THE STEPHANIE GLITCH - part 5
The hangover (includes brilliant video about simulation theory at the end)
Another part to my serialised novel THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, in which a teenage psychic discovers her universe is falling apart, but that another, safer universe isn’t very far away. Features interdimensional travel, reincarnation, superintelligent AI, and one dead alien near the end of the book who you may recognise. Was that a spoiler? Maybe.
Recommended listening (for this scene, a bit of Pulp fits perfectly).
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THE STEPHANIE GLITCH - part 5
Stephanie stirred in her sleep. She was not herself. She was younger and smaller, helpless, held dangerously close to a rectangular hole in the universe. The hole was balanced on a string. It was a spinning hole. A cube. A sphere. It changed whenever it was observed. It wanted to be unknown.
Everything around her was bright, too bright, but the hole was blacker than black. It went on forever and she knew it well. It returned to its true shape and intention under the pressure of her consciousness. It was her uncle’s coffin.
Her mother held Stephanie’s tiny body above the void. She heard her father’s voice mumble something, but it was too late. She was falling. She felt her little legs and arms flailing, but it was useless. She slipped into the void beyond the coffin and into a black abyss that ate all light and sound and smell. She looked up as she was falling, seeing a rectangle of light shrinking above, her vanishing doorway to safety. Suddenly it was over, but she was back in the church again, this time watching things from above the rafters. She could see the back of her own head. The void-drop had not happened yet. The story was repeating, the record skipping. The Stephanie ahead of her was a child.
“She’ll be fine,” Stephanie’s mother said, lifting her little body from the pews. Above them a brutal laser show of kaleidoscope light blasted through stained glass, turning the oppressive dust of the place into a nebula of overwhelming colours.
“She doesn’t need to go,” Stephanie’s father interrupted, but it was too late. Little Stephanie was already being marched toward an open coffin. The older, floating Stephanie clenched her right hand, remembering the fragment of stone pillar she had once gripped for comfort all those years ago. She remembered wishing to be with the other children again, who moments before were too noisy and talkative and frightening.
“Meredith. I don’t see the point,” Stephanie’s father said, his dress shoes clack-clacking on the stony floor. Stephanie’s presence remembered a blue wave of scratching light.
“She deserves to see him. It’s her right. She has a right to see him,” Stephanie’s mother announced. She approached the coffin, holding little Stephanie aloft and terrified. Uncle Andrew was in there, displayed like one of the big dolls in the toy shop. Before Stephanie could get a good look, he faded away, and a black hole opened up in the rippled white silk at the back of the coffin. A whirling white-silver fabric slipped away into a colourless void below. Little Stephanie called out into it and watched as a candle slipped and fell inward, drifting and shrinking as it fell through the endless black.
Her mother dropped her in. Older Stephanie, bound to her younger self by an invisible chain, was dragged down too. She fell through the rafters like a ghost, trailed behind her younger self, watching in third person as her younger body vanished into the void that would always be hungry, that would always want her to fall in. The void that had followed her forever.
“Agh! Agh!” Stephanie yelled out loud, her voice escaping her nightmare and bouncing around her room. Back in the nightmare, her parent’s confused faces were a shrinking blot of colour against a velvet black universe. There were no stars in the void inside the coffin. No movements. No pockets of warmth or breeze or any of the usual things human bodies would process subconsciously. The utter absence of these sensations was blinding. Little Stephanie panicked as she tumbled further, as she lost all awareness of up and down, left and right. She kept falling until falling no longer felt like falling, until falling was something meaningless and obscure and distant. Her mind, devoid of stimulus, started making things up. She saw biting teeth and staring eyes flying past as she fell endlessly. Fragments of buildings and rocket ships and coffins rushed past. Stars appeared and exploded. Galaxies spun into each other, and vast tendrils of light grew like cracks across the whole black canvas, reminding Stephanie of flaking paint on ancient pictures. There were things writhing under the paint. Stephanie turned as she fell, slipping into one of these cracks and yelling something incomprehensible. She fell through images of metal corridors and nebulae, each collapsing into the next, each spiralling and splitting like cuboid cells into blues and chromes and pinks. Everything smelled cold and metallic, her skin was itching.
Finally, she fell into nothing. The void became Stephanie. The nightmare would go on forever.
Until her foot hit something solid. Pain rung out through her veins and time changed. She was back in the rafters above her younger self. This time there was hope, but she slipped and fell through the nebulae of coloured dust, spiralling through the beams of stained-glass light towards the coffin. Her sprawling teenage arms allowed her to reach the sides this time, to hold on for her life against the suction of the void below the coffin. But it was not enough. Stephanie tore the silk lining down with her, scrambling for a grip on something attached to the outside world. She banged the back of her head on the edge of the coffin as it ate her, as she was pulled further and further down towards death.
“Fuck!” she yelled. A cold sweat bathed her body in a primal, frigid haze.
“Fuck!” she thrashed about in bed. She wouldn’t die this easily.
“Fuck,” she murmured hopelessly. Her eyes were open. The black void was leaving, the nightmare bleeding away, spiralling like a whirlpool. Stephanie woke up, shaking off the sounds and smells of the dream. It was over. She mumbled and stirred and swore once again for good measure, sitting up groggily. She could smell eggs and toast. Mum never made eggs and dad always burned them. This was granddad’s house. Peace.
