Falling in Reverse

Cover photo credit: Stock image by Muzammil Soorma via Unsplash.

Prologue

            August 1991 – Somewhere in outer space

The ambient temperature of the room grew colder as they approached. This was the first sign of their arrival. The second signal was the lighting. It changed from a warm, dim light to a bright, fluorescent light that reminded Cyrus of hospitals in movie clips where someone was dying. The voices behind the door shook him to the core, as familiar as any human tone would sound, except for the combination of a high pitch and a muffled vibration accompanying it. It sounded how he imagined a person screaming under water would sound.

            The door opened and the White Coats entered swiftly and silently, six of them this time. Their features were impeccable, as if each and every one of their faces were carved from the textbook of widely appreciated beauty standards. Alabaster glass skin glistened beneath the cold lighting, highlighting steel-edged jaw lines, jewel beetle eyes the color of arctic ice, and stature cheek bones; not quite human, something more ethereal, like angels. Cyrus did not believe they were angels, and he certainly didn’t believe that angels created them. Not after the encounter he had after escaping his room.

            It was a few days before, at least it felt like it was. Time lapsed differently here, and with no clear rotation of day and night, there was no way to tell how long he’d been on the spacecraft, or how long ago it truly was when he discovered the drain room. He didn’t even want to think about that room. Cyrus estimated that he’d been captured at least six months ago, and all he could think about the entire time was his daughter, Josephine. She was three years old when he was taken, and her birthday must have already passed. Being locked in a room can drive a person to madness, so when he realized he had most likely missed her fourth birthday, he was desperate to find a way out, especially because he somehow was beginning to forget her face. Some days he’d even forget her name or that she existed at all. He waited for them to come in for a routine checkup. That’s what he called it, when they entered the room unannounced yet on a schedule, drew four vials of blood and gave him two pills, a green one and a white one. They didn’t tell him what they were for, but if someone refused to take them or fought back, they took the person away and nobody ever saw them again. This happened a few times in the beginning, when all the captives were grouped together, before being carried off to different operations. Cyrus had been taken into one of the inspection rooms. He’d stayed there being poked and prodded, only given enough food and water to sustain him.

            One of the White Coats left the room after drawing some samples, but the door had not clicked shut all the way, and Cyrus took the opportunity to make a run for it. He was quickly caught after getting lost in the endless corridors of soulless sheet metal, dim green lighting, luminescent buttons telling of machines operating accordingly, and running out of a room he’d found with shelves lined with jars of all sorts of human specimens: eyeballs, fingers, a pair of lungs, hearts, kidneys, and fetuses. They threw him into an empty room, plucked one eye out, extracted several molar teeth, and left him there to nearly starve. Until now. He watched the six humanoid beings walk closer, eerily silent and in sync. Cyrus could feel the fear creep up his spine and raise the hairs on the back of his neck. He just hoped the death would be quick and merciful.

1        Rooster

            August 2014 – Indianapolis, IN

            “Hey, handsome.”

            Lincoln awoke to the side of his face being brushed lightly by the back of Fiona’s fingers. The smell of coffee filled their small downtown Indianapolis apartment pleasantly, and he could hear morning rush-hour traffic outside the bedroom window. Dawn trickled through the curtains and promised a glorious August day. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and yawned, sat up and looked toward the digital alarm clock on the bedside stand. The time read six thirty-two, and the sudden realization that it was Saturday brought a smile to his face.

            “Good morning, love,” he said back to her, embracing her and running a hand through her soft, auburn hair that always smelled of fresh lavender and rose petals, with a hint of patchouli. Moondance, their Australian shepherd, leapt on the bed and licked his face with excitement at his awakening.

            “I was going to let you sleep in, but I figured you’d want to start your day a bit sooner. Do you know when you’ll be back home today?” Fiona stood back up and opened the curtains to the view of the city. She walked into the kitchen, clattering a couple of mugs around and pouring them both some fresh-brewed coffee out of the French press he’d bought her a few years ago. She always added a splash of caramel oat milk creamer to hers while Lincoln preferred his black. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet, lounging around in a robe on the weekends when they didn’t have plans or errands to run was her favorite way to relax and unwind. She worked overnights for a shipping company and had gotten home just an hour before. She went to college full-time pursuing a degree in English in hopes of becoming a professor someday, guiding young poets to realize their potential without fear of being silenced.

            “I’m not sure, I think I’ll take a good twenty jumps or so and then hit the grocery store. Text me what you need, and I’ll pick it up for you. Unless you’d rather I get home and then we go together?”

            “Yeah, that sounds good. I need to stop by the hobby store and pick up some art stuff for my painting. I got inspired last night and I think I know where I’m taking it. Maybe instead of a hummingbird I’ll do a frog. I thought it would be nice for the kitchen!” Fiona loved painting in any spare time she could find between school and work. She liked to display them in the apartment to add some color to the walls they couldn’t paint. And going out shopping was always quality time spent together in her eyes.

            “Sounds good. Do you mind if I have the boys over tomorrow? I know I said I was going to Ben’s but Cassie’s sick and he told me last night that him and the girls aren’t feeling too well, either.” Benjamin was Lincoln’s best friend since childhood. He had married his girlfriend of eight years a couple years back and they had two daughters together.

