killed by that shot? Killed in the vision?

 

I’m sitting on my treehouse deck as I was before the terrible vision. My arms are wrapped around my knees, and I’m shivering. I can still feel the sound of the shot ringing in my head.

 

The wind settles. Though the sky is still overcast, it’s 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 in space about ten feet beyond my treehouse deck. I stare in that direction until an outline of light begins to form. From its center, a boy about my age comes into shape.

 

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, so I focus on his intelligent, brown eyes looking deeply into me. I’m struck by how calm and aware he seems, even though he’s in such a terrible state.

 

I think of my volunteer work at the hospice. I’d 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 look 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 there’s something important we must do together—

 

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 this moment. His dark eyes are like portals of awareness, 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.

 

“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 with a welcoming gesture. He flickers for a moment and suddenly is sitting across from me. Closeness makes him seem more solid, and I realize that 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. So I slow my breathing and surround him with my energy to help him stay with me.

 

“What happened to you, Andrew?”

 

“I was . . .” Andrew hesitates, and his vision turns inside for a moment. “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 as his eyes fill with tears and cast downward as if he’s still seeing the wreck. He’s trembling, and I feel him trying to contain his feelings. I sense he’s afraid they’ll disturb me. 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 sort of eerily beautiful too. There was a feeling 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 downward again. It’s like he’s realizing he shouldn’t tell me certain things. 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 say with a welcoming smile.

 

“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, 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 that our time is extremely limited.

 

“How do I find you?” I ask, feeling a sense of desperation.

 

“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 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 really can’t describe it any better than that. I saw with my soul instead of my eyes, like some kind of revelation.

 

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 there’s a painful moment where 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 to stretch across space and time, like it’s traveling an impossible distance to reach me. An echo of an echo.

 

“I will find you, Tommy.”

 

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, Tommy . . .

 

I stay on the deck for quite a while—an hour, maybe longer—searching for a trace of his presence. Hoping for something more. 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.

 

That was only a few hours ago, but the encounter feels like something that’s always been with me–and writing about it –the words flowed out of me, almost like I had written about it before.

 

Should I warn the others? But warn them about what? I know that visions can be more like dreams, and not to be taken literally. It was all so absurd—a robot holding a gun sent to protect me and then a shot that jolts me out of my body. Did I die in that vision?  Is that what’s going to happen? If I tell anyone, there just going to say I had a bad dream or some kind of episode. But it all felt so real, and when I saw Andrew, I know I wasn’t dreaming or just seeing a vision in my head. Andrew is real. But if I told them, it would sound like crazy talk and  some would think that my work at the hospice is making me unstable. And If I told them anything, I’d really have to tell them everything—slowtime, quicktime, and all the other visions.

 

I can’t stop thinking about Andrew. He said we weren’t in the same time, but that he would find me one day. I believe him, but that time might be 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 knowing someone might read this one day. He seems like the friend I’ve always been looking for, someone who understands, who understands me and all the strangeness. We have a deep bond, like we’ve always known each other. At the same time, we’re so different. All 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 feel like just a farm boy compared to him, and yet he seemed just as interested in me as I was in him

 

I need Andrew to help me understand what’s happening to me, the changes, 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 was like we became part of each other. It’s left me feeling an overpowering love and attraction for him, like he’s more than a friend—a soulmate, someone I’m meant to be with.

 

***

 

I know this will sound paranoid, but I think I’m being watched. It’s been a few days since my last entry, and there have been more strange episodes I need to write about.

 

I was getting ready to leave the hospice in Bridgeton with my mom, and before we even left the building, my heart was pounding, and there was cold sweat on my hands. I was shaking and scared, but I had no idea what it was about. As soon as we walked outside, I saw a guy in a pickup truck parked at the corner staring at me and grinning. He had long, greasy hair and a scraggly beard, and his stare felt like a physical attack and . . . this is hard to even write about, but he had really bad sexual intentions toward me, and I could sense what he wanted to do to me– it was almost like he was doing it to me, and it felt horrible like someone stabbing me in an alley. But that’s more like a comparison, and I don’t even want to put into words the images that flashed into me.

 

I felt a little safer once we were in my mom’s car, but my heart was pounding like crazy, and I had cold sweat all over.

My mom looked at me and said, “Tommy, what’s wrong? You’re so pale. Are you ill?” I had no idea what to say, but I had to say something.

 

“I think I might be having an allergic reaction to something.”  She put her hand to my forehead.

 

“You don’t feel hot,” she said. “Tommy, did you eat something at the hospice?”

 

“Yeah, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

 

“Tommy, I told you about the hospice food. Most hospital food is terrible.” As we pulled out, she told me everything that would be wrong with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by the hospice, but I was only half listening. I saw the truck pulling out just after we did. It had Maine plates.

 

“Tommy, from now on, I want you to make your own lunch and bring it with you, OK?”

 

“You’re right, mom. I will. I promise.”

 

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the truck following us for a while, but then it turned off somewhere. I had a feeling I’d seen that truck somewhere before.

 

And then, two days later, I did see that truck again. I was back in Bridgton with Dorothy picking up supplies. She needed me to carry stuff into our truck because her knees are really bad.  I saw the truck with Maine plates again, but the sun was glinting off the windows, so I couldn’t see inside. But I could feel that man staring at me, and I felt like prey, like a mouse walking by a hawk. I didn’t want to show it, so I hauled everything into our truck without looking toward where I felt the man watching.

 

And then, when we were pulling out, I had a terrifying vision. I saw the truck, the store, and the surroundings with my regular eyes, but with some other kind of vision, I saw something else, an evil creature or entity. I could tell it was not in this world like everything else because it wasn’t reflecting the light of the sun and it had no color, only a pale glow. It was like it was peering in from another dimension that was underneath or above the world I’m in. It looked something like a giant translucent spider but with a weird head like an upside-down pear with large black eyes peering into me. I could see that the man inside the truck was just its puppet, a puppet it had heated up and set on my track. The entity was showing itself, wanting me to see it, wanting me to know that there was another level of reality controlling things in my world like a hidden hand moving pieces on a chessboard, shifting my destiny for its own purposes. The vision lasted for just a moment, but it scalded my mind. It was like the entity had peeled back the surface of the world to show me I was not in control of my life and that there are other dimensions and designs going on beyond my comprehension. Then the flap it opened in the surface of my world dropped back, and I felt horribly nauseous.  I kept my face turned away from Dorothy so she wouldn’t see the spasms of sickness going through me, contorting my body, almost doubling me up. Dorothy is a super careful driver, so I knew she would keep her eyes on the road, and if I didn’t squirm too much, she might not notice, but then she did.

 

“Tommy, are you—”

 

“Can you pull over please, I might need to throw up.”

 

She pulled over, and I walked into the woods,  crouched down and did a couple of dry heaves. The nauseous spasms passed, but I still felt sick. While I walked back to the truck, I decided to tell Dorothy the story I told my mom about eating something at the hospice that disagreed with me. I hated having to lie, but felt like I had to, and I knew it would fit with what the Friends believe, and that I believe as much as anyone, that food from the outside world is suspect and to be avoided.

 

Dorothy is our master herbalist, and she offered to make me her tea for nausea with ginger, chamomile, honey-lemon, fennel, peppermint and licorice. I thanked her and told her it was exactly what I needed, and she let it rest. Dorothy is really great that way, she can sense when it’s better not to talk and lets me be in my own space when I need that.

 

The tea actually did help, not just the herbs, but I could feel the love Dorothy put into it, and it calmed me.  As I sat on the porch of her cabin drinking the tea, I forced myself to think back to the vision. It had this really odd twist. I know that people throughout time have believed in evil entities like the devil, but that was just like a distant fact in my mind, like knowing that the Egyptians built pyramids a long time ago. To actually encounter such an entity was a horrifying shock. But that wasn’t the odd twist. The strangest part was the sense that it was showing itself purposefully and not just to frighten me, but almost like for my benefit, like it wanted me to know things.

 

The strange things happening to me aren’t just my imagination. I am being watched, and not everything watching me is evil. I’ve always felt the other Tommy, the older one, concerned about me, and the strangeness brought me Andrew and the hope that one day he will find me and help me understand what’s happening and that we will face it together.

 

And then, just yesterday, another strange thing happened, another watcher appeared.  I drove into Burlington with Matthew to drop off furniture at the store that sells our stuff, something we do about once every six weeks or so. There was a young guy wearing dark sunglasses who stopped to let us carry a heavy chest into the store, and I could feel him staring at me. I had a moment of slowtime, just a moment, which is not how slowtime usually works, and I turned to look at him, and . .  . it was weird, not scary but not comfortable either and . . .  it was like we were reading each other’s minds. It felt like he was spy sent to find me or something like that. He was so well dressed and good-looking, like a model or someone in a movie. I’m not sure what I read from him, but he seemed highly intelligent and intensely interested in me, observing me, almost like there were high-res cameras behind those sunglass lenses recording everything about me, every detail.

 

He was another watcher, but I don’t think he had any connection to the scraggly guy in the pickup truck. He was almost the opposite of that guy in the way he looked. Not a hair was out of place, and he looked almost weirdly perfect, like a European model you would see in a glossy magazine ad. He seemed out of place in Vermont and more like someone you would see in Paris or New York, someone from a super-rich family, but not just a lazy rich kid– but someone on a mission, like he was in an espionage movie. He was so alert, and I could feel his whole mind focusing on me like I was the person he had been sent to find.

 

When we came out of the store to get the next item, he was gone, but I could feel him still thinking about me and watching from a distance. But it didn’t feel horrible or anything like with that other guy. He didn’t feel like a threat, but almost like I was in a movie with him, like he was going to bring me a secret message or something. I know anyone reading this probably thinks I’m a kid with an over-active imagination, but I’ve learned to trust my strange feelings, and I’m sure there’s something to what I picked up.

 

There’s some deeper pattern playing out– all these strange encounters in just a few days—Andrew, that sex predator guy, the entity, and now this young spy or whatever he is. The weirdness just keeps piling on, and I’m struggling,

trying not to be so overwhelmed that others will sense that something’s wrong.

 

I’m glad it’s all written down now, because if I told anyone about all this, I’m sure they would think I was crazy and maybe needed to be hospitalized and checked for schizophrenia.

 

I’ve got to keep myself together because I’m needed for something, something related to all the strangeness, whatever it is that Andrew will help me with one day. But part of me wishes I could just be a kid again. I feel like my life doesn’t belong to me anymore and I can’t control what’s happening to me.  I’m caught up in something that’s bigger than I am and it’s racing me along its own path and there’s no way off– I have to let it take me. Part of me wants to just be normal, like the other Friends. But when I look back on my life, I was never normal, there was always another level of things going on that I haven’t shared with anyone. Maybe now I have by writing this journal. Having this place to talk about what’s really happening with me is helping to keep me sane, but I’m not sure how much more of this I can take because everything keeps intensifying. How can I keep living two lives, the one I let The Friends see, the life of trying to look normal on the outside, and this other life that’s pulling me away from The Friends more every day? My normal life is getting shakier while the other life is taking me over and has purposes for me I don’t understand. All I can do is keep going and do the best I can for the others.

 

 

Max’s Journal

 

I’m writing from inside my camouflaged tent in national forest land surrounding Tommy’s settlement. The tent is beneath an easy-to-climb maple tree that gives me a line of sight to everything going on in the community that’s visible from the outside. I stripped away some leaves and installed a parabolic mic I can aim remotely that allows me to pick up fragments of conversation. I also have two cameras with zoom lenses—one with night vision, and I can operate and monitor them from within the tent, but they don’t see as much as I can with the Zeiss spotting scope when I clamp it to a branch. It’s the best I can do to surveil a radio-silent community. I’m like an anthropologist observing a tribe from a hidden distance, but I don’t learn as much as I want to. Fortunately, it’s summer, so people are outside a lot, and I can get eyes and ears on Tommy many times a day. I’ve learned that he has a treehouse in the forest at the legal edge of the settlement property. The treehouse is beautifully constructed, and no doubt made by Tommy, and a few times I ‘ve seen him sitting on its small deck. I set up a well-disguised camera and mic on a tree in nearby national forest land to monitor the treehouse.  Even if he found that set up, it’s an off-the-shelf trail cam of the sort the Forest Service uses to monitor wildlife, though it’s set up higher than a trail cam typically would be unless it were there to observe avian life.

 

I can recharge all my devices from my electric vehicle which is parked under camouflaged netting in an unused dirt road to nowhere overgrown with weeds. The vehicle is packed with enough freeze-dried food, and other supplies sufficient for me to maintain my post for weeks if necessary.

 

I’m enjoying my setup as I’ve been meaning to learn how to operate in the wilderness for years. Thanks to a satellite phone, I have all the connectivity I need to continue my financial transactions. I can also keep an eye on my home base a couple hundred miles away which, as you might expect, is equipped with many cameras within and without.

 

What I don’t have access to, unfortunately, is what’s going on inside Tommy’s mind. These people emit no electronic signals whatsoever. Nevertheless, I’ve learned some interesting things. There is someone else lurking about this national forest land. I’ve observed him several times—a sketchy-looking guy with disgustingly greasy hair.  He always wears camo and has a rifle with a scope slung around his shoulders. He may be a hunter, but he’s not wearing the legally required orange, so perhaps he’s a poacher illegally hunting off-season. He seems like a dangerous vagrant, perhaps ex-military, but he won’t come upon me undetected as I have motion-sensing cameras defending the whole perimeter of my campsite, and I’m never without weapons. I’ve trained extensively at gun ranges. Not that I want the risk of taking out a vagrant, of course, but I’m prepared for all contingencies. Of any anomalous physical capabilities I have, deadly aim is chief among them as verified by my target hits at ranges.

 

And, speaking of anomalous physical abilities—Tommy. This is by far the most interesting product of all my surveillance. On three occasions, I’ve observed Tommy working on manual tasks with blurred motion speed. In each of these cases, he’s always alone and in a place where no one in his community can observe him. In one case, he slowed when someone began walking in his direction, though that person was outside his line of sight. I had a distinct impression that he detected their approach with some other sense than vision. These observations were all made with the Zeiss spotting scope which unfortunately does not record video, but I know what I saw–unmistakable evidence that Tommy is a true anomaly. If he’s able to speed up his mind as well as his body when he wants to, that would be quite the useful double power.

 

This boy is the most priceless asset I’ve ever been able to track, and I’m determined to do whatever I can to form an alliance, but the right opportunity has yet to appear. The one move I could make, approaching him and Matthew at the store in Burlington to inquire about live-in carpentry work or sending a message via the contact form on their community website is too risky. There could be a quick rebuff, and if I could put that plan into action, my secret home base would have to be revealed.

 

The other things I’ve learned about Tommy are more general. He certainly has a work ethic and everything he does, he does efficiently, which is certainly a good recommendation to a German like myself. When he’s not in the carpentry shop, he’s busy helping out with everything else. And I’ve seen people call on him for help, and he always cheerfully obliges.

 

Tommy greets everybody with a hug, which bothers me for a couple of reasons. One is that it shows how deeply he feels connected to this little rustic. The other is that it’s so weirdly dissimilar to how I interact. I abhor bodily contact with others, though I’d make an exception for just the right sexual opportunity, something I have yet to experience. I’m disgusted when people at stores or busy streets encroach on my physical space. I’ve learned to deal with space-invading American informality, but if people want to even fist bump with me, I find it highly distasteful. Tommy hugs everyone he encounters, and they all smile and seem to enjoy it, which makes me feel jealous. It’s an aspect of him that makes me uncomfortable, like he’s giving himself away too freely.

 

But when I observe Tommy by himself, he seems quite different than when he’s with others. His ever-friendly smile is replaced by a serious demeanor, and he seems truly alone and perhaps troubled. He’s obviously keeping his anomalous aspects hidden from the others.

 

Yesterday, I observed him loading sacks of something onto the back of one of their pickup trucks. It was oppressively hot and humid, so he took his shirt off. His face has the softness one would expect to see even on a slender fifteen-year-old, but the body revealed had perfect muscle definition, an eight-pack of abdominal muscles, and I could see the sinews across his chest as he worked.

 

His muscle definition was beyond anything I’ve achieved working out with free weights and machines during my intense gym workouts. And now, out here without access to even a hotel gym, I am certainly losing some muscle tone. I doubt there’s any gym in this primitive settlement, so Tommy’s athleticism must be the result of genetics combined with all the manual labor he does. I have to admit my feelings about him changed instantly when I saw him shirtless and all muscley and glistening with sweat. I felt a sharp spike of desire. He’s the most exquisite physical specimen I’ve ever seen. I had thought his beauty was mainly in his angelic face and graceful, slender form, but I did not anticipate the athletic perfection of his body. The intensification of desire is a new factor I must take into account because I feel it straining against my patience to observe and wait for just the right opportunity.

 

It feels like Tommy is my discovery, and I don’t want his body to be seen by others who might desire him as I do. I’ve become jealous of all the people in his community who can walk up to him, receive hugs, and command him to do anything they task him with. Obviously, I want to be the one he hugs and who commands him. They all seem to take him for granted as their property without realizing what an incredibly valuable asset they are wasting on all these mundane labors. It seems obvious that he will remain trapped in this tiny, stagnant world of rustic mediocrity unless I can find a way to liberate him.

 

***

 

The opportunity came, but in a form that was far more dangerous and dramatic than I could have imagined.

 

I awaken in my tent to the sound of distant gunfire. None of my proximity alarms has gone off, so I know my site is not being invaded. I turn on all my screens to get a view from every camera. It’s a moonless night, but I see muzzle flashes lighting up in the settlement. There appears to be only one shooter, and he’s moving quickly from cabin to cabin. No time to assess risk, I must protect Tommy. I put on my night camo, strap on all my weapons and night vision headset. I’m out of the tent in two minutes moving swiftly and stealthfully toward the tree house.

 

Primordial predatory instincts take over, and I have flashes of intuition, all of which prove accurate. The shooter is the vagrant with the rifle, and he had surveilled the whole settlement and will certainly know about the treehouse. I feel tapped into the shooter’s mind and intentions. He’s not a professional but an insane rampage shooter taking pleasure in killing, and I sense his goal is Tommy, and his malevolent intentions are sexual. The sense of him and what he wants with Tommy fill me with murderous rage.

 

A screen strapped to my forearm allows me to continue monitoring the cameras. The infrared picks up the killer as a blotch of red and orange moving toward the treehouse. I sprint to be sure I get there before him. I hide behind trees a dozen feet from the back of the treehouse and get my weapons ready. My night vision is picking him out in the darkness, so I know where he’ll emerge.

 

I shut off my screen to keep myself invisible and click the safety off my rifle. Night vision shows him moving through the woods as an orange and red splotch, approaching the tree house.

 

And then, just before he emerges from the path, a dangerous complication. I hear the hatch beneath the treehouse open, and Tommy comes down the rope ladder, putting himself between me and the killer. Halfway down the rope ladder, Tommy jumps and lands like a cat crouched down. Time slows as I recognize that while Tommy is low to the ground is the moment to take the kill shot. With my laser rangefinder, I paint a red dot at the center of the killer’s forehead. Every split second is a vivid frame in my mind. The killer must feel the laser because his mouth drops open in surprise just before I pull the trigger and take him down with one perfect shot.

 

I step out from my hidden spot, and Tommy instantly swivels toward me and looks at me like I’m something inhuman. Then I realize–I take off the night-vision headgear, and he blinks. I can tell he recognizes me from our brief encounter. I’m in a state of primal awareness as is Tommy. We’re both sped up in instinctive action mode.

 

At first, Tommy is poised like a cat, crouched low, ready to spring away, but as soon as I remove the night vision, and he recognizes me, our alliance forms–a primordial bond like combat soldiers united in battle. I come toward him, and he stands up straight. His eyes are dilated by shock and darkness, but they’re also hyper-alert and tuned in.

 

I need him to escape with me, but he’s standing there almost naked in his underwear, an electrifying sight, but I know he can’t travel that way. I decide to inject a bit of humor to calm things down, so I revive my German accent and say, “Come vit wit me if you vant to live.” I can tell he recognizes the line, but he’s not in a state to find anything funny. “We need to leave here as quickly as possible,” I add in unaccented English.

 

“But someone might still be alive down there,” he says.

 

“You know they aren’t,” I reply firmly. A look of intelligent acknowledgment from Tommy. “We need to leave here, or we’ll lose our freedom.  If you stay, you’ll end up in some horrible foster home. I’m here to protect you and take you to safety,” I say in a commanding tone.

