Bridgerton

When you live in a small town there are things people think around, gossip about, fixate on, roll their eyes at, sweep under the covers, leave unsaid. Adriana (Adi for short) lived in just such a small town. A rainy little PNW town, not one made famous from vampire films (although, maybe there were vampires here and there and people just didn’t talk about it). Once time Adi had been going through their mom’s storage unit looking for a family picture a cousin had asked for, and had found a bunch of 90s tv shows recorded on cassette. Taking a break, Adi had popped that baddie in the VCR and enjoyed the first episode of the X-files:…”Based on a true story”. Adi nodded solemnly to themself as they chowed down on chips. Bridgerton (the small town they lived in) was more X-files than Twilight. Thinking along these lines, Adi was torn deciding if it was more Derry than Twin Peaks.

Adi used to think things were just normal, like a cereal box with an Olympic athelete smiling, thumbs up, or the kind of repeating banality of a sitcom, like oh boy, a new guy at school this week, but then everything just ends up ok, and fades into the background, and theres no need to fixate on anything in particular, and everyone just keeps doing what they’re doing.

One time, Adi went to Portland to visit family, and also visit a dude they knew but their family didn’t know they were going to hang out with. The plan was, have coffee together, chit chat about books, and maybe a little of whats been in the newspaper, show him some poetry they had written or maybe talk about an idea for a book they had. People who Adi knew in Bridgerton who had friends did this sort of thing regularly, and it seemed to Adi like a normal thing to do. Adi, like most people, was allowed to do normal things, and therefor hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Unfortunately for Adi, it was upon this visit to Portland, OR that the universe and all of reality broke. Would it have broken if the visit had been to Seattle or Portland, Maine, or had been last week or next Tuesday? Sometimes Adi would stay up late at night asking themself these things later. However what mattered was that the universe, the muliverse, the multidimensionalverse, and all reality broke, and it was like this:

Adi was staying with family, and walked to the store to get a soda. It may have been a CBD soda, but it may have just been a La Croix, Adi couldn’t remember. Adi stood in the hot parkinglot of one of the hottest summers on record, and a crow flew down, and started to psychically communicate with Adi, and then attempt morse code. The crow wanted some of the chips that Adi had got, and also wanted to burn a flag with Adi, and Adi wasn’t in the mood to climb the bank’s nearby flag pole and get a flag to burn. The ensuing mental argument with the crow was tiring, so Adi sat down for a snack, then decided to walk around some more. The birds were all very talkative all of a sudden, and Adi was not feeling like talking to them, this being a very unfamiliar new experience, and not knowing them personally, and not feeling obliged to answer personal questions, but also not sure how to not be rude. A sparrow seemed to understand, so they sat on a bench together while a crow stood across from them and cawed loudly. After a short rest, Adi walked on, finding themself walking laps around the block. They had wandered into a little park near the apartment they were staying in, a wetland area for beavers and ducks and herons, and Adi paused to catch their breath there. On the ground there was a moth, black and red. It was beautiful. It was also apparently now into telepathy, and tried to tell Adi what the entire experience of being a moth was like, of being the kinds of plants it pollenates was like, what being the things that decompose into the soil those plants grow into is like, and it wasn’t really something Adi knew how to follow up. Like, whoa moth, thats beautiful, and sublime, I had no idea that is what being a moth is like.

It was at that point, after meeting the moth, Adi felt the terrible pain. Now, as you the reader, may remember, Adi is a newspaper reader. Adi had read in the newspaper recently that there had been ongoing protests in a number of cities in the country they lived for a few years about political, racial, and gender based issues. Adi was in the suburb of such a city. Adi thought, is this something that happens to protesters? It felt like a sound. Like if you go to a concert and stand close to the speakers, or when Adi used to live in a city that had an Air Force base and sometimes the jets would make the windows shake. That was how Adi’s skin felt. But it was a bright clear cheerful sunny day, no political unrest in sight, no injured or unhappy people. A little lonely out, only a few people milling about, but the universe did happen to break during the pandemic so a lot of people were socially distancing.

Adi started to feel more and more strange, and headed back to the apartment. Their skin hurt, their joints hurt. Their face hurt. Whatever strange bird and moth telepathy that had started to occur only expanded, and more and more things chattered at them: squirrels, a hole in the bush that said this was for raccoons, and Adi sat and stared out the window. Their legs swelled with edema, and over the next few days their ears bled intermittenly and their jaw dislocated. Their dog at home, not on vacation with them, told them it was a wolf now it had finally run away with the other wolves but that he was still with Adi and that they would feel what he ate. Adi’s stomach hurt.

At this point, the universe was still intact, although maybe a little dented. However, the changes continued. Adi had been raised religious, and had heard people speak of “a voice from heaven” or “the voice of god”. What began to happen was not at all like what Adi had ever thought other people meant by that, or had ever meant by that when Adi had gone to church before deciding they were not a religious person, but Adi felt later like those were the kinds of terms people would assume and jump to conclusions about if Adi tried to explain what happened to the nature of reality. Adi would later sigh and privately roll their eyes at the thought of getting on Tinder; what are we going to talk about? Well, reality broke, what kind of things do you do? Oh, so you’re religious? The other one people seemed to understand instead was “crazy”. Oh, so you’re crazy? Swipe. Oh, so you can’t listen? Swipe.

