“What happened to the hologram of Earth_42?” Paul the North Star’s podcast host said. He was referring to that gently glowing orb of my most recent Earth that had hung in the Drop’s epicenter the last time I appeared on their show.
The Drop, as you may already know, was my 50-foot diameter sphere that acted as a sanctuary for navigating the multiverse.
“We’re going to do something a little different today,” I said, over the live feed to the two podcast hosts. “The Drop’s epicenter is clear for a little demonstration. This is normally how we astrally launch up into the movierain, from this focal point.”
Kitty and I were sitting in the lotus position next to each other in our spots in the zen garden that lied just below the Drop’s epicenter.
“My partner Kitty here,” I continued, “and I are going to perform a little demonstration of dimensional leaping between many worlds for your podcast audience.”
Our camera feed hovered above our physical seats, but I would switch to my helmet cam for a first-person POV once Kitty and I projected into our astral forms to surf the movierain multiverse. My helmet Bueller effortlessly transitioned between phases—physical to astral.
“Paul, Pete the Killer and all of your viewers will see what I see,” I said.
“Where are we going today, Bill?” Pete the Killer, Paul’s compadre, said.
I looked over at Kitty who sat quietly in meditation, readying her body, mind and spirit for the impending leap.
“We’re going to take you on my Earths Beat,” I said. “These are a dozen Earths that I’ve strung together in my travels. Each world contains infinite destinations, but I’m going to focus on locales that I think Kitty would like.”
Kitty opened her eyes, blushing a little, shooting a glance in my direction just to her right.
“Oh, I’m honored,” she said.
“Sounds amazing,” Paul said. “Just make sure to narrate what’s happening for our audience. I’ve heard the movierain can get kinda dicey.”
“Don’t worry. We won’t leave you in the dark,” I said. I had a lot of practice at narration, at that point, chronicling events in my Thunderbird log. Although this podcast format, in real time, was a little more off the cuff.
“Take it away, you two,” Pete the Killer said.
Kitty and I centered our physical bodies, sitting in the lotus position. We simultaneously projected our astral selves into the epicenter of the Drop, while our material forms remained sat. The podcast feed switched to my ethereal helmet’s viewpoint.
“We’re readying to enter the movierain,” I said. “In our energetic form, I’ll conjure an electromagnetic Alcubierre bubble around my center of gravity. Kitty will project hers too and we’ll tether together to maintain connection through the chaos.”
Ball lightning ignited between my astral feet. I maintained a tight orb between my ankles and then expanded a larger sphere to completely envelope Kitty and me. Our vehicle was primed for 5th-dimensional travel.
“Brace yourselves, fellas,” I said. “We’re about to break through.”
Impossible gravity surged into the fine point between my feet and then exploded out the larger orb holding us. The feed formerly featuring the serene setting of my personal Drop suddenly smashed cut to torrential rain pelting the outside of our energetic orb. We were surfing the movierain. Each droplet contained individual events, some held whole worlds, as they pelted the curved surface protecting us at speeds of pure thought.
“Can you hear us, guys?” I said to the two hosts.
“Yes, Bill!” Paul was yelling over the multiversal downpour.
“OK, we’re going to drop in first on Earth_Berkeley and check on the grassroots dimensional leapers,” I said. “I haven’t introduced Professor O’Halleran’s class to Kitty yet. Cue ‘Running From the Cops’ by Phantogram.”
The bubbling bass-blasting banger kicked on from the band themselves playing a gig in the basement below the Drop’s 10-o’clock position living room. It was a little, live musical accompaniment to ease our transition from physical reality into the Dew.
Mentally, I placed myself on the sprawling Berkeley campus to attain its unique vibe. My flying Drop orb vehicle resonated with the frequency this specific world emitted. Drops of increasing resemblance to Earth_Berkeley appeared right in front of us. We leapt into the fully precipitated drop of Earth_Berkeley, soaring over a green field and landed at the steps of Birge Hall. Since we were live, I sped up our pace, slightly accelerating the frequency to arrive at Prof. O’Halleran’s door. Kitty and I walked through the threshold, once we fully materialized from the astral plane.
“Professor O’Halleran,” I said, interrupting his class already in session. “There’s someone here I want you to meet.”
Back at the podcast studio, the guys were eating up this live content.
“This is great footage, Pete,” Paul said. “First we were in Bill’s Drop, then the movierain, and now we’re in a UC Berkeley classroom. All within a matter of seconds.”
I heard in my earpiece from Pete the Killer: “This is gold, Bill.”
“Bill!” Prof. O’Halleran said. “Love the pop-in.”
The professor’s students sat quietly, as I introduced him to Kitty.
“Class,” O’Halleran shifted focus to his students, “I want you to meet another dimensional leaper. This is Bill’s colleague Kitty, who’s a Thunderbird in training.”
“Hi, guys,” Kitty said. “Would love to hear what you’ve been working on recently.”
“Right now, we’re reviewing furthest leaps and how we developed those techniques,” Janice, O’Halleran’s star pupil, said.
“Oh, I love intriguing leap stories,” Kitty said. “I would love to hear yours.”
“Sure. Well, as we now know, distance is sort of an irrelevant term when it comes to 5th-dimensional travel. So I’ve decided to catalog my furthest leaps as those that are most exotic from our home world here. The professor has been working with me to push further and further without getting lost out there. I’ve made it as far as an Earth where humans have to share the title of ‘most intelligent species’ with several other life forms on planet.”
Kitty’s eyes lit up. “That’s a new one for me.”
I had been talking about Prof. O’Halleran’s class so much to her at this point, it felt refreshing to finally let her put names to faces. I was also aware we were broadcasting.
“Janice, hold that thought,” I said. It takes but a moment between seconds to leap. I turned to Kitty. “We gotta keep this train moving, but we’ll return to hear Janice’s story before long.”
And like that, Kitty and I leapt back up into my energetic Drop, astrally surfing the movierain. We left our newly materialized earthly shells back in the classroom, as placeholders to easily return.
“Guys! You still with us?” I said to the podcast hosts.
“We’ve been rolling this whole time,” Paul said. “Where to next??”
“Kitty told me she wants to check in on Earth_PeaceProject,” I said. “You’ll get to meet my Thunderbird buds, the Crows. They’re still stationed there.”
Droplet worlds flew by, as Kitty and I navigated the Dew. I let my mind frequencies resonate with the thought of the Earth_PeaceProject sphere, and it eventually held in superposition on our 12 in front of us. I drove the Drop into the full-fledged world and descended down to the New York City streets on this version of the planet, Earth_PeaceProject. I didn’t see any Crows in my immediate purview upon landing, but I could still sense their presence.
Earth_PeaceProject was an experimental planet for the Thunderbird Order. The planet had recently achieved worldwide peace, but the balance was tenuous at best. The Order had deployed Their most formidable of factions, the Crows, to maintain presence and keep the peace, while the planet and all of Her earthlings adjusted.
“You want to see how Leviathan’s doing?” I said to Kitty.
“Maybe He’ll look at me this time,” she said, dryly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll still have time to visit sunnier places. We’re just making the rounds now.”
I knew Kitty didn’t mind. She was always up for the adventure, wherever the destination. Her developing Thunderbird instincts had her, like me, wanting to check in on this planet’s peace. I told her not to worry more to remind myself that this running thread of a continuous outing was about showing her a good time.
