Chapter 1: A Dime a Dozen
For Nora Ambrose, it had been a day like any other. Or not quite—on account of Christmas. Festivities abounded, although the people in her family weren’t of the age to celebrate Christmas with many presents.
She received some jewelry from her mother. Her mother was Chinese, a woman now named Lynn Ambrose, and her heritage meant that she thought moderately expensive jewelry was the best gift that could be given. To spend money on somebody was an expression of love. She had long learned hear mother’s love language, and gratefully accepted the gifts, even though she wasn’t the type to wear jewelry. She made some arbitrary, early New Years resolution to attempt to wear her mother’s well-meaning gifts more often. Nora never felt any compunction to wear makeup or otherwise up her appearance beyond its norm. She was lazy, for better and worse, and couldn’t bring herself to otherwise spend the 10 to 20 minutes daily to do makeup. She didn’t mind that anyone else wore makeup, but just accepted that was the way she was. She didn’t care for the opinions of others, her skin thick from scathing insults from siblings, a controlling mother, and inconsiderate middle schoolers.
Her philosophies: It is impossible for everybody to like you and don’t worry about what you can’t control. These two personal philosophies she carried through life, a Generation Z’er with little motivation nor particular hope for the future. She got through college with nice grades on an Engineering Degree, and got an acceptable but not outstanding job in Silicon Valley. She accepted that she’d likely never afford a house near where she worked, and resolved to live a DINC (dual income no children) life, if she could work up the motivation to wade through the toxic sludge of dating apps in the first place.
She’d probably end up a cat lady. Oh well.
Her mother had recently remarried to Elliot Ström, a Scandinavian-American man of deeper pockets than her last husband, Joseph Ambrose. She didn’t bother changing her last name this third time around. Her mother’s life had been tumultuous, her first husband died young, and she was ousted from the family without any money. Her second marriage was from where Nora and her sister Elizabeth was born, and the divorce had been messy. It was a fundamental incompatibility in personality that reared its head as Nora and her older sister were still young, but old enough to remember the yelling fights between them and thrown objects. Her mother was controlling, a tiger mom. Her father was hands off educationally and too frugal with money to spend it on significant childhood enrichment. But Nora and her sister were good students, and cruised through high school with good grades.
There was nothing strange about the two, except her parents’ messy divorce. The two shared custody, Nora and her sister switching between the parents houses every week. The two lived near each other and their high school, so it was easy enough, all things considered.
In America, divorces were a dime a dozen. She was just another coin in the jar of broken vows of love.
That Christmas should have been like any other. She was gathered with her mother’s new husband and new stepbrother to match—Oskar Ström. They ate a hearty but very non-traditional dinner—handmade dumplings, various stir-fries to top on steamed white rice, and some cold vegetable dishes. Dumplings were dipped in sauce made with the classic dumpling-sauce trifecta—soy sauce (Kikkoman, the ol’ reliable), Chinese black vinegar, and sesame oil. Grated garlic was added for a bit of extra flavor, but homemade dumplings were so flavorful she never needed it; storebought dumplings could never compete. The meal was finished off with warm and easy soup, dropped with eggs and some of the various vegetables used in the stir fries, added with some of their sauce for flavor. Cut fruit on plates prepared for all of them as a healthy desert. She loved it when her mom gave her cut fruit, a pleasant memory of childhood.
Holidays were one of the few times her mother didn’t mind how much Nora ate. She wasn’t overweight, but Lynn still held ingrained Chinese beauty standards, at least in Nora’s youth. The controlling woman had softened over the years, like a rough cast iron smoothing after care and use, adapting her expectations to healthier standards. Her mother’s mellowing had brought the two of them closer. Nora understood her mother operated on a different cultural paradigm, but the two learned to talk about what actions upset each other. Nora knew her mother’s concern over health came from a place of unconditional love.
Her mother’s philosophy: Your body is the most important thing; You must take care of it. The other: Money is freedom. Nora didn’t think of her mother as gold-digging or money-grubbing, just realistic.
She ate to a comfortable stuffed, and enjoyed the Christmas with her still-uncomfortable new family.
They sat around an unlit fireplace, playing board games. Her mother wasn’t very good at them, constantly asking questions or asking for clarification and holding up the game. The house was oddly large for Nora, a large house on the outskirts of Oslo, Norway. She had grown up in small townhouses and apartments. Her biological father’s failed investments after a Ponzi scheme left him as the one failed boomer with no house to call his own, except for the apartment her mother and his ex-wife had sold to him out of kindness (or perhaps pity) instead of renting out.
She wasn’t going to complain about a large house. She got to sleep on a queen size bed, instead of the merely full bed in her teeny-tiny, rented room in a house back in Silicon Valley.
Night deepened, and Nora headed back upstairs. Ever the introvert, she didn’t have the social battery to continue for much longer, and was the first to turn in for the night. The voices of her talkative sister, her sister’s boyfriend, her stepbrother, and her stepfather were blurred through walls and insulation. She settled into her guest room bed, warm and content. Quilted blankets and comforters pulled all the way up to her neck, trapping heat all around her body. She had inherited her mother’s propensity to constantly feel cold, and her body temperature always seemed to plummet when she stayed still for any length of time.
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She absent-mindedly wondered if they’d have fried leftover dumplings for breakfast the next day, as she drifted into sleep. They were always better the day after, with dumpling skin crisped up in hot oil contrasting the hot meat wrapped up inside. Just like her, snug as a dumpling in her bed. All was well.
*****
She awoke with a start.
Or she thought she did. She wasn’t awake. She couldn’t feel her body. Her sense of body and self was strangely weak. She wondered if she was suffering from sleep paralysis, until she sensed The Thing, her sleep demon.
