Katrina's Journal, 07 January 2022
Something Spiritual, Why Me? & The Curious Case of Lerina Garcia
The Goddess has reminded me to be a bit more spiritual. Quite right, too. As always.
Malcolm, my psychologist, has the usual materialist-thinking questions about her. It’s the scepticism thing. I have shot him a fair few stern looks over the last few months and he’s perfectly aware of how I feel about so-called ‘agnostics’. It would be better to hyphenate that word, methinks. A-gnostic. Translation: ‘I don’t know’. Or ‘I’m ignorant’. Or something likewise. Most agnostics don’t want to admit that, of course, but they should. It’s a similar thing with the difference between ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. ‘Belief’ is in fact simply ‘hope that it’s true’. ‘Faith’, on the other paw, is fundamentally based on lived experience. The reason I believe in my Goddess is because I know she exists. And the reason I know she exists is because I have experienced her.
And I don’t give a shit what self-important psychologists might say. Hallucinations my arse. And no, Malcolm, it’s not a hidden alter neither. So there.
Actually, I’m perhaps being a little harsh on Mal here – I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression of him. He’s not like that really. Dismissive I mean. I think it’s just that he hasn’t had the same intensity of spiritual experience that I’ve had. I told him, because he’s a totally outdoorsy kind of person (he’s from the Lake District) that when he’s out in nature doing his fell-running and his cycling and stuff he should let go his conscious mind and just feel the whole aliveness of nature. It’s a little trick that does take time, this sort of conscious/fully awake meditation/trance type thing, but once you get it, it’s totally liberating.
“Well, ok, Katrina,” says he in riposte, “it’s fine for you with this instant self-hypnosis deep trance ability -”
“Superpower, Malcolm. It’s a superpower.”
“Superpower, then. Whatever, to borrow a word from you millennials -”
“I beg your pardon, Malcolm, but I’m forty-nine years old! Millennial! Pish!”
“Whatever. What I’m saying is it’s easy for you and easier said than done for the rest of us mere mortals.”
“Ok. Fair enough. Fair point. Well made.”
Anyway, he said he’d give it a go. Can’t ask for more than that.
We were on the subject of the Goddess because one of the obvious questions they asked me when I first arrived at the Embassy – partly in jesting mockery, I should add – was how I got from my world to this one. Part of me wanted to make a funny about stepping into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and then vanishing, especially after I mentioned my dad’s company, Meyer Electronics, does a lot of research into quantum computing and QTC (quantum teleportation communication), then later I mentioned I have a prototype AI in my home (she’s called Kay – I’ll tell you about her later). My world may well be fifteen years ahead of you (of your ‘publicly acknowledged’ level, that is), but we don’t have the technology to transport people into parallel worlds. The spooks were somewhat relieved to hear that, as it happens. So, no, that’s not how it happened. The other options were something like ‘falling through a wormhole-type thing’, ‘extraterrestrial mischief’ and ‘divine intervention’. Well, I quickly came to the conclusion that the explanation was option three. The Goddess.
And that’s the one I’m sticking to.
So the next, obvious question, would be ‘why?’. Well, I’ll come to that.
But certainly, one of the incisive and, yeah, sinister questions I sometimes get asked [and which informed much of the anxiety displayed by all those spooks in Paris] was why me? That’s to say, why was it me who was unceremoniously transported to a parallel world? I mean, it’s not as if I am ‘just anyone’. I am not a ‘normal person’ like, with no offence intended to her, Lerina Garcia. That’s to say, I was never the kind of person who, if you removed her from the world, no one would really notice and the world would not change in any profound way.
You’ve probably not heard of Lerina Garcia. Which is partly my point. Well, here’s a brief synopsis of her curious case. Essentially she woke up one morning to find that ‘things had changed’ from what she remembered. Like objects in her home being in different places. Also, she remembered splitting with one bloke and then going out with someone else for about three months or so. Aside from that, the larger world seemed the same. Obviously, she was a tad distressed about this. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? This explained a lot of my own curious (and at times frankly insufferable and uppity) behaviour and demeanour in Paris. [I certainly pissed Tom from MI5 off no end, lol.] It still does, to be honest – I hope you can sympathise there, dear reader – I miss my family still. In fact I miss everything. I was loved and respected. I could make any movie I wanted to because I had my own production company. Now I’m having to start all over again. Well, sure, I like a challenge, but as far as anyone will be concerned I’m just a mad fantasist, so how in hell are they going to take me seriously, let alone give me the money to make my movies? I mean, I know I could make a better movie than most people in the business today, but they’re not going to believe that. So what’s a girl to do? Well, I’m going to keep working hard, make the national team, get a good sponsorship deal, use some of that money to do a small budget short film and use that as my ‘evidence of brilliance’, and hopefully attract some financial interest. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long haul, that’s for sure. Oh, and I’ve also been busy recording some perfect indie pop songs. You’re gonna love ‘em. Trust me.
Anyway, I digress. Seems to me Lerina’s case has two possible explanations. First, some kind of rewiring of the hippocampus (memory storage). This is perfectly neuroscientifically believable. Essentially we’re talking about three months’ worth of memory loss – an extended blank spot, that is – compensated for by the brain’s creative manufacturing of new false/alternate memories of that same period of time, thus creating a seamless continuity. Some of my more conspiracy-minded readers may well instinctively consider nefarious MK-Ultra-style shit here, but Lerina didn’t seem to have any other distinctive symptoms of that kind of thing, so in this case – unfortunately – we can’t well blame the CIA, much as we might like to. Likewise alien abductions (which also happens to be CIA MK-Ultra stuff, by the way – this is a good essay on that). So this neuroscientific explanation is entirely plausible, and people like Malcolm would surely choose that option. The other option is that there really is a parallel world thing going on here, and it’s essentially that she ‘swapped places’ with her twin in t’other world. So, it’s a transference of consciousnesses. There is, indeed, some suggestion that this is how to explain what happened to me. That’s to say, it’s not that my body (and brain) was teleported to this world (and got thirty-one years’ younger in the process), but that this body was already here, just that my otherworld consciousness got teleported into this body (or brain, rather).