Thunderbirds are psychically connected. After a brief consultation with Earth_PeaceProject’s Akashic, rather effortlessly, I located Leviathan who had stationed Himself and his first officers in Central Park of this planet’s NYC. We leapt there as the Crows fly.
Leviathan, the gargantuan Crow Leader, was perched up in a giant oak in the center of the park.
“How goes the peace project??” I yelled up to Him.
“Ah, Bill,” the 10-foot tall Thunderbird rumbled down from high up above, “you’ve returned.”
Kitty and I ascended up the oak’s trunk to meet him, bending gravity ever so slightly to hover within feet of the top Crow.
“How long has it been?” I said.
“It’s been a few weeks since you departed this planet,” He said. “But I’m not sure what that is relative to your own timeline.”
I wasn’t sure either. The passage of time becomes a bit futile in the midst of the multiverse.
“Has the planet remained at peace? Oh, and you remember Kitty, right?”
“Yes, hello,” He said. “We’ve encountered a few flare-ups, but nothing my Crows can’t manage. The Order says we should only have to remain for another month or so. Then we’ll just keep a watchful eye from a distance.”
“Any hotspots worth us covering?” I said. “We’re currently filming a piece for the North Star‘s podcast.”
“This is great stuff, Bill,” I heard Pete the Killer utter into my helmet’s earpiece.
“You may want to head to the West Coast,” Leviathan said. “L.A. and neighboring counties have exhibited riot bellwethers.”
“Roger that,” I said. “Big Cat and Kitty: out.”
From the top of that oak in the middle of Central Park, we leapt up into my energetic Alcubierre bubble. Gravity propelled us into the stratosphere, as we surfed miles above the contiguous United States.
Mid-flight, Kitty: “Are we going there now?”
“No,” I said. “Let’s leap back up into the movierain. It dons on me that someone I once knew on Earth_Home, my origin planet, asked me if I’d ever leverage my newfound Thunderbird knowledge to benefit the planet, kind of like what the Crows are doing for Earth_PeaceProject.”
“Oooh, your home planet!” Kitty said. “I’ve been meaning to visit.”
“I know.”
Droplet worlds torrented through our periphery as we sailed the Dew. I manifested Earth_Home in my line of sight, and we leapt to that world to rendezvous with Stacy, someone I had known in my terrestrial life there.
Kitty and I landed just outside the shop where Stacy and I used to get coffee. I didn’t have to channel Stacy’s vibration to locate my old friend; sure enough, she was in the coffee shop at the same time—Tuesdays at 2 p.m.—we had always met to chat. I opened the glass door and let Kitty in after me.
“Stacy!” I said. “How long has it been?”
“B-Bill?” Stacy said. “I never thought I’d see you again… It’s been a few years.”
“I promised you I’d return. I want to introduce you to my partner, Kitty.”
Stacy and Kitty made their acquaintances.
“Why have you returned after all this time?” Stacy said.
“I had to make good on your request. You said, if I could master leaping off planet, through the multiverse, would I return to share the wisdom from other planets.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “And?”
“And we found one such version of Earth, not unlike our home planet here, that has finally achieved world peace.”
I was referring, of course, to the planet we just leapt from—Earth_PeaceProject—where the Crows were currently occupying to ensure the peaceful times stuck.
“That’s outstanding,” she said, as she sipped her quickly cooling coffee. “What now?”
“Well, I wanted to finally introduce you to Kitty here. And I wanted to let you know that we may have found a solution to this planet’s woes.”
“I’ve heard so much about you and Bill’s home world,” Kitty said. She was mostly being polite. I hadn’t spoken much about Stacy.
“I’m going to consult my Thunderbird colleagues, the Crows, next and see if they can find the time to swoop down to this ground. But I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“Bill,” Stacy said, “you’re nothing if not reliable. I appreciate your remembering our conversation that seems like lifetimes ago.”
She had no idea how many lifetimes it had been.
“We’ll be back!” I said. And like that, Kitty and I swiftly exited the coffee shop and right there on the sidewalk, I leapt up into my electromagnetic Alcubierre bubble. So did Kitty. Hovering a story or two above the ground, we broke spacetime back into the movierain. Off to the next world.
“I couldn’t believe the look on Stacy’s face,” Pete the Killer said into our earpieces, as we surfed the multiverse.
“Thunderbirds leaping freely between worlds can have that effect on terrestrials,” I said.
I turned to Kitty, who was surfing on my 8.
“I have a surprise for you!” I said. “Enough about my past, time to take you to one of your bucket list locales.”
Kitty’s light-up eyes on her helmet built from white to a beautiful violet. I concentrated on the identifying frequency for Earth_Letterman and resonated.
The spherical Drop which housed Kitty’s and my shuttle through the multiverse took on a deeply dark hue. The calamitous frequencies quieted to a dull chatter. Its membrane dissolved and we both touched down light of foot to a cool, linoleum floor. We were backstage on the Late Show with David Letterman.
“Are we going out there?” Kitty said. The tone in her voice indicated she was excited and a little nervous.
“Yeah, I set it up so we would be Letterman’s next guests,” I said. “I know you’ve always wanted to appear on a talk show.”
We heard the band play on between segments. And as the crowd settled, Letterman filled the large silence left by the formerly clapping studio audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Letterman commanded the attention of his production, “our next guests come to us from extremely far away. Please welcome Bill Thunderbird and Kitty.”
The audience applauded and cheered as we were whisked out on stage. Kitty and I walked out together, side by side. Letterman jaunted out from behind his desk to meet us halfway. He kissed Kitty’s hand and then extended his own to shake mine. He whispered in my ear as the crowd continued their applause.
“Good to see you again, Bill,” he said. “Let’s have a good set.”
Kitty sat in the seat closest to Letterman’s desk and I flanked her right side. As we sat and Letterman resumed his Late Show throne, his faithful studio audience quieted in the dark theatre.
“Welcome back, Bill,” he said. “And this is my first time meeting Kitty.”
“Yes, this is my partner, Kitty,” I said.
“Nice to meet you, Dave,” Kitty said.
“Well, what have you two been up to lately?” Dave jumped right in.
“Oh, you know, just a little leaping,” I said. “We’re actually recording a podcast right now for my paper, the North Star.”
“How lovely,” Dave said. “What’s that, synergy?”
His crowd chuckled.
“And what has Kitty been doing while all of this dimensional leaping has commenced?” he said.
“I’m currently in Thunderbird training,” Kitty said. “Bill’s one of the best. I feel like I can learn a thing or two accompanying Him on these voyages through various levels of consciousness.”
“Wow, that sounds exciting,” Dave said.
Their conversation continued. I could tell Dave took a liking to Kitty. How could he not? As their banter continued, I queued to Kitty telepathically that we’d astral leap out of these bodies at the next commercial break.
“Alright, ladies and gentlemen, more with Kitty and Bill when we come back,” Dave said.
In the middle of a moment’s pause during our off-air small talk with the late-night host, Kitty and I leapt back up into our energetic selves hovering a few feet in midair of the Ed Sullivan Theatre. Before we left the dimension, Kitty grabbed my arm and turned to me.
