The Space Between Moments
Sequel to Persistence of Vision
1
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Up, down, yes, no.” The pleasant looking woman in the grey wool uniform on the other side of the glass pressed a switch before her. A faint hiss follows as our two chambers are equalized.
“What’s the point of that?” I muttered, mostly to myself. To my surprise, Ken answered. “Toons are constitutionally incapable of giving a totally straight answer to anything. They will always deviate somehow, just to be silly.
The simple “reality check” as we call it serves two purposes. The first being to identify especially realistic toons, and the second being to ensure that both you and everyone in the vessel you’re about to equalize with are operating in the same uncontaminated reality.”
I remarked that he was being unexpectedly candid. “There isn’t much left about toons that’s classified for you now, or you wouldn’t be in here. Besides, there aren’t many uncontaminated humans remaining. We’ve been pooling our knowledge with every other similar agency around the world in hopes that we may still solve it in the eleventh hour. After all, what’s the alternative? Just...live with it?”
He gestured out the window. A mixture of regular cars and cartoon cars sputtered past. An old timey cartoon bus plodded along, the entire structure of it doing a sort of dance where it would extend upwards to one side, then retract down into the center, then extend up to the other side, over and over. Its bulbous white eyes up on the front implying some measure of intelligence, though I’ve never seen one that can speak.
“Well, I dunno. I’ve met an awful lot of people who would be happy to. Granted, it’s mostly gross overweight hairy dudes with anime girlfriends.” Ken grimaced, retracting the window blind all the way. “Does that look fucking normal to you? Can you really live with that?”
Outside, the grassy hills and nearby highway were illuminated by soft, warm rays of morning sunshine...from a cartoon sun. Big ol’ smiley face, big white puffy eyeballs like pillows that the pupils seem to float around on, giving us all a thumbs up.