Animal Theater

The Many Iterations of Kendra Dixon

Her life, every human life, was a labyrinth, a branching out of many possible paths through existence. Before the surgery she saw time like anyone else, experiencing only the present moving ever forward, but then the headaches came and the doctors ordered tests and scans. Abnormal growth, they said, a brain tumor, deep inside, near the center of her brain. Surgery would be risky, but the doctors assured her that it was completely necessary. The moment she regained consciousness she knew something was different. She was in immense pain, but she found that she could turn the pain off and on at will. She could stop the pain, but while it was stopped she couldn't move her body. She thought something was terribly wrong and even considered the possibility that she was dead, but when she did it in the presence of another person, she figured out what was happening.

She was stopping time, or more precisely, stopping her forward movement through time. The nurse came in to see how she was doing and froze mid-sentence. It reminded her of childhood fantasies of freezing time and robbing a bank or checking to see what type of underwear her teachers wore. Unfortunately stopping time meant stopping herself too, and the only thing still moving was her mind. She felt like she was sitting on a wheel, and all she had to do to start up time was to lean forward ever so slightly. It wasn't long before she found she could lean the other direction too.

Kendra was convinced that her brain had been damaged in surgery, and she didn't know what to do. Moving forward in time she could almost feel normal, although she wasn't used to being in control of the speed of her forward progress. But moving backwards was disorienting and unpleasant at first. She rushed back past the surgery and spoke to her mother and father backwards, words jumping into her mouth. She went through the awful experience of shitting backwards, and went past a big meal she'd had for breakfast the day before, with the omelette coming up her throat, being assembled by her teeth and spit onto her fork.

She was glad she could rush these unpleasant things, zip by them in a blur if she wanted. She rushed back and back to the last time she'd had sex with her boyfriend. Orgasms felt amazing backwards, so good that she became convinced that it was how they were meant to be experienced. She could stop all sensations instantly, and play them forward or backward, feeling the same intensity every time. Soon she stopped seeing her new abilities as a scary problem, and began to feel that she'd been released from the constraints of time. The only thing she missed was being able to change anything. Forward or backward she thought she had to live it the same way. Then came the first mysterious pulse.

It started as a kind of chatter in Kendra's head, a bunch of thoughts that were both foreign and familiar at the same time. They got louder and louder and then the spatial reality of what Kendra was seeing snapped into focus, and there was a moment of two Kendras occupying the same body. They both reacted in fear. 'Who are you?' 'What are you doing in my head?' Kendra stopped her forward progress in time and listened to the internal chatter recede. She moved forward along the timeline again, but found that things were now a little different than they had been before. In this timeline Kendra tried to describe what had happened to her sister.

That was how she discovered that she could still change things if she wanted to, and it was how she discovered the branching points of her life. Right at the moment where the two instances of Kendra's life diverged, things got blurry. She could feel the different directions she could go, almost spatially. She discovered, to her absolute amazement, that she had lived many thousands of lives as Kendra Dixon. Some of the lives followed almost exactly the path of a previous life, and some were radically different. The only thing all of them had in common was the moment and circumstances of her birth.

She discovered that if she felt a pulse coming she could stop all movement and clear her mind, and the instant of another Kendra passing by trapped in linear time wouldn't cause such confusion. If she did it right it also wouldn't create a serious branching point like it had the first time. Her theory was that there was something in the brain, some little node in there, that kept human consciousness glued to the present, of which there were many. Her node had obviously been removed during the surgery. The pulse was the present, a wave of time, another roll of the dice, and it moved across everything that existed.