“We’re just going to leave, mid-interview?” she said.
“We’re in between moments right now on this Earth,” I said. “We can return where and when we left off with Letterman. He won’t even notice we’ve left.”
“OK, cool,” she said. “Gotta keep it moving for the podcast audience.”
“We appreciate it!” we heard Paul say into our helmets. “Loving this flow.”
“Where next, fearless leader?” Kitty said.
“I thought we’d take a trip down memory lane,” I said. “Remember those Earths you had to rescue me from?”
“Yes!” she said. “Those are some of my first retrievals. You remembered.”
I set an existential course with Earth_Analog2020, vibrating our Drop to attune with this Earth version’s vibe. Before long, we descended into the atmosphere of the planet that had helped me set the first record for longest stay. We flew to The Herald‘s offices, where I had worked as a local reporter for the small-town weekly.
“I feel like I was just here yesterday,” Kitty said, as our Thunderbird feet touched down.
I knew all too well to what she was referring. When you spend decades on a planet, the familiar sights, sounds and scents suck your earthly mind back into the furniture of that landscape. Spend too long on a planet, and you’ll forget altogether how to leave.
“I thought this Earth might spur some feelings of nostalgia,” I said. “I want to introduce you to my first newspaper editor, at the Herald.”
We entered the paper’s main office lobby. The receptionist, Mildred’s face went white at the sight of me.
“Bill?!” she said. “What happened to you?”
“Uh, hi, Mildred,” I said. “I had to take a remote assignment rather abruptly. Sorry for the no notice. Is John the editor in? Oh, and this is my partner Kitty.”
“Hi, Kitty,” she said. “Yes, yes, he’s in his office. I’ll buzz you two through.”
John’s reaction to our impromptu pop-in was similar to Mildred’s. He looked like he had seen a ghost upon setting eyes on me. I guess, in some ways, he had.
After a somewhat awkward introduction I mediated between him and Kitty, we found ourselves sat in his office reminiscing on old stories I had reported for the Herald. I could sense the conversation could go long, since apparently a lot had happened in town since I left. Telepathically, I connected with Kitty again who was sitting next to me on John’s sleek, leather couch.
“I want to keep catching up with John,” I said mentally to Kitty’s mind. “At the next pause in conversation, let’s astrally leap out of our physical bodies. We can return to this exact point whenever—us sitting on my editor’s couch engaged in conversation—we just need to keep the podcast feed moving.”
“Sounds good,” she pung back telepathically.
“We appreciate it,” Paul said in our helmets. He and Pete the Killer and their entire live podcast audience could hear our internal dialogue as well.
Then, John’s voice volume ramped up rapidly the way your childhood teacher’s lecture could snap you out of a daydream.
“Remember that fire at the Fargus mansion?” John said. “The blaze was huuuge.”
I sunk into the couch leather, pretending to contemplate on that momentous time, but really I was mentally preparing to astrally leap. And in that pregnant moment of pause, Kitty and I leapt out of our physical shells set in editor John’s office, with the newsman none the wiser.
Amidst the movierain, surfing the multiverse once again, I keyed Kitty into our next destination.
“All this newspaper talk has me wanting to check in on how the nascent local weekly on Earth_Suburban is shaping up,” I said. “Jacob and Gabe’s Earth in the Drop’s 10-o’clock position seems like the next natural stop.”
“I’m sensing a trend here,” Kitty said. “That’s now two Earths you’ve mentioned where you’re tied to local newspapers. Didn’t I also free you from Earth_3.14159×10^100, while you were working for a local weekly there?”
“Yeah, the Gainsville Gazette,” I said. “It’s not surprising that I gravitate toward this type of work while undergoing terrestrial existence. It’s basically what we’re doing now on a 5th-dimensional level—covering a beat.”
“Except your regular haunts are entire planets, instead of physical establishments in some sleepy town,” chimed Pete the Killer, as my helmet continued to broadcast our multiversal journey.
“That’s why I call this rhythmic leaping between harmonic spheres the ‘Earths Beat,'” I said. “Reporting in the 3rd, 4th or 5th dimension is baked into my DNA on any plane of existence.”
I channeled the frequency for Earth_Suburban, and two seconds later Kitty and I found ourselves standing on a street corner in the town center of Shermer. Usually, while visiting this planet, we’d head directly to the tavern for a good storytelling session with our brethren townsfolk. But today, we were hot on pursuit of the exciting, burgeoning trend bringing the craft of local print news reporting back to this region.
“Bill, take a look at this,” Kitty said, gesturing to a small, yellow newspaper vending machine on the sidewalk.
The periodical dispensing box read across its top: “Shermer Sun.” It was a local weekly that had just sprouted from the growing reintroduction to local news sweeping the region. It was exciting and refreshing to witness the resurgence of democracy’s fourth estate happening in Shermer and the greater county at large. More interesting, the headline:
“Who Are These Mysterious Weekly Visitors?” the front page read. And there was a giant, blurry photo of shadowy figures clumped together walking downtown at night. I could clearly make out the silhouette of my helmet and dorsal feather from one of the figures. The lead story was about this Thunderbird and his Cheshire crew.
“Uh oh,” I said. “It appears our clandestine storytelling in town has leaked. Well, that’s just good investigative reporting. Grab a copy.”
The paper had printed and delivered but one issue and local news was already hot on the trail of yours truly. The story added mystique to our presence in Shermer. It also acted as a warning that we need to be a little more discreet on our Wednesday night visits.
“Looks like you guys are already famous here,” I heard Pete the Killer say into our helmets.
“If they could procure this photo under the cover of night,” I said, “there’s no telling what witnesses could get in broad daylight like right now.”
I turned to Kitty, “Let’s leap back to the Cheshire for a moment. I want to pick up Guillermo and head to his Earth in the Drop’s 12-o’clock position next. We can return to Shermer momentarily, albeit inconspicuously.”
So as not to further blow our cover, Kitty and I slunk into the Shermer Public Library and set a breadcrumb to return. And, from the stacks, we astrally leapt back up into the movierain and onto the Cheshire spaceship. We found Guillermo in the galley making a sandwich.
“Guillermo,” I said. “Kitty and I are currently recording a podcast for the North Star and wanted to show them your jungle Earth. Care to join us?”
“As long as I can eat while we leap,” he said.
There, from the Cheshire kitchen, I added Guillermo’s energetic essence in addition to Kitty’s already in tow of my hovering spherical Drop, and piloted the electromagnetic Alcubierre bubble to what I had coined Earth_Guillermo, a planet with the largest Amazonian rainforest I had ever seen. I relinquished the tour guide reins to our shaman.
As we phased my Drop vehicle from the Cheshire’s kitchen, vibrating the Drop’s outer wall membrane to the frequency of Guillermo’s jungle Earth, I introduced our new guest to the podcast hosts.
“Guys,” I said, “this is the Cheshire’s resident shaman Guillermo. He’s the one who originally taught me how to tap into a planet’s fundamental essence. He’s done so on the jungle planet we’re about to land upon. So I thought it fitting to let him lead the way.”
“Great to meet you, Guillermo,” Paul said. “You may have a tough act to follow. Bill and Kitty here have led myself, Pete and our entire live audience on the merriest of excursions, thus far.”
