Invisible Threads--Chapter 05

Writer's Note: Please read prologue and previous chapters of Invisible Threads prior to reading this.

Chapter Five

After storming from the restaurant, Cherie climbed into her car and burst into tears. What the hell?! Crying?

Doofus was going to be following her out the door as soon as he finished paying and there was no way that he was going to see her crying. She wiped her eyes, put the car in gear, and pulled into the empty street. She went two blocks before turning into the parking lot of an auto parts store where she parked to catch her breath.

The tears came again. This time accompanied by shaking. She twisted the rearview mirror and looked at herself. Her no-run make-up was sprinting, and her eyes were getting bloodshot against a ghostly pale complexion.

Something about the spoon had terrified her. A rush of adrenaline followed and then anger. Naming the emotions brought some calm and allowed her to become analytical. Why did the spoon frighten her when the cards back in Nashville had not? It didn't feel the same. Something was making her afraid. Not just the spoons but something else.

Another ill-advised look into the mirror told her that an emergency make-up replacement was needed. She dug into her glove compartment and found tissues. Using a wad of them and some good old fashioned saliva, she managed to apply new make-up over freshly irritated skin. After a final glance at mirror, she pronounced her face to be less awful. She backed out of the parking lot and returned to Gary's apartment.

***

Gary was very cold and, cursing her with every hurried step he made back home. Turning the final corner into his apartment, he saw Cherie's car. He expected to find her sitting inside the vehicle but it was empty. He mounted the two flights of steps to his apartment and was again surprised to not find her waiting at the door. His door was unlocked. She was sitting inside on the couch.

He looked down at her. "How did you get in?"

"With my key."

"How did you get a key?"

"It was in the drawer... in the kitchen."

"Huh."

She held up the non-disclosure agreement. "Here, this is the NDA that I was showing you before our conversation got sidetracked."

"Before you freaked out."

She nodded, "Before I freaked out. I have signed the NDA. In it, I promise never to tell anyone how you do anything unless you approve it."

"Can we put something in there about keys to my apartment?"

"Focus. Do you accept this NDA as signed?" She handed it to him.

"Sure." He did not know what to do with it and had no file drawers. So, he just held it in his hand.

"Good. Because that is my ticket to the 'Land of No Bullshit.' No hocus pocus or high-handed lectures about changing reality. Is what you do sleight-of-hand?"

"No."

"Then explain it to me. Slowly."

He pulled his laptop out of his backpack and set it up on the plywood, spanned across four wobbly pairs of plastic milk crates, that served as his dining/study table. After it booted up, he opened the photograph that he had taken of his white boards from the previous night.

He turned the screen toward Cherie. "That shows my latest efforts to try and explain what I'm seeing when I do one of the tricks."

"What is it?"

"It's math."

She glared at him. "I can figure out that it's math, douche-breath. But that's going to be my limit. I'm not going to be able to understand any of this. So, let's go at it from another direction. When were you first able to do these tricks?"

"About six months ago. For the last two years, I've been trying to analyze and model the impact of electro-magnetic quanta on a planet's magnetic field."

"I don't know what that means."

"Let me get to the end and then maybe it will make more sense." He paused to collect his thoughts, "About nine months ago, I was talking with one of the guys from the biological physics team. He was working on how the brain interprets electrical impulses from neurons. He was about to start some magnetoencephalography..."

"Say what now?"

"He was about to start measuring the magnetic fields created by people's brains. We wondered how this field might impact the earth's magnetic field and how it might impact each person's relative perspective on the world around them. It seemed like an idea that might get us a grant if we could flesh out some details. So, we began to work together.

"We created a helmet made up of silver and copper filaments which was expensive. Using the helmet, we tracked the magnetic field around each person's head. It was very preliminary, but we began to see that each person's magnetic field had a unique pattern..."

"Like a fingerprint?"

