Ok. That was crazy, but I was going to have to try it sooner or later. Might as well be now.

I was still in my room, and everything looked the same. Only it wasn’t. There was a stillness now that hadn’t been there a few moments ago. I realized that the quiet that I’d noted during the ‘bus incident’ was back. All the typical house noises, like the constant hum of the central air unit or the occasional noise of the house settling, were gone.

I stood up and walked over to my window. At first glance, nothing had changed. Then a bicycle went by, without anyone on it, its pedals rising and falling under their own power. This was followed by several driverless cars and an empty stroller walking itself. There were no greyed-out images of people at all. I was fully within the first layer of reality, L1. No people.

This was amazing. It had taken me a year, but I was finally back in one of the layers and I’d done it on purpose this time. I still didn’t know how getting into the actual layer was better than simply being in an R1 bubble, but I was determined to find out. After all, when I’d first gotten this ability, I had no idea what I could use it for and a few months ago I’d been able to use it to save forty people from a life of slavery.

Pulling myself away from the window, I sat down on my bed to think about what I should do next. What the hell? The bed was hard. It had no give to it at all. I might as well have sat down on a rock. Even the sheets, which I hadn’t bothered to straighten up this morning, were frozen in place and my weight didn’t press them down. I got up and tried to move them. They wouldn’t budge.

I walked around the room and experimented by trying to move things. Everything was stuck in place. My chair wouldn’t even move when put all my weight pushing against it. Whereas normally I could breath on my desk lamp’s pull-chain to make it move, all my strength wasn’t enough to cause it shift from its position.

Pacing back and forth, my mind tried to work out what was going on. I couldn’t move anything, but the bikes and cars outside were moving. It seemed as if the movement couldn’t be initiated here in L1. This was a layer of reality, one of it’s building blocks. When you put all the layers or building blocks together, you ended up with the final product that was our normal reality. The layers themselves had no movement. You only got that in the final stage of reality. So the layers formed reality, but then reality changed the layers?

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The explanation felt right and I was feeling good about my reasoning skills when my foot caught the edge of one of the pens that I’d placed on the floor and sent it skittering across the room and under my bed.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. It shouldn’t have moved. I walked over to the bed and knelt down to get the pen. It was the blue one that I’d ‘dropped’ into L1 by removing its fields. I made my way back to the black pen and tried to pick it up. It wouldn’t move. How were the pens different?

It only took a few seconds for the answer to click and it all made sense. The black pen still had a counterpart in reality. The blue one didn’t exist in reality anymore. By removing the blue pen from reality, I’d taken away its anchor to there and so I could move it around in L1. The black pen was still tethered to reality, in that I hadn’t turned off the fields that surrounded it and moving it could only be done there.

Something felt odd about the blue pen though and that was strange in and of itself. I shouldn’t be feeling anything about the pen. It was just a simple pen and I didn’t have a field around it. How was I sensing anything from it? I closed my eyes and concentrated on what exactly I was feeling. Wrongness. Not in an evil way, more like something didn’t belong. Out of place.

I realized that what I was sensing was coming from my field, the one that always surrounded me and that I’ve never been able to turn off. That field was sending information that my brain in turn interpreted and converted into this feeling of something being out of place. It was showing me that this pen was a construct of reality that had been dropped into L1, where it didn’t belong. It vibrated at a different frequency than everything else here and the field was picking up on that.

I wondered if I was giving off the same vibe as the pen, but I didn’t feel any different. Maybe it was just that you can’t feel your own incompatibility with your surroundings. Or maybe the combined L1 field that I still had around me kept me slightly apart from L1. Should I shut down the fields to check it out? What if I shut down the fields and couldn’t get back to reality? Two R1 fields sent me to L1. I presume that two R2 fields would send me to L2. What two fields would send me from L1 to reality?

That’s when I made the second monumentally stupid decision of the day and shut down my L1 field.