“Don’t worry, fellas,” Guillermo said. “The forest is plentiful with spirits and magic, which tell a never-ending tale.”
We touched down on the forest floor of Earth_Guillermo. Guillermo, as our guide, wasted no time. He quickly found a serene place to sit and meditate under a giant Shihuahuaco tree. I could telepathically tell he had tapped into the planetary essence and was communing with Its vast network of flora.
“I’m talking to the trees,” he said, with eyes still closed.
We sat in silence for a few beats. We could only hear the peaceful sounds of nature. Then, Pete the Killer chimed in.
“I’m digging this spiritual experience,” Pete said, “but it doesn’t make for great TV.”
I knew Guillermo’s conversations with plant spirits could last hours, even days. So I took Pete’s cue to move onto the next world.
“Guillermo,” I said, “we’ll leave you to the plant spirits for now and we’ll return in a few.”
Eyes still closed, Guillermo gently nodded. Kitty and I leapt back up into my energetic Drop, broke through the local spacetime into the movierain and descended into the next droplet world, Earth_CityFlat, whose entrance sat permanently at the 2-o’clock position of my stationary Drop. It was always only a thought or two away, when piloting the tighter, epicentral orb of the Drop, mid-flight, through the movierain.
“I have another surprise for you,” I said to Kitty as we touched down on a Village street in Earth_CityFlat’s local neighborhood. “You know some of that new music you heard me listening to the other day?”
She nodded.
“I’m going to take you to the origin of this new form,” I said. “The movement’s burgeoning in a city neighborhood just north of here.”
The city was electric with the scent of new music. “Beep boop,” they called it. Earth_CityFlat’s spirit Ariadne had tipped me off to where some of the prime players in this new art form hung out.
We zipped to one artist’s basement recording studio. His name was Bowflex. After energetically hovering through city streets to the north neighborhood, we materialized onto Bowflex’s stoop. I rung the doorbell. Bowflex answered.
“Bill! I had a feeling you may be dropping by,” he said.
“Bowflex, I want to introduce you to my partner, Kitty,” I said.
“Hey, Kitty. I understand you’re a fan of beep boop.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I had never heard anything like it before, but now I’m hooked.”
And we descended into Bowflex’s basement. He showed us a few tracks he was working on. And we got into the origins about how this new art form was taking shape.
“You need a magazine to chronicle this artistic movement,” I said. “In the early days of hip hop, they had the Source. It created a central reference for all artists and fans to check in on how this new music was evolving. New albums, for instance, would earn anywhere from 0 to 4 microphones. Maybe beep boop could incorporate some kind of rating system like that.”
Bowflex’s mixing board lit up in synchronization with the beep boop beats playing in the background.
“How did this musical form originate?” Kitty said.
The beeps and boops grew louder. It’s as if the new music herself had heard Kitty’s question.
“Oh, that’s quite a story to tell,” Bowflex said.
I looked over at Kitty. As we sat in swivel seats behind the studio’s blinking console, I telepathically indicated to her that it was time to astrally leap again. We’d leave our physical shells swiveling in these seats for now and return to hear Bowflex’s story.
We leapt. My orb expanded around Kitty and me, undetected by Bowflex in his dark, basement studio. Back unto the movierain we went.
“It’s time to head to Ron and Rachael’s Earth,” I said. “I also wanted to introduce you to Poseidon on Earth_Ocean.”
Breaking into the water world of Earth_Ocean was perhaps one of our easiest exits from the movierain. The watery planet of Ron and Rachael was Poseidon’s main haunt, although He populated all Earths’ water—real, imagined, dreamt or otherwise. He was probably one of my most famous friends.
“I can’t wait to meet the ocean god,” Kitty said, as we glided at high speeds, several meters above the ocean’s briny chop. A cliffed, green coast hung just over the horizon. Thick mist occupied the space between us and the land mass. We wouldn’t have even seen that edge were it not for the lighthouse shining brightly on top of the highest cliff. We circled the giant spire three times and then darted back out to sea. It was easier to summon Poseidon when sailing way out on the water where one could nearly forget there was land.
After several seconds of careening fleetly, a giant whirlpool formed in the water below. We button-hooked around that, as it grew in diameter. At its center, emerged the massive ocean god, Poseidon.
“Bill!” He said with the clamour of a hurricane. “Nice of you to visit. Who’s this?”
“Kitty, sir!” I said. “I told her of our exploits together and she wanted to meet you.”
“I’m honored,” He said. “Would you care to accompany me on a current sea squall about to take place? We can swim and chat.”
We tethered our enegetic orb to the ocean god, who pulled us through the saltwater as if it were fog. When we finally resurfaced, we were a few hundred yards out from a tropical archipelago.
“We need to intervene at this surf community,” He said. “Like the crashing waves their culture celebrates, they’re currently weathering a potentially volatile conflict that we need to quell. I could handle this calamity myself, but glad to have Bill and his friend as company.”
The strip of tiny islands flung out on an otherwise open ocean were unable to reach consensus. The two main ali’i—Kamehameha IV and Ko’olau—who ruled opposite ends of the archipelago were at odds. They were in disagreement on how to handle the impending storm fast approaching their lands.
“The terrible squall Tugbato is in hot pursuit of these islands,” Poseidon said, as we approached. “The cyclone forms once every 50 years. It devastates the islands every time. Even worse: the two island monarchs and their subjects can’t agree on how to weather Tugbato this time.”
Poseidon would go on to explain to Kitty and me that one chief, Kamehameha, intended to stand their ground, resisting the destructive forces of this 50-years storm with the unifying might of their people. His equal, Ko’olau would rather sail out to sea and wait out the storm. He believed whatever destruction their islands sustained could be repaired, but human lives could not be replaced. The two chieftains represented the two schools of thought among all their people, but a divided archipelago would not survive. Time was running out, and as one unified island nation they needed to remain.
We touched down on the beach. The air was eerily calm. It was the calm before Tugbato.
“Now, Bill and Kitty, it’s a law of the sea that I can’t intervene directly with these island people,” Poseidon said. “I have ideas on how I’d usually protect the sea-faring community, but I’m interesed in what you may think.”
I turned to Kitty standing next to me in the sand. I had some ideas on how to save these people, while keeping their fragile political structure intact, but we had one final stop to make on our continuous journey. Telepathically, I indicated to her that we’d leave these earthly shells on the beach for now to return momentarily. We wouldn’t leave Poseidon hanging.
I slowed time on the islands to a near standstill. Kitty and I leapt our energetic selves out of those earthly bodies. I formed the Alcubierre orb and like that we were flying among the movierain once again.
“What’s our final destination?” Kitty said with eager anticipation.
“We have to head to Earth_Baseball,” I said, “in the 8-o’clock position of the Drop. But we’re not going to a baseball game today.”
“Oh, then why do we need to head there?”
“There’s something I haven’t told you about Earth_Baseball yet,” I said. “It’s also your Earth of origin. We’re headed there to meet your parents.”
Even sailing high in the 5th-dimension, with her Thunderbird helmet on, I could tell Kitty blushed at my delivery of this news.
“I had always sensed something special about that particular planet,” she said. “I’m both excited and nervous to introduce you to my parents.”
