“Let’s set up the Naivety tonight,” Linda said. She looked forward to it every year.
Her son groaned and stretched - he hated the Naivety but obediently dragged all the equipment out of the cobwebbed old attic. Fresh straw and moss on the coffee table. Linda & her husband and their son & daughter unspooled all the red and green wires and hooked them up to the steepled steel device on this bed of greenery. Finally they all put on their plastic and rubber and LED headsets and found a place to settle in the living room, husband relaxed on the recliner, son stiff in a chair, daughter one end of the couch, Linda lying down next to the entire apparatus. And flicked it on.
They all opened their eyes sitting or supine on a soft bed of green grass, outside an enormous modern monstrosity of a church. Stars twinkled above, and the metal of the building seemed cold, but they were all warm- artificially so. Her family blinked and waited for her to begin.
“Well, very well, now that we’re all here”, she said with a sudden smile, “I’ll remind you how it’s done.” She walked away from the crowd on the grass and became young again, in college, suddenly both herself and seeing herself changing degrees from psychology to biology so she could go to veterinarian school, like she always wanted - opting out of the easier degree and missing the senior seminar where she met her husband. No matter - the Naivety was a time of happiness, joy, choice, not realism. She stayed single through and after school (but wasn’t without her dalliances). Years rushed by, powered by the groaning and tinkling sound of the steelspired church, whose doors were always shut, sounds like a car cooling down after a hot drive. Her favorite was volunteering at the petting zoo to take care of the animals there, outside of her regular role at the clinic, and she wasn’t afraid to toss a few bales of hay around either. Hay went everywhere, got everywhere, strewn indoors. Sweeping up, trying to be polite, she saw a trail of straw leading to a residential home, like someone had drug one over. That’s funny, she thought. Nobody lives this close to the petting zoo. She walked up to the back door and looked through and saw herself, grinning wide and vapid.
Her husband got up and left shortly after she had walked into the void without looking back. Artificial time wasn’t quick enough for him to meet his sweetheart, so he left unmarried- unmotivated, as well, as meeting Linda was the thing that bumped his ambition from still-water to rushing- he lived at home for a bit, got in fights with his old man about the worth of a college degree, respect lost & then re-earned when he finally got a job at the same factory- different manufacturing stage so they weren’t constantly running into each other. He had excellent vision, enough to get a little higher pay than his father, fusing tiny selenium alloy parts into the frame of those new psychomimetic toys that were all the rage - smells like a mix of solder and garlic. He was a little sick all the time, just run down from the hours, he thought, and the doc said he had liver issues but he didn’t drink that much- he couldn’t figure it out. He got up from the last assembly one day and went back to his locker and found a completed one on the top shelf, shaped like a conglomeration of spires, antennae to absorb ambient brainwaves, repel and direct the user to a certain state. He put his welding goggles away and picked it up- heavy, and warm. Then he was in his car and it was in the passenger seat. Why do I have this? he thought. Then he was driving a long time, not to his parent’s house, but to a destination he knew and couldn’t name. He parked the car and found the right key and unlocked the door and walked in with the apparatus still in one hand and went into the living room and saw himself and a woman he didn’t know and two kids that looked like they were his, and this woman’s, and he started to weep. He knew he wasn’t allowed to touch any of them. The device in his hand and the device on the table were similar/different, chirping with urgency, coordinating to let the last individual out of shared delusion- he put it down, frightened all of a sudden- went to his sleeping self with a headset covering his eyes, drooling, fatter, happier, maybe- and pulled the goggles off.
They got up and surveyed the output of the machine. On one end, miniature, silvery factory workers on a line, making tiny copies of the pointed overlord above, still humming from its work, almost pleasurably. The husband’s parents waved up at nobody in the air. On the other end of the table animals frolicked and were posed like they were eating the real straw from the table - “Very clever this year”, the husband remarked, though he had to find his glasses to make out the detail on the donkey’s mouth. In the middle Linda with a lab coat and her husband in overalls with an almost imperceptibly small soldering iron. Between them a curious crib that a few flecks of straw had made their way inside, supported by two crosspieces at each end. It was empty.
Linda looked around. “Oh, shoot,” she said. “I’ve forgotten to have the kids again.”