Chapter 1
Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a few years earlier, Izzy refused to let the tremors and stiffness hold her imagination captive. While the rest of her coworkers at Aimless Office Solutions slugged away diligently at their dull corporate tasks, Izzy spent most of her days with glazed-over eyes, living in the vibrant dreamscapes that played like vivid movies behind her vacant stare. Her relentless daydreaming had been a source of constant friction and scoldings from her superiors for as long as she could remember.
"Get your head out of the clouds!" was practically a daily mantra barked at her by whatever middle manager caught her zoning out in her cubicle, her hands shaking slightly on the keyboard.
Izzy couldn't help it. The real world just bored her to absolute tears, and the escape into her mind helped Isabel cope with the physical limitations that Parkinson's imposed.
While her drab, paperwork-slinging job was mind-numbing in the extreme, Izzy's internal psychedelic landscapes were overflowing with excitement, wonder, and endless possibilities. Her imagination was a place where her disease held no dominion. In her mind's eye, she was a young adventurer, unencumbered by tremors or a shuffling gait. One minute she could soar between the heavenly nebulae at the helm of her spaceship. The next, she was a famous archaeologist uncovering ancient secrets in a booby-trapped temple.
Some afternoons, having solved the riddle of the universe, Izzy imagined wearing her magical Rock Steady boxing gloves. She viciously fought a horde of warriors. Her punches were strong and sure, exploding foes with every blow.
In the evening, with one metropolis-melting breath, she could transform herself into a mighty dragon ruling over mythic kingdoms of sword and sorcery. In a blink of her third eye, she had suddenly transported galaxies away to do battle against interdimensional cyborg entities hell-bent on enslaving all of existence.
No corner of mundane existence could contain the sheer expansiveness of Izzy's mercurial imagination. From the sleepy confines of her cubicle, her consciousness routinely dodged between more planes of imagined reality than an acrobatic astral nomad hopping through four-dimensional wormholes. Wild chromatic complexions of metaphysical energy licked at her astral edges as she surfed the very curvatures of spacetime towards grand, galactic revelations.
"Get your head out of the clouds!" was practically a daily mantra barked at her by whatever middle manager caught her zoning out in her cubicle, her hands shaking slightly on the keyboard.
Izzy couldn't help it. The real world just bored her to absolute tears, and the escape into her mind helped Isabel cope with the physical limitations that Parkinson's imposed.
While her drab, paperwork-slinging job was mind-numbing in the extreme, Izzy's internal psychedelic landscapes were overflowing with excitement, wonder, and endless possibilities. Her imagination was a place where her disease held no dominion. In her mind's eye, she was a young adventurer, unencumbered by tremors or a shuffling gait. One minute she could soar between the heavenly nebulae at the helm of her spaceship. The next, she was a famous archaeologist uncovering ancient secrets in a booby-trapped temple.
Some afternoons, having solved the riddle of the universe, Izzy imagined wearing her magical Rock Steady boxing gloves. She viciously fought a horde of warriors. Her punches were strong and sure, exploding foes with every blow.
In the evening, with one metropolis-melting breath, she could transform herself into a mighty dragon ruling over mythic kingdoms of sword and sorcery. In a blink of her third eye, she had suddenly transported galaxies away to do battle against interdimensional cyborg entities hell-bent on enslaving all of existence.
No corner of mundane existence could contain the sheer expansiveness of Izzy's mercurial imagination. From the sleepy confines of her cubicle, her consciousness routinely dodged between more planes of imagined reality than an acrobatic astral nomad hopping through four-dimensional wormholes. Wild chromatic complexions of metaphysical energy licked at her astral edges as she surfed the very curvatures of spacetime towards grand, galactic revelations.
Whiplash scene transitions were Izzy's normative state of being. Her consciousness was a slipstream par excellence, forever outracing the boring pedestrian constraints of physical reality. While the dullards surrounding her slogged through their risk-averse life scripts, Izzy was an interdimensional nomad of pure virtuosic potential - shapeshifting through realities, embracing every imagined thrill and cosmic escapade her boundless mind could conceive.
Since the day she was diagnosed as a shaker, Izzy's powerful daydreams allowed her to slip the suffocating bonds of the mundane. No matter how dire or soul-crushing the circumstance, she could always hit the metaphysical eject button and transcend into wonderlands far beyond the limits of physicality.
