• There are times when everything seems completely out of whack… There are times when the unbelievable becomes a reality. There are times when all seems lost… But, imagine all of those times happening at once.
    October 4th was when it happened, when everything that I’d lost had come back in the most unexpected way, and the life I had grown used to was changed forever. It was the day I met them.
     
    EPISODE 1- ASENSCION 17

    Today was a special day; it was my birthday. Finally, I was turning seventeen and I could leave the orphanage and start a new life. Maybe I’d pick up a job as a waitress, or something… The choices were endless.
    I was sitting on my bed, thinking of all the things I could do when I was out in the world; when I was finally of legal age to take care of myself, when I’d be out there, three hours from now. I heard someone quietly tiptoe up the stairs and step into the doorway of my room.
    “Kayleigh, happy birthday.” Mrs. Kertchweld held a small cake in her hands and gracefully presented it to me. A warm smile stretched across her wrinkly face.
    "Thank you, so much.” When I took the cake, I noticed it had a small quote written on it in frosting: ‘grats for ascending to adulthood’.
    “This is a very special year for you, Kayleigh. You finally get to govern yourself now.” Mrs. K sat on the bed next to me and took a little bit of the frosting off the top. “You’ll be free.” Those words scared me, in a way. I was in the Knotty Pines orphanage since I was two and a half, and I followed all their rules without question, and without hesitation. Now, I’ll be setting the rules for myself, with no one to give me any guidance.
    “I guess nobody would consider adopting someone as old as me… I’m basically an adult now.”
    “That’s not true. In fact, this morning, two nice people were considering it.” She ate the frosting on her fingertip and then rose to her feet. “They were looking for someone your age.”
    “Oh, wow… That’d be the best birthday present ever!” I put the cake on the nightstand and took a deep breath. “Is there any way I can contact them?”
    “They said they were coming back tomorrow. I’ll make sure to have them meet you as the first ‘exhibit’. Enjoy your cake.” She smiled and left the room, sauntering down the creaky wooden stairs of a creaky wooden orphanage… This was the oldest building in the entire city. Too bad nobody considered fixing it up.
    “Hm…” I took a tiny bite of the cake and then laid back in the old, worn out bed. I closed my eyes, and fell asleep for the first time as an adult.
    …That was when I had that dream.
    I remember it vividly, as if it were real. I looked out my window and saw burning buildings, bodies everywhere on the streets, soldiers killing civilians; it all made no sense, but it felt so real… Maybe it was the sugar in the cake I ate.
    But, to this day, I still wonder. Would this really happen to me, or was this just another nightmare of the many I’ve had up until my 17th birthday?
    When I woke up the next day, I was finally able to meet those people. Maybe, just maybe, they’d adopt me.