Malcolm is sceptical about that explanation. [And try convincing a load of paranoid spooks about it and likewise convince them I’m not a threat to national security, like some spy in advance of an invasion or something and, well, if you can do that then you’re a better girl that I, Gunga-Din.] Well, I shall remain open-minded about Lerina’s case, as anyone should be. I think this happened some fifteen years ago now, so I hope she has readjusted by now, or become well-adjusted to this new world, and I sincerely wish her well.
But she’s not me.
Anyhow, I mentioned this Lerina person because obviously one of the things Malcolm [and Tom] did was Google it. ‘Claims to come from a parallel world’. I wouldn’t use Google if I were you, by the way. It’s a CIA thing and you should know how I feel about them. Facebook likewise. Sorry. In Lerina’s case the psychologists explained it as some kind of neurological disorder. From a neuroscientific perspective this is entirely plausible, of course, as I’ve outlined. In her case everything was virtually identical aside from only some things that were personal to her. That’s to say, it wasn’t a parallel world with a different global history – it was a localised phenomenon. In my case, there is, if I can put it like this, a world of difference between my world and this one. And furthermore, as I’ve said, I myself played a pivotal role in that difference.
So, what I’m saying here is that my ‘case’ is unlike hers. There’s a superficial similarity, in the psychological sense – I mean you wake up and things are different – although she didn’t wake up in a different place. She wasn’t transported anywhere. Then there’s the understandable stress she felt. Sure, I had that for a while. Still do from time to time. Although in my case it’s become more about living in a fucking dystopia. That and being away from my family.
But yes, Malcolm looked it up on your Internet. He quickly found Lerina’s case but equally quickly understood how vastly different our two cases are, from a psychological perspective, that is. There are a fair few paranormal stories about people slipping back and forth from different places, but none of them are like me. Most people would be at least vaguely familiar with them, related as they are to stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and all that (it’s a hangover from Atlantis, in case you were confused). But that’s a different phenomenon.
And none of them ever mentioned penance.
No, my case is different. Malcolm gets it. Of course he sometimes thinks – when he wants to circumvent the cognitive dissonance thing – that my story is all some great compensatory mechanism for an abusive childhood and all that, and there’s no ‘scientific’ or ‘physical’ evidence of me coming from a different place (well, there wouldn’t be, would there? CCTV notwithstanding). I don’t mind going along with that diagnosis as it happens – if it keeps me safe, I’ll believe anything you want me to believe.
“Why are you here, really?” was the question. From a spook point of view, that is a good question. It’s like if a counter-intelligence officer discovers someone living in our country with suspicious associations to former KGB residents then they’re obviously going to ask that question. It’s a sign of insecurity of course, ironically. “We’re worried about your presence here, Katrina. What are your intentions? Do you have the power to change our world too? Will you be subversive? Are you now or have you ever been?”
Well, from a certain point of view, my entire being here is subversive. Girl from a parallel world? Well, that gets people thinking, doesn’t it? And ‘they’ don’t like people thinking. ‘They’ would rather people just shut the fuck up, stop complaining, don’t ask impertinent questions and either get back to work or bend the fuck over and pick up the fucking soap.
So, in the interests of my own safety (I’m being totally honest here), I made some suggestions about what to do about me. This happened after Malcolm told me he’d been scouring the Interweb for similar ‘neurodivergent’ anomalies and found the tale of Lerina Garcia. “I tell you what, Malcolm. Maybe you could tell [Guy] those spooks to propagate the idea in the public’s mind that I’m just a curiosity. You know, like an X-file. Intriguing, sure, but not to be taken seriously. Humans are hardwired to believe the first explanation they hear, after all. So if you get your gambit in there first, then reinforce it a bit, well, there you go.”
The spooks, happily, thought this was a jolly good idea. And I am perfectly happy to help with the reinforcement. Call it a condition of my immigration visa.
So, to end where we began, as is the way of things. There’s a spiritual reason why I’m here. And it’s not just my penance. Yes, I’m still reluctant to tell you why I should need to do a penance (let’s say it’s classified), but maybe I will sometime later. I think, perhaps, given that the Goddess always has reasons for intervening in ways like this, there are wider implications of my being here. Like the effect I will have on the people I meet along the way. And you too, perhaps, dearest reader. Perhaps you too might start to think differently about your world, about everything, for that matter.
And maybe that is a similarity between me and Lerina. I mean, her story is on the Internet, it must have been read by thousands of people. And every time some beautiful supernatural anomaly like that happens everyone who hears about it is startled out of their habitual, mundane way of thinking. Even if just for a moment, they begin to understand that yeah, maybe there is something more to this world and this reality than they want us to think. Maybe I do have a soul and death is not to be feared. Maybe life really is full of wonder and beauty and magic.
And doesn’t have to be this way.
And if I keep thinking like that, then maybe they can’t control me anymore.
Maybe I’ll ask even more questions.
If I keep all that in mind.
Then maybe I’ll be free…