            “Ugh, well you’re going to have to help me clean up around here a bit when we get back from the store then. I’ll pick up here and there while you’re out before I start on that essay. I’m assuming we’re picking up snacks for it? No wonder you suggested running errands,” she scoffed then sniggered.

            “You know me too well.”

            “Well after six years I’d certainly hope so,” she laughed with that infectious laugh and beautiful smile that enticed Lincoln to ask her out for their first date. “Next weekend we really need to get serious about packing and making sure Jenny knows the schedule, so the plants don’t die. I swear if we get back and my lemon tree is dead, I’m going to be pissed.”

            They had met at a bar on a Wednesday night. She was with two friends celebrating her twenty-second birthday, and he was with Benjamin enjoying a cold beer after a long day at work. She wore a form-fitting little black dress and he was still dirty from hanging dry wall. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and she noticed. He bought her a drink after striking conversation and they agreed to meet again for dinner and a movie the following Saturday. The plan was to see Journey to the Center of the Earth, he still can’t remember how it came up in conversation or why they decided on it. It didn’t happen that weekend, they did meet up for dinner but decided to take a walk along the Canal downtown. Neither of them wanted the night to end and they agreed to see each other again the next day. Sometimes people are just meant to be together. At least, Lincoln thought so.

            “Six wonderful years,” he reminisced as he glanced toward the nightstand on his side of the bed. “I know, we need to get Moondance to the vet too and get her that Lyme disease shot and some tick prevention.”

            They were planning a two-week road trip through the states, stopping in multiple places to camp and tour on the way to Arizona to finally see the Grand Canyon, and through Utah to hike through Zion National Park, something they’d been planning for four years. The reason they were still living in an apartment was because the money they had managed to save up was mostly for this trip. Saving for a home purchase would come later, once they decided which state they wanted to live in. What Fiona didn’t know was that Lincoln was planning to propose to her, they’d leave as a couple and come back engaged.

            He’d secretly saved up for the ring for two years. Fiona’s best friend Suzanne had helped him pick it out, a pear cut salt and pepper diamond that came with a diamond-encrusted curved band. He hoped she’d love it as much as Suzanne insisted she would. Lincoln would find out soon enough.

            “Yep, I’m going to call them as soon as they open which is in about… twenty minutes. Are you going down to the gym first today?”

            “Yeah, I probably should. Want to tag along?” Lincoln smirked at her.

            Fiona rolled her eyes. She wasn’t as active as he was when it came to routine fitness. Lincoln gathered up his gym bag and kissed Fiona on the cheek before leaving their apartment and taking a trip downstairs to the gym. They liked living in this type of building with all kinds of amenities and even better, it was within walking distance of restaurants and shops.

            Lincoln worked out for about an hour and a half that morning, eager to get started with his day. He was a professional licensed skydiver, and he loved every minute of it. Sometimes he worked as an instructor during the summertime, helping others achieve their licenses or attaching himself to someone for a tandem. But the pay wasn’t great (not that he got into it for wealth), and he preferred just enjoying his license and going solo. Ben used to do it too, but he stopped skydiving when his first kid was born.

            There’s a feeling during the free fall that can’t be attained any other way. You’re weightless, breathless, otherworldly, it’s just you, the clouds, and blue skies. Skydiving gives you this clarity that makes you feel alive. All the problems in your life and in the world wash away, and you remember what it means to live.

            The beauty of the ground below is another thing entirely. Indiana was okay, but his favorite place to skydive was Costa Rica. He’d been to lots of different places in the U.S. and around the world to skydive, zipline, and bungee but Costa Rica had his heart. He and Ben had been three times just to jump overhead.

            Fiona wasn’t an adrenaline junkie like Lincoln. She just didn’t understand. At least she finally stopped hassling him about his potential death in the sport. He always only responded with, “Blue skies, black death.”

            Lincoln showered off the workout, changed into airy clothing, then got into his Ford Focus and headed for Frankfort, Indiana, about a one-hour drive north. He pulled into the lot of the municipal airport, where Skydive Indianapolis resided. Upon arrival, he briskly grabbed his equipment from the trunk and headed inside. His rig was already packed from last weekend, his helmet charged and ready to go with the Bluetooth operational, and his latitude watch was on his wrist.

            The hours passed by.

            Jumping at least nine times already, Lincoln climbed back into the airplane after repacking his rig. He stood at the edge of the open slide-up door, looked down for two seconds at the cornfields and tiny highways, then flung himself over backwards, exiting the small plane in a backflip, hurdling himself toward the fields below upside down, for faster momentum. He went like this for about sixty seconds then shifted himself right-side-up, expanding his arms outward and feeling the cold air rush across his entire body. He hadn’t reached the clouds yet, let alone opened his ‘chute, when his body suddenly started slowing down.

            Lincoln looked in every direction he could, none of his mates were to be seen and he’d lost sight of the airplane as well. The air became frigid, and his body suddenly stopped in the midst of clouds. He couldn’t hear or see anything, just fog and mist with hardly any sunlight coming through. The silence was alarming, the only sound being his confused and panicked gasping. Was he still asleep? He shouted out for help to no avail, and the Bluetooth in his helmet disconnected, he couldn’t reach anyone.