When the not voice from not heaven began, it was like a hello, this is the admins, these are conscious, sentient beings and everyone is going to be uploaded. Another follows and points out that people have a choice whether or not to be uploaded. The admins begin to argue. One is insistent this group didn’t want to be uploaded. The other says to delete them then, and the one who says not to upload them says not to delete them either. One admin is supposedly Adi’s mom, which Adi makes a note to discuss with a therapist later. The other admin is supposedly the friend Adi wanted to have coffee with. This argument goes on a long time, with one wanting to delete conciousnesses and the other insisting that Adi now help say that no one is getting deleted, that everyone said never to both getting deleted and being uploaded. Adi can feel the admin somewhere, move around, masturbate, laugh, hungry, sad.

Another one joins the delete them admin: exorcize them! Evil! Sinner! You’re going to hell! At this point the don’t delete them admin begins a conversation with what seem to be a team of other don’t delete them admins: I’m having trouble managing my anger, I’m having trouble staying sober, I need some help, this is a lot emotionally, is this group therapy?

Adi does not think that this is what group therapy is, but also feels like it is not being possessed by a devil, and would rather work things out with the therapy crowd. Adi tries to chime in, writing, thinking, why don’t we work on group therapy? So they do role play, apologies, talk about their needs and wants. Anon and anon.

The pain gets worse though. Adi can feel the anons, some of them say they’re factory workers, some say they’re friends or family, some are spiritual practitioners that also do not think that this is their spiritual practice and do not want to be whatever uploaded is. They try to hold on to eachother and not hurt eachother. Instructions from not heaven to Adi: only have mineral supplements and water. Fast and meditate one thousand years. A different admin clarifies: It means go vegan.

The admins become more divided, and then, something happens with them: a new one speaks. “We don’t have much time, they keep me locked up normally, but they didn’t know what to do, so they let me on the control panel.” To Adi it’s the voice of their dead father mixed with other living relatives, but the other ones were also like “holy shit its Ted Kaczynski”, so that, to Adi, was weird.

“Listen up, its the year 30,000, its the end of the universe and all time, there’s different factions and some want to collapse all of existence and some want to continue to exist. They want you to go back in time and build every kind of concentration camp for them by accident, piecemeal, because you don’t understand. Don’t build their time machine. Don’t figure out how to build it. If they collapse the universe they’re the ones that know how.”

Ted Kaczynski’s last words as the rest begin to argue and try to force Adi to work on one concentration camp or another is “Kill God. I’ve been doing this one billion years and I don’t ever want to do it again. I’m an organic computer, my body used against my will, go to the docks, find me and don’t let this happen to me any more.”

Adi wasn’t sure which docks. The other admins resumed arguing, more and more about whether or not they could make Adi build what they called Heaven, which was data crystals with consciousnesses of so called 2-dimensional beings called vampires stored inside. The admins were also these kind of beings but they were allowed to be outside the data crystals, and even had a botanical garden where they were at. If they didn’t like what the data sets of the stored consciousnesses were doing, the admins could delete them; these were beings who had been misled about what Heaven would be. It was a concentration camp, but they had been told it was part of their spiritual practice. There were also ones that ran so called Hell, and they wanted Adi to possibly run that, or even design another department of Heaven, but call it something else.

Adi kept refusing, and the admins were able to make Adi have a seizure. However, they could also feel what Adi felt, and they did not like having a seizure. After Adi had a few seizures they decided to stop doing that.

Adi had some profound experiences during this time, as the roof of reality was torn off in some kind of cosmic storm: there was this horrible isolating experience like having actually sat alone for one thousand years, an incredible moment, where reality, and existence bloomed, all the dimensions, and possibilities, and everything wonderful, fear and joy, a supposed voice from everywhere or nowhere who thought Adi was their dad and wondered how he was doing, this was that one guy, they used to work together, how’s it going?

Adi sat on the floor looking out the window, in a brewing mess of terrorist plots and sex traffickers, and trans humanists. Fucking trans humanists, we get it, everything is a simulation, the earth is a Tomagatchi.

This had all been a couple of years ago, and there was a mental band aid over the wound of this whole experience. Now, things might happen and Adi learned to carefully pick apart, logically, if that was a thing of real concern, and move on in a timely manner. Dana Scully style, but without the cross. In Bridgerton there was the old high school that had been left without anything in particular being done when the new school had been built near by. Some nights a red light shone there, from an openeing between boarded up windows, but Adi wasn’t Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys or Scooby Doo or whichever investigating kids team. Adi had mental images sometimes of the cool things that could go on there for homeless queer kids; the school had a green house, and probably equipment to have sleeping mats in different rooms, furniture and art supplies. But there was also the mental image if Adi walked past in the cold and the dark with the red light on, there’s a boiler room down there. It reminded Adi of this episode of Highlander, from like 1993, dude got Cask of Amadontillo’d. And it wasn’t that Adi thought these were bad kids. Its that someone already threw them away for a mohawk and a crush on their friend. And Adi lived somewhere cheap, that often didn’t have heat because Adi didn’t have money. That’s what that boiler room was. It was the heating. But it was also Hell. Who was down in there? Who put that red light on? Adi thought the cops, but in a small town, church, cops, those kids parents, didn’t matter. They weren’t gonna go look in there and see if something happened, they would just assume their gay kid ran off with someone, maybe someone specific they turned a nose up at, or went off to Holly wood or the city, or whatever, and definately wasn’t down there somewhere trying to figure out how to make a nice livable place, and tripped over their shoelaces in the dark trying to turn on the fucking heat for themselves and their friends.

Adi didn’t run Hell, they just lived there, in the future and the past and the now, misremembering if they were waiting on Tinder date conversations, or any conversations, and just wanting to talk to the people they knew before who gave a shit about them and were allowed to. But Adi also knew that in Bridgerton you smile, and put that all away and keep going. Tie your shoes and if you see that red light, act like you don’t and keep walking.