Happy Place
A faint, pleasant breeze kissed her face, and she awoke. She was looking across the sparkling waters of a the bay, sitting on her favorite wood-slat bench under the shade of a swaying poplar. Her initial reaction was an involuntary smile, followed by a series of slow, cleansing breaths. The slight sound of children at play in the schoolyard nearby, of meadowlarks chittering happily, of the distant buoy bells clattering with the gentlest waves upon the surface of the bay, all collaborated to elicit a resplendent sensation of unparalleled peace.
Two chestnut-brown chipmunks scuttled into her periphery, drawing her attention to their charming mischief. They darted to and from a hollow space between two sun-bleached stones adjacent to the concrete base of a silvery, coin-operated tower viewer overlooking the bay. Her eyes blinked a few times in vague recognition, her head tilting reflexively. As she stood from the bench, she felt unsteady on her feet, as if they weren’t quite making contact with the pebbled pavement beneath them. She was not unsettled by this sensation; it, in fact, brought a nervous giggle to her lips as she steadied herself before approaching the tower viewer. Her own voice, unlike the sounds of the critters below or the windswept leaves above, unlike the buoy bells and meadowlarks and laughter of school children, seemed, somehow, off.
Her voice seemed disturbingly real.
Hesitant to give it a further thought, she came to the base of the tower viewer and began to pat her hip pockets in hopes of finding a few quarters within. She was in luck, reaching into her right pocket and producing a single, shimmering quarter that both drew the eyes and shone too brightly in the sunlight for them to discern much detail upon its surface. She was about to place the quarter into the coin slot of the tower viewer, but she was inspired to try looking at the quarter, again. She knew not why, but she needed to see it in greater detail before she spent it. Actually, she needed to verify that she was capable to seeing it in detail, at all.
She felt the surface of the coin between her fingers, seeking the ridges on its edge and finding it smooth, or rather featureless altogether. She held one hand cupped over the other as it rested in her palm, shielding it from the sun high above, yet it still gleamed so acutely in just the right places that she couldn’t make out a single definitive detail upon it. There was a face, but it could have been anyone’s face. On the other side, there was some sort of a building, or was it a tall ship, or a flag on a hill.
“Megan,” a voice called out from behind her. Sitting on the wood slat bench where she had just awoken, there was a young woman wearing a smart, gray silk blouse and a pair of comfortable-looking rose-colored cotton slacks. She was drinking coffee from a tall, covered cup as their eyes met. Megan did not know this woman, but she also wasn’t exactly a stranger.
“You are doing it, again.”
“I’m sorry,” Megan blurted, genuinely apologetic despite her ignorance as to what she was doing and why she should feel badly for doing it.
“Don’t apologize,” the woman said through a heartening smile as she took a sip of her coffee and patted the space on the bench next to her with the palm of her other hand. “Come back and have a seat, okay?”
Megan hesitated for a few moments before the woman patted the bench once more, and she was compelled to take her up on the offer. She had felt so much better before she stood from that bench, after all. Things made more sense to her from there. She complied, though her smile was gone and she wasn’t sure how she would find it, again.
“Um,” she began to speak before knowing precisely what it was that she wanted to say. The woman turned slightly to engage her in an appraising look, her face a blend of warmth, pity and understanding.
“This is the place you come to when you would rather not remain in the moment, Megan,” the woman said in answer to the question Megan didn’t realize she wanted to ask. “This is your Happy Place. I could leave you here, again, and you will forget all about me, but every time I do, you find some reason to ask questions and challenge your peace.”
Megan looked around a bit, taking in the bay, the birds, the patterns being painted in the grass on the nearby hill as the breeze combed through it. “None of this is real?”
“It’s real,” the woman said, reaching over to tap her fingertip against Megan’s right temple. “These are places you’ve been, things you’ve seen, experiences that give you comfort when confronted with circumstances you would rather not face. They have been coalesced into their purest, most concentrated form, all these details that bring you to this blissful place of rest and respite.”
