Rachel Graham s Precious Little Life Chapter 1
- 2 years ago
- 30
- 0
Rachel Graham's Precious Little Life - Chapter 5 free porn video
I used to have normal dreams, back before all this happened.
Then I got caught up in all this quantum physics crap, and my brain ended
up getting caught in the crossfire. That wasn't supposed to happen. But
it did.
The doctors liked to co-opt terms from other fields to make it all sound
better. "Phase shifted" was an electrical term. "Quantum entanglement"
wasn't quite what this was. The rip in spacetime happened in 1981,
somewhere in Japan. After that, people anywhere had the potential to get
hit with what we call Quantum Entanglement Syndrome, or QES. It happened
because spacetime ripped open in a dozen, or a thousand, or a billion
trillion universes, so occasionally as we drift through the cosmos the
realities bump into each other at just the right angle that two people are
occupying the same space at the same time at slightly different
frequencies. 99% of cases are tiny particles, maybe a few hundred cells
that can be safely removed with no effects. The remaining 1% involve
organs, limbs, body parts, which we developed tech to replace almost
flawlessly, with one percent of one percent involving the brain. Less
than a hundred people have ever had a full-brain entanglement in the past
32 years.
I'm the fourth to survive, and the first woman.
Phazblox is a drug made out of strange matter, harvested directly from the
rip's containment center. Since it contains chemicals from all possible
universes, it calms down the effects of being entangled, which in neuro
cases present as severe headaches, and is quite painful anywhere. Since
QES treatment is based on removal of the affected tissue, long-term
effects aren't a concern, since you should be on the chopping block in a
matter of weeks. In mine, and a few dozen other people's cases, however,
that wasn't possible.
So I had dreams. Strange ones, that I have no doubt were influenced by my
hitchhiker's thoughts, conscious or not. I wondered about him. Who was
he? Was he still living his life, with the same headaches as I have? Or
was he entirely within my head now? There was only one way to find out.
I forced myself through the rest of the week. Counting down the days
until Sulyn would come to visit, making arrangements to have a light
schedule the two weeks she'd be in LA, and half-assing two auditions for
parts I didn't care about. I almost missed Dmitri's concert, but luckily
I managed to get dragged to that and fake support for him. They were
terrible.
Then, the week was over. Phazblox lasts exactly one week. After that, my
brain was shifted through multiple realities, and connected to subspace.
I opened my eyes, and there was a door. I stepped toward it, opened it,
and fell back into myself. This time, though, I was ready. I'd brought a
snack, my phone, and had done everything I could to mentally prepare
myself to have to relive my memories all over again.
Except that didn't happen. I landed in what looked like an average
suburban home. Tri-level, hardwood floors. Fancy. Nothing familiar to
me. Quiet suburb neighborhood outside, no cars on the street. The house
itself was empty, though. No furniture, no appliances or food in the
kitchen, just empty, like it had just been moved out of...except it wasn't
empty. I headed upstairs, and sure enough, my hitchhiker, sitting in the
corner, sobbing until he either heard or saw me standing there.
"You...what are you doing here? What's going on?"...we were in for a long
palaver.
I sat on the floor, facing him. "Let's start over, cause last time
freaked me the hell out." He nodded weakly. "I'm Rachel. Rachel G--"
He cut me off "Rachel Graham. 19. Born and raised in Ohio, moved to LA
to pursue acting. World-class violinist who gave up on a full-ride
scholarship. Gold-star lesbian who's currently in a long-distance
relationship...am I close?"
"Frighteningly. How the hell do you know all that?" I dug in my pockets
and pulled out my snack, a pack of cheesey crackers. I didn't open them,
though.
"Because I made you up. I created you as a character in my head."
"I see. And when did you create me, Mister..." I asked, hoping he'd
volunteer his name.
"Stills. Steve Stills." He did.
"Like the singer?" He nodded.
"About two or three years ago. I based you on my brother's girlfriend at
the time. She was nothing like you, other than you're identical in
appearance."
"I see. And the fact that I've lived my life, all 19 years of it, means
precisely...?"
"I have no idea. I don't know what's happening. Where the hell am I?"
"From my perspective, you're inside my head. I took a subspace door,
which I'm guessing you don't know anything about, and landed in your
hallway. Is this your house?"
"It's...it's my parent's house. I don't know how I ended up here, one
second I'm at work and everyone's missing, the next minute you're there,
and then right after you disappeared I ended up here, and I can't leave.
I've tried, all the doors are sealed shut."
"That makes sense. This place is just a construct we're making together.
Last time I had to wander through my high school to get to your office,
I'm guessing."
"So what does all that mean?"
"It means, that you're probably dead, at least in your reality. This
isn't something anyone really has a lot of data on. But if you're only
existing in the construct, then that means you probably stopped existing
on your world."
He started crying. I hate when men cry, you never know whether to console
them or back off. I just sat there. I was never good at consolation
anyway. "So if I'm dead, and I'm in your head, what does all that mean?
I don't get it." he said through his sobs.
"It means...jeez...it means your brain and mine occupy the same physical
space, and I have to take drugs to keep the vibrations from giving me an
aneurysm. The rest is just speculation, but if you're saying you dreamed
me up...that's what isn't making sense."
"Why? Isn't it obvious? This is hell. This is my punishment for
everything I did, to be tormented by the one who I used to torment so many
other people."