The creations of Izzy's unconstrained imagination flowed with an organic transcendence that rendered mundane concepts like time, space, and even her Parkinson's utterly obsolete. For Izzy, the line between reality and imagination often blurred so seamlessly that she couldn't quite point to where one ended and the other began.
Her daily existence was akin to living with one foot planted in each of two very different dimensions - the corpo-rat world where her body slowly deteriorated, and the endlessly generative, surreal mindscape that her unshackled consciousness would frequently escape into. While her tremorous body remained planted in that same tiresome cubicle day after day, Izzy's inner psychonaut was off embarking on some grandiose new adventure. Her mind was completely untethered from the constraints of logic or physics.
Izzy's physical difficulties only deepened her disdain for the cut-and-dry "real world" around her. Why would she wish to engage with such painfully one-dimensional affairs that highlighted her limitations when her mind could easily transcend into far richer, more textured, more wildly alive experiential realms?
Izzy's supervisors saw her incessant dissociated daydreams as the ultimate sign of laziness and disrespect. But her brilliantly creative mind operated on an entirely different metaphysical plane, rendering the mundane tasks assigned to her utterly invisible. Reprimands and threats of termination had exactly zero impact on Izzy's ability to stay grounded. If anything, they just sent her deeper into her mental world as a coping mechanism.
Izzy's coworkers noticed her tendency to drift off into these hermetic trances. But their small, pedestrian minds could scarcely fathom the breathtaking scope of the interdimensional travels her consciousness was exploring between brushes with the corporeal plane. To them, she simply appeared glazed over, disrespectfully zoned out, while very real, very important office operations took place all around her. Izzy's persistent zoning out simply looked like the spacing out of a hopeless underachiever. They failed to comprehend the sheer divinity of the escapist portals her consciousness was swan-diving through. While they lived lives mired in mental stability, Izzy's life was a boundary-obliterating masterclass of unbridled existential renewal.
When agonized customers were berating her over the phone or her boss was looming with palpable annoyance at a report delayed by her shaking hands, Izzy's sublime mental getaways were her only salve against the sanity-stripping tedium and humiliation of it all. She'd simply up-shift her awareness into hyperspace and then poof - abracadabra, bureaucratic soul erosion, and bodily deterioration be damned!
One day, her perpetual underachievement at Aimless Office Solutions finally caught up to her. She was deep in an exceptionally phenomenal science fantasy mindscape that morning - something involving her captaining a sentient bioship made of ambient stardust through a supranatural wormhole. Without any warning, Izzy was rudely jolted back to physicality when her boss slapped a meaty palm on Izzy’s desk.
"Switch! My office, now!" the crimson-faced manager seethed through gnashed teeth. "I've had just about enough of your spaced-out incompetence around here."
No mention was made of Isabel’s Parkinson's. It was as if the man refused to acknowledge Izzy's daily struggles. With hunched over shoulders, Izzy followed the man into his palace-sized office.
As her boss screamed, Izzy did her best to appear contrite and focused. But her inner eye kept gazing back over the visions of the untraversed celestial territories her mind had been exploring just moments before.
Of course, the man wasn't having any of her distracted nonsense anymore.
Minutes later, Izzy clumsily gathered her few personal items with trembling hands, stuffing them into a small box after being unceremoniously fired. As she struggled to maintain her grip, her manager scowled with impatience, making Izzy feel even more worthless.
Dumped by security on the sidewalk in front of the office building, Izzy clumsily sat down on the concrete, her legs stiff and uncooperative. Despair set in as she contemplated her future as an unemployed explorer of consciousness with a degenerative disease.
Izzy sat there in a dumbfounded daze. The abrupt nature of her ousting left her struggling to reorient herself with this suddenly recalibrated reality. Didn't they know how important her internal quests were? How crucial it was for her to maintain constant escape velocity from the crushing, grey-dimension grind?
Of course, she realized the penny-pushing drones at Aimless couldn't comprehend the cosmic urgency of her wayfaring mind. To them, she was simply a lazy zoner who failed to respect the sanctity of whatever it was they did there.
