Untitled Work In Progress
First Draft of the First Part
Sally knew something wasn't right as her body dropped a few inches landing on her back. Opening her eyes she saw the trees rising above her, dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy with birdsong in the distance. And that was right but she'd never really had a sense of touch before with Arcadia. Sitting up she saw Izzy and Joe close by, as they were in the house. Well, almost as they were in the house.
"Love the upgrade Sally, how'd ya manage it?" Arcadia gave you empty forest, occasional wildlife and very occasionally signs of human activity. Nobody had ever mentioned meeting other users in the trip.
"But a few clothes wouldn't go amiss." Joe added, "No that I'm complaining, you understand." They'd never been anything more than disembodied observers, but her body definitely seemed to be with her this time, along with Joe's and Izzy's.
Sally gave some thought to Izzy's comment. She hadn't been able to make any Arcadia for a while because the summer had made it hard to get the key ingredient, a fungus. Had she got the strength wrong and just made it a bit more immersive? Possible - she'd never got round to testing the effects of increasing doses. Something different in the fungus? Possible - maybe the long hot summer. Something was clearly different as this was much more immersive, and whatever it was she couldn't explain it.
"So, how does this work?", asked Joe. "Is this a shared trip, or am I imagining you and Izzy sitting there?" And that, she thought, was a good question.
"Erm..." How could minds out of bodies share a common experience?
"Or I could just be imagining you asking those questions.", was Izzy's opening of a third viewpoint. "I didn't want a philosophy seminar, I wanted to chill out in the woods for a bit. So that's what I'll be doing over there." She got up and walked off towards what looked like a nearby clearing.
"I think I'm going to stop thinking about it," Joe said after a couple of minutes. "I can feel my brain beginning to hurt and I can't even work out what the question is."
"Yeah, give it an hour or two and we'll be back in reality. It's just as well it's a nice warm day. Assuming that I am actually talking to the real you, you might want to make sure Izzy doesn't stray too far as Arcadia can give a bit of a nasty hang over if you go too far and since this feels more real that could be nasty this time round."
"Fair enough" said Joe as he got up to wander off after Izzy.
Sally tried to put the philosophy out of her mind; she could vaguely recall some big name philosopher who himself tied up in the question of whether he was dreaming or not and that didn't feel like a problem she could solve. So she moved a little over, into the sun, sat back against a tree and watched the light through the leaves.
That was almost the Arcadia experience she'd been wanting - apart from the need to clear twigs and avoid roots. As she lay there her mind kept coming back to the same question: why was it so much more immersive this time?
When you're the "designated driver" you're not supposed to be the one who sees the unbelievable. The strange, possibly. The disturbing, likewise. A bad reaction or a nasty side effect, maybe. After all, that's why we always had one and it was my turn today. Arcadia was normally no trouble - you lost consciousness for a couple of hours, had an immersive woodland experience and came back feeling like you'd had a week's holiday.
It was never going to be a drug for the nightclubs or thrill seekers but it was the best response to a stressful time. And after last week, I'd been looking forward to it right up until I drew the short straw. Sally made a note of the time and the dose, and while she, Joe and Izzy took a drop of it in a glass of water, I took a cup of tea, sat back with a magazine and watched them drift off. And vanish.
What the ...
The three of them were definitely gone, clothes lying where they'd been. If I'd not been looking at them as it happened I'd have thought it a practical joke of some sort. But I'd been watching them ...
I pulled Sally's jeans away from her T shirt and sat back down.
I was at a loss. No point calling an ambulance or doing any of the other things a designated driver might be called on for. I pulled my phone out, checked the time and took a photo of the clothes. What next? I could think of nothing else but to finish my tea.
A mug of tea can only last so long and when I'd got to the end of mine, nothing had happened to change things. The clothes were still lying there; Sally, Joe and Izzy were still not there and I was still at a dead loss on what to do now. It was a while since she'd last made any and this was the first go with the new batch. Sally had always said that if she was going to let other people drugs she'd made then it was only right that she should have tried them herself, so if this was something to do with the Arcadia then there shouldn't be anyone else at risk at the moment.
So there's probably nothing I could usefully do at the moment. I went through to the kitchen, did the washing up and came back with a fresh mug of tea to try and work out what to do next. Because if I tell anyone it'd be a toss up between being prime suspect for three murders or an awful lot of time with psychiatrists.
Should I take a dose myself? Go wherever they'd gone? But if I did, would I be able to find them? Would I end up wherever they'd gone? Much as I hated loosing Sally it seemed like too much of a leap into the unknown. So if I wasn't going to try to go after her, I needed to come up with something that wouldn't leave me looking like a complete fruit cake.
