Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (43 page)

She leaned her head back on her pillow
and studied the pseudowall generator tracks on the ceiling. “We
won, Mr. Attorney,” she whispered through teeth clenched firmly
against the surging emotions inside her. Trouble is, I don’t feel
much like a winner. All I feel is empty.

A sudden silence enveloped the room,
and she looked up to notice that the HV broadcast had been turned
off.

“Show’s over for now,” the woman in
the next bed said in response to Rayna’s inquiring glance. “More HV
later. Time for visitors now.”

Rayna half expected to see her parents
materialize at the ward entrance, her father looking concerned but
coolly confident, her mother wearing a reassuring smile. She closed
her eyes and pressed her lips together.  

“Hey, lady,” an unexpected voice
announced, “I’ve been waiting to see you for three
days!”

Rayna’s eyes snapped open and her
heart leaped. She tried to reach for the man on the crutches, but
her body was frozen, and she almost forgot to breathe. Never
shifting his eyes from her face, he sat down on her bed and took
her hand in his. When she finally regained her ability to move, all
she could do was silently squeeze his fingers.

“Thank God you’re all right, Ray,” he
said at last. “You had me plenty worried.”

A thousand thoughts flashed through
her mind in an instant, but the words she wanted to say remained
stubbornly out of reach. “Keith,” she asked incongruously, “are you
really here?”

He laughed, leaned forward and kissed
her gently on the lips. “I’m definitely here,” he said. His
expression turned serious as he added, “I—all of us—have you to
thank for that, don’t we?”

Rayna lowered her eyes and jerked her
head forward in an abrupt nod. Keith stroked her hair for a few
seconds, then pressed a finger against her jaw, turning her head
until their eyes met once more. A moment later, they were clinging
to each other as if to a life raft, tubes trailing, unheeded, from
Rayna’s right arm.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she
murmured, her head resting against his shoulder.

He pulled back, grinned and flexed his
right bicep.

“Who?  Me?  My only problem
was getting mugged by a rebellious tree.” 

So it
was
Keith I saw at the
park! Rayna thought.

“Keith,” she said, “this... this...
thing
I’ve got....  I   mean, this psychic
power. It ruined my grandfather’s relationship with my grandmother.
How do you—”

His kiss answered her question before
she could ask it.

“Ray, if it weren’t for you, that
falling log might have done me in instead of just sticking me with
these crutches for a while.  Come to think of it, I guess I
was
killed in some other branch of reality. Just like Tauber
survived in some other branch.”

Rayna felt the blood drain from her
face, and Keith quickly grabbed her hand. “It’s all right, Ray.
This
timeline is safe. You’ve seen to that. And as long as
enough of us care about the kind of world we live in, it’ll stay
that way. Don’t worry. We’re in this together.”

She studied his face for a long
moment, then surveyed the beds around her. Park casualties, the
nurse had told her. But not as many as there might have been. For
the first time, her muscles relaxed, and she smiled—a big, glowing,
soaring smile that came from deep inside.

“I’m not worried,” she said
softly.

* * *

Dreamers and idealists have always
had the power to change the world, but without the psychic booster
that reality matrix physics explains, the road from dream to
fruition was often indirect and hard to discern. Nevertheless, much
of the “real world” that we so often take for granted began as
someone’s dream. In the end, the best of “the real world” owes its
existence to those who build castles in the air while the rest of
us scramble to fashion our rough huts in the mud.

—   
Alec Zorne
Unpublished paper on reality matrix physics,
1972

This book began as a four-page short
story titled “Castles in the Air,” which  I wrote in 1971. At
that time, I was working as a reporter/copy editor at the
Valley
News
(predecessor of today’s
Los Angeles Daily
News
).  In fact, the newsroom scene in the Prologue is
based on the city room of the old
Valley News
offices in Van
Nuys, CA.

For some reason, the story idea stayed
with me, but it seemed incomplete. So in 1985, I started filling in
some gaps and expanding the story into a novel. I finished the
first complete draft sometime in 1986, but I didn’t actively pursue
publication at that time. Life took me in a different
direction.

Then one day, I mentioned the novel to
a friend. She asked to read it; so I started reviewing chapters
before I sent them along. That’s when I re-named the book “The
Reality Matrix Effect” and started working actively to get this
book published.

Although this novel is fiction, some
things in it are real.

—As noted in the Acknowledgments section,
Nitinol exists. It is a “memory metal” that was developed at the
Naval Ordinance Laboratory.

—Modern interpretations of quantum physics
(including the Many Worlds theory) suggest the existence of
multiple realities (at least on a quantum level).

The concept of reality matrix theory
and shifting from one reality to another, however, is a fiction of
my own invention. Or is it? What was once considered mysticism,
religion and Eastern philosophy seems to be merging with hard
science. So at this point, who among us truly knows the nature of
reality?  

January 15, 2013

Laura Remson Mitchell is a former newspaper
reporter/copy editor, free-lance writer, public policy analyst and
disability rights advocate. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the
Valley News
,
Los Angeles
Daily News
,
Los
Angeles Times
,
California Journal
,
Capitol Weekly
and other publications. A graduate of U.S. Grant High School in Van
Nuys, California, and of California State University at Northridge,
she has lived with multiple sclerosis for many years.

[1]
wom
,
n. 1. a
derisive slang term referring to something that is useless or
pointless. 2. someone who is considered worthless or incapable of
performing useful functions; a moron. Etymology:  Believed
derived from a late 20th-century acronym for “write-only memory”
(WOM), a computer term referring to a hypothetical type of computer
memory into which information could be entered but from which data
could not be retrieved.

               —
from
Dictionary of Modern American English, second edition, c.
2020

[2]
bowl-squatter
,
n.
an uncomplimentary slang term referring to space colonists who earn
title to their property by living on it. Syn. rock farmer.
Etymology:  The
“
bowl
”
reference is derived from the shape of the life domes within
which space colony environments are controlled for such factors as
temperature, pressure and atmosphere. These domes resemble inverted
bowls.

                     —
from
Dictionary of Modern American English, second edition, c.
2020.