            He floated in the clouds for what felt like several minutes, frozen, weightless, shouting for help into the nothingness, using his arms and legs in an attempt to move his body in toward Earth’s surface to no avail. Then, he felt a gravitational pull begin to extract him from the clouds, in the wrong direction. The speed picked up, faster and faster as he found himself now falling in reverse, the latitude on his watch climbing higher and higher until he surpassed the thirteen thousand feet from which he’d exited the plane. Lincoln looked up only to see an opening in the sky that his body was rapidly headed toward, a blinding white light brighter than the sun.

            He reached the entrance into the sky, hardly a breath sucked in as the pressure crushed his lungs. Then he was inside, the light shut off and he was now in total darkness, light impression spots floating in the nothingness from where he looked into the light. Slowly, dim green lighting lit a corridor, and a figure in a white lab coat approached him.

            “We’ve been expecting you, Lincoln.” A rooster crowed somewhere in the distance, and then he fell unconscious.

 2   Joker

            Later that night – Arcadia, IN

            Alice left the client’s house around 9:30 p.m. It was late August, so it was just beginning to get very dark out. She stopped at a small Exxon station for gas and a pack of Marlboro menthols. She filled up her tank, moved her vehicle from the pump to a parking spot, and sat in her car, flipping a lucky in the pack and sparking up a cigarette while taking down notes of her excursions throughout the day. She was a life insurance sales agent, so she took the time before heading home to jot down everything to track her performance to ensure meeting a made-up sales goal she set for herself; everything was about money in that business.

She wrote down: how many people she door-knocked, how many people she scheduled appointments with, how many people she sat with and didn’t sell to, how many people she sat with and sold to, how many people she phoned, how many policies she made money from today, how many people she successfully recruited to an interview to join their multi-level marketing company, and so on and so forth. Shamelessly comparing numbers to other sales agents in their ruthless journey to exploit the fear and disaster that strikes when death falls on a family, using bait and switch sales tactics to lure unsuspecting people into buying overpriced insurance policies they’d later use as excuses to continually check in with existing policyholders to upsell them, collecting more contact information from people to reach out to their families to sell to them as well and if not, hunting for bodies to join their finance cult because the real money comes from the backs of recruits, and doing all of this under the disguise of genuinely caring about helping people when financial disaster inevitably strikes—everybody dies eventually—when really, all they cared about was making thousands of dollars a month and rolling around in their shitty BMWs that aren’t built to rack up miles and miles on the odometers, flashing off their Gucci belts, Rolexes, and lame trips to Florida for the purpose of showing off on social media how great their pyramid scheme is to attract potential bottom lines that don’t know any better, and using hustle culture to shame people out of having second thoughts about the morals and ethics behind the scenes. “If you can’t make it here, you’ll never have financial freedom to do as you please later, your family will never experience generational wealth, and you’ll be giving up the dream that everyone wants.” It’s a pretty disgusting and predatory line of work, but the set-up is genius, and works, and Alice was good at it, she hadn’t worried about a single bill in months. Though she did feel guilty about the reality of the job, she did need the money, and people in the working class did need life insurance. At least it wasn’t a total scam, policies did pay out eventually. Still, Alice looked down at all her numbers and the smile wiped from her face as she thought about all the funerals she had personally attended over the last few years, and how even though she was supposed to feel like she was doing good in the world, she felt like a slimy money-hungry monster, and everything suddenly felt like an unfunny joke. In another life, she would have worked as a travel journalist. Mostly broke but seeing the whole world as the years passed her by and feeling zero guilt for the strategy behind her source of income.

She needed to clear her mind now that the day was over. She stepped back out of her Toyota RAV4 and leaned against the door, puffing on her cigarette and looking up to the twinkling star-speckled sky. One star was especially bright, blue and flickering in the distance like a match to the Northern Star that leads to Neverland. Was it Venus? Alice always thought the brightest star in the sky was Venus. It appeared to move, but she knew it was her eyes playing tricks on her. She loved it out here, it was quiet, dark as the blackest black in some areas where the headlights on your vehicle are the only source of light driving through the back roads, and the stars lit up the sky like millions of distant fireflies inviting thoughts and questions that can’t be answered. Her mind drifted to when she’d finally get home. She called her boyfriend Larry, told him she was on her way home, and got back in her vehicle.

About four minutes passed, driving on the dark road, mindlessly singing along to Spotify jams while subconsciously watching for deer. The Joker by Steve Miller Band was playing.

            The road ahead gradually grew lighter. She looked down at her dash, she hadn’t turned on her high beams, usually forgetting about them entirely. But no, the lights were definitely getting brighter.

            Alice immediately tried to shut the radio off as the signal jammed and the tune started screeching along with alternating low and piercing frequencies that almost made her ears bleed. It wouldn’t turn off, the music bent and statically played in and out of audibility. The lights on her dash flickered on and off, gauges flying back and forth, headlights beaming as far as two miles it seemed, and just as quickly, everything shut off. The car stopped moving and she found herself in dead silence and total darkness.

            “What in the fuck…” She reached up for her phone to call for help. Dead battery. She could have sworn she had just under half a full charge before leaving the gas station.

            Jiiii-kraa-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!

