Hello. Sam Stefanik here. Welcome to the third installment of 'Crown Vic to a Parallel World.' Bare with me, or maybe bear with me, not sure if it's a bear, or a bare, or a bare bear...anyway, this is a short chapter. We need just a little more exposition before we really get moving. Chapter 4 will give you something to sink your teeth into. In the mean time, please have a look at this.
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3
This is a documentary?
I sat on the bed and rubbed my face with both hands. I rubbed it like I was trying to rub my expression off. Shawn pulled the door shut and returned to the armless chair. I finished with my face and shook a cigarette from the pack I took from my pocket. "Do you have to do that?" Shawn asked.
"Yeah, I do." I said and lit up. "Usually forty times a day." I set the pack and lighter on the nightstand and let the cigarette rest in my mouth.
"Do you have any idea what that does to your body?"
I felt my hands ball into fists. `Parallel world, prophesy, faith healing, and life advice...' I thought. I forced my hands open, drew on my cigarette and plucked it from my face with the first two fingers of my right hand. I pointed it at him and talked the smoke from my lungs. "Look...I didn't ask to come here. You brought me. Eight billion fucking people on Earth and you picked me." I shook my head at the glowing ceiling. "Eight billion people..." I said to it.
"I'm sorry." He sounded genuinely chastened. "It's your body and what you choose to do with it is up to you."
I eyed him to see if what he said was serious or sarcasm. He seemed to be trying, so I settled down. "Alright...let's have it...the whole she-bang. You were sent to Earth to find a man to fit a prophesy and you picked me. What's the rest of it? Why am I here? How did I get here? Who are you? What is this building we're in? What's next?"
It was his turn to look at the ceiling. "That's a lot." He said on a deep exhale. "But all fair questions." He lowered his gaze and made deliberate eye contact with me. "This building houses The HALL Organization. H-A-L-L is an acronym that means Humanitarian Agency for Lasting Liberty."
He continued before I could comment on how names like that are almost always misleading. "The HALL is an organization of problem solvers. It answers only to the highest leaders in the government and its operations are conducted in secrecy. The HALL monitors foreign threats, is the source of all intelligence and counter-intelligence both foreign and domestic, investigates federal crimes, and advises the military."
`Sounds like the CIA, FBI, DHS, and Joint Chiefs of Staff all rolled into one.' I thought. I said nothing.
"I am an agent of The HALL. Normally I work in the public health division, but I was put on special assignment by the head of the organization. He is the one that sent me to Earth to find you. His name is Ars Summas and he's my uncle on my Mother's side. We have an appointment to see him this afternoon at four. He will be able to explain the rest of the prophesy. I was only told to find a powerful and compassionate man."
He finished speaking and waited for me to say something. His was wringing his hands in his lap, the palm of one ran over the back of the other in alternating succession, adding a dry rustling noise to the silence of the room. I inhaled the last small draw of my cigarette and stubbed the butt out. My watch found its way into my hands while I processed what he'd said.
He hadn't really told me anything. He provided some background on his employer and indicated the need for my presence was as much a mystery to him as it was to me. I grabbed onto the one thing he'd left out. "How did you drive us to a parallel world in my Crown Vic? I've driven that car several-hundred-thousand-miles and never even found myself in another country."
His hands came to rest on his thighs. "That's why I needed to go to Baltimore."
`This is gonna be good.' I thought and gave him my undivided attention.
"I wanted to depart from a tunnel to minimize the risk that our disappearance would be noticed or would cause a wreck on the highway. Drivers tend to look straight ahead in tunnels and would be less likely to notice a vehicle that was there one moment and gone the next. That early in the morning, it was half-passed-one, anyone who did notice would probably assume their eyes fooled them. We arrived here on a rural road in the low mountains you saw from the roof. I drove us here and put you in this room." He sat a little taller, apparently proud of his own ingenuity.
I stared at him and tried to think of something to say, an objection of some sort, but nothing came to mind. I told him what I thought. "I don't know what to say. You explain it so plainly, but it's batshit crazy. Look, I'm just gonna pretend to accept all this is real and play along...at least until we meet your uncle, then we'll see."
I lit another cigarette and noticed the pack was almost empty. I held it up to him. "I need more of these. There's a carton and a half in the trunk of my car. Can I get them?"
He got up like he'd been sitting on a spring. "I'll go. When I get back, we can order lunch."
"Sure. Anything you say." I shrugged. "How `bout a magazine or something to pass the time?"
"I don't have any reading material. Would a show be alright?" He pressed his palm on the surface of the nightstand. A grouping of dime-sized green dots glowed in the white surface. In them, were arrows and numbers from zero to nine. He touched the `up' arrow. The entire far wall of the room lit up and became a television screen.
"That'll work." I gave him a `thumbs up' and started to flick through the channels. He left, closing the door behind.
The shows were all reality based. The one I settled on was a kind of docudrama about the lives of a group of people who worked in a large power plant in the far south of the Protectorate. The show was very educational.
