X-dimensional world

I was dating Shane from the L Word.  We needed money and had turned to a life of crime.  Our last heist was going to be the big score that allowed us to leave the country with enough money to live happily in a tropical paradise for the rest of our lives.

I was climbing the side of a building to break into a bank vault when I was caught by security.  Shane was already inside, sneaking through corridors and disabling alarms.  I couldn't warn her.

I went to a big jail-court building and was released on my own recognizances after a short conversation between the judge and an elegant female lawyer who gave me her card, her name unreadable in loopy font, as she escorted me outside. "We can't afford to lose any more good ones," she said, steering me down the steps.

Meanwhile Shane had taken a set of spiral stairs that drilled endlessly up and up through the building.  She got dizzy; the air seemed thin and foreign.  A man at the top of the stairs in a velvet blazer and gold shoes spotted her.  She thought she was caught but he just laughed and laughed.  "You've walked through the time screw," he said.  "No turning back now."

Shane walked the spiral staircases again, reversing her direction by walking on the bottom side, as the stairs had gravity in every direction; she emerged at the top into a sunny world that smelled like trash.  Clearly not the world she'd left.  She passed out in an ashy pile of debris at the bottom of a garden-variety straight stone staircase which is where we found her, hours later.  She had grown a thin moustache and said that it burned ferociously between her legs.  We propped her against a wall.  A man sidled up with rotten teeth and worse breath.  "You need a doctor," he giggled.  "A doctor, a doctor, a doctor," it was a singsong.

"Is there someone you can recommend." I felt absurd at the formality that came out but the man seemed oblivious to the incongruity.

"Yes, yes, yes," he sang.  "Dr. Deehickey," and pointed toward an alley with a shaky finger.  "Through the tunnel, second star on the left and straight on till morning," he danced away jerkily.

I wandered through a urine-soaked alley, emerging into another side street; at the mouth of the alley a ragged old man crouched over a small camp stove.  Beside him on the left was a delapidated building with three store fronts.  A man with a sizable gut and a soft red beard unloaded giant circuit breakers and amps from a van into the first store that was entirely decorated with logos from early computing brands like Apple and Fiji.

In the second store I approached the counter and tried to get the cashier to direct me to Dr. Deehicky.  His face registered and then squelched recognition.  He peered at me through coke bottle glasses pretending puzzlement.  "Please," I pleaded.  A very pregnant, beautiful blonde emerged from the back room.  I addressed her. "If you know any way we can find this man," I said.  "Dr. Deehicky?  My friend is very sick."

"He needs antibiotics," she told the cashier, ignoring me.  I realized SHE was the doctor and felt ashamed of my inadvertant sexism.

I woke up as a mannequin in a department store.  It took a little wandering around, waxy-headed and muzzy, to dress myself in rhinestone studded shoes of two different colors, a black and teal striped dress, and a pale pearl-colored hat.  In a mirror I saw a stout 40-something woman with deep reddish-purple hair.

The store attendant spoke to me and what came out of my mouth felt like gibberish till I realized I was speaking the local futurese.  The words were wooly and lumpy but began to get clearer though I stumbled over many unfamiliar terms.  I realized from his answers and comments that we were on an orbiting space station, hundreds of years after the world was too poisoned to live on. 

I drifted slowly out of that body and watched the mannequin woman as she continued talking. "That tari... transton... transition," the mannequin woman was saying, "was a lil... little rough for me this time," mannequin lady said.  As they talked, I observed a second even-less coherent being slide into frame, attracting the salesman's attention, a female person wearing a girl's sundress.  It was my own recognizably Hilary body, but with a vapid affect and far-away gaze.  Hilary-person stood there slack-jawed and drooling, sucking from time to time from a milkshake.

Noting the salesman's new focus, mannequin lady said, "Yes, it was a couple of circuits ago.  Something went wrong with the forminator and she lost a lot of cortical activity but we've kept her going out of nostalgia you know."