I resonated the precipitating orb of our Drop with the frequency of Earth_Baseball. A large, droplet world formed just ahead of us as we flew. And we descended down into its world. We landed on the doorstep of Kitty’s childhood home, where her parents still lived. I rung the doorbell. Kitty and I made sure to remove our helmets before her parents answered the door.
“Kitty!” her dad said, upon opening the grand, oak entrance with a golden knocker. “How are you here right now?? We thought you’d be stationed on the other side of the universe in the Cheshire for at least another five years. What a pleasant surprise!”
“Yes, I am still stationed there, dad,” she said. “We’re actually still aboard that spaceship if you can believe it. We’ve manifested physical forms on this planet, after leaping impossible distances of time and space, so that I could introduce you and mom to my partner, Bill, here. I’ve been leaping dimensions with Him lately. That’s the only way I could be here right now.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” I said, and held out my hand to shake.
“You too, Bill,” he said, and then he looked at Kitty. “Well, your mother’s inside somewhere. Come in and sit down, you two, we’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.”
We entered the quaint colonial and sat down on the couch in the living room. Kitty’s dad called up to his wife to come visit with their unexpected guests. As Kitty and I waited for her mom to descend from upstairs, I telepathically connected with her.
“While we wait for you mom,” I said (telepathically), “let’s leap back up into the movierain and leave our physical bodies sat on your parents’ living room couch. It’s time to do the rounds for all the worlds we’ve visited in this podcast, thus far.”
Kitty gently nodded, as her dad searched his words for small talk, and we astrally leapt out of that home, unto the movierain once again.
The droplet worlds flew by our peripherals as fast as ever.
“OK, guys,” I said to the two podcast hosts, who had remained quiet on the last two worlds we visited, “we’re going to pick up the pace on this dimensional leaping a bit. We’ve left bookmarks on all destinations. We’ll seamlessly return to each.”
“Sounds great, guys,” Paul said through our helmet earpieces.
The house band’s tempo kicked up to “Jolene,” by Dolly Parton.
First, we resonated our traveling orb with the world frequency of Earth_Berkeley, where the professor and his students were exploring dimensional leaping techniques. We seamlessly re-entered that Earth space and the Berkeley classroom exactly where we had left off, a half hour or so ago on the live podcast runtime. Although no time had passed for Professor O’Halleran and his students…
Janice was about to tell us of the most exotic Earth she’s visited.
“Humans were not the only intelligent species on this version,” she said. “There were also these rather large, lizard people—standing eight or nine feet tall—that had emerged centuries ago from deep, underground caves.”
“What were they like?” Kitty’s eyes were wide with curiosity.
“It turns out that they had been running the world from the shadows,” Janice said.
At her utterance of “shadows,” the spacetime surrounding Kitty and me began to shake. My Thunderbird id was resonating with another recent world we had visited—Earth_PeaceProject. Our entire space was consumed with wavy lines that resembled the heat signatures rapidly subliming from the asphalt of some desert highway on a 100-degree day. The concept of shadows linked Kitty and my consciousness to the hearts of those resisting peace on L.A. streets. They were about to riot.
The shimmering that encompassed us calmed. And we found ourselves next to the Crow Thunderbird Jab, who was currently hovering mere feet above Sunset Boulevard in L.A. A large crowd growing in hostility had formed down on the ground. They brandished handmade signs that read things like “Peace is not peace, if it’s forced!” and screaming things like “Go home, Crows!” They clearly had not liked the imposed peace project upon their planet.
“Bill!” Jab said. “Where did you come from?”
“I was just talking to your leader Leviathan,” I said. “He told me that things were flaring up on this corner of the globe. We’re here to help or at least observe the Crows in action.”
“It’s nothing we can’t handle,” the intimidating Crow said. “We’re not all force, you know. We’ll enter each one of these rioters’ minds to better understand what in their past is prompting them to resist our presence so violently. Though, right now, they wish us harm, we as enlightened beings know that this rage is misguided. We’re happy to correct their pathologies.”
“…Correct their pathologies” echoed in my mind. Our setting—these L.A. streets—blurred once again, like it had done in Berkeley’s Birge Hall classroom. I tuned our world frequency from Earth_PeaceProject to Earth_Home, where Stacy awaited our response for curing her world’s qualms.
Kitty and I landed just outside the coffee shop, in the wake of our exit point from that exact locale earlier in the broadcast. Stacy was still sipping her coffee that had not yet cooled.
“I didn’t expect you back so soon,” Stacy said, upon our return to the coffee shop.
“We’ve spoken to the Crows,” I said. “I haven’t convinced them yet to visit this planet. They’re still dealing with quelling Earth_PeaceProject. But we have gleaned some wisdom.”
Mid-sip, Stacy nodded to indicate I should continue.
“Thunderbirds, like the Crows you see, possess the uncanny ability to enter the hearts and minds of earthlings,” I said. “They can intimately understand why a person or militant group of people can resort to violence. That’s what they’re doing on Earth_PeaceProject.”
“And you think they could do that for this Earth?” Stacy said.
Kitty and I were sat on either side of Stacy, at the window-side bar of the coffee shop. It takes but a moment between seconds to leap. At Stacy’s uttering of “…Earth?” our local spacetime blurred once again. I could have answered Stacy right then and there, but I knew we could return at the speed of thought. So we left our corporeal bodies sat in that coffee shop, as the time on Earth_Home slowed to a snail’s motion.
The blurring continued. Kitty’s and my energetic selves reverberated with all electromagnetism. And when the vibrations calmed, we were both still sat. But now back on the set of the Late Show of Earth_Letterman.
Letterman and I sat on either side of Kitty, Letterman at his talk show desk of course. The stage was dark, as the host had just sent us to commercial break.
“Great first segment, guys,” Letterman said, leaning in, as his band played on.
The overhead lights beamed bright. The band stopped.
“OK, we’re back!” Letterman said. “So you been to any cool worlds or what?”
“Well, as we mentioned before the break, we’re currently filming a podcast right now,” I said. “We’re touring their audience through about a dozen or so worlds.”
“Oh yeah?!” Letterman’s interest was piqued. “Any of them got, uh, any of those vuvuzelas?”
The studio audience laughed at Letterman’s callback to those cheap, plastic horns ubiquitous in World Cup stadia.
“We’ve recently come from an Earth where inhabitants have spontaneously learned to dimensionally leap,” Kitty said. “We’ve visited an Earth that has just experienced planetary peace. We’ve also landed on Bill’s home world, all just minutes before appearing here, Dave.”
“That is fantastic,” Letterman said. “Must feel like the rug pulls out from right under ya, huh?”
“Oh ya,” I said. And then I telepathically pinged Kitty to keep her corporeal body sat in Letterman’s guest chair. The Ed Sullivan Theatre’s cool air then blurred and shimmered. When our minds’ eyes focused again, Kitty and I were sat on Herald editor John’s leather couch, of Earth_Analog2020.
“Remember that Fargus fire?” John repeated his question for emphasis.
“Yeah, that was my first story,” I said. “I cut my reporter’s teeth on that fire.”
“You’ll be happy to know,” Kitty interjected, “that Bill has continued his reporter craft.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” John said. “Well, there’s been a lot happening around here in your absence.”
