I was working on a team building some sort of spaceship. The psychologist from Bones, Doctor Lance Sweets, was there, and when the team leader clapped for one of us, and we came near Sweets, these small objects that were lodged in out brains would hover invisibly outside our heads, exactly a foot away in the direction of the doctor. When the boss waved his hand between us and the doctor, they would drop into visible reality. They were smooth but irregular, like river stones, somewhat kidney-shaped, about an inch and a half long. They were made of deep blue stone, wound about with gold wire, threaded with gem-bright beads or components of some kind. Their purpose was to allow us to behave predictably in multiple quantum states, so that, say, three Lauras could be working at once. And to do a full update on our devices, all three of us would have to be called in and compiled back into one. My boss made some adjustments to my device to see if it would help me work more safely, but when he put it back in my brain, the world was all in black and white, and I got very depressed, so he had to put it back to the way it was and do more research.
After that I was back in Castroville, where I grew up. Mom and Brooke and I went to Saturday evening mass at St. Louis Church, then I went for a walk down Highway 90. I noticed from a banner that today was the 26th anniversary of an unsolved shooting at the Dairy Queen. There were wreaths of flowers hung on the outside of the church and down the streets.
After a while, Mom and Brooke and I went to a pool, and Aunt Liz was there, too, and so was my little buddy Kieran. I was watching over Kieran VERY closely, because a vampire named Long Shadow was swimming around, just below the surface of the water, and I knew he was going to try to drown someone. He must have succeeded, because suddenly I was walking up to the top of a hill to go to Holy Rosary Church in Hostyn, to a funeral service. All my family was there, and one of my cousins was holding tight to my hand and crying, but I couldn't figure out who had died, because I counted aunts and uncles and cousins and cousins' kids, and everyone seemed to be in the pews.
Then I began working remotely on my laptop. Joe had sent me a spreadsheet with two columns of linked URLs. I couldn't figure out how this spreadsheet was different from the previous one he'd sent, so I couldn't tell what he needed me to do with it. I knew he wanted me to update one of our web pages, but it wasn't at all clear what needed to be changed, and I couldn't figure out why the link for HSE0011 and the link to the to a page showing the SKU number for glazed strawberry cake doughnuts were in the same spreadsheet row, because I had NO IDEA what HSE0011 had to do with doughnuts. I kept trying to explain to Joe on the phone that I didn't know what to do with what he sent, and he kept insisting it was obvious from his changes to the spreadsheet.
So I put that project aside for a while, and went over to an area where I was designing new museum exhibits, and brainstorming ideas for merchandising lines to go with them. The exhibits would feature new archaeological finds, like a skeleton found in Peru, with jewels in the eye sockets. The gemstones were carved in the shape of flowers and stars, so one of the things we would sell in the gift shop was a plastic skull replica with bright acrylic copies of the gemstones. There was another exhibit having to do with findings along the Oregon Trail, and we were reviving the game, and arranging for wagons to be built. Another exhibit featured finds by a museum team on an island nation in the Pacific. I went out to the island to photograph a city-scape, that included the museum, one of the prettiest buildings there, from a hill that had the best view. I had a hard time getting up to the hill, though, because all the tourists were trying to drive on the British side of the road when that wasn't actually the correct side of the road to drive on. While I was on this trip, I picked up a packet of a local snack food, which was little balls of salty, soft yellow cheese that were soaked in honey and spiced with cinnamon. These were sticky and gooey and remarkably delicious.
I finally rejoined my group after taking these photographs. It was night on the island and the trees were full of huge, fragrant white blossoms that gleamed in the moonlight. We all got into shiny convertibles, tops down in the warm night air. As we set off to drive down to the seashore, I realized was Sookie Stackhouse, riding in a car with Eric the Viking vampire. Then I woke up.
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