Jared had called the main office about the woman in his apartment three times, but it insisted that it was not the corporation’s problem. The PhaseCyclers(TM) had been certified by the government (federal and state), and the last inspection two months ago recorded all readings at optimal levels. Also, as the voice on the other end mentioned several times, there had been no other complaints.
Conclusion: it was all in his head.
Except it wasn’t. Jared knew what he saw–or, rather, what he almost saw. If he stood near his mini-fridge in the corner, and tilted his head, he caught her shadow. No, not shadow, exactly. A shadow of her presence, like the aftermath of a flash. She sat at the shelf that acted as a table.
And it was a woman, definitely. It wasn’t the outline that told him. (There wasn’t really an outline, just the smeared residue of an outline.) It was the otherness. The echo of her presence was like a line of sunlight piercing dark curtains and shining on the living room carpet. He knew maleness. This, whatever it was, was not that. Not a thing in Jared’s spartan apartment felt less than utilitarian, but the non-shadow at the edge of perception, that was like an artistic flourish at the end of a tax document.
She bothered him, whomever she was. Jared’s whole apartment complex was phase-shifted so that every room was rented out to two different renters who moved in different cycles of reality. A brilliant business scheme: twice the capacity squeezed out of the already claustrophobic living arrangements. Jared didn’t complain. It kept rent low enough he could actually afford it without regularly donating blood.
He didn’t know why she bothered him. He couldn’t really see her, and he kept busy enough that he wouldn’t have noticed her much even if she had actually lived with him. But it was the principle of the thing. It was his room. It was his private domain on a planet teeming with grasping humans. This was his space. (Even if it was, technically, hers as well.)
He tried to ignore her.
She showed up on the couch next. For a whole weekend, whenever he looked up from his mattress in the corner, he thought he sensed her on the small, off-white couch. All day. What was she doing, watching some of…whatever she watched? He wasn’t sure what she might watch. His own streaming services only suggested shows they knew he would like, and he rarely talked to anyone outside his cultivated social media circles and his clients via VR. He knew some people lived entirely different virtual lives, and that some even still spent large chunks of time in crowded, communal streets of a city bursting at the seams. Maybe she was one of them.
Then one night he woke suddenly from some dream–a vivid one which he forgot upon waking even as the danger that had aroused him still throbbed through his veins. As he lay there, disoriented, he sensed, like a phantom, like an intuition, the woman there beside him, nearly pressed against him. He felt nothing, but the sensation of another in the room with him, in the bed with him, hovered close, covered him. He remained motionless and tried to still his breathing. He could not see her, even out of the corner of his eye, but she was there, like a spirit, a memory, a pressure. She did not go away. There was no flesh, but there was a weight upon him, like the expectation of bad news.
Jared waited. Nothing happened. She slept or she waited there, like him, trying to find the corner she might tug to pull back the veil between them, pull away the fabric of reality that separated them.
He spoke: “Are you there?”
She was not. He was alone in the room, alone in a city with one billion people, alone on a planet where billions lived and billions of corpses decayed.
He called and complained again in the morning. He did not want her there, even if they did share the same space.
It was his space.