The mention of “absence” was enough of a segue for me. John’s office blurred. We’d return soon to satisfy the cliffhanger of what the Herald had covered recently. But right now, I tuned our frequency to Jacob and Gabe’s Earth_Suburban, where their town weekly had been reporting on these Thunderbirds.
The 5th-dimensional dust settled. And Kitty and I stood in the Shermer Library stacks where we had left our breadcrumb—a small, non-descript paper bookmark we had tucked inside a novel on a nearby shelf. We were both dying to know how a Shermer Sun reporter had caught wind of our weekly Thunderbird presence.
We had left a copy of the newspaper on a table between the library stacks, where people sat to study. The periodical was still there, since barely a moment had passed relative to this world. Within the privacy of those back aisles, we continued to read the front-page story.
The lede: “They only seem to appear on Wednesday nights, descending down from a quaint cape in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Their neighbors report little to no activity around the house the rest of the week. Are they world travelers? CIA? The people of Shermer want to know. A few townsfolk have seen these mysterious, weekly figures enter the tavern on Wednesday nights. Although, after asking several of the regulars there if they can provide any more detail to these unknowns, their invariable response was of no help to this reporter: ‘No comment.'”
“Good,” I said, putting down the paper. “At least the tavern guys haven’t dimed us out yet. As long as they keep our presence close to the vest, no ripple effects should escape Shermer.”
“Maybe we should keep moving,” Kitty added. “Being here in broad daylight is making me antsy.”
“Duly noted,” I said. “And next Wednesday, we should probably enter the tavern through the back door.”
The stale air in the Shermer Library began to shimmer. I was preparing Kitty and my relative spacetime to tune into a new frequency—Earth_Guillermo. Vibrations all around increased rapidly and then subsided. And we stood in the Amazon jungle. Guillermo was still meditating. He was in full trance, attuned to the plants talking to him. And he was singing an icaro that melodically interpreted their higher floral language.
We didn’t immediately want to stir Guillermo from his transcendental practice. We took a breath.
“Bill,” Paul piped up. “How are you leaping between these worlds without passing through the movierain intermediary?”
“Great question,” I said, always eager to illuminate laymen on our Thunderbirdcraft. “Each world, each individual event even, carries its own signature frequency. I’ve become attuned to the dozen or so worlds we’ve queued up for this show. So now, it’s just a matter of tuning our own existential frequency to resonate with each.”
“Fascinating,” he said, as Guillermo’s plant chanting hummed in the background on our end.
Then, Guillermo slowly awoke from his trance.
“The roots beneath our feet are electric,” Guillermo said. “I’ve talked to the plants and they have a message for the humans: Though you walk freely among the forest floor, you, me, we are all connected. You must understand that your individual actions affect the whole…”
Guillermo then slipped back into a melodic icaro.
“Let’s leap to the next dimension,” I whispered to Kitty, “while he continues his download from the rainforest plants.”
My energetic orb surrounding Kitty and me blurred the inside spacetime and I tuned frequencies to Earth_CityFlat. We were still sat in Bowflex’s basement recording studio. He was about to tell us the origin of beep boop.
“As in almost all musical forms,” Bowflex said, “there were a combination of factors that we can attribute to its origin. But the signature sound of beep boop harks from those throwback dial-up modems in the internet’s infancy. Remember those?”
Bowflex was referring to the cacophonous sounds of digital data that Earth_CityFlat (and many Earths like it) heard to access the internet over phone lines, via dial-up modems. From a musical perspective, the juxtaposed tones carried no tune, but some savvy, experimental composers of that time heard potential where others only suffered noise. Bowflex would go on to explain that these pioneers sampled the modem sounds, layering them over instrumental tracks.
“The resultant music emulated jazz’s improvisational bebop and scatting, but with a modern feel,” he continued.
“Kind of reminds me of Guillermo’s icaros that speak to the plants,” Kitty said.
“Who’s Guillermo?” Bowflex said.
Kitty and I looked at each other, our eyes searching the other’s for how to explain our colleague. It takes but a moment between seconds to leap. So in that pregnant pause, I telepathically indicated to Kitty that it was time to phase to the next dimension. I resonated our relative spacetime with that of Earth_Ocean‘s and, like that, we were again standing on the sandy beach of the archipelago, with Poseidon.
When last we left them, a storm was fast approaching.
“Any ideas?” Poseidon said, as groups of natives grew in size and frustration by the water’s edge. A line in the sand had been drawn by the two chieftains, where their people chose sides on an archipelago now divided.
“Let me fly out to meet Tugbato on the open water,” I said.
But before I could wait for a response from the water god or Kitty herself, I lifted Kitty and myself out of our beach bodies and resonated our Alcubierre bubble with the frequency for Earth_Baseball.
If you recall, we were sitting in Kitty’s childhood home, on the living room couch. Last we left her dad, he was making small talk. We could answer his mundane questions easily enough—things like “How are you liking your work aboard the Cheshire?” or “Are you getting along with Captain?”—that I could also telepathically talk to her in tandem.
“What do you mean you’re going to meet the storm Tugbato?” Kitty said to me telepathically.
“I think there’s a way for both island chieftains to be right,” I said in our collective minds, “without splitting their people down the middle OR facing imminent destruction.”
We heard Kitty’s mom’s footsteps on the stairs.
“Is that my daughter I hear down there?!” her mom said.
Before her mom could enter view, though, I blurred our spacetime once again. At our next breath, we were tuned to the Earth_Berkeley classroom.
“The lizard people did NOT like that I possessed the ability to leap dimensions,” Janice continued. “I only stayed for a moment, and then quickly returned to this Earth.”
“How do you think you were able to reach such an exotic Earth?” I said.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t entirely know. I do know that my mind was the most clear it has ever been just prior to leaping.”
“Perhaps the pure nothingness allowed an Earth from near obscurity to enter your purview,” Kitty said.
The class contemplated on this profound notion. I seized the moment to blur our reality onto Earth_PeaceProject.
Kitty and I were hovering with Jab and His murder of Crows once again, high above the L.A. streets ready to riot. The Crows were deep in midair meditation. They were entering the minds of the would-be rioters to better understand their motives.
We telepathically followed Their cerebral signatures reading each of the militant earthlings down below. Images of their past trauma flooded the podcast feed. Some had been beaten as children. Others had been picked on or were otherwise ostracized as youths. Whatever each respective rioter’s case, they had misdirected their rage toward the Crows.
I tuned our existential channel to Earth_Home where we still sat with Stacy in the coffee shop. She had just asked if the Crows could perform similar peacekeeping services for her Earth.
“I believe they can,” I said. “They travel into the minds of aggressors to better understand their motives. I don’t see why they couldn’t do that here.”
“They really attack the violence at the source, huh,” Stacy said.
Before Kitty or I could answer, I channeled Earth_Letterman, where Dave had just asked us if rapidly leaping dimensions felt like a rug slipping out from under us.
“You don’t know the half of it, Dave,” I said.
I shifted our existential channels to Earth_Analog2020. Herald editor John was about to tell us what’s happened at the paper since my absence.
“Our readership has really grown,” John continued. “We’ve exposed corruption in local government. We’ve been able to advocate for many of the small businesses in our town. And several of our columnists have really found their voice, speaking directly to the hearts and minds of our readers.”
