3.

By now you know the basics; anything physical has a worldline and, because the worldlines are consciousness, each is a story that can be read from the Land of the Dead. You also now know that, even when living, I knew Alphonso Despardario. To my sister, and in his first meeting with me, he showed only one version of himself, the wise sage. But as our association continued, his and mine, he showed another version of himself, the savvy businessman. I seek the answer to a question I was never able to find in life, who is Alphonso really? But in the meantime I have made a important discovery, a second worldline joined to his, as if there are two twins who travel together. Although it is true that, once established, a worldline will travel along with other worldliness, sharing particles, these two worldliness have been artificially bound together by a third, one that takes a strange shape, that of a weaving of dead worldliness, ridden by a consciousness that was never alive. Although nonphysical entities undeniably exist, they generally can’t be perceived with physical senses unless they join a worldline. It is tempting to believe that this hasn’t happened much, but it actually has a long and unfortunate history. It constitutes another force that is emerging and will force the destiny of this story.

Alphonso’s Worldline—September 1, 2020

When Alphonso was child in the hood, his four older siblings brought the chaos, coming home when they got pregnant, gave birth, or were using. But through it all, Alphonso fed and bathed the younger ones and put food in the cupboard running numbers for a local bookie. Despite all this, he managed to excel at high school. He never tried to be a superstar, yet won an “A” average, even with sporadic attendance. Classes were like relatives once removed; you tried your best to keep them in mind and sometimes enjoyed their company, but those closer dominated.

Then in his junior year, he took his first physics class. Mr. Fizz-Ick, as they called their teacher, was a crazed performer, popping around the front of the classroom sucking eggs into bottles, bending light, creating magnetism in a simple nail, and making his hair stand on end. He changed Alphonso’s life by seeing that this Desperdario was nothing like his older brothers and cousins. This kid intuited what the next question should be. When Mr. Fizz-Ick argued that advanced mathematics would only make the answers more fun, Alphonso discovered and excelled at calculus and trigonometry.

For his class project, Alphonso wowed Fizz-Ick by finding a new way to laser ceramic surfaces so that a vessel would hold the heat of the substance inside it for days. He was admitted early to Cal State and didn’t hesitate to stuff his backpack with some clothes and the ritual knife of his father’s, the Lakota blade Alphonso had rescued before a sibling could pawn it. He checked for the hundredth time to read the note jammed inside the quilled and beaded sheath, “Inyan opened his veins to make Maka, the world. In this way, he saved the world” His mother would only say about Alphonso’s father, just one of the family’s baby-fathers, “Fue loco.” As a child, Alphonso knew that, if his father was crazy, he wanted to be crazy too.

Carrying his few things, he found his mother at the motel where she cleaned rooms, and, in a far briefer exchange than he expected, they said goodbye.

Alphonso invented himself again in college, mingling with other students as if he were a regular undergrad, although he made no friends. He wrote up his ceramic process for Physical Sciences Letters and survived on royalties from the patent he sold to Rubbermaid. However, within the month, the house he bought his mother with his initial payout, a large suburban split level, burned to the ground. No one was killed but, in his mind, he let his mother and siblings go, the euphoria chasers, the baby makers without love. He also abandoned romance, although beauty stirred him, but it was just triggers built into the bone.

He buried himself in lab spaces of higher learning. Although not the white-tiled, sparkling clean, and meticulously ordered realm he had expected, college helped erased the grime of his childhood. Within the tumult of the Physics Department, confusing warrens jammed with computers, precarious pillars of paper, and machines with countless knobs and endless cables, he would find himself anew.

But not immediately. Dismayed by the sheer number of clever and purposeful people—professors, technicians, and other star students—he felt disoriented until he narrowed his attention to the task, the project, the question. And because he could see a complicated event and its outcome as if from multiple surveillance cameras, he was shown respect, although never camaraderie.

He was gangly and his language was straight from the hood. He shocked his fellow students by admitting he’d never been carefully groomed by a family sacrificing for the right pre- and prep-schools, robotics camps, and science fairs.

He once overheard two classmates assessing him as they tried to solve a glitch in an experimental apparatus that they had boiled down to a mathematical calibration issue.

“Ask Despardario.”

“Spare me another fourteen gedanken experiments.”

“I’m always afraid his pants are going to fall down.”

