Alice is the color of yellow. A foul, unpleasant yellow. Not an inviting canary yellow. Not the kind of lemon yellow that would suggest a tartness. Not the raised alertness and increased velocity that the yellow of a traffic light would induce. Certainly not the kind of yellow that would raise wariness and apprehension like a nest of bees approaching a back yard cook out. No sir, this is the kind of yellow that suggests rot. The kind of yellow that would drive a mother to say things like "Do you plan on dying alone? Because that's the only outcome, looking like that. Filthy." and "I know she's our daughter, Charles, but the girl's gone sour. I say we cut our losses before she really starts to stink".
Now, mind you, Alice is a looker. A hot tamale, as it were. On the rather misogynistic but admittedly accurate Scale Of One To Ten, Alice clocks an easy 9. Over the course of her 33 years she's turned enough heads to populate a decent sized Russian city with sufferers of the fairly commonplace affliction known as "whiplash". Brown hair with red high lights, button nose, full lips, curvy but fit, etc etc etc etc.
As it were, a decent sized Russian city is Vyborg. One of the many things that makes Vyborg a place of note is that it is essentially the hub between the eastern slavic and scandinavian worlds. Not particularly good at keeping the political friends they make apparently, Vyborg was told to "kick rocks" by Finland in 1940, being traded to Mother Russia in exchange for what I've heard was about 7,300 crates of vodka and 23% of the television earnings of one Yakov Naumovich Pokhis, a.k.a. Yakov Smirnoff. Considering that Smirnoff wasn't born for another eleven years after this arrangement between Finland and Russia, this shows considerable foresight on behalf of the Finnish government. Vsevolod Sidorov, a russian translator whom I keep in my employ for the occasional political piece or factual inclusion of communist governmental practice, once said of Vyborg "city is nice, brother Lewis, but citizens live there are dogs. Hate dogs? No, brother Lewis, but dogs is dogs. We drink and joke them constantly." Whether or not Vyborg is seen as a "mutt hut" by much of the russian population remains to be seen, as I have come to find over the past two years that Vsevolod Sidorov is a braggart, a lech, and a ghoul when on the drink , a practice he fancies daily. As far as I know the citizens of Vyborg don't suffer from a city-wide case of whiplash and Vsevolod claims he knows no one named Alice. Nonetheless, you catch my meaning.
So, keeping in mind that on the Scale Of One To Ten, Alice, whom normally rates an easy 9, at present is coming in around a 6. And a shaky 6 at best. Let it be said, this rotten yellow muck is doing no one any favors on the attractive spectrum.
"Now, don't be alarmed Alice. When you faze-shift, the white blood cells in your system will serve about as much use as your appendix does now. Oh, and we took the liberty of removing your appendix, speaking of which. I'm sure you noticed the small scar on your stomach. As it turns out, the appendix has been bursting in 98% of all our newly fazed citizens, creating quite the medical fuss considering we haven't figured out quite yet how to set up hospitals Over There yet."
"Doctor Kendell went through this with me in my last physical. I'm ok, really. It's a little unnerving at first, but I feel fine since the pills kicked in. It's a rather bizarre sensation, though."
"Haha I'm sure it is. Don't worry, sweetie. Once you faze-shift to your new biological perception, you can wash this yucky residue off your skin and be back to your gorgeous self."
Faze-shifting. Alice is about to faze-shift. So are 2,000 other people in the next hour. This is the third group today being prepped for shift. The marketing companies have used the slogan "Your New Biological Perception" as their key selling point for volunteers for the faze-shifting agenda. This slogan is purposely repeated by all the medical technicians whom are responsible for the physical preparations of the volunteers prior to shifting. "Your New Biological Perception" was used in a study group and found to be 11% sexier than "Same Skin, New Universe" and a whopping 37% sexier than "Shift Gears To A Better Life". So, with a resounding "ha-rumf", the advertising agency hired to run the faze-shifting public relations campaign, Chavko and Chavko, exhuberantly agreed on the slogan and put it into action. To call their campaign a success would be a grotesque understatement and a pitiful attempt at humility. Within six months over 103,00 million people volunteered to be faze-shifted. Faze-shift stations were erected over the course of the past year and a half and, as of four days ago, have gone completely operational.
I suppose a brief back story is necessary at this juncture to drive the story forward. In 2048 the earth's population was around 9,221,045,176. This, dear reader, as you can imagine, was simply too much. Much like a fat deer tick bloated from gorging on sweet slick deer blood for far too long of a time, the world was about to pop and create a sticky mess as it's resources dwindled and it's inhabitants' needs swelled along with their anxiety and pragmatic fear. Experts said the sands were falling through the hour glass at an accelerated pace. One analogy used to convey the dire nature of the global emergency to those citizens who were a little slimmer in the brain pan was "Imagine our population moving at the speed of a sloth. Now imagine it moving at the pace of a cheetah. Please stop having fuckin' kids."