“Readers” rung in my ear and I phase shifted the spacetime frequency to Earth_Suburban, where Kitty and I still stood in the Shermer Public Library.
“Let’s materialize some street clothes while we tour this Earth during the day,” I said to Kitty.
We walked out of the library inconspicuously. Though no one on the street could see it, I was still wearing my Thunderbird helmet, Bueller.
“We’re going to walk down the street and introduce you to some of the tavern guys,” I said to the podcast hosts and audience, via my helmet feed. “It’s almost quitting time. Some of them should be there by now.”
Mid-stride, Kitty and I tuned the world channel to Earth_Guillermo.
Guillermo was still singing his icaro. Chanting and singing, he completed this round of the plant download. He stopped singing and kept his eyes closed.
“We are all one Earth, as we stand on Her planet,” he said. “We are Her children. But we must also celebrate our unique perspectives of the same planet we share. We represent polydimensional viewpoints of a single body. This is what the plants wish to tell the humans.”
“Profound,” I heard Pete the Killer say into our earpieces.
Guillermo’s icaros echoed in my mind well after he had ceased singing. The plant jingle spurred my memory toward Earth_CityFlat. And, in the single breath of a channel shift, we were back in Bowflex’s basement studio.
Bowflex had just asked about Guillermo.
“He’s one of our colleagues,” Kitty said. “He can communicate with plants by singing their language in icaros. It’s a melodic exchange of information, not unlike the inspiration for beep boop.”
“That’s rad,” Bowflex said.
The basement was so cool and calm, I almost didn’t want to leave. But the podcast show must go on, I thought. I phased our frequencies to rougher waters, on Earth_Ocean. I was about to fly out to meet tropical storm Tugbato.
Poseidon agreed with my pitch. I left Kitty, the water god, and the island natives all on the beach, while I flew out over the chop to meet the formidable cyclone.
Winds picked up. Ocean waves growing larger in magnitude crashed louder and louder as I approached the ominous Tugbato front.
“Who dares interrupt my path?!” Tugbato wailed as howling wind.
His sonic boom sound shook this Thunderbird a bit. In response, I phased Kitty and me into the safer confines of her parents’ home on Earth_Baseball.
“Did you talk to the tropical storm?” Kitty said telepathically to me as we sat on her living room couch.
Her mom had finally made it to the first floor and entered the room.
“Kitty! My baby!” she said.
“I’ll tell you after this,” I telepathically told Kitty.
“And who’s this?” Kitty’s mom said, now looking at me.
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer her. To buy time, I tuned our relative spacetime back to Prof. O’Halleran’s classroom on Earth_Berkeley.
“My mind feels, by far, the most clear sitting under a redwood meditating,” Arnold, another one of the professor’s students, added to Kitty’s theory about clearing your mind pre-leap.
Our frequent leaping picked up pace even further. The upbeat “Jolene” jingled in the back of my mind.
Earth_PeaceProject: “We’ve waded through most of the crowd’s psyches now,” Jab said to me, describing His team’s effort to quell mob rage. “These are all good people down on the ground, and we can remind them of that… albeit supernaturally.”
Earth_Home: “Yes, the Crows are as thorough as they are effective,” I said, in response to Stacy’s question of the Thunderbird murder’s integrity. “Once their done on Earth_PeaceProject, I’ll refer them here.”
Earth_Letterman: “Yowsah!” Letterman said. “That kind of action would drive me to drink.”
Earth_Analog2020: “So what have you been up to all this time, Bill?” John the editor said. Kitty and I just looked at each other. I decided to show not tell…
Earth_Suburban: Kitty and I entered the Shermer Tavern. A few of the regulars were sat at the main, square-shaped bar in the front room. We motioned them to head to the back.
Earth_Guillermo: “Though the plants seem still, they move ever so slightly. Their timelines are on a much larger scale compared to the scurrying humans, whose entire life spans seem like flickers to the near immortal plant life.”
Earth_CityFlat: We channeled one of Guillermo’s icaros into Bowflex’s basement studio. “Could you make this into a beep boop song?” I said.
“For sure,” Bowflex said.
Earth_Ocean: “Terrible storm, Tugbato!” I said. “I’ve flown out on the open ocean to kindly request that you veer your course.”
“And WHY would I do that?” Tugbato said.
“To spare the tiny island community that would otherwise be in your destructive path,” I said.
Earth_Baseball: “I’m Kitty’s partner,” I said to her mother.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Bill,” she said. “And thank you for bringing our daughter home to us! Can you stay long?”
We cycled through these 10 Earths a few more times, at breakneck speeds. I could sense static in Kitty’s mind. After all, I was the one piloting our Alcubierre orb through the dimensions. It must have been dizzying for her, not knowing when we’d leap next.
To alleviate Kitty’s spinning, I encouraged her to float out of this 5th-dimensional torus of Earths we had created in the leaping.
“Why don’t you hover above my path in the movierain?” I said, mid-flight, surfing between dimensions. Droplets precipitated all around in torrents.
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “I could use a rest.”
“Fellas,” I said to the podcast hosts, “Kitty’s going to hover above the 5th-dimensional path we’ve created. I’m going to switch my helmet feed to hers, once she’s high enough above.”
“Roger,” Paul said.
An instant later, Kitty slung out of the spiral to hover above my leaping, lightning path between droplet Earths. I was the unifying black thread sewing together reality.
“It’s beautiful, Bill,” she said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Pete the Killer added.
The Earths I had strung together along this transdimensional path, and the infinite events contained on each planet, manifested as droplets torrenting in a continually recycling torus. These droplets became like particles following the wave pattern of the reverberating doughnut errupting from the center, descending droplets down its outer wall and then feeding back into its center from the bottom. It glowed brilliantly, a divine yellow-white whose emitting mist resembled the rainbow halo after a rain storm.
“Kitty!” I said, leaping at impossible velocities within the torus. “Navigate to 40.5365° N, 80.1844° W on Earth_3.14159×10^100. I’ll meet you there.”
“What’s happening, Bill?” Paul said to keep his podcast audience engaged.
“We need a respite from this rapid leaping,” I said. “Kitty and I are going to steal away at a cookout that occurs in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. On this version of Earth, the movie Houseguest actually happened.”
Kitty and I rendezvoused just outside the backyard of the Sewickley cookout. We entered the property clandestinely, as the get-together roared in full swing. Sinbad and Phil Hartman had each just snatched barbecued chicken thighs, eating them over paper plates while they sat on the back deck’s steps.
“…C’mon, there’s got to be some way out of this,” Phil Hartman said to Sinbad.
“There’s one way,” Sinbad said.
We sat next to them on the steps. They didn’t know we weren’t invited to the cookout either.
The mobsters in hot pursuit of Sinbad and Hartman barged into the backyard through the hedges. The comedic duo jolted to their feet to flee and re-enter the 5K. Kitty and I had the steps to ourselves.
“It’s nice to finally have a break,” Kitty said. “Should we get some chicken?”
“We won’t be here long enough,” I said. “I just wanted us to regroup.”
“It was so interesting viewing your torus pathway, as you leapt between worlds,” she said. “I noticed the mist wafting off the particle worlds that formed that haze. I think those were lost souls struggling to find their next life within one of those Earths.”
