I love that twist.

You ever play Transistor, by chance? You should at least watch YouTube clips, if only for its awesome soundtrack. Minus time travel, the vibe feels similar.

While less similar, I sometimes think about a similar scenario in a transcendent future, specifically Orion's Arm. There's no time travel there either (general relatively rules), but basically, two deep soulmates diverge. One transcends to higher levels of consciousness where, eventually, their substrate spans and encloses multiple stars, while the other person stubbornly stays the same. And I think out little vignettes, like conflicts of trust when one parter can literally simulate reality for the other, despair, worry, scenarios where even the transcendent human turns to their partner in a crisis.

She feels disgusting.

Refuse everywhere: old takeout boxes, filthy clothes, garbage in every cranny, full bottles stacked precariously in the corner. She could not will herself to leave. She works, sleeps, and suffers in this room.

And she hasn’t had a shower in four months.

Once, her hand had grazed the doorknob, but the fear and trauma of being out there was too much. Who knew what awaited her in the hallway?

It was probably nothing, just her agoraphobia.

She couldn’t smell herself anymore, but any time someone came by with food she ordered, they perched in on a table under her bedroom window and scrambled away.

She’s going to try it today. She’s going to take that first step. She doesn’t remember what the kitchen in her house looks like.

The filthy bed calls for her, begging her to forget this nonsense.

Bravery and steelheartedness wins the day. She gently clicks her door latch by pushing the rotating handle down a couple degrees a second.

And she delicately pushes the door open. The door makes an impossibly shrill creak, and the air suddenly tastes foreign and wrong and clean.

One grimy foot taps against the hardwood. A head of matted and greasy hair peeks out from behind the door frame: the decay of isolation has neglected the housework and the rest of the house, or at least this hallway, is in shambles too.

The shower is downstairs.

She knows the fifth stair creaks, and she knows that it’s too bright in here. She cannot see the staircase for the L-shaped hallway that lies before her.

She tentatively pokes her head around the corridor, seeing the stairs.

WHAM! Something has her by the neck, lifting her off the ground and her feet are thrashing and she’s panicking and six mouths draw near and she whimpers for help as loud as she can but her throat is closing and three-hundred-eighty-eight teeth in six mouths draw within an inch of her face and her butthole puckers and this is the absolute end and somehow she would always knew her life would go this way;

And the biggest mouth leaned in closer, right up to her ear, its tongue tasting its teeth, before screeching the following words:

(this fragment cuts out prematurely)

No, no, this right here, this was her new low. She had balanced a TV dinner on her grubby shirt over her chest, and she hadn't worn a bra since the last time she went grocery shopping, which was--what, three weeks ago? Yeah, that was when she left the house. She was very aware this wasn't exactly the best look. But what could she do?

She watched this incredibly banal show on television and just moved the spoon from the plastic tray on her chest, to her head, which was cranked to the right so she could see the screen. Frustrated by the motion it takes to get her head straight again so the food doesn't just fall off the spoon, she begrudgingly takes her eyes from this stupid show that she hates.

Where did it all go so wrong? Was it the performance two months ago? And why did she get cut from future auditions, instead of him? It was probably just sexism at work. Sexism can be pointed to as the cause of a lot of troubles, she reasoned, and she was partially correct, but that was a crutch she leaned on too much.

She shoved the spoon into the pocket of her pajama pants and flung the little plastic tray out of the living room, down the hall, and through the open kitchen door, where it landed perfectly in the nearly-full garbage can. She's not impressed by this anymore. She's a practiced hand. An expert latibulator.

Off the couch, television's off too, that show was so dumb, and she crashed down in her office chair and the word "posture" briefly floated into her mind. She sat up straight, and she sat straight for five seconds before slumping down, the unemployment claim website open. And she typed in the jobs she looked for this week. This week even fast food turned her down.

She couldn't say it was two years ago, cause years were exclusive to Earth, and she wasn't here. Years still felt right, cause she started here. She was singing to massive audiences, auditoriums packed with a sextuple balcony, layers and layers of people from worlds as far as she can remember. She was someone and she was talented and she was beautiful and there's a ravioli on her sweatpants.

She ate it.

Let's see. She got her fast food application attempt in, her home improvement store attempt, she even applied to some terrible telemarketing gig. And she tried not to cry. Didn't try very hard though. Her hair got wet, where it was hanging in her face. She worried for a moment it would ruin her mascara--oh, who the hell was she kidding?

The scandal about eighteen months ago, a year and a half, that's when things started to go awry. She was lonely. A friend she had performed with on stage for a long time, they were seen at some sort of nightclub, sharing a drunken kiss. He was always charming with his words and she always felt like she was playing second fiddle to his Stradivarius. He was always careful to avoid singing in her vocal register, cause he was always of the thought that her voice was pretty, needed to be heard, and that he was there to enhance it however he could.

She missed him. She thought it was love. Some tabloid broke the news and it propagated at such a pace that the speed of light was a slow walk. She was unbookable, and so was he. And they did what needed to be done. They took his boat and they left. They made for that tiny little backwater reservation planet that she was from. This one here. The one that wouldn't let her work at a convenience store.

Oh, that's why she's not getting hired, cause she doesn't have any sort of verifiable work history whatsoever, and it's not like she can tell the truth on these applications. It's a reservation, colloquially a prison planet for a reason.

She doesn't know where he is. Hasn't heard from him in months. Hopes he's okay. Her heart sinks. He can't even come over to her house and say hey. She's broken. She has no hope, and she hopes to gather her strength. She knows she can. She just doesn't know when.