"Basically. But it changed with the focus of a person's thoughts. Whenever a person focused on the same thought, the magnetic field realigned in the same pattern. My partner got even more excited about this as he felt it was a clue to how the brain interpreted the information. I thought that it could lead to empirical proof of a causal link between consciousness and quantum reality. I changed the focus of my research to this while he continued on the original path.

"His was considered a breakthrough and mine was considered farcical. So he got faculty support and I was left with late nights and weekends. I became my only test subject and created a series of tests where I recorded what I was thinking about and what I saw while wearing the helmet. One night about six months ago, I was wearing the helmet and focused on a specific memory from my past and I observed unusual phenomena."

"Unusual how?"

"I saw what I call threads. They were superimposed over everything."

"What did they look like?"

"They don't look like anything. I can see them and not see them at the same time. I sense them. There appear to be an almost infinite number of them going in every direction. I've named the dimensional perspective from which I can see the threads The Extraverse."

She shrugged, "Cool enough name. Can you make sense of it?"

"This is the weirdest part. I don't have to. It is like my brain is specifically evolved to be in this environment. I think of something, and I instantly know which threads run through it."

"So, what is a thread?"

"I don't really know yet. I'm working with quantum entanglement concepts right now, but I've also puttered around a little with a quasi-crystal matrix idea. I know there are at least thousands of threads that go on functionally forever. If I focus my attention on one thread, then I can feel everything that's touching it."

"Everything that's touching it? What does that mean?"

"I mean every bit of mass in the universe that is touching that thread. And, once I can feel it, I can move it and manipulate it."

"Like the spoon."

"Like the spoon. In seconds, I can work through three threads to relocate an item to any point in 3-dimensional space. So, you can see how I would lean towards quantum entanglement..."

"No, I really can't."

He was on a roll and ignored the interruption: "But the math defining quantum entanglement doesn't match what I'm seeing empirically. That's what got me interested in the quasi-crystal. Possibly viewing the threads from that perspective could show that everything along the line is in the same location in 8-dimensional space-time."

Her mouth dropped open. "Now you're just making up words."

"You still don't believe me?"

"Yes, I do. That's just my way of digesting it. You don't wear a helmet."

"It seems that once I had figured out how to align my brain's magnetic field, the helmet was unnecessary. I found that out sitting on the toilet."

"TMI. Would I be able to use the helmet to help me figure out how to align my brain field?"

"I don't know. After this happened, I tried it with other subjects and have not been able to duplicate the results. That's the problem."

"The problem?"

"I went to my advisor to pitch him for a grant application and, since I couldn't duplicate my experiment on anyone else, he thought I was making it all up."

"But the tricks? How could he explain those?"

"Idiots don't need to explain things. He refused to sponsor the grant application and refused to let me work on it during work hours."

"That's when you got the idea to go to Superstar?"

"No. That's when I sent an abstract of my findings to the Emergence Theory people since they had their own funding and were interested in tying consciousness to reality. I sent it without checking with my advisor first. That didn't go well."

"They turned you down."

"They called Lecki and he told them I was pulling their leg and to ignore me. But they sent my abstract around to other physicists and most of them were not flattering about its potential. Lecki was seriously pissed."

"That's when you decided on the Superstar route?"

"Right. And here we are."

Her eyes were focused somewhere outside the walls of the apartment, and she whispered under her breath, "And here we are."

***

It was early Sunday morning and Lacy Birkland was back in LA and sitting in the back of an Uber heading over to Al Parker's house to work. When she arrived, she made her way up the concrete steps to the front door. She knocked and heard a muffled sound from within. Opening the door slightly, she stuck her head in. "Did you say something?"

Al's voice came from out of sight: "I said come on in. It's open."

Lacy stepped inside the door and walked through the cluttered living room toward the kitchen. The living room walls were covered with photographs, all of which were work-related. Award statues that Lacy did not recognize were aligned along the top of the small mantle.

Al was working at the small square table wedged into a corner of the already compact kitchen. The table was filled with hardcopy printouts of the acts and descriptions of their backstories. Many of the papers had ketchup and mustard stains on them.

