Geoffrey waited in the park where they agreed to meet. Sally was already twenty minutes late, but he expected that. Sally, or the seer, as she called herself, was usually late for just about everything. If Geoffrey could get her to do anything at all, it was a miracle.
The trees were so tall at the park that they hid the high-rises behind them. Geoffrey followed the winding trail with his eyes, and something caught his eyes above, and not further down it, but in the sky. It was strange to him because it looked to be floating, like a balloon might float. But it wasn’t a balloon because it was holding an umbrella. Furthermore, as it came closer, it was in the shape of a particularly large, oddly formed woman.
When she was only about a football field away, he noticed that it wasn’t just any woman, but the woman for which he was waiting. The umbrella she was holding was a strange umbrella. It was oversized, it had a solid foot hold, and the handle, because it was so thick, was must have been reinforced to hold up even the heaviest of weight, because she was the largest woman he had ever seen.
“So… When did you get so daring? You floated in? Don’t you think that it would look a bit obvious that something would be out of place, here?” Said Geoffrey. Geoffrey had seen something like this oddity before, but never on the old earth.
“So I like to shock people. What’s more freakish than an oversized lady floating in on a goddamn Merry Poppins umbrella?” Sally spoke with a flat accent. Sally often seemed to take indulgence in her weight. She rather enjoyed it, Geoffrey thought, and it never seemed to phase her that it may kill her some day. Any other women would not have been bragging about her weight. But Sally didn’t care much for what other people thought. She seemed to own her weight now, and she always had. She took her foot out of the foot hold in the umbrella, closed the umbrella, and sat on the park bench, rattling it.
“Right. Well, in the new world, that may be possible, and it even may be a common sight, but here, it would be odd enough to create attention, don’t you think?”
“Who cares. The people here are all a bunch of dumbasses, anyway.”
“That’s not the point, and you know it.” Geoffrey dangled over Sally, as they sat in the park bench, even as he was leaning on his cane, with his back arched. It was obvious he was not well, and well into his nineties. His fedora hat hid his balding head.
“Is she born, yet?” Sally was pear shaped, had close to no breasts, and she was extremely large even for a large woman. Her body rippled under the stresses of even her tiniest of movements. The park bench shook and squeaked as she shifted her body.
Geoffrey felt uncertain, and uncomfortable. The public chair under them was large and made of thick painted wood and concrete, but it still paled under her size, and it looked as if it was about to break under her weight.
Sally took a candy bar out of her pocket, unwrapped it, and shoved the entire thing in her mouth. She swallowed it, very nearly without chewing, and threw the wrapper on the ground near her feet.
“No. But we have already altered her amygdala. She won’t be as temperamental as the other Changers over the centuries.” Geoffrey was obviously ill, but even with his dying body as it was, he leaned over, picked up the wrapper, and pocketed it. He noticed that Sally’s shoe laces were both undone. He tied them both.
“I can tie my own laces, Geoffrey!” She didn’t move her feet until he tied them, anyway. “You shouldn’t be messing with her brain. Have you considered that maybe she was supposed to be temperamental?”
“Might I remind you what happened the last time we let things go naturally? Besides, we can’t afford to wait another hundred years for the next Changer to arrive. We’re running out of time.”
Sally didn’t look happy about the subject, but that didn’t change her demeanor much, anyway. For the most part, Sally rarely looked happy, and when she did, it usually involved manipulating something or someone she didn’t care for, which was pretty much everyone. Geoffrey was aware she hated being corrected, especially by him. It was a delicate subject to bring up, the past, and Sally didn’t like to talk about it. Geoffrey knew this, and he regretted it immediately. “That whole ordeal was your fault, and you know it.” Sally didn’t like to reminisce about the past, and Geoffrey was aware of that, but it was brought up now because it needed to be, and now Sally looked like she was especially unhappy about it. Sally didn’t want to meet Geoffrey in the first place, and he knew it. “Why am I here, Geoffrey?”
“You know about the upcoming Changer, but what you don’t know about is what is happening to the world.”
“What did you do this time, Geoffrey?”
Geoffrey took a deep breath. “I got cocky. You know about the other world, and how I altered time to create more space.” Geoffrey was one of the most advanced scientists in the new world, and that was saying a lot, considering the new world was ahead of the natural world in science by centuries. Geoffrey shifted his body in the bench. He was always uncomfortable, but sitting up was excessively hard for him. There were things he had to do before it was too late. Time was nearly up for him, and he knew it. “But what you don’t know is that we stretched it too much. It’s about to snap. And worse, yet, I’m dying, and don’t have time to figure out how to fix the issue.”
“I’m not fixing it, Geoffrey. I’ve already done my part.”
“You can’t, anyway. You may have some of the skills, but you aren’t built to do it all.”
“OK.” Sally relaxed uncomfortably. On one hand, it meant she wasn’t going to be responsible for, yet, another mess. On the other hand, she didn’t like being told what she could and couldn’t do. She wasn’t about to do anything she didn’t have to do, and Geoffrey knew it. Sally was inherently lazy. Geoffrey knew she felt that she already did her part… poorly… and not only did she deserve a break in her opinion, but she had no business messing with the world again. She just wanted to live out the rest of her life until she died.
“Gunther will have the mind for it. We took scans of her brain as we altered her amygdala, and she will be able to do it.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. I know it just like I know the scientists in our world will never figure it out. They are missing something.”
“Something? They are brilliant scientists. What else could they need?”
“It’s not in their field of capability. They don’t and can’t think correctly for fixing this.”
“How do you intend on teaching her what she needs to know? You’ll be dead.”
“You already know Gunther will be a Changer, the center of humanity’s cultural web. We’re placing a presence of my image through a computer in the nearest dimension that only Gunther can see, by altering her brain, so that only she can see through the nearest membrane to that dimension. As she grows, she will learn by listening to my likeness. As a Changer, she will already have the mentality to do it. She will just need to learn. Who better than a Changer than to do that? Considering what we know of Changers of the past, they are more than capable to do what needs to be done. As for my likeness, because there is a dimensional shift, others won’t be able to see or hear my likeness.”
“Why can’t your likeness do it?”
“It doesn’t work that way. My likeness will only be data. It can’t learn.”
“Gunther will already be different than others. Do you want people to think she is schizophrenic too?”
“We don’t have a choice in the matter. We should hope she will be stronger than that, emotionally.”
“This whole thing is a bad idea, and I want nothing to do with it.” Sally stood up and opened her umbrella, again.
“I need you to watch over her.”
“I’m not doing it, Geoffrey!”
“Fine, then we’ll all die.”
“Why can’t you get a scientist to watch her?”
“You know why.”
“I’ll just mess her up. You know how I feel about children. They’re smelly, stupid, make poor decisions, and they eat junk food, which is the only thing they do right.”
“You’d rather have some ignorant scientist watch over her?”
Sally stared at Geoffrey for several seconds. “I hate you.”
“I’m sorry, Sally, but after Gunther, you will be responsible for everything… watching over her, keeping her safe, even making the world what it is through her.”
“So what you are saying is that I will have all the responsibilities and none of the benefits.”
Well, you will never have to worry about money again. But aside from that, yes.”
“You should have started with that.”
“So you’ll do it?”
Sally put her foot into the foothold of the umbrella, grimaced, and floated back into the air, yelling, “I’ll do it, but don’t expect me to like it.”