214 - Two Hundred Fourteen

Breaker Whiskey

[TRANSCRIPT]

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God, it’s fucking helpful having someone else around to bounce ideas off of. My stupid hungover brain wasn’t exactly functioning at the highest point this morning but I think we burned through so many conversational topics last night that over breakfast we actually talked seriously about this whole…deal. Not just the Junior of it all, not just the basics, but the particulars of how this fucked up world works.

He agrees with most of my theories—that we’re in a separate place, but time marched on normally without us somewhere else. That the photographs are a glance into that place. He’s heard some weird sounds though the years too, so the sounds of cars, the tornado siren…all that stuff, everything he’s heard, he agrees that it’s probably bleeding in from that place. From home. Or maybe other timelines, because we’re definitely not the only people stuck in a place like this. That wouldn’t make any kind of sense.

He’s less certain to say with any finality what he thinks the situation with Birdie and Fox is. We both have a hard time with the idea of any kind of all-knowing, all-powerful entity, but we’re also both familiar with being on a government’s wanted list so…the idea of some kind of surveilling body isn’t crazy. That’s what he thinks they are. That they’re supposed to be monitoring us, monitoring the other timelines, which is why Birdie disappears sometimes. And he had the thought—the idea that maybe that’s why they use morse code too. That maybe it’s easier to transmit over long distances using only morse, that maybe they’ve got some kind of relay system built into the country. Which would make sense, I guess—something that existed before the timeline split off, something that’s maybe operating off of old telegraph lines. What’s a longer distance than trying to communicate across all of space and time?

That still doesn’t answer the question of where Birdie and Fox are. Are they here in this timeline? Are they in the real world? In somewhere in between? And…who are they? Part of the US government? Independent scientists? Something other than human?

I’m not sure we’ll ever know, but it’s been nice to theorize with someone. And I’m not holding my breath that Birdie or Fox will respond—and I’m not sure I even want to hear from Fox—but that’s bothering me less than it usually would. It’s easier to bear not knowing when I’ve got someone else who is equally as clueless as me.

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