    EPISODE 2- THE START OF SOMETHING BIG

    “Kayleigh, wake up. They’re downstairs.” Mrs. K. was sitting at the foot of my bed whispering.
    “Oh, you mean they’re here to see me?” I got up right away and started brushing my hair in a panic. What would they think of me? What if they didn’t want me…? I don’t think I’d be prepared for that.
    “Don’t worry. I’ll have them wait while you take a shower. See you in fifteen minutes?” She left the room and gently closed the door behind her. When she took each calm step down the stairs, the increasing amount of worry swooped over me. I wanted to be free; I wanted to live a normal life with a family who accepted me. I shook it off and walked into the bathroom, closing the rickety wooden door behind me.
    I cleared my mind of all the worries and stepped into the shower. The water was like a warm, moving coat that gently covered my back. It was soothing, and I began to loosen up a little more. This was gonna work out for me; it just had to. It’d be impossible for it not to, right?
    When I’d finished cleaning up, I put on my favorite sweater and my lucky pair of shorts. The blue sweater hat tan-colored diamonds cascading down the left side, and it fit loosely around my small waist. The shorts were dark blue, almost black. I remember when I got them; it was probably the luckiest day of my life.
    When I was ready to see them, I slipped on my checkered shoes and carefully descended down the steps and into the foyer. A woman with short wavy hazel hair and a man who was balding with a somewhat tall stature stood at the front desk; their attention immediately shifted to me, which was, in a way, embarrassing. They smiled politely and I became a little nervous. Maybe they were just going to “consider” it, and then I’d get my hopes up… Just like all those other times.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Peters, this is Kayleigh. She’s been very eager to meet you.” Mrs. K. gestured for me to walk up to them.
    “Hello, Kayleigh.” The hazel-haired woman’s voice waltzed into my ears. Her smile was modest, and her eyes glowed with a wondrous light of liveliness.
    “It’s great to meet you.” Her husband spoke rather softly, and he didn’t feel comfortable looking me in the eyes.
    “Hi. It’s really great to see you, too.” I shook both their hands and tried to hide the fact that I was trembling like I was in a freezer. When I looked at the woman, her smile stretched a bit; it calmed me down a little, or at least enough to be able to breathe normally.
    I sat down in a cushioned chair and took a deep breath; they sat across from me and tried to break the awkward silence.
    “How… How long have you lived here?” Mr. Peters looked down at the floor and didn’t have eye contact with me. He cupped his hands and began looking around the room.
    “I’ve been here since I was three. I dunno where my parents are.” I eased up and tried not to be sad. I forced a smile and then leaned back in the comfy chair I was sitting in.
    “Oh, that’s awful…” Mrs. Peters put her hand over her mouth, she really did seem concerned. But, Mr. Peters didn’t really say anything in response to that. He just tried so hard to avoid looking directly at me. What was wrong with him?
    “Mrs. Kertchweld, could I have the adoption papers, please?” Mrs. Peters’ words picked me off up my feet. I was actually going to be in a home that I could call mine! I was going to be part of a family… But most importantly, I was going to be the daughter of someone!
    “Absolutely, I’ll be back in just a moment.”
    “Kayleigh! Wait up!” My friend Stacy’s voice came from the other end of the large wooden foyer. When I turned around, she had something folded in her arms.
    “Stacy, thank God you’re here. It's finally happening!” I jumped out of my seat and hugged her tighter than I’d ever hugged anyone before. Besides Mrs. K, Stacy’d be the only person--- or thing--- that I’d miss about this creaky old place. “What’s that?”
    “I made you another sweater. It was a rainy weekend, so I figured I’d pass the time.” She handed it to me and I unfolded it. I think it was the most beautiful sweater I’d ever seen. There were stripes that went down diagonally, and her famous colored diamonds were on the inside of the stripes. What was the most noticeable part was that the sweater was composed of probably twenty different shades of blue. It was gorgeous… And this is what she calls a “boredom project”.
    “It’s amazing. But hey, you’re seventeen too, right? When you get out in the world you should start a sweater business. You’d be famous!” I hugged her one more time and she cried a bit. We’d been best friends since fourteen years ago. The two of us were inseparable, and it was gonna get hard not to see her barging into my room in the middle of the night.
    Mrs. K came back with the adoption papers and a pen, and gave them to Mrs. Peters. She started signing away immediately, and with each word she scribbled on the page, it was one letter closer to declaring my freedom from this place. I wanted so badly to see what the outside world would be like… It was probably so much more fascinating than this isolated bubble of a place.
    “There, all done.” Mrs. Peters handed the paper and the pen back and all the worries dissipated. I was going to miss Stacy and Mrs. K, but this was an opportunity that I couldn’t afford to decline. Mrs. Peters hugged me and she had tears of joy in her eyes. “Welcome to the family, Kayleigh.”
     
