Monday July 18, 2020

I stopped shaving long ago. There was no point. Angelica and I get everything delivered. It stops in the hall. I wipe all the items down with Clorox wipes while wearing gloves. Once sanitized I bring them into the house and move them into the kitchen. I put everything away in the cupboards and shelves and go about my day.

I tried going outside the other day. I found the streets dead. It is like a ghost town each time I step out.

I need to get out of the house, but being outside is bittersweet.

I love the isolation. I can dip back into my Pokemon Go walks. It just feels wrong. There is a strange hollow around me. When a car passes, the driver is about as surprised to see you and as you are to see them.

I saw another person walking today. They were taking their little noise maker dog for a tug. The dog knows something is off too. I feel that critters pain. It’s getting weird.

It’s uncomfortable isolation. While I walk around I see children peeking from their windows. It would be a comfort at any other time, but now. Right now it looks like I am walking through a dystopian city where the road warriors may arrive any minute to start pulling the men from homes to force them into their gang or kill them to take over their town.

I haven’t heard from anyone in weeks. My family, my friends, the university, no one, just no one. I still get my direct deposits, but that’s it. The receipts I turn in get honored, but they don’t write any memos. They don’t even question the expense. I gave them a receipt for a complete fill for my car. I don’t have a car. They must know I don’t have a car. The receipt had someone else’s name and had a footprint on it.

I think I have lost all connections back home.

I think I have been marooned here. There should be some contact. There needs to be someone out there listening. They couldn’t have just put me on “ignore.” This isn’t a filing mistake. It can’t be.

I haven’t shaved in days. I hate my facial hair, I don’t enjoy having a beard but I can’t bring myself to go and shower just to shave. By this point it is getting too long to shave anyway. There is going to be this whole ordeal. I’ll need to dig out my clippers, trim it down in stages, then I have to shave. I don’t have the energy for that today.

I am cooking in my apartment. That’s the other reason I don’t want to go outside. It’s hot and humid. I only run the one room air conditioner from time to time, not because of the bill, but because of the casual deployment of greenhouse gasses that I can’t help feeling terrible about. It’s like adding to the destruction of these people, but also, if I am actually stuck here, maybe I can help steer them away from the destruction that I am here to watch and you know… am currently in the middle of.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

It’s just self preservation at this point. I don’t want their world to burn, because I am one of the assholes stuck here.

They are still taking my reports and removing them from my Chromebook. That gives me hope that they might be out there trying to reestablish a proper connection to get me home.

The people upstairs are banging away at one another again. I would have thought it would have gotten old by now, especially considering how much they fight. They fight and they boink. They fight some more and get back to acting like rabbits.

I thought that the apartment complex would have thrown them out by now. They are the people who forced the remodel. The first few days home I thought they were going to shuffle some of the worst here out, but it turned out that everyone was just moving back in. The people upstairs just took a little longer and the moment they got back they have been making my life more uncomfortable.

I hate it here. I do not want to be stuck here.

I look at my bank funds on my mobile and see that I have a healthy safety net to move the hell out of here. I think I may even have enough to put a considerable down upon a house if I start looking in the areas where the Covid-19 casualties have been high.

I open up Zillow and start shopping the area for a fair priced house for what I have and what my allowance has been for the last weeks.

There was a three bedroom place up the block for a reasonable price. A few searches show there was an estate sale there, and a bit of digging reveals that the owner recently died. Seems a perfect fit. I create the accounts necessary and I put in a request to see the property.

I don’t have any right to do this according to the university protocols, but if I am stranded, I better start making the arrangements to stay long term. The uni supplied me with all the documents I would need to exist here. They had entered me into their systems and in theory, those entries should be bulletproof, I could assimilate as a normal citizen without any major upset.

When I looked myself up here, something that is very much against the rules, I discovered that my line simply isn’t in this reality as far as I can discover. Just as this reality doesn’t have a New Amsterdam, they don’t have anyone of the Alginon line that I can find. It is probably just one of those multiverse oddities that they lecture about before they allow you to take an assignment. They like to use the butterfly effect to explain deviations from our sister realities. This reality, being a much greater deviation than any of the other stable multiverses we’ve started to research, was the oddity that I was sent here to observe.

In essence, this isn’t about a butterfly flapping its wings and making a small change, this was like someone crapped in the punchbowl and stirred it in. This place is a path to be avoided and my university wanted everything documented until a hair away from collapse to ensure those paths are always avoided.

My email alert chimes with the classic AOL: “You’ve Got Mail” alert for nostalgia's sake. It was the agent for the house.

Damn, they must be desperate.