“Incongruous reincarnation?” I said.
“Maybe. Do you think we could help them? Do you think we could do a better job of relocating those lost souls?”
“It’s worth a try,” I said.
“What’s happening now?” Paul said into our earpieces.
Per usual, Kitty and I were on the same wavelength, but I elaborated for the podcast audience. I told them we’d wind down the torus of worlds and then install a safehaven for souls leaving any of the dozen or so worlds we covered. Instead of haphazardly hoping for these spirits to soundly land in their next life, Kitty and I created a place to intervene.
If the torus was a Dyson sphere, then Kitty’s soul sanctuary hung in the center. Like my Drop, this fully manifested world was hollow. The inside of its edges were lush with forests and greenery and inviting jungle bungalows where souls passing through could rest and recalibrate before their next earthly life.
“You guys just spun up this world on the fly??” Pete the Killer said.
“That’s a little trick of the Thunderbirds,” I said.
I left Kitty to tend to her newly fashioned garden of souls. She really had a knack for understanding how a soul in one life could become misguided, die, and then unleash their own brand of paranormal hell in the afterlife. She didn’t shy away from these monsters, but instead met them where they were. She helped them shed the psychic, self-imposed bondage they accumulated in life so that they could choose a better situation in the next.
As Kitty established her soul sanctuary, I closed out the loops created from our world hopping. We said our goodbyes.
Tropical storm Tugbato agreed to veer his course on Earth_Ocean. “Oh, I didn’t realize there were people in my path,” he said. He really wasn’t that bad of a low-pressure system, once you got to know him.
I left Guillermo to continue meditating in the Amazon jungle. He could find his way back to my Drop, by walking through the 12-o’clock position from Earth_Guillermo, when he was ready.
I sent Herald editor John, on Earth_Analog2020, a recording of this podcast, after he asked what I had been up to. It was for his eyes only.
Bowflex, form Earth_CityFlat, sent me a beep boop mixtape inspired by Guillermo’s icaros. Shit slaps.
I promised the boys on Earth_Suburban that we’d broadcast a live North Star podcast from the tavern’s back room one of these days, after they met the hosts, Paul and Pete the Killer.
Prof. O’Halleran invited Kitty and me back to his class on Earth_Berkeley, as guest lecturers for dimensional leaping, once he let the Big Cat out of the bag that Kitty and I were Thunderbirds.
Dave and his Late Show audience were perplexed when Kitty disappeared from the guest chair into thin air. I set my helmet Bueller on his desk, with white, electric eye lights flashing, to wipe their memories clean. This reduced the risk for ripple effects on Earth_Letterman.
We promised Stacy we’d refer the Crows to Earth_Home, once they had completed pacifying Earth_PeaceProject. I told her I’d run the official request up the flagpole to the Thunderbird Order.
And Kitty and I made a point to return to visiting her parents on Earth_Baseball, when we finished recording the podcast. We didn’t want to be rude.
As we wound down the Earths Beat torus, the hosts played some ads from their sponsors and entered the final show segment.
“All this adventure is great, Bill!” Pete the Killer said, returning to the broadcast. “But what about Earth_42? We were hoping to revisit the planet that kicked all of this off.”
The question, although intended to be harmless, was a gut shot. As it sat in the 6-o’clock position of my Drop, it was the heaviest world to bear. I had delved the deepest down there, on Earth_42. It held the most gravitas in reality I had endured thus far.
“That’s the planet I’ve piloted through the movierain this entire episode,” I said. “But we could zoom in on some 4th-dimensional coordinates of the surface, if you want. Admittedly, this was the heaviest leap for me. It’s also the most recent. I’m a little concerned I might get sucked down into Her vortex once again for another 42 years. I’d like to keep it light, if we can.”
“That’s fair, Bill,” Paul said. He was the more merciful of the two hosts.
We finally closed out the show. The hosts paid their gratitude and signed off. Kitty ascended back up into the lower decks of the spaceship Cheshire. I lingered for a few more moments in the spherical Drop, remembering my inaugural leap from Earth_42, without which this fine display of streaming consciousness today wouldn’t have been possible…
Flashback
From the ground, my astral self leapt out of my body, into the stratosphere, balancing on ball lightning between my energetic feet. I encircled the globe, pole to pole, increasing in centrifugal force as I skimmed electromagnetic Van Allen belts. My curved velocity accelerated rapidly, as from my purview the Earth rotated in Her normal fashion and also at perpendicular pole to pole rotation—a planetary gyroscope.
The blue-green sphere lit up into white-hot light, and then liquid. At a terminal velocity orbiting the glowing globe, I was traveling well past the speed of light. I had, in fact, broken spacetime and the liquid, white-hot Earth bled into an inverted orb that encompassed me, as I had initially flown around Her. She completely enveloped me, and I let the Moon guide my flight, which was now stationary at the center of this Earth orbiting. The Earth’s surface, inverted, now surrounded my surfing body on waves rippling gravity. I had transcended 3-dimensional space, outside of time, into a 5th-dimensional intermediary colloquially coined the movierain, but scientists would refer to this dewey realm as the multiverse. Infinite Earth versions flitted past my surfing, inverted orb—all droplets in the eternal, torrential downpour. They all shared the same Moon, which hung in the center.
I lingered for only a moment in this 5th dimension, as it quickly became difficult to control the orb of my Earth, still white-hot and a little translucent so that I could see nearby droplets precipitate by. I imagined my Drop—my own personal universe—that sat in superposition above, in a Lagrange point in Earth orbit of an adjacent dimension.
Although initially imagined, my very real Drop dipped down to meet me—a blue, upside-down pyramid lowering to meet my ascending green Earth vector. Within the overlapping, unifying field, I pierced through the Drop’s bottom—a pool that projected my version of Earth above. The central pool in my Drop, was open from both the bottom and top. I could see through the liquid, where my higher body sat, in the lotus position. I sat still up there, but my reflection through the water prism shimmered my stoic shape above. My lower self, ascending with my Earth orb from below splashed through the pool in space, ricocheting off its Earth projection counterpart hovering in the Drop’s epicenter.
My Thunderbird essence originating from that latest Earth version below emerged from the globe’s north pole. Twisting, I back-flipped and fell into my higher Cheshire-borne self sitting in the lotus position on the stone centerpiece of the Drop. The ascending, energetic self and my steady, stoic self sitting became one. We opened our lids and third eyes aligned.
I was sitting serenely in the lotus position. A projection of the most recent Earth from which I came hovered above, in the epicenter of my spherical Drop. I looked down through the clear pool in front of me. And that Earth, from which I had just leapt, sat peacefully in its original 4-dimensional form down below. Just as I had left it.
After healing a little from my long stay, under the waterfall that filled my Drop’s central pool, it was time to finally return to the Cheshire spaceship. I crawled down to the catwalk that surrounded my stone altar and waterfall. I cranked the hatch handle that acted as a trap door below a section of the catwalk. A quarter turn of the door handle would queue a red light above in the ship to switch green. It was OK to now re-enter the Cheshire from my Drop. It would also alert Kitty up in her quarters on the upper decks.
I could hear her now: “The Earth version has switched in the Drop,” she said. “Bill’s back.”
If you liked this short story, it emanates from the universe of the novel Big Cat.
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