Thankfully, both scientific advancement and the human spirit mutually crave the sweet tang of success on their tongues, and in 2063 the first successful trial of "faze-shifting" was documented. The basic concept of faze-shifting is best exemplified with the statement "what if people simply weren't in each other's way anymore?", and thus the race to the answer began. An object occupies a specific location in Space and in Time. Since Time wasn't the issue at hand, the scientific minds turned their attention to Space. With the draining of fossil fuels the world's space programs were slowed to a codeine slur and wouldn't have been able to get to a point of outer outer outer outer space exploration and colonization quickly enough before the earth ate itself alive, figuratively and literally. A humane alternative to simply whacking 50% of the world's population and disposing of their bodies in whatever ways possible was paramount to the survival of humanity's ethics, civility, and basic decency ("I say, sir, could you kindly keep off my grass? My God, is that rifle really necessary?", perhaps this isn't the best way to handle things). Professor Martin Leblanc-Shivol, MIT, was the one who cracked the riddle of space as layers and how wildly unnecessary the abundance of them were. "For us to actual function, we only require about 43% of the Space that we occupy, level-wise. The other 57% are simply hanging around, not accomplishing much. A bunch of spacial truants, all jacked up on the theory of relativity, when you think about it." Thus, faze-shifting was born. Humans didn't have to actually leave earth, simply move to the layers of space that weren't high up on the priority totem pole of reality. Science marches forward.
So this is how we arrive at "Your New Biological Perception" and Alice and thousands of others being covered in yellow film. White blood cells proving to be next to useless on the layers of reality the volunteers will be moving to. "Dropping Excess Baggage" is how it's explained. Purged through the skin in a controlled environment and faze-shifting before the medical repercussions take hold. Brilliant.
Scott loves Alice dearly but will not be joining her this faze-shift. Both Alice and Scott are mildly heartbroken about this but they both understand that Scott is doing what's right and he will be joining Alice as soon as he can.
Scott is staying behind to take care of his mother Patrice. Patrice has an illness that is most commonly known as Rupert's Lung. What Rupert's Lung basically is is a rather disagreeable case of Whooping Cough. And it's terminal. Rupert's Lung was originally believed to attack not only the respiratory system but the cerebral cortex as well. This belief sprung forth from the concept that a version of tourettes was developed along with the exacerbated version of whooping cough. This concept, which was systematically dispelled, stemmed from the first diagnosed case of Rupert's Lung. Delilah Rupert, a lovely church going woman at marinated age of 73 developed this affliction while living with her daughter Sheila and her grand-daughter Maureen in Oxfordshire, England. Delilah was well-spoken, well-mannered, and well-behaved, thus the cause for alarm when, one afternoon when Delilah was having a particularly bad spell, the 8 year old Maureen came bouncing into the kitchen where her mother Sheila was preparing the afternoon's repost of tea and biscuits, her pig-tails jumping about like a drunken trapeze act, smiling wide and long and gleefully pronounced to her mother "Mum! Nana just told me to go fuck myself!". When a neurologist made a house call to check in on Delilah, Delilah responded to the battery of tests by proclaiming "Oh, for the love of God, my lungs are on fucking fire, you medical twat! I don't feel like being pleasant." With that, Delilah passed away, leaving the statement "you medical twat" as her verbal legacy. Shortly after, it was concluded that Rupert's Lung didn't actually attack the cerebral cortex, it was simply made it powerfully uncomfortable to breath, which turned the patient rather cranky.
Scott stayed with Alice right up until she entered the medical quarantine zone. They hugged for what seemed like an eternity, tears pouring down Alice's cheeks like streams cutting through a glade. She was wearing her favorite sun dress that Scott adored her in. Finally, her name was called and the couple bid each other a pained goodbye. Alice walked through the quarantine zone while Scott kept his eyes on her until she rounded a corner and was gone.
Right now Scott sits in his mother Patrice's home and thumbs through a booklet he was given about coping with the separation and some facts about the faze-shift reality that his beloved Alice will be residing in going forward. The fact that piqued his interest more than anything else in the booklet was this - "A less than common but not impossible phenomenon that is capable of occurring is something we've name 'Bio-kinetic Echoing'. In an essence what this phenomenon consists of is an ethereal visualization of someone who has faze-shifted that is occupying a place in Space and Time that is nearby someone who hasn't faze-shifted. In other words, you can be standing on the corner of 5th and Tinner and see someone who has shifted across the street who happens to be standing also at the location of 5th and Tinner but simply on their respective layers. It's treated as a visual echo because neither person experiencing the phenomenon can have any corporeal interaction." Scott realizes that he may be able to see Alice on occasion even before he joins her down the road. This manages to calm Scott's broken heart at least a little bit.
*****
Day 9 after Alice's departure: Scott sits on the lip of a fountain in the park. It's 1:37 pm. He's drunk on rum. At the center of the fountain there is a statue of two cherubic angel children, rosy cheeks implied through the white marble carving. Their backsides are playfully bumping together as their togas twist and dart aimlessly across their bodies. The angel on the left is holding a bugle to his lips and appears to tooting a juvenile, joyful motif. The angel on the right is holding her bow and arrow with authority, almost as if she is protecting her partner's merry tune. Scott notices both angels and doesn't really care.