Sally's mind had strayed from the question of why it seemed so much more immersive to the question of how and when it would end. An hour or so in the woods on a hot summer's day was nice but sooner or later food, water and clothing would become increasingly needed. There was also the question of who and what also they might run into if they were here for any significant time.
She'd seen people, or what she took to be people but only at too great a distance to see details and wildlife consistent with European forests - boar, bear and wolves were potential dangers here. But today she'd seen none of these though from an exclamation of Joe's, he and Izzy had seen something at a distance.
It was difficult to judge time but the shadows had moved round quite a bit and it was definitely cooling off. Still warm enough for a last bask in the sun before doing something to keep warm.
I wasn't having much success trying to come up with a way of opening a conversation about people disappearing into thin air. Just generically missing I'd need to give it a few days even for Sally and the question of the clothes left behind would have to be addressed if I didn't want to get into what would look suspiciously like destroying evidence.
There was a thud from the kitchen closely followed by the sound of Sally going into full strop mode: "What the fuck have you been playing at Paul? Why am I in the kitchen and where are my clothes?" Never had I been relieved to hear someone so angry.
"I haven't been playing at anything - you're the one who disappeared. And they're through here."
Her head appeared round the door so I threw jeans and shirt in her direction. "And if you know anything about what's happened to Joe and Izzy we might be able to do something useful."
"What do you mean?", Sally's voice was still raised but she seemed to be more interested in getting dressed than bringing down immediate vengeance for silly buggery on my part.
"All three of you just vanished into thin air just after taking the Arcadia."
"Vanished?"
"Into thin air. One moment you were there on the sofa, the next you were gone. Bodies gone, clothes still there."
"Really? You're not having me on?"
"I promise. I've spent the last hour going spare. Trying to think of what to do that wouldn't see me sectioned or charged with murder. Or both. God, its good to see you again." That last as she came into the room. "Where've you been?"
"That's a ... good question. You say we just vanished."
"A minute or so after taking it." I picked up her note of the dose. "At 4:27 you took it, and vanished. Here, look at the time stamp" I passed he my phone with the picture of the empty clothes. She looked at that, at Joe and Izzy's clothes and back to me.
"So, where are they now?" she asked.
"I was hoping you might be able to answer that."
"Well, I thought they were with me but maybe 50 meters away."
"You didn't come back exactly where you left from ..."
"And I did move about a bit but not far ..."
"So when they come back ..."
"They'll be about 50 meters away."
"And needing those." I said, pointing at their clothes.
"You check the front. I'll take the back"
I grabbed a couple of coats and went out onto the street. Fifty meters probably could see them inside someone else's house on the other side of the street, but gardens or the road were more likely. A few minutes later I'd checked the gardens quietly calling their names but not found them. I went back to the house to see if Sally had had more luck, but no. She'd drawn a blank too.
Had they returned but been trapped somewhere - like a stray cat locked in a garage? Were they still wherever they'd gone? Was our assumption about where they'd return to wrong - Sally had ended up in her kitchen. Perhaps they'd gone home. I set off to check that possibility - they lived a couple of miles away so I grabbed my bike and set off leaving Sally to keep an occasional eye on the neighbourhood.
They weren't in so that was one more failed idea, assuming that they'd come back. Trips on Arcadia varied a bit, but they should both have been back - if this was behaving like Arcadia. I gave the area the once over as I came home - still no signs of them, or the disturbance that a couple of naked people materialising in a back garden or living room might cause. And Sally hadn't been able to round them up either.
"What do you make of it?"
"Well, you came back. What was happening for you when you came back?"
"Nothing much, I knew I should be doing something, but while it was still warm I was getting sleepy. I think I nodded off and then I was back in the kitchen."
"Normally sleepy or something else."
"It felt pretty normal, just the natural sort of dozing in the sunshine."
"So we probably need to keep an eye on things for the next few hours."
"Now if we had a cat, we wouldn't look like complete nutters walking around, peering over fences..."
That wasn't a discussion I was going to get into at this point so I volunteered myself for kitchen duty and started pulling together some dinner. For four because I felt the need to act optimistic even if I wasn't really convinced.
It was about half an hour later that there was a banging on the door and a shout of "Paul". Sally beat me to the door and Izzy ducked in.
"Thank God your OK - where's Joe?"
"Behind a fence across the road - number 37."
"Your clothes are where you left them - through there"
"I'll get Joe." I said taking the coat and walking over to number 37. I found him between the waist high fence and a rather bushy rhododendron and passed him the coat. "There you go mate."