"This isn't hell. What are you talking about?"
"I used you, the character you I mean, to do terrible things." He told me
about everything he'd done, all the hearts he'd broken, all the pain he'd
felt. I felt violated at the end of his tale.
I had a feeling it'd be something like that. He had that creepy look on
his face. "That explains why you think this is hell. But really, there's
another question at hand: You don't know anything about subspace, or this
spacetime rip, do you?"
He shook his head. "No, I mean we talk about stuff like that in science
fiction, but you talk about it like it's a part of daily life."
"I guess I'm living in a science fiction world then, to you." I secretly
wondered what his world was like, if there was no subspace or QES or
anything of the sort.
"Pretty much, yeah. But seriously, can you help me out here?"
That was rich. "You just admitted you did terrible things with me, and
you want me to help? If it made a lick of sense, I'd kill you, but we've
got to get to the bottom of this. And killing you wouldn't help me a bit.
I'm not going to help you, but I guess you're going to help me, and help
yourself in the process."
"What do you mean, help you? What can I do? I'm just stuck here, in your
head apparently."
"Right, and you give me some violent headaches. I have to shoot up an
experimental drug cocktail every week to shut you up. So the way I
understand it, if we can't come to an agreement, I'm going to be dosing
myself into an early grave. And if we do come to an agreement, I'm
negotiating with a monster."
I opened the crackers and started eating. We were both quiet for a long
time. Finally he spoke up.
"What kind of agreement? How do we do, whatever it is we need to do?"
"That, I don't know. It likely will involve doing something weird here in
subspace, but for now, we've made contact, and while I don't think I could
stand you as a person, I think we're at least on somewhat amicable terms.
I suppose that's all we can expect."
He nodded. "Listen, for what it's worth, I'm sorry. I always knew what I
was doing was wrong, I just couldn't help myself."
"I know. That doesn't make it okay. You wrecked some perfectly good
girl's lives for your own benefit. What's sick is I remember all of this,
except for having to actually break up with someone instead of just not
logging into your fake email account for a few weeks."
We talked for another hour or so. His story lined up almost perfectly
with my life's history, and he'd really done his research, it seemed. He
knew enough music theory and musician lingo to keep up with and fake a
conversation, apparently. It was odd talking to someone who knew me so
well, but who was a total stranger to me.
After we got done, I stood up and pulled my phone out. "For documentation"
I said, taking pictures of him and the house, and writing down the
information about himself that he gave me. Finally, I approached the
front door of the house, which was my ticket out of there. I turned the
knob, walked into the darkness, and flopped on my bed in my apartment.
He was from Kentucky. It looked like, if I was going to find any answers,
I was going to be looking in the Bluegrass state. My head was hurting,
but surprisingly not as much as it had been. I loaded the pictures from
my phone onto my computer and checked them out. I wasn't a very good
photographer, but they'd turned out all right. I was worried that
subspace would interfere with them, but it seemed fine.
I looked at the shots I'd taken of the neighborhood through the living
room window. A street full of empty houses with no cars, of course. But
there was something...
I would check it later. I needed to take my medicine, and that new
formula was going to knock me out for a couple hours. I looked at the
clock: 7:30 AM. I was going to be late for work, that was for sure.
As I connected the tube of the syringe to the port in the back of my neck,
I wondered if I would dream. I depressed the plunger and barely had time
to disconnect the syringe and steady myself before I collapsed onto the
couch in a heap.
Turns out, I did dream. I dreamed that I was a puppet on strings, like
Pinnochio. I dreamed that for everything I did, I was not only being
jerked around, but someone was watching me, writing down everything I did.
I couldn't see who was pulling the strings, or the writer, but I knew who
they both were: Steven Stills.
I woke up. 9:40 AM. I texted David at work to apologize and let him know
I would be in by 10:30, a half-hour past when I was supposed to start. I
hopped in the shower and stayed in there a long time.
I felt dirty, inside and out. This guy knew...things about me. He'd
rattled off every single one of my insecurities, things I'd never told
anyone. He knew my secrets. He knew what I knew, almost down to a T.
Sure, there was some discrepancy, but he hadn't "created" me in a world
with a hole in spacetime, with a rampant ailment that had no rhyme,
reason, or treatment.
I scrubbed and I scrubbed, but I couldn't feel clean. I felt like I was
being watched, all the time now. I didn't have a safe place anymore.
He'd even described the layout of my apartment, the sheets I had on my
bed, and where I kept things in the cabinets. My own home was like a
custom-designed prison cell, or zoo cage.
I turned off the water once it ran cold, and stood there for another
minute or two before I grabbed my towel and dried off. I kept it wrapped
around me as I dug through my clothes pile. I used to be comfortable
prancing around the apartment stark naked, but I worried those days were
long-gone. I needed an appointment with my therapist, and maybe with a
regular one, to help me figure all this out.
As I finished getting dressed, I glanced at my computer again. I still
had the neighborhood picture pulled up, but whatever it had been before
caught my eye this time. There was a motion blur. Outside. Something
moving, something dark. I left the apartment, and was halfway to work
when I realized what it was. It was something tall and bipedal. It was a
person. It was someone else.
Jo
- 13.02.2022
- 22
- 0
Rachel Graham s Precious Little Life Prologue
- 4 years ago
- 40
- 0
Rachel Graham s Precious Little Life Chapter 7
- 4 years ago
- 33
- 0
