Full Spectrum

My 5000-word story for THE MIDNIGHT VAULT.

I’m going weird again.

This is my 5000-word story for THE MIDNIGHT VAULT.

Well, it’s the first few lines, as the story was accepted!

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Full Spectrum

By Phillip Carter

Full Spectrum
By: Phillip Carter

Consider Janet Sheahan, age twenty-seven. It is Janet’s first day in a supposedly new job, where government secrets are ferried like pirated treasure in trolleys like minecarts through the various caves and caverns of an ever-expanding office building affixed to an increasingly secretive base on the outskirts of an unremarkable, and by all accounts forgettable town. Janet wears bright shirts and loud blazers, but exhibits an almost allergic reaction to bright lamps and noisy coworkers. She is forever insulated from this realm of repetitive overstimulation by her red tinted glasses and her noise cancelling headphones, which allow her to trim some of the sensory fat from reality – that irksome stuff which most people’s brains long ago learned to tune out. Janet’s brain is different; it doesn’t filter much at all, and from the resulting galaxy of sensory input Janet’s brain ekes meaning. From those messy constellations of sensory coordinates, her brain discovers patterns. But are patterns alone enough to bestow upon one person extraordinary senses, extraordinary luck, or is something else at play? For Janet’s sensory reality, her private microcosm, is so different to our own that it could be said to have entirely different physics.

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Cheap desk dividers rattled as another day’s secrets were shunted from department to department, the intellectual treasure of a government that had long since forgotten the value of intellectualism. Janet wished to be back in the stairwell, where the sound was good and the light was good and the smells were even tolerable, if the guy from IT who smoked only expensive cigars and wore nice aftershave had brushed past. The décor was good too, 1970s stuff, warm wooden tones and grey concrete window frames that absorbed light like pumice. Back in the office, things were nightmarishly neon, noisy, and smelly.

From where Janet was sitting, she could not see much of the large, slightly tinted windows which bracketed this floor. She was a nucleus in a three-sided cell of cheap felt and thin metal. Or maybe the mitochondria… she thought to herself. But, at least this place let you dress how you wanted, as long as it was smart-casual, whatever that meant. For this first day, Janet wore a red-orange blazer with a dark green floral shirt. Hints of hot pink flickered out in flower petals and exotic birds, perhaps fictional. She flinched as someone across the office made a crash in the canteen, and turned up the music she was secretly playing in her headphones.

END (for now)

This story was accepted into THE MIDNIGHT VAULT II, so to read the rest of it you'll need to read that book! Thank you for stopping by.

Cover Reveal and Story List: The Midnight Vault II

You can alternatively hop over this paywall to read the original version of the story, if you're a paid subscriber to realphillipcarter. But I still recommend you get THE MIDNIGHT VAULT II, because there are 21 other great stories in it, too.