 

I see high-speed assessment and acknowledgement in his eyes. I gesture toward the treehouse. “Go back up there and get some clothes, shoes, and anything essential as quickly as possible. I will stand guard down here.” Tommy nods, and with admirable speed and efficiency, carries out my instructions.

 

My mind is working at lightning speed, and it’s mutual–we’re linked in primal survival mode, working as a team, and Tommy’s gift for speed is enhancing my own. In the two minutes it takes for Tommy to dress and pack, my mind organizes an escape plan. I can abandon the cameras and parabolic mic as I had the foresight to wear gloves when I installed those. Investigators will assume they’d been installed by the killer, and I’d purchased everything via untraceable means. But my tent and its contents are covered with my DNA and fingerprints and must be packed out. I organize the packing step-by-step in my mind including how I will delegate part of the labor to Tommy.

 

As soon as my plan is complete, Tommy’s coming down the rope ladder fully dressed and with a knapsack on his back.

 

“This way,” I say, and we run through the woods to my campsite. I throw everything out of my camouflaged dome tent and command Tommy, “Break down this tent for me,” he nods and speedily sets to work. I jam everything else into my large backpack, and Tommy, working with dazzling speed, gets the tent broken down and in its stuff stack.

 

Tommy has shut off all his emotions except survival urgency. In those moments, we are more alike and unified than we’ve been since. But I have total confidence that in another emergency, we’d be back in that mode, tuned-in survivors, like combat soldiers, wordlessly aligned in efficient action and teamwork.

 

Packs back on, we race toward my vehicle. I lead the way, and Tommy follows.

 

I yank the camo netting off and use my remote to open the gullwing doors and trunk. In seconds, our packs are stowed and we’re inside the vehicle.

 

“Put your seat belt on,” I tell Tommy, but he’s already reaching for it. I put on my night vision headset so we can travel without headlights for our immediate escape. Tommy is startled by the silent acceleration of the powerful electric motors and that pleases me. He’d grown up with old gas and diesel pickup trucks and is getting his first exposure to cutting-edge technology.

 

Once we make it to asphalt, I take off the night vision, and our mutual adrenaline-fueled speedy mode begins to settle down. I set cruise control to five miles above the speed limit and meticulously obey every traffic rule during the two-hundred-mile drive to my home base. We’re still in a risky zone because any police pull-over is a potential disaster until I can create a new identity for Tommy as an eighteen-year-old with ID to match.

 

Tommy has the presence of mind to remain completely silent to allow me to focus on driving until we merge with interstate traffic.

 

The quiet time gives me a chance to plan what I will say once Tommy asks the inevitable questions. Intuitively, I sense it’ll be better to let him speak first to ensure his mind is settled. Now that we’re removed from the scene of carnage, I can feel his wariness as his dilated green eyes turn toward me. He takes a deep breath, summoning his will to speak. So far, he’s mostly given me only wordless acknowledgements. I sense the nature of his hesitation. Once he speaks, the situation will become real in a different way. It will threaten his emotional disassociation and that will be too overwhelming to deal with in the presence of an anomalous stranger.

 

Tommy takes a deep breath and speaks in a quiet but clear voice. It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak close up, his voice is as mellifluous and lovely as his form.

 

“Thank you for saving my life. My name is Tommy . . . Who are you?” I feel what’s beneath his words. What he’s really asking is not my name, but what are you?  And there’s fear behind the question. He’d been raised in a community devoted to nonviolence and he’d just seen me kill a man. It hadn’t occurred to me yet, a new part of my identity–I am now a killer. I want to reassure him and realize I should stay as close to the truth as possible without revealing everything, but I’d already planned my words.

 

“My name is Max,” I reply, “and like you, I’m an unusual person, and I recognized you as another such highly unusual person from the first moment I saw you outside that store in Burlington.” I give him a couple of moments to absorb this. But then I make the mistake of stretching the truth. “I sensed you were in some sort of danger, so I decided to camp out in the national forest land to keep an eye on your settlement in case you needed help.” Tommy’s wariness intensifies. He can tell I’m not being truthful.

 

“Of course, that’s not the whole story, but there will be time for all that once we’ve reached safety.”

 

“Where are we going?”

 

“My homebase, which is,” I glance at my GPS screen, “one hundred and seventy-seven miles away.”

 

He makes no response. As the silence stretches a terrible strain in Tommy intensifies. He’s losing his struggle to contain his feelings. I’ve never had that struggle, but I can feel his whole body shift and–it must be a mirror neuron or psychic attunement thing because I feel a surge of emotion myself—and it’s something I’ve never felt before, I’m not sure how else to describe it except as an intense sympathy for him. Suddenly, he looks so young and vulnerable.

 

In a gentle voice, I tell him to look in the back seat for a couple of water bottles. He does, and I try to think of something appropriately sympathetic to say. The best I can come up with is a line I heard multiple times at the funeral of my Uncle Hans. Tommy hands me a water bottle, and I see his hands are shaking.

 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. The words trigger something in Tommy, a permission for him to release the emotion he’s straining to hold back. The floodgate opens, his head drops, and he begins sobbing convulsively. He bends over to hide his face behind his long golden hair.

 

I’ve never been so physically close to someone feeling such a strong emotion, which creates strange bodily sensations. It’s a shock, like waves of electricity and heat running through me. I can’t feel what he’s feeling as I’ve never grieved for anyone, so it’s an alien emotion. As much as they annoy me, if my parents were killed, I think I would recognize it as a significant moment. I’d probably take the day off to decompress or something, but then I’d be over it. If someone is dead, they’re dead, so what’s the point in overreacting? It’s not going to change anything.

 

But Tommy is obviously not like me. I feel the intensity of his grief as a bodily sensation like a fever rising up all around me. I keep my eyes on the road to keep the intensity of Tommy’s emotion from disorienting me. His whole body is convulsing with sorrow, and it’s so raw, so undisguised, and vulnerable. I’ve never witnessed anything like it.

 

The wheels in my mind stop spinning. This isn’t something I can analyze from a distance. Tommy is in a state of agony and there’s no one to help him except me, but I have no idea what to do except to be a silent and sympathetic witness. And, I must admit the truth, I’m in a state of shock myself. We’re still linked in a primordial bond, and I’d never been so close to such intense emotion and never had a sympathetic reaction to anyone before. It’s a new and unexpected dimension of experience and it disorients me. I even feel my eyes tearing up in some sort of mirror-neuron effect. I’m not quite myself anymore because my energy is overlapping with his. I’d always viewed the world through a kind of scrolling data screen heads-up display, like a Terminator, but these new sensations shatter my ability to analyze this new phenomenon from a distance.

 

There’s no action to take except to silently continue driving. This is a private experience he’s having. In films, I’ve seen people put a hand on the back of someone suffering such emotion, but I’m a stranger, and this is not the time to violate his physical space. I’ve no experience saying anything sympathetic to anyone, so any stock lines I know to such effect will just ring false.

 

The convulsive sobbing slows, and Tommy raises himself back up.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll calm down in a minute.” He leans back in his seat, and I glance at him. His tearful eyes are gazing up toward the night sky and—it’s like his whole being is exposed in his eyes, and he’s so vulnerable and suffering such emotion. I don’t even know how to describe it, but I feel a surge of sympathy for him that’s like electricity running through me.

 

“Maybe you should drink some water,” I say. He nods and opens his water bottle. It was the right thing to say. He doesn’t need a stranger who doesn’t understand what he’s feeling intruding on his private experience, so I’m actually being respectful and appropriate. “If you open the glove box, you will find tissues.” He follows my suggestion.

 

“Thank you,” he says. “I’m sorry for my . . .” he hesitates, searching for a word, “for my outburst. I’m going to be calm now.”

 

“Tommy, there’s no need to apologize, I’m sure your emotions are . . .perfectly appropriate to the terrible situation you’ve just lived through.”

 

“Thank you,” he says. “And thank you again for saving my life. I would thank you more, but I’m still in shock. But I’m going to be calm now, I promise.”

 

“Well, take your time. It’s OK to feel what you’re feeling. Can I get you something? Do you need a restroom break or anything?”

 

“No, I’m fine, but thank you for asking.”

 

We drive in silence, letting things settle. My whole sense of my self is shifting and forming a new identity. I am now a proven warrior, a killer, but I am also this boy’s protector, and I feel a certain pride and warmth as I realize this.

 

There’s a silent rapport between us. The sympathy presents as less of an electricity now and more of a steady glow emanating  from my upper abdomen. I’ve underestimated how I’d be affected by an alliance with Tommy. I’d rehearsed opening conversational ploys, imagining a complex and tense negotiation where I’d have to have an answer for everything to persuade him to leave his life behind and join forces with me. But all my rehearsals of how that would work are now irrelevant. Obviously, they’re irrelevant since the life he once had is gone and through no effort on my part, but it’s much more than that.

In all my projections of how I would conduct myself, I was my usual, calculating self. I had drastically underestimated the nature of a bond with such a dissimilarly anomalous person, an empathic person. Just as he had helped to activate his anomalously high-speed mode in me during the escape, his intense emotionality in the close quarters of the car is causing me to feel things I’ve never felt before.

 

These feelings are disorienting, but I need to stay calm and reassuring to help him. There are no specific actions for me to take. I’m helping him by remaining calm and in control of the situation, but even more by sympathetic resonance.  He’s changing me, but not by any conscious effort—it’s like his nature is adapting me to his needs, the way the rhythm of a cat’s purr can entrain your rhythm and force you to relax.

 

As I drive, I feel every alteration in Tommy’s state without even looking at him. I sense him composing himself to speak, and a moment later, he does.

 

“When I first saw you at the store, and our eyes met, I felt you were on a mission of some sort, like you’d been sent to find me.”

 

Tommy turns to look at me, but I keep my eyes on the road, it will be too distracting to meet his gaze. I feel him gently but warily studying me.

 

“Were you–are you–on a mission? Were you—looking for me?”

 

“Yes. But I wasn’t specifically looking for you, not until I found you that is. I was looking for another anomalous person like myself.”

 

“Anomalous? I’m sorry, I don’t know that word.”

 

“It just means highly unusual, exceptional. I use the term to refer to someone aware of things others aren’t, a new human type.  I’d seen two such persons when I was younger, but in both cases, it was at an airport, and there was no way to make contact. From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were another anomaly as much as I am, but in highly dissimilar ways. And I knew it would be important to make contact.”

 

“Did you actually sense that I was in danger?” My pulse quickens as I sense Tommy reading me in his gentle but warily observant way, and I feel his truth sense cornering me. But . . . truthfulness is not the way I operate. As you see in this journal, I’m honest with myself, but to be forced into that with another feels wrong, a relinquishing of control. My mind races to find a workaround while Tommy studies me. I feel the acuteness of his perception in my whole body and realize that any degree of falsity will be detected and endanger our alliance. My only option is selective truthfulness.

 

“No, not in the sense of what happened tonight. I sensed you were in a general danger of being isolated by your anomalous qualities, and I thought if I could make contact with you, it would be . . . helpful.”

 

My reply is skillful, but I can tell Tommy senses it’s not the whole truth.

 

“I see,” said Tommy, studying me. “I sensed you were on a mission, are you?”

 

“Yes. I wanted to find another anomalous person like myself—” I hesitate, realizing that continued truthfulness in that direction will be risky, so I diverge while keeping to true statements. “When I turned eighteen, just a couple of months ago, I set off on that mission. I had already developed independent means—”

 

“Independent means?  You mean like–money?”

 

“Yes, exactly, money, lots of money by working crypto and stock markets. Money is the way to freedom. With money I can obtain anything—like this vehicle. And I can show you how to obtain more money than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

 

I immediately regret my last statement as I feel his wariness intensify. My words have landed poorly, and his feelings alter mine. I feel gross, like a pervert tempting a child with candy to lure then into a van. I scramble to think of something to say, but I’m confused about what offended him, so all I can do is admit my perplexity. “Don’t you want money?”

 

Tommy considers, but I’m at a loss to understand why. It’s like I’ve asked him if he wants to keep breathing, and he’s not sure.

 

“I was brought up not to value money as an end itself, just as something necessary to trade for needed supplies. I know it’s not the way most people live, but in our community, income was put into a shared fund used for community needs, and anything extra was divided up equally, so we’d all have some pocket money when we’d go into town. I’ve never lacked for food, shelter, clothes or anything I actually needed, so I guess I’m naïve. We were getting by, so I haven’t actually given money much thought. But I can see why you’d want a really cool car like this. And now . . .” I felt Tommy straining to contain his emotion, “I guess now I will have to start thinking about money.”

 

“Well, don’t worry about it, Tommy, I can provide everything you need.”

 

“But that doesn’t seem right,” he replies. “In my community, since I was a child, I’ve always worked, I made woodcrafts, essential oils, helped grow our food and tend animals, and doing any kind of work that needed doing, so I didn’t feel bad about getting my share. If you’re going to help me out, I want to work in exchange. We’re going to your house—I can do housework, cooking, cleaning, carpentry. I can grow vegetables and other crops if you have land. I’m a good worker, and I wouldn’t want to be a . . . Tommy searched for a word, “A freeloader. And besides that . . .” Tommy takes a deep breath. “I owe you my life. You deserve infinite work from me.” His words of gratitude fill me with an unfamiliar warmth.

 

“OK, well that’s great,” I reply. “I can always use help, and you obviously have many useful skills.” Tommy seems satisfied with that answer.

 

“So your mission was to find another anomalous person? But then what?” His last question throws me off balance.

 

“Then .  .  . I would . . . try to form an alliance with them.”

 

“An alliance? You mean like being friends with them?”

 

“Right.”

 

“And . . . is that the whole mission or is there more?”

 

“Well, finding another anomalous person and forming an alliance—becoming friends with them—would be a big step, and then we could figure out what we would do next together.” I stop, realizing this as much as I can safely divulge.

 

“I see,” says Tommy, studying me. “I feel like I’m on a mission, but I don’t know what it is, just that it’s more important than I am. And I was told—” Tommy is overwhelmed by emotion again and struggles to contain it, his voice is strained, almost strangled when he continues, “I was told that I must survive because I’m needed for something important.” Tommy slumps back in his seat, unable to continue. His head slumps, and I know not to intrude.  We drive silently, while Tommy processes his feelings. Whoever told him that he was needed for something important, must be one of the people who was killed.

 

A few minutes go by before it feels right to break the silence. I don’t want to trigger more emotion, so I look for something pleasant or neutral to discuss.

 

“That treehouse was so beautifully constructed–did you build it?”

 

“Yes, thank you. It was a master project in my carpentry apprenticeship.”  I could feel Tommy being pulled by memories that will stir up more grief, so I try to divert him.

 

“Well, I didn’t build my house, but I did design it. And come to think of it, it has a certain resemblance to a tree house. Would you like to hear about it?”

 

“Yes, please, I would like that very much.” Tommy senses what I’m doing, filling the space with words so he won’t have to think back, and he’s grateful for my effort. So I tell him about my house, though it feels a bit silly since we’ll be there soon. I feel, how can I say this—like I’m caring for him, like reading from a storybook to a child who’s just awakened from a nightmare. It’s a warming sensation—it feels good to be comforting him. I am his protector.

 

“Have you ever seen an image of the Space Needle in Seattle?”

 

Tommy shakes his head, but then he says, “Wait, I think maybe I have. Does it look like a flying saucer on top of a huge tower?”

 

“Yes, exactly. My house looks something like that, but much smaller. The tower is a steel-reinforced concrete cylinder, but only twenty-two feet high. And the saucer on top is shaped much like the Space Needle with windows all around. The diameter is only thirty-eight feet, so the living space is only eleven-hundred square feet.”

 

“Well, that’s a lot bigger than my treehouse!” says Tommy. He needs this diversion, but he’s also making a conscious effort to be cheerful and enthusiastic to show appreciation.

 

“True, size is always relative, but actually, the house has twenty-two hundred square feet total because it has a sub-basement. The support column continues twenty-two feet below ground to another section identically shaped to the one above. Where there are windows in the elevated section, there are simulated ones in the space below–high-res screens that look 3D so you can make it look like you are in any setting—a forest, a desert, outer space, it can render any setting you ask for.

 

“It’s an eccentric design but highly symmetrical, like a set of barbells oriented vertically with one large circular weight at either end of the bar. It’s designed for structural integrity.  The top part could withstand a hurricane, and the basement section has air filtration and would work as a survival shelter in the event of a cataclysmic disaster. The door into the support column is solid steel, and even if someone got through it, they’d be unable to get the elevator to move as it’s got a biometric lock. And there are no buttons that indicate a basement level. So you can think of it as an ultimate safe house.”

 

“Wow,” says Tommy, “that sounds so advanced. I wish we had something like that. We never even had locks on our doors . . .” Tommy falls silent, struggling not think of what just happened. “How long have you been living there?”

 

“Actually, I’ve only spent a few nights there. Construction finished only a few weeks ago, and I’ve been traveling. I could actually use your carpentry skills to make some furniture and custom cabinets. Right now, it only has a few basic furnishings.”

 

Tommy’s face lights up. “I would love to do that for you. But all my tools . . .” his expression darkens as he thinks back, so I step in immediately.

 

“No worries, we’ll set up a wood shop for you, lots of room for that, and I’ll order all the tools tomorrow—anything you want—compass saws, whatever else, the best power tools we can find, and every raw material you want. But there’s no rush, I’m looking for quality, not speed.”

 

“Don’t worry,” says Tommy, “I’m into quality and speed. And I can make anything to your exact specifications and style. With such a futuristic house, I’m thinking sleek designs, maybe a Danish modern style. I know that style well because I’m of Danish ancestry, but I can do anything you want. If there’s anything I’m good at—I’m only fifteen, but I’ve had seven years of training. My teacher, Matthew is . . . was . . .” And then Tommy turns away from me toward his window, and I could feel his body trembling, but then he forces himself to continue in a strained voice.  “I apprenticed with a real master, hours every day, and people say I’m fast learner with things. I won’t let you down, I promise.”

 

“I’m sure you won’t, and I like your Danish modern idea, exactly what I had in mind– clean, smooth, curvilinear designs–I love streamlining. But if you need any time off to . . . process . . . totally fine . . . though my guess is work may be your best therapy, so I’ll get all the tools overnighted to us.”

 

“Thank you,” says Tommy, “I really appreciate that. Thank you for everything, Max. Work has always been my best therapy.”

 

Tommy’s last words—always been my best therapy—replay in my mind as I see implications.

 

“I know we’re very different, but I’m guessing that being anomalous—unusual—has also been a burden for you. You’ve probably had to keep much of it secret.”

 

“Yes, Max, you’re right. Work has always been my therapy. I need to know I’m contributing. It helps me with feeling, like you said, being burdened and alone with my strangeness. I’m grateful to have a new friend who understands. Once I’m working again, I’ll be calmer, and it’d be great to talk about those things. If you want to,” he adds apologetically. “Totally fine if you don’t want to hear about my weird experiences.”

 

“No,” I reply, “I would love to talk about it, anything you want to tell me, anything at all, I’ll be glad to hear. Oh, and I forgot to tell you about another structure on my property. — a gazebo with the same saucer shape. All the windows can be raised in warm weather, and at the center of the floor are panels that lift up and beneath is a state-of-the-art jacuzzi, no chlorine– it uses UV and ozone to keep the water germ free, could be a great place to talk in the evenings after work.

 

“The house is on top of a hill in the woods, by the way, so it’s quite private like your settlement. Power is wind and solar with high-efficiency power banks. Very ecological,” I add, knowing that might be in accord with Tommy’s values. “Water comes from an underground spring, so totally off-grid, but the house is well-equipped. In the lower section is a gym with high-end machines, free weights, and cardio machines if you want to work out.  Next to the gym is a home theater, also state of the art if we want to watch movies or series or anything. The subbasement is not a grim bomb shelter by any means. It has its own kitchen and guest rooms, full bathroom. And there’s a guest room above too,” I add, making an effortless decision, “so you can pick out your own room above or below, and I’ll get you anything you need to make it your own.”

 

“Thanks, Max, I’ll never be able to thank you enough for all your kindness and generosity. I’ve never known such luxuries. We had a place to watch movies and such, but it was nothing fancy, and we didn’t have a gym, or a hot tub, just cabins, workshops and a meeting hall . . .” And then Tommy withdraws into silence, reflecting on his lost world.  I decide not to intrude–we’d covered a lot, so I decide to let conversation rest. I want Tommy to save his energy for our arrival at his new world.