"Cheers." He pulled the coat on, checked for passers by and climbed over the fence and we walked back.
"Your clothes are on the sofa where you left them."
"Thanks mate, see you in a mo."
And by that point, dinner was done so we cracked open a couple of bottles of wine and began to digest the events of the last few hours.
I won't pretend that I can remember all the conversation from that evening. There was rather a lot of it and having missed out on the the experience I can't say it all made complete sense to me. Sally, Joe and Izzy compared their experiences and decided that they must have been together in some sense. Their disappearance and reappearance pointed to them having been physically there, wherever there was and this was backed up by some scratches Joe had picked up from brambles or something similar.
Joe and Izzy had also returned when they fell asleep and having tried not to until they could resist it no longer they were clear that this was not just normal dozing off. The three of them agreed that wherever it was looked like the familiar destination with Arcadia, and that wherever it was it was very similar to the Sussex countryside, but not any part of it that you'd find in modern Britain. Too much big wildlife and a few other things that just didn't look "right".
So regardless of our inability to explain any of it the three of them had definitely been somewhere, their return coming as the drug wore off and their movements in that place reflected in the position they returned to. If it didn't sound like bad sci-fi I'd have used phrases like "teleportation" and "planar travel" but that just feels like asking for ridicule.
As we finished eating the discussion turned to what to do next. True to her normal self, Sally wanted to investigate the effect of the drug and try to understand what was actually making this happen; Izzy wanted to understand more about wherever it was that Arcadia was taking us; Joe was adamant that he'd not be trying it again and me? I was half way between wanting to see what they'd seen and agreeing with Joe, that they'd been lucky this time and there was just too much that could go wrong.
"Have you ever," he said, "read Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde? Do it too much and the effects could stick, and that's before the fact that he'd a base to operate from and we'd turn up bare bollock naked."
"But that's just a story"
"After this afternoon just how sure are you of that?"
"Good point; but that just gives us some things to watch out for and lessons to learn from." I could tell that Sally was up for some pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
"So you will read it then?"
"Yeah, like you say there are risks and practicalities to think about and I want to see if I can figure out why it's having this effect now."
I think we all needed to spend a bit of time thinking this afternoon through because the conversation sort of petered out and nobody was making any suggestions. So we agreed to think our thoughts, read such bits of fact or fiction that might help us decide what was the best way forward and to write up our own recollections of the day while they were fresh in our minds.
"Love the upgrade Sally, how'd ya manage it?" Arcadia gave you empty forest, occasional wildlife and very occasionally signs of human activity. Nobody had ever mentioned meeting other users in the trip.
"But a few clothes wouldn't go amiss." Joe added, "No that I'm complaining, you understand." They'd never been anything more than disembodied observers, but her body definitely seemed to be with her this time, along with Joe's and Izzy's.
Sally gave some thought to Izzy's comment. She hadn't been able to make any Arcadia for a while because the summer had made it hard to get the key ingredient, a fungus. Had she got the strength wrong and just made it a bit more immersive? Possible - she'd never got round to testing the effects of increasing doses. Something different in the fungus? Possible - maybe the long hot summer. Something was clearly different as this was much more immersive, and whatever it was she couldn't explain it.
"So, how does this work?", asked Joe. "Is this a shared trip, or am I imagining you and Izzy sitting there?" And that, she thought, was a good question.
"Erm..." How could minds out of bodies share a common experience?
"Or I could just be imagining you asking those questions.", was Izzy's opening of a third viewpoint. "I didn't want a philosophy seminar, I wanted to chill out in the woods for a bit. So that's what I'll be doing over there." She got up and walked off towards what looked like a nearby clearing.
"I think I'm going to stop thinking about it," Joe said after a couple of minutes. "I can feel my brain beginning to hurt and I can't even work out what the question is."
"Yeah, give it an hour or two and we'll be back in reality. It's just as well it's a nice warm day. Assuming that I am actually talking to the real you, you might want to make sure Izzy doesn't stray too far as Arcadia can give a bit of a nasty hang over if you go too far and since this feels more real that could be nasty this time round."
"Fair enough" said Joe as he got up to wander off after Izzy.
Sally tried to put the philosophy out of her mind; she could vaguely recall some big name philosopher who himself tied up in the question of whether he was dreaming or not and that didn't feel like a problem she could solve. So she moved a little over, into the sun, sat back against a tree and watched the light through the leaves.
That was almost the Arcadia experience she'd been wanting - apart from the need to clear twigs and avoid roots. As she lay there her mind kept coming back to the same question: why was it so much more immersive this time?