As the jarring injustice of it all slowly seeped in, Izzy felt her rest frequency spike in tandem with a broiling resentment towards the corporatist reality she had just been so unceremoniously dumped from. Who were those tie-wearing lizards to deem her unsuitable? She was a fathom-deep oceanographer of innerverses - not some expendable day walker!
Just as Izzy's mind began slip-streaming into another reactionary escapism, a cantankerous voice rang out from somewhere nearby - jerking her back into the material plane. She turned to see a homeless-looking old man seated on a milk crate next to her, eyeing Izzy with an unplaceable expression.
"You don't belong among those depressive realizers, my friend," the toothless man cackled cryptically. "Your consciousness strays far too prodigiously to be shackled by their industrial conventions."
"I...I'm sorry. What did you say?" Izzy stammered, still reeling from the whiplash of having her dreary corporate life obliterated mere moments ago.
The old man looked at her with eyes that seemed infused by blazing interiors far too vast for their sunken sockets. A wry, all-knowing smirk played across his cracked lips. "You can cut the mundane act," he rasped in a tone somehow both parodic and profoundly reverential. "We both know your consciousness was never long for the deadening confinements of deluded norms."
A crazed cackle escaped the old man's lips then, deranged but also curiously anchored - as if he'd just cold-read some hidden truth scrawled in ephemeral fire across Izzy's aura.
The stranger said, "Your eyes twinkle with a spark of potential that no NPC could ever truly comprehend."
"Who...what are you?" Izzy asked, now staring wide-eyed.
A gut-busting belly laugh roared from the man, leading to a coughing fit. He caught his breath enough to fix Izzy with a gaze. "I am a complementary annihilator of middling projections, dream walker," he replied.
Izzy said, "Why are you talking to me? I mean, do you know who I am?"
His chin dropped like a wrench whose fulcrum was loose, revealing a mouth full of brown gunk. Closing his lips, he paused before answering. "Well, it seems rather silly to me that I need to tell you. You are Isabel Switch; in case you didn't know." He mumbled a bit under his breath, "Doesn't seem quite right in the head. Are you sure this is the right one?"
Seeing the man talking to himself led Isabel to simply want to go home. The day had been rather strange, and a long hot bath would be just the ticket toward dreamy normality. And so, perplexed and a little nervous, Izzy tried to stand, her movements jerky and unsteady.
The old man extended a dirty hand to her. "Let me show you what you're truly capable of, Isabel Switch," he said.
Izzy noted the black-stained fingers and the odor that pushed past her deadened nose. Izzy considered for half a moment. Then she defied all conventional reasoning and grasped the old man's beckoning palm.
Instantly, the grimy cityscape warped and contorted all around them in a blinding chromatic convulsion. The air itself seemed to ripple with ancient geometric codes as a vortex of iridescent light consumed their physical forms.
When Izzy's awareness resurfaced, they were... somewhere else entirely. Izzy shook her head, trying to clear away her overly active imagination. But the vision firmly seated itself, as if physical reality had completely disappeared. She was now in a placeless dimension of pure metamorphic potential. The atmosphere shimmered in every direction with ceaseless transmutations of texture, hue, and underlying universal patterning too intricate to parse. Somehow, this bizarre metaphysical plane felt more real to Izzy than any reality she'd ever experienced.
The old man was grinning wildly, having shed his disgusting street rags to reveal luminous robes and an air of supreme, almost elemental mastery. "I am Dr. Quantum, your extra-dimensional instructor and guide!" he bellowed with a wink. "The mandala-versal architect of your imminent quantum upswing to cosmic deployability!"
Izzy heard herself blurt out, “Talk about a paradigm pop!” She slapped a hand over her mouth. Despite her restraining order, her head vocalized, “Did I say that? Why can’t I quit talking? My lips aren’t moving. … What the.”
Dr Quantum said, “Now you’re catching on. Control your thoughts, control your voice. The difficult trick is to control your heart.”
Izzy said, “What?”
Dr Q said, “The heart is deeply mysterious and likes to speak its mind, especially when it is ignored. If one refuses to listen, it throws a vibrational fit throughout the body.”
