Parallax 2.03
"That is so cool," Karen gushed. "Can you make it do tricks?"
Jamie's wheelchair stopped in place, doing a quarter turn to one side, as if it were looking over its nonexistent shoulder at the girl following it.
"No," I said, rolling my eyes. "The mass of the object limits what I can do with it, although I can move things even most weight lifters might have difficulty budging."
She pouted. "Not even a wheelie?"
"Somehow I doubt Jamie would approve," I said, turning around and resuming our trek down the street.
We had spent the last few hours meandering around the town on foot with Karen supervising. Ostensibly she was there to act as Jamie's guide, while in reality she had weaseled her way into the task as a means to interrogate us without Sunny around. Right now the brunette was reveling in the novelty of a self-propelled wheelchair that didn't actually have any motors of any kind installed into it.
Karen walked us from landmark to landmark, blithely chattering about things that had absolutely nothing to do with the historical significance of the places she took us to. Instead she told us amusing anecdotes of silly things she had witnessed tourists doing at the locations. The stories were funny enough that Jamie had apparently laughed herself to exhaustion, falling silent by the time we'd hit the downtown areas.
On a weekend day like this, the streets around the shopping centres were fairly populated. It was a weekend and the spring weather was warm enough that the various kiosks and cafés were seeing a rather good turnout from the townsfolk. The chance of us running into somebody unexpected was high, yet I felt oddly secure in our relative anonymity.
Karen was dressed in jeans and a hooded jumper with a blue and grey weave in the fabric. Her hair was once again tied back into twin pigtails, the ends resting over her shoulders. A small handbag dangled from the handles of the wheelchair she was pushing as she carted Jamie through the streets. Jamie, for her part, was wearing a blouse underneath a pink cardigan Karen had lent to her along with a long, white skirt. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, although it had been trimmed so that it only hung down to her shoulder blades.
Despite being her elder, Jamie was slightly smaller than Karen, so much that even the younger girl's oldest and smallest set of clothing still reached past her fingertips and feet. The end result made her appear much younger than she actually was, something I hoped might throw off any trackers sent by the hospital-laboratory scientists. Even though we had not heard much—if anything—from them recently, the possibility that they would attempt to retrieve Jamie for their studies was one we both strived to avoid. If they were looking for a crippled Asian girl in her late teens, hopefully they'd ignore the crippled Asian girl who looked to be in her preteens.
I reflexively cringed as I anticipated the scathing retort from Jamie defending her appearance. When none came, I carefully reached into the link and found it... empty. Again. Even as part of me began to panic, I noticed Karen leaning over Jamie's shoulder with a thoughtful expression.
"Huh," she said. "Did you two have a late night or something?"
Slightly confused, I chanced a split second to move around to where I could see Jamie's face. "What are you talking about—?"
Jamie was asleep. And... I was still here.
That in itself wasn't too unusual. During the period where we had been trying to shift our sleeping schedules, we had more or less become out of sync with each other to the point where it wasn't unusual for the host that anchored our spectral forms to the world to fall asleep before the ghost's main body woke up.
When that had happened previously, barely a minute would pass before the ghost passed back over and force their body to wake up in their original world. I wasn't sure how long Jamie had been asleep for, but something told me it had been much longer than a minute.
"Um," I stared up at Karen, "You can see me, right?"
She blinked. "She's asleep... and you're still talking to me." She stood up straight with a thoughtful expression on her face. "Huh..."
"I'll take that as a yes," I muttered, dropping myself back into the wheelchair. Though I didn't comment on it, Karen's original question about our late-night activities bounced around in my head for a few moments.
...
"We haven't been able to determine what he was trying to look up," Flurry said as she walked towards me. "Many of the hardcopies for the files have been scattered, either whilst he was searching through them, or when he fled. Was J able to find out anything?"
We both turned towards Jamie, who had a pensive look on her face. Jamie? I silently prompted her. She looked up, startled for a brief moment before she turned to face Flurry. "Nothing," she shook her head. "I've searched through my memories, but it was too dark for me to see anything of use."
I frowned, there was something off about that comment, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what was bothering me about it. I shook my head to clear it, now was not the time for my mind to be wandering.
Flurry turned towards me again. "Looking Glass, you were the first person other than J on the scene, do you remember anything that might help us?"
I shook my head. "Just the two downed officers. I did a quick check on them to make sure they weren't badly injured. They just had a few knocks over the head and their pride took a serious hit, but they should be alright." I shrugged helplessly. "Sorry, I'm about as baffled as you are."
"Hmm," she reluctantly agreed.
...
"So you're a projection of her mind... but she's not controlling you, or else you would have vanished when she passed out..." Karen continued muttering to herself. She paused and stared at the wheelchair she was pushing. "But if you aren't a projection, then that means—!"
I poked my head out from the back seat, reaching out with my hand as if it could stop her train of thought from reaching a conclusion. "Wait!"
"...that this is pretty in-te-res-ting~" she continued. She glanced at me with a knowing grin. "What am I waiting for?"