When you're the "designated driver" you're not supposed to be the one who sees the unbelievable. The strange, possibly. The disturbing, likewise. A bad reaction or a nasty side effect, maybe. After all, that's why we always had one and it was my turn today. Arcadia was normally no trouble - you lost consciousness for a couple of hours, had an immersive woodland experience and came back feeling like you'd had a week's holiday.
It was never going to be a drug for the nightclubs or thrill seekers but it was the best response to a stressful time. And after last week, I'd been looking forward to it right up until I drew the short straw. Sally made a note of the time and the dose, and while she, Joe and Izzy took a drop of it in a glass of water, I took a cup of tea, sat back with a magazine and watched them drift off. And vanish.
What the ...
The three of them were definitely gone, clothes lying where they'd been. If I'd not been looking at them as it happened I'd have thought it a practical joke of some sort. But I'd been watching them ...
I pulled Sally's jeans away from her T shirt and sat back down.
I was at a loss. No point calling an ambulance or doing any of the other things a designated driver might be called on for. I pulled my phone out, checked the time and took a photo of the clothes. What next? I could think of nothing else but to finish my tea.
A mug of tea can only last so long and when I'd got to the end of mine, nothing had happened to change things. The clothes were still lying there; Sally, Joe and Izzy were still not there and I was still at a dead loss on what to do now. It was a while since she'd last made any and this was the first go with the new batch. Sally had always said that if she was going to let other people drugs she'd made then it was only right that she should have tried them herself, so if this was something to do with the Arcadia then there shouldn't be anyone else at risk at the moment.
So there's probably nothing I could usefully do at the moment. I went through to the kitchen, did the washing up and came back with a fresh mug of tea to try and work out what to do next. Because if I tell anyone it'd be a toss up between being prime suspect for three murders or an awful lot of time with psychiatrists.
Should I take a dose myself? Go wherever they'd gone? But if I did, would I be able to find them? Would I end up wherever they'd gone? Much as I hated loosing Sally it seemed like too much of a leap into the unknown. So if I wasn't going to try to go after her, I needed to come up with something that wouldn't leave me looking like a complete fruit cake.
Sally's mind had strayed from the question of why it seemed so much more immersive to the question of how and when it would end. An hour or so in the woods on a hot summer's day was nice but sooner or later food, water and clothing would become increasingly needed. There was also the question of who and what also they might run into if they were here for any significant time.
She'd seen people, or what she took to be people but only at too great a distance to see details and wildlife consistent with European forests - boar, bear and wolves were potential dangers here. But today she'd seen none of these though from an exclamation of Joe's, he and Izzy had seen something at a distance.
It was difficult to judge time but the shadows had moved round quite a bit and it was definitely cooling off. Still warm enough for a last bask in the sun before doing something to keep warm.
I wasn't having much success trying to come up with a way of opening a conversation about people disappearing into thin air. Just generically missing I'd need to give it a few days even for Sally and the question of the clothes left behind would have to be addressed if I didn't want to get into what would look suspiciously like destroying evidence.
There was a thud from the kitchen closely followed by the sound of Sally going into full strop mode: "What the fuck have you been playing at Paul? Why am I in the kitchen and where are my clothes?" Never had I been relieved to hear someone so angry.
"I haven't been playing at anything - you're the one who disappeared. And they're through here."
Her head appeared round the door so I threw jeans and shirt in her direction. "And if you know anything about what's happened to Joe and Izzy we might be able to do something useful."
"What do you mean?", Sally's voice was still raised but she seemed to be more interested in getting dressed than bringing down immediate vengeance for silly buggery on my part.
"All three of you just vanished into thin air just after taking the Arcadia."
"Vanished?"
"Into thin air. One moment you were there on the sofa, the next you were gone. Bodies gone, clothes still there."
"Really? You're not having me on?"
"I promise. I've spent the last hour going spare. Trying to think of what to do that wouldn't see me sectioned or charged with murder. Or both. God, its good to see you again." That last as she came into the room. "Where've you been?"
"That's a ... good question. You say we just vanished."
"A minute or so after taking it." I picked up her note of the dose. "At 4:27 you took it, and vanished. Here, look at the time stamp" I passed he my phone with the picture of the empty clothes. She looked at that, at Joe and Izzy's clothes and back to me.
"So, where are they now?" she asked.
"I was hoping you might be able to answer that."
"Well, I thought they were with me but maybe 50 meters away."
"You didn't come back exactly where you left from ..."
"And I did move about a bit but not far ..."