    EPISODE 3- THE HEADACHE

    When I walked out the door of the orphanage, the world unfolded before me; the only time I’d seen the outside world was when I looked out the dirty windows on occasion, or when parents were looking to adopt, but that was it. When I saw it with my own two eyes, and when I was actually able to stand right in the middle of the real world, outside of the rickety wooden bubble in which I resided for fourteen years… I became a little scared. The world was just so massive, where would I begin to embrace it? There were so many things I’d never seen before; it felt as if I hadn’t actually been alive for the past fourteen years.
    I had to now leave everything I knew behind, and I had to start completely over. I was literally an infant adult. And, to help me start over, my legal parents guided me.
    “C’mon, Kayleigh, the car’s unlocked.” My mom opened the back door to their van and gestured for me to get in. It was a sleek, black color, and the seats were strangely comfortable. I had no idea what material the inside of the car was made of, but it gave off a strange faux rubbery scent. When mom closed the door behind me, an odd dinging sound echoed from the front of the car. I learned about cars when Mrs. K taught us in class, but the textbooks she gave us were about cars from the 20th century, and not the ones today… So, I never really knew what the dinging sound was for.
    Mother got in the drivers’ seat, and father just sat quietly in the front passenger seat of the car, not uttering a word and fidgeting with his tie. Mom pulled the seatbelt down her left shoulder and to her right hip, making a clicking sound. That’s when I remembered to put mine on as well. So much was happening all at once that I began to get confused; I now left the place I reluctantly called home for the past decade and a half, and now I’m in some sort of high-tech van… With two people I just met, who are now my parents… It’s definitely quite a bit to take in at one given time.
    In less than ten minutes, we pulled up to a large house. It had perfectly cut grass, immaculate grass and fresh, un-chipped white paint all over the beautiful home of perfection. The driveway had no cracks in it, compared to the wasteland of a parking lot at the orphanage. My life just went to the polar opposite of itself; I have parents now… And, apparently, I’m going to be living in a really awesome house.
    When mom and dad got out of the car, I unbuckled my seatbelt and followed them. Mom unlocked the side door and pushed it open, inviting me in. It was the most stunning place I’d ever seen. Everything was either perfectly clean or pretty freaking close. Mom and dad walked in behind me and sat at the table to my left. She smiled, and dad just kind of drifted off again. He really only said one full sentence to me ever since I saw him. I sat down at the other end of the marble white table and remained silent.
    “So, what do you like to do? D’you have any hobbies?” Mom looked me in the eyes and smiled.
    “I like to read, and, I like knitting, I guess…” I couldn’t really think of all of the hobbies that occupied my time back in the orphanage. I used to knit, read, doodle, and sleep. That was basically my daily cycle minus eating and taking a bath, it eventually became like a ritual.
    “That’s wonderful. I love knitting, too.” Mom got up from her chair and waved for me to follow her. “C’mon with me, I’ll show you the sewing room.” Her shoes clicked on the perfectly white tile, and when I followed her into the next room, I saw a huge black picture hanging on the wall. It had buttons on the side, and there was a beige couch planted right in front of it. I kept looking at the frame, but it didn’t look like there would even be a picture that would take up all that space…
    “Oh, I see you have some slight interest in the plasma TV. It was kinda expensive, but definitely worth it.”
    “Jane, it was ninety five hundred dollars… The picture better be pretty.” Dad yelled from the other room sarcastically; that was the longest sentence I’ve heard come out of his balding head.
    “Steve watches a lot of those National Geographic documentaries. What a snorefest…” Jane rolled her eyes and giggled a little.
    “Wait… Whoa… You’re telling me this giant thing is a television? Where’s the antenna?” I scratched my head; there was no way in hell this wall-consuming square black hole of a picture frame was a TV. How would it work? There were no antennae, and the only thing that made it look remotely like a TV was some freaky black box under it with a bunch of silver buttons.
    “Err… There are no antennas anymore; everything’s all digital signals.” Jane tilted her head in surprise. She was actually surprised that I’ve never seen a plasma TV before, as if it meant I had forgotten how to breathe or something. These people were rich, filthy rich, because I never even knew what a plasma was…
    “Well, it doesn’t look like a TV… I mean, it’s flat.”
    “That’s what a plasma TV is,” mom laughed, “here, I’ll show you how good it looks.” She turned the TV on by pressing a white button on the side, and a news channel came on. There were no weird static things messing up the picture, and it felt like I was there… How’d these people leave the living room? After a couple minutes of watching, an odd noise started ringing in my head, and my head started pounding. When I looked up, I saw the big TV sparking, and it shut off without my mom pressing anything. I fell to the ground and that was all I remembered before I woke up in a room that resembled the infirmary at the orphanage.
    “She’s fine, just a blackout.” A strange man in a white coat said as he left the room. Mom hugged me tightly.
    “Thank God you’re okay. What happened?”
    “I don’t know, I just got a headache and some ringing sound got louder…. I dunno, I just felt kinda weird.”
    The guy in the white coat walked in, and in a panicked tone of voice, he panted,
    “Mr. and Mrs. Peters, there’s something you should take a look at.”