“I’m so confused,” Megan said, though her smile was returning to her lips. “Is it real, or not? It can’t be both.”
“Sure, it can,” the woman replied with convincing surety. “Look at me, for example. I’m an amalgamation of those people with whom you have felt most at ease. We’re sitting together on this wood slat bench you recall from the park outside your aunt's apartment building, near the coffee shop where this cup I’m holding came from. The poplar trees were in your grandfather’s back yard. You climbed them when you were little, hiding yourself among their boughs and dreaming of being whisked away to a place much like this.”
“You’re not… I mean, are you…”
“I am real, Megan,” she responded to the half-asked question. “You make me… make all of this… as real as it needs be.”
Megan sat in silence and blinked. She felt that the woman was about to get up and walk away, letting her forget about this conversation and try, once more, to accept the happiness this place offered her. She reached out to take the woman by her wrist, however. “Please, stay. Please?”
The woman paused a moment, then nodded. “Of course, Megan. I’ll sit with you until you’re ready.”
“Ready for what,” Megan asked. The woman smiled and took another sip of her coffee, then cast her gaze across the bay.
“To embrace the peace of this place, or to reject it and return face the reality this place is shielding you from.”
“What is it I’m hiding from,” Megan’s voice became a bit desperate. She was growing anxious, and the world around her became a bit less vivid. Clouds blotted out the sun, and with its rays no longer dancing about in the rippling windswept waters of the bay, a dull veil of gloom chased across the landscape.
“You came here so that you wouldn’t have to think about it,” the woman said, reaching over to take Megan’s trembling hand in hers. “Wouldn’t you rather be happy? Why do you do this to yourself? Every time you come close to finding a lasting peace, here, you find some reason to refuse it."
“Because I…,” Megan began to answer, but she was afraid of what might happen if she did. The woman, patient and kind, nodded and encouraged her to go on. “Because I’m afraid whatever it is that I’m hiding from… I should try to face, instead.”
----------
The unmistakable background noise of a busy urban space invaded her ears and drew her hands up to her head, where she felt the shape of a device like a pair of headphones wrapping around from behind her skull and clinging to her temples. Her eyes blinked, and as she disengaged the Synaptic AR device. A cold, utilitarian metropolitan plaza gradually bloomed into her field of vision. She was sitting on a narrow, scoop-backed chair, all cast aluminum and molded acrylic resin with none of the charm of the wood slat bench she vaguely recalled from within her customized Happy-Place app.
A curtain of ionized air separated a six-foot square space around her from the rest of the plaza grounds, a cube-like frame surrounding the chair with a glowing, holographic sign projected onto the barely visible mist forming the walls of the SDC she sat within.
EPA-approved rebreather required by law prior to leaving Social Distancing Cubical
Megan regathered her thoughts and folded the Altered Reality headset in half, dropping it into her bag by her feet before standing up. She recognized the industrial edifice of glass, stone, and steel she was facing as the hospital where her close friend had just been delivered via a Paramedic Drone. A haptic thump against her hip reminded her that it was time for her daily inoculant booster, so she sat back down.
She knew that she always felt a bit lightheaded in the moments immediately after her injections. Twisting her left forearm to expose the embedded smart-com in her wrist, right over her pulse, she slid the tip of her right, middle finger across the screen and initiated the inoculant injections. A hiss and series of three short beeps followed, and Megan felt uneasy immediately thereafter as she knew she would.
She was fortunate to still have time in her Rest account to afford her the use of an SDC in the beating heart of the city. If she had to stand around, like so many others who were forced to wait outside the hospital for their friends and loved ones, she might well have succumbed to her body’s disfavor of the inoculant injections.
Her thoughts went to her mate, Katrina, languishing inside the hospital. Megan had lost three close friends to Sin-40 in the past three consecutive months, and they had all been taking the inoculants and all mandated precautions. So many people were doing exactly what they were told, growing miserable and depressed, and still, they kept dropping one after the other.
