We went around the room, one Wednesday night at the tavern. A regular roundtable discussion. The guys, the locals, gave the Cheshire crew the floor to all share our longest recorded dimensional leaps, respectively.

“What are those?” you might ask.

Well, each of our baker’s dozen of a spaceship personnel had been leaping now for some time. We had, in fact, become quite good at this most existential of crafts. Leaping dimensions, as far as we were concerned, meant dipping out of one version of the planet Earth, into another version of Earth. The “Many Worlds” theory will tell you that there are an infinite number of Earth versions.

Keith’s longest leap was 48 hours. He was newer to our discipline. Then went Sully. His was 20 years, since that’s how long it took me to find him, cast into oblivion from the mishap among the movierain—which is the code name for the torrents of worlds that precipitate the multiverse like falling rain.

Moreover, the “movierain” is my nickname for surfing the multiverse. You’re the dimensional surfer, leaping like lightning between droplets of rain descending down from some divine source. Each droplet is a world, and when Sully accidentally got sucked into one of those falling destinations, while I was teaching him to surf, I had to retrieve him. You can read more about that in my Thunderbird journal, out now in an Equipment Room near you.

We went around the room, including Lucky #13. I had lasted a lifetime on one version of Earth. That was when I became a small-town reporter for their local weekly, The Herald. Jumping from conversation to conversation among the townsfolk for my stories came naturally to this Thunderbird.

A lifetime spent there, and I would have died an old man in my quaint little hilltop bungalow, with a beautiful back porch view. But I made it back to the good ship Cheshire, that magnificent Earth satellite hanging in a Lagrange point in Her orbit. Kitty returned the favor from that time we lost her in the ’80s .

We both told our own versions.

Bill Thunderbird’s Account

By the time it was my turn to chime in, on that Wednesday night storytelling at the tavern, the longest recorded marooning on an obscure version of Earth was 21 years, held by Kitty.

I had that beat.

“In the interest of time, I won’t start at the beginning. It’s best to begin when I finally realized that this world in which I found myself was not my actual home…”

It truly felt like another lifetime conjuring up this former terrestrial life. As I channeled this old self, I looked around the circle we had formed in the back room of the tavern. This wasn’t the typical tale we’d tell on Wednesday nights. And I could tell the crowd hung on every word. I continued.

“I began noticing clues in my everyday routine reporting for the town’s local weekly. It’s like this universe was trying to reach me.”

Signs are real. Pay attention to them. The human brain is trained to recognize patterns. If you’re noticing some pattern in your everyday existence that seems more than coincidence, it is. The pattern carries meaning that someone or something from beyond your current plane has attempted to convey to you.

For example, I’d notice more than the average string of Ford Thunderbirds rolling by downtown streets. While interviewing certain subjects for the local paper—a restaurateur who mentions dew for some reason, the local florist who insisted upon showing me her zen garden, and so on—clues accumulated to a critical mass. Like the moments just after waking up from a deep dream, these clues felt more like memories from another life and another world, rather than imagined.

“It was Kitty,” I told the tavern audience. “She was outside my realm, behind the fourth wall, and couldn’t influence me directly. Had she revealed my true nature too early, the heavy news would have been too overwhelming. It wouldn’t have stuck. And I would have been left to languish there.

“The place was so similar to my home world. That’s why it was easy to get lost there—its familiar allure looming always.

“I also didn’t mind being there. That could have contributed to my blissful complacency. Usually, in similar situations of ignorance, a gut feeling would guide me out of the woods. It was an innate intuition that the world in which I found myself in was not my own. On this Earth, however, ‘Analog Earth’ we’ll call it, never incited this feeling in me. Like I said, I would have remained there until death had Kitty not intervened.”

My crowd started to stir. I could tell I was losing them.

“So how’d you get out of it?” yelled one audience member from the back. One of the reasons this was not the typical tale we’d tell on Wednesday nights was that this crowd appreciated people who got to the point. I was taking my time.

“I’ll let Kitty elaborate more on my liberation,” I said. “But I can tell you what supplied the aha moment. It was quite the stroke of genius.

“The key phrase to unlock past-life memories goes like this: ‘surf; zen; leap; navigate; teach; thunderbird.’ Reading or hearing these words in that order will unlock my mind, should I get lost. Kitty knew this, of course…”

I hesitated for a moment on delivering this news to the group in the back room. I was internally debating how much thunder to steal from Kitty’s version. I decided to tease it.

