The Third Personality: A Novel (1)

A bright, clear June day, back in 2055 ...

PLYMOUTH, Massachusetts - It kind of served her right, for staying up so late the night before.

Okay, so 8-year-old girls need their beauty sleep. But especially for this kid (her off-the-map prodigy status notwithstanding), she should have long since fallen asleep prior to midnight last night, even if that night was a Friday - and even if that Friday was at the beginning of another gently-unfolding, full-of-possibilities summer.

So now, here it was, a Saturday morning, and it served Little Miss Hunt right that intrusive, glittering sunlight should burst through the pulled-down blinds in her bedroom to creep inside her lids and pry open her eyes at … oh, for goodness sakes! … 7 a.m.

Not that she budged from beneath the luxurious quilt and soft-top sheet, which buried her in her bed. Its headboard fell directly beneath one of the light-saturated windows in her air-conditioned chamber.

Still, still - she wasn't obliged to move. She was a kid in her own bedroom, and she could do as she pleased.

Outside that window, high above her house, she heard the telltale whirring sound of yet another Aroghens space vessel as it approached Boston's South Shore airspace - passed over, mrrrrmmmn - and then moved out over the Atlantic. It was a good bet, too, that its pilots were all wrapped up in their curious and probably incomprehensible affairs to the exclusion of all else. God forbid they should enjoy themselves up there. Of all of Earth's three-dimensional interplanetary…well, tourists, the Aroghens had to be the least accessible - not to mention the least charming.

Regardless. At least their engines weren't too disruptive.

The next time Miss Hunt opened her eyes (she had no sense that she'd even closed them, actually), some gentle tap-knockings on the other side of her bedroom door induced her to slip back into consciousness once more. The glistening daylight, of course, had remained.

The dream she'd been having - something about swirling ghosts, loud rattling and air vents, and … stuff - was already slipping into obscurity.

She squinted, and rubbed sleep out of her eyes.

Mr. Clock's 24-hour face insisted the time was now closing in on 8:30 a.m.

"Tawker?" came a gentle adult male voice on the other side of her door.

Daddy.

"I'm…here," she croaked raspfully, amazed at just how much effort it took to respond to her father's promised wake-up call. And, so now, she found herself staring at the door, as well: a sure sign full consciousness was once again commandeering her body.

On either side of Tawker Hunt's bedroom entranceway were two (of three) full-length hanging posters on the walls of her room. First, and to the left of her door, there was the "Seth Spoak - Did Enee-bod-ee Lis-n?" two-color poster, which depicted a pre-digital photograph of a woman's face along with the sketch of a round-faced man superimposed over the top of it. And on the other side of her doorway, there was a poster with a superdigitalized image of founding multidimensional explorer (then, in his 30s), Hamilton Boggs, Junior, looking tired, overweight - but fully committed, while walking toward an Entry Point - which he, of course, was credited with being the first human to discover - and pass through.

Consciously, anyway.

Then, finally, on the wall closest to her bed, there was the third, a full-color holographic image floating in the air midway beneath her ceiling and floor, of maybe the future great love of her life, a still as yet very young Tom Mendelson - smiling down at her bed, as if right at her! Good thing he was still so darned cute back then, whenever that image was taken (he was still a long way away from the old-poopish wrinkledliness of his later years).

In addition to the handsome image, there was a rotating holobanner beneath it, which read, in late-20th Century Chaucerian notation: I HAVE NO IDEA WHY I'VE TAKEN THIS PICTURE. HAVE YOU?

Those words sometimes made her laugh. First of all, she'd not even met him yet (he was, after all, exactly 100 years older than her; they had the same birth month and day, a full century apart.) And at this stage of her life, she had no idea why Tom had shot that self-image (apparently for the future her), either. Ah, but one day; not so terribly distant from today, she knew that she would.

"Why is it I'm sensing that you're still in bed, Tee?" Djordj Hunt chided from the hallway. "I'm right, right? So - do you suppose I can induce you into making today's scheduled appearance at House Three?"

