En route back to the Cheshire, I remember feeling exhausted. Surfing space-time can take a lot out of you. I passed out and fell under the unconscious heat of fever dreams that felt more like memories.

FLASHBACK:

I am in the middle of a torrential downpour. In fact, I am one droplet in the midst of this monsoon. And I’m leaping, like electricity, between the water. It’s effortless and seamless, fluidly transcending the falling precipitation. Each drop represents one version of Earth, and there are infinite iterations. The space between them, I call “the Dew.” Navigating this mist seems daunting, but it’s the only way to traverse the multiverse. This movierain flows always; it’s a fundamental Truth of our reality. It’s ever present and eternal as it falls continuously. I permeate the Dew until the gravity of some drop pulls me into its world. Oscillating between energetic and physical realities rings as my endless condition.

And I awake with the lingering thought that the movierain is always just there, within reach—like a hovering cloud—should I ever need to drop out of one world and reenter the Dew.

END FLASHBACK

***

After salvaging what would have been a scrapped mission, with Sully and Photo Joe, the Cap and crew were happy to receive me back on the Cheshire for once.

“I heard you actually pulled your weight finally!” the Cap said, as I walked onto the ship’s deck, following my two teammates. Before I could verbally accept praise, Sully chimed in to elaborate.

“Cap, you shoulda seen it. Joe and I were having a hell of a time tagging the event. I thought for sure we were going to have to return empty-handed. Then, this kid jumps up outta nowhere with a solution.”

As Sully recounted the triumph, I could feel the warm acceptance of each crew member’s eyes gazing fondly upon yours truly, the way the Sun shines rays down lovingly upon the skin releasing vitamin D. Before my head swelled too much, however, the tribute was interrupted by a call from Danny V., checking in on the mission. Cap and crew quickly snapped back into business mode reporting on progress to their superior. I retired to the supply closet.

Sully soon found me there, not too long after.

“You gotta teach me that technique, kid!” Sully would not let go of this newfound skill he admired in me.

“I’ll do my best,” I said. We agreed to meet each morning, down in the engine room before the rest of the crew were awake. We both thought it good to keep from Cap.

THE NEXT MORNING:

I woke up to Sully knocking on the supply closet door. He was a few minutes early. I warily rose to greet my eager pupil.

“I can’t wait to surf space, kid,” Sully said, as I opened the door to him. Sully was an accomplished pilot and lifelong learner. He was one of those guys who had a million hobbies, including cooking, from which the whole crew benefited. If he wasn’t experimenting with a new recipe or spacecraft maneuver, he was scouring the Akashic archives for information on some obscure topic. If he learned of a skill that intrigued him, he must excel at it. Space-time surfing was his current infatuation, and I was his teacher.

“OK,” I said, the both of us were now standing in the engine room, not five feet from the ship’s incredibly powerful internal reality oscillator.

I continued, “It’s fitting that we’re in close vicinity to this powerhouse of a machine.” I pointed to the oscillator. “Think of that as you’re concentrating electromagnetivity from above, down your shoulders and spine, through your legs, focusing the energy into two points on your inner ankles. The energy flows all around us. So we’re becoming a superconductor, channeling its flow through our bodies. It’s an endless rhythm, flowing in a torus fashion from above, through the middle (our lightning rod bods) and out through the soles of our feet, back into the ground and radiating outward until it elevates above again and back through the crowns of our heads. Rinse and repeat. Think of Earth’s Van Allen belts, which protect the planet. We are each the planet in this sense, and our focused torus energy acts as an electromagnetic field forming a protective bubble that can elevate us to any desired point within local space-time.”

“Holy shit, kid,” Sully stifled me. “I didn’t realize it was this involved. Bear with me.”

“Let’s sit in the lotus position,” I suggested. “Before we get into any high-octane hovering here, let’s meditate on focusing our torus energy.”

“Good idea,” he said. “I could use a break from that knowledge dump.”

For the next four mornings, we sat knee to knee, in the lotus position, concentrating on our personal Van Allen belts. By day 5, Sully had achieved full hover three inches above the engine room floor. Our pilot was a quick study.

“Now let’s try producing this torus energy while standing,” I said, upon observing that my student was ready for the next level. Keenly, he didn’t hesitate. In retrospect, I wish I had noticed how overeager he truly was.

Before I could get up, Sully was already emphatically concentrating his focused electromagnetivity, while squatting and appearing poised to power lift a Buick. Sparks flared and cracked between his ankles like iron sharpening on a whetstone.

“Now don’t fixate on a single point between your legs,” I said anxiously to my overly exuberant disciple. “Though we do need to balance on the ball lightning, we still need to make sure the energy flows freely to the ground. Focusing the gravity too heavily on a finite terminal can result in a tear—”

But it was too late. Sully’s electromagnetic enthusiasm had ripped a rift in space-time. The novice surfer was sucked through the mini black hole, which snapped shut like the ping of a drop hitting water. In the wake of light gravity ripplings echoing about the engine room, he was gone.

Panic struck. Call it what cliché you will: trial by fire; necessity mothering invention; fight or flight; but an otherworldly force took over my mind. I had barely completed the first Thunderbird trial at this point (learning to surf) and yet, now, in an instant, it became imperative that I leap dimensions and navigate the Dew to retrieve the unfortunate Sully. I would also not say that zen had been achieved in my makeshift electromagnetic Drop, but the adrenaline steadied my mind enough for a controlled leap. Luckily, the first Dew stop on any burgeoning Thunderbird’s leap in a new body is to the Equipment Room. That’s how I acquired my helmet.