     
    EPISODE 4- THE BRAIN

    The weird guy in the lab coat, in a panic, told my parents to follow him. Who was he, and where did I end up? It was like a big infirmary with tons of people in white clothes. Mom followed the man and Dad walked slowly out of the room.
    “She has to come, too.” The man gestured for me to follow as well. When I looked at myself in the mirror on top of the medicine cabinet, my sweater and shorts were replaced by an ugly eggshell blue robe, and my hair was pulled back in a bun. I took a deep breath and walked out of the room behind my parents and we walked into another cold room.
    “Kayleigh, please lay on this bed.” The lab man pointed to a thin bed that was next to some giant white dome thing. I followed orders like a subordinate and lay down slowly. “OK, you’re going to have to sit very still. We’re just going to do a quick scan and it’ll be all over.” A few seconds later, the bed moved backwards and my head was covered with some freaky white cage. I closed my eyes in fear. What was he going to do?
    A weird static ringing noise echoed in my ears and I squinted from the pain, the pain that came with some odd disruption from the machine that was looming over my face. I remained still, and wanted it so much to be over, I desired to go home so badly that seconds passed like hours; I just wanted to go back to my new home, with my new parents, and my new life… It was like receiving paradise and getting it taken away just as quickly as I received it. It all felt so unfair.
    “Alright, we’re done.” The man said as the bed I was laying in moved back out of the white dome machine. When I looked at my parents, Mom cupped her hands over her mouth as she looked at some screen. “You can come back now.”
    When I walked to my mom, the man looked at me and laughed nervously. He pointed at the screen he was looking at, and then I looked at his name tag: DR. MATHIS was in gold lettering on a black tag. It all made sense; he was a resident doctor, so that’s why he was so nervous.
    “Jesus Christ, this stupid contraption is broken…” Dr. Mathis moved his hands away from a panel that was covered in letters and symbols, like a typewriter with a screen. He put his hands over his head and sighed with disappointment.
    “How is it broken? What’s wrong with it?” Mom looked at the screen, bewildered. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the freaky machine… It just showed a giant circle with some blinking white dots. At first, I thought it was some sort of radar, but then a menu popped up and some icon was moving around.
    “Just a minute--- Carl! I need help with this stupid machine!”
    A tan-colored man with a black shirt and white pants sauntered into the room, expressionless. He turned to Mathis and laughed, “Don’t ever try to pick up a career in computers, John…”
    “I swear to God, this machine is broken…”
    “That’s what you said about the time when you forgot to press the power button---” Carl’s smile and laughter turned into a tense frown as he stared at the screen of the machine; apparently, there was nothing wrong with the device. But, Carl looked at me with the most nervous look in his eyes, and that’s when chills went down my spine.
    “I dunno what happened to your daughter, but this machine is in perfect condition, and it says her brain stem is detached from her skull….” Mathis frowned and then looked away.

     

    EPISODE 5- STATIC CHILD

    “What do you mean? She’s standing right here, perfectly fine, isn’t she?” Jane was mad, and I couldn’t see why not. I mean, humans cannot live without a brain, and I’m definitely not dead, so that completely throws that theory out the window. Mathis flinched when Jane’s razor tongue stabbed at him, “It better be broken or something else might be broken in a minute.”
    “I-I-I’ll see what I can do. The machine tends to malfunction a lot. Carl, stop downloading updates for it, you know that causes compatibility issues. I’m sorry, Mrs. Peters, we’ll do everything in our power to fix this.”
    “Thank you. I mean, how can a brain scan machine mess up so much? Don’t you people---”
    Dr. Mathis put his hand up and stopped mom for a minute; it seemed like he had an idea. Mom backed up and flinched when his hand popped up right in her face, but then she became far more curious as to what magical idea Mathis was coming up with this time.
    “Wait, Mrs. Peters… Would you help me with something? I’d appreciate it.” Mathis gestured for mom to get into the brain scanning machine; she rolled her eyes and decided to follow along with the doctor’s little electronic charade. When mom lay flat on the bed, the machine pushed her into the weird white dome and then the doctor told Carl, “Now, scan again.”
    Carl pressed a bunch of buttons on the panel thing and then a scan popped up with the brain picture again.
    “I don’t get it,” Carl scratched his head, “how come the machine is working for her?”
    “Just a second; I’m going to have to ask your daughter to step out of the room, please.”
    When I walked out of the room, the door was slowly closed behind me. I waited a few minutes until the doctor asked me to come back in; Mom and Dad stared at me with a concerned look, which I disregarded at the time. Dr. Mathis then handed me some odd device that looked like a really thin phone. For some reason, it had a picture of an apple on the back…
    He told me to press the little square button, and when I did, something popped up and I saw a series of shiny glassy buttons roll across the screen on the device. Dr. Mathis looked at it and he pointed at something that had these five bars on the side. When I held the odd contraption, the bars all disappeared and I saw something pop up. It said ‘ERROR: NO SIGNAL’.
    “Oh crap…” Mathis took the device from my hands and then showed me it, when he held it, there were four bars on the top right hand of the screen. “We’ve got a problem.”
    “What is it?” Jane looked at the device and then stared at me. “There’s nothing wrong with the phone… What is this all about?” She crossed her arms and stared at Dr. Mathis with a look of skepticism. He put the phone in my hand again and the error thing popped up a second time. He then took it back and placed it in mom’s hands.
    “She’s like a walking electromagnetic field… When she holds the phone, all signals are gone, but if you or I hold the phone, nothing happens and it works perfectly normal.”
    “Oh, come on; there’s no scientific way any human being could give off static disruptions. It’s just not possible. Jesus, you’re really a quack.” Dad palmed his forehead and then turned around in frustration. Maybe the doctor was right, though. Maybe the reason why the TV at home knocked me out was because it was on a digital frequency. Same with the phone; my hand started tingling when I held it in my hands, and my head was hurting somewhat badly when I was in the machine a few minutes ago.
    What’s going on…?