"You can induce me, Daddy," she called back cheerfully, peeking out wide-eyed from under the quilt, as only the innocent are able - her vocal chords more cooperative this time. "See? I'm getting up now."

"I think you're still under the covers, Tee," her father's voice countered after a brief pause. "C'mon, sweetness - time to go."

Finally, Tawker whooshed the top sheet and quilt away from her, and dragged herself from her cushiony womb. A skirt and cotton top awaited her, folded neatly on the small sofa across the room from the foot of her bed.

Her father had already turned and headed back toward the kitchen, where she knew breakfast was waiting. She knew this. She was her father's daughter.

The genius part, though, she hadn't inherited from him - although Djordj Hunt was light years from stupid. No, the genius part of her makeup kind of waltzed in from left field, at the time of her birth.

Or, more likely, from some time before that.

On the way to her father's worksite on the Atlantic seashore in Marshfield, Massachusetts, up eight-lane Route 3 toward northeastern Plymouth County, Tawker's father had steered their discussion away from summer and fun, and toward the immediate business at hand. He didn't often invite his daughter to join him at work for the day, but the two of them had planned this now for several weeks. Tawker welcomed it.

They were on their way to "The Plant," as he always called it, which looked like anything but: it was a row of nine houses right along the Marshfield beaches, linked by nothing more than a sand-sprayed paved street, barely a lane wide, and eight interconnecting driveways, all on the mainland side of The Plant's solitary row of houses. There were no walkways between them, unless you considered the length of beach on the other side of the tall, clear, salty plastic seawall a path - which, in practice, it often was. Still, at most other times, The Plant's employees (of whom her father was one of about 50, including extraterrestrials) simply walked on the driveways or, with increasing commonness (when they were "on"), simply stayed where they were, and communicated telepathically.

This was the latest trend in private, unadvertised (and unpromoted) enterprise in America: you didn't bother setting up security systems any more - particularly in the oh-so-calm greater Boston/South Shore area - which once upon a time, as her father had instructed Tawker early on in her education, was a pretty unsettling place from a human aggression standpoint. There was a time, in fact, when eastern Massachusetts's mothers raised their children to be aggressive - even to be fist fighters. Those days, gratefully, were long gone. Now the residents of the Greater Boston area - on its ever-sprawling North Shore, as well as its South - had embraced civility and gentility as an open, formal lifestyle. Massachusetts, in fact, was the first U.S. state to adopt such a formal public orientation. The infamous Cambridge Murder-Suicides of 2008 triggered that change, of course - but it was one in which most residents had come to feel was long since overdue, anyway. Once upon a time, Bostonians were a pretty surly lot. Djordj Hunt knew this first-hand: for he'd grown up in that culture.

"Tee, you know the rules," her father concluded, as they pulled their sleek hoverbuggy into the small driveway separating the second and third houses at the south end of The Plant. Tawker was staring out the passenger side window, meanwhile, not fully taking in everything her father had been saying. After they were parked and Djordj had turned off the ignition, he sat there silently for a moment and stared at his daughter - until he finally had her attention. "…The rules?" he repeated.

"No running off on my own, unless it's the beach," Tawker recited, rolling her eyes and blinking. "No consumption of other plant researchers' food supplies. No talking unless I listen to what's being said to me first. No entering toilet areas without knocking first. And, no prejudicial species references." She then paused, and gazed impishly into her father's eyes.

"Unless they're Arrogants," she added finally, with a smirk.

Her father sighed. "It's Aroghens - you know it's Aroghens - and you'll not find any of them working here - or even visiting here. Tawker, I expect you to be respectful - and I expect you to behave."

"I always behave, Daddy," she said with the trace of a pout.

"you're eight," he said. "It's not possible for you to always behave."

"You'll see," she said with a twinkle - and then she blinked her eyes back at him.