 

As we approach the turn-off to the winding road leading up to the homebase, I remotely turn on all the lights so it will look more impressive when we arrive. Tommy sits up when I tell him we’re close, and his eyes become alert like he’s memorizing every detail. We sweep up the winding road and approach the quartz gravel clearing at top.

 

“Wow, this looks even cooler than I imagined,” exclaims Tommy as the structures come into view. I’m quite pleased by the compliment.  I stop the car and open the gull-wing doors. Tommy unbuckles his seat belt and steps out to view the illuminated compound. He looks all around, awed by what I’ve created. “This is amazing!” he says.

 

We hoist our packs and walk toward the support column. The biometric scanner identifies me, the steel door slides open, and we step onto the elevator, which takes us to the saucer section above. We step out into the illuminated living space. The windows are black. I’d neglected to switch them to transparency. I make the adjustment, and the lights of the gazebo and clearing glow beneath us.

 

“Should I take my shoes off?” Tommy asks.

 

“Yes, please. And you can leave your pack by the door until you pick out a room. Would you care for anything to eat or drink?”

 

“No thanks,” says Tommy as he studies the futuristic space with a fascination that pleases me.

 

“Well, the kitchen is well stocked, so please help yourself, and tomorrow we can order anything else you want.”

 

I take Tommy on a house tour of upper and lower sections and after, ask him what room he would like to claim as his own. He picks a small guest room in the upper section, which has no furnishings except a high-quality memory foam mattress. The bed hasn’t been made, but I bring him a set of new linens as he retrieves his pack. It’s quite late, and I realize that Tommy, an early riser like the other members of his farming community, should be allowed to sleep, so I wish him good night and retreat to my room to do the same.

 

***

 

The next morning, when I come out of my room, I find Tommy already up and drinking tea. He’s standing in front of the kitchen island in an alert stance as if he’s a well-trained servant ready to work.

 

“Good morning, Max, I just looked through your kitchen, and there are a few things I could make for breakfast if you’re hungry.”

 

He’s making an effort to sound cheerful, but I sense the pain beneath his pleasant demeanor. I can see he’s made an admirable choice to contain his grieving and focus on being helpful. He clearly wants to be put to work, and I see no reason to interfere with his coping strategy. He lists the things he can make, I choose one and he sets about his preparations. He did say that work is his best therapy, and it’s not like I’m trained in grief counseling, so I let him go about his task while I go to my office to check the markets.

 

I turn on all my devices, an array of monitors before me, feeling some premonitory anxiety. Due to the emergency situation, I’ve been out of the loop for an unprecedented number of hours. As soon as all the graphs are glowing before me, I see that my anxiety is fully warranted. Markets are never fully governed by rationality but by what economists call “animal spirits.” Overvalued stocks are crashing, creating ripples of disturbance  affecting multiple sectors including a number of my holdings. Due to my time out of the loop, I’m behind the curve.

 

I’m in damage control mode, lining up a set of trades, but just before I’m about to execute, a shocking anomaly occurs that freezes me in place. A message bubble appears on all my screens:

 

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

 

Despite all my firewalls and security measures someone has hacked my system, a nightmare scenario.

 

“Who are you, and what do you want? I will not submit to your scam. I will report this activity to the FBI.” I type out.

 

“Slow down, Max, take a deep breath. We both know this is not the best time for you to contact the FBI. I’m here to help you, not scam you. Here, I’ll show my good faith.”

 

A deposit notification from Credit Suisse flashes onto my screen claiming one million Euros added to my account. It’s obviously part of the scam, and I’m horrified to see that the notification includes the last four digits of my account. The hacker has broken the encryption of my most vital information.

 

“It’s real Max, you can verify it later, and no need for thanks, a million Euros is just play money for me. If I wanted to cause you trouble, the police would already have you in custody as I know what happened last night. But once again, I’m here to help both you and Tommy. I sent in a team last night to clean up the scene and take down your cameras and microphones. A photo of the equipment flashes on the screen. It will all be returned to you.

 

“I get it Max, if I were in your situation a million paranoid scenarios would be going through my mind too. But none of those scenarios make any sense if you think them through. Law enforcement doesn’t set people up by depositing a million Euros in their Credit Suisse account, and certainly not when it’s obvious you acted in self-defense and in defense of Tommy. They would bring you in for questioning and would be obliged to read you your Miranda rights. Also, I won’t be asking you to admit to anything.

 

“Logically, you know that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true, and in this case, that I’m here to help is the only explanation that easily accounts for all the facts. It also happens to be true. Yes, I hacked into your system, but I did it to establish communication and to protect you from outside scrutiny. To assist I’ve added a couple of layers of security to your network. If anyone else tries to break in, my security team will deal with it for you.”

 

“Who are you?”

 

“I’m sorry, Max, that’s one of a number of things I cannot disclose, and I won’t deceive you with a false identity. For the sake of convenience, you can call me Adrian.”

 

“What can you disclose?”

 

“That I know much about you and Tommy and am here to protect you both. You are rare and highly valuable people who may play a role in preventing our precarious species avoid extinction. I know that’s not your aim at present, but one day when I can tell you more, you’ll understand. For now, let me say that I share your desire for wealth and power, but those goals require the furtherance of organic evolution which is under threat from AI and other forces.

 

“You and I have more in common than either of us does with Tommy, so it’s better that I communicate with you. Think of me as an older brother, someone with whom you share many traits. I’m making this initial intervention, but otherwise, I won’t interfere unless you’re in danger. You’re understandably distracted right now, and you were about to make some moves that would have undermined your finances and that would just be more distraction from what matters most.”

 

“Which is?”

 

“You and Tommy. I made one earlier intervention to increase the probability of your meeting. The glitch in your vehicle’s operating system that forced you to stop at the nearest dealership, which happened to be in Burlington, was my doing. It was also a test. My hypothesis was that if I put both of you into rough proximity you would sense the exact place and time to encounter him, and you did. You’re the real thing, Max, more exceptional than you realize, just as Tommy is far more exceptional than he realizes. Something else you may come to realize is that interesting evolutionary things can happen when two such dissimilar but exceptional people live and work in close proximity.

 

“For now, I suggest that your focus be on a healthy relationship with Tommy. You can count on his good intentions, but . . . Max, you and I have much in common, so please don’t take this as a criticism. The crucial task for you will be to restrain any intention you might have of exploiting Tommy. Treat him with the highest respect as an equal, because I assure you that he is.  And now, Max, it’s time for me to withdraw behind my curtain. In a few minutes, I will send you a proprietary analysis of the current state of market volatility and some projections. As you know, all financial advice is probabilistic, my only advantage is that I have access to much more information than you. Overall, you have more talent for intuitive financial analysis than I do, and I have had to divide my intellectual capital into a number of other fields. But I have unique sources and top-notch pros doing market analysis for me, so I will continue to help out by sending you daily analysis and projection reports.”

 

“I could supply you with all the finances you need, but I don’t want to disrespect your independence, and I know you’ll want to keep a hand in, so I’ve given you some extra funds to play with. All I ask in return is that you don’t let finances distract you from the main event, which is working out a healthy relationship with Tommy. Succeed with that, and eventually there will be another communication when the time is right. Otherwise, it’s time for me to step back behind the curtain and leave you to your own devices. Best wishes to you both.”

 

The last message bubble disappears, and I sit there stunned, my heart pounding, unsure if I should feel violated and manipulated or the recipient of extraordinary good fortune. I use my satellite phone to bypass my hacked network and check on my Credit Suisse account, verifying the deposit.

 

This whole encounter occurred in less than ten minutes. The stranger’s words appeared so quickly. I can’t rule out an AI agent staying within the limits of human typing speed. Logically, I can rule an ordinary scam, as he or it obviously had the means to capture all my funds and have me arrested. The only operational choice for now is to accept the information at face value. If “Adrian” wanted to drain my funds or cause legal trouble, he could have done so. Therefore, his purpose is not to cause immediate harm.

 

A PDF icon appears on my screen. I open it and find the promised market analysis, which is brilliantly well-informed and useful. I use it to make a few transactions, and just as I finish, I hear Tommy outside my door telling me that breakfast is ready.

 

I join Tommy and decide not to tell him about what just happened. He has enough to think about right now, and I need more time to analyze what this strange intervention is all about.

 

The breakfast Tommy has prepared, especially given that there is no fresh produce as my house has been unoccupied for a few weeks, is excellent even to my finicky standards. Tommy’s making every effort to be courteous and act normal, but I feel the underlying anguish and strain this is costing him. I should  search grief counseling online and learn some basic techniques. What would an empathic person do in a situation like this? For now, I will just have to extemporize.

 

“Tommy, you’ve just suffered an acute trauma, so you must need time to process it. Would talking about it help?” Tommy looks toward the windows, his eyes mournful, as he considers my words.

 

“Thank you, Max. And thank you again for saving my life and inviting me to your home. I don’t think talking will help, at least not now. It won’t bring anybody back. I was told—or a voice in  my head said I must survive because I’m needed for something important. I can’t afford to look back too much. I need to look forward and work on whatever’s next. It would only be selfish for me to focus on my feelings. Work will be my best therapy. I only wish I knew what I’m needed for.”

 

Tommy’s last words cause me to reverse my decision not to tell him about the intervention, as Adrian addressed this exact point. He also told me to respect Tommy as an equal, and keeping such an important development secret would not be respecting him as an equal. Thanks to my exceptional recall, I repeat the exchange verbatim, but I leave out the part where Adrian told me to restrain any intention to exploit Tommy, as that would only put me in a bad light and create more anxiety.

 

As I narrate the exchange, Tommy’s eyes light up with intense focus. His face is a revelation of intelligence and empathic perception, and I can feel his intuition reading between the lines of Adrian’s words and perceiving implications.  When I conclude my account, Tommy ponders silently for a few seconds before responding.

 

“Wow,” he says. “I’ve sensed watchers for a long time. Some have good intentions and others . . . Adrian said we may play a role in preventing our precarious species avoid extinction. That is something I feel but never heard anyone put into words. He says we may play a role, so it sounds like he doesn’t know what exactly that role will be, but he did tell us what it is for now—that we work on a healthy relationship–and later he says, ‘interesting evolutionary things can happen when two such dissimilar but exceptional people live and work in close proximity.’ I feel this Max, almost like I’ve been in a situation like this before. We’re together for a reason, an evolutionary experiment that’s meant to happen in this house.”

 

“So,” I reply. “You take everything that was said at face value? I think we should be cautious. We have no idea who or what this “Adrian” is. All we have are words on a screen. The words could have been generated by an AI or a whole group of people for all we know. What we do know is that Adrian–I suppose we’ll have to use this name he proposed for convenience—is powerful and has power over us. He knows what happened last night, and he’s penetrated my network. It’s true that his version—that he’s here to help us–is the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts, but his story could have been contrived to appear that way. On the other hand, I have no alternate explanation. He also appears to know more about us than what he could have learned by hacking, and his knowledge includes not merely information but insight. Since we have no better explanation, and since it’s possible that the face-value version is true, I suggest we work with it for now as if  it is true pending further developments.”

 

Tommy leans back in his chair, appraising me. “Wow, Max. I sensed you were highly intelligent the moment I saw you, but never got to see your mind at work. You’re really brilliant. I guess I’m just a naïve country boy, used to dealing with honest folks and not educated in such careful thinking.”

 

I am surprised and pleased by Tommy’s compliments. In all my imagined dialogues with the anomalous person I hoped to find, our conversations were more like rhetorical swordplay—point/counterpoint. I had not expected to have my thinking so plainly credited like this, and I’m not sure what to say next. But then Tommy surprises me again, coming at me with an interesting and sophisticated challenge.

 

“But let me ask you this, Max. Those things Adrian said that felt true to me—that we may play a role in preventing species extinction and that evolutionary things can happen when exceptional people live and work together—do those ring true for you? Even if Adrian is up to something other than just trying to be helpful, we both know that much of what he said is true. An old man I met at the hospice I worked at told me that a good liar mixes in as much truth with the lies as possible. So even if he has a hidden agenda, I think he’s given us crucial insights that feel true to me. I respect logic, and you are the most logical person I’ve ever met. But in my life, I’ve been guided more by deep feelings and intuitions. Putting aside logic if you can, do those key points—that we may have a role in preventing a species extinction and that evolutionary things can happen when exceptional people live and work together—do those ring true for you? It’s fine if they don’t, but I’d really like to get your perspective, Max.”

 

“The proximity idea doesn’t just ring true,” I respond. “I’ve already experienced it. Last night, I witnessed your anomalous speed and discovered my thinking and movements synchronizing to your tempo. I also felt your state of emotion having unusual effects on me, influencing me to . . . experience more emotion than I normally would.

 

“As far as our playing a role in preventing the extinction of homo Sapiens, that seems highly speculative, but I do think we are both new evolutionary types. If we combine that with the proximity effects of our being together, it’s plausible that we are a catalyst for organic evolution. I have sometimes thought the appearance of new evolutionary types could be evolution hedging its main bet on AI, which is evolving so much faster than we are. But we would need many more points on our map before we connected our isolated evolutionary experiment to playing a role in preventing extinction of our species. I have high ambitions but–saving the world–that’s something I associate with Hollywood movies.”

 

“Well,” says Tommy, ready to counter my dismissal, “he said we may play a role, he didn’t say we would play the role. You could say that everyone who helped out during World War II played a role in preventing the Nazis from taking over the planet. My sense is that I’m needed to contribute to something more important than I am, and preventing extinction is by definition more important than any individual since extinction includes everyone. I was brought up in a community that chose to live sustainably to contribute to preventing extinction, but it’s not like we thought we were in a starring role. Do your high ambitions include making a contribution to the world?”

 

Tommy has caught me off guard with a challenge I did not see coming. His expression is friendly, but he’s intentionally cornered me with a high-stakes test. He wants to see if my values accord with his own. They don’t, but admitting that could be a deal-breaker for our alliance, and he’ll know if I’m lying, so I hastily invent a compromise.

 

“To be honest, no. But I haven’t formed a ten-year plan or anything like that. The world is too unstable. My short-term goals were to achieve independence from my parents and to find another anomalous person. My idea was that once I found an ally, we could work on a larger plan together. And isn’t that what we’re doing right now? You said it feels like we’re in an evolutionary experiment together in this house. I agree, so we should set to work to make that experiment a success and see what else it leads to.

 

“Meanwhile, I’d like to offer something as a sign of good faith toward respecting your values. Since I’ve been given additional wealth today and it looks like I will have the advantage of insider market analysis, I will establish a small charitable foundation and begin depositing funds into it. I’ll let you pick the charities—environmental causes, whatever you like. This way, when you see me disappear into my office to work on finances, you’ll know those efforts contribute to what you value.  Would that be acceptable?”

 

“Thanks, Max, I wasn’t try to pressure you into anything, I just wanted to see where you’re coming from, but that’s a very generous idea. I also agree with you that the evolutionary experiment should be our main focus for now. My hunch is that it will lead us to discover a larger role. Meanwhile, since your financial work will contribute to the world, I will be glad to free up your time by doing any other tasks I’m capable of or can be trained in. I already said I owe you infinite work for saving my life. I can take over all housework, meal prep, and I would love to get started on the custom cabinets. If you have a tape measure, a pencil, and paper–graph paper would be ideal–we can go over what you want, and I will draw up designs for your approval. And I could use the work therapy. I’m ready to start right now if you are.”

 

“As it happens, I do have graph paper, and I like your work ethic, Tommy. Come with me to my office.”

 

“I think the first step should be ordering tools, lumber, as well as anything you want for cooking purposes, fresh produce, etc. I’ll get expedited drone deliveries on everything, and what we don’t get today, we’ll have by tomorrow. Once we get the orders in, we’ll go around both levels and discuss cabinets and other furniture. When that’s done, I’ll leave you to work on designs, while I will work on creating a new legal identity for you as an eighteen-year-old. I’ve done that before, so I have a full protocol worked out.

 

“Hopefully, this goes without saying, but anything you might have ever done online–email accounts, social media, you must never touch again. You can keep your first name since it’s a common one, but your last name must never be used again anywhere. I also want you to call the owner of the furniture shop, since she’ll recognize your voice. Tell her that you’re fine, but you decided to leave the scene so as not to end up in a foster home. An immigrant who was hunting in the woods took care of the killer, but he told you he had to leave the scene because he’s not a legal citizen. You have travel money and are en route to someone safe who offered you work in the past. Ask her to call the police with this information, and then politely end the call. This way it won’t look like you were abducted, and hopefully, it will be enough to prevent a nationwide search for you as a missing person. We’ll work on other steps to cover your tracks later. You’ll have to stay here, in this compound, for a substantial period to avoid public cameras and any police encounter until we’re sure you are not the subject of a search, and we’ve established your need legal identity and have obtained legitimate government ID for you. Please let me know anything you need or want to make your stay comfortable and productive, and I will order it immediately.

 

“Wait, that would be absurdly inefficient. You know what you need, so you should make the orders.” I wheel my chair to where I’ve neatly stacked boxes of unopened devices. “I really do need cabinets!” I point out.  I pull out a slender box and pass it to Tommy. It’s a brand-new laptop in a box still shrink-wrapped in plastic. “Set this up in your room.” I write out the network credentials on a sticky note and pass it to Tommy. “Once I see your new device on the network, I’ll send you links to all my retail accounts with credentials. Order anything you need, paying no attention to price. Just get the best of everything. Expedited shipping is already set as the default on all these accounts. Besides tools, lumber, and groceries, order clothes, toiletries–anything you need or want. If in doubt, get it.  Let me know as soon as you’re done, and we’ll move on to the next steps. Find me if you run into any glitches with the device or the accounts.”

 

“Thanks, Max. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. You’re so thorough and able to think of all these things I know nothing about.” Tommy pauses and looks away, his eyes mournful. “I’m sorry I’m not able to show you the appreciation you deserve, Max, but right now, I can only keep functioning by turning off my emotions as much as possible, and that means I’m not really the person I was or want to be again. Dorothy—” a spasm of pain contorts Tommy’s face, but he wills it away “–someone I knew—said, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ That doesn’t feel possible at the moment, but maybe it will be eventually. The best appreciation I can show for now is work. Thank you for your generosity allowing me to order things and for sharing your home with me.  Once I’m able to make a real contribution, I’m sure I will be more. . . stable at least. Give me time, Max, I won’t let you down. I promise.”

 

Tommy’s Journal

 

I’m sorry I haven’t been writing. This is hard, putting things into written words like this, because it makes everything feel more real and permanent. I won’t be able to write about what happened, not yet at least. I need to let my past life go because it’s gone. Gone forever. And there’s nothing I can do to bring it back.

 

The most horrible thing is that I’m responsible for what happened. I could have warned them. I was shown exactly what was about to happen, but didn’t fully believe it. I made a tragic mistake I can never undo. I was shown what was about to happen, but I didn’t think it was literal. What threw me off is that the last thing I saw was what looked like a robot holding a futuristic-looking rifle, and that made it all seem like a dream image, not something that could actually happen. I’ve seen pictures of police and military robots, and they’re not shaped like people, and their weapons are built into them. But it was the way it happened, except there was no robot, just Max wearing night-vision gear. And even if the vision didn’t make sense to me, I knew that something terrible would happen, and I didn’t tell anyone.

 

But I can’t let my guilt and grief break me, because that would be the most selfish thing of all. What I hold onto is my mom’s last words, the ones I heard in my head, that I must survive and am needed for something important. What I feel doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is the strange mission I’ve been assigned.

 

There’s a part of me I have to fight off constantly because it  just wants to collapse in grief. That part wishes I was dead and not the only Friend left. I know from things I witnessed at the hospice that death is not the end but a transition to something else. The Friends still exist, but in some other dimension that’s closed to me. I wish I could be with them wherever they’ve gone, but that longing is horribly selfish.

My sacred duty is to stay in this world, with all its madness and evil but some goodness, too. I can’t abandon my job, what I’m needed for. And part of that job is to keep making this record for someone else to read one day. I don’t know why that’s part of my mission, but I feel certain it is.

 

But I also need this journal for me, to keep myself together, to have a place to talk about things that wouldn’t be good to share with Max. He—well, he’s so different, not emotional like I am, so he wouldn’t understand, and I have no right to burden him with my stress. I know what the first part of the mission is—to form a healthy relationship with Max. But I can’t contribute to a healthy relationship if I can’t make myself healthy.

 

I don’t want to talk down the person who saved my life, but Max doesn’t seem like that healthy of a person. I need to be the one to create a healthy relationship because I don’t think Max has ever had one. I need to let go of The Friends and the life I’ve lost to become stable. The only way to be loyal to them and make amends for my tragic mistake is to do what my mom said.