Alphonso was aware that, like his English, his dress identified him as an outsider. But he resisted change on emotional grounds. His brother had died wearing symbols of other heroes who had gotten over, legit: the heavy gold chain and the sports jerseys with vintage Timberwolves creep-show lettering or Bullets hands-up logo. But his bro had not gotten over, not been legit, and got shot down during an encroachment of the Sinaloa cartel into Crips territory. Looking at the chain to see if the linked interstices were still dulled by his brother’s blood rust, Alphonso hoped it would never flake away.

He fantasized about torturing his brother’s killers, yet could be moved to tears by songs extolling life in the gangs, Cypress Hill and Asesino de Asesinos, people who were warm, funny, and loyal to the small group. Not like these gringos, whose allegiance seemed mostly driven by getting ahead. Anyone could be cut, if an obstacle, or ignored, if unneeded.

Shell Silverfeet was the other fish-out-of-water in his program. He and Alphonso and a couple of other students specializing in theoretical physics, seven of them, had cubicles together in a bullpen. Like Alphonso, Shell had come east to MIT. In Shell’s case, he had come from the Rosebud Res in South Dakota.

Shell operated on “Indian time,” keeping deadlines only loosely. This angered Shell’s advisor, Dick Sand, who reprimanded Shell severely. Right after, Shell went to his cubicle, where, with a neutral face and in a voice that gave each word the same emphasis, he announced that he was leaving the program, his choice.

There was silence all around and Alphonso said in his mind, “Don’t give them nothing!”

Then Shell nailed it on the head. “I’ll say one thing, you white people really know how to get shit done.” When Shell’s eyes met Alphonso’s, they said, “Good luck with that.”

But Alphonso didn’t need luck. Instead, he longed for one other person to know the real him, such as it remained. He waited for a double to mirror him, but someone who had already arrived, already had it all. He didn’t think “to save me,” but he believed a beacon would call him forward, that one woman would intensify his wishes until he understood them better himself.

#

Alphonso’s cubicle at MIT was both plain and a miracle; here he would hatch his dreams. He barely noticed that his graduate classes were harder, since he was free to plan unorthodox, impractical projects. Even more unbelievably, into his lonely advancement came a woman.

Beddelia Sweeney was a force of nature; like combustion, she inflamed him. Yet she was also a distillation, a gentle rain of pure dew from above. Alphonso’s life was clarified by Beddy.

An Irish exchange student from Dublin, her brogue was nearly unintelligible to him, but he clearly read her wildness. She made him feel like el jaguar, like he might try to devour her, but she’d remain unharmed. Even when he groped her clumsily, she would laugh as if the air joyed to be released from her body. “Your energy,” she would mouth, on his mouth, as he read her braille with his lips. Energy!

Beddy’s study at MIT was neuroscience. “Psychology,” she clarified. Maybe this was why Alphonso told her things that he hid from others—that his mother was a Mexican illegal, that she’d never married his American father, a real American, a genuine Lakota Sioux. To Beddy he could say that his father had left them, left his mother to fend with the help of other men, who left her with other babies. He told her he was going to find his father in the only town his mom said that his dad talked about, Belle Fourche, South Dakota. Alphonso planned to go just as soon as he graduated; he would go as Dr. Desperdario.

Beddy listened to Alphonso with serenity, animal, but also also nurturing. She showed him a mercy that humbled him; his loneliness transformed to something he merely knew, rather than felt. They would meet to satisfy her detailed instructions, whispered with the power of a shout, and then, after, talk for hours.

In their long conversations, Beddy extolled the brain’s marvels. She said that every memory is constructed from separately stored pieces and formed anew each time it’s retrieved. She told him how the ancient reptilian brain pathways are still there, under newer add-ons, the mammalian emotion and the human cognition. She said brain cells create theta waves that oscillate particles into existence out of the quantum foam.

“Is that true?” His lecture on space-time foam had not covered this aspect––but he’d heard just-as-weird in the lecture hall.

“It only remains to be proven.” Her vocal chords crescendoed her sheer delight. “Have a look at the brain’s microtubules,” she suggested, like Have another helping of stew.

With this prompting, Alphonso did some reading. He found a theory of consciousness that said quantum effects happen inside miniscule tubes called the microtubules, inside the neurons. Alphonso had, of course, studied quantum physics, but had never heard of it affecting anything bigger than the smallest particles. With this information, wondered about tiny places. He felt they might lead him to a new discovery, which is the holy grail of all scientists.