Her father smiled back. The two of them then climbed out of their ground vehicle, now resting on pavement, and quietly walked up to - and stepped through - the front door to House Three. Without knocking.

Djordj Hunt was a time travel researcher and support operative. From the outside of the houses, a passerby would have no idea what was going on inside. Time travel, even in 2055, was still an enigma to the public. In fact, it was generally still thought of as arcane.

There weren't a lot of power relays or devices in House Three - or, for that matter, in most of the row of structures. Only in House Nine, the Launch Site for the time travel voyages, was there much in the way of technical apparatuses, other than multitask computers. And even there, most of the contraptions in supply had to do with what The Plant staff called "dampening:" the blocking out of all focus-weakening conscious thought processes. Dampening equipment always struck Tawker as being medical in nature, rather than anything office-esque or workpersonlike.

In truth, the only time machine anywhere on the premises was inside each of the voyagers' brains. Time travel, which had begun years before as an offshoot of a combined remote viewing and lucid dreaming enterprise which quickly manifested into closely guided out-of-physical-body experiments, inevitably, if slowly, evolved into both a highly complex and difficult-to-pin-down quantum mechanics puzzle, and a philosophical tease - all of which led contemporary voyagers to vacate their physical bodies and then rematerialize in another place and time … in a next-door physical reality. (Or, in the case of ol' Harrild St. Pierre - to become untethered from his own time/space-of-origin, and rematerialize in a semi-physical reality [ … not next door - the staff's best guess so far], thus finding himself "lost" in some sort of gigantic metaphysical woods - an unexpected circumstance which, in turn, encouraged his now-vacant physical body to lapse into a coma-like state.

Which is what it was in.

Harrild's literally unconscious body was inside House Three, in fact. He'd been moved there from House Nine quite some time ago - an unprecedented quite some time ago. No family notifications had been made. He'd been a bachelor for years prior to that day when, while voyaging to the far "outskirts" of a Tertiary N (the furthest outer realms of N-Theory's universe of parallel physical realities), he'd apparently lost his confidence - like, say, a Red Sox pitcher might have done in terms of losing his or her control, all of a sudden - and, according to all of his physiological and brain-pattern readings, he'd simply done the unthinkable: he panicked while under a deep trance … and "went away."

His body remained behind, of course. But his physically-limited consciousness - what made Harrild St. Pierre Harrild St. Pierre, at least in the mid-21st century - simply, unexpectedly, and unprecedentedly up and disappeared.

Against all good judgment, the staff eventually came to label St. Pierre "the sleeper." He had been in a coma for so long, most everyone had nearly forgotten what Harrild was like before the tragedy. And even though no disrespect was intended, the new nickname stuck. His ongoing vacant condition scared the hell out of everybody. Calling St. Pierre "the sleeper" softened that fear.

No one seemed to have a clue where, when - or if - Harrild had ended up. Time travel theorists were often required to concoct all sorts of novel ways to ask appropriate questions. But such questions couldn't be answered if no one was clear about what to ask. And there were no ifs about it by now - when it came to St. Pierre, staffers had turned mute.

Hal St. Pierre had been in a coma now for very nearly six years.

While Djordj Hunt huddled with his House Three associates about the goings-on of the day, Tawker found herself, as always, wandering out of his workspace, around a corner, and down the hallway to the sleeper's room. That door was never locked, but a large viewing window along the outer wall next to that door provided a means for adequate scrutiny.

Pressing her nose to the window (actually going inside, uninvited, was considered an act of disrespect, her father always insisted), Tawker quickly surmised that St. Pierre's body was undergoing one of its twice-daily workouts. The huge, noisy hospital gurney he was on was presently moving St. Pierre's movable body parts through various range-of-motion exercises: first it exercised his legs, then his arms, then his neck, then his head. Shortly thereafter, then, his body gently arched up at four locations between his thighs and his shoulders, before the body was still once more.

Tawker's eyes watered while watching all of this. Mr. St. Pierre's circumstances were so sad, she'd so often felt...

