Par-Cell was well suited for her position among the 77 and she was a proper leader of and guide to the mathematicians and engineers of the planet, providing counsel where needed and deciding priorities for learning.
It was shortly after being chosen that Par-Cell started to feel an overwhelming sense of dejavu as she moved through her life.
Par-Cell sat nervously in the throne that was newly fashioned for her tastes; the high back had been carved from a durable metal designed by early Ascendant engineers for artisans to construct the mega-rounts old statutes of the planet. The high back of Par-Cell’s throne was fashioned into the two tools that were most valuable to her; a knife with a long, flat blade and short hilt, and a mallet with a thick face and relatively thin handle. The first time she saw it, Par-Cell knew that she had seen it before. Technically she hadn’t ever seen it; she had been led into the Hall of the Chosen and gifted her throne shortly after the conclusion of the elections that named her master mathematician and engineer. But when she laid eyes on it for the first time, it felt familiar, like she had laid eyes on the throne before and been incredibly humbled and afraid of the task of being a member of the 77. She recalled the subtle trembling of her body as she sat on the soft padding of the throne, it all felt so familiar. She was accessing a memory as a whole body sensation, living it and moving through it like a part her body played. It was almost an out of body experience, like she saw herself or was aware of herself to see her own actions as familiar as she enacted them, but it was not a true out of body experience because her consciousness retained her body. She felt like three versions of herself; the body that was acting, the mind that animated that body, and then this third shadow that was seemingly shocked to life by the unnerving familiarity of events. It had happened for the first time at the induction ceremony, but it would happen frequently from that moment on, Par-Cell’s third shadow self would emerge and things would feel familiar.
The jump to the past had reduced the number of occurrences of dejavu, but when they did happen, they were more intense and Par-Cell saw herself be herself through an entire standard daylight and twilight cycle that is displayed on the inside of Top’s Outshell. The daylight and twilight cycle of the Outshell is equivalent to the sunset cycle of the relatively ancient planet Wiis, that is roughly twenty-one hours RET.
It was shortly after the jump, when everyone on the ground of Top, on every continent, waited nervously, or bravely, or a faux version of either, for the moment they had been warned was approaching that should have no negative physical consequences, though the world would definitely look different to the eye, and physical properties would be altered to unknown effect. Everyone was generally nervous, Par-Cell could tell that the heads of Aeternus universities and libraries that she met with as the planet Top passed into the Quinspace were very nervous. They all gasped audibly as the colors of everything changed to a dreamy, smeared version of itself that mostly retained it’s rigid outline. Some things smeared, others glowed, some grew fuzzy, but it was a hallucinatory vision of the reality that the inhabitants of Top were not used to.
Par-Cell calmed the meeting and they were able to commence their discussion; the official mandate of the 77 was that business should commence as usual on the planet if possible, and the changing of colors and textures was not an immediate impediment to discussing academic curriculum. It took a few cycles, but the new palette of existence became less jarring and business did largely continue as usual, but Par-Cell had been outside of herself for most of it, and awed at the feeling. She remembered all of it, or she had seen it exactly as it was before and she had time to imagine, or what felt like imagination but could have been something more substantial. It was as though the same cycle played in a rapid-fire over and over with subtle variations, the same shock and eventual acceptance, and then the meeting with Sil-Prom who was worked up about a recent conversation the two had shared where Par-Cell revealed mostly by accident that she hoped the theories were just that and the planet Top was not the cause of the rapid expansion. But then the booming voice came that was not a sound, but contained within the minds of each and every member of the Ascendant,
“You do not belong here, do you?…”
There was more before it trailed off but the voice was like a light turned on for Par-Cell who suddenly understood. She remembered, and her three selves collapsed into one. It was just as she was preparing for sleep and she startled up from her pillow.
“This has all happened before.”
PRL Serials 