Al looked up, "Coffee is burnt but hot. Grab a cup and the antacids are next to the sink for after." Al had the beginnings of a headache. Ten years before, a Sunday morning headache would have been a hangover. Now, she hoped it wasn't a migraine. She chewed three aspirin and downed them with the bitter brew. Her stomach lining would just have to deal.

Lacy put her backpack down on the floor, pulled a cup from the cabinet above the simple drip coffee maker, and filled the cup with the steaming liquid. It was all kinds of awful. Her mother's training took over and she glanced around for a coaster to put under the mug. A glance at the multitude of permanent rings on the surface of the table told her she wasn't going to find one. She sat.

In keeping with following her mother's many examples, Lacy asked a question as she was setting up her computer, "Have you ever been married?"

Al didn't look up. "No. Have you?"

"No." Lacy started thinking up the phrasing of what she wanted to say next.

Al blinked away the eyestrain from four hours looking at her computer screen. "If you're thinking up a carefully worded question regarding whether or not I'm a lesbian, please realize that asking such a question is misogynistic in our culture."

"I am."

Al had already returned her focus to the work. "You're what?"

"A lesbian."

The older woman's first reaction was instinctual, "Why do I care?" Then another thought bloomed. "Oh God! You don't have a crush on me or something like that, do you?"

Lacy shook her head. "No. It's nothing like that. I just wanted to tell someone."

Al tried to get back to her work then stopped again. "Wait. You haven't told anyone?" She kept herself from saying why me?

"I've told my parents."

"How did they take it?"

"They said all the right things. They love me and support me. But on my last visit home, I found a prescription for anti-depressants for my mom."

"That could be for anything."

"I asked my dad about it. He said that she was depressed because she thought she would never have grandchildren. That's probably true but I don't think that's all of it."

Al paused for a moment before realizing that Lacy was done talking. "You've never told anyone but you've dated, right?"

"No, I picture telling my mom that I had a girlfriend and what that would do to her. I think she still holds out hope that I'm going to change my mind if I meet the right guy."

Al needed this conversation to stop. "You realize that I am uniquely unqualified for this touchy-feely emotional stuff."

Lacy nodded. "That's kind of why you're the one I wanted to tell."

That didn't make sense but Al looked back down to her screen to try and get this morning back on the rails. Lacy did the same. But something felt incomplete. Al reached over, laid her hand on top of Lacy's, and gave it a gentle squeeze. Lacy responded with an uncomfortable smile.

The director got back to business, "How much have you got?"

"I have the draft of the matrix done."

The matrix was a cross-reference of talent against backstory. Every act needed a back story and one of the main jobs of the talent management team was finding it. The favorites were: family redemption stories, recovery from a life-changing event or illness stories, years in the business and never got the big break stories, and, finally, military or first responder stories.

Originally, Talent Management had relied on the honor system regarding the contestant's backstories. And a lot of them lied. Huge lies. Exposstory in the middle of the broadcast season lies. It made ratings go up in the short term but was unsustainable. The audience needed to root for these people and so they needed to trust them.

This was the purpose of today's meeting. They went through the artists, the backstories and the private detective firm's research. After that discussion, they took a bathroom and antacid break to recover from the rancid coffee. When they returned, Al paced as Lacy sat down.

"What's the update on the nerd magician?"

"Gary Richardson. Ed is talking with that intern that's working with him. Other than the nerd schtick, she doesn't have much yet for backstory but is working to have something solid by the time that B-Roll gets there."

"Let's get that nailed down as quickly as possible. The focus groups are loving all over that guy. He's getting rated as high as Mr. Handsome."

"Jim Harriman."

"Right. Him. Women will probably go for Harriman. He pulls off the humble hunk thing well."

Lacy looked up and followed the pacing of her boss, "I don't know. Richardson has a wounded puppy vibe that I think plays."