His curiosity bore fruit when he overheard that a graduate student in geology had a sample of black dolerite from the Stonehenge quarry. In the same millennium as the construction of the pyramids, huge pillars of this rock had traveled over one hundred miles of English countryside to be raised in a circle of towering arches.

Alphonso planned to study this mystery as no one ever had. But before he sought out the sample, he bought regular fit blue jeans. He accustomed himself to the tighter casing of a button-down shirt. He lost the leather baseball cap with the gold chain edging the crown. He practiced imitating the grammatically correct sentences of those around him, although it made him feel as if he speechified instead of spoke. Still, he kept his long black hair, shiny and flowing free.

The geology student was a big man, an impression made stronger by the fact that he wore his hat in his graduate cubicle. It was clearly his field hat, sweat stained and begrimed, with a flop to its wide brim, like he was waiting for his own Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then Alphonso had a more unsettling impression, of being Tonto to this guy’s Lone Ranger. Alphonso shook it off, but he would forever remember the man as Ranger.

Although Ranger had worked on the sample for the last nine months, he had not yet developed original findings. Moreover, he was at the end of the ten years allotted to finish his dissertation. Alphonso knew it was a desperate man who moved a box to clear a chair for him. The man sat too and leaned forward to answer all questions.

Alphonso wasted no time on preliminaries. “You’re looking at the atomic level, right?”

“Yup. With a Picker four-circle diffractometer. It’s monochromatized for MoKαє radiation.”

“Can you pick up special features at the quantum level?”

“Negatory. I can only determine the lattice parameters.”

Alphonso had heard what he knew he would hear: The rock was a crystal with tiny spaces. The lattices would force atoms to obey quantum laws, just like Beddy’s microtubules did in the brain.

“Do you ever think about whether the rocks are strange?” Alphonso asked Ranger.

“Strange?”

“Have weird properties. One possible cause could be quantum effects.”

“Like quantum physics?”

“Yeah.” What else? Quantum arts and crafts? Alphonso continued, “Quantum laws lead to wild behavior. Fluids climb up and over walls, or stay in motion years after the container has stopped spinning. Floating rocks? ” He shrugged.

Ranger sat back with sudden force. “You mean you want to explain how the rocks were moved?”

The big man pushed his hat up high on his forehead, revealing a stark tan line. He mopped the back of his neck with a western bandana as he waited for Alphonso to continue.

Then Alphonso produced his lynch-pin point: “There is one place where we can see quantum effects without high tech.”

“Where’s that?”

“The brain.”

Alphonso gazed around the cubicle. Geodes and minerals were displayed like precious Fabergé eggs on gold stands. Framed degrees, undergrad from Harvard, high school from Philip Exeter, leaned against the open cardboard boxes that crowded one corner of the cramped space.

Alphonso saw that his fellow scientist followed with difficulty, so he offered, “The uncertainty principle says we don’t observe matter without changing it.”

“Hunh. You’re saying we change things by looking at them? I see objects all the time, and I don’t affect them.” He put his hat back on.

Alphonso could answer this tricky point. “In the macro world, atoms exist in so many different states, the effect is cancelled out. But the Stonehenge rocks have tiny lattices that force atoms into the same state; that can lead to quantum entanglement. The brain has tiny places, too. My idea is, maybe the rocks and the brain could entangle.” He wasn’t sure that Ranger would understand this crazy proposal that mind could direct matter.

But then Ranger gave an aw-shucks chuckle. “And that’s how they moved the stones to Stonehenge? People thought about them and then they floated? Impossible.”

“I have an idea how to test it. We don’t try, we don’t know.”

#

They conducted the experiment in the Physics Department with a special piece of equipment. The Febry-Pérot resonator could shoot energy lattices called quantum dots, then read the energy change. But this day, the energy would come from mental focus. If they measured an effect, it could only be due to mind itself.

Because the resonator was being used in an ongoing experiment, they would have to make do with the current set up. This meant that one of them—Ranger— would focus on the rock in a lead-lined booth while Alphonso would run the controls in a separate room. The two men would be connected only by an intercom and a camera.

Before beginning, they agreed that, if there was a change in the quantum dots, they would repeat the procedure using the Stonehenge rock. If the rock moved, their futures would be assured.

Alphonso suddenly thought of Beddy’s prompt. He told Ranger, “Repeat the word energy,” the word Beddy had kissed into him not too long ago, “and really concentrate on it. Try and see it.” At Alphonso’s signal, Ranger said the word again and again. Listening over the booth’s intercom made Alphonso feel stupid; it was too simple. But the big student was taking the task seriously. Via the camera, Alphonso watched Ranger take off his fedora and annunciate energy as if auditioning for the Shakespearian stage. His eyes were closed and his face was red. He was shaking and panting. Alphonso realized with some disgust that he now knew what the man looked like having sex.