(this fragment cuts out early)

The oboe opened with her A, and all the other instruments followed, the sound of preparation, the sound of anticipation.

With a hush from nowhere in particular, the audience stilled their lips and focused their attention. Once the tuning came to an end, the only musical qualities that could be heard in the theatre were the lifting plates of the media drones, making their staccato, stuttering D-natural hum as they flew above the audience and down to the stage, for the viewers at home and abroad.

It was opening night.

The stage was entirely darkened. No one saw her walk out, just a bit stage right of the center.

The orchestra started a jaunty, forthright tune, and in her soprano that won her a lead role, she opened, two bars later, the beat the lights clacked on:

"We all know Godot won't show /

"We all know what the pistol's for /

"And atop the barricades she swore /

"For a moment, at least //

"But all the destiny was written for them /

"You knew their path when your ass was sat /

"And now the oracle's gone, so that was that /

"No protection, no fear, this story's all mayhem /

Oh no, this isn't to the script, her co-lead came out two lines early--and he wore glasses! She improvised cause he did it already, that suit's broken early, and she entered a delicate two-step pose with him, his arm around the small of her back, her arm over his shoulder.

Alcohol on his breath. Oh lord.

And the libretto scrolling, the text backwards, on his glasses.

And without any further announcement or heraldry, his vomit on her chest, all down her dress.

She was an idiot to expect anything else. He was the son of the director. He never auditioned for anything whatsoever. And she was enraged. She stormed off the stage, the audience abuzz, the house lights coming back on.

She grabbed her purse and tried the back door out past the dressing rooms, desperate to get away, but oh no, the reporters were there, they found her. Cameras hovered, whirred and clicked. She couldn't push past them.

One reporter shoved his way up to the front and shouted,

(this fragment cuts out early)

Before she even passed under the crime scene tape, she knew this would be bad. She took the bottle of peppermint oil from her trunk, saturated her surgical mask in it, and passed it to her partner, who did the same, and they gazed up at the house. Two stories, some sort of old catalog home, and a terribly unkempt lawn.

"Come on, we have to do this before the local dicks investigate this one."

"I really don't want to have to do any corpse extraction."

"If we're here, there's absolutely going to be corpse extraction." She was already wearing her mask, but she wished it had a hole for a cigarette; never minding the fact of the reminder banging in her head, there were her ex-wife's last words to her there in custody court: "maybe if you'd stop chain-smoking, you'd get to see the kids." She hears that snippet of thought at least twenty times a day. She pulls a small manila envelope from her pocket, with an address, and extracts a single silver house key.

"Gentle now, easy does it." The door eases open quietly, not so much as a creak, and almost immediately the peppermint oil tries to yield.

Standing in the doorway, there was a living room that was well-lived in, but with two people that couldn't negotiate a building garbage problem. She was only here because she was sure those two people were dead, and she just had to figure out why.

A laptop on the coffee table, still plugged in. She tapped the space bar, and up came some internet video about a musical singer being puked on, with commentary from some random influencer. Notably, the keyboard wasn't dusty, just dirty, and the rest of the computer felt like it hadn't seen so much as a damp paper towel in a decade.

Her partner went up the stairs, saying, "there's prolly one of them up here, I'll check this out, you hit the kitchen," and she went upstairs, leaving the woman alone amongst hundreds of roaches and tens of mice. She wished she wore boot covers.

As soon as she nudged the kitchen door open, she saw the epicenter of the odor: a corpse slumped over the dining table, holding a note. She couldn't identify the race of the corpse, her academy days were far off. This guy here though, had a bald head, a wide head that never tapered into a chin and a neck, and six mouths, hundreds of teeth. The only thing she could remember was that these folks were obsessed with singing choral music, singing all the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts, at once, cause they could. They were probably legends elsewhere in the galaxy.

Slipping some latex gloves on, she gently parted his largest mouth: his gums were recessed and bloody, his teeth in disarray. Did they never get hygiene supplies? She left the man in his chair, slumped him back over the table, and inspected the kitchen. Not a single grain of food to be seen in any cupboard, not a single clean dish either. Just yet more garbage bags, and impromptu garbage containers for when they ran out of bags.

He could have never left the house to do any shopping, he was on Earth, and the people of Earth are notoriously racist, they'd have an absolute fit if anyone else was seen who wasn't human. That means the shopping fell to the other occupant of this house, some human girl in her twenties. She immediately felt bad for the dead man slumped over here, only able to experience his oncoming demise, cause if he were to take one step outside, he'd get dissected by a hundred governments.

"Hey," she called up the stairs, "did you find her up there?" She tentatively climbed the stairs to find her partner in a bedroom at the back of the second level, staring at a corpse in bed. A human corpse. The girl, the one in her twenties.

"I've just been standing here, asking myself, why couldn't she leave? Why couldn't she get out of here?" The dead girl was on her side in the bed, dirty blankets pulled over her shoulders, the room in as much shambles as anywhere else in the house. "Had she gotten off her ass and tried to clean or get food or anything, none of this would have happened."

"I'm not so sure of that. I'm sure something more had happened, but I'm not eager to dig through the evidence. Wanna just say she had agoraphobia, bag up the guy downstairs, bring him in and see if we can't get his body repatriated to his people, and just close this one out?"

"Sure, I guess so, sounds like a--hey, check this out!"

Written on the hallway wall, opposite the door to the dead girl's bedroom, where they'd be seen every time she left her room, were the following words:

(this fragment cuts out prematurely)

So real life plus ghosts?