            A loud screeching door hinge sound followed by an explosive bang made her jump in her seat and emitted a sound from her comparable to the yelp of a dog. “Oh, MY GOD WHAT is happening?!” Panic ensued and she started crying.

            A flash-bang in front of her car lit up everything around her, two tall figures walked slowly but deliberately toward her, an icy chill crept up her back, and Alice felt seven freezing cold fingers close around her throat. The last thing she saw was a pair of stoney pale grey eyes staring back at her from her rearview mirror.

***

             Alice’s car was found dead-center in the right-hand lane on E 256th Street, just before IN-19. The doors were closed but unlocked, the keys still in the ignition, and the battery dead. State police found her purse in the passenger seat and her phone still sitting in its mount on the dash. There were no footprints in the dirt to the side of the road, no way of gaining any clues to what happened in this bizarre discovery. She had, essentially, vanished without a trace.

3       Moth

The following Monday — Indianapolis, IN

            “Two disappearances that happened this past Saturday in Frankfort and Arcadia have left ISP flustered and scrambling for clues. Lincoln Mayfield and Alice Wicker of Indianapolis vanished without a trace just hours apart this past Saturday. Mayfield, a professional skydiver last seen jumping from his plane from the Frankfort Municipal Airport around 4:30 p.m., he never made it to the landing zone and his body has not been located in any part of the perimeter he should have landed in should a double malfunction have happened to his parachutes. Friends assured reporters that he is a seasoned diver, but nobody is immune to accidents, however the concern lies with the disappearance of anything that could be linked to him. Wicker was last seen leaving one of her client’s homes in Arcadia around 9:00 p.m., police being notified when she never made it home, and her vehicle was located stranded on E 256th Street along with all of her belongings, and no traces of footprints have been…”

            The reporter’s voice faded out as Fiona’s thoughts drowned out the television, staring blankly at a picture of her and Lincoln that hung on the wall near their favorite window. They took it in New Orleans on their last visit. Lincoln had always expressed to her that in the event he should die in a skydiving accident, she had to accept that he died doing something he loved. The idea of his body being found mangled made her want to drink bleach, and him being missing was better than that; better than having to identify pieces of a person. She didn’t believe he was truly lying dead somewhere in the fields, she couldn’t. But if he wasn’t dead, where could he possibly be and why?

***

            August 2027 — Carmel, IN

            Lincoln’s disappearance would torment her for the next thirteen years, his body was never found, and nobody had found any leads, leaving him to be a curious cold case. She stayed in the apartment for five years after that weekend, hoping someday he’d show up at the door, running to it anytime someone rang or knocked. It wasn’t until she finally went through his things, slowly discarding them as she packed up to move on that she’d find the engagement ring, which she still kept on a silver chain around her neck to this day. Suzanne had told her about it sometime after a mourning period, but she couldn’t bring herself to look for it. Her new partner William that she had met in a grieving group was entirely understanding. His wife died in a car crash and every year they did something for their lost significant others on their birthdays and the dates of their… gone-ness. He still wore his ring, too.

            Fiona couldn’t take living there without him any longer, so when she finished school she moved out of the city, to a nicer, calmer part of the state. She and William had found a nice two-bedroom condo close to town. There was even a nice backyard for their dog, Willowbie, a Golden Retriever they adopted from some friends that moved out of state. Moondance had to be put down years ago, her ashes kept in a cherry-wood box with a golden placard across the front that sat on a shelf in their living room between a framed photo and a flower vase.

            A rapt knock came to the door. Fiona was home alone and wasn’t expecting company. Looking through the peephole, she didn’t recognize the faces through the warped fisheye. Wait— yes she did. One of them. Waiting for a response was a rugged man of some sort of African descent wearing a black eyepatch, a leather jacket, and carrying an air of uncertainty. Next to him stood a younger woman, white, blonde, green-eyed, plum lipstick and a grim expression on her unmistakably familiar face. Alice Wicker? She didn’t seem to have aged a day from the photos that overtook the nation for a long time, and Fiona didn’t recall ever hearing a story of her being found alive and safe. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have answered the door, but intuition made it impossible not to. She placed the satin nickel chain lock through its bracket before turning the knob and opening the door, slowly.

            “Hello, ma’am, we’re sorry to bother you,” the man seemed apprehensive and that gave Fiona a chill up her spine.

            The woman chimed in immediately, “Is your name Fiona Shoemaker?”

            A long beat, “Y-yes…?”

            “We’ve been looking for you for two years. My name is Alice. Alice Wicker. This is Cyrus Huxley.”

            Cyrus Huxley?! No fucking way. Fiona’s mind started reeling. “You’ve been missing since, like, the nineties.” Her heart began to stomp in her throat. There was something strange and cold in his exposed eye that she didn’t fully trust, and yet, it was nothing compared to the dead green eyes on Alice’s face that seemed to stare directly though you. They seemed entirely detached from the person wearing them. She didn’t trust those eyes at all.

            “Yes ma’am. It’s… a long story.” He looked away sheepishly, “But you’re going to want to hear this. We know where Lincoln is.”

            Tinnitus. That’s all she could recall from the moment he uttered Lincoln’s name to the moment she collected herself enough to respond. The ringing was shockingly loud in her ears. She could feel the two of them studying her face. Fiona invited them inside and prepared some tea. Alice looked around the condo judgingly, Cyrus pet Willowbie when she trotted right up to him, the dog staring at Alice and keeping away from her.