Megan’s aunt, her only living relative who was alive during the first of the Pandemics, told her stories about life in America as it was before the Great Conflict. She had to speak in hushed tones and cover her smart-com in a signal-dampening glove out of fear that she might trigger a Cancellation, the way her husband and Megan’s father had. It was dangerous speech, and Megan was reluctant to hear any of it, as if the selfish gall of ‘liberty’ would be somehow as infectious as Sinoveridae-40 had proven to be.
Of course, things would only be worse if the Great Conflict had gone differently, Megan knew. They taught her such in school, and she had no reason to believe the ramblings of her aunt in lieu of the Popular Truth.
A haptic thump and a trill of sound indicated that she had received a message through her smart-com. The screen flashed:
Approved communication in re: Katrina Dawes
Patient Dawes has been processed through triage and is presently in isolation. A Tracer Agent has been assigned to your case. You are located within a Social Distancing Cubical. Do not leave the SDC you are currently within until cleared to do so by your designated Tracer. Doing so will violate Social Distancing Law. This will be your only warning.
Megan began to blurt, “But, how is she? Is she awake? Can I talk to her?”
There was no answer forthcoming. She swept her finger across the screen and tried to make a direct contact with her friend, Kat, but the attempt was merely logged and archived.
They weren’t letting her talk, and they wouldn’t say whether she was okay.
Megan began to have a panic attack. She felt it coming, and she tried to keep her emotions in check, but the invisible walls of the six-foot cube of ionized air now seemed to be solid, dark, and shrinking around her. She was having problems breathing, so she was about to reach into her bag to produce her rebreather by instinct. Then, she saw the Synaptic AR headset next to the rebreather mask in her bag.
Shaking, with tears gathering in her eyelids threatening to burst over the roundness of her cheeks, she looked around her, unable to focus her eyes on anything. She whimpered softly and nearly brought her hands up to wipe the tears from her cheek, only just then realizing that the act of touching her face in public would be logged and archived, especially now that she was a part of a Tracer investigation.
“God,” she said, cupping her hands to her heart. “Is this real? Can this not be real, please?”
“Hey,” an angry-looking young man with pink, glowing ocular enhancements and pierced... everything, came dangerously close to her Social Distancing cube and roared in anger, “Are you seriously f#@&%^g praying, right now? Right in front of me?!”
“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her hands as the man continued to berate and belittle her for the nerve she just showed, displaying her faith outside of the designated isolation zones where such a thing was permissible. “You’re right, that was very rude of me.”
The man was unmoved by her apology, and he was entitled to use the worst kinds of language to demean Megan because she had violated his rights by triggering him with her selfish behavior. She had no recourse but to continue apologizing and accept his derision and mockery. Once he was satisfied and left her alone, she asked, again, beneath her breath, “can this please not be real?”
She looked down, again, at the Synaptic AR device.
----------
A faint, pleasant breeze kissed her face, and she awoke. She was looking across the sparkling waters of the bay, sitting on her favorite wood-slat bench under the shade of a swaying poplar. Her initial reaction was an involuntary smile, followed by a series of slow, cleansing breaths. The slight sound of children at play in the schoolyard nearby, of meadowlarks chittering happily, of the distant buoy bells clattering with the gentlest waves upon the surface of the bay, all collaborated to elicit a resplendent sensation of unparalleled peace.
Two chestnut-brown chipmunks scuttled into her periphery, drawing her attention to their charming mischief. They darted to and from a hollow space between two sun-bleached stones adjacent to the concrete base of a silvery, coin-operated tower viewer overlooking the bay. Her eyes blinked a few times in vague recognition, her head tilting reflexively. As she stood from the bench, she felt unsteady on her feet, as if they weren’t quite making contact with the pebbled pavement beneath them. She was not unsettled by this sensation; it, in fact, brought a nervous giggle to her lips as she steadied herself before approaching the tower viewer. Her own voice, unlike the sounds of the critters below or the windswept leaves above, unlike the buoy bells and meadowlarks and laughter of school children, seemed, somehow, off.
Her voice seemed disturbingly real.