Izzy's consciousness was still careening from her expulsion from the Borgish corporate cube. Now finding that she had been hand-ported across planes of reality by this self-proclaimed metaphysical wizard - all within a few startling moments, was overloading her circuits. “It’s the Parkinson’s. It must be. Oh god, the hallucinations have started. … Get it together Iz. They’ll lock you into Shady Acres Home.”
Dr Q said, “Relax.”
Izzy’s voice said, “Relax? Relax? My imagination has warped. Am I demented?”
Dr Quantum said, “Alright. Enough.” He snapped his fingers. “I can’t take listening to your brain spinning.” He pointed at Izzy’s hand still lingering over her mouth. “You can put your hand down. I can’t hear your thoughts anymore.”
As she lowered her hand, a giant glowing worm floated past Isabel and said, “Excuse me.”
Watching the creature casually float away, Izzy thought about this strange situation. Just when she'd resigned herself to a future of hopeless flatlining as a homeless, unemployed, shopping cart pusher, the cosmos had essentially remixed her entire experiential blueprint. Was she lucky, crazy, or maybe she had died? Maybe her body was lying on the sidewalk while people stepped over her. But she was certain of one thing. Isabel was no longer in Memphis.
The entire time Isabel was pondering, she heard Dr Quantum rattling off a list of consciousness upgrades. Izzy was astounded that she heard what he was saying, even while her mind was busy on other things.
Whether this Dr. Quantum character could truly facilitate the boundless upgrade he was claiming remained to be seen. But Izzy's famously open-ended imagination was eager to find out.
"All right, all right, just hold on a minute here!" Izzy sputtered, her mind still reeling from the bizarre dimensional shift she seemed to have just experienced. "Who or what in the infinite cosmos are you, exactly? And where...where have you brought me?"
Dr. Quantum let out a hearty, reverberating chuckle, as if incredibly amused by Izzy's utterly bewildered state. With a snap of his fingers, two ornately cushioned chairs blinked into existence amid the ever-morphing patterns surrounding them.
"Have a trans-dimensional seat, my culture-bound friend," Dr. Quantum bellowed merrily, gesturing for Izzy to make herself comfortable. Dr. Quantum addressed Izzy, saying, "For the objective reality you've been taught to believe in since birth... well, let's just say it's about to be expanded beyond all recognizable parameters!"
Izzy lowered herself into one of the hovering chairs. She was mesmerized by the intensely vivid geometry, continuously blooming and metamorphosing all around them. It felt as if she had suddenly been thrust into the shimmering bloodstream of a higher-dimensional universal organism.
"You see, Izzy," Dr. Quantum began in a conspiratorial tone, "this boundless immensity is the womb of materiality's potential."
Izzy scratched her head, her hand shaking worse than ever.
He said, "You are what's known as a lucidnaut - a gifted inter-dimensional mind capable of navigating realities!"
Izzy said, "I don't understand."
"Your grotesquely limited perceptions of what makes up the 'real' are born from eons of consciousness being inculcated within reductive, fear-based thought-forms," Dr. Quantum proclaimed, his voice taking on an impassioned revolutionary zeal. "The priests and petty commissars of the old paradigm have for too long imposed their deprivation-coded virtual prisons upon the slipstream potentials of eternal souls!"
Izzy sat dumbfounded. She felt as if she had spent her entire life until this moment shuffling about in a cramped, black-and-white cubicle called Earth. And now the clarifying vitascope of transformative novelty was introducing itself.
He said, "You are one of the reality sculptors our far-future selves deployed backward through multiple big bounces and protoplasmic emanations." Dr. Quantum continued in a whisper. "You are a potential manifester whose sleepwalking surface-level mind required an abrupt existential defibrillation sequence." Nodding his head, he smiled. And without warning he said, "Pow! ... I'm the one sent to shock you awake."
Dr Q gestured expansively around the transmuting scape, like an elemental magician showcasing the boundless fields of creation itself. "This is but one of the parallel, interpenetrating, dimensions composing the facets of universal Being. And you have the innate codes to collapse, transmute, transform, revitalize, or destroy any of them - all without in anyway disturbing Being in anyway."
The odd man kept talking, spewing ideas far beyond Izzy's comprehension. Her head was spinning in time with the turning of the galaxy. If she hadn't been sitting in a floating chair, she was sure she'd have fallen … or shot off like a rocket to some distant planet. …Wait, had Dr. Quantum said something about Izzy manifesting using "the technology of limitless overdrive joy sculpting"?