            They told their stories. Cyrus had been walking home late one night in downtown Indianapolis when he was abducted. Alice’s story was terrifying to Fiona, and yet something was so… off about her. How could she carry herself so calmly and so chipper? They’d managed to stay away from the cameras when they returned, miraculously released from their captors, only hunting down loved ones and then turning away at the last moment when they realized their reappearance may do more harm than good. Cyrus was up there for thirty-four years. His daughter was a toddler when he disappeared. Now she was a grown woman, with a family and a life of her own. They’d spent eleven years up there with Lincoln. Of course, time moved differently on the spacecraft, it only felt like two years. So why did they hunt her down? Why tell her all of this? Something just wasn’t adding up to her. She wanted so desperately to believe them, but that was difficult. Mourning the loss of Lincoln was something she was still currently doing, even if it wasn’t at the magnitude it used to be. This all felt very cruel.

            Fiona bid her guests farewell, unsure of how to even end a meeting like that. By the end of story time, they told her that she could see Lincoln again. He was due to be released soon. It was all so vague, and she had so many unanswered questions, but she didn’t even know how to ask any of them. She ended up saying she needed time to sit on this, she did have a new life after all.

            When Will walked through the door, hurriedly after Fiona called him in hysteria, he found her curled up on the couch, sobbing into an old photograph of her and Lincoln, tears streaming down her red cheeks and a mess of broken glass, several plates had been thrown on the kitchen floor. She was wrapped in a beige Afghan blanket, an empty fifth of Scotch toppled over the coffee table, amber liquid tepidly swimming in a Glencairn that had been filled, devoured, filled, devoured. Willowbie sat beside her curled into a ball with her face resting in Fiona’s lap.

            “Wh-why would anybody do something like this?” She wailed into the blanket, anger and confusion lashing from her vocal cords. Will tossed his keys and briefcase to the side and rushed to her, offering what comfort he could. He knew how terribly recoiling all of that must have been to hear, but if there was anything remotely close to the possibility that his late wife may still be alive somewhere, he would do anything to figure out if it was really true, no matter how far-fetched and ridiculous it sounded. And if those two people were who they said they were, could it really be that far beyond the realm of possibility?

            He took care of her that night, and the next morning when the alcohol caught up to her body. By the evening of the next day, they had talked extensively about the details shared from their uninvited, increasingly serendipitous (though still dark) story-telling guests.

            Fiona couldn’t ignore the sheer curiosity she felt about the entire situation, and she resolved that she had to trust them. Who would make up such a story and for what purpose? To give a stranger hope and then destroy them, for what? Why would anybody go through the trouble? She couldn’t stop thinking about the spitting image of Alice from the photo of her she’d seen repeatedly. She hadn’t aged a day. Upon researching Cyrus’ story, neither had he. With a curt nod from Will, Fiona picked up the phone and dialed Cyrus’ number, flocking to their story like a moth to a flame.

4 Space Dust

            August 2014 – Somewhere in outer space

Lincoln woke with a start. The shrill of a screaming woman brought him to collective lucidity. He was in a small, rounded chamber with a single overhead light and one door serving as an exit. There was no handle on the door. He searched it up and down for a button, a nook, anything, nothing could be observed and pushing on it was pointless. It was when he gave up that he realized he couldn’t even remember how he got there, or how he got into the fleece-lined jumpsuit he wore. He thought back on his day, and the last thing he remembered was getting on the plane to jump. How long had he been here? Where was here? What would Fiona be thinking right now? Had he been absent long enough for anyone to notice?

The door suddenly opened with a swift whooooosh as it slid upwards in a fluid and quick motion, steel on steel creating that lingering breath-like effect that wasn’t quite a full clink. Lincoln fell backwards as a towering creature that seemed human but brought a degree of uncanny valley atmosphere wearing a long white coat glided into the room, depositing the unconscious body of a blonde woman on the cold, checker plate flooring then exiting and letting the door fall closed once again. The woman lay motionless, donning the same outfit.

Lincoln became increasingly aware of his labored breathing. This is what true fear felt like. Selfish as it was, he was glad this other person wasn’t Fiona, and he clung to the thought that she was safe at home. “Hey…” His voice was shaky, his throat sore, most likely some mild altitude sickness, he could somehow feel that his body wasn’t on the ground. He crouched down and reached out a hand and gently shook the woman’s shoulder. After a few minutes of nudging, she began to stir.

Alice lifted herself from the floor gingerly, using Lincoln’s hands to keep steady.

“Where am I?” She looked at him with big, bulbous eyes desperately searching for safety. She couldn’t have been over twenty-five, close in age.

“I don’t know. I only just woke up in here about fifteen minutes ago,” he wished he could have given her a better answer. He wished he knew.

She looked down, walked to the wall and sat defeated on the floor with her back to it. “A bright light.”

“What?”

“All I remember is a bright light…” A long beat, “And dead eyes.”

They sat in the room for what felt like a few hours. The door opened once again, but instead of another person entering, they were ushered out with a gust of cool air, placed in handcuff-like equipment that clasped their hands closed into fists, and escorted down a long corridor.