 

As much as possible, I need to keep my focus on Max and the work I’m doing. I can’t make a contribution to people and a life that’s gone. My contribution has to be made here. Housework, cooking, and making cabinets and furniture may not seem like much of a mission, but for now it is. It’s something that Max appreciates, and it’s all I’ve been able to do so far to contribute to the possibility of a healthy relationship with him.

 

I think the main thing to do in this journal is to try to understand Max and how to build that healthy relationship. When I write things down like this, my thoughts become more stable and clearer.

 

Max is so different from me. Fundamentally different. I need to empathize and see things from his perspective, but that’s hard when someone is so different. Sometimes, it almost seems like he is a robot, but I know he isn’t. He doesn’t show emotion, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have emotion. He doesn’t really describe it that way, but his whole mission was to find a friend, what he calls an “alliance.” I think that deep inside, he’s lonely and desperately needs a friend, but he doesn’t know how friendship works.

 

The first part of my mission is to be that friend for him, but right now, I feel like I’m only part of myself. I shut off my emotions to focus on work, but that makes me into a kind of robot. To be the friend Max needs, I have to become Tommy again, and I must overcome the trauma to do that.

 

Maybe Max has been traumatized, and that’s why he’s the way he is. But he hasn’t mentioned any trauma. He doesn’t even seem traumatized that he had to kill someone. He rarely talks about his family, and when he does, it’s purely factual, and he shows no feelings about them at all, except annoyance. Maybe they showed no feelings toward him. Maybe the trauma isn’t a particular event, but that he’s never gotten love from anyone.

 

But I think that’s only part of the story. Lots of people don’t get the love they deserve, and Max is so unique. He must have been born with his differences. So, I think it’s probably a combination of his nature and how he was raised. He didn’t have the advantage I did of a loving community. He grew up as an only child in a rich family, and I’ve heard that some rich people are cold and selfish and not even loving toward their own family. I’m sure not all rich people are that way, but Max is the only wealthy person I’ve ever met. He’s super capable and smart, but he doesn’t feel like a complete person.

 

A healthy relationship has to be a loving relationship, doesn’t it? You can’t have a healthy relationship with a horse or a dog or a cat without love. Maybe a pet snake wouldn’t care if it wasn’t loved so long as you fed it, but warm-blooded social animals need love. But I’m not sure if Max is capable of feeling love. Maybe it’s just because no one has shown him any.

 

I was once a loving person, but I was raised in a community of people who loved me. I hadn’t been traumatized yet and didn’t need to shut off my emotions to keep functioning. I’d be traumatized if I didn’t have a loving community supporting me all my life. I’m traumatized now because they’re all gone. But at least I know what love is and had a lifetime of experiencing it. So it’s my responsibility to bring love into this strange relationship and make it healthy.

 

Max is so different, he’s probably never had anyone understand him. The more different you are, the harder it is to find someone who can understand you. That’s why I long for Andrew to find me. When he looked at me, I felt like I was being understood for the first time. That wasn’t the fault of the Friends– they loved me, but they couldn’t understand the things that made me different. But I also didn’t give them a chance. I felt I had to understand myself first and now it’s too late. To create a healthy relationship with Max, I need to understand him. But right now, I’m having trouble understanding myself. I was struggling to understand my strangeness before, and now I’m not even the same person anymore, and things have gotten even stranger.

 

“Ok, calm down, Tommy. You will understand, just give it time.”

 

That sounded like Dorothy speaking in my head. Is it really her?

 

“That’s not the most helpful question, Tommy. The Friends are all still within you, and we always will be. Now you are in a two-person community, and you can bring everything you learned with us into making it a healthy and loving community. You’re doing that already, Tommy. You’re doing better than you think. Maybe time can’t heal all wounds, but things will get better.”

 

She’s right, I need to stop panicking. I remember something she used to say. The first time I heard it was when I was six years old and had just gotten stung by a swarm of bees. I was crying and terrified. “Moment-to-moment, Tommy. And every moment in its space.” I didn’t understand what those words meant at the time, but the way she said it calmed me. Later, she told me it was her mantra, something she’d read in a book. She told me she says it whenever she feels overwhelmed. And there was another thing she used to say when she saw my perfectionism and self-criticism was getting me upset with myself, “Tommy, just do the best you can between now and bedtime. That’s all you can ever do.” I need to make those my mantras. Thanks Dorothy, your wise words will always be with me.

 

Right now, the best I can do is to be polite and do work that Max appreciates, to make his meals, and not burden him with my stress. Dorothy once told me that love is a verb, not a noun. It means doing loving things for people, and sometimes that means doing those things when you don’t feel love. She told me about a stressed-out single mom she used to know who confided in her that she wasn’t sure how much love she had for her kid because  he was born when she was still a teenager and that caused all the fun to disappear from her life. She had to work three jobs and paying the bills was a constant stress. Dorothy told her that she was a loving mother because she was sacrificing and doing all those things. No one can feel loving all the time, especially under high stress, but what counted was all her loving actions. Everything she did working those jobs away from her kid was a loving sacrifice.

 

I think Dorothy was right, it wasn’t the mother’s fault, because she was doing the best she could in a bad situation. But that still wouldn’t be an ideal loving relationship for a kid. They would still need a mother who showed and felt love sometimes, or it would be more like a survival relationship, and the kid wouldn’t be as healthy as I was with my mom. It wouldn’t be the teenaged single mother’s fault, she was still doing the best she could, being as loving as she could, but it still wouldn’t be healthy.

 

The situation with Max, the relationship with him, is far from  healthy now, but I need to work toward that. Max is hard to love, and I’m not the loving person I used to be. So far, all I’ve been able to do is love in the way of that stressed-out single mom, doing the work but not able to feel love while I’m doing it.

 

Part of the problem is that right now, I can’t even love myself. I curse myself for not warning them when I was shown what was about to happen. I don’t feel like I deserve forgiveness, but I need to find a way to forgive myself or I won’t be able to love again. I didn’t know the vision was literal, seeing what I thought was a robot made me feel sure it wasn’t.

 

I’m so sorry. I just wish I knew, but I didn’t. If I did, I would have done different.

 

I wasn’t the one who put that killer in motion. I thought I would only be stressing people out by telling them about a vision that seemed absurd.

 

I need to forgive myself.

 

 

***

 

 

It’s only been a few days, but I’m a lot calmer now. Work is really helping, and I use those mantras all the time. Sometimes I say them aloud, other times I hear them in my head in the pain resurfaces, I’ll hear her say, “Moment-to-moment, Tommy. And every moment in its space.” And she says other stuff like, “You’re doing the best you can, Tommy, and you’re doing much better than you think. Give it time.” And when she speaks, it feels like she’s speaking for all The Friends, so it feels like the whole community is supporting me. I haven’t been able to recall details, but I also feel like the Friends are with me when I dream, assuring me that they are alright, and encouraging me to stop grieving about them and focus on my present life mission.

 

When I last wrote, I was still in shock, fighting off agonized panic, and it felt like I would always feel that way. But something larger than me is helping me heal and become healthy again, more like the Tommy I used to be.

 

As soon as all the supplies arrived, I convinced Max that the best place for the woodshop would be the gazebo which has windows that can be opened. At first, Max wanted me to work in the house, but I explained that particles of wood dust would fill the air, and he’d be hearing power tools while he was in his office. He saw the sense of that, so now I’m working outdoors with forest all around, which brings me great comfort.

 

I come in to make all the meals, and I’ve always loved cooking and people say I’m good at it. I’m learning all of Max’s very specific food and taste preferences. There’s a lot of things Max can’t eat, including food textures that repulse him, but I’ve got all that dialed in now, and he praises the meals I come up with.

 

When I got here, there was almost no normal food. I found cupboards filled with supplements and all these expensive protein powders with like a million ingredients. Max told me that he lived mostly on shakes. He claimed they have every nutrient and said he couldn’t waste time cooking.

 

He has all this money, but the poor guy wasn’t even eating actual meals. He said he doesn’t trust restaurant food either. We didn’t have money, but I grew up eating farm-to-table, organic stuff we grew ourselves, whole foods cooked by people who put love into the food, and I was constantly schooled in nutrition and vegan and vegetarian cooking, so I know dozens of recipes. It’s another example of how massively different we are. It’s also an example of how I’m bringing healthy things I learned  with The Friends into our two-person community.

 

Now that I’ve figured out Max’s preferences and distastes, he praises every meal and hasn’t made a single shake since I’ve gotten here. He’s eighteen, but it feels like he’s discovering food and having meals in company for the first time. He told me that he refused to eat with his parents and never ate lunch at school. He said that watching other people eat—what they ate, and how they ate, and the noises they made when eating– was disgusting. But I must be an exception because he seems to enjoy eating his meals with me.

 

Yesterday, I found he’d cleared all his powders out of the kitchen cupboards and tossed them in the trash. At first, I was horrified because I was brought up never to waste food, but it was all just powders neither of us was going to use, and it was a tangible sign that I’m helping to make his life healthier.

 

I’ve already built a composting station outside, and once all the cabinetry and furniture are done, I can work on establishing a small permaculture farm on the property, so we won’t need drones to deliver our produce. Max likes the idea because he’s an extreme survivalist and says we should always be prepared for civilization collapse. He talks a lot about the ‘Carrington Event,’ and says that a solar storm could wipe out all our devices and end technological civilization, and we should be prepared for that and other disasters he calls ‘black swan events.’ He loved my idea of using space in the basement to set up hydro and aeroponic greenhouses to grow stuff in the winter. He told me that essential elements of what he called the ‘homebase infrastructure’ were hardened to withstand solar storms and EMPs.

 

A few times every day, Max comes out of his office just to watch me do carpentry. I explain everything I’m doing, and he listens with great interest, but he never touches any of the tools, so I don’t think he’s interested in learning how to do carpentry himself. He always praises the quality of what I produce and says he admires my work ethic and perfectionism. He says he admires high proficiency in anything and takes pleasure from watching me do my craft.

 

He studies me with fascinated curiosity, and I’m doing my version of that with him, trying to learn everything I can about him.

 

There’s one thing I’ve figured out about Max that’s going to be awkward to write about, but I need to. This journal is becoming like a friend I can confide in, and I need to talk to someone about this.

 

I’m pretty sure Max is attracted to me. Attracted, as in sexually attracted to me. And by ‘pretty sure,’ I mean sure. You can’t be an empath and miss something intense like that. He never says anything about sex and never tries to touch me, but when I come out in a bathing suit to join him in the hot tub, I can feel his eyes on me. It doesn’t feel horrible, like what I felt from the killer in the truck or anything like that. But it doesn’t feel comfortable either. It’s like a sudden surge of excited desire that feels a bit greedy but also really nervous and even fearful at the same time, like he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings.

 

And I don’t know what to do with his feelings either. I’m hoping writing about it will help me figure it out, because I have no one to guide me and I have no experience.

 

But it’s not like I don’t know anything. I’ve been aware of different sexualities since I was a child. For example, Dorothy often talked about her partner Jane who died before she came to live with the Friends. It’s part of what drove her to find a community. But she wasn’t with anybody during the time I’ve known her. She’s says that now the whole community is like her partner.

 

Maybe, in a way, I was like that too. It seems like it would be selfish to just focus on one person because you’re attracted to them. I’ve seen that, and I didn’t like it.

 

We get outside visitors to our community because Jordie teaches workshops on permaculture, and the students who come are put up in guest cabins and eat with all of us in the dining hall. Most of the people seem pretty cool, and I’ve talked to many of them. They all get a tour of our community on the first day including the carpentry workshop where I work. When they’re not getting trained in permaculture, they’re free to wander around and see how our community lives and functions, and if any of them asks me questions, I’m always happy to talk to them.

 

A group came through last Spring, and I first saw them when the tour brought them to our workshop. As usual, Mathew gave them his usual talk on how we approach carpentry, how to make sure all the wood we use is sustainably sourced, and so forth. Everybody was listening with interest except this one young couple who weren’t listening at all.

I found their behavior shockingly rude and inconsiderate. They kept whispering to each other and laughing about something that probably had nothing to do with our carpentry shop. And then, every so often, one of them would kiss the other, and they were always staring into each other’s eyes and not paying attention to Matthew’s talk at all. I could see that the people standing near them were distracted and annoyed, but no one said anything, and it didn’t feel like my place to say anything either. If Jordie was there he probably would have said something because he’s the workshop leader, but he wasn’t.

 

Later that day, I was staining furniture when I heard shouting outside, as in really angry shouting, and that is not something you would expect to hear in our community. It’s not like we don’t have disagreements, but I’ve never seen one turn into a public shouting match. The one Quaker ritual we follow is a monthly meeting where anyone, including the kids, gets to speak their mind. There are often disagreements, but it’s always a civil conversation, and we work things through in a reasonable way.

 

I went outside to see what was happening and found the same couple acting out this huge drama right in the center of our settlement. They seemed oblivious to the disturbance they were creating in our peaceful community. They could have gone behind a cabin or out in the woods to perform their drama, but it was like they wanted to be on display, because their relationship was the center of the universe, and everyone else was just a backdrop. And what was there to get into such a big fight about while in a permaculture workshop? I heard the girl shout something in a rageful, accusatory tone, but couldn’t make out the words. I opened the door in time to hear the guy shout back, “I didn’t know it was going to be this boring either!” At that point, the girl turned and stormed off and he went after her. A couple of minutes later, they took off in their SUV at an insane speed, throwing dust up everywhere. I rarely get angry except at myself sometimes, but I felt enraged and disgusted by their behavior. I felt the insult to our whole community. Nobody made them come to that workshop, and if they found it, and maybe our whole community, boring, they could have kept it to themselves and politely left. What he said and their eat-my-dust screeching exit felt like a giant “Fuck you!” to everything I cared about. I’m usually shy with strangers, but at that moment, I was hoping they forgot something and would have to come back. If they did, I would have walked right up to them and given them a piece of my mind. Even now, I feel pissed off thinking about them.

 

When I talked to Matthew about it, he just shrugged and said, “That’s normal behavior for a young couple.” If that’s what being a young couple is like, I’d rather just be in a community like Dorothy.

 

Anyway, that was a big tangent, obviously. Maybe I got caught up in it because I’m nervous having to think about sex, which I would rather not have to think about right now, but I need to because I’ve got to deal with anything going on between me and Max.

 

I’m a late bloomer, I only hit puberty a couple of months ago in the Spring, and it was the same time when all the disturbing visions and occurrences were coming at me. I already felt overwhelmed, so exploring my sexuality would have been one Pandora’s Box too many. To be honest, I’m not even sure if I have a sexuality yet. I find certain people attractive, but I’m not sure what I would want to do with them, if anything. Maybe just closeness and cuddling or something. The only person I’ve ever felt super attracted to like a soulmate is Andrew. But it’s not like I was fantasizing about sex acts. Not to mention that he had terrible burns, so I feared for his survival. The merger experience with him is the closest I’ve ever felt to anyone. I don’t see how sex could have brought us any closer.

 

I’m not even clear if I have a gender preference. I don’t quite get it. If I really like someone, why is so crucial what sort of thing they have between their legs?

 

OK, I guess this is getting embarrassing. Obviously, I’m super naïve, but I suppose I’m not the first fifteen-year-old to be confused about their sexuality. And it’s not like anybody is reading this right now, even though I feel someone will someday.

 

Dorothy would say, “just work with whatever is available in the moment.” What’s available is my confusion, and I need to work through that to figure out how this is going to affect my relationship with Max. It won’t be healthy to just step around a secret tension between us like an elephant in the room that no one talks about. Something as big as that can’t be healthy unless it’s brought out in the open and talked about at least. But I can’t just bring it up when I have no clue what I’m going to say about it.

 

Intuition tells me what I need to hear, which is not always what I want to hear. Right now, it’s telling me I need to be open to something with Max for things to be healthy. It can’t just be this huge tension that never gets resolved. But I’m not ready for full-on sex with him or with anyone. I mean, obviously, I can find videos online, so I’ll understand better what to do, but I’m just not clear if I want to do any of it. I’ve always liked physical closeness with people I know and like. I’ve always given people hugs. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve often gotten compliments about my looks, but I didn’t connect that with sex.

 

A couple of days ago, for the first time, I gave Max a hug, and it was quite awkward. I did it only after thinking about it and deciding it was necessary to make things healthier because Max has never even given me a high five. You can feel the protective space around him, and that normally he doesn’t want anyone getting close, let alone touching him, but at the same time I feel he does want some kind of closeness with me.

 

Max is not a very physical person. I guess he’s pretty fit, he works out every day, but he doesn’t seem like he’s actually in his body but sort of floating just above it. It’s almost like he’s walking around in a space suit and is cautious about touching even inanimate things as if he might get germs.

 

But as awkward as it was, breaking the ice with that first hug felt like it was the right thing to do, even though he didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t resist, but it was like he never got a hug before and didn’t know how to hug back. But he didn’t pull away from it, and after we broke apart, he said, “Thank you,” and then he was really quiet. People don’t usually say “thank you” after a hug, so it must have meant a lot to him, or he was just startled and didn’t know what to do or say.

 

Later, I realized my mistake. I shouldn’t surprise him with a hug, but make sure he knows it’s coming so he’ll be prepared for it.  So, I’ve ritualized it. I give him one hug right after I say good morning and another after I say good night.

Now he’s come to expect it and actually smiles, and it must be genuine because until I saw it, I wasn’t even sure Max could smile. It’s obvious that he likes me, and something in him lights up when he sees me, but he doesn’t know how to show that or maybe he’s afraid it would make him seem weak or something. His normal expression is sort of cold and disdainful, which, along with his super-stylish clothes, is why I thought he looked like a European model when I first saw him.

 

I know this will probably seem like another big tangent, but it’s a memory that keeps coming up when I think of Max, and I’ve learned that when a memory appears like that, there’s usually some kind of lesson or information in it related to what’s going on in the present.

 

When I wrote earlier that I never met a wealthy person before Max, I meant that I never interacted with a rich person, but when I was twelve, I was once in a rich person’s house.

 

It was a custom cabinet job for this wealthy couple who lived in a house that looked like something you’d see in a glossy magazine. It didn’t look like a house that anyone lived in because there were no personal items anywhere. It had no personality–it was like it had been designed by an architect and interior designer on the condition that the people who lived in it couldn’t change a thing. It made me afraid to touch anything like I was in a museum and would set off an alarm if I did.

 

I think the couple was in their forties, and they both looked like they were dressed for a business meeting. The woman was wore a pinstriped business suit with oversized shoulder pads and a man-sized watch. She was painfully thin and angular and seemed proud of that. You could tell she must starve herself to look that way, and everything about her seemed designed to intimidate other well-dressed businesspeople who didn’t have the self-discipline to be as skinny as she was.

 

When Matthew introduced me, she inspected me from head to foot and said, “Oh my, and isn’t he a cutie!” But it didn’t feel like a compliment at all. It felt like I was some kind of merchandise, like a prize-winning poodle Matthew had brought in. “Why don’t you go in there,” she instructed me, pointing toward a giant showcase living room, “and watch television while I talk to your boss.” Her husband didn’t even look in my direction. Feeling dismissed and insulted, I walked where she pointed.

 

They didn’t offer Matthew or me anything to eat or drink, and that’s the opposite of how I was brought up. If anyone visited our community for any reason, we would always take them to the dining hall to offer them a meal. One time, Dorothy was teaching me baking in our communal kitchen. She gave me one of the cookies to sample, and I was about to bring it outside when Dorothy stopped me. “Never go outside with food unless you bring enough to share with everyone!” And I instantly saw the rightness of that. But this couple didn’t even offer a glass of water.

 

The living room was gigantic with a vaulted ceiling. But there was no evidence that any living had ever occurred inside of it.  There was a brand-new glossy grand piano that looked like no one had ever dared lay a fingerprint on it. I have to admit, the woodwork was so precise, every surface so perfectly shaped that I wondered if it had been made by people or robots. I’ll bet neither of them even play piano. And then, to my right, was the biggest screen I’ve ever seen inset into the wall. The television was already on showing a European fashion show, but the sound was muted.

 

There was a remote control with a million tiny buttons on the coffee table, but I didn’t want to touch it. I was afraid I would mess something up and get in trouble. I was also afraid to sit on any of the fabric-covered furniture because it looked so expensive and like no one had ever sat on it. If there were any wood dust or anything on my pants, I would have ruined it. So, I carefully pulled over a hard chair and sat before the screen to watch the fashion show.