In a supernatural zen state, frantic and steady, I leapt up into a ball lightning hover, as the last of Sully’s gravity ripples shimmered and faded away. Having never leapt dimensions in this life before, I somehow still knew concentrating enough electromagnetism between my ankles would breach the space-time beneath my feet. It worked, and before I knew it I saw surfing the Dew on a shaky but stable Drop flying through the movierain, calamitous and torrential as all hell. I had no idea where I was going or how I would find Sully, but a prominent droplet flew into view and I was drawn to it. Its gravity pulled me into its world and I found myself in the Thunderbird Equipment Room.

Led by my intuition alone, I glided through the many aisles of the Equipment Room, after passing through its giant pearly gates. Its shelves stretched infinitely in length and height, holding technology foreign to my knowledge, but I pressed deeper and deeper into the intricate labyrinth. At last, I arrived at a shelf that was eye-level as I hovered. There sat a Thunderbird’s helmet. It was smooth, like curved black glass, in the shape of an upside-down drop with a tiny dorsal fin at the top. A curved white line that came to a point by the mouth at the front resembled a bird of prey’s beak. When I touched it, two giant green eyes lit up. I instinctively donned the head-encompassing cap, which fit perfectly. On the inside was a viewfinder display that read my brainwaves, displaying information necessary for me to navigate the Dew. We had established a telepathic connection, myself and the helmet, which knew to play back the instant just before Sully’s fateful leap. The antenna fin atop the helmet tapped into his signal and tracked where the eager pilot had traveled within the Dew.

At once, I knew where to surf to retrieve Sully. I leapt from the Equipment Room the same way I had left the Cheshire’s engine room moments earlier—through a man-made rift in space-time. The helmet illuminated Sully’s Dew path, making it easy for me to follow. And I located the droplet world where he had landed. I descended into this world to find Sully slouched on a plush couch, in the living room of some city apartment. He had aged 20 years. Though it had only taken me minutes to collect my helmet from the Equipment Room and find him, the time dilation in this droplet world version of Earth had moved much faster. I somehow knew automatically how much time had passed for the poor Sully—metadata telepathically indicated to me from my newfound helmet most likely—and I wondered if he’d recognize me.

I was hovering just above the lethargic Sully—still in energetic form so that he couldn’t notice me. When I popped into physical view, floating above the couch potato, Sully sat up startled and bewildered.

“Sully! Sully! It’s me, Bill! Do you remember me??” I probably should have taken off my helmet before fully dipping into this physical world.

“Wha- What’s going on? Who or what are you?” Two decades had clearly taken their toll on him. I dropped from hover onto his living room floor and took off my helmet. He still didn’t recognize me.

“I know it’s been a while, but do you remember you used to be the pilot of the SS Cheshire? We were practicing space-time surfing in the engine room, and you accidentally leapt dimensions. The Dew must have dropped you in this alternate version of Earth.”

“My therapist told me those were just dreams, 20 years ago. You mean that previous life was real??”

“Very real. More real than this primitive, physical world. I’m here to take you back. Do you trust me?”

“Not really, but anything’s better than this slum. How do I get back?”

“Just come with me.”

I leapt back up into hover and extended my Drop to include the lump that was now Sully. We both hovered feet above his living room floor. Taking on the extra weight, I donned my helmet once again and leapt out of this bleak dimension back into the Dew. The helmet’s viewfinder made it easy to retrace my Drop steps back to the Cheshire’s engine room. The two of us re-entered our training floor not five minutes after Sully had originally departed, except now he was a shell of his former self.

My feet hit the floor beside Sully who had landed lying down—not unlike how he had been lounging on that couch. A stew of emotions bubbled up in my gut. I was relieved to have retrieved my friend and happy to be home, but had no idea how I was going to break the news to Cap that her star pilot had inexplicably aged 20 years and perhaps would be rusty flying the ship. And just when I had entered into her good graces.

As my mood calmed, my helmet lifted effortlessly above my head and vanished. It would float in superposition, like an invisible halo indefinitely, until I needed it again.

***

NEXT UP: Bill breaks the bad news about Sully to Cap. She’s pissed. The Cheshire’s tagging adventures have to take a brief hiatus without a pilot. Danny V.’s pissed. The whole crew’s pissed… at Bill (except for Kitty). Cap is so furious, in fact, she can’t look at Bill and orders the young stowaway to remain in his quarters (the supply closet). Only Kitty visits him. Sully probably would stop by from time to time, but he’s too busy relearning how to fly the spacecraft and operate its ever complex reality oscillator.

Bill has nothing but time. He experiences yet another flashback while meditating one day and remembers how to expand space-time, from the inside out. He forms his Drop, under the Cap’s nose. It’s decked out nicely, eventually. And he and Kitty begin to explore the multiverse… covertly. You see, as a burgeoning Thunderbird, Bill requires neither the pilot Sully, nor the Cheshire’s impressive hyperdrive to transcend dimensions. He just needs a jumping companion, in Kitty, who’s learning to leap herself quite effectively. The two leverage the Earth, Sun and Moon Themselves as the only spacecraft required of savvy Thunderbirds. Tethered together, they can triangulate back to the good ship Cheshire, however far their excursions may stretch.

Word spreads among the crew that Bill knows what he’s doing. Sully’s still not at 100%. Not even close. And as more and more of the crew come around to Bill, he takes them on he and Kitty’s adventures, all the while perfecting his craft. Cap eventually needs him again to quell Danny V.’s impatience, as a backlog of tagging requests pile up on the government worker’s desk. Bill has a breakthrough with Cap, a redemption of sorts, and she finally comes around.

And now, with the full Captain and crew on Bill’s side, the entire Cheshire can break free of Mr. V’s impossible workload. What a time to be a Thunderbird.

***