"Who's that lovely young woman there, gazing upon our sleeper?" an older woman's voice queried from down the hall. Tawker turned - she instantly recognized Annuh Larsen's voice by now, despite the young girl's relatively infrequent visits to the Plant - and grinned.

"Hi, Annuh!" she said with a giggle, adding a wave.

"Why aren't you outside on the beach by now?" the woman asked as she drew nearer. "It's a lovely day."

"I know," Tawker said, making a face. "But it was pretty seaweedie down in Plymouth, so I figured the beaches were seaweedie up here, too."

Annuh Larsen nodded. "Reasonable," she said.

Tawker's eyes then lightly darted to the left, then to the right, while her smile remained in place.

"You have something on your mind, yet to be said?" Annuh asked.

"I think I'm supposed to be standing here today - right now, in fact," Tawker said.

"Well, that's certainly alright," Annuh said. "But I should think the entertainment value of the exercises in there would have worn off by now."

"Well, there's more," Tawker replied with a nod. "I've been thinking about Mr. St. Pierre a lot this past week. I even had a dream this morning, we were all in it, where I thought…"

Annuh's expression abruptly shifted. "I was in your dream?"

Tawker looked up at her, feeling a bit unsure, when she suddenly remembered that Ms. Larsen's specialty on this staff was lucid dreaming exploration. So she nodded.

Acknowledging her shift in mood may have unsettled the youngster, Annuh immediately softened her approach. "Well, Tawker. I had some dreams about him - or I should say, with him - myself this week… This morning, too - and you were in it. Is that how yours were?"

Tawker again nodded, this time more enthusiastically. "Oh, yes - yes. We were standing outside his room here, just like we are now, when…"

"You heard some rumbling," Annuh interjected.

Tawker blinked. "Yes - you and I were just standing here, talking. There was this rattling sound…"

"Rattling - like in the rafters overhead - right?" Annuh responded - and upon seeing the startled recognition in the youngster's face, she realized they'd apparently shared the same precognitive memory - it had to be … "What else do you remember?"

"Well," Tawker began, and briefly paused as if trying to remember. "You and I stood here, you know, chatting - and then Daddy came down the hall…"

The woman again jumped in. "-And, after looking up at the ceiling vents in confusion, your father looked at us, and he asked…"

Tawker gulped. "Yes! But he's said I shouldn't use that language, Annuh!"

"Oh, my goodness!" Annuh said, her eyes wide. "Oh, sweetheart - this is so unusual - this is so rare. You and I - we're about to experience our shared dream! I'm…sure of it!"

"No fooling?" Tawker gushed back at her in astonishment.

"This almost never happens between two people," Annuh began. "There are so many variables …"

Then, from overhead, from the ceiling - a rambling rattling…rumble began to emanate down through the ceiling vents - as if from the rafters. And it increased in its seeming intensity, causing both Tawker and Annuh to wince.

Then - sure enough, from around the corner at the end of the hall, Djordj Hunt made his sudden appearance - as if he were an actor, making a long-rehearsed stage entrance - on cue. He was gaping at the air vents overhead - and wincing, as well.

Just as he had in the two dreams.

"What the flying fuck…is that!?" he croaked.

Then the apparition appeared.

Vaguely smoky and formless, it swooped down through the ceiling, just missing Djordj - and immediately headed straight toward Annuh and Tawker.

In moments, both of them were engulfed in a … rotating cloud.

"Tawker!" her father wailed. "Get out of there!"

Neither Tawker nor Annuh responded to the shaken man standing, frozen, horror-struck, at the far end of the hall.

"Tawker!" he repeated, and he began to rush to the engulfed females.

"No, Djordj…stop," Annuh calmly ordered Tawker's father from within the apparition's now-vertically-swirling form, as she straightened up. Very quickly - but gently - Tawker herself then silently straightened, as well. "…There's no threat here," Annuh whispered huskily. "There's…no threat."

