Countless Slivers

By default, the unnamed man lowered his gun, but Ace turned away even angrier to have been shut-down by his team-leader in favor of the Flamingo.

He barely took a step and she had another foreign thought, this one in Ace's voice but she said it out loud anyway, "fuck'n bullshit."

Ace whirled around with a gloved finger pointed venomously at her, "stay the fuck out of my head you crazy bitch!"

"I wasn't in your head,” she countered, “YOU were projecting!" When she stepped back, away from Ace's rage, her body collided with a solid wall of armored man. A startled glance over her shoulder revealed it was the giant so, she couldn't be sure if it was his presence or their leader's following words of warning which stopped Ace from pressing forward.

One step put enough distance between the giant and her that she turned to face the man in charge, even as he addressed her next:

"You said Ace was projecting, what does that mean?"

She was caught by surprise, took a moment to circle her own thoughts and started with the basics "...Projecting. To extend outward beyon-"

"I know the definition; what YOU mean, in laymen’s terms?"

"I mean... wait... here, let me demonstrate." And by ‘me’ she really meant the giant man, herself, and their imaginations. It was the giant she turned to next, realizing he hadn't moved and was a little too close for her comfort, already within arms reach. "Do you-"

"Laith" the giant named himself with the smallest of smiles.

The passenger nodded, "Laith. Do you mind being my model?"

While everyone else laughed, Laith simply said, "no."

Someone made a comment about "Laith the Ape" being the next Tyra Banks, but she ignored them and looked around to wait for their eyes and minds to be receptive. One by one, it got quiet, Laith and their leader most patient, and finally she tried to put it in simple terms.

"Imagine thoughts with substance, like our breath. We only see our breath in extreme cold, but we know it exists because we feel it, we make it happen... and thought is the same way so, just imagine Laith's thoughts as steam radiating off of him."

Someone made a sex joke in whisper, others laughed but she pressed on. “Now, if Laith were to think a thought he wanted to say but didn’t, he might think it with such force, the steam radiates further than usual… follow?”

A look around the room said some weren’t following.

Steam? What’d she do, sniff it and know the thought?

Running a hand over her face, she sighed and rerouted her attempt by stepping closer to Laith, so close it seemed unnatural not to reach out and touch him. The urge was there, but she was making a point, and waited.

Aside from the noise of the subway, the car was absolutely silent with a side of breathless. No one knew what she was doing, or going to do, but she had their attention.

When she took a deeper breath to speak again, she felt it against Laith’s armored chest and abs. Her eyes looked up at him to make sure she wasn’t overstepping and found he’d already realized where she was going with this.

For the rest of the impromptu class, she explained; “Man, woman, or otherwise, someone stands this close to you, and you feel something inside you reacting. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s incredibly confusing.”

There were a few chuckles, but she kept talking, trying to take that tangible experience to the next level in their minds. “A thought has this much substance, you can feel it-“

“But you said it word for word.” Ace countered.

“Yeah, about the beach too.” The other man reflected aloud.

“You can’t feel words, can you?” someone else asked.

“And how does ‘slivers of infinity’ fit in?” came from the one who’d aimed his gun at her, still puzzling over the possible endings she’d spoken about.

The man in charge cleared his throat and took them down another proverbial road entirely. “From the moment you said it was too bad you missed the beach for this, just describe your experience of the events to the best of your abilities.”

“You’re debriefing her?!” Ace asked, unhappy.

“We’ve got time.” His leader countered, and waved a bared hand toward their passenger for the floor once more.

Still resisting the urge to put her hands on Laith to push herself back, she made herself feel certain she could step backward without running into Ace or someone else. When she had room to breathe without touching anyone, she found herself looking at the floor; a mental note flashed about the constant feeling of motion zipping in vibrations beneath her converse and through her mismatched socks. “I call it a foreign thought.

“For me, it’s sometimes in my own… thought accent, if you will, but it’s not something I was thinking and without the weight of something shoved up from my subconscious.”

“Go on.” He said when he saw her look up to see if they were following.

“When I say a... foreign thought out loud, like the beach comment, someone usually claims it, just like you did.” While some laughed, she took a moment to smile at the simplicity of it, even if she felt bad for putting the would-be beach-goer on the spot. “That was what I call a ‘general projection’; he wasn’t thinking that thought AT anyone, just thinking it with a lot of conviction… right?”

