We landed on Jacob’s suggested forest city Earth upon departing from the Twelve’s paradise. The utopian, arboreal metropolis put even the best sci-fi renditions and architectural mockups to shame. Wiry plants crawled all over the towering wooden skyscrapers. Green as far as the eye could see. The ubiquitous shrubberies pumped so much oxygen into the air, an immediate state of fresh, clean calm filled our lungs and our spirits. We walked the grass-covered streets breathing the sweetest breezes any of our noses had ever inhaled.

We didn’t know anybody—any of the passersby, of course—so, we soon grew tired of the perfect floral society. My helmet had located some local public figures and other persons of interest we could visit, but I had a better idea.

“Let’s keep leaping,” I said. “Let’s not land on any particular world, just yet. Let’s fly through the dew, skimming personal worlds off of all of our deepest subconsciousnesses.”

“What do you mean, Bill?” the Cap was always the first to ask, after Kitty left to become a Thunderbird herself.

“We’re standing on the brink of infinity,” I explained. “We shouldn’t limit ourselves to single worlds just yet. Let’s surf the edges of these realities, until we find somewhere worth landing.”

“OK, but let’s first check in on Keith,” the Cap ordered. We had left him behind on the Cheshire to field any impromptu check-ins from Danny V.

The Cap radioed Keith, as we crew all held in superposition among the Dew.

“Keith!” I heard the Cap yell into her transmitter. “How are you doing back on the mothership? Has the UU called?”

“A few times, yes,” Keith reported, crackling over the Cap’s speaker. “This Earth Book the Twelve granted us has worked wonders. First, Danny V. asked where everybody was. I said you were all asleep and that I was on anchor watch, on our Lagrange Point. He grilled me on specific pedigree data about some of our latest tagging missions. The Book didn’t disappoint. No matter how detailed or precise Danny V.’s coordinates verifications, the Book delivered that data to the nth degree. Danny V. soon left me alone, once he realized he couldn’t stump me, or my secret weapon: this big, beautiful Earth Book!”

“Good to hear, Keith,” the Cap said. “We’re going to leap through a few worlds now. We’ll check back in later. If you need to reach us, well, you won’t know where to find us. But play my song into the receiver, and the tune should hopefully traverse dimensions.”

“Roger, Captain,” said Keith.

The Captain closed her transmitter and looked at me to take the lead. I held position, surfing at the tip of the flying V, leaning fully into the Dew to explore pure multiversal reality. Butterflies fluttered in my Thunderbird stomach. We were about to blow the ceiling off this consciousness.

***

The more we leapt—world to world—the more we realized it wasn’t just about the place. The people and events that occurred within that place mattered most. Timing was critical. My helmet’s compass lit the way toward serendipitous occasions, where I, Bill Thunderbird, and the Cheshire crew could drop in.

***

I had never hung in the movierain so long. Each world—a possible Earth—flew truly like a droplet through rain. And we, the Cap, the Cheshire crew and a Thunderbird bolted between these precipitates like the golden thread of lightning, rippling thunder in our wake.

This is really where my channeling technique came in handy. You see, before long, we had seen every possible, conceivable world our earthly imaginations could muster. We ran out of ideas. We grew wise to the traditional concepts, but eventually had to scrap those notions to successfully expand our minds into higher Truths. The droplets swoll heavier still.

As I surfed through the Dew, leading the way, I began listening to the rippling sounds of rain. They inspired overlapping circles to expand like water gently falling on the surface of some lake. The harmonious chords rung beautiful music inside my brain, and let the tones plot notes along this Grand electromagnetic staff.

It was a Higher calling, that I suspected the Order, or even the Twelve beckoned from afar to guide us along our divine path.

***

Channeling is like listening. On a telepathic level, almost, I don’t necessarily need to fully articulate the whispers later. I just sense on some innate level what they’re directing me to discover.

I heard the first of these whispers when out on the long expanse we spent surfing the Dew. I heard an author of this story beckoning me to pick him up, perhaps while writing the very fact that I was surfing the Dew between worlds, and hadn’t landed yet. But now a beacon called.

I dropped into his study. A bubble from nothingness grew to a size 10 feet in diameter in his home office off the living room—a quaint, carpeted, serene space. The silver barrier that encased my Drop evaporated like liquid nitrogen and, sure enough, he was writing, narrating every one of my movements not moments ago. He asked me to give him a lift.

That was another Thunderbird occupation I hadn’t mentioned yet: interdimensional chauffeuring. Maybe he could tell us where to go.

***

The writer became my therapist.