But before he was prepared for it, Alphonso saw success: the quantum dots in the resonator were emitting surface acoustic waves. The men had changed the quantum dots using consciousness as an energy source. As they headed to the parking lot, they planned how they would repeat the process on the Stonehenge rock.

Even without confirmation, Alphonso’s heart rode higher in his chest. He had arrived at a beautiful station after a long and uncertain journey. But unfortunately, he had arrived with Ranger. During the walk to the parking lot, he played six scenarios forward to determine whether his collaborator would acknowledge that this was Alphonso’s idea, or would claim a share of the Nobel Prize, as if he had been more than a dim-witted tag-along.

They stood at their cars. Ranger seemed somehow diminished in size.

“Man, that really took it out of me.” Ranger leaned on his Range Rover as if he wanted to crawl onto the hood and take a nap. His face was the color of old oatmeal and he breathed in shallow sniffs. “I think I need to go to a hospital.” So Alphonso was not surprised when Ranger called the next day to say, “The doc told me, no more whatever I was doing before the episode,”

Momentarily delighted, Alphonso determined to go it alone. But in the next instant, he realized that he would need to change the lab setup. Getting permission would be a lengthy process. He had no choice to coerced Ranger, “I’m going forward tomorrow, with or without you.”

When Ranger showed up as appointed, they conducted the identical procedure, but now Alphonso trained the booth’s camera on the two-gram Stonehenge stone, to document evidence of a miracle. Ranger gabbled as they began, as if he were fighting his own tongue. Alphonso encouraged through the intercom of the resonator, “You can do it,” wondering if he sounded just like that Latin actor Edward James Olmos, in a movie about inner city kids getting an education.

In the same moment, he thought, The rock moved. Just slightly, but it had moved on its own.

Alphonso’s joy at the stone’s twitch died when Ranger collapsed. Dismay became despair as the man would not rouse, or breathe. Kneeling over the corpse inside the Febry-Pérot booth, Alphonso panicked. The doctor’s documentation would suggest that Alphonso’s procedure had killed the man. There was no time to erase the resonator’s electronic check-out. And no time to download the image from the cubicle’s camera.

So Alphonso did what any competent resident of East Los Angeles would do in this situation. He took the rock and ran.

Maddox’s Worldline—May 22, 2023

Maddox McGauern looked like trouble. Hair, cock-fight red; size, big. But his friends’ parents always ID’d him as the trustworthy one and he always got a nickname. Before his growth-spurt, it was Sliver; afterward, it was Plank. Sometimes, with irony, he was called Mad Dog or 20-20 in acknowledgement that he was much more likely to be discovered reading Popular Mechanics or some old fantasy book (he liked the big guys—Fafhrd, Beowulf, Conan) than caught drinking or fighting more than his fair share.

He grew up in Charlestown, a city falling apart. But his mom always spread cheer in the community, when she wasn’t too bogged down cleaning house, haranguing her five kids, or working. Mrs. McGauern would put on her miniskirt to join the band that let her sit in Saturday nights at the Knights of Columbus. Mr. McGauern would be there every gig, his boot seams showing mortar but his eyes gleaming, glued to his wife. While his mom heaved the accordion around, hair dyed pink or blue, working the Stomach Steinway, pushing and pulling out Get the Party Started and Whiskey in the Jar, Maddox and his siblings would be there too, playing Transformers in the corner next to the upright piano.

When the kids outgrew the floor, the boys found themselves past sharp reprimands. Their dad would occasionally look thoughtful at something they said and their mom got confidentially sweet in a way that let us know that she admired brawn and some disobedience. Then they discharged the mayhem they had stored over the years. They got their younger uncles busted by their aunts for buying them booze at Charlestown Liquors, and Maddox got Fernan Maki cited for teaching him how to drive without a learner’s permit.

It was his dad that laid out the decision tree for Maddox as they sat one night at the kitchen table: You’re strong. Do you want to work with me? I guess not. (Boring). You’re a good shot. Police academy? Nah (Let me understand, not judge). Wadda ya wanna do? Math and science (But don’t tell Fernan Maki).

