Over the next week everyone at school calmed down with the whole hero madness and things went back to normal. Dad and I had turned down dozens of interview requests from news organization all over the country. The late-night talk shows were the pushiest but invoking my status as a minor really helped in getting them all to back off. I just wanted all the attention to go away.

People were still noticing me more than I liked, but even that would fade away with time. I was really hoping that the Friday night football game against Northfield would put some new people in the limelight and let me fade away completely. I was tempted to ask Bobby if he’d managed to get the playbook to his coach and if they were going to use it, but I had enough to deal with. They’d either work with it or they wouldn’t. I already had the information that I wanted from Bobby and I should be able to put my plan with him in motion next week, after the big game.

In the meantime, I’d made a lot of progress over the past months in terms of how long I could hold the field and in extending the field to other objects, but I know knew that it could do a lot more. There were other levels to this ability and now that I was much better with it, it was time to find out if I was good enough to get into those levels.

The ‘bus incident’ showed me that I could go to a place without people, a place without people or cars and to a place without people or cars or buildings. These places weren’t just places where I could go through things, rather these were places where those people or things didn’t even exist. Each of these places was like a different layer of reality. Each time you peeled back a layer, something disappeared.

From what I could piece together, when I moved into R1, I wasn’t really going into any of those layers. I was kind of at a half-way point between reality and that layer. For example, R1 connected me to the place where there were no people and no cars or buses, but I wasn’t actually there since I could still see those things, only greyed out. It was more like the field created a bubble of that level in normal reality. That was why I could pass right through people and moving objects, but not buildings. In the level I was accessing, buildings still exist, so I couldn’t go through them. If I was right about this and I could find a way to access the other levels, then I’d probably have to rename R1 to R2. The level without people would be R1. The level without buildings would be R3.

Damn, it was actually even more complicated than that, since I wasn’t going into those realities, but only a bubble of those realities or a sub-reality. In that case, I was going into Sub Reality 2 (SR2). If I found a way to go to R1 where there are no people, but I was still in reality, then I’d be in SR1.

This was entirely too confusing and complicated. I’d figure out the naming of things later. Right now, I wanted to see if I could move into different bubbles of reality. The really important one for me was to get into the place with no people, but where cars or buses still existed. If I could do that, then I could ride in cars or even planes, completely unseen and without falling through them. I could sit in chairs or lie down on a bed because they existed in both reality and in R1.

Sitting on floor of my room, I picked up the book that I was currently reading, Blue Moon by Lee Child. I had considered doing the test by sitting in a chair, but every mistake would mean that I fell to the floor. It was much simpler to have the book fall through me to the floor if my experiments failed. I placed a field around the book and turned on both my field and the book’s field. Now we were both in what I was hoping I’d be able to call R2 shortly, namely no people and no moving objects. I wanted to get to just the ‘no people’ layer.

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It seemed weird to me that although there seemed to be a progression from one layer to the next, I had apparently started off by skipping layer one and going straight to layer two. I decided that I was using too much power to get into the first sub-layer and not enough to get into the third sub-layer. It would take more finesse to get into the first sub-layer. I was guessing that I had to dial down the power, almost like a dimmer for a light switch. A second possibility was that I was on a specific channel of power to get into R2 and that I needed to switch channels to get to R1 and R3. I was betting that the dimmer switch theory was the one that would prove to be true, since it matched up better with what happened during the ‘bus incident’, where I saw a gradual transition from one layer to the next, without any pauses or abrupt channel changes.

With a dimmer switch in mind, I focused on the field surrounding the book and concentrated on what I felt from the book field as I turned it off. The transition was too fast for me to get any useful information or feelings and the book fell through my hand and tumbled on the floor. Next, I tried it the other way to see if I could catch what was happening when I turned it on. Still nothing. It was too fast. The field was either on or off and it happened at the speed of thought. There was no way to feel what was happening. This was a dead end. What else could I try? How could I turn the field on with less power?

I thought about the different things that I could do with my field. I could turn it on or off to get me into R2. I could create other fields to take things or people with me into R2. The field gave me information about things inside the field and about pressure on the field itself. Finally, I could create a second field around me. This field could be expanded outwards or contracted inwards. So far, this aspect was the only thing that I was doing that called for a change in power. I needed more power to expand the field and I used less when I contracted it. How was I doing that? Maybe I could do the same thing with my field to change between the sub-layers of reality.

For the next half hour, I expanded and contracted a second field around me, concentrating on what I was doing as I pushed out more power to make the field bigger and pulled back power to make it smaller. I worked on pulling the second field closer and closer to the first, in minute increments, until they were almost touching. The exercise let me re-master this technique, with more understanding this time.

I turned my own field on, shifted to R2, and then scaled back the power that I was feeding it to stay turned on. I was only able to scale it back once. As I tried to scale it back a second time, the field turned off. I turned the field back on and scaled it back just once. It felt lighter, but not in a physical sense. The smaller power requirement just seemed to make the field easier to hold. I walked over to the chair and put my hand on it and it didn’t pass through the chair. Success! This was so exciting that I jumped up on my bed and I didn’t fall through. My bed was in reality, but it also existed in wherever R1 was, so I didn’t fall through it. Since I was in (the newly renamed) R1, I was being held up by the R1 bed. I was surprised though that the bed didn’t move at all. I couldn’t bounce on it. It, and the blankets and pillows, were as solid as rocks and I couldn’t move them. I returned to reality and lay on my soft, comfortable bed. I’d worry about the rock-hard bed later. Future me would need to figure it out. Right now, I was just going to enjoy the moment.

This was one of the last three obstacles to my goal for my new foundation. Being able to travel without being detected was a key point. Access the new R1 meant that I could get on a plane and not fall through it. It meant that I could take the bus or the train, without having to even buy a ticket. Technically, I wasn’t taking a seat so there was no need to buy a ticket. I could show up at the airport and board any plane, going anywhere. I could bypass security and I didn’t have to show anyone my passport. No one could track where I went. This would make traveling so much easier.