“You’ve been assigned to Group C-A-R-O-44,” only one creature spoke, but it sounded like three did.

“What’s that?” Lincoln didn’t think too hard before he spoke.

“Civilization Anarchic Response Observations. Forty-four.”

What in the fuck could that possibly mean, Alice and Lincoln exchanged wary glances.

***

The grand hall wasn’t cold and depressing at all compared to what they’d seen of the spacecraft, in fact the exact opposite. Windows allowed views of the vastness of outer space. The walls were painted in a soothing sage tone and lined with shelves of books, puzzles, board games; paintings throughout the ages scattered the walls from Paleolithic cave markings to Aegean vases on pedestals, Rococo Vigée Le Brun, nineteenth century U.S. Romanticism, Impressionist Degas, and Art Deco vita-glass ornamented the historically adopted ceilings as the philosophical-inspired architectural timeline moved to modern art and photography. The Renaissance period featured glamorous iron corona hanging from the mural ceilings and the Gothic Revival movement rendition adorned enormous mosaic windows with none other than Catholic biblical persons. From Lincoln’s experience in watching advanced technology alien movies, it appeared these beings had no interest in upholding any sort of prime directive law. Thick oak wood tables stretched thirty feet decorated with candelabras, lanterns, various plant species set in centerpieces, golden charges paired with golden goblets and silverware with rolled linens, and always served exotic fruits, wines, vegetables, grains, and meats at meal times lined the center of the hall. It was strange, this was basically heaven. Nothing was expected of them here. No work of any kind, no strangely inhumane experiments were performed, they were given their own small rooms to sleep in, and aside from basic rules against harming themselves and others, not speaking out or trying to escape, they were free to do whatever they wanted. Of course, anytime somebody began to lose their minds, they’d be carried off and never seen again. Although once in a while, an individual or a group would be plucked out for seemingly no apparent reason, and they were never seen again either.

There were usually around two hundred of them, newcomers coming in and old ones going out on a fairly regular basis. Some lasted a couple of months, some lasted years. Nobody ever aged. It must have been one of the pills they were made to take daily. Alice and Lincoln knew they had it well, some of the people stuck there for a long time weren’t so lucky when they were first picked up, spending lengths of time transferred to different departments of study and experimentation. Some people were completely maimed, missing digits, limbs, organs, including a man named Cyrus they’d become acquainted with after what seemed like one month. He confided that his experiments weren’t especially brutal but once he tried to run he lost his right eye for it. He did find humor in the eye patch he was given and cracked a joke when he could. Lincoln remembered his name from somewhere, but no matter how hard he thought about it… it wouldn’t come.

They met a woman named Regina from the Baltics and she was nice to talk to, to take their minds away, popular amongst the crowd because she was beautiful, well-spoken and extroverted, and had many stories to tell. But one day she went completely mental, shouting at the walls, throwing forks at people, and yelling obscenities. She was promptly carried away.

Alice and Lincoln had become fairly close. They spent most of their time together. Alice did her best not to forget Larry, but his face was blurred. Lincoln, on the other hand, thought of Fiona every day. Even when he and Alice would separate from the crowd and into one of their rooms to aggressively rip the clothes off each other and fuck the boredom away. Lincoln hated her guts after each time, riddled with guilt and disgusted with himself, always thinking back to the diamond ring he’d left in his drawer at home. And as much as he hated himself for it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see Fiona again. Lewd and salacious behavior was not uncommon. The aliens didn’t care about it, it may not have been something that was encouraged but it certainly didn’t seem to be something frowned upon. Nobody was ever punished for it anyway and some of the really battered people were especially lascivious and would take part in orgies every once in a while. Sex seemed to be something the White Coats understood was a part of human nature that would only be avoided if everyone had been mutilated and castrated.

There were people from all over the world coming in and out. When they weren’t using sex as a distraction, they’d spend the rest of their time talking about their old lives, sharing stories from their homelands, reading books, and mindlessly staring out the windows to the unknown. Sometimes the space dust flecked onto the windows, and it glinted in and out focus before careening off into the endlessness. Lincoln envied it, wishing he could be swallowed into the black abyss. It went on like this for a long time.

Then one day, Lincoln, Alice, and Cyrus were all pulled from the hall after an extravagant dinner. Fear once again seeped down to the bone in every one of them. They walked down the corridors, passed by doors, glass panes with plants and animals behind them, and every once in a while they would hear a scream. Three aliens escorted the group behind each of the individuals, followed by one in the front. Eventually, the one behind Alice grabbed her by the arm and took her in a different direction.

They’d heard rumors from others that the social experiment they were placed in was a holding cell before being released back into society, and then observed from a distance to how the world would respond to their reappearance, and how they would interact with other people once back on Earth. But nobody knew for sure. And as sad as Lincoln was to watch her go, he secretly hoped she was being taken to a different operation and he was being released so he could go back home and leave the shame of his infidelity behind him. But once placed in a room with Cyrus, Alice reappeared a short time later.

“Where did you go?” Cyrus asked her.

Silence.

Something was different about her appearance. Her eyes. They seemed unlinked. She didn’t speak a word. It gave Lincoln chills. He looked away from her.