"No threat?!" Djordj said, now paralyzed with indecision. "My word, Annuh - if you were seeing what I'm seeing..! -Oh, Tawker!"

"We're fine, Daddy," the 8-year-old's voice responded softly.

The vertical motion surrounding both Tawker and Annuh now increased in its intensity, while the shaken rafters overhead were similarly quieting. All the while, the swirling smoky apparition made no sound as it flooded the females' end of the hallway.

Djordj then straightened, and released a breath through pursed lips. "Okay, Ann - I'm together. What can I do? What do you want me to do?"

"This may not last much longer, Djordj," Annuh responded, her lips now obscured by the smoky swirls racing in oblong circles from her feet to her head, and then back again. Tawker's situation appeared to mirror Annuh's. "You … might just want to record this," she said.

"Okay - I'll do it … Tawker?" Djordj asked.

"It's okay. I'm fine, Daddy," Tawker's voice responded through the spinning smoky whirl. "I'm pretty sure - I am sure - this is Mr. St. Pierre."

Djordj Hunt heard all he needed to hear. He disappeared around the corner in search of help - and some holographic recording materials.

From inside the spinning cloud, both females began picking up telepathic communications, apparently emanating from the roiling swirls surrounding them. But their messages were considerably different.

To Annuh, the communication was: "…I'm coming home, baby! I'm back - I've missed you so! And I have such wonders to tell you about! Such wonders ..! (Such wonders …) ((wonders …))"

By the time the telepathic voice had fully faded, Annuh Larsen found herself filled with the powerful sense of a deeply internal … embrace - the likes of which she hadn't experienced in, well … six very long -

And very lonely …

Years.

Tawker's experience was equally engaging - but the comments she heard were apparently for her alone. (Later, when Tawker and Annuh would compare experiences, they'd discover neither had any sense of the very personal, and different, message the other received simultaneously):

"…Why - you are Tawker Hunt," the second communication began, so clearly it was as if the words were being spoken aloud. "When I saw you last, you were so … little ... Oh, my child - what a miraculous, uncommon, meaningful and privileged life awaits you - ohh! Your loving, assertive nature will find adventure, and expression. And even more wondrously - you will love, and be loved … So uncommon! These are matters of record. I've seen your future - oh, and so much more - so much ..!"

Then Tawker experienced something she'd remember for the rest of her life. She'd fallen so deeply into what she'd later recognize as a profound meditative state, she had the distinct sense of floating somehow - yet being fully awakened emotionally, as well - far beyond the physiological boundaries of even a prodigious (and very perky) 8-year-old.

So, when these next words "reached her," she was beyond a state of exhilaration, at least in conventional terms. For reasons she couldn't explain or duplicate emotionally in any later memories, she began crying - all the while another part of her observed herself doing that! So strange!

When the impassioned personal message next continued, it was as if Tawker Hunt had become wide open inside, like an empty bowel waiting to be filled - prepared to be deeply, and somehow spiritually, touched:

"My child - you are loved more than you know …

"More than you may even imagine possible…"

(… There was such a lightness to these words …)

"Always believe that - particularly during the singular major life crisis you'll one day experience … and survive … so many years from now …

"You are admired - and you are loved … Oh … so … loved …

"(Always remember …)

"((Always…))"

Then all communications ceased. The voice was gone.

By the time the event was over - which was before any recording equipment had yet been maneuvered onto the scene - the monitoring equipment in Harrild St. Pierre's room began going haywire - berserk, actually. And if the then-lurching body inside that room was any indication, its owner had very probably re-entered its (somewhat famished, albeit well-exercised) body.

The swirling apparition that had surrounded Annuh and Tawker was completely gone, as well, leaving both individuals standing silently erect, as if gazing off into some kind of unseen void - through floods of tears, which were now streaming down both of their faces.

By the time he'd returned, Djordj found both Annuh Larsen, and his beloved, light-of-his-life daughter, Tawker Hunt, sobbing.

Unabashedly.

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