She could still taste last night’s alcohol on her tongue. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyelids weighed down by the centuries of music she had danced through in her big boots. She felt a rising pain in her leg. Her foot was dangling over the side of the bed. She had kicked the bedside cabinet hard in her sleep, knocking it into a weird angle. Her heart was racing, her face cold and itchy, her body covered in cold sweat. She turned. The pillow smelled of kebab and wet hair. A bit of garlic mayonnaise waited for her on the other side as she turned again. An image of a dead man flashed before her eyes. Then reality crept back in. She had never been dropped in the coffin; she had turned away from seeing her uncle at the last second. She had never seen him at all. But she had cried, and her overactive imagination had plugged in whatever horror images it could conjure to fill the gap. She kept crying, and her grandfather had rescued her from the funeral, taking her to the beach to skip stones and explore on that horrid day so many years ago. He turned it into an adventure. He made it safe.
Truly, Stephanie had no idea why the memory stressed her so much. Perhaps it was simply because this was her first encounter with death. But that didn’t feel like a good enough explanation. The void beneath the coffin felt real, like a nightmare given shape in the waking world. Nobody else saw it, but Stephanie had repeated the nightmare so many times now that the void felt like a memory.
She twisted her way out of bed and thought about the night before. She smiled at the thought of Emma’s pita hat and the 80s playlist that had taken over the dance floor. She remembered the skeleton on the glass. She reached for her notebook and drew it hastily, before writing something down.
Skeleton in tube
brain in jar?
Floating here, aimless
With old momentum
She smiled. She added a little retro rocket ship with an alien in the circular window. She had swerved staying at her mother’s or father’s again by highlighting her grandfather’s proximity to the best bus route. She had spun comfort into efficiency. It was an old and tired excuse. The best kind of excuse. It was woven into the tapestry of her language now, and had become true through simple repetition, aided perhaps by the fact that it was actually true to begin with, some years ago. The part which was a lie was that Stephanie secretly enjoyed the longer bus journeys more than the convenience of staying with her mum. But she couldn’t give this excuse to just her mum, so she had to sacrifice some time with her dad to avoid hurting her mother’s feelings. As she thought about it in detail like the riddle it was, she realised she might be inadvertently hurting her father’s feelings too, but then remembered his knowing glances and nods whenever the excuse was used. Whether spoken or not, he was in on it. She sleepily checked her phone to check in on him, and to make sure Emma was still alive.
DAD:
D: “Hungover?”
S: “No. Didn’t stay out long.”
This was a lie. Stephanie pushed a greasy patch of garlic sauce off the screen.
D: “Can pick U up after college, say hi to Granddad for me”
S: “Okay, will let you know.”
EMMA:
E: “Kebab tonight? Jk. I think I might be dead”
S: “Still got some left.”
E: “Gross”
Stephanie smiled. Her dad didn’t seem to mind, and Emma wasn’t dead. No texts from mum though. She was probably at one of countless social groups, in which numerous old ladies would throw insults -and sometimes little pots of jam- at each other. Stephanie leaned forward and found some socks on the floor, sleepily putting them on and looking at the half-closed blinds. She began to forget the nightmare. She checked her phone again for no real reason, brushed her teeth in the little bathroom, and stared at herself in the mirror.
The person staring back was unfamiliar. Stephanie couldn’t quite pin it down, but something in her own face felt alien. She yawned and closed her eyes. An image of a night sky flashed through her consciousness, along with a feeling of intense coldness and isolation. She felt alone all of a sudden, lonely, but that wasn’t it. She didn’t feel alone, but as if she was being watched by something too distant to communicate with. This paranoia drove her prematurely downstairs, where she could barely disguise that she was still a bit drunk from the night before.
“Morning Granddad,” she said. Briefly she caught a flash of her mother’s face, along with a sharp pang of guilt for not visiting for a while. Then she realised she wouldn’t be allowed to wear the clothes she had on at her mother’s anyway. They were too dark, or too moody, or aggressive, or ‘satanistic’ or some other term her mother had picked up in church.
“No beans today, it’s early, I know what you’re like,” Granddad said. Stephanie hummed in agreement, then checked her phone again.
“Not good with the morning beans,” she confirmed. The thought of writing this down as a potential band name for Jay crossed her mind, but she let it go.
“Are you staying long?” granddad asked.
“Not really, sorry, I don’t have much time,” she said.
“You in at nine?”
“Ten.”
“That’s not too bad, but I would have woken you up if I knew.”
“No, it’s okay, I forgot to set an alarm,” Stephanie said. She sat at the little table in the kitchen. She had her food and talked briefly of exams and student loans and how the last few weeks had flown by so fast she wasn’t even sure if they happened, and how Emma had reconsidered uni then reconsidered her reconsideration. Granddad nodded through the blurred mess of it all, and even if he couldn’t quite keep up with her ridiculous pace, Stephanie was just happy to have someone who tried, and who pretended to not notice she was still sobering up.
“I can do my own breakfast next time, it’s okay,” she said.
“Dislike the eggs?”
“No, it’s not that. I just feel bad.”
“I have paracetamol.”
“I mean guilt. I feel guilty.”
“Oh, well you shouldn’t Stephanie. I was making eggs anyway. You need your rest after all that studying,” Granddad said. Stephanie briefly thought she had gotten away with stumbling in at three in the morning, but Granddad winked at her.
“Were you with Emma?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Is that her boot at the bottom of the stairs? I couldn’t find the other one. I checked the front garden.”
“Oh no, sorry Granddad. It’s mine. Thanks.”
End (for now)
And here’s the simulation theory video. Anton Petrov is one of my top 5 science communicators. He’s brilliant