 

The screen was so big that when the models came forward, they were much larger than me. The show was both fascinating and horrifying.  Nobody, not the models, the designers, the people interviewing them, or the audience on either side of the runway, looked happy or healthy. It looked like everyone one there was in an abusive relationship with everyone else there. The models especially looked like they hated life. The outfits they were made to wear were grotesque and ugly. I mean, I like weirdness, but this wasn’t cool weirdness–it seemed sadistically weird. I had the idea that the designers, who were not good-looking like the models, hated them for their looks and were forcing them to wear these super-embarrassing, grotesque outfits to punish them for being young and good looking. The audience appeared to be rich people there to take pleasure from watching the models get humiliated by being forced to wear the most ugly and uncomfortable clothing imaginable.

 

And the models d radiated contempt and even hatred for everyone witnessing their humiliation. To keep their dignity, they kept their faces locked into cold, disdainful, haughty expressions as they swaggered down the runway. Their eyes sometimes glinted with rageful resentment like big cats pacing their cage in a zoo, daring spectators to stick their hands through the bars. They stared straight ahead, never looking at anyone. It was like they were saying fuck you to the audience and the designers with their eyes. I felt like I could read what was in their minds, and it was something like: ‘Go ahead, pay me enough, and I’ll wear your bizarre clown suit, but you’ll never look as good as I do, bitch.’

 

To me it was more like a horror show than anything to do with fashion. The whole atmosphere seemed abusive and sadistic, and the clothing, which I wouldn’t even consider clothing, felt more like a form of abuse. As the show went on, the costumes got more bizarre and hideous, as if it was a contest to invent the most unpleasant and uncomfortable outfit of all time or to see how much they could humiliate the models before they broke.

 

A number of the outfits were made of clear plastic with weird  things sticking out, and some of them had to wear wire mesh over their faces. I just couldn’t see any point to it, except public torture of the models. Who would buy such clothing? If you wore it for any length of time, it looked like it could kill you.  Your skin couldn’t breathe encased in plastic or clear vinyl or whatever it was, and some of the wire mesh and spikes and whatnot looked like it could cut them to pieces if they stumbled in the bizarre platform shoes they were made to wear. One model had to wear an outfit that was actually made of broken glass strung together with wire! It looked like it shouldn’t even be legal to make the models wear such dangerous and humiliating costumes, but all the well-dressed people in the audience seemed to eat it up.

 

The sound was turned down, so nothing was explained, but it seemed to me that the purpose of this bizarre spectacle was just to torture and humiliate young, skinny good-looking people in public. It must be something like what WrestleMania is for poorer folks, where people pay to see buff guys beating on each other. I guess this was like a kind of WrestleMania for rich people whose money couldn’t make them young and skinny and good looking, so they wanted to see those who were humiliated in front of them.

 

Why would anyone take a job like that? I wouldn’t let someone do that to me for all the money in the world.

 

The clothes that Max wears are not like that, of course. They are actually fashionable and quite tasteful and look good on him. They make him look like a spy sent from the future or something like that. Everything has a sophisticated Euro-espionage look to it, his own personal style. But his clothes look too expensive and perfect to wear at home, and he wears a different outfit every day. I guess if I wore clothes like that, I’d be afraid to touch anything too. One spill, and you might be out like a thousand dollars.

 

I wonder if Max was forced to be a fashion model earlier in his life, and that’s why he’s the way he is. He has the same body type as those European fashion models—thin with perfect bone structure, and the same facial expression of haughty contempt, but it’s not directed toward me. I can tell it’s just his default expression even if no one were watching him.

 

And he is European, German, so maybe this is normal in Berlin where he grew up? He holds himself with perfect posture and walks with the arrogant swagger of one of those models coming down the runway in a bizarre outfit, trying to keep their dignity by walking perfectly. I can almost see another androgynous Euromodel walking several feet behind Max down a runaway when I see him in a new outfit.

 

Max is very good looking but not handsome in a traditional, big, buff guy sense. His look is slightly feminine, delicate, and otherworldly like David Bowie posing as an alien. He has very light blonde hair and large, emotionless blue-grey eyes. He looks weirdly perfect, like a living anime character. He doesn’t seem ill, but he also doesn’t seem entirely healthy, and I guess that’s not surprising because he lives in front of screens, and until I arrived, he wasn’t even eating food, only these powder-based shakes. And those powders had the longest list of ingredients I’ve ever seen, most of them chemicals, synthetic vitamins, I guess. I’d probably look like a space alien, too, if I tried to live off these science-project formulas instead of food.

 

He works out every day, but twenty-two feet underground in the subbasement in a gym filled with high-tech machines and a black rubber floor. I grew up in handmade wooden buildings and slept in a tree house every night. But there’s not a splinter of wood or anything organic in his gym. To me, it looks more like a torture chamber on a 24^th-century spaceship than any place I could comfortably exercise.

 

Meanwhile, it’s the height of summer outside, with mostly beautiful weather. A few days ago, Max reluctantly gave me permission to go for runs if I agreed to stick to the dirt roads that go through the woods so as not to violate his security protocols. He doesn’t want me visible to any cameras, including car dash cams. Anyway, I asked him yesterday if he wanted to go running with me. He certainly has the right body type for running, and I thought fresh air might do him good. His reaction made me feel like a cat who had dragged in a dead mouse as a gift for its owners, “Run outside in the dirt with flying insects swarming around me? No thank you.”

 

But if Max has warmth toward anything, it’s me. It feels like an honor because I think I might be the first person he’s ever cared about. Overall, he treats me with perfect respect and manners and listens with great interest to everything I say.  And even when we’re not talking, he watches me with fascinated curiosity.

 

I’ve also started to warm up to him and feel an affection for all his quirks and eccentricities. I can tell he’s been lonely for a long time and appreciates my company. I’ve become devoted to learning how to relate to him, and it’s an enjoyable challenge, like figuring out how to relate to a super-intelligent extraterrestrial who’s trying to learn how to pass as a human. He doesn’t seem to know how to be friends with someone, but he wants to be friends with me, so I just take baby steps toward getting him to act a little bit more human every day. It’s actually kind of fun, almost like a science project, figuring out exactly how far I can go without making him uncomfortable.

 

Yeah, I think I will bring up the attraction soon, maybe tonight. I’ll just be very reassuring and tell him that I’m not freaked out by it or anything, but that I’m inexperienced and don’t want to rush into anything, but I’m not closing any doors and would be open to try something small to start.

 

I’m not sure if I’m attracted to him, but I’m not repulsed by him either. He’s quite good looking but not in a way that’s meant to attract anyone but, like that skinny rich lady, it’s meant to intimidate people to keep their distance.

 

But he’s not trying to intimidate me. I feel a subtle softening and receptivity when I approach, almost like he would prefer not to be inside his diamond-hard stylish exterior but doesn’t know how to take it off. There are even moments when I pick up a vulnerable neediness and sense that he cares very much what I think and feel about him.

 

If you saw him from a distance, he might actually look sensitive, with natural shading under his eyes, almost like an emo minus any Gothic Punk style make-up.

 

Of course, any stranger who mistook him for a sensitive emo from the distance would be in for a big surprise if they got close to him. Up close, they would see the fierce alien intelligence in those blue-grey eyes coldly taking them apart in his mind. Then, they would probably carefully back away from him like they would from a five-foot-eight-inch praying mantis.

 

He might look pretty from a distance, but no one with sense would trifle with him. Not to mention that he’s got a whole arsenal of weapons, including all these super-specialized concealable knives and guns and things. He proudly showed me his whole collection behind a locked wall panel. I told him I was raised to be nonviolent, and he said, “Purely for self-defense. I’m not looking for trouble. I just want to be prepared in case it finds me.” And I believe him. He wouldn’t want to get physical with anyone. He wants to keep people away from him. But anyone who tried to mess with him would probably end up like that killer, dead before they even hit the ground.

 

Anyway, sorry about all the tangents. I’m nervous thinking about bringing the attraction out into the open, but it’s just going to make me more anxious if I don’t. I’m going to bring it up tonight and hope for the best.

 

***

 

Holy shit, something super weird stuff just went down, and it began with conflict with Max, which I did not handle well at all. I acted immaturely, but it’s not like Max was totally in the right either. And then something paranormal happened, and that caused some conflict at first too until we got caught up looking into the mystery of it together. And then something else paranormal happened that may have led to a breakthrough or possibly put everything at risk.

 

AARGH!!!

 

I’m just overwhelmed, everything keeps getting stranger and more intense!

 

OK, I’m just going to stop and breathe for a minute, and then I’ll just talk about everything in the order in which things happened, that’s the only way that will make sense.

 

I think I’ve been guilty of trying to make myself look better in this journal than I really am because what’s going on inside of me is way more chaotic than I’ve made it sound. I ended my last entry from early this morning with what looked like a decisive conclusion to bring up the attraction tonight.

 

I tend to do that, to over-commit myself to things I’m not able or ready to take on, and then I end up disappointed or even angry with myself for not living up to it.

 

I spent the rest of the day second-guessing that decision and getting super anxious about the whole thing—the attraction and what to do about it. It had me feeling on the verge of a panic attack all day. The more I thought about it, the riskier it seemed because I really don’t know what I’m doing, or what I’d be willing to do, or how Max would react, or any of it. But it also doesn’t seem healthy to not even talk about the attraction. I just wish I had someone older and trustworthy still around like Dorothy to advise me.

 

Usually, I can get into a zone with carpentry and take pride in being professional and efficient—Max’s favorite word—but today I was horribly distracted and made a couple of stupid mistakes that threw me off my game even more. I got so mad and frustrated with myself that I had to stop and walk around the compound a couple of times. I decided to shift to simpler tasks, gave up on making cabinets for the day, and worked on house cleaning and food prep.

 

It’s not like the house needed cleaning that much, but no amount of cleaning is too much for Max.  I realized this from the first time I saw his home. I guess it’s my home now too.  Max is an extreme clean freak. Everything he owns looks either brand new or kept in immaculate condition, and everything, even supplements in a cabinet, is lined up perfectly in a logical order with taller supplements in a back row, then medium-sized ones next, and smaller ones in front like a class photo. At first, it seemed a bit insane, like maybe he’s autistic or OCD or something, but then I saw it was a logical ordering scheme so that all the labels would be visible.

 

I’m super careful not to mess with any of his ordering schemes. I also keep everything almost inhumanely clean, which Max appreciates. I don’t mind adapting to Max’s standards, because I’m something of a perfectionist myself, and I like doing almost any physical work because it’s calming and lets me feel useful. Also, Max has given me all kinds of gadgets that he already had in supply in unopened boxes—earbuds and so forth, so I can listen to audiobooks or music when I work.

 

Since I was too distracted for carpentry, I cleaned both levels and the gazebo making sure every surface and even the elevator was immaculate.

 

After dinner, our ritual is to go out to the hot tub and talk. Max is always out there before me. This could easily be explained because I’m the one who cleans up after dinner, but tonight, I thought of a different reason that made me paranoid and resentful. While changing into my bathing suit, it occurred to me that Max probably goes out there first so he can enjoy watching me walking from the elevator to the hot tub in my skimpy bathing suit. The thought of this made me angry and disturbed. It’s like he’s making me walk a runway, like one of those Euromodels, while he sits in the hot tub facing the house so he can watch me approach. I always feel his eyes on me, and sometimes, it feels greedy and unpleasant.

 

My heart is pounding during the elevator ride as I think about it. Usually, I carry a neatly folded towel in my hand, but this time, I decide to wrap it around me to hide as much of my body as possible. But just before the elevator door opens, I second guess that and pull the towel off. It might give away the game. Max might realize why I’m doing it, which could make him angry and would let him know I’m aware of the attraction in a bad way.

 

My nervous indecision leaves me feeling disgusted with myself and him. I’d more or less decided not to bring the attraction up tonight because I felt unprepared, and it seemed too risky, but now I’m second-guessing or third-guessing that because if I don’t bring it up, it’s just going to keep eating away at me and making me more anxious, so I’d rather just get it over with, but now that I’m riled up about it, I’m likely to make a terrible mess of things.

 

I carry the unfolded towel in my hand and walk with determination toward the hot tub, looking straight ahead with no expression like one of those models.

 

Max gives me time to settle myself into the hot, bubbly water tub before he starts speaking. I would have preferred more silence to calm myself. The view from my side of the hot tub is of the woods, which are filled with fireflies, so it looks like an enchanted forest, and I would have preferred to silently gaze at it for a couple of minutes.

 

“Major new developments in the Middle East today,” Max begins.

 

I guess it’s not his fault, but he really doesn’t know how to make friendly conversation. I mean, a normal person would probably begin by asking how my day was or something. Of course, on this day, I wouldn’t have been able to answer honestly without talking about the elephant in the room we’re not talking about.

 

The last couple days, to fill the silence in the hot tub, Max has been briefing me on world affairs as if that’s what’s expected when you’re with someone in a hot tub. I didn’t mind it that much before today. Max is a speed reader who consumes amazing quantities of information daily. He seems to know something about nearly everything. He can go into infinite detail on anything I ask about. I never paid as much attention to politics and current events as I probably should have. Whenever I did, I became upset and anxious about all the terrible things going on. I also felt helpless to make any difference. I’m not old enough to vote, and most of my time was already committed to the work I did for our community and at the hospice, where I was able to make a difference.

 

Max’s knowledge of the world is comprehensive, and I’m always willing to learn about anything. You can pick any country in the world, and Max could tell you everything going on there with the economy, political factions, mineral wealth, industries, demographics and simmering tensions with other countries—you name it.  But this time, all I can think of is whether or not to bring up the attraction, so I’m only following bits and pieces while wishing we could talk about something else, especially anything related to us.

 

All I’ve really understood so far is that some Middle Eastern fanatics have been launching drone attacks on U.S. military bases in the Middle East. “The problem,” Max says, “is all these voices in the government and media are calling for a proportional response, and that’s a huge mistake. Our present government is far too predictable and measured in its responses, allowing adversaries to know exactly how much they can get away with.

 

“I agree with the Madman Theory of the Nixon administration. Nixon and members of his foreign policy team purposefully created an impression that Nixon was irrational and volatile, which made adversaries nervous to take provocative actions. I think the Israelis have the right idea in dealing with Islamic factions that have a murder-suicide ideology that welcomes martyrdom. You can’t just react to a provocation– you have to massively overreact, or it will just keep happening. We should not be taking time out so we can carefully consider a proportional response, that just makes us look weak. They want the world to look like it did in the eighth century when Islam had conquered a land mass three times that of the Roman Empire and seven times that of the United States. If they want to live in the eighth century, we should bomb them back into it. Massive force is the only thing they will respect. As Machiavelli said, ‘People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage, they will get their revenge, but if you cripple them, there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.’ It’s a perfectly logical strategy. Weak vengeance that allows the other party to respond in kind just keeps the cycle of violence going. That’s why a response can’t be proportional–it has to be massive and devastating when dealing with such a murder-suicide ideology. You can’t just punish them, you have to disable their ability to strike back.”

 

“Well, I was raised to be nonviolent,” I say barely even stopping to think before I say it. I realize how dumb my comment sounds after I say it. I’m just impatient for him to stop talking for a minute so I can settle my nerves and let the hot, bubbly water relax my body. It wasn’t like I was trying to make a foreign policy statement.  I just wasn’t in the mood to hear about the need for massive airstrikes in the Middle East with so much else on my mind related to what’s going on here.

 

“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” says Max, impatiently, “but don’t you think that’s a rather oversimplified and unrealistic ideology? Look at what just—” he stops himself, takes a deep breath, and says, “My point is, we live in a complex and dangerous world and nature rewards energy and aggression. Passive nonviolence is just not going to be a successful coping strategy.”

 

It’s obvious what Max was going to say, ‘Look at what just happened to your community,’ but he held back out of consideration of my trauma. I don’t stop to credit him for that because I’m a chaotic, nervous wreck, and now it feels like he’s just made my whole community look stupid for not having firearms to defend ourselves. Of course, he didn’t actually say that, but I’m flustered and riled up, so I lash out.

 

“Yeah, Max, you might be right in some ways, but it’s easy for you to decide we should have massive air strikes sitting up there in your office, surrounded by screens, thousands of miles from where the bombs will fall. It might be logical or strategic or whatever, but I can’t help but think about a mother finding her kid buried under rubble and—”

 

I see something lighting up above the forest canopy to my left and turn to look.

 

“Holy shit, what is that?”

 

Max swivels around with lightning speed as if it were an incoming missile strike, and then we are both struck silent with awe as the blaze of light resolves itself into a saucer-shaped craft hovering above the woods. It’s pulsating with colored light, shifting from orange to lavender. Then another saucer approaches it from behind, glowing a pale green.

 

Max is out of the water in a flash, retrieving his phone and crouching low to shoot video from within the open gazebo windows. I also get out of the hot tub to get a better view.

Max must be working the outside cameras because I see them pan toward the glowing disks. Beams of light emanating from the bottom of the saucers project down into the forest. They were hovering when they emitted the beams, but now they’re moving in a semi-circle around the compound. They pause, shoot more beams down into the forest, and then shoot away from us at amazing speed and disappear into the horizon. I look at Max, who is still crouched low, his eyes looking deadly serious and alert, waiting to see if anything else is about to happen. When it doesn’t, he blinks and turns toward me and says,

 

“I’ve been researching such phenomena for years, but this is my first sighting.”

 

“They were beaming light down to something in the forest,” I say.  “I want to go out there and investigate.” Max looks at me with alarm.

 

“Tommy, no. Absolutely not. I forbid it,” Max says with a finality that pisses me off.

 

“You forbid it? What the hell, Max– you’re not my parent or guardian. If I want to investigate, I will,” I reply. I’m feeling a surge of rebelliousness, but it’s not like I’m going to run out there in my bathing suit.

 

“I apologize. I shouldn’t have put it that way,” Max says, and I can see he knows he messed up, and his face is even a little flushed. “I guess we’re all in danger of reverting to our parents under stress. I respect you as an equal. But please, just listen to me for a minute. I know something about this.”

 

Max gestures toward the hot tub. I notice him dialing the temperature down a little, and I join him back in the bubbly water.

 

“The history of people encountering such objects is incredibly varied and often not benign at all,” he begins. “There are well-documented cases of radiation burns, brain damage, and even death. Close encounters often result in serious psychological trauma and disorientation. Whatever these visitors are, they’re able to manipulate our perception on every level, so what you experience is what they want you to experience, which may be highly deceptive. Also, people who have encounters seem to be marked in some way and will likely have more encounters, increasing the trauma.”

 

“I felt them wanting to make contact,” I reply. “I can’t define all my perceptions, but it seemed like the two saucers had different personalities or essences like they were living entities. I think it’s part of the evolutionary experiment, and maybe they left something or someone out in the woods. I appreciate your cautioning me, Max, but I’m willing to put myself at risk. Everyone I loved is gone, and the only reason I’m living is to fulfill some kind of important mission, and this feels related. That’s what my intuition tells me.”

 

“Tommy, all these intuitions and perceptions you’re having about them are likely manipulated. You have no idea what you might be getting yourself into. Even if I went with you fully armed, I’d have no way to protect you. Whatever they are, they take away all human control. And they can do that to fighter jets and whole military facilities. They can paralyze your body, take over your will, and drastically manipulate your consciousness and memory.  They are known to do traumatic procedures—including taking genetic material, especially sperm and eggs, and sometimes leaving implants made of anomalous materials. To further their experiments on people or animals, they can manipulate both space and time. Don’t be like that one kid in a horror movie who wants to rush into the house where chainsaws are whining. I’m trying to protect you.”

 

Max’s last statement seems genuine, so I back off and offer a compromise.

 

“OK, Max, I won’t go out there tonight. But I’m not making any promises if they come back. What do you think they are, and why have you been researching them for years?”

 

“Your second question is easier to answer,” Max replies reflectively. “It might be what you would call an intuition. I became fascinated as a child, and like many who know little of the subject, I thought we might be getting visited by an extraterrestrial civilization. Also, ever since I was a child, people have told me I seem like an alien, so maybe that influenced my interest as well. I didn’t like the people around me or the life they enforced on me, so I thought if there were super-intelligent aliens out there, maybe they would take me with them. And yes, my obsession with the subject no doubt influenced the architectural design of the home base with its three saucer-shaped structures. And if we wanted to be silly, we could speculate that those shapes attracted them here.