All the girls he knew liked school too, but none of the boys. He worried about that a lot, being studious, quieter. He could tell his dad did too, until Mr. McGauern realized that experimental physics was pretty macho and that the family basically got an electrical engineer into the bargain. Maddox brought the old house up to code. “Let’s get everything you want done now,” Maddox told his dad before heading off to a football scholarship at Bridgewater State. “I don’t know when I’ll have this time again.”

Even then, he was scenting the path.

It led, via a bricklayer’s union scholarship, to MIT, where he studied magnetism, a force around us always. But, even after two years of graduate physics, he couldn’t answer the question, What is magnetism? any better than resorting to compasses or refrigerator magnets, or by explaining it as the byproduct of its more popular twin, electricity. This bothered him: electricity has the satisfying attribute of sending energy from one place to another. It has a clear function. But magnetism? No such unifying theme. He had been lectured that it was unscientific to think about anything in the natural universe as having purpose or design, but that was just how his mind worked. During his studies, he seized on a fact: soon after the birth of universe, magnetic fields singlehandedly flung protons and electrons together to clump into elements. This new matter obeyed new laws—Newton’s laws. Thus magnetism ended quantum rule, all three minutes of it.

So, ran his thinking, magnetism was a barrier to quantum forces. But it was a kooky idea. It wouldn’t get him into the private sector, developing the next Teflon or Post-It note. Nevertheless he dreamed of getting his family out of the small clapboard two-story in Charlestown, letting his dad quit laying brick, letting his ma quit pushing paper at the Local Union Three.

But what he never dreamed, was that his education would bring him issues with science. It was his girlfriend back at MIT, Bedelia Sweeny, an Irish exchange student who, even though beautiful, was one of the boys. She could hammer Guinness with the relentlessness of an oil derrick and had none of the sticky possessiveness of other women. Maddox was smitten, but figured she’d blithely returned to Dublin the minute graduation revoked her student visa.

It was Beddy who got him to do the Zener cards, the ones used in the classic extrasensory perception tests. With a major in brain and cognitive sciences, she had chosen the cards because of their five simple symbols, perfect for a study on mental imagery.

They were hanging out in her lab space and Beddy was joking around. She took her lovely, long-fingered hand away from the copper curl it had been twirling (the hair that sometimes fell onto his hair and made him imagine how made for each other they seemed to be) and blocked his view of a card.

“Tell me which one I’m looking at.”

When Maddox said “Star,” and she showed him a star, she laughed the glissando tones that had been part of her attractive powers, along with the suggestive, and accurate, eloquence of her name.

“Next,” she commanded.

“Star, again.” Again correct and again the laugh. However, when Maddox guessed eight out of the next ten, there was no such hilarity.

“We’re going to have to test this, with proper controls.”

That was the beginning of the end for him in physics. It didn’t happen right away, but rather over conversations with Beddy. They spent nights, their two red heads bent over pitchers; him, intoxicated with her laughter and her, telling him how his ability with the Zener cards could be explained by science.

“It may actually be us together; the sender keeping the energy of the mental image focused to match the receptivity of the receiver.” At this she would pause to punctuate her lascivious pronunciation of “sender” and “receiver,” although he couldn’t help but notice that she reversed their sexual roles. Then she erased his qualms by kissing him again and again.

Maddox had waves of misgivings when his new experiences clashed with his physics training, especially during the teaching that he did for his assistantship money. Guiltily, he informed his classes that there was no action at a distance at the macroscopic level, in the walking-around world where they all lived. But he knew it wasn’t true, as Beddy had shown him.

When Beddy confirmed, by the scientific method, that he actually sensed, without using vision, the flip-side of the cards, his honesty cut him loose from the scientific mainstream. He drifted. After Beddy left MIT without so much as a fare-thee-well, he applied and was accepted into a program in parapsychology. He packed his bags like a zombie.

“It ain’t MIT,” his dad’s pronounced and didn’t speak to him for six months.

Leaving his family far behind was disorienting. He came from a neighborhood where no geography west of the Mississippi was relevant. On the plane coming here to Minnesota, he had dismissed the vast expanse of crop fields passing below. It was food, sure, but also desolation; just corn and crows and lonely empty roads. Who would have thought, in such a place of empty wholesomeness, the world’s sureties would fragment.

Beddy’s Worldline—March 2, 2024

The pedestrian bearing the student visa identifying her as “Bedelia Sweeny,” resident of Ireland, here in the U.S. to study cognitive science at MIT, had no intention of entering the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. She would get a new body outside the terminal.