Izzy's consciousness pinwheeled through the dazzling hyperspace Dr. Quantum had abruptly transported them to. She couldn't help but marvel at the sheer absurdity of her predicament. Here she was, a recently disassembled drone, suddenly catapulted into a realm of rainbow fractals and impossibilities by an eccentric wizard claiming to be her interdimensional benefactor. It was like she'd leaped into a psychedelic fantasy novel, authored by her overclocked imagination!
"Okay, let me get this straight," Izzy sputtered, her boggled mind grasping for some semblance of logical footing. "You're telling me that all of reality is just a holographic playground projected by our consciousness? And that I have the innate ability to bend it to my will like some kind of sorcerer?"
Dr. Quantum let out a hearty chuckle, his prismatic aura pulsing with amusement. "Oh, my dear reality-parched protégé. You have seen nothing yet! Behold, the true nature of your multidimensional birthright!"
With a dramatic wave of his fingers, the trippy dreamscape surrounding them warped into an even more breathtaking vista. Towering opalescent spires soared into the non-sky, their fractalline geometries pulsing with self-aware Fibonacci spirals, each vocally calculating its own being and non-being simultaneously. Luminous orbs of pure thought-stuff drifted by, flashing colors of experiences not yet experienced. Dr Quantum pointed out that each orb contained entire micro-realities waiting to be explored.
Izzy sensed the importance of this opportunity. If this was truly just a minute glimpse into the higher realms, and if she could learn to navigate and sculpt at will, then sign her up for the full-blown Hogwarts crash course, pronto! "All right, Dr. Quantum, you've utterly boggled my noodle," Izzy conceded, a giddy grin spreading across her face. "Consider me a believer in your far-out philosophy. When do we start my training in these mind-bending reality hacks?"
The wizardly sage reached out to clasp Izzy's shoulder. "Why, right now, of course! The path to your self-realized apotheosis begins in this very instant, my soon-to-be-levitating Padawan!"
Since the day she was diagnosed as a shaker, Izzy's powerful daydreams allowed her to slip the suffocating bonds of the mundane. No matter how dire or soul-crushing the circumstance, she could always hit the metaphysical eject button and transcend into wonderlands far beyond the limits of physicality.
The creations of Izzy's unconstrained imagination flowed with an organic transcendence that rendered mundane concepts like time, space, and even her Parkinson's utterly obsolete. For Izzy, the line between reality and imagination often blurred so seamlessly that she couldn't quite point to where one ended and the other began.
Her daily existence was akin to living with one foot planted in each of two very different dimensions - the corpo-rat world where her body slowly deteriorated, and the endlessly generative, surreal mindscape that her unshackled consciousness would frequently escape into. While her tremorous body remained planted in that same tiresome cubicle day after day, Izzy's inner psychonaut was off embarking on some grandiose new adventure. Her mind was completely untethered from the constraints of logic or physics.
Izzy's physical difficulties only deepened her disdain for the cut-and-dry "real world" around her. Why would she wish to engage with such painfully one-dimensional affairs that highlighted her limitations when her mind could easily transcend into far richer, more textured, more wildly alive experiential realms?
Izzy's supervisors saw her incessant dissociated daydreams as the ultimate sign of laziness and disrespect. But her brilliantly creative mind operated on an entirely different metaphysical plane, rendering the mundane tasks assigned to her utterly invisible. Reprimands and threats of termination had exactly zero impact on Izzy's ability to stay grounded. If anything, they just sent her deeper into her mental world as a coping mechanism.
Izzy's coworkers noticed her tendency to drift off into these hermetic trances. But their small, pedestrian minds could scarcely fathom the breathtaking scope of the interdimensional travels her consciousness was exploring between brushes with the corporeal plane. To them, she simply appeared glazed over, disrespectfully zoned out, while very real, very important office operations took place all around her. Izzy's persistent zoning out simply looked like the spacing out of a hopeless underachiever. They failed to comprehend the sheer divinity of the escapist portals her consciousness was swan-diving through. While they lived lives mired in mental stability, Izzy's life was a boundary-obliterating masterclass of unbridled existential renewal.
