The Stephanie Glitch - Part 4
Two universes start to echo each other.
Due to the article length limits on Substack I’m having to cut in awkward places. I will work around this by posting Stephanie more often. I’ll be querying her in January 2023.
Below are two little polls, just to see how well this whole thing is working. The goal is always to make it more entertaining and more accessible.
THE STEPHANIE GLITCH
PART 4
“Stand awkwardly beside the dancing people?” Emma smiled convincingly, raising her eyebrows. She continued raising her eyebrows a few more times, as if the decision to stand near dancing people was the best decision that had ever been made. Before Stephanie could reply Emma was stood up, waving her hands at Stephanie’s bag and notebook, making her pack it away.
“You could always take a year out, come to my uni for a week, see how you feel,” Stephanie raised her voice over the music.
“Sleep on your floor, sample the nightlife?” Emma asked.
“Yeah.” Stephanie stood up.
As they pushed through one crowd to another crowd that was ordering drinks, Stephanie caught sight of another skeleton glass filled with light greenish liquid, perhaps a cocktail. The skeleton on this one was a brilliant white, and for a moment Stephanie had an idea about a skeleton floating in a glass tube somewhere. The image lingered in her mind as they approached the dance floor, giving her an idea for a story.
“You good?” Emma said. Stephanie re-entered reality. She looked up at the flashing red and blue lights, breathed in a puff of fake smoke, and prepared to embarrass herself by either dancing or not dancing.
“Yeah, just a bit hungry.”
“As soon as I ask you to dance you want to leave?”
“I want to eat,” Stephanie said.
“Right now?” Emma began dancing, weaving through the crowd backwards with a lazy rhythm that did not match the music at all. They weren’t at the dance floor yet.
“You’re dancing.” Stephanie was not pleased.
“No I’m not.”
“You definitely are. Your feet are moving.”
“I am walking rhythmically,” Emma protested.
“That’s dancing.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Maybe after this song,” Stephanie said, “Celebratory kebab.”
“Is that another of Jay’s band names?” Emma yelled through the crowd.
“No, just a suggestion.”
“It’s a good suggestion,” Emma said. She reached out for Stephanie’s hand as she crossed the threshold between regular floor and disco floor. Stephanie laughed at the face she was pulling, and quickly disposed of her drink. The disco floor felt out of place, so Stephanie didn’t much mind standing on it, knowing nobody would be interested in looking that way anyway. From here she could see that the mass of people was really a clustering of much smaller groups, each preoccupied with their own conversations and awkwardness. Strangely, on this lit-up floor, Stephanie felt pleasantly invisible.
After a while Emma finally began dancing in time with the music, watching as Stephanie awkwardly tried to keep up. At this moment a trio of tall goths crossed paths with them, apologising about being in the way before recognising Emma.
After brief, incoherent introductions had been yelled over some obscure 80s dark wave song, the truly awkward dancing began. Emma was spinning and moving her arms about in slow motion to some chorus about being buried alive, Stephanie was swaying from side to side just appreciating the music, and the three tall goths whose names would be forgotten by the end of the night were jumping up and down beside them. One of them was the happiest goth Stephanie had ever seen. In fact he was so happy that he made Emma look bored by comparison. Stephanie noticed Emma smiling, as if she had won in her efforts to get her onto the dancefloor, when they both knew she would rather be hidden away in a corner.
“Am I embarrassing you?” Emma teased. She started headbanging out of tune, throwing her lion’s mane of ginger hair back and forth. Stephanie didn’t respond. Instead she turned to the tallest of the goths and tapped them on the shoulder.
“Hey. Can you pretend I just said something really funny?”
The man laughed loudly. Emma looked to him and back at Stephanie, yelling, “Hey, what did you tell him?”
“Oh, nothing,” Stephanie grinned.
“That’s not fair,” Emma replied. She reached out and grabbed Stephanie, pulling her further into the dancefloor and spinning her around.
“Tell me what you told him, or I’m going to make you do a silly little dance.”
“No,” Stephanie said. Emma grabbed Stephanie’s wrists and began moving her around like a puppet, speaking into her ear.
“Tell me.”
“I told him that you think baked beans are just tiny potatoes.”
“What?” Emma yelled. The music was too loud.
“I told him you think baked beans are tiny potatoes.”
“You didn’t.” Emma was horrified.
“No, I just asked him to laugh.”
“You total shit!” Emma said. She found a circle of older women and inserted Stephanie into the group, disconnecting with her and watching as they started spinning around. After a minute or two of awkward drunken dance battles in the centre, Stephanie re-emerged with messier hair and murder in her eyes.
