Overlap

Chapter 29: My New Life

<11/05/2010 - 09:15 | Saffrin Middle School (Math), Austell, GA, USA>

My name is Reed. I'm still in the seventh grade, have an average life, and above average intelligence. But ever since the start of this week, I've had a secret, one I've been keeping only to myself. Despite how normal everything may appear on the surface, I'm actually a psychic.

I don't have too many special powers mind you, only one in particular, the ability to telepathically communicate. The other downside is that I can only use this telepathy on one specific person, an individual who by all self-proclamations is an Altiri alien from a distant star system in the Genosis cluster. Lumina is the name of the other person I can speak to, someone who is also a more impressive psychic than myself, on top of having other special abilities.

However, I don't have the means of producing any concrete evidence that any of this is real, that Lumina and the Altiri actually exist. In fact, I'm still not entirely convinced myself, but since our first encounter, things have changed dramatically. I ended our first day with the probability calculation that there was only a 1% chance that Lumina was real, leaving the 99% chance that I had gone insane and lost part of my rational mind to this new world. However, as the days passed into this Friday, I've since changed that probability of her existence to 5%. It's not a very high number, but there are some good reasons for my newer calculations today.

Factor one: Lumina's presence has not gone away. I actually have the power to decide whether I want to see her ever again, and proven the effectiveness of this on some level. I read somewhere that hallucinations typically only last up to 24 hours tops, unless you are really crazy. But here we are on day five, and she's still here with me now. You might be wondering why I keep calling her back, but the answer to that is actually simple. On one hand, I'm having her help me out a little with learning how to be more social, talk to people, and understand the language a little better. On the other hand, I'm also bored sometimes, and I just want to ask her about the specifics of her world.

Which brings me to point two: No matter what I ask Lumina, she has an answer for just about everything on the spot. She's been teaching me all kinds of things about her world, things that are hard to understand given the complicated science aspect to it. However, I've also had her teaching me the basics of outer space and general physics, only to go and look into it afterwards. Her accuracy in outer space physics is too precise and high for all of this to be a coincidence. In all, Lumina is capable of teaching me things even about my own world that I would have had no way of learning prior to hearing her about it. If she were fake, that shouldn't be possible in the first place.

Then there is point three, the realism of her responses and personality. Despite how I imagined a complex hallucination, Lumina isn't like me at all. She isn't an introvert, nor is she afraid to speak what's on her mind. Through this whole week, I've seen reactions and behaviors from her that all feel too real for it to be a product of anyone's imagination. It's actually impressive; I've seen more personality out of her than I've seen in most of my own classmates. As scary as that should be, her helpful nature towards me has at least earned her a spot of trust.

I've gotten used to calling her and talking to her at random intervals of my day, usually having one conversation unbeknownst to anybody around us, while listening or pretending to listen to another conversation, usually a teacher's lesson. I also took Lumina's advice in keeping this a secret from everybody else, realizing only now that it was the smarter move to make. After all, I don't really feel like I'm insane, not with how much control and freedom I still have over myself. Lumina can't control me, my body, my emotions, or my decisions. She actually told me herself that such type of possessive control is not within the realm of possibilities for psychic powers.