A few moments after Bob joined Cindy at the table, Nancy excused herself to visit the Ladies Room. While she was gone, Bob casually gathered up all three of their phones, dropped them in the nearest trash bin like he was disposing of old receipts, and led Cindy over to the drink station for refills.
When Nancy returned, she found the table empty, no phones, no Bob, no Cindy. Just wrappers and empty containers.
They returned a moment later, drinks in hand, and immediately began looking around with a mix of confusion and theatrical concern.
“Our phones are gone,” Bob said.
Nancy grabbed wrappers and napkins, looking underneath.
“We left them right here while we went to get refills,” Cindy said. “They’re just… gone.”
“You’re telling me someone stole all three phones while you were standing a a few feet away?”
“Apparently,” Bob said. “Either that or they grew legs and walked off looking for better reception.”
Nancy stared at them both. “Seriously?”
Cindy just shrugged. “We weren’t gone long.”
As you may have guessed, all that talk about biological signature pings had been rattling around in Bob’s head. The moment Nancy stepped away, he’d decided: no more phones. From here on out, it was burner phones. No GPS, no digital trail, no chance of having your spleen tracked by satellite.
They boarded the flight to Canada without issue. Not even a second glance at security. Once they arrived, they got lucky and were able to buy three tickets to Belgium, paying cash, of course. Bob still half-expected a SWAT team to jump out from behind the currency exchange booth, but no one seemed to care.
By the time they boarded the long-haul flight, Bob was running on caffeine, anxiety, and that one martini he ordered the second they hit cruising altitude.
Pinkies up, he downed it in one gulp, ordered another before the flight attendant could even move to the next row, then promptly passed out like a tranquilized bear.
Somewhere mid-flight, he began twitching in his sleep, muttering incoherent nonsense like a man trying to explain quantum mechanics to a toaster. Cindy leaned over and gently shook him awake.
“Just checking in…” she said softly.
Bob opened his eyes slowly, red and unfocused.
“To see what condition my condition is in?” he croaked.
“Yeah, you okay?”
“I had a weird dream.”
“I figured as much.”
“That guy, the street pooper, he was in it.”
Nancy, who had been dozing nearby, perked up. “Street pooper? You have to tell me about this.”
“Yeah, some weird stuff happened while you were at Grandma’s,” Bob said. “One of them was a guy we saw actually pooping in the street.”
Nancy blinked. “Seriously?”
“There was a cop nearby,” he continued. “Looked like he was about to haul the guy away, but then this other car drove by, real criminals, I dunno, probably from the Most Wanted List. The cop chased them instead and just let the pooper go.”
“He pooped on our street?” Nancy asked.
“No, it was at Crystal Pines,” Cindy said. “We thought we’d have a nice little time-off getaway.”
“Oooh, Crystal Pines,” Nancy teased. “And what happens at Crystal Pines, stays at Crystal Pines…”
“Oh, cut it out,” Cindy said, blushing a little.
Bob rubbed his eyes and went on. “Anyway, in the dream, it was like I was seeing an alternate universe. One I had seen before…”
Nancy leaned in, curious now. Bob chose his words carefully.
“I mean, in the dream, it was like everything we’ve been through, was just a story.”
Cindy looked at him sharply. “And the street pooper was in it?”
“That’s the weird part. Me and him, we were business partners. We started a website back in 1999, when Google was just getting started. Somehow, twenty-five years later, the site was still going.”
“Oh, so we’re internet millionaires now?” Nancy asked, hopefully.
“No, not exactly,” Bob said. “The site never made any money. It was a tax write-off at first. Then they changed the tax code, and it just became… an expense. We kept it running because we wanted to. No logical reason.”
“Figures,” Nancy said, disappointed.
“His name was Stephen. But he didn’t really poop in the street, that was just something he wrote in his comedy column, Lunatic Ravings. He made the whole thing up. Only in our world, it really happened.”
“That’s bizarre,” Cindy said. “Your brain digested all of that and spit it back out as some kind of dream-version reality.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Bob said. “But the really weird part is that everything that happened to us, everything you experienced, everything I did, it was just part of a column I wrote. Called Ask Bob.”
Nancy stared. “Wait. So… you dreamed that this, all of this, us, is just part of something you made up?”
Bob nodded. “It seemed so real. But in the dream, it was just fiction. Like there’s a reality out there where this reality is just… a story.”
Cindy raised an eyebrow. “The weird crap your brain comes up with.”
“Exactly!” Bob said, suddenly animated. “That was the name of the site, TheWeirdCrap.com. And it’s like you just… remembered it. Like it’s buried in your subconscious too.”
“I guess, in another reality…” Cindy trailed in deep thought.
“And you just blurted out the name of the website, like it was natural. Makes me wonder…”
“…if somewhere out there, there are people in some alternate reality, reading about everything we say and do,” Cindy finished.
“Exactly,” Bob said, nodding.
Nancy shook her head. “Sounds ridiculous. And kind of creepy. That somewhere, there’s an alternate reality where people are just… reading about us. Like we’re entertainment.”
“I guess you’re right, It’s too far fetched to actually be real…” Bob said, leaning back in his seat.
-Pause.
“…Or is it?”
AND NOW YOU KNOW!!!
Song in my head:
Coming Next: The Confrontation…