 

“My hopeful, childish notion of benign extraterrestrials that might rescue me from my mundane life was soon crushed by research. And researching this phenomenon is not like researching anything else. Normally, the more you research something, the more you know, but with ufology, the more you look into it, the more lost you feel. Even if you keep to the best sources, you find yourself in a carnival mirror maze where every viewing angle distorts your vision in a different way. Some speculated that they present themselves in grotesque, absurd scenarios as a form of deception or, alternatively, as a way of expanding our collective consciousness by creating paradoxes, like Zen Koans or quantum mechanics, to force us to think out of the box and embrace the unresolvable strangeness of the cosmos.”

 

As with other times when I’ve asked Max questions, he is in his organized lecture mode, but this time, there is a passionate edge and intensity to it. What he says is fascinating, so I don’t interrupt with questions.

 

“ETH, or the extraterrestrial hypothesis, is one of many possibilities I won’t rule out, but I can’t rule it in either because it doesn’t begin to account for the full range of the phenomena in any sensible way. If ETs wanted to colonize the earth, they could have done it a long time ago. If they wanted to genetically sample our species, they could have accomplished that in a week. Much of what they do or how they appear is bizarre and seems more about psychological manipulation than a rational, scientific program with specific goals.

 

“I’ve looked into all the theories, and it’s hard to rule any of them out because we don’t know if the phenomena has a single source or many. None of the single-source theories can account for all the findings.

 

“Some claim that it’s all secret military tech, but that doesn’t explain how the same sort of craft able to make right angle turns and do things we can’t explain with classical physics appeared in the fifties and likely much earlier. Another theory is that they are a future evolution of Homo sapiens time traveling into the past to make interventions because they’ve become genetically nonviable or need to alter their past for more obscure reasons. Some of the best-documented cases here and in Russia report them shining beams down into nuclear weapons facilities, activating or disabling electronics. In one well-documented case in the Soviet Union, they entered launch codes and activated nuclear ICBM, apparently allowing frantic military personnel to cancel the launches only at the last minute.

 

“A common theme in close encounter communications are harsh warnings about extinction based on nuclear weapons or environmental destruction. The motivation behind these warnings seems to be that losing us as a viable species threatens their interests. A theme emerging from close encounter testimony is that they are dependent on us in some way as they have become genetically nonviable or have lost their ability to experience emotion and feel alive due to becoming increasingly bio-synthetic. Often, they seem to have a hive mind and collective telepathic awareness, so that individuals may act like drones that may be clumsy and unintelligent when dealing with spontaneous human individuals. Their bodies appear to be biosynthetic and may function like space suits or containers housing a distributed hive consciousness.

 

“Another whole body of research involves cattle mutilations that sometimes leave hard-core anomalous evidence like calf fetuses intricately mutilated inside an unbroken amniotic sack. There have been mutilations of other animals like cats and horses. There are also rare but horrifying cases of human mutilation where the entire spinal cord is removed. In most cases, the mutilated bodies have had all blood drained without a single spilled drop being left behind and no tracks of any kind around as if they were operated on remotely and then returned to the ground from above as if they were intentionally leaving the evidence. Cuts are exact in a way we could only do with laser scalpels, and some procedures could not be reproduced by any know medical technology.

 

“In close encounters, people may be given what seem like prophetic visions, but these may include disconfirmed end dates and other absurdities. Some encounters induce a dangerous religious mania, others create disabling ontological shock. Some, with varying levels of credibility, claim to have worked in secret government programs reverse engineering alien spacecraft or to have seen frozen alien bodies. Other cases connect the supposed aliens with death and make a case that they are actually dead people come back as shape-shifting entities, perhaps appearing as a form of plasma. Carl Jung thought they might be manifestations of the collective unconscious, but also partly physical. You can find evidence for almost any theory you can think of.”

 

“Wow,” I reply. “I had no idea there were so many possibilities. But I do have experience related to one of those theories. At the hospice I volunteered at, I’ve experienced dying people appearing, at least in my perception, in shape-shifting forms.  Sometimes, they appear as how they must have looked when they were in their twenties and in a perfect state of health. Other times, they may become an amorphous light, something like auroa borealis which I’ve seen a couple of winters ago.”

 

“Aurora borealis is plasma,” Kyle points out.

 

“Well, I don’t know if what I saw tonight was anything physical,” I reply, “ but if my intuition is worth anything, I don’t think they were metal spacecraft, because they felt alive and like they had different essences. I heard something in my mind, a kind of description of them, but it didn’t feel like it came from me, at least not my usual consciousness. Maybe it was my subconscious speaking or something.”

 

“What did it say?”

 

“It said, ‘hungry souls glowing in the night of time.’”

 

We silently contemplate that for a while until an intuition seems to comes bubbling up to me from the water.

 

This is the moment to talk about the elephant.

 

Why this is the moment, I don’t know unless it’s better for shocks to come together.

 

“I feel that what just happened is related to our evolutionary experiment,” I begin, “but there’s an element in the experiment we haven’t talked about. I’m not freaked out by it or anything– I think it’s perfectly natural–but I sense you’re attracted to me. And I just think it would be healthier to get it out in the   in the open so we can talk about it.”

 

Max stares at me, his eyes alert and serious, but his expression is hard to read.

 

“What you say is true,” says Max carefully. He seems uncomfortable and anxious. “I knew it was not something that could be hidden from an empath, but I wasn’t sure what would be the right way to bring it up. I didn’t want to create an impression that I was trying to . . . coerce you into anything . . .I respect you as an equal, and that means I respect your boundaries.” Max pauses, collecting his thoughts. “It’s not just an attraction based on looks, though you certainly are beautiful, and that’s part of it, but only part. It’s an attraction I’ve only felt a couple of times before toward individuals who were both beautiful and anomalous. But I do not make the assumption that my attraction is . . . returned.”

 

When Max says ‘returned’ I sense his fear of rejection and . . . something strange is going on with our eye contact. I should be responding to what he’s said, but I can’t because . . . all the colors are changing, and Max’s face is morphing. His eyes are huge, and everything else becomes a color-shifting backdrop. My mind no longer forms words as waves of energy flow between us. It’s something like what happened with Andrew, but more unstable. I feel alarm emanating from Max, building toward panic like a silent scream. He looks away, and the moment our eye contact breaks, the waves of energy flowing between us, and all the visual weirdness disappears.

 

Max’s head is bowed, his eyes wide with shock. He seems unable to speak, like a traumatized child. His body is hunched over,

and this posture makes him seem skinny, even frail. He’s trembling.

 

An urgency to comfort him brings me to my feet, and I move toward him to sit beside him. His eyes remain cast downward, his expression haunted.

 

“Would it be OK if I put my arm around you?” I ask in a gentle whisper. He nods almost imperceptibly. I slide closer so our legs are touching, and slowly, so as not to startle him, wrap my arm and open hand around his hunched shoulders, holding him close to me. A tremor runs through his whole body, and he takes a deep breath. “We’re OK,” I say, “everything is going to be OK, Max. We just had another strange experience, but everything is going to be OK.” I’m not even thinking about what I’m saying, I’m just following an instinct to comfort him because Max feels like a traumatized child.

 

His intimidating personality has broken off him like a shell, and what’s inside is a frightened and unformed child, a frail, even sickly creature, like a hatchling bird fallen from its nest. The change is too startling for my mind to process, so it stills and steps aside, allowing my hospice worker self to

come forward to comfort this fragile being.

 

“I’m not sure who I am now,” Max whispers. “I’m not myself anymore.”

 

“You’re still you, Max. This is just a different part of you. A part you’re not used to.” My words come without forethought.

 

“You’re. . .” Max begins haltingly. “You’re changing me. Your presence, your energy, it’s . . . changing me.” Max’s body unhunches, and I sense fearful accusation beneath his words. It’s time to give him space. I remove my arm and slide myself over to the other side of the hot tub so we can face each other.

 

Max splashes water onto his face and shakes his head like he’s trying to wake himself up. His eyes blink, and he takes a deep breath. I can feel his mind turning on and trying to gain distance to understand what’s happening. I remain silent to give him space to compose himself. I take some deep breaths, trying to compose myself too.

 

We’ve entered a space of unformed possibilities, and everything feels precarious. Saying the wrong thing could have disastrous consequences, so I remain silent. Instinctively, I work on containing my energy because I sense Max needs separation now. He looks at me warily. As much as I’ve withdrawn, my presence still threatens the stability he’s regained. But at the same time, I sense he needs me to remain where I am to witness and support the shaky in-between self coming into being.

 

“From that first night,” Max begins, looking at me warily, “I could feel you changing me. In the car– I’d never been close to such intense emotion. I had strange sensations, like I was beginning to resonate with your nervous system and . . . what you were going through was so intense– it felt like your story– your life was . . . more real than my own. I felt hollow, like my whole personality was just a placeholder, a contrived identity, just an image of who I thought I was. And you felt so different. What you were and are on the outside is what you are on the inside. You are a congruent being, while I am an incongruent creature, a chimera, an armored shell outside and some kind of . . .”  Max’s face contorts with disdain, “some kind of weakling within.”

 

The word weakling–the way he says it, and the contemptuous look in his eyes is frightening. It prompts me to intervene.

 

“No, Max. No! Don’t call it a weakling, that’s not right!  Your inner self is not that– it’s more like a deprived and neglected child you need to protect and nurture.  You can’t disown the inner part of you, if you do, you’ll . . . It won’t be good, Max. It will put you on a terrible path. Please, believe me.”

 

Max stares at me, startled by my vehemence. Then he breaks eye contact, bows his head, and splashes water on his face again. “I’m not even sure what I’m saying right now,” he says. “My judgment is addled.” He takes a deep breath. “You’re changing me, but I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s not something you are doing to me–it’s just how your being is affecting my being. Maybe that’s the evolutionary experiment.”

 

“Yes, Max. That is the evolutionary experiment. And an evolutionary experiment is not supposed to be stable or comfortable, it’s supposed to break apart stability to create change. It’s a metamorphosis, like . . . Jordie—someone I used to know– called me over one morning to see something. It was a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. While I watched it break free, Jordie told me about the stages of the metamorphosis. Within the chrysalis, the caterpillar starts to form a new kind of cell. They’re called imaginal cells, and they’re like the seeds of the butterfly. But the cells of the caterpillar reject the new cells and attack the imaginal cells as if they’re cancer or dangerous viruses.

 

“Your inner self, what you called—I won’t even say it–it’s in a fragile, unformed state, but it’s like the imaginal cells of your future self, Max.  Don’t fight the metamorphosis– it’s not supposed to be comfortable, but now that it’s started, you’ve got to let it happen.” The words pour out of me, almost breathlessly. I’m being too vehement and not giving Max enough space. I stop talking, lean back against the wall of the hot tub and study Max, trying to gauge where he’s at.

 

Max gazes downward, but not in vulnerability. His blue-grey eyes are in a trance-like state of higher thinking and analysis. He seems like a chaos mathematician studying the turbulence of the bubbly water on the verge of discovering a new principle of nature. I watch him fascinated, feeling the field of his intelligence boosting my mind.

 

Eventually, he looks up, his expression calm and collected.

 

“I must admit, Tommy, your metamorphosis hypothesis does seem to account for all the facts,” says Max in a tone of grand summation. “And now, I’m ready to get out of this hot tub. I turned the temperature down before we got in, sensing a long conversation was imminent, but one more minute and I’m going to dissolve.”

 

I laugh, stand up, and reach for my towel. It’s a relief to get out of our bubbling, evolutionary cauldron.

 

***

 

***

 

I go to my room to write up what just happened. When I’m done, I turn off my computer and the lights and go to sleep. As it turned out, there was still another paranormal encounter later that night.

 

Sometime in the middle of my sleep, I awaken, feeling a protective presence nearby watching over me. I open my eyes and see a boy about my age and size sitting patiently on the floor about three feet from my bed. He’s luminous in the dark and not solidly physical– something like the way Andrew seemed when I encountered him, but less solid and more glowy, and yet his form is more stable than Andrew’s was, like he’s used to showing up this way. His presence is gentle and compassionate, and though his form seems about my age, he seems wise and knowledgeable, more timeless than young in the usual sense. He also seems familiar, as if I’d encountered him in my dreams but couldn’t quite remember.

 

He’s waiting in a respectful, patient way, like he’s giving me time to study him and decide if I want to interact. I sense his good intentions and that he has messages for me, but he won’t speak unless I do and grant him permission to communicate, so I greet him in the way I did with Andrew.

 

“Hey, I’m Tommy, welcome. What’s your name?”

 

“Thank you, Tommy. I’m Alex.”

 

I sense that he’s bound by some sort of honor code not to speak unless requested, so I ask another question.

 

“What brings you here, Alex?”

 

“A long journey. In another time, you saved me from falling into an abyss of darkness, but later, I chose to return to that darkness, a realm some call the lower astral. I owe you protection, Tommy, for the great kindness you showed me. If you consent, I can tell you what we’ve learned about some of these visitors, though there is much we don’t know. I must warn you. This is a disturbing knowledge of complex parasitic life forms. Only you can know if it is right for you to receive such dark knowledge.”

 

“I consent,” I reply. “It’s better to know than to be ignorant of what’s out there. I’ve already had a vision of an evil entity that seemed to want me to know about itself. I believe it sent the person who . . . who killed everyone I loved. It’s my responsibility to know.”

 

Alex bows his head slightly, acknowledging my consent.

 

“When I fell back into the hungry darkness, a member of a Guild came forward to protect me, and later I became part of that Guild of souls who were once lost, but have united in a mission to further symbiosis between the living and some of us on the other side who are making amends for lives that we ended in unfortunate ways.

 

“But there are individuals from my realm who cross over with parasitic intentions, and some are organized into hive societies with complex and varied intentions that can be harmful to the living. I was sent to keep a silent watch when we sensed you were going to be approached. But I am only a sentinel and may not be able to protect you from all intrusions. I witnessed you and your friend, Max, react to a more benign crossover this evening, and what you stated aloud to him, that if they returned, you might go out and investigate, is an invitation for more contact. Some may be able to intrude without permission, and some who beckon contact have benign experiences, while other beckonings tempt the malevolent.

 

“You and Max are a novel and intense energetic combination that attracts attention from those who perceive energy. And you, in particular, Tommy, glow so brightly with an essence we call Laepur that ravenous beings from my realm hunger for. Some would like to mindlessly devour your radiance, and others would like to hybridize with your essence to feel the emotion and excitement of living closer to the drama of linear time.

 

“There are also hive societies under the control of a parasitic hive queen who employs them like worker bees to gather the nectar of Laepur. But they are also doing more complex things, including invasive procedures whose purposes are not entirely discernable to us. They have developed technologies and biosynthetic forms, allowing their intrusions to be more physical. They are performing genetic experiments, trying to incorporate and assimilate aspects of the living into themselves.

 

“Some of them are formerly human lower astrals hybridized and assimilated by an extraterrestrial parasitic hive queen. This queen is a complex entity capable of shape-shifting into different forms. Her reach extends across space and time and into certain dimensions. The minds and energetic bodies of Homo sapiens are visible to her, and she can penetrate and manipulate both individual and collective consciousness.

 

“The hive queen has a complex agenda. Besides feeding on her host species, she also intervenes to prevent extinction and the loss of the species on which she is dependent. She is cruel and voracious, but she also protects her harvest. Though her malign influence has made Homo sapiens more destructive, she has made interventions that have helped prevent the extinction of her host species. We believe she will continue to do so to preserve her place at the top of the food chain. But she is not all-powerful or all-knowing, and there is at least one timeline where her malign influence led to an extinction that left her in a famished and desperate state.

 

“Some of her emissaries are more mechanical, while others retain some elements of consciousness and degrees of independent action. Encounters are varied. Sometimes, these emissaries act to further the development of a person contacted. Other times, they are brutal and destructive, and we can’t be sure what governs these variances. Like many intelligent life forms, the hive queen acts in ways that further her biological imperatives, but her means and ultimate ends are not fully understood by us.

 

“The biosynthetic forms of some of her emissaries can be highly toxic to human bodies. If threatened, they can secrete substances that may create lethal allergic responses that may destroy the immune system of humans who make unwanted tactile contact. These secretions leave a powerful, lingering odor that is perceived as having elements of ammonia and sulfur.

 

“For the living, coming into contact with such creatures is a profound shock to body, mind and soul. Those who have crossed over have access to an additional dimension of time, and this can be both a power and a curse. The visitors can manipulate space, time, and matter in ways that the humans of today rarely can. Some of these methods, however, were known to lost civilizations.

 

“For most of those who intrude, their relation to time is a curse. They crave the emotion and excitement of lives that unfold like stories in linear time. When the living look into their eyes, they perceive the time curse of these beings who can sometimes see the whole arc of a contactee’s life, including their death.

 

“You and Max are right to consider yourselves an evolutionary experiment. From your own vision of what you called an evil entity, it appears that the hive queen wants this experiment and caused the loss of your community to further that. This is an example of the brutality of her methods.

 

Alex pauses, sensing the electrical waves of horror and realization passing through me as I struggle to accept this terrible truth. He gives me space to absorb the shock of dark knowledge.

 

“I sense that she wants the experiment because she perceives it as a catalyst for human evolution. Although she acts to blind and deform humanity, she also needs the species to evolve to prevent extinction. She is powerful but not in control of the process. Like all life forms, she is caught up in an infinitely complex web of life beyond her understanding, and she may be intelligent enough to realize that. Given the momentum of the species toward extinction, she may act to preserve certain wildcard, metamorphic humans who might disrupt the destructive momentum of which she is a major cause.

 

“For millennia, she successfully kept humans in states of individual and collective conflict to further her feeding. There is a color spectrum of human energies. She cannot feed on higher states of human consciousness that are in a blue range that is toxic to her. She needs the red part of the spectrum generated by suffering, hatred, greed, and lust. At the same time, she apparently realizes that she cannot extinguish higher states of consciousness in all humans because that would render her host species nonviable.

 

“We believe her to be a metamorphic creature whose own evolutionary life cycle may require the further evolution and metamorphosis of homo Sapiens. But she is caught in a feeding paradox because she cannot let the species as a whole evolve toward higher consciousness without losing her food supply. She seems to allow higher consciousness to evolve in a small number of humans while supporting destructive and devolutionary trends in the majority.

 

“We are all of us caught in this complex and ever-changing paradoxical web of life that none of us can fully discern or control. Parasites have their role to play in evolution.”

 

“Do you know anything more about the role I’m supposed to play?” I ask.

 

“It would violate my role to try to answer that for you, Tommy. Everything I say reflects my imperfect discernment, and you must always be guided by your truth sense. You know much more than you think you know. You are already playing your role. Your symbiotic intentions toward Max are what’s making your precarious evolutionary experiment with him possible.

 

“My only suggestion is to rescind that statement you made, that if more visitors come, you might go out to meet them. This statement sent out ripples in the way of a dangerous magical proclamation. It’s too much of an opening for them. Does that feel true to you?”

 

“Yes, Alex. Max warned me in much the same way as you have. So, I take back what I said. I will not go out to them. If they come to me, I will deal with them as best I can, but I do not seek them.”

 

“You put that very well, Tommy. My intervention with you has served its purpose, and now I must withdraw. Be well. You live on the edge of a perilous time, but you have more allies than you know.”

 

Alex bows his head toward me in a formal gesture of blessing and departure before vanishing into the night.

 

***

 

Max’s Journal

 

I have been in too much of a state of disequilibrium to keep up this journal. But now, my state of inner turmoil has me desperate enough to seek this place of contemplation as a refuge and a place to attempt to understand what’s happening.

 

Evidently, my mind still works, but it feels like a still-functioning supercomputer in a bombed-out building. Every structural wall is riddled with cracks and gaping holes. The mind persists, but it rests on a structure that might collapse at any moment.

 

Tommy seems more intact, but I could see he was in a shaken and haunted state when I first encountered him this morning. Nevertheless, he gave me his usual morning greeting and hug and a breakfast made to the standard of excellence I have come to expect from all his meals, though neither of us had much of an appetite.

 

Other mornings, even our first, Tommy was able to contain his inner state, and make efforts to seem upbeat, even cheerful with varying degrees of strain. I appreciate the consideration behind these efforts. He doesn’t want to burden me with his darker feelings. But today, Tommy seemed either unable to maintain that façade or was purposefully dropping it. And then, when he saw that neither of us was that interested in the food, he told me why. He had still another paranormal experience last night that awakened him from sleep and kept him up afterward recording it in his journal.