I learned how electricity was generated and distributed. The power station was clean-room neat and built like a cathedral of light. Glowing pipes ran in racks across vaulted white ceilings. Plant operators moved along golden catwalks or through broad galleries. They wore long, red lab-coats and dark wrap-around glasses. Supervisors wore turquoise. All carried tablets of black glass that showed them the status of the various plant operations.
The process fascinated me the most. The plant was actually a pumping station. Great solar collectors gathered energy which was conditioned in transformers as big as freight trucks. The resultant electricity was directed to sets of electrodes ranged in rows behind smoked-glass panels. Angry white arcs were established and tuned by the operators. When the arcs reached the right intensity, a magic catalyst, a diamond-shaped piece of clear glass perched on the end of a thin, glass rod, was raised into the plasma.
The arcs were drawn into the catalyst where the plasma changed to a viscous luminescent fluid that ran down the rods into collection basins that fed to pumps. This fluid could be stored in tanks and distributed through glass pipes just like water. When it reached its destination, another, much-smaller catalyst was used to convert the fluid back to usable electricity.
The screen showed huge pipes discharging the plant's production into the distribution system for the city it served. Then it showed a flood of workers leaving the plant at the end of their shift. The eye of the camera selected one of the workers from the crowd. It followed this attractive, young man home to a large studio-style apartment. The decor was simple, bordering on stark, but clean and neat. The man's live-in boyfriend was already home and was setting plates of food out on a kitchen island.
The two men greeted each other tenderly and sat to eat. They made small talk about their respective days and expressed how glad they were the work week was over. The plant worker was looking forward to some friends dropping by later. He hurried through his meal and went to get cleaned up. The boyfriend finished his meal and cleared the plates away.
I was getting bored with the domesticity and wondered how two people eating dinner qualified as entertainment. I half-expected the worker and the boyfriend to sit together on the couch and watch another couple have dinner and small talk. That's not what happened. The boyfriend was wiping the island off when someone knocked on the door. He opened up to welcome a young blonde woman. She sat at the island as boyfriend finished cleaning up.
The scene changed when worker came back to the room. He exited the bathroom, busily toweling off his close-cropped hair. He was nude and I was confused. Worker sat at the island and greeted the blonde warmly. She wasn't surprised by his lack of wardrobe. Even more interesting was his choice to drape the towel on the back of his chair instead of using it for his modesty.
Some minutes later, another knock preceded the entrance of a young couple, this time a man and a woman. Everyone greeted everyone else with familiar warmth. The man from the couple teased worker for being enthusiastic. After a little small talk, the four clothed members of the group stripped naked, carefully folded and set aside their clothes, and all five began the first tentative exploration of each other.
They kissed and touched without regard to male or female or who was apparently in a relationship with who. The scene continued to heat up. The group moved from the kitchen to a long, low couch in the living room. Kissing and touching evolved to oral ministrations, again without regard to man or woman or relationship boundaries. What started as a documentary on the workings of a Solum power plant had somehow evolved into a five-person, bisexual orgy. I was very confused.
Shawn strolled into the room without knocking a warning. I felt like a teenager caught with a skin magazine. He glanced nonchalantly at the screen. "This is a good one." He said as he handed over a half-carton of cigarettes. He sat on the white chair and watched what had become full-on, sweaty sex. After a few minutes, he asked me if I was ready for lunch.
OK,' I thought, where the fuck is the hidden camera?' He'd asked about the afternoon meal like he'd found me watching the weather instead of life-sized, high-definition porn. I pointed at the action. "Can you explain that to me?"
"Oh, did you just turn it on?" He went to the screen like he was giving a multi-media presentation. He started with the characters. "The man with the dark-complexion, " he had to wait for the scene to switch back from a penetration close-up to an establishing shot before he could point out who he meant, "well, you can't tell he's dark because he's flushedÉbut the one whose facing us, bent over the back of the couch, he works in a power plant..."
"STOP!" I barked. He stopped. I searched for and found the `pause' button on the nightstand surface. Paused, the image on the screen was even more disturbing. I shut the screen off and stared at the blank wall. "I was watching a documentary, then I was watching an orgy. I need you to explain that to me."
He spoke slowly like he was a patient instructor working with a backwards child. "That show is true to life. Sex is part of life."
I started to object. He raised his hand to stop me. "There are no diseases here, no accidental pregnancy, no stigma about preferring the same sex or the opposite, no stigma about alternating preferences, or liking both. Sex is fun. On this world, it's treated as pastime. People still love each other, and the long-term two-person relationship is the basis of our society, but..." He trailed off to think before resuming. "Sex between people in love is a beautiful physical celebration of that love, but not all sex is physical love. Between friends or acquaintances, it has no more meaning than getting together for a drink after work. See?"
I dropped my head into my hands. "I better wake up soon or I'll be in a straitjacket." I muttered to my palms.
"Church, is something wrong? Do you feel sick? Let me look."
I felt him near me. I jerked my head up and fended him off. "NO! No more. I can't take anymore. PLEASE...please, let's just have lunch and go see your uncle. Don't tell me anything. I don't think I can take it...not sober anyway."