"Nothing," I said evasively, shrinking back.
A low moan interrupted us as Jamie shifted, then stretched her arms out. "Total. Open. Book," she reminded me as she yawned. "You're absolutely rubbish at keeping secrets, have I ever told you that?"
"Good morning!" Karen chirped. "I didn't even notice you conked out back there, sorry about that."
Jamie turned to regard our host with sleepy eyes. "S'okay," she mumbled. "I haven't missed anything, have I?"
"Well you missed out on about half of my tour... I suppose I should be a bit miffed about that," Karen replied. She stopped in place to turn the chair several degrees to one side. "Shall I go over what you've missed?"
"That's okay," Jamie said, waving the suggestion away. "It's probably not anything I haven't seen already. And I'm willing to bet a couple of quid you barely talked anything about the town itself and more about him." She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder towards me.
"True. I'm almost disappointed that it—he—wasn't really a hologram," Karen said. "It'd be nice if he was a creation of yours; I could have used a bit of Tinker ingenuity for upgrading my computer."
ooo
Our tour continued late into the afternoon, stopping briefly at a nearby café for a quick lunch—or rather, a lunch for Karen and a smoothie for Jamie. Shortly afterwards I suddenly realised that the buildings around us seemed familiar. Not just in the sense that they were identical to the ones back in my world, but something more recent.
Jamie had noticed as well. Her responses to Karen's dialogue became less comprehensive, more clipped. She seemed to shrink in her wheelchair slightly, curling in on herself as she avoided looking at the building we were passing directly.
"What's up?" Karen asked, picking up on Jamie's change in demeanor. She began to slow down, but Jamie reached up and grabbed at her arm.
"Don't stop," she pleaded. "Just keep moving at your regular pace."
"Uh, 'kay?" Confused but compliant, Karen obediently resumed her pace, although she fell silent in favor of watching her closely.
"James?" Jamie whispered.
"On it." My thoughts were running parallel with hers and I immediately took off, first dashing into a nearby alleyway, then climbing up the building's side.
"Where's he—?" I heard Karen ask as I moved out of hearing range.
I made my way to the second floor of the building's east side. Being mid-afternoon, the shadows were darkest there so I dimmed myself as much as possible, but then thought better and simply merged myself with the building's walls. The building was much too large for me to treat as a 'body', but the individual portions of the frame were not. I hopped from segment to segment to hide myself within the walls, then poked my head out once I was certain I had reached my destination.
I found myself in a messy room, currently unoccupied. I was inside the hospital-laboratory where Jamie had been studied—more specifically the office of the doctor who had overseen her treatment. A quick scan of the mess on the desk showed that he wasn't currently working on Jamie's case, so I dove into the filing cabinet against one wall. Opening it proved to be no challenge at all—I simply bypassed the key mechanism itself and pulled at the locking pin directly—and I began visually scanning the folder tabs for Jamie's information.
There was nothing in the first drawer although the tabs appeared to be alphabetically sorted. I skipped to the third drawer but didn't find the proper name range. I finally found what I was looking for in the fourth drawer that I checked, a hanging box-folder packed with sheets of paper. The tab read 'Shirakawa, J'. I dropped myself into the folder itself, carefully keeping the sides pressed together so that the papers inside wouldn't fall out, and lifted it out to drop it onto the desk.
I had just closed the drawers when I heard a key rattling at the door. I quickly dove back into the folder, ready to fly it out of the office window until I realised I hadn't yet taken the opportunity to open it first. With no time for alternative options and no better hiding spots, I stayed where I was as the doctor entered his office and turned on the lights.
He immediately walked over to his desk and I metaphorically held my breath as his eyes glanced towards me... then past me to the rest of the stacked papers. He carelessly brushed a few centimetres of paper from the stack, dropping them carelessly over me as he sorted through his pile, picking out a few sheets from the new top of the stack and walking back towards the hallway.
A quick flick of the light switch dimmed the room and he stepped outside, closing and locking the door behind him. I waited a few more seconds to get my wits under control, then shoved my way from underneath the pile of discarded papers.
I opened the window just wide enough to slide myself out, dove back into the folder, and then I was gone.
It took me a few minutes to return to the girls, flying ahead of their path and finding a place where I could intercept them without the rest of the crowd noticing. Karen had a mildly surprised look when a file folder flew out from between two buildings and dropped into Jamie's lap.
"What was that all about, then?" Karen asked mildly. I glanced towards her, then looked away so she couldn't see my expression and use my own tells against me. She couldn't quite pull off the aloof-impassive look her sister did; although her face was studiously neutral, her eyes burned with naked curiosity.
"Nothing," Jamie said softly as she cradled the folder against her chest. "Don't worry about it."
Now who's the bad liar? I sent.
...
"Ow."
I woke up that night with the worst case of pins and needles I'd ever felt. It might have had to do with the fact that I was currently sprawled out along the floor, one leg still stretched out above me whilst my arm had ended up beneath me.
Jamie poked her head over the bed and gave me an arch look. "You fell out of your bed," she commented.
