Annica: Starseed Ambassador

Chapter 6: Back to Basics

"Hi!" Maya's voice chirped.

Annica quickly examined her surroundings. She seemed to be in some sort of classroom, without having any awareness of how she got there. There were no desks, but there was a large backlit, softly glowing whiteboard against a wall. At the center of the room was a mesa-shaped metallic platform, emitting colorful holographic geometric images above it. The room was otherwise empty.

"Where am I?" Annica asked, completely disoriented and uncomfortable with the thought that she had been transported somewhere without her knowledge. "Am I in the ship, or the undersea city?"

"We are somewhere new today!" Maya cheerfully answered.

"Where?" Annica asked, looking around nervously. "Is this place 'real'?"

Annica still felt a gut-level, animal-like fear in Maya's presence. It was more manageable now; Annica could consciously override it, for the most part. But still, it hadn't disappeared entirely. Annica wasn't sure if it was a lower instinctive part of her mind that simply needed to be suppressed, or if it was a higher intuitive warning of legitimate danger. She had presumed the former, but her recent research led her to now consider the latter.

"In your terms, you would call this place, perhaps, twenty percent 'real' and eighty percent 'unreal,' with 'unreal' being what you would consider purely mental," Maya explained. "In this context, what you call physical reality is about ninety-nine percent 'real' and one percent 'unreal,' and what you consider to be waking imagination is about one percent 'real' and ninety-nine percent 'unreal,' once the degree of astral overlap is taken into consideration. Does that make sense?"

"Not really," Annica answered, feeling increasingly distrustful. "Why did you bring me here?"

"It is time for lesson number three! I decided that our last meeting counted as two lessons, just as an update there," Maya said with an enthusiastic grin.

"I've been getting a lot of 'lessons' lately," Annica said wearily. Even in what she presumed to be a sleeping state, she still felt mentally exhausted.

"Yes, you are on a highly accelerated path right now. This is normal! We wish to offer you assistance in your studies." Maya winked and gave a big thumbs-up.

Annica grimaced at Maya's excessive cheerfulness. "Okay, let's start with a simple explanation of how much of this is real, or how much of anything is real." She shook her head. "I have no idea where to draw the line anymore."

"Yes, your mental construct of reality is dissolving. Please remember the lesson about the ship! Let's start with the basics."

Annica scratched her head as she thought back to the lesson about the ship, but its relevance wasn't immediately obvious. Something about things not literally existing as they appear?

Maya turned to the structure at the center of the room projecting the colorful holographic shapes.

"Much of your confusion is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what reality is to begin with," Maya said in a slightly deeper tone, as if imitating the voice of an adult schoolteacher.

"You mean atoms?" Annica asked. By now her lingering fear had mostly subsided, and she was curious about where Maya's lesson plan was going.

"Yes!" Maya gleefully affirmed. "And within those atoms?"

"Protons, neutrons and electrons?" Annica answered, briefly thinking back to a middle school chemistry lesson.

Maya snapped her fingers. "Right again!" She then started pulsating her hands as if holding an invisible, quivering ball between them. "But actually, most of what we consider an atom is empty space, between all the protons, neutrons and electrons. It's a lot like how the macro universe is also mostly empty space, between all the galaxies and the stars and planets within those galaxies. And even the protons and neutrons aren't the smallest units of physical matter. They're made up of little quarks, and between those quarks...?" Maya's voice trailed off, and she leaned an ear forward expectantly.