“Kim?” Sarah gaped in disbelief. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Unlike Sarah, Dr. Kim was fully dressed, and wearing her normal lab coat. Sarah felt a little embarrassed to be seen in only her (well, someone’s) underwear, but that couldn’t really be helped under the circumstances.
“Sarah! It is you! Oh God, I’m so glad we found you! I’d hug you if I could, but that’s not really an option…”
Sarah squinted in confusion. Every new development was only bringing a host of new questions. “What the hell are you doing here?” she repeated. “What the hell is going on?”
Kim’s look of joy faded. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me.” Seeing Sarah’s blank look, she continued. “Sarah, you’ve been missing for a year. The day after you’d last been seen, we came in to find evidence that the machine had been used. We came to the conclusion that you’d used it on your own, but we couldn’t figure out why. Do you remember anything?”
“I didn’t use it myself”, Sarah said, trying to get her memories in order. “I…I came back to the lab because I forgot something, and it was already on. I tried to turn it off, but… there was a flash, and… I’m sorry, did you say a year?”
Kim nodded. “That’s how long it took us before we were ready to send someone after you. I insisted on being the one to go. We were able to pinpoint the first place you’d gone in the inter-dimensional time stream, and they sent me there. So we’ve both come to the same place, but from a year apart. That’s space-time travel for you.” She smiled nervously.
Sarah was about to say something, but Kim continued. “Listen, Sarah… there’s more.” Her tone was ominous. “When you activated – I mean, when the machine was activated, you were phased into an alternate reality. In this timestream, you don’t exist.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You’re not you. You’ve shifted into someone else’s life. According to my analysis, your name is Jocelyn McAllister.”
“What?” Sarah ran over to the mirror on the far wall. The face reflected was clearly her own. “But I still look like me…Wait. What on Earth?”
Looking herself over in the floor-length mirror, Sarah realized what the strange feeling from earlier had been. Below her neck, her body was a noticeably different skin tone, and there was a birthmark on her hip that she’d never seen before. Looking all over, she was starting to see that every part of her body was subtly different somehow – longer fingers, more muscular legs, a better bust – this wasn’t her body at all!
“Holy shit!” Sarah cried, overcome with wonder. From the neck up, she was still Sarah Thierau. Her face was still made up from last night, and her hair still looked freshly shampooed. She was even wearing the same earrings she’d put on before she’d left for the gala – the gala she’d never gotten the chance to actually go to. Her head was still exactly as it had been ‘last night’, when she’d been caught up in the malfunctioning device. But below the neck, she was Jocelyn McAllister.
“Are you seeing this?” she asked her friend.
“It certainly is incredible,” Kim responded. “Temporo…spatial… Cranial… Substitution? I don't know what to call it. This goes beyond anything we expected.”
“Hey, why don’t you look like this? You look like you have your normal body still.”
“Because I’m not physically here. This is just a projection, that only you can see. It took a few months of tweaking to make something like this possible, but we thought it might be safer.”
Sarah sat down on the bed. She (and Kim) were without a doubt the first human beings to ever be in this situation. So why did it seem so familiar?
“So what do we do now?” she asked her friend’s hologram.
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