She could have fooled herself into thinking it was a sleep demon if not for its undeniable nature. What she perceived before her was some impossible expanse of power, a Thing so powerful, so overwhelming her mind screamed and struggled to make sense of it. Like staring into unmentionables by H. P. Lovecraft, that twisted minds and drew people into madness with just a glance.
She couldn’t form a thought. Not really. Her perception was scattered, like trying to perceive light through her eyelids, or in a perpetual state of waking fuzz.
The Thing attacked her.
Attacked her soul.
She hadn’t even known that souls existed, but this was the most brutal revelation she ever had in her life. She had no other words to describe the state she was in, disembodied and vulnerable before some vast cosmic entity.
It was pain she had never experienced before in her life. Indescribable.
The Thing wanted inside. Her soft vulnerable being, all that she was. Her memories, her preferences, her loves, her dreams, her dislikes, her skills or lack thereof, her fantasies, her habits.
She realized quickly it could not get inside unless she let it. Despite not knowing a soul existed until moments before (although she had already lost all sense of time) the soul was adaptive and intuitive. That didn’t stop the excruciating pain as it tore, ripped, scratched, slamming, pounded, trashed, slashed, whipped, burned, crushed, and battered at the outsides of her soul. She wanted to know why she had to suffer like this; what did the being want from her? There was nothing she could give it, but she wouldn’t give up herself. Ironically, the capitalist system she so hated had spurred on her desire to never give in.
With the option of death off the table she sought a method of relief. She had the vague awareness that letting it inside was one way to stop it, end all the pain.
She was tempted. Oh, she was so tempted. Her soul screamed at her.
Anything. Anything. Anything. Anything! Anything! Anything! ANYTHING! ANYTHING! ANYTHING!
DO ANYTHING TO MAKE IT STOP!
She also realized what that meant.
An eternal slave to whatever broke through her will, free to scoop out her opened up soul leaving but a shell, carve it out, shape her into some monstrosity, or use it for whatever it wished for the rest of her feeble, insignificant existence.
What Nora hated more than anything else, was eternal slavery. Wage slavery, the threat of unfortunate medical debt, and paying off her college loans had already been enough for her. Call her weak-willed, but she would rather die than be a slave. She just didn’t have the energy to live through that. If she became a slave to that being, would there ever be a day of rest? A normal work week already exhausted her of all she had. She wouldn’t suffer that for eternity. Work can go fuck itself. She would rather die.
But she could not die. She had no body to kill. She was just a soul, discorporated, suffering at the hands of a voiceless enemy.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, death was not an option offered to her. Had it offered its hand, she would have grasped it without a second thought. She hoped it would look like Death from the Sandman, a kind, gentle woman that led her to the lands after, though she was an atheist.
She hatched a plan. It wasn’t appropriate to call it a plan as an instinct, a fight or flight response triggered by her extreme, inconceivable current situation.
How had she gone from comfort after a Christmas meal to soul torture by some inconceivable vast mind-blasting cosmic entity?
Nora waited.
And waited.
Nora waited for a very long time.
The entity’s interest in her waned bit-by-bit. Its capabilities and mind was inconceivably vast, but perhaps even that had its limits. Or, it simply ceased to care, tormenting her as some passive action, an afterthought. Like a program that ran automatically, she was just another background task. If a program long regulated to the back of it’s mind crashed, what did it care.
That her torturous existence was some sort of passing afterthought was an offense she didn’t have the luxury to bear.
It may have been vast, but she was very small. She leveraged that, slowly dispersing herself. She didn’t know how to really do so. But souls, she realized, learned very quickly when forced to do so. They adapted. She adapted.
But ever so patiently, she broke herself apart, like grains of sand tumbling from a cliff, or steam rising from a glass of water warmed by the sun.
She was nothing, so she would become nothing.
From dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.
All that she was: her memories, her preferences, her loves, her dreams, her dislikes, her skills or lack thereof, her fantasies, her habits.
They scattered from her, the softest of whispers blown away on some cosmic wind, slipping through the cracks of her soul-prison. Like air escaping from a balloon, she deflated herself.
She would not let the being have her soul.
At some point she realized.
She did not have herself either any longer. All that she was, she scattered. She was lost.
Her awareness was scattered around, invisible speckles of pollen carried to far, far away.
For a long while, there was nothing but emptiness. She couldn’t perceive this time because there was no way to perceive it. It was void and empty, mirroring the cold and empty universe without even the light of stars. It was a peaceful emptiness, much improved from her previous state. She did not mind it. If this was to be the end of her existence, she accepted it.
Then she saw flickers. It as everything as once so much so that it became meaningless. Like static on a television, or a jumble of voices at a party. Everything was so melded together it was senseless. She experienced the melting pot of all of the universe, all of everything dropped into a soup, and she jumped into it. She was the broth of the universe-soup, and she sensed all the small ingredients dropped in.
She saw different lands, different people. Impossible sights—grand floating cities of crystalline spires, built on lands that surpassed gravity. Sky-seas filled with sky-beings, massive creatures like fantastical sky-whales of lore, land and sea reversed. Her being brushed against the inverse horizon, dancing at the boundary of reality and unreality.
She had the distant thought that she was searching for something…searching for what? Herself?
When had she forgotten her name?
She long left the prison and prison warden behind, subsequently losing herself in the process. The pieces of herself were scattered, but she could still feel them, distantly, if she focused. So, she focused, her being operating on instinct alone. As she did, the fragments of her soul gathered like dust forming a nebula. It mixed with something, twisting with in some inseparable weave. Her soul formed a new tapestry, with some strange, new threads. The edges were incomplete, still searching for her threads lost to the cosmos.
And that is how she became a wandering soul.