“Your problem is that you start out on voyages too vague,” he said one day to me, mid-flight. “A place and its people require context for their visitor to properly interpret. We’ll need to investigate the zeitgeists of their world. What’s the slang? And, most importantly, who are the players and where is their scene? Forthright reconnaissance will accomplish the necessary dossier to equip our knowledge as we enter from the Drop.”

I said nothing amidst the Dew. A beat.

Then, he continued, “…or you could just play a record, just prior to leaping between dimensions. The songs draw from this 5th-dimensional source. Their lyrics, melodies and tempos can light the way through the movierain.”

I asked him where he wanted to go. I think he was stalling.

“Well,” he said. “You need a good story for your Wednesday storytelling session at the tavern, correct?”

I nodded.

“Then, let’s find something about worth tellin’,” he continued. “Shouldn’t we try and find, Kitty? Everything you’ve told me about her leads me to believe she’s someone worth findin’.”

Again, I nodded. And we button-hooked it back toward the existential direction of the Twelve’s paddock. They were the last ones to have seen her. Our tether had been broken, now that she was no longer a crew member on the Cheshire. And instead, on hot pursuit to becoming a Thunderbird Herself.

From the 10-postion of my Drop—in the living room of the Shermer house—as we surfed the movierain, I queued the turntable to play the song, “Home Soon,” by DOPE LEMON.

Memories of my time with Kitty began flooding back into my mind. And I thought of where she might go. Our first stop was that world she had got lost in those months ago (or years depending on how you looked at it).

***

We were like black lightning flitting through worlds. In order to arrive at the precise Earth where Kitty had spent her terrestrial time, it wasn’t enough to just think of where she had been, and where I retrieved her those many moons ago. We had to create a 5th-dimensional path from our current position in the movierain to that infinitesimal coordinate among an impossibly huge haystack. We leapt worlds like skipping rocks to get their.

The key was not spending too much time on a particular Earth for too long. A lingering traveler became furniture on those planets, and thus stuck. I devised a wristwatch that counted down the crucial time spent on any one world. The source of a Thunderbird’s power draws primarily from the reacquaintance into perfect nothingness between dimensions. In fact, the incredible gravity Thunderbirds wielded emanated from the dark center of a supermassive black hole. And if we spent too long in lighter places, we’d become part of them.

The watch ticked down to our necessary departure. And then the sweet nothingness—the dewey space between drops of movierain provided the perfect palate cleanser, arresting lemon zest to snap me back into the highest reality—I was a Thunderbird leaping between worlds, on hot pursuit of Kitty.

We saw some exotic and interesting haunts en route to her. I remembered Kitty’s Earth, when I picked her up, was experiencing an ’80s era. So we worked our way back through the decades, tracking reverse time breadcrumbs that would lead us to an ’80s-era Earth that fit our criteria.

By the time we hit the ’90s, the author suggested we conduct a little exploring. I had perfected my craft at this point and could determine if a world was viable within a half hour—well before the watch counted down. We entertained his suggestion.

The ’90s was an interesting era for Earths. Almost all of them enjoyed a post-Cold War reality. Those that didn’t were blanked out by nuclear warfare. So that narrowed down our targets a bit. We went to one world where Kurt Cobain never killed himself. Nirvana were alive and well. We discreetly attended a concert, hanging in the rafters above the sold-out stadium, listening to the Kings of Rock ‘N’ Roll. Kurt shredded on his Stratocaster as the band played classic hits that I remembered from my childhood Earth, and also new masterpieces that delighted my virgin ears.

This ’90s-era exploring also taught us invaluable lessons about interdimensional leaping. Limitations are important, for instance. Keeping the worlds to only this time period helped us narrow down our descension points. If I recall, the very reason we even solicited the author’s help was to overcome the writer’s block of pinpointing destinations.

In our ’90s-era exploring, we learned that too many choices is a prison, in and of themselves. Imprisoned in nothingness, the perfection between movierain droplets, required us to point-select drops to enter.

We also landed on a ’90s Earth where computers never took over the prior ’80s decade. What an analog bliss that place was. It also reignited our reverse time breadcrumb trail to Kitty. I had remembered her Earth was one that never succumbed to the cyber allure that Jobs, Gates and others had inflicted upon the planet.

***

NEXT UP: They arrive on Kitty’s world. It’s a nostalgic late ’80s where Jobs never released the Mac and personal computing never took hold of society. “Analog bliss,” they nicknamed it. It’s quite a utopia compared to the cyber hell Bill’s from.

***