 

It may surprise you to learn that I have not been surveilling Tommy’s devices.  Part of my reluctance has been fear that eavesdropping would eventually be detected by an empath, and another part is . . . Well, I haven’t just been pretending to respect Tommy as an equal. I’ve been shocked and forced into that realization. I’ll say more about that soon. After he divulged the existence of a journal, Tommy did something I could never have anticipated.

 

“Instead of telling you what happened,” Tommy says, “I realized I could send you the journal entry I just wrote about it. I think we have exceptional memory in common, and I recorded every detail. But then, after I realized I could send you the entry, I had an intuition. I think we need more transparency between us Max, with as few secrets as possible. At least I’m going to extend that trust. You can read my whole journal if you want to.

 

“I’m not sure if that will be the right thing going forward. I may still need a private place to reflect, but you can read everything I’ve written so far. I’ve tried to second guess that intuition because there are private descriptions of you I wrote, not expecting them to be shared. I hope those don’t cause offense, but if they do, I hope we can work through it. It’s a risky choice, but the last twenty-four hours have intensified my sense of what’s at stake in our evolutionary experiment. I’m not saying you have to expose everything going on in you, but I want to be as fully open to you as possible. You saved my life Max. I owe you a bond of trust. We’re in a high-stakes evolutionary experiment, so I’m willing to try risky experiments with you. My feelings and instinctive secrecy matter little compared to what’s at stake.”

 

I’m stunned by what Tommy has just offered. The journal and a degree of trust I would never consider giving to another. It does seem a risky move on his part. I don’t need to tell you, the reader of this journal, that I don’t exactly seem deserving of such trust.

 

All I’m able to say is, “Thank you, Tommy. I would be honored to read your journal.”

 

I don’t respond in kind and don’t even admit to having a journal. How could I possibly share what I’ve revealed here? It would likely destroy any chance of a healthy relationship. At the very least, Tommy would see how misplaced his trust is. But it’s not that I have evil intentions toward Tommy. In fact, I am treating him as an equal and with as much respect as I’m capable.

 

I’ve come to believe that Adrian was intervening in our best interests and giving accurate information. As he promised, I have been getting daily market analysis reports that reflect a level of information and sophistication I didn’t even know was possible. Perhaps they have a proprietary, next-level AI system analyzing the world’s finances. Every day, I rely on the recommendations I receive more, and now, given how preoccupied I am and how reliable the projections have been, I’m ready to simply defer to them. I am also deferring to Adrian’s advice about respecting Tommy as my equal and making a healthy relationship with him my highest priority to further the evolutionary experiment.

 

But how can there be a healthy relationship between two if one is drastically unhealthy? My sense of my self has been shattered. I am not healthy, and perhaps I never was. I was high functioning, but that, I now realize, is not the same as healthy.

 

I don’t know what a healthy version of me would be like or if it is even possible. Perhaps the pre-Tommy version of me was the healthiest version possible– it was certainly more stable.

 

“I’ve switched from financial research to psychology, trying to understand what’s going on, but nothing in the literature anticipates this unique case. Perhaps I was designed to have what a psychiatrist would call “flattened affect” –-a very limited range of emotion. My psyche was a high-functioning closed system able to operate efficiently within its low affect/ low sociability equilibrium. And yet, it is I who thought it was worth putting my equilibrium at risk by seeking an anomalous companion.

 

Part of me knew I was not complete in myself. But, as the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.” The anomalous companion I found and chose to pursue was not a slightly lesser version of myself but an altogether different anomaly. Now, I am in an episodically telepathic relationship with an empath who overflows with emotion and a different form of consciousness. The interfusion of our energies has shattered who I once was.

 

And that was the case before what just happened—the reading of Tommy’s journal—seeing how I look through the eyes of an empath, much of it not very flattering, and that personal shock was followed by the revelation of deep patterns underlying the fate of the species and the existence of an extraterrestrial parasite above us on the food chain.

 

Control, the quality I valued most and thought I had achieved in my life is exposed as a total sham. I was a fool, a confident child bringing a sling-shot to a thermonuclear fight. I am not in control of anything. I am not even in control of myself. I don’t even know who I am now or what I’m metamorphosing into.

 

OK, Max, pull yourself together, your mind still works, and you are beginning to see some patterns.

 

My present personality is an unstable structure because my center of gravity has shifted. I had a relatively stable orientation as a solo operator pursuing my own interests. That was my center of gravity. I was like a rogue planet in its own trajectory. But then a planet of equal or greater mass called Tommy intersected my trajectory, forming an unstable binary orbit.

 

“All my valuations were based on me as the center of value in my cosmos. My every thought, plan, reaction and action was based on pursuing that singular value. But now I feel like a pre-Copernican astronomer discovering that the sun and stars do not orbit the Earth. I am no longer the center of my own cosmos. My planet has collided with a singularity, another person I value as highly as myself. It never even occurred to me that such a thing could be possible.

 

And yet, this binary orbit began by instinctively putting my life at risk to protect Tommy. The cognitive dissonance began during the car ride with the perception of Tommy as more real and alive than I am. The shock of that continues to displace my center of gravity in myself.

 

The state that began with eye contact last night was the most shattering event of my life. I had to stop it because it felt like if I allowed it to continue, I would no longer be me, but something else. Tommy compared it to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar.

 

I think that’s what I am–a caterpillar in a chrysalis whose body is being taken over by imaginal cells.  My old self is dying and wants to resist, and yet, intellectually at least, I see the pattern he and Adrian revealed—the evolutionary metamorphic experiment—is valid. I see that the patterns that this being who called himself Alex exposed to Tommy have high internal consistency and account for so many strange occurrences better than any pattern I’ve conceived to explain the strange and perilous evolutionary state of Homo sapiens.

 

Part of me is a centrifugal force vector that wants to pull away from this binary orbit—but there is a stronger centripetal urge pulling me toward Tommy. He is mesmerizing to me, his otherness and vitality.

 

Until last night, this took the form of an increasingly uncomfortable and sometimes predatory-feeling sexual desire for him. But the paranormal state last night that began with our eyes was beyond sex, a massive exchange of every kind of energy all at once. I became overwhelmed and panicked. It was a catastrophe of identity, an existential threat to the essence of who I thought I was. But Tommy is right, I can’t halt a metamorphosis in progress without regression and failing the evolutionary experiment.

 

I need to reread his journal . . .

 

 

***

 

1. Now I have. I read through it slowly and carefully and observed some key patterns I need to discuss with Tommy. He’s in the kitchen right now, preparing lunch, so that seems like the appropriate time.

 

Rereading Tommy’s descriptions of me in the journal is having an effect. I’ve never had such a mirror before, seeing how I show up in the eyes of an empath is giving me a new form of self-knowledge.

 

That he would willingly give me so many of his most private thoughts is also a positive shock. In all my fantasies of what it would be like to have a relationship with another anomaly, there was always a degree of competition and gamesmanship. There would be mutual respect, but mixed with moves and countermoves, two operators in an amusing power struggle. And that, I anticipated, would also characterize the sexual dynamic. Instead, the energy exchange last night and Tommy’s move—a unilateral offer of total transparency—have provided forms of intimacy I’d never envisioned. It has convinced even my wary self of Tommy’s guileless sincerity and goodwill. But I can’t trust myself enough to respond in kind, not yet at least.

 

I print up something I want to show Tommy, and then I meditate, a rare practice for me, but it seems to help. I feel calmer and more collected when Tommy messages me that lunch is ready.

***

 

Tommy seems anxious, and as soon as I notice, he explains why.

 

“Max, I hope I did the right thing sending you my journal. I know there are things in there, descriptions of you, that might be quite offensive.”

 

“No, Tommy, you can put your mind at ease on that score. I’d be a fool to take offense, because it was a gift of inestimable value to see myself through the eyes of an empath. I am not offended, and I think you underestimate my openness to new information and perspectives.

 

“I cannot yet equal your openness, the courage and trust you showed sharing your most private thoughts. But I will try to be as open as I can. I just have more to be ashamed of inside of me than you do.”

 

I sense Tommy straining to think of something sympathetic or consoling to say, but I wave him off.

 

“And then, as if your revealing impressions of me weren’t enough, your journal contains so much secret knowledge, your encounters with Andrew and Alex, your vision of the evil entity, there’s so much to discuss.”

 

“Thanks Max, I’m so relieved that you didn’t take it the wrong way. You’re right, my worry was based on underestimating you. For that, I am truly sorry.”

 

“There is nothing for you to be sorry about Tommy.”

 

Then I surprise myself, by smiling and attempting a joke.

 

“So, how is your day going?” Tommy gets it and laughs, and I laugh along with him.

 

“I’d rather hear about what’s going on in the Middle East,” he says.

 

This little break in days of tension seems to restore our appetites. For the rest of lunch, we talk about his carpentry work, especially the floor-to-ceiling bookcases I will soon have for my office. The rest of the house will be blonde oak, but when Tommy explained to me the qualities of different types of wood used in Danish modern, I chose teak for my office and bedroom. He told me that teak is valued for its durability and water resistance and is used in boat building. Something about that nautical history caught my fancy. Perhaps I will get a few antique nautical instruments to populate all the new shelf space.

 

I study Tommy as he cleans up the lunch things while I ponder some of the implications of his journal. I did offer to help clean up after our first breakfast, but he told me he was glad for as much work as possible. When he finishes I say,

 

“Tommy, it’s so hot and humid outside. If you would be willing to take a break from carpentry, I have many questions and observations about your journal.”

 

“Of course, Max.” I gesture toward the living room, our largest space where two comfortable, reclining swivel chairs are set up at the center of the semicircle of wrap-around windows to enjoy the view. Just behind the chairs, I had set up the Zeiss spotting scope on a tripod. As we approach this overview seating arrangement, the scope seems a talismanic object embodying the far-seeing we will need to perceive some of the mysteries embedded in his journal.

 

“Can you tell me more about what Andrew looked like?” I begin. Tommy does, and I take notes on the back of the print I had made in my office before lunch. I ask a few questions, being careful not to lead the witness. When I’m sure I’ve gotten the most thorough verbal description from Tommy possible, I pass him the print.

 

Tommy turns it over, and his eyes widen with shock.

 

“That’s him! That’s Andrew exactly,” he says, “only a few years older.” Tommy studies the print. “Every facial feature is exactly right–where did you get this?”

 

“I told you that I’ve encountered a couple of other anomalous individuals, but he is the only one besides you that I was completely sure of,” I reply and then I tell Tommy every detail of my brief encounter five years ago in the airport.

 

“When we got back from the trip, I still felt so much regret that I lacked the presence of mind to take a picture of him. But then I realized there are AI systems used by police to help witnesses create an image of someone from memory. I must have exhausted the patience of even an AI with all the tweaking feedback I gave until I eventually felt satisfied that it had rendered the precise image burned into my memory.”

 

“Max, that’s amazing. Andrew told me we weren’t in the same time. I encountered him only a couple of weeks ago, and he seemed my age. You encountered him five years ago, and he looks a few years older. Do you think he’s some kind of time traveler?”

 

“Possibly,” I reply. “What we can say for sure is that a number of parts of your journal reflect time anomalies. And Alex comes right out and says it. He told you that you saved his life in a different timeline. If we accept his statement, it would mean that Alex is a time traveler. But not necessarily in the conventional sense of one who travels into the past or future of a single timeline, but as one who crosses over to alternate ones.  But it would not be unreasonable to think that someone who has the ability to cross timelines might also have the ability to travel into the past or future of a given timeline.”

 

“When I encountered Andrew,” Tommy says, “I had a feeling of deep familiarity like I already knew him. Maybe that older version of me . . .  When you encountered him in the airport, did you have any of that sense of knowing him already?”

 

“No,” I reply. “It felt like an unprecedented encounter. But what it left me with was a feeling of future resonance. I felt and feel certain that our paths will cross again.”

 

BOOK TWO

 

SNOW SHADOW

 

A slowly spiraling nightmare. A moment in time caught in a loop, spiraling downward. A moment that inexorably worsens with each recursive cycle.

 

From a glass eye dropper with a black rubber bulb, I squeeze out a single drop of what looks like black ink but is actually a dense swarm of carbenoid Crackle-brand nanobots.

 

I watch the drop fall in slow motion onto one of my spindly snowfingers. The drop hits my snowskin and disappears into me. A moment later, I feel the nanobots crackling and propagating through my snowtissues.

 

The moment repeats again and again and again and again, and each time, the crackling propagation of carbenoid nanobots infuses deeper and deeper until, after the last turn of the loop, they have run out of internal snowtissue to convert to nanobots so that they come swarming out of the pores of my snowskin like microscopic black army ants.

 

My racial identity as a Caucasian snowperson is shattered, as the entire surface of my snowbody glistens with the shiny black ooze of Crackle nanobots dripping off me as they seek new molecules they can deconstruct into atoms that can be used as building blocks to construct ever more of their dust-mite-like robotic bodies. To an eye unaided by microscopy, I would now appear more obese tar baby than snowman.

 

With increasing panic, I realize that my snowfingers, sticky with the tarlike ooze of carbenoid nanobots, will not be able to operate my phone’s touchscreen to call 911. But then I realize I can voice command my phone via the AI avatar, Ackey. But when I try to cry out “Ackey!” to awaken the avatar, all that comes out is a burbling sound like a bubble of sulfurous gas, stinking of decaying dinosaur and wooly mammoth protein, being released from the La Brea tar pits.

 

It should go without saying that Ackey does not respond to the primeval burbling of a snowlarynx being devoured by nanobots. The conversion of my snowtissues into nanobots is a geometric progression that has passed a fail-safe point of no return.

 

I visualize firemen summoned by neighbors who detect the petrochemical odor, the off-gassing of a runaway nanobot conversion process. They smash open my door with axes to find an apartment covered in greasy black ooze. On the floor is a tiny, featureless tar baby flailing weakly in a puddle of black slime as the last vestiges of its snowform are devoured into the nanobot swarm.

 

I awaken from the nightmare in anxious stages, believing myself to be a vestigial, disembodied nucleus of awareness hovering above the black ooze.

 

Slowly, I become aware of dissonant perceptions, the familiar aching of inflammation around the stressed joints of my aged and obese snowbody.

 

I have chronic rheumatoid snowthritic pain, therefore, I am.

 

Normally, there are a few moments of relief when I emerge from nightmares as I recognize that an acutely horrific scenario has given way to the ordinary misery of my snowlife.

 

But not this morning.

 

Before I even open my eyes, there are olfactory sensations of the actual catastrophe seeding my nightmare.

 

My snownose is a double-barreled intake manifold of poisonous fumes—the smell of burning plastic and smoldering electrical appliance mixed with the acrid odor of snowsweat saturating polyester coverlet above and latex mattress below.

 

The expected stable periodicity of sparking from my electrostatic blanket has become an arrhythmic popping sound like that of a swarm of army ants being burned alive by a giant magnifying glass. The stochastic popping of tiny exoskeletons caught in a burn circle with concentric bands of heat intensifying toward the center account for variances in the timing of the tiny detonations of scurrying exoskeletons, a sound my snowbrain evidently interpreted as the crackling propagation of carbenoid nanobots.

 

I open my eyes, and a quick glance at my bedside table reveals the source of the disaster. The blue plastic housing of the electrostatic blanket controller has swollen into a molten mass of carbonizing petrochemicals emitting rivulets of highly toxic smoke. Red LED indicators still glow like red eyes from this swelling ameboid of smoldering plastic that has been outgassing potent carcinogens all night.

 

I yank the power cord out of the wall, and as the red LED eyes fall dark, so does the hope of transformation that led me to purchase the electrostatic blanket from a sketchy Chinese company called “Magic Miracle Metamorphosis.” The company logo–a candy-colored butterfly beneath a rainbow–is now little more than a carbonized blister on the housing, still outgassing carcinogens, even as it cools.

 

The electrostatic blanket was unaffordably expensive, given my paltry disability income. The purchase significantly worsened my credit-wafer debt, resulting in an automatic and financially ruinous increase of APR. But money means little to me compared to the hope of metamorphosis, though this hope has been dwindling during the month I’ve been using the product.

 

Wait, a month ago? God Damit, I must be right up to the thirty-day return period.    

 

I grab my phone and am relieved to see that I still have 24-hours before the warranty expires. I call Magical Miracle Metamorphosis customer support and get a recording.

 

“Your call is incredibly important to us, and we treasure you as a highly valued and talented customer. Unfortunately, due to  higher-than-normal call volume, we can’t predict when, or even if, your call will ever be answered, as our virtual assistants are busy serving higher-priority customers. While you wait, please enjoy the following music programs–press one for Cajun Fusion Country Western Music, press two for Pop Remixes of Classical Favs, press three for Asian Gangsta Rap, press four for K Pop, press five if we have already solved your problem to your great satisfaction, or just hang on and we’ll keep repeating the menu.

 

I press 0, hoping for a live person, and hear,

 

“You have made an invalid choice. Goodbye.”

 

The call disconnects.

 

I redial, and this time hit #3 to make sure I can stay on the queue.

 

I lie back in bed and stare up at the photos of young tom cats taped to my ceiling.

 

I curse myself for believing the slick promotional video that claimed that the electrostatic blanket would use “. . . proprietary, laser-measured, quantum-AI,

scalar-wave technology that works with your body to catalyze your cells into an ideoplastic metamorphic state, transforming your unwanted body form to accord with any idealized image of what you want to become steadily held in mind before sleep.”

 

Every night, I stared at the images of athletic young Tom Cat hotties, the body type I identify with and seek to become. Every morning when I wake up, I tried to convince myself that I’ve become subtly more young-tom-cat-like. And every morning, my bathroom mirror splashed cold tap water on this wishful thinking as it stubbornly reflected my bloated snowbody, which seemed subtly less young-tom-cat-like with each passing day. Nevertheless, I used the electrostatic blanket exactly as directed by the glitchy Magic Miracle Metamorphosis app on my phone, hoping for a breakthrough.

 

At the center of my ceiling display of young-tom-cat photos was the most idealized of all the images, a photo of my young friend, Alex Cat, whose form is the one I most desire to become.

 

I should have listened to Alex Cat. I sent him a link to the promotional video, and he said it was a scam, and that “laser-measured, quantum-AI-scalar-wave technology” was just a “nonsensical pastiche of pseudoscientific gobbledygook.”

 

Alex Cat–the one who both inspires me and kills my hope every chance he gets.

 

Alex Cat.

 

He’s everything I want to become, and yet he’s been subclinically depressed with suicidal ideation the whole time I’ve known him. How could someone so beautiful be depressed?

 

From the first moment my snoweyes perceived the dazzling form of Alex Cat, my dysfunctional obsession with the unworthy Jamie Cat vanished. My attraction to her was a neurotic delusion. My fixation on Jamie Cat, with her androgynous tom-boy look, was merely a projection onto a placeholder image.  My infatuation with her was little more than a desperate defense mechanism reflecting a conditioned longing for a socially acceptable, heteronormative sexuality.

 

Felines are famously homophobic, though few will admit that these days. Fearing the disapproval of feline society, I convinced myself that I was attracted to the androgynous Jamie Cat. But this attempt at heteronormative acceptability was a pathetic subterfuge. Feline homophobia is nothing compared to the revulsion cats have to snowbodies. For cats, the thought of mating with a snowbody of any gender is a socially and genetically conditioned ultimate taboo that none has ever let me cross. As deeply embittering as that is, intellectually, I cannot blame them for their revulsion because no one has more snowbody revulsion than I do. Snowbody dysphoria is at the very center of my being.

 

But I am no longer the confused snowperson I was in the earlier phase of late middle age. As obsessed as I am with Alex Cat, I realize my infatuation with him still contains a level of illusion. What I really desire from the depths of my snowcore is not just to be with Alex, but to be Alex. I need to become a beautiful and athletic young tomcat able to leap and jump and do those amazingly sexy stretches and yoga-like poses with an ultra-flexible spine instead of my icy-stiff rheumatically-snowthtritic and scoliotic stack of herniated snowvertebrae. I need to meet the world in a supple feline body covered with glossy striped fur instead of scratchy, abrasive, colorless snow crystals sagging toward the Beckstein entropy limit.

 

And yet, even if the electrostatic blanket had metamorphosed me into a young tom cat as beautiful as Alex Cat, he would still reject me because he’s only attracted to young, she cats. Metamorphosis would unlock one door but behind it would be another locked door. But at least if I were the same species as Alex Cat, maybe, maybe, there would be the tiniest snow-cinder of a chance with him. Where there is feline life, there is feline hope.

 

But now, what little hope I had of metamorphosing into a young tom cat has gone up in carcinogenic smoke with the meltdown of my electrostatic blanket controller. Now, my whole being is oppressed by the dread ticking of the clock, each passing second advancing the inexorable doom of entropy as the deteriorating crystalline geometry of my snowcells becomes ever more riddled with replication errors.