When agonized customers were berating her over the phone or her boss was looming with palpable annoyance at a report delayed by her shaking hands, Izzy's sublime mental getaways were her only salve against the sanity-stripping tedium and humiliation of it all. She'd simply up-shift her awareness into hyperspace and then poof - abracadabra, bureaucratic soul erosion, and bodily deterioration be damned!
One day, her perpetual underachievement at Aimless Office Solutions finally caught up to her. She was deep in an exceptionally phenomenal science fantasy mindscape that morning - something involving her captaining a sentient bioship made of ambient stardust through a supranatural wormhole. Without any warning, Izzy was rudely jolted back to physicality when her boss slapped a meaty palm on Izzy’s desk.
"Switch! My office, now!" the crimson-faced manager seethed through gnashed teeth. "I've had just about enough of your spaced-out incompetence around here."
No mention was made of Isabel’s Parkinson's. It was as if the man refused to acknowledge Izzy's daily struggles. With hunched over shoulders, Izzy followed the man into his palace-sized office.
As her boss screamed, Izzy did her best to appear contrite and focused. But her inner eye kept gazing back over the visions of the untraversed celestial territories her mind had been exploring just moments before.
Of course, the man wasn't having any of her distracted nonsense anymore.
Minutes later, Izzy clumsily gathered her few personal items with trembling hands, stuffing them into a small box after being unceremoniously fired. As she struggled to maintain her grip, her manager scowled with impatience, making Izzy feel even more worthless.
Dumped by security on the sidewalk in front of the office building, Izzy clumsily sat down on the concrete, her legs stiff and uncooperative. Despair set in as she contemplated her future as an unemployed explorer of consciousness with a degenerative disease.
Izzy sat there in a dumbfounded daze. The abrupt nature of her ousting left her struggling to reorient herself with this suddenly recalibrated reality. Didn't they know how important her internal quests were? How crucial it was for her to maintain constant escape velocity from the crushing, grey-dimension grind?
Of course, she realized the penny-pushing drones at Aimless couldn't comprehend the cosmic urgency of her wayfaring mind. To them, she was simply a lazy zoner who failed to respect the sanctity of whatever it was they did there.
As the jarring injustice of it all slowly seeped in, Izzy felt her rest frequency spike in tandem with a broiling resentment towards the corporatist reality she had just been so unceremoniously dumped from. Who were those tie-wearing lizards to deem her unsuitable? She was a fathom-deep oceanographer of innerverses - not some expendable day walker!
Just as Izzy's mind began slip-streaming into another reactionary escapism, a cantankerous voice rang out from somewhere nearby - jerking her back into the material plane. She turned to see a homeless-looking old man seated on a milk crate next to her, eyeing Izzy with an unplaceable expression.
"You don't belong among those depressive realizers, my friend," the toothless man cackled cryptically. "Your consciousness strays far too prodigiously to be shackled by their industrial conventions."
"I...I'm sorry. What did you say?" Izzy stammered, still reeling from the whiplash of having her dreary corporate life obliterated mere moments ago.
The old man looked at her with eyes that seemed infused by blazing interiors far too vast for their sunken sockets. A wry, all-knowing smirk played across his cracked lips. "You can cut the mundane act," he rasped in a tone somehow both parodic and profoundly reverential. "We both know your consciousness was never long for the deadening confinements of deluded norms."
A crazed cackle escaped the old man's lips then, deranged but also curiously anchored - as if he'd just cold-read some hidden truth scrawled in ephemeral fire across Izzy's aura.
The stranger said, "Your eyes twinkle with a spark of potential that no NPC could ever truly comprehend."
"Who...what are you?" Izzy asked, now staring wide-eyed.
A gut-busting belly laugh roared from the man, leading to a coughing fit. He caught his breath enough to fix Izzy with a gaze. "I am a complementary annihilator of middling projections, dream walker," he replied.
Izzy said, "Why are you talking to me? I mean, do you know who I am?"
His chin dropped like a wrench whose fulcrum was loose, revealing a mouth full of brown gunk. Closing his lips, he paused before answering. "Well, it seems rather silly to me that I need to tell you. You are Isabel Switch; in case you didn't know." He mumbled a bit under his breath, "Doesn't seem quite right in the head. Are you sure this is the right one?"
