METAFICTION

Chapter 1. THE HIGH READER

THE PLANET FICTION had no accompanying sun, yet its entire surface was bathed in a bright light that was somehow natural and indistinguishable from a keen sunlight. Huge purple leaved trees, tall and springy and bending gracefully as if in a gentle breeze, dominated the planet's surface, yet there was no atmosphere. The trees looked as if they were sweating from a tropical heat, yet any thermometer would read just a few degrees above absolute zero. Planet Fiction was a tiny planet, yet the gravitational force on its surface was equivalent to the Earth's.

There were no cities, towns or villages on the planet Fiction, just a single building known as the High Reader's Realm Depository Complex. A huge dome-shaped building covered in hexagonal glass-like panels. Inside the dome was a particularly vast central hub area, a circular area easily large enough to house its current occupancy of just over nine thousand humans. There were walls to enclose the area, but the ceiling was high above and was the outside structure of the dome-shaped building itself.

The area was covered in row after row after row of sleeping humans of all ages. Unlike outside, there was heat and atmosphere in the building, and all the humans were in a deep sleep and comfortably breathing. The humans were all levitating horizontally just a few feet above the floor. They looked as if they were floating in a sea of randomly changing magnetic currents. For each human, gently rippling differently coloured glowing cables made of a substance called hard-light would temporarily appear and attach themselves from an associated control panel to each human. Some cables concentrated on physical needs. They stimulated muscles and allowed streams of sustenance to flow. Other cables allowed data interfacing, particularly for memory and sensory control. It was as if luminescent ephemeral snakes were appearing out of nowhere to attack their human prey.

The humans were fully clothed, and judging by their clothes, it seemed groupings of rows of humans were from different times and shared cultures. To some extent that was true. But it was more subtle than that. And it was far more extraordinary.

Looking down on the sleepers through the glass walls of her elevated control room stood the High Reader, Jingsey Pleam. She appeared to be a confident, intelligent and extremely beautiful young woman. Her deep-blue eyes sparkled and her perfect golden blonde hair hung straight with its perfect central parting down behind her back to her waist. But appearances can be deceptive. And none more so than from an absolute master of appearance manipulation. The High Reader, a shapeshifter, owned the most transmogrifyingly awesome abilities in the known chain of universes. It was she who invented soft-light and hard-light projection and structure. She was dressed resplendently in a long white dress with ever-changing black-lettered English words. She was the only being awake in the dome. The hard-light and atomised dome was her creation, as was the mainly structured soft-light planet Fiction.

Just then, inside the control room, an electrical sizzle sounded and the High Reader involuntarily and momentarily shapeshifted into an old withered alien with a pained expression stretched across her face, before shapeshifting back to her previous beautiful human form. The ever-changing words were now all red-lettered words of warning. However, each of these words was eventually replaced by the capitalized black-lettered word "HELP".

"No matter the urgency, my personal needs can wait," she whispered quietly to herself. "I must borrow one more human, the final jigsaw piece in my puzzle."

The High Reader closed her eyes and concentrated ...

Within seconds, she slumped and began to float horizontally in an invisible soup of magnetism, asleep, just like the thousands of humans she had been viewing. But she also materialised on the planet Earth in her beautiful shapeshifted female form wide-awake in hard-light form that looked no different from a flesh and blood form. She had materialised in outer London. The date was Thursday the 12th of April 2032. She was in a bedroom where a woman was sitting by the bed of her dying ten-year-old son. The High Reader still presented herself with her long white dress, but there was no sign of the black-lettered ever-changing words.