“I am going to kill you.”
“Kebab first,” Emma reminded her. She started weaving back and forth between more dancing groups, but Stephanie now had food on her mind. She grabbed Emma by one finger and dragged her away from the dance floor, even as she was still dancing and saying hello to people.
“I think I got invited to a wedding,” Stephanie said as they reached the front door.
“By the circle women?”
“Yeah.” They exited the bar. Stephanie winced as brutal hailstones pelted down from the black and orange sky, clattering against parked cars and bus stops. It felt as if the clouds were closer and angrier than usual, as if the outside world was demanding she go back inside. There was something ancient and threatening about the weather, but the thought of hot food kept her going. She walked ahead of Emma, stepping carefully out into the street and walking toward the roundabout that would lead them to the kebab shop.
“It’s freezing,” Emma said, as if Stephanie wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
“Kebab,” was the only response.
CHAPTER THREE
Fight baddies, save multiverse
The Artifice fell like a blood drop through a vortex of rock and dust. Behind it countless interstellar objects clattered and converged upon the space it left behind, spinning into a makeshift shell that the Virtualist cruisers could barely penetrate.
“We knocked two down,” Toumai said emotionlessly.
“Be more excited,” LP said. “That’s two less for me to deal with when this plan stops working.” She looked to the diagnostic screen. Upon it was a digital reconstruction of events behind the ship, objects mapped and rendered in real time. She pulled the ghostly image loose from the screen, clicking it into her own holograph display, and watched as the Virtualist cruisers slipped between larger rocks but got hit by smaller fragments.
Behind the lumbering form of the Artifice, the jagged shapes of Virtualist cruisers zipped between and around the rocks, following the invisible path carved by the gravity bursts. LP knew it was only a matter of time before one of them got through, and then a matter of hours or days before they caught up to the ship.
“Talk to me,” LP said. “What’s the backstory?”
“Surely we should be discussing strategy,” Toumai said.
“We are. Once we know more about each other we’ll find more common ground.” She glanced at the image and saw another Virtualist cruiser battered by a storm of cosmic debris.
“I am a starship intelligence, and you are a human from a higher reality. We do not have much in common,” Toumai said coldly. LP laughed and leaned on the edge of a console, loosening the straps on the wrists of her spacesuit so the metal panels came loose.
“Where I’m from the computers aren’t very funny. I like you. That was funny.”
“It was not meant to be,” Toumai said.
“I know, and to be honest, that helped it,” LP said. She stretched and cracked her joints, the noise filling up her spacesuit. It was as if she hadn’t moved in centuries, as if she had only recently been thawed from deep sleep. She twisted and cracked again and said, “New body, a bit stiff.”
Toumai’s social programming saw an opportunity for humour, an old joke from Elspeth, repackaged and delivered to a new audience.
“I know the feeling,” he replied, “This particular shell needs oil.” He whirred and moved his eyestalk, flexing a joint that creaked as it moved, echoing the movements of the crew member some months earlier. LP smirked and exhaled through her nose.
“See. Robots here are funny. I’ll miss that when reality collapses.”
“Elaborate,” Toumai said.
“You know… because reality is ending. We have that in common. That and her,” LP said. She pointed to an empty space in the room, pretending to be pointing at Stephanie.
“She is not invisible,” Toumai said.
“I know that. You said she doesn’t have a body yet, I’m pointing – literally – toward that fact. It needs to be resolved. Also, it feels wrong to point at her skeleton. It’s morbid. I know you could speed up the process by the way. Those printer bugs are basically idle. You should do that. Hurry up.”
“She is not ready,” Toumai said assertively.
“Well neither was I and I turned out fine, only died four times, or was it five?”
Toumai ignored this, choosing instead to focus on the issue at hand.
“From the messages we have gathered, Stephanie’s psychological profile indicates such a traumatic change in circumstance may lead to psychosis.”
LP shook her head at this, removing the wrists of her spacesuit.
“I didn’t have time to wait and I’m pretty well-adjusted. No underlying health problems, definitely no lingering psychological issues.”
“You are right. We should know more about each other,” Toumai admitted. LP sighed in relief and slumped to the floor, clanking a part of her spacesuit on her way down.
“I never thought you’d ask,” she said, ignorant to the imminent danger. She reached up to the loose hologram of the debris field behind the Artifice and pushed it back toward its screen, watching it fade and bleed away before reconnecting with its host.
Stephanie’s first life is going quite well at the moment. It would be a shame if these two universes were to catastrophically collide.