Seeing the man talking to himself led Isabel to simply want to go home. The day had been rather strange, and a long hot bath would be just the ticket toward dreamy normality. And so, perplexed and a little nervous, Izzy tried to stand, her movements jerky and unsteady.
The old man extended a dirty hand to her. "Let me show you what you're truly capable of, Isabel Switch," he said.
Izzy noted the black-stained fingers and the odor that pushed past her deadened nose. Izzy considered for half a moment. Then she defied all conventional reasoning and grasped the old man's beckoning palm.
Instantly, the grimy cityscape warped and contorted all around them in a blinding chromatic convulsion. The air itself seemed to ripple with ancient geometric codes as a vortex of iridescent light consumed their physical forms.
When Izzy's awareness resurfaced, they were... somewhere else entirely. Izzy shook her head, trying to clear away her overly active imagination. But the vision firmly seated itself, as if physical reality had completely disappeared. She was now in a placeless dimension of pure metamorphic potential. The atmosphere shimmered in every direction with ceaseless transmutations of texture, hue, and underlying universal patterning too intricate to parse. Somehow, this bizarre metaphysical plane felt more real to Izzy than any reality she'd ever experienced.
The old man was grinning wildly, having shed his disgusting street rags to reveal luminous robes and an air of supreme, almost elemental mastery. "I am Dr. Quantum, your extra-dimensional instructor and guide!" he bellowed with a wink. "The mandala-versal architect of your imminent quantum upswing to cosmic deployability!"
Izzy heard herself blurt out, “Talk about a paradigm pop!” She slapped a hand over her mouth. Despite her restraining order, her head vocalized, “Did I say that? Why can’t I quit talking? My lips aren’t moving. … What the.”
Dr Quantum said, “Now you’re catching on. Control your thoughts, control your voice. The difficult trick is to control your heart.”
Izzy said, “What?”
Dr Q said, “The heart is deeply mysterious and likes to speak its mind, especially when it is ignored. If one refuses to listen, it throws a vibrational fit throughout the body.”
Izzy's consciousness was still careening from her expulsion from the Borgish corporate cube. Now finding that she had been hand-ported across planes of reality by this self-proclaimed metaphysical wizard - all within a few startling moments, was overloading her circuits. “It’s the Parkinson’s. It must be. Oh god, the hallucinations have started. … Get it together Iz. They’ll lock you into Shady Acres Home.”
Dr Q said, “Relax.”
Izzy’s voice said, “Relax? Relax? My imagination has warped. Am I demented?”
Dr Quantum said, “Alright. Enough.” He snapped his fingers. “I can’t take listening to your brain spinning.” He pointed at Izzy’s hand still lingering over her mouth. “You can put your hand down. I can’t hear your thoughts anymore.”
As she lowered her hand, a giant glowing worm floated past Isabel and said, “Excuse me.”
Watching the creature casually float away, Izzy thought about this strange situation. Just when she'd resigned herself to a future of hopeless flatlining as a homeless, unemployed, shopping cart pusher, the cosmos had essentially remixed her entire experiential blueprint. Was she lucky, crazy, or maybe she had died? Maybe her body was lying on the sidewalk while people stepped over her. But she was certain of one thing. Isabel was no longer in Memphis.
The entire time Isabel was pondering, she heard Dr Quantum rattling off a list of consciousness upgrades. Izzy was astounded that she heard what he was saying, even while her mind was busy on other things.
Whether this Dr. Quantum character could truly facilitate the boundless upgrade he was claiming remained to be seen. But Izzy's famously open-ended imagination was eager to find out.
"All right, all right, just hold on a minute here!" Izzy sputtered, her mind still reeling from the bizarre dimensional shift she seemed to have just experienced. "Who or what in the infinite cosmos are you, exactly? And where...where have you brought me?"
Dr. Quantum let out a hearty, reverberating chuckle, as if incredibly amused by Izzy's utterly bewildered state. With a snap of his fingers, two ornately cushioned chairs blinked into existence amid the ever-morphing patterns surrounding them.
"Have a trans-dimensional seat, my culture-bound friend," Dr. Quantum bellowed merrily, gesturing for Izzy to make herself comfortable. Dr. Quantum addressed Izzy, saying, "For the objective reality you've been taught to believe in since birth... well, let's just say it's about to be expanded beyond all recognizable parameters!"
