Challenge 89 response:
Marie’s Blue Escape

First the story reminded me a bit of “Searching For Kelly Dahl” by Simmons in the Dozois’s Thirteenth Year’s Best Science Fiction. Oddly it’s not my favorite story ever, but Kelly Dahl is one of my favorite characters. I worry a bit that her character will seep into my challenge response. Also that it is way too long, far longer than the story was, in truth.

Her life had become something of a dead end. There was work, there was the Deli, and there was her brother. He had been little comfort, as they did not especially like each other. She had always been kind to him, but her presence had made his life difficult, because her Mom always told them she was special. She said her birth had been planned and even in the womb she felt something wondrous about her. Because of this she made it clear she was her favorite. The brother grew to resent this, as did she.

She resented it because she never saw much special in herself. As a child she would go off into a Fantasy land some times, but many kids seemed to do that. Her intelligence and talent were basically normal. The most impressive thing she did as a girl was win a national prize for painting of a falcon flying over a volcano.

As an adult she had managed a series of odd jobs, none of them memorable. It was during one of them that she realized if she wished to forget an experience it was forgotten. This did not seem unusual, as many people do that, but it seemed at times her bad experiences were forgotten by others as well. Usually this could be easy to dismiss, as the event was relatively minor or the person was old or naturally forgetful. Still one case, a year before her disappearance, struck her.

She was eating at the Deli when she came upon her old fiance. At the time people told her what a catch he was, being smart, funny, handsome and, above all, rich. He had been a prime mover in telecommunications. However it ended in humiliation for her. He skipped out on the wedding to flee to Switzerland in order avoid charges on insider trading and supporting illegal casinos on the Net. Later she heard he married some Burmese exile living in Geneva and had reformed. He returned to Iceland, served his time, and was now working with “Free Burma” or Aung San Suu Kyi or something. So the criminal who had skipped out on her became a humanitarian hero, and she remained a nonentity. Still, she tried not to be bitter about the whole mess.

All this came to her mind when she greeted him and his admittedly gorgeous Burmese wife. Indeed she was quite civil, but to her surprise he had no memory of her. Indeed he insisted he had never been engaged before his current marriage. She wanted to believe he was lying to please his wife, but later she found that all evidence of their engagement had vanished. Her brother insisted she had never been engaged while her parents said they remembered no such event. Curiously though, her parents added, “If you say it did dear, maybe you are right.”

In any event this issue troubled her, as did others. Still she tried to act as normal as possible, but right before her vanishing act her father demanded to see her at the Deli. There he told her a rather bizarre story. He explained that her fantasy land as a kid was real. It was some kind of other dimension that wished to link with ours. Her parents had somehow designed her with the ability to be a bridge to this other realm, with the side affect that she could warp people’s memory and perception. It all sounded insane, but he insisted she could return there if she just remembered.

To prove her father nuts she tried to remember the way to Fantasy Land she’d had as a child. It was a silly kid’s thing, and trying it made her feel quite foolish. She spun around three times, then closed her eyes and thought of numbers in bright blue. Specifically a number series called Fibonacci which she had seen on a math show as a girl. “One, One, Two, three, five, now I am truly alive.” Then she opened her eyes and screamed. She’d assumed it was all just childish Fantasy, but it was here. The falcons, the volcano, and the people speaking in an odd tongue. She realized now it was Gaelic they spoke. How could she have known of Gaelic speech as a girl? Why hadn’t she picked up on the memory of the odd speech, and wonder?

She quickly realized she was in an alternate history. One where Iceland was Irish and people were more advanced in some ways, although they were also primitive in others. She found a speaker of English, as she did not know Gaelic. Here they did not know of space travel or the extra solar planets, but they had a greater understanding of time and could manipulate aspects of M-theory.

They had called her father years ago, but he could never really enter this place. However by signalling a confirmation that she was an intelligent being they could make the needed connection. They told her the sequence of primes or the numbers in Pi would have worked just as well. However the color imagined had to be blue as her mind seemed to send out a signal only when she thought of that color.

Anyway, time passed and she found her life here special and unique. They “called” many, but only a half a dozen had been able to make it work. Of those, three were in China and two in Brazil. She was the only one in a free nation, as Brazil existed as some kind of Fascist state here and China was led by the Chiang imperial dynasty. She quickly committed to this world in her heart and mind. This might seem implausible, but her connections to her old life had been weak. She just hoped that for their sake the ones she hurt back home would forget her in time. She thought briefly that her disappearance might upset her co-workers, but she had never been close to them. She doubted they could even describe her appearance and this doubt made that the reality.

As for being a bridge between worlds she felt the best way to do that was by living solely in this new realm. At home she would just be ridiculed or even institutionalized for her claim. Here she could tell them of a Viking-descended land, of her China or Brazil, and most of all of spaceships. She had never been interested in space before, but among them space seemed exciting for the first time.

And in time she forgot old what’s-it-called and the people who worked there.