Leaving the animal shelter, I was all keyed up with nowhere to go. I drove around in L2 for awhile, feeling the rush of speeding on an empty road with no chance of being caught in a speed trap. I’d discovered that I was able to drive the car in L2, if I put a field around it first. For the millionth time, I wished that I’d been given some sort of a manual in how my field and the layers worked.

Eventually the exhilaration of finding a new use for my ability wore off and I found myself on the highway heading west, towards the mountains. I didn’t have any reason to be going there and it took only a few moments to turn the truck around and head back to town. I didn’t have to change to the other side of the road, but I figured that it’d be good practice.

As I drove around, I started reviewing the last few days in my mind and trying to figure out the implications of each new revelation. First, I’d found my way back to into the other layers of reality, L1 and L2. It felt good to accomplish that, but what could I do in those layers that I couldn’t do in R1 and R2? So far, I’d used the layers to store the truck and the money that I’d taken away form Len and the guys from Serpentine. The layers had to be good for something besides acting as my own personal storage universe.

I’d also just found out that objects that I store in the layers are held in stasis. How was that useful? I suppose if I was cooking a few different things for dinner, then I could pop each dish out of the oven and send it into L1, where they would stay fresh from the oven until I brought them back. Only I wasn’t much of a cook and I rarely, if ever, cooked more than one dish at a time.

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What else needed to be preserved? Cold food. I already had a fridge and freezer. I didn’t need a whole universe for that. Endangered animals. I suppose that I could shift a few breeding pairs of certain animals in to L2 and use the layer as a sort of Noah’s Ark for future generations. The problem with that was that only I could access the layers and all those animals would be lost when I eventually died.

Organs. Transplant teams had a limited time to transfer an organ, such as a heart or a liver, from one person to another. I could create a service where I store the organs indefinitely. I liked this idea, except it fell apart for the same reason as the last idea. There was only one of me. Organ transplants were happening all over the world. I could only preserve organs in one place at a time. Maybe that would be good enough, though. I didn’t have to solve the global problem. I could help locally.

I briefly considered the possibility of storing all sorts of nuclear waste and other biohazard products in L2. The benefits were amazing, in that there would never be a risk of those materials poisoning anyone. However, I didn’t know if the radiation from the waste would have any long-term effect on the layer. Even if there were no long-term effects on L2, making the problem simply go away wasn’t conducive to our society finding better solutions in the future.

Before too long, I was back home and still didn’t have any better ideas of how to use the layers to their full potential.