"So when they come back ..."
"They'll be about 50 meters away."
"And needing those." I said, pointing at their clothes.
"You check the front. I'll take the back"
I grabbed a couple of coats and went out onto the street. Fifty meters probably could see them inside someone else's house on the other side of the street, but gardens or the road were more likely. A few minutes later I'd checked the gardens quietly calling their names but not found them. I went back to the house to see if Sally had had more luck, but no. She'd drawn a blank too.
Had they returned but been trapped somewhere - like a stray cat locked in a garage? Were they still wherever they'd gone? Was our assumption about where they'd return to wrong - Sally had ended up in her kitchen. Perhaps they'd gone home. I set off to check that possibility - they lived a couple of miles away so I grabbed my bike and set off leaving Sally to keep an occasional eye on the neighbourhood.
They weren't in so that was one more failed idea, assuming that they'd come back. Trips on Arcadia varied a bit, but they should both have been back - if this was behaving like Arcadia. I gave the area the once over as I came home - still no signs of them, or the disturbance that a couple of naked people materialising in a back garden or living room might cause. And Sally hadn't been able to round them up either.
"What do you make of it?"
"Well, you came back. What was happening for you when you came back?"
"Nothing much, I knew I should be doing something, but while it was still warm I was getting sleepy. I think I nodded off and then I was back in the kitchen."
"Normally sleepy or something else."
"It felt pretty normal, just the natural sort of dozing in the sunshine."
"So we probably need to keep an eye on things for the next few hours."
"Now if we had a cat, we wouldn't look like complete nutters walking around, peering over fences..."
That wasn't a discussion I was going to get into at this point so I volunteered myself for kitchen duty and started pulling together some dinner. For four because I felt the need to act optimistic even if I wasn't really convinced.
It was about half an hour later that there was a banging on the door and a shout of "Paul". Sally beat me to the door and Izzy ducked in.
"Thank God your OK - where's Joe?"
"Behind a fence across the road - number 37."
"Your clothes are where you left them - through there"
"I'll get Joe." I said taking the coat and walking over to number 37. I found him between the waist high fence and a rather bushy rhododendron and passed him the coat. "There you go mate."
"Cheers." He pulled the coat on, checked for passers by and climbed over the fence and we walked back.
"Your clothes are on the sofa where you left them."
"Thanks mate, see you in a mo."
And by that point, dinner was done so we cracked open a couple of bottles of wine and began to digest the events of the last few hours.
I won't pretend that I can remember all the conversation from that evening. There was rather a lot of it and having missed out on the the experience I can't say it all made complete sense to me. Sally, Joe and Izzy compared their experiences and decided that they must have been together in some sense. Their disappearance and reappearance pointed to them having been physically there, wherever there was and this was backed up by some scratches Joe had picked up from brambles or something similar.
Joe and Izzy had also returned when they fell asleep and having tried not to until they could resist it no longer they were clear that this was not just normal dozing off. The three of them agreed that wherever it was looked like the familiar destination with Arcadia, and that wherever it was it was very similar to the Sussex countryside, but not any part of it that you'd find in modern Britain. Too much big wildlife and a few other things that just didn't look "right".
So regardless of our inability to explain any of it the three of them had definitely been somewhere, their return coming as the drug wore off and their movements in that place reflected in the position they returned to. If it didn't sound like bad sci-fi I'd have used phrases like "teleportation" and "planar travel" but that just feels like asking for ridicule.
As we finished eating the discussion turned to what to do next. True to her normal self, Sally wanted to investigate the effect of the drug and try to understand what was actually making this happen; Izzy wanted to understand more about wherever it was that Arcadia was taking us; Joe was adamant that he'd not be trying it again and me? I was half way between wanting to see what they'd seen and agreeing with Joe, that they'd been lucky this time and there was just too much that could go wrong.
"Have you ever," he said, "read Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde? Do it too much and the effects could stick, and that's before the fact that he'd a base to operate from and we'd turn up bare bollock naked."
"But that's just a story"
"After this afternoon just how sure are you of that?"
"Good point; but that just gives us some things to watch out for and lessons to learn from." I could tell that Sally was up for some pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
"So you will read it then?"
"Yeah, like you say there are risks and practicalities to think about and I want to see if I can figure out why it's having this effect now."
I think we all needed to spend a bit of time thinking this afternoon through because the conversation sort of petered out and nobody was making any suggestions. So we agreed to think our thoughts, read such bits of fact or fiction that might help us decide what was the best way forward and to write up our own recollections of the day while they were fresh in our minds.
Comments