Izzy lowered herself into one of the hovering chairs. She was mesmerized by the intensely vivid geometry, continuously blooming and metamorphosing all around them. It felt as if she had suddenly been thrust into the shimmering bloodstream of a higher-dimensional universal organism.
"You see, Izzy," Dr. Quantum began in a conspiratorial tone, "this boundless immensity is the womb of materiality's potential."
Izzy scratched her head, her hand shaking worse than ever.
He said, "You are what's known as a lucidnaut - a gifted inter-dimensional mind capable of navigating realities!"
Izzy said, "I don't understand."
"Your grotesquely limited perceptions of what makes up the 'real' are born from eons of consciousness being inculcated within reductive, fear-based thought-forms," Dr. Quantum proclaimed, his voice taking on an impassioned revolutionary zeal. "The priests and petty commissars of the old paradigm have for too long imposed their deprivation-coded virtual prisons upon the slipstream potentials of eternal souls!"
Izzy sat dumbfounded. She felt as if she had spent her entire life until this moment shuffling about in a cramped, black-and-white cubicle called Earth. And now the clarifying vitascope of transformative novelty was introducing itself.
He said, "You are one of the reality sculptors our far-future selves deployed backward through multiple big bounces and protoplasmic emanations." Dr. Quantum continued in a whisper. "You are a potential manifester whose sleepwalking surface-level mind required an abrupt existential defibrillation sequence." Nodding his head, he smiled. And without warning he said, "Pow! ... I'm the one sent to shock you awake."
Dr Q gestured expansively around the transmuting scape, like an elemental magician showcasing the boundless fields of creation itself. "This is but one of the parallel, interpenetrating, dimensions composing the facets of universal Being. And you have the innate codes to collapse, transmute, transform, revitalize, or destroy any of them - all without in anyway disturbing Being in anyway."
The odd man kept talking, spewing ideas far beyond Izzy's comprehension. Her head was spinning in time with the turning of the galaxy. If she hadn't been sitting in a floating chair, she was sure she'd have fallen … or shot off like a rocket to some distant planet. …Wait, had Dr. Quantum said something about Izzy manifesting using "the technology of limitless overdrive joy sculpting"?
Izzy's consciousness pinwheeled through the dazzling hyperspace Dr. Quantum had abruptly transported them to. She couldn't help but marvel at the sheer absurdity of her predicament. Here she was, a recently disassembled drone, suddenly catapulted into a realm of rainbow fractals and impossibilities by an eccentric wizard claiming to be her interdimensional benefactor. It was like she'd leaped into a psychedelic fantasy novel, authored by her overclocked imagination!
"Okay, let me get this straight," Izzy sputtered, her boggled mind grasping for some semblance of logical footing. "You're telling me that all of reality is just a holographic playground projected by our consciousness? And that I have the innate ability to bend it to my will like some kind of sorcerer?"
Dr. Quantum let out a hearty chuckle, his prismatic aura pulsing with amusement. "Oh, my dear reality-parched protégé. You have seen nothing yet! Behold, the true nature of your multidimensional birthright!"
With a dramatic wave of his fingers, the trippy dreamscape surrounding them warped into an even more breathtaking vista. Towering opalescent spires soared into the non-sky, their fractalline geometries pulsing with self-aware Fibonacci spirals, each vocally calculating its own being and non-being simultaneously. Luminous orbs of pure thought-stuff drifted by, flashing colors of experiences not yet experienced. Dr Quantum pointed out that each orb contained entire micro-realities waiting to be explored.
Izzy sensed the importance of this opportunity. If this was truly just a minute glimpse into the higher realms, and if she could learn to navigate and sculpt at will, then sign her up for the full-blown Hogwarts crash course, pronto! "All right, Dr. Quantum, you've utterly boggled my noodle," Izzy conceded, a giddy grin spreading across her face. "Consider me a believer in your far-out philosophy. When do we start my training in these mind-bending reality hacks?"
The wizardly sage reached out to clasp Izzy's shoulder. "Why, right now, of course! The path to your self-realized apotheosis begins in this very instant, my soon-to-be-levitating Padawan!"