“One day, I’m walking down Main Street through the town center, en route to report on a story. I was 42 on this planet by this point. I strolled by the local surf shop. I remember reading the word ‘surf’ on the storefront. Just then, a bus drove by with an ad across the side promoting a wellness spa that read, ‘Achieve zen.’ As the word ‘zen’ passed in and out of my mind, I approached a puddle by the curb. I leapt over it, into the street and almost got hit by a Lincoln Navigator. Not too long after that, I bumped into my favorite gradeschool teacher on the sidewalk. I caught up with her for a few minutes before continuing on my path to my source’s destination. I arrived, and right before entering their office, I glanced back at the street. A Ford Thunderbird drove by. I remember entering the building in a daze. I felt high, as my mind ignited otherworldly thoughts. Déjà vu blossomed into full recall of my Thunderbird identity before I made it through the lobby. I stopped dead in my tracks and turned around. I never made it to the interview that day. Through that series of events, at once, I remembered I was a Thunderbird and doubled back to my apartment. I knew I’d have to link up with Kitty to get off planet. But I’ll let her tell you how we rendezvoused…”

I relinquished the floor to my Thunderbird apprentice.

Kitty’s Account

“You should have seen Bill, when I first came across him,” Kitty jumped right in.

“Bill appeared really quite content,” she said. “I was concerned my soul-freeing Thunderbird tactics would not ripple enough to free him. I tailed him for years, until the perfect moment presented itself.

“I felt like his guardian angel, checking in on him over terrestrial milestones. I remember when he first got his job at the paper, how happy he was. I remember when he earned his first byline reporting on a local 3-alarm fire that had burnt down the old Fargus mansion. I’d tail him on dates and visits with friends. I felt like Bill’s ghostly biographer, who knew Him better than he knew Himself. Of course, I was outside of Analog Earth’s timeline and could fast-forward to terrestrial Bill’s pivotal moments.”

“Why did Bill berth into this planet at all, if it ran the risk of forgetting his true identity?” an eager tavern-goer asked of our Thunderbird craft.

I thought to chime in on Kitty’s rendition, but then held back. I wanted to hear the reason in her words.

Kitty continued, first addressing the question from the audience.

“Drastic leaps like these are sometimes necessary for a Thunderbird,” she said. “Ideally, and often, we can leap in and out of worlds all while retaining our highest sense of self. This type of light leaping, however, doesn’t always get to the root of the world. Sometimes, in order to truly know a certain Earth version, the Thunderbird has to live it. That’s what Bill was doing down there on Analog Earth.”

“Makes sense,” we heard from the crowd. Sounded like the same guy who asked the initial question. Kitty veered back to her story.

“Anyway, my monitoring of Bill’s milestones was merely a precaution. Our thought, before mounting this leap, was that Bill’s Thunderbirdhood would occur to him naturally down on the ground. But when that didn’t happen by the checkpoint, I had to intervene. It took months of planning to align those six key-phrase cues on his walk that day.”

“How’d you do it??” apparently this guy thought we were in a Q&A segment, but Kitty pressed on unfazed.

“Well,” she said, “when you live outside a world’s timeline, you can see all causality at once. Cause and effect, in fact, are interchangeable like a chicken and an egg. ‘Which came first?’ It doesn’t matter. I knew what Bill needed to see to inspire the six key phrases. So I picked the best day in his routine where these crucial components could all occur in the correct order.”

I could tell Kitty’s Thunderbird training had really improved her leaping skills. She had answered his question expertly, but not sure it all landed to the pedestrian.

“I— I see,” he said. “Not sure I have the right frame of reference being stuck in this planet’s time, but I trust ya.”

“Thanks,” Kitty said. “Maybe we can take you on a leap sometime, and illustrate our point.”

She looked at me and smirked. We usually only leapt with Cheshire crew. Most terrestrials couldn’t handle the monsooning movierain of the multiverse.

“Once the Thunderbird idea had been firmly planted in Bill,” Kitty continued, “next, we just had to rendezvous. At that point, it was easy, since I was confident Bill had recalled his training. I knew, as he now knew again, that we’d have to meet at a place on planet where a natural vortex whirled. There just so happens to be one such vortex at the mountaintop on the outskirts of town. I was also confident that Bill would remember that timing mattered. He knew, as I knew, that a lunar standstill was coming up in a few days. So we met on the mountaintop three days after I unlocked Bill’s Thunderbird mind, during the full moon of the axial lunar precession that occurs only once every 18.6 years. After a heartfelt reunion, we leapt hand in hand back up to the Cheshire. That’s my story.”

Claps and cheers rang through the tavern back room. Kitty glanced quickly at me to see if I approved of her rendition. I nodded slightly to indicate it was spot on. I looked around at the rest of crew in-house tonight who hadn’t shared yet.

“OK,” I said. “Who else has a long-leap story?”

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If you liked that tale, you may like the novel, “Big Cat.” This story emanates from the same universe (or multiverse) of the book.

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