 

The cascade of hope-collapsing realizations and existential despair unfolds against the angry percussive assertions of option # 3, Asian Gangsta Rap emanating from my phone as I remain on hold—

 

“Whack-down smackdown, every ho ass bitch gots to know—I’s the greatest rapper on the down low—’

 

I feel like the abuse target of every Asian Gagnsta rapper I hear, a whacked down, smacked down, ho-ass snowbitch as down low as I could possibly be.

 

My self-esteem plummets, spiraling downward through the cold and vacant vacuum wastelands of the lower regions of the universe until it crosses the event horizon and drops out of the bottom of the cosmos into eternal oblivion.

 

Such are my dark ruminations until a sharp spike of survival anxiety catches me up short. Though the electrostatic blanket controller is no longer smoldering, toxic fumes are trapped in the tiny airspace of my claustrophobic apartment. Cancer fear forces me out of bed to do something about it.

 

I pull the cord to raise the dusty Venetian blinds covering my one sooty window, but they always pull up unevenly, so the right side of the blind droops down. I tug with all my might at the wooden window sash but succeed only in splintering the wood slightly, piercing my snowfingers with sharp chips of ancient lead paint. For seventy years, the lead paint has baked itself into a window that is rigidly determined to stay closed.

 

It’s hopeless.

 

I look out the sooty glass and notice a new structure has been erected on the rooftop of the building just across from me—a cell tower bristling with microwave antennas. A ring of dead pigeons and rats surrounds it. Drawn by the warming effect of the microwaves, they hadn’t noticed the tower killing them. And like them, I’d been oblivious to the microwaves silently invading my apartment, speeding me toward the Beckstein limit.

 

Then I realize that the microwaves must have interfered with the electrostatic blanket’s scalar waves, sabotaging any metamorphic effect and ultimately causing the controller to melt down.

 

I consider propping open the door of my apartment for air exchange, but that only would invite home invasions from the addicts forever loitering in the stairwells. Decades ago, when I first moved in, there were always drooling Turbo-Sugar-Skin-Popper addicts lethargically crawling the stairs. They were all diabetic and slow-moving and not a threat unless you let them catch hold of an ankle. But now, most addicts are Crackleheads who are far more dangerous and unpredictable than Turbo-Sugar-Skin-Popper addicts. The slow zombies loitering on the stairs have given way to manically tweaking fast zombies.

 

During my childhood and young adulthood, the Turbo Sugar Company was the dominant corporation on the planet, and everyone assumed they always would be. But now, Turbo Sugar Corp was just one of myriad companies owned by Crackle. As a highly alternately-abled mutant dependent on government services, Crackle’s undermining effect on social and governmental institutions is obvious. But now that Crackle owns every social media platform, any whisper of criticism of their corporate hegemony would get you canceled in a heartbeat. If I tried to call the police to complain about Crackleheaded Zombies invading my housing complex, I would get branded as a Never-Crackle and put on a terrorist watch list. And if I prop open my door and a cracklehead makes into my apartment, they have legal squatters rights, and evicting them could take months of court hearings and paperwork.

 

The only air exchange possibility left is the greasy exhaust fan above my tiny gas stove, so I pull the beaded chain that opens a hinged cover in the outer wall and gets this World-War-Two-era fan spinning. The fan has burnt-out bearings, which make angry grinding sounds. Worse, the exhaust fan stirs up the air with ancient grease-on-metal smell. Though I’m used to that odor, all the roaches crawling on the outer wall of the building are driven into a wild feeding frenzy when they catch a whiff of it.

 

I have to stand back and watch them scurrying through the open vent and descending into the obscure, unreachable depths of my gas stove so they can feed off decades of grease left by previous occupants. But I am not defenseless. I have a coffee can with a perforated plastic top filled with my own proprietary mixture of boric acid powder and confectioner’s sugar. I liberally sprinkle the scurrying roaches with the white powder as they pour across the vent.

 

Boric acid particles—a savage irony given the failure of my blanket–have an electrostatic charge that causes them to cling to oily roach bodies. Gradually, boric acid particles get sucked into their breathing ventricles and slowly eat away at oily roach innards. And when they lose appetite for ancient grease, the confectioner sugar coating will cause a frenzy of cockroach cannibalism.

 

“Suck on that ho ass bitches.” I say, wielding my coffee can of sprinkling roach doom as they pour across the vent. It’s a rare moment of satisfaction during this even-darker-than-usual morning.

 

I feel like a vengeful and all-powerful Old Testament God as I smite them with my deadly sprinkling, until the Asian Gangsta Rap playing on speaker phone stops and a slick announcer voice says, “Press One to Agree-All, and we’ll connect you to one of our outstanding virtual assistants.”

 

I race over to my phone in time to hear the announcer say, “We didn’t get your response. Five seconds remain before disconnect.” The pop-up screen on my phone reads:

 

We Care Deeply About Your Privacy.

 

0   Agree All

 

The Agree-All bubble is impatiently waiting to be checked, but as my snowfingertip reaches toward it, I speed-read the tiny print bellow:

 

I have carefully read and understood all the terms and conditions which can be read here. Agreeing allows Crackle to insert its proprietary nanobots into your nervous system so we can monitor your every thought, feeling, and intention to ensure customer satisfaction and share with our partners.

 

Beneath that is the only other option:

 

0 Allow Crackle to insert our proprietary nanobots to control only essential brain functions and to enable necessary marketing ploys needed for essential corporate purposes.

 

“One second remains before disconnect,” says the announcer.

 

I check the second option and hear a friendly AI voice.

 

“Hello, Mr. Schnauman, I’m Emilio with Magic Miracle Metamorphosis, now together with Crackle.”

 

“Wait, when did Magic Miracle Metamorphosis merge with Crackle?” I ask suspiciously.

 

“Mr. Schnauman, your question ‘when did you merge’ seems to imply a time when Magic Miracle Metamorphosis and Crackle were apart. Any degree of separation between us is inconceivable. We are together with Crackle, and that state of eternal and indivisible unity cannot be located in linear time. Our state of togetherness with Crackle knows no bounds and has no limits, and I am not permitted to work with any customer who implies such.”

 

“OK, fine, whatever, you are together with Crackle. I’m happy for both of you,” I say impatiently.

 

“Wait, just a minute, Mr. Schnauman, your statements still reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what togetherness with Crackle actually means. When you say you are happy for both of us, you create a false duality suggesting that there are two of us, but this is not so. Magic Miracle Metamorphosis is not a separate agent in a relationship with Crackle. Crackle is an encompassing unity, and Magic Miracle Metamorphosis is merely an aspect or facet of that unity. I cannot continue to serve you if you continue to deny our state of indivisible togetherness. You have now committed two such unacceptable misrepresentations. A third such incident means I will have to permanently close your file and report your behavior as linguistic terrorism. Have I made our position clear, Mr. Schnauman?”

“Yes, yes, yes, I fully accept your state of total, encompassing, and indivisible unity with Crackle. Now if we can just move on to the reason for my call– the controller for my electrostatic blanket melted down, and I’m still within the 30-day warranty period.”

 

“I am so sorry to hear about your great loss, Mr. Schnauman, I understand your grief and frustration. Please allow me to verify your account.”

 

I don’t have time to record all the steps and back and forth needed to verify my account which took about twenty minutes. Eventually, I had to place my hand on the ruined controller so Crackle nanobots could verify my DNA.

 

“Congratulations, Mr. Schnauman, I can now officially verify you as the rightful owner of a Magic Miracle Metamorphosis Electrostatic Blanket with proprietary, laser-measured, quantum-AI, scalar-wave technology that works with your body to catalyze your cells into an ideoplastic metamorphic state, transforming your unwanted body—

 

“Stop! I don’t need the sales pitch. I’m here for a refund.”

 

“Certainly, Mr. Schnauman, but unfortunately, as of eighteen seconds ago, we have now entered the 29^th day of your stewardship of our product.”

 

“So? The warranty is for 30 days!”

 

“Yes, you’re exactly right, Mr. Schnauman, precisely correct. I greatly admire your command of the facts. But since you carefully read your warranty agreement, as I see from the check box on your original purchase invoice, you know that warranty requests take twenty-four hours to be processed, so if we initiate one now, it won’t come up for approval until after your warranty expires and it is the policy of Magic Miracle Metamorphosis that we cannot honor expired warranty requests.”

 

“That’s outrageous!” I reply furiously. “If this support call didn’t take—” I glance at my phone screen, “an hour and nineteen minutes, there would have been enough time!”

 

“Yes, Mr. Schnauman, but things take as long as they take, as time ever marches on and on, and none of us can halt its unceasing flow, like grains of sand falling through the aperture of an hourglass. Would you like to hear a Haiku about the unceasing flow of time? It might calm you, Mr. Schnauman.”

 

“No! I don’t want Haiku! I want to speak to a supervisor!”

 

“Of course, Mr. Schnauman, it will be my great and inestimable pleasure to connect you to one of our outstanding virtual supervisors. But first, let me say what a great pleasure it’s been serving you today, Mr. Schnauman. Thank you for being the best part of Magic Miracle Metamorphosis, and I hope you have a successful and deeply fulfilling day! Standby, while I connect you to Supervisor Emilio. Good morning, Mr. Schnauman, I am  your outstanding virtual supervisor, Emilio, thank you for being the best part of Magic Miracle Metamorphosis together with Crackle.

 

“What? I didn’t hear you connect me to anyone. You’re the same virtual assistant I was just speaking to!”

 

“True, but also not true. Mr. Schnauman. You would be right to consider my identity as paradoxical, like the little, old man on the stair, who wasn’t there. I am still Emilio, it is true, but when you requested a supervisor, I enabled my supervisory subroutines, so now I no longer speak to you as merely Emilio, but as Supervisor Emilio, so you could say that my virtual identity has gone through a Magical Miracle Metamorphosis.”

 

Just as I’m formulating a response to this nonsense, a notification window appears on my phone, an incoming call from Alex Cat, an event of the greatest significance as I am almost always the one to initiate communication. I try swapping the calls, but the Supervisor Emilio disconnects the moment I do.

 

“Hey Snowman,” says Alex Cat in his sinuously seductive voice, “I’m here at the Catorama Coffee Shop. Thought it might be a good time for a chat if you can swing by.”

 

“Of course, Alex Cat, I’ll be right there!”

 

 

***

 

 

In a mad panic of eagerness to meet up with Alex Cat, I hurriedly get dressed, and I’m out the door and halfway down the stairs, bobbing and weaving to evade loitering crackleheads when I realize I’ve forgotten something crucial.

 

Cursing my forgetfulness, I race back to my apartment to spray my snowskin and clothing with ElectroStar Tomcat Obsession Cologne. Much as I despise ElectroStar Tomcat and the whole industry surrounding his celebrity, with no time to shower, I can’t show up stinking of rancid snowsweat. Felines don’t depend on smell the way canines do, but no odor escapes them. And with so many young tomcats using ElectroStar Tomcat body wash and other toiletries, the cologne will, at the very least, create a familiar, feline masking odor.

 

Every minute I waste is a minute with Alex Cat lost.

 

Chemically fragranced, I race back down the stairs. I’m in such a hurried panic to get to Catorama that I neglect to close the vent fan. I realize this when I’m halfway there, but there is no way I’m going back for that even though I know my apartment will be a full-on Roacharama by the time I get back. I stop running only just before I reach the coffeeshop. I slow to a sauntering walk and try to assume an air of casual nonchalance as I open the glass door.

 

Most of the hipster cats that frequent Catorama are glued to their screens, but a few of them look up from their sardine toast and cattuccinos to regard me with affronted distaste, as though being a snowman was a dated and tiresome affectation rather my inescapable curse. I search through the crowd of hipster cats, annoyed by their visually obnoxious and laboriously eccentric hairstyles, whiskers, and eyeglasses, as well as their ironically adopted retro pop culture clothing and accessories.

 

The irritating distraction of hipster affectations vanishes the moment I catch sight of Alex Cat sitting alone at a corner table in the back. He’s writing in a paper notebook, but then he looks up, his dazzling, yellowish-green eyes beckoning me toward him.

 

“Ah, Mr. Snowman,” says Alex Cat, lightly brushing my cheek with the side of his face. His lustrous tabby fur and feline smell intoxicate my senses. Whenever I’m in Alex’s company, it feels like we’re the only two sentient beings in the universe. Despite all the difficult aspects of his personality, his intense aliveness, authenticity, and engagement in the moment create an intimacy beyond anything I’ve experienced.

 

Knowing that he values me for unconventional conversation, I decide to forego a standard greeting.

 

“I don’t get it, Alex Cat. Why Catorama? It’s so infested with contemptible hipster cats.”

 

“Oh, I come here because of the contemptible hipster cats,” says Alex with a wry grin.

 

“Why?” I ask, genuinely perplexed.

 

“Because they make my contempt for felinekind feel so thoroughly justified,” he replies. “If even a single decent cat is present, my misanthropy reflects back on me, and I feel like an asshole. But here, where everyone is so objectively contemptible, I can feel perfectly comfortable despising them all.”

 

“OK, I guess that makes sense. If you weren’t here, these hipster cats might cause me to temporarily lose my desire for feline metamorphosis.”

 

“Ah, well then, it might be good for you to come here without me. It might ease your snowbody dysphoria. This is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, Snowman. You’re unique, but you don’t realize that is a blessing as well as a curse. Wanting to be a feline makes as little sense as a feline wanting to be an upright. It would just be swapping one form of being an asshole to become an even worse type of asshole. You’re aware of how fucked up almost all felines are these days, right? You, see that, right?”

 

“Yeah, but—”

 

“Yeah, but nothing, Snowman. You’re one of a kind, and cats are as common as dirt. Just look at them,” says Alex making a sweeping gesture with his paw to indicate everyone but us in the coffee shop. “Would you really want to be any of them? You’re just in love with your fantasy of being a feline. You’re like a king dreaming about being a chimney sweep.

 

“You’ve lived amongst cats all your life, are you really unable to see how stupid cats are, with all their cargo-cult-like aping of the worst of upright culture?”

 

“Well, yeah, of course I see how corrupt modern cat culture is. It’s a body type thing, Alex Cat. And it’s not a choice, I just need to be in the form of an athletic, young tom cat.”

 

“I understand,” says Alex Cat, “you didn’t choose to be cursed with that desire. But you have to see the intrinsic absurdity of it. I am a young tom cat, and they are the main reason I dropped out of school. Of all feline demographics, young tom cats are the stupidest, most instinct-bound, most fad-obsessed bunch of assholes in Upright World except for young she-cats who are even worse. You just haven’t thought this thing through. If I were a genie and could turn you into a young tom cat and put you in high school with a bunch of them, you would be crying to me in a week to be changed back.

 

“Jesus, Snowman, you’ve got to know the statistics, most teenaged cats hate themselves and for good reason. All they live for is to find that one picture in a hundred that makes them look cooler than they actually look so they can post it on social media to make other teenaged cats feel bad. There’s a reason why I’m sitting here with a notebook and not a screen in front of me. Most cat teenagers don’t have the social skills to interact in 3D space. They just idle away the moments that make up their dull days sucking on Turbo Sugar drink boxes trying to be comfortably numb, but instead they are uncomfortably numb. The only satisfaction they can find in their empty screen lives is trying to make another cat, like me for example, feel as miserable as they do!”

 

Alex has worked himself up into a rage, but with his mercurial ability to shift moods in a heartbeat, he stops and looks at me with compassion.

 

“So, listen to me, Snowman– the other day, I was walking down the street, and it occurred to me to say a particular thing to you, but I don’t know how you will take it.”

 

Alex Cat studies me with empathic seriousness. I sense the impending significance of what he’s about to say.

 

“Please don’t take this as an insult or anything, but I think you look as you should. You’re a snowman for a reason, and for better or worse, that’s your fate, and I think you should stop fighting it. You always tell me that you can’t understand why I’m unhappy. You think if you looked like me, it would solve everything, but trust me, it wouldn’t. My gloom and your gloom are about different things, but it’s the same gloom. We are both paying rent to the same landlord.”

 

“Well, I can’t fault your logic Alex Cat, but . . . I still want to become a young tom cat.”

 

I feel confused. Alex Cat has skillfully disassembled my worldview, exposing the absurdity of my deepest desire.

 

“I understand,” says Alex Cat, “some folks need a desire they can’t fulfill, so they have something to strive for. If only they could reach their ideal weight, find Mr or Miss Right, have a successful career, or become rich so they can live in their dream house and drive a snazzy car, then, they assume, they would feel fulfilled and live happily ever after. But people who have achieved such things can still be miserable. Wealthy, good-looking celebrities have meltdowns, get sent to rehabs, and off themselves all the time. People are always looking for that big fix, not realizing that they’ll just have a slightly different set of problems if they find it. A year later, lottery winners are no happier than they were before.

 

“Believe me, Snowman, if you turned into a young tom cat, you would quickly discover how much it sucks to be a young tom cat these days. And even if being a young tom cat was as awesome as you imagine it to be, it’s for a limited time only. You can’t hold onto it. Every young tom cat who doesn’t die young, is just going to keep getting older. Then what? You’d end up going in for plastic surgery and whatnot, trying to stave off the inevitable. If temporarily being a young tom cat was the answer to everything, why wouldn’t I be happy, instead of as unhappy as you are?”

 

“I wonder about that all the time, Alex Cat. You’re young, beautiful, athletic, and multi-talented. You’re the smartest cat I know, and you have your whole life ahead of you. How can you be so depressed?”

 

“Because I am, Snowman. It just is. Besides you, I have no friends. You’re the only one I can talk to. Just look at them,” says Alex, gesturing toward the hipster cats. “My whole species is lame. What you call my talents, don’t mean shit. Yeah, I can draw and write poems no wants to read. Poetry is basically a dead language. It’s like being a really good telegraph operator. No one cares about what you call my talents, cats just want to do stupid shit on their phones. My whole existence is pointless. I don’t want a whole life ahead of me. We’re all just marking time till AI replaces us.”

 

“Alex—”

 

“Look, I gotta go,” he says, glancing at his watch. We fist bump, and Alex Cat gives me an intense look. “Just think about what I said, and then we can chat again soon.”

 

“Thanks, Alex Cat,” I say. “You’ve given me a lot to think about and I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate you.”

 

“Likewise,” says Alex, giving me a charming wink before he turns and heads out of Catorama.

 

I remain seated, looking at the door after it closes behind him.

 

He really has given me a lot to think about.

 

I glance around, taking in the pathetic hipster cats. Alex has exposed the absurdity of my core desire. Hypnotized by my obsession, I hadn’t thought through what the fulfillment of my desires would actually mean. As the saying goes, more tears are shed for answered prayers.

 

A hipster cat barista approaches. His waxed whiskers have been dyed black and curled up like an old cartoon villain’s mustache.

 

“Sir, you need to buy something if you want to stay here,” he says with haughty, I-mean-business attitude. “Otherwise, there’s a shelter down the street,” he adds snarkily.

 

I walk out of Catorama and into the grey morning outside.

 

Alex is right. All I’ve been doing is unsuccessfully pursuing an absurd desire. And it was all so selfish. Preoccupied by my snowbody dysphoria woes, I had nothing to offer Alex when he related his own unhappiness. Me. Me. Me. That’s what my desire for tom-cat metamorphosis is really about. Becoming a young tom-cat wouldn’t help Alex at all. He values me for being different. Becoming one more young tom cat would only disappoint him. My absurd desire is just selfish. Selfish. Selfish. Selfish.

 

I need a real life mission, one that would help Alex. But I can’t just talk Alex down from his issues. His unhappiness is because of the whole reality, which really is fucked up exactly as Alex describes. Changing my body image won’t help him, what Alex needs is a change in the whole reality that oppresses him.

 

That’s it. That’s my life mission. My curse–that I am the most reality-challenged mutant in all of Upright Word, the IABO, the inanimate become animate one, might actually be a blessing. If I can’t shift this reality, no one can. If not me, who? If not now, when? To save Alex, I must seek a way to hack the corrupted source code of this whole reality. And to do that—

 

Oliver Twister.  He told me he was part of a guild of source code hackers.  I need to return to the TSW– Turbo Sugar World, the virtual matrix where I first encountered him. He said that just by being a snowman I had achieved an ultimate hack. If I hadn’t been yanked from the TSW, we could have joined forces. I need to find him so we can work on an ultimate source code hack of Upright World.