Sooner rather than later, she would be able to whisper irresistible commands to a woman of her choosing. But first the physical plane would have to be “astralized” —she laughed at the term for their realm, since “astra” means star, and stars are physical too. First, greater numbers of quantized objects were needed to thicken the etheric. This medium would let her dictates entangle another mind into compliance. But until then, she would lack the power of mental control that was her fondest wish; she would have to be content with a combination of surprise, strength, and superior knowledge.

She made the quick walk from short-term parking and spotted a woman standing alone outside baggage claim who met her important criteria: beautiful and showing expensive red-soled high heels (Works in the financial sector? High-priced call girl?)

She gained surprise by summoning, using the little power she had here in physical to call up beings that were a good match to her mental purpose of overtaking and conquering, or weak thought forms that were close to manifesting, like urban legends. Her favorites were the old lifeforms that had answered the same needs as those that called her forth. By summoning them, she startled her prey before she took them.

Beddy stood only slightly distant from the woman to begin her ambush. She called on the glistening brown bodies that trundled sure-footedly from the foundations of the airport, having gathered there like all of their brethren, anywhere that man congregated. Although from an earlier time than humans, indeed than any mammal, the adaptability of roaches made them a perfect partner to humans, since both mindsets conquered by perseverance and numbers.

The swarm of glistening carapaces saw their prey and scurried with lightning speed to climb the three-inches of the red-soled stilettos then onto the smooth silk of the woman’s stockings. They followed Beddy’s desire and scurried up the elegant routes of leg into the shadows of the woman’s skirts. But before the woman could scream, Beddy grasped both of her forearms to thumb down hard on her pressure points. Then the woman’s brown eyes widened to glint lovely reflections of Beddy, who delighted in the slight moan escaping the woman’s barely parted lips as she concentrated her way into the new shell. The cocoa eyes rolled back into a lovely head, signaling that the resistance of the host personality had yielded, and Beddy slipped in to a tight, warm fascicle of affordances––limbs, senses, cognitions––giving life.

This was far better than human sex, which only involved her nerve endings, never her whole self. To be sure, she felt nostalgia for sensual experiences: Alphonso was shadow, a beckoning yet retreating cleft of cold fire, whereas Maddox was sunny, an energetic frolic, a sweet with a sad center. Nevertheless, these men had been mechanisms for a particular end, nothing like this ecstatic merging of selves.

According to Omnis Dominum, her nemesis in Astral, she should never acquire a host in this abominable manner. Like most Forms, he abhorred Beddy’s sacrilege of kidnap-and-kill. Omnis Dominum insisted that, if she must “go physical,” she should do it by assembling atoms out of the quantum foam into a convincing human facsimile. But then, he was a tender-hearted Form, born of the Renaissance, a time when kindness and fairness were much in human thought. Beddy’s origin was older, from the Paleolithic, when the earth goddess was worshiped and women’s blood empowered the soil. Her first time in Physical, she used weapons of stone. She wielded and smote. And was smitten.

Beddy’s second time in Physical, she inspired the prophet of the Book of Revelations, whispering to him the rite to create the objects that he would increase her power here. But the prophet sensed her emptiness even though her displays of wanton lust attracted crowds of human followers. He preached against her, this Red Whore of Babylon. In the end, he was exiled and she was killed, again with no warning, no hope of taking a new body. But this time would be different, she thought, as she smoothed her skirt, shaking out the tickling tide of roaches that receded back to their crevices.

The portion of consciousness she had left in the corpse lurched toward a corner of the airport exterior, then spun awkwardly to sit into it. Bedelia Sweeney had, for all purposes, died when the Form took possession, the school year before. But now her family would be notified. Beddy ran her hands again over her new voluptuousness and took a last look around, but no one was curious about the woman apparently sleeping in the corner of the terminal.

The new body was magnificent and the information stored in the host brain now expanded Beddy’s perspective, since that recent identity left convenient knowledge traces in its brain. She knew herself to be a nurse. This was an unforeseen stroke of fortune, since her next mission was to infiltrate a hospital to send medical records. However, it was also a red flag. The profession did not match the shoes. And the diamond of the wedding ring was big. Yes, the new brain confirmed, there was a powerful husband. Beddy would have to avoid ringing any alarms. Then, having the woman’s memories of her personal life, she rejoiced in the fact that she was well-loved and protected. Red shoes, yes, but Red Whore, my ass.