All that could be done was to keep an eye on the bigger things, manage the implications. What wasn’t even on her radar, because there was seemingly no reason for it to be, because arrogance fogged critical thinking, because otherwise she would have had to watch for butterflies and count every grain of sand, was the boy she spent barely minutes with in one reality, and never met at all in another. Christopher.

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She saved him, and in the same stroke inadvertently torched the one thing that made Elliott who he was. Without the one aspect that made Elliott, Elliott, the boy now a man was aimless. That night at the carnival, he told her he had synesthesia. When he composed or played, notes were colors. When the colors were reduced to only one, music disappeared from Elliott’s life. He dropped out of college after two weeks.

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Arya’s fascination with uncanny and statistically improbable similarities evolved into fixation, which drew her over the boundaries into the personal, making her unable to make clinical sense of Elliott, and the others. Research had strayed far from credible studies and accepted diagnostics to something that more resembled dogma.

Christopher opened his eyes and smiled at the officers at the top of the hill, his eyes hidden by the wet strands that coiled like snakes, his smile in full view. Sometimes he felt he was strong enough and fast enough to run between the raindrops, or just push them to the side, and for a delayed second staring at the multicolored lights and the guns, actually considered if he could do the same for bullets, if he just kept running up the hill.

The idea came to Bastian in college just before he dropped out. Beginning as loosely formed thoughts scribbled on bar napkins with a few acquaintances who thought like he did. Just a few pals spit balling over beers about the idea of faith and its hierarchical structure. It was for fun, an intellectual exercise. How to make a religion.