"Thank you for pointing that out," I groaned as I shifted myself into a more comfortable position. Once my limbs were in their proper orientation and placement, I began the painful process of working out the kinks and tingles as I struggled into a sitting position. "I'm so glad you're here to point these things out for me."
"Anytime!" she chirped.
I fetched a towel that had been draped across the back of my desk chair and made my way down the hallway, just as Mum came up the stairs with a small basket of clothes. She gave me a funny look as we approached each other.
"Son, going out again?" she asked me in Japanese.
"Every night," I reminded her in the same manner. I paused at the bathroom's threshold. "Why? Did you and father need help tonight?"
"We'll be fine. It's just that you... " She shook her head as she passed me, "Never mind. Take care and come back safely."
"Thanks," I said under my breath, nonplussed at my mum's odd remarks. I shook my own head, resolving to dunk my head under the shower as quickly as possible. Nothing ever seemed to make sense right after I had woken up.
ooo
I didn't actually go out that night. Instead I parked myself in front of my computer and began looking up as many terms as I could remember from the reports Jamie's doctors had collected on her. Or at least as much as the two of us could remember, either way.
"Neurons," she said.
"The electrical thingies that make up your brain," I replied. "Even I know that."
"Yes, but what does it mean?"
"Erm." Rather than try to answer myself I ran the term through an internet search and clicked on the first link at the top of the page. I winced as a wall of text appeared on my monitor. "Um... it means that."
Jamie was quiet for a few moments as she read the screen. "Down," she ordered me imperiously. She fell silent again as I scrolled to the next several lines.
I pointed at another word on the screen as we read together. "Myelination. Wasn't that there in the report somewhere?"
"Yes," she said absently as her eyes crossed and criss-crossed the screen. "Down."
The two of us read through the terms, trying to figure out what it meant in the report's context. Once we'd agreed on the particulars, I copied the notes into a simple text-editing program and we moved on. Jamie piped up with the next term she wanted us to look for, "Motor cortex."
"Thalamus."
"Amygdala."
"Neurogenesis."
"Wait, wait," I interrupted her. "You remembered all of these terms?"
I saw her eyes flick away briefly before returning to my face. "Sort of," she muttered.
I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms, staring up at her. She met my stare, stubborn resolve clouding her expression. I arched an eyebrow and she furrowed her brow, narrowing her eyes into a glare. "Jamie?" I said at last.
She frowned and looked away. "I'm reading the report right now," she said. "I've got a night light."
I blinked, then blinked some more as what she said processed through my head. "Wait a minute," I said, leaning forward. "You mean... right now?!"
"Well, not now-now," she said. "When you're busy taking down notes, I just jump back over and scan the next paragraph."
She was jumping over? Over to wher—? "Jamie you can cross over to your real body whenever you want?!"
"Yes...? Sometimes." She gave me a peculiar look, "You mean you can't do it?"
I don't quite know how long I sat there, simply staring at her in disbelief. I had never even considered doing such a thing. In my physical body I was more or less content to stay where I was. During the periods where I was Jamie's personal ghost, I had been too busy feeling sorry for myself. "No... not so much..."
She gave me a pitying look as she reached over to pat my hand. "Poor Big Brother," she said. "It's not as useful as it seems. It takes a lot out of me to do it," she admitted. "I can probably only do it a handful of times more tonight before my body passes out completely and I'm stuck here for a bit. But this is important." Her eyes narrowed back on the computer screen. "Scroll down, by the way."
I obediently tapped at my keyboard, still shocked by what she had just casually revealed to me. Jamie was able to force her body awake in order to draw herself back into her world for... minutes at a time? Longer? It was a skill I had never even considered, much less attempted to cultivate. It made me wonder why she had thought something like that would be important to learn.
Unbidden, my memory flashed back to the time preceding our escape from the facility, how Jamie's avatar always seemed to blink out at the most random times. At the time I had assumed it to be a product of our mis-aligned sleeping schedules. But now... ? I had to wonder what other ways she had attempted to make use of our abilities that had also never occurred to me.
ooo
In this manner, we received a crash course in neuroscience over the next few hours. Hardly enough to make us brain surgeons, but enough to understand at least the conclusions the scientists had produced during Jamie's stay, even if we didn't quite grasp the medical jargon they used to explain their points.
Jamie was not pleased with what we had found.
ooo
a/n—this is sort of cheating, i guess. this chapter is not actually complete. but i'll be out for most of the 4th of july weekend and i wanted to get something out, so here's this first part. it's too short to be a standalone chapter imo, so check back sometime next week (probably middle-ish, not sure how much i'll be able to get done immediately after i'm back) for an update.
update: it's done :D
edit: entirely my fault, but after rereading what i wrote, i decided that the last scene for this chapter took place a bit too soon (narratively speaking), so i removed it to put back in at a later point. hopefully not a lot of you know what i'm talking about but... those who did, consider yourself to have SPOILERS!11one zomg.
for those who don't know what i'm talking about... eh, you didn't miss much. o.o;