Day 18: The promotion Scott was patiently waiting for at work fnally went through. To celebrate he and four of his co-workers go for happy hour drinks at a strip club seven blocks from their office building. A stripper named Lucy is paid to give Scott a lap dance by his co-workers. Lucy smells of lilacs and snaps pink bubblegum while humorlessly performing the lap dance. Scott extends her an empty thank you, tips her, knocks back his beer, and tells his co-workers he has matters at home that require his attention. An hour later Scott is staring at the wall in his living room while his mother noisily sleeps upstairs, carving up the night's quietus into ribbons with chainsaw breathing and death rattles.
Day 32: The funeral service is elegant but long winded. Scott stares distractedly at a lebanese family placing flowers and an assortment of trinkets on a burial plot with a simple headstone about ten rows away from where his mother's service is taking place. At the post-funeral banquet Scott is approached by his uncle who asks Scott to loan him $2,000 dollars of Patrice's money. Scott shoves his uncle in the side of a cadillac.
Day 49: Scott sees Alice at the subway station. She is wearing her second favorite sun dress. His eyes beam and he waves to her. She waves back. She looks tired.
Day 57: Alice shakes a piece of paper above her head, making it practically impossible to see what she has scrawled on it. Unfortunately Scott is distracted by a fight in the check out line between a mother and her daughter. The mother calls her daughter an ungrateful bitch while fishing coins out of her purse to pay for the cigarettes. Her daughter storms out of the line and through the front doors. Security keeps a watchful eye on the mother until she exits the store herself.
Day 72: Alice holds up the piece of paper so Scott can read it. The note says "There are things that live here. We've been instructed to stay indoors unless escorted by a security detail." She wears a ripped pair of jeans and a Rolling Stones t-shirt. She looks like she hasn't been eating well.
Day 79: Scott receives notice that he has been accepted for the faze-shift procedure coming up in three months. After much consideration Scott decides to wait until two months from now to let his employers know that he will be leaving the company. Another man that worked for the company had left with an earlier faze-shift group and was treated like a pariah by his supervisors up until the day he left. Scott has no interest in going through that.
Day 101: Alice's note reads "Everyone's been getting sick. The doctors aren't entirely sure what it is. I wash my hands with disinfectant about twenty times a day and it seems to keep me healthy."
Day 119: Scott dangles his feet off the dock into the water. It's cold for this time of year but Scott doesn't seem to mind. He turns his head and looks at Alice. She crouches about three feet away from him. In roughly scribbled lettering her note says "We're not slaves to time here. I recently watched my five year old self watch my first pet die. It was actually worse the second time around." Scott is starting to wonder if it even is Alice that he is looking at. She's...changed.
Day 144: Scott's boss shakes his hand and tells him "good luck, son." Relieved that he won't be strung up and abused for the remainder of his time at the company, he celebrates by having expensive drinks at a happening night club downtown. After seven expensive scotch and sodas Scott meets a young woman named Amy. They talk for about an hour, yelling over the music spilling out of the jukebox on the other side of the bar. After an hour Scott and Amy sneak into the women's bathroom. Scott fucks Amy up against the toilet paper dispenser. Amy gives Scott a fake phone number and insists that he call her next week so they can meet up for drinks again.
Day 158: Alice wears no make-up. Her hair looks like it hasn't been brushed for weeks. She is dressed all in grey. Scott can't quite tell if it's a dress, a sheet, or shadows. Her hand shakes as she holds up the note. Scott can see scratch marks all up her arms and bits of dried blood under her finger nails. The note reads "God's here...It's not what we thought." Scott drinks himself to sleep that night.
Day 170: The white blood cells leak out of Scott's pores. An hour later he is surrounded by intense white light. His skin crackles and pops and hums and creates a harmony of pitches against intangible walls of light all around him. His veins feel like highways and his blood feels like a million little automobiles blazing down the stretch of road before them. He is a symphony. He is a trans-atlantic through-way. He is a lark. He is an octopus. He is a sun setting against a desert skyline. He is faze-shifted. There is silent disorder all around. It's dark but he can feel commotion all around him. He's not entirely sure where he is or what he is. A gurgling abomination of sound rises from the throats of things all around him. Stinging. He touches his left pointer and middle fingers to his bottom lip. It's sticky and warm with blood. He looks down and there are significant parts of him missing that he most certainly can't afford to have missing. He faints from blood loss. Scott doesn't wake up.
*****
The two cro-magnon men move with a quickened pace across the rocky terrain. They're pretty sure they've given the large creature with the huge razor-sharp talons the slip. There is an alcove in the rock about seven feet high and about fourteen feet deep. The two cro-magnon men stop to rest in the alcove. One of them keeps an eye on the entrance while the other sleeps. The man who was asleep awakens some time later to find his companion wide eyed and staring at him, a look on his face that has never been made by cro-magnon man before. It's a look of deep contemplation, intellectually well beyond the capacity of cro-magnon man. All of a sudden, in a burst of linguistic elegance and physiological development thousands upon thousands of years past his capability, the man looks at his companion and says "She came while you were sleeping, dressed either in a gown or a sheet or in shadows. She is something called a ghost. She says we are going to be terrified of things like her for a very long time."
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