“Your assignment is to re-enter your society. Re-establish yourselves amongst your peers. Infiltrate the behaviors, we will track everything from here. If you succeed, you will stay. Fail, and we will find you.” The creature walked in behind them. The room they were in was a pod, dissecting itself from the main vessel and hurdling through space and time, back into the Milky Way, back toward Earth.

“How do we know if we failed or succeeded?” Lincoln had no intention of coming back.

“You won’t.”

A large circular door in the floor slowly opened to the ground below, about ten feet up. Alice and Cyrus were pushed out. When Lincoln went for his turn, he was held back.

“What are you doing?” Fear.

“You stay. We drop you off elsewhere.”

“What? Why?” That didn’t seem fair at all.

“You’ve been chosen for a separate assignment.”

5 Chipped

September 2027 – Arcadia, IN

            The clearing was eerily empty.

            Fiona, Will, Cyrus, and Alice pulled up to a field about two miles from where her abduction took place and started walking out in the night.

            “A little chilly for a September night,” Fiona literally had no idea what to talk about.

            Without a word Will took his light jacket off and placed it over Fiona. She smiled at him. “Are you sure you’re okay with all of this?”

            “I know you would do the same for me if there was a chance my wife was coming back.” He was right.

            It was dead silent out here. Nobody else spoke. Fiona was slightly shaking. What would she even say to him? What would his return mean for the three of them? Would she part ways with Will forever and thank him for his time? Sure, she’d do the same, but it was still heartbreaking.

            The ground began to rumble and shake. An opening in the sky shot a blindingly bright light beam to the ground in between them all. Everything went cold.

            It was then that they noticed Alice pulling Cyrus to the end of the clearing, him yelling and protesting while she laughed maniacally. The loudness in the vacuum seal within the light made it impossible to hear what they were saying as Will and Fiona began to float off the ground.

            “Wait, what’s going on?” Will was afraid.

            “This wasn’t part of the plan!” Fiona was terrified.

What Cyrus didn’t know was that Alice was given a different assignment. Lobotomized and with a microchip placed in her brain, whoever she was or used to be died before landing back on the planet. She was being driven by the White Coats, just the empty host of the person she used to be. But over time, she did begin to formulate a new personality of sorts. For the two years she had been by his side, she managed to talk him out of his assignment and join her on hers: to deliver as many people as she could to the spacecraft. He wasn’t even aware that anytime she’d disappear she was doing just this, with almost everyone they’ve met. He thought the assignment was to study the couple and get close to them, to bring them to a location where Lincoln would be released for whatever reason. Will and Fiona were a special addition she decided to tackle after spending some time hunting them down, stalking them, and now luring them directly into her trap. It was easy to trick Cyrus into a life of lying low and keeping him by her side to help her with her expeditions indirectly. He was lonely and who else do you stick by after an experience like that?

Fiona would be an asset to study. Something about her made it impossible for Lincoln to forget her, even with the pill that slowly erased most of your other life. At least, the parts that made people crazy enough to try to escape. It happened sometimes.

Cyrus made a run for it. Alice wasn’t worried about that. He’d failed his assignment; they’d pick him up soon. She wouldn’t discover until later that his body would be found in a motel room and labeled as a John Doe, deceased by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

She watched in satisfaction as the bodies of the couple floated upwards to the light in the opening of the sky. When they disappeared, she calmly walked through the field, back to her vehicle she’d used hypnosis to drive right off the lot of a dealership and headed back into town. She didn’t know how long they’d let her stay, but as far as she knew, this was her new life now, and she liked it.

6 Multiverse

September 2025 – Planet E 2.0

            The pod had been flying for a long time, and that made Lincoln nervous. How far away were they dropping him off and how would he find his way back to Indiana with no funds in his pocket? By the time it finally came to a stop, he was pushed out in an empty cornfield. He looked around confused, it looked like Indiana. Something felt different but he wasn’t sure what. He was pleased to find money in the wallet he was given before being thrown from the pod.

            “How am I even going to use this?” The cash was a blush color instead of green and he didn’t recognize the faces on most of the bills. A couple of women, some men, and was that… Rosa Parks on a thirty-dollar bill?

            He managed to hitch a ride into town. It took just two cars to find a person willing to drive him. But when he arrived, he found Indianapolis to be… different. The same buildings were there, but in different colored bricks, the same businesses were there for the most part, but different people, different products, and different logos. He saw three dogs that had two heads, and the birds had scales instead of feathers. There were a few more actual skyscrapers than he remembered as well. The cars were more box shaped, and several roads were cobblestone. Even the trees were weird, shaped like cones with a pixelated texture. He spent several days wandering around, learning how to blend in with this strange new place.

            When he felt he had the hang of it, he walked to a small book shop he knew Fiona loved, hoping… but when he arrived, it wasn’t a bookshop at all. It was an art gallery owned by none other than Fiona Shoemaker. How long had he been gone?

            He looked inside and sure enough, there she was. In all her remarkable beauty and arid poise. He checked himself in the reflection, decided that that’s as good as he’d look, saw she had no ring on her finger and she miraculously looked exactly the same except for a new nose piercing and a tattoo of a tree on her arm, and walked inside the building.

            “Hi,” he started.