“Yeah. I gave up the beach for a mediocre payday and I’m getting a philosophy mind-reading lesson.” His tone was a little dry, but he didn’t seem to be entirely disappointed.

Laith interrupted, “It’s more like… thought radio.”

“Yes!” She jumped, which on a moving subway is stupid, but a little stumble-step and she didn’t hit the floor. When they laughed, she laughed, but quickly tried to keep them on track. “In thought radio terms, a general projection is like a walkie talkie, and anyone open to all channels, or that specific channel, can hear it-er well, think it.”

“What about what I said? I was thinking it at Klepic.” Ace asked, and explained, throwing a head-nod toward the man in charge as he named him.

“Precisely,” the passenger replied without skipping a beat, “like a satellite dish aimed directly at him, but it’s still a stream of thought and I heard it, in your voice, in my mind.” It was a confession, but one she followed with clarification… for the record. “I didn’t reach in take the thought, you threw it across the car and I intercepted the edge of the band.

“Listen guys, I don’t know the exact science to it all,” she admitted, finally looking around the subway car at all their puzzled and skeptical faces, “but I know human beings are more than the matter and functions that make us physical beings. We feel the substance of our own thoughts in every emotion we’ve ever felt, albeit via chemical cocktails- … some of us, well, some of us are like open receivers, radio band scanners, whatever you want to metaphor to make sense of it, but for us, there are less boundaries between conscious minds and the slivers of the infinite infinity.”

Eventually, her gaze and attention shifted to the gunman before she went on, “to understand slivers of infinity, you’d have to think about every choice you’ve made since you suited up today, and every one you didn’t, because they all exist in some sliver of infinity.

“If you debated on shaving this morning, there are countless slivers of infinity where you chose the other option, where you chose an option not even on the table in this reality, and more still where it wasn’t even a question because you woke up with the perfect face.

“If you think you don’t own a pair of whitey-tighties, you’d be wrong, when you’re aware of infinity.” She went on, pausing so they could laugh and jab a few that apparently wore them in this reality.

When their eyes made their way back to her, she continued, turning in a tight, slow circle to look at all their faces, to see that on some level, each of them was beginning to understand, or at least now thinking in terms of other possibilities.

“Whether it’s a thought or emotion of someone else, or a touch of infinity, it’s all based in energy we don’t yet have the science to fully explain. Still, you’ve all experienced synchronization between slivers of infinity every time you experience déjà vu.” Again, the passenger paused to let that sink in.

“What do you mean?” The question came from Ace, no longer angry, but trying to figure out what she was saying without the right form of context in his own mind. His question was genuine, as was his impatience for understanding.

“déjà vu, it literally means “already seen” to the French, and describes those moments we’re doing something, but remember already having done this very same thing- like… living the same moment over again. What we fail to realize, as a whole, is that these moments aren’t just flicker-tricks of the mind anticipating what you’re doing, but using your anticipation to harmonize with the energy of another sliver of your infinity in which the said moment has already happened, or is happening simultaneously-“ she took another breath and saw some nods slowly gathering around the room.

“It’s like a quantum conscious data download; happens in a split second, but you feel the entire moment in a false memory even as you’re committing the deed…” Letting her voice trail off, she noticed Laith and their Leader, Klepic, were smiling. The other ten men were scratching their chins, their heads, or giving each other looks of weighted debate without a word.

“Now, imagine becoming so familiar with déjà vu, you begin to see beyond the moments of harmony, beyond the moments of synchronicity… imagine, for a moment, you could sense a déjà vu-feeling for the choices you didn’t make, for the possible futures in the choices you will make…”

This time, she let them think on it especially long. Her eyes watched their faces, most of them having taken the masks off altogether, though some merely lifted them into an awkward beanie. It was her turn to go off book and just take it in, that she was in a subway car with armed men, being escorted to an undisclosed location, but they were thinking about worlds beyond this one, choices beyond the ones they chose, and collectively not present in the car, consciously.

Her smile bloomed into a grin while her heart swelled in a kind of awe that she had nothing to do with.

Like a mountain shadow, she felt edged by a setting sun and lifted her gaze to see Laith watching her with a knowing smile. She knew he knew why she’d grinned and somehow, it made it even more worth the indulgence before her appreciation was interrupted by a question from Frankie.

She only knew it was him because of the sound his voice made with the handicap of a broken nose Klepic mentioned earlier.

“Yur talk’n super connectivity, righ?”