The Third Personality: A Novel (1)

Marginal History:

A bright, clear June day, back in 2055 ...

PLYMOUTH, Massachusetts - It kind of served her right, for staying up so late the night before.

Okay, so 8-year-old girls need their beauty sleep. But especially for this kid (her off-the-map prodigy status notwithstanding), she should have long since fallen asleep prior to midnight last night, even if that night was a Friday - and even if that Friday was at the beginning of another gently-unfolding, full-of-possibilities summer.

So now, here it was, a Saturday morning, and it served Little Miss Hunt right that intrusive, glittering sunlight should burst through the pulled-down blinds in her bedroom to creep inside her lids and pry open her eyes at … oh, for goodness sakes! … 7 a.m.

Not that she budged from beneath the luxurious quilt and soft-top sheet, which buried her in her bed. Its headboard fell directly beneath one of the light-saturated windows in her air-conditioned chamber.

Still, still - she wasn't obliged to move. She was a kid in her own bedroom, and she could do as she pleased.

Outside that window, high above her house, she heard the telltale whirring sound of yet another Aroghens space vessel as it approached Boston's South Shore airspace - passed over, mrrrrmmmn - and then moved out over the Atlantic. It was a good bet, too, that its pilots were all wrapped up in their curious and probably incomprehensible affairs to the exclusion of all else. God forbid they should enjoy themselves up there. Of all of Earth's three-dimensional interplanetary…well, tourists, the Aroghens had to be the least accessible - not to mention the least charming.

Regardless. At least their engines weren't too disruptive.


The next time Miss Hunt opened her eyes (she had no sense that she'd even closed them, actually), some gentle tap-knockings on the other side of her bedroom door induced her to slip back into consciousness once more. The glistening daylight, of course, had remained.

The dream she'd been having - something about swirling ghosts, loud rattling and air vents, and … stuff - was already slipping into obscurity.