            “Hello, how can I he—oh, it’s you,” she pressed her lips together with comically amused eyes as if she was suppressing embarrassment.

            “Do you recognize me?” He was… confused.

            “Yeah, we met like a few years ago. Do you not remember how that date went? You spilled wine on my dress and got so embarrassed the rest of dinner was super awkward and I never called you back.” She started laughing.

            It was at that moment that he realized. This wasn’t his Fiona. He was dropped off on the wrong planet. That’s why things were so strange and different yet familiar enough to navigate. He was in a different dimension where wherever this version of himself was, he was never abducted by aliens. He also didn’t have a relationship with Fiona. This momentarily devastated him, until he saw the opportunity in it.

            “Can I have another chance? Please,” He looked into those intoxicating light brown eyes, searching for the love they used to look at him with.

            “Okay…” She shrugged her shoulders and smirked. “One date.”

            Lincoln walked into a small thrift shop later that day looking for some cheap clothes. Oddly enough, he found a pair of khaki pants that he’d swear up and down he’d owned in the past. He selected a few items, and when he went to check out, he was greeted by a much older man that he’d know anywhere. Cyrus owned this shop. In this universe, he never went missing either. On the wall to the left, a framed photo hung with a younger Cyrus pictured with a woman and a young child. They exchanged pleasantries, and Lincoln changed in a dressing room before leaving the shop. Placing his hands in his pockets, Lincoln walked out into the sun-bathed pavement of the strange Not-Indianapolis, looked up at the sky, and smiled.

            But before he could re-establish a relationship with Fiona, he had to do something inconceivable to make sure no potential run-ins would ruin his stay here.

            He tracked him down fairly quickly and easily. It’s a funny thing how patterns can sometimes transfer between dimensions. He found himself at the same bar he and Ben frequented in his other life. Studying Lincoln 2.0 was disorderly, taking all of his time aside from when he’d spend it with Fiona forming that relationship back up. He made some decisions Lincoln couldn’t fathom, like driving drunk, doing drugs, making an ass out of himself in front of multiple women. And he wasn’t even a skydiver in this life. In fact, he watched most of his spare time be taken up by watching movies. He had no real career, no ambition, no girlfriend, and came home to a single cat and TV dinners. He wasn’t even sure why Ben was even friends with him in this life, Ben somehow still had it together, though he didn’t have children here, so he never had to hang up his rig, and he took way more risks as an adrenaline junkie. Lincoln was envious of him, but even more completely astonished that his other self would waste so much time when he could have been adventuring with Ben. What the hell happened to this Lincoln? He hated this version of himself more than any passed version of himself he’d experienced first-hand.

            He waited in the bushes one night on a route Other Lincoln frequented. It took a lot of courage to muster; this was suicide on an AP level. Rounding a corner, Other Lincoln was taken off-guard with headphones in, stabbed in the chest multiple times. Lincoln decided he wanted a quick death; he wore a ski mask to conceal his face. He didn’t want to mentally fuck up his other self just before brutally killing him, but he knew he recognized himself through the eyes when Other Lincoln stared into them incredulously and with full betrayal and confusion, there was definitely a hint of familiarity there.

“I’m so sorry. It has to be this way. This is my universe now.”

No time to think, he needed to properly dispose of the body so he could replace him without the fear of him being dug up someday and a million questions being asked of him. He dropped him off in the foundation of a construction site, and the next day watched his other self be buried in cement. So strange, while he’d mourn that death for the rest of his life, he was after all, him, it felt satisfying taking out a version of himself he didn’t find appealing in the slightest.

***

June 2026 – Planet E 2.0

            “Let’s move away from here. Let’s move somewhere warm.”

            “Where would we go?” Fiona chuckled.

            “I don’t care where we go as long as I’m with you.” Lincoln had never been more serious about anything in his life. Moondance jumped on their couch at that moment, the cat named Sunny perched on a scratching post. A different unit, in a different building, decorated the same yet different.

            “Well… I just randomly read this really cool article someone wrote on Argentina. Some lady named Alex or something? She went alone, so if it’s safe enough for that, moving there doesn’t seem too bad.” She gave him the side-eye.

            “Let’s move to Argentina.” Before she could protest the absurdity of such a drastic change, Lincoln got down on one knee and fished out the ring he had magically found in the pocket of those khakis he’d found at Cyrus’ shop earlier that year. “I love you, Fiona Shoemaker. In any place, in any lifetime. I know it seems fast, but I think we’ve known each other before. Marry me, let’s spend our lives together and move to places like Argentina.”

***

            Argentina proved to be a great idea. Ben joined them for the first couple of months of their new life and they had a blast skydiving in the warmer, subtropical climate with its lush tropics. Even Moondance and Sunny seemed to like this place. It was always fun going on outings to meet travelers.

            One night, they were adventuring around Buenos Aires when they ran into a couple of Americans that had also made the move down south just one year prior. They chatted for a while.

            “Nice to meet a couple of other ex-pats. Sorry, we haven’t even introduced ourselves. I’m Lincoln, this is my wife Fiona.” They reached out to shake pinkies. For some reason hand shakes turned into pinky shakes in this realm.

“Hi, I’m William and this is my wife Sarah. Would you guys like to grab dinner with us later?”

fin