Shadowloss - Part 4/7

You snooze you lose

This is Part 4 of “Shadowloss,” a serialized novella about a man who loses his shadow. If you need to catch up or refresh, find:

• Part 1 here

• Part 2 here

• Part 3 here

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[Est. reading time: 8 minutes]

My older sister has always made me look like a failure by comparison. But as much as I'd love to hate her for that, I've never been able to manage it. She has the kind of no-nonsense confidence most people can only dream of. She's also smart as hell, and generous to a fault. At least when it comes to me.

Which is why I can't hate her, and why I was so thrilled when she showed up, as promised, before the sun went down.

"Reg," she said as soon as I opened the door, "I'm sorry about Kat," and pulled me into a tight, efficient hug.

"Now let's see what's going on."

We didn't even make it outside before my condition became obvious, and stopped her in her tracks. This was exceptionally vindicating.

"Holy shit," she remarked.

"Yeah."

"OK..." She circled around me, then gently pulled me toward the elevator. "Let's get the sun before it goes down."

Outside, Kat was ready with her phone, and got plenty of video. Then she positioned herself so that the only thing between her eyes and the setting sun was my body.

She squinted. "Holy SHIT," she said with an uncharacteristically limited vocabulary.

"What? What do you see?"

"You're like a...a two-way mirror. Light obviously reflects off of you, or else you'd be invisible, but the light also passes *through* you. At least, hang on--" she used her phone camera to perform the same experiment.

"This is absolutely wild," she said. "Same thing in the camera. Light passes through you. But it *also* reflects off of you, so--"

"So shouldn't there still be a shadow?"

She nodded. "But there isn't."

I'll say this: being objectified like some sort of exotic curiosity took most of the edge off of the fear I felt. We were doing experiments. We were solving problems.

We.

My heart almost exploded with love for my dear sister. She was saving me from the doom of insanity. At least for the moment.

Thea tried every angle she could before the sun slipped completely below the horizon and the light got softer.

"Come on," she said, glancing around and noticing strange looks from strangers. "Let's go back inside."

Back in my hotel room, we set up lamps so that they would create crisp shadows against one wall, and set up Thea's phone to film all the things she wanted to try. Then she situated me in front of the makeshift shadow-stage and said, "Take off your shirt."

Feeling extremely compliant, I started to tug up the hem of the dark blue t-shirt I'd been wearing for the past two days.

"But hold onto it," she added, and I understood.

I couldn't help myself as I pulled my shirt off, I had to look at the wall to see what would happen. Sure enough, there were no shadows to indicate anything. And then I had my shirt balled up in my hand. I held it out, away from my body.

Still nothing.

"Drop it," she said.

I did.

"I didn't see anything. Did you?"

I shook my head.

"Okay. OK...pick it back up."

I bent over and picked it back up. As I stood, there was still nothing on the wall. I tried letting it dangle from my hand, but the shirt wouldn't cast a shadow, which inspired a feeling of kinship. It was nice to have some company.

"This is nuts," Thea said as she came over and took the shirt away from me. She proceeded to dangle it in front of the wall herself, with the same result. According to the shadows, she was making a loose fist, but holding nothing.

Then she held the shirt up between herself and the light. Again, no shadow on her, but her shadow on the wall was unaffected.

"Do you remember if this is what you were wearing when you...when your shadow left?"

"I'm...not sure," I said, wishing silently that I had bothered to shower and change my clothes more often over the past few days.

Suddenly, she grabbed a pillow and held it up in front of me. It cast a shadow on the wall behind me as though I wasn't there.

"Hold this," she said. I did, and she let go, watching the dark image on the wall closely. I was watching the same thing she was, and it was quite an effect. I could move it around, change its shape, toss it up and catch it, and according to the evidence of blocked light, that pillow was morphing and jumping around on its own.

"I don't believe this," Thea said as she waved her arm slowly between me, the pillow, the wall, the light. Exploring the boundaries of the phenomenon.

I couldn't blame her. And, frankly, with her there with me, so enthralled, so eager to experiment and discover, I started to see the magic in it, instead of just feeling horrible and scared. We were witnessing something unexplainable. Something magical. There was little enough left in the world that could truly astound a person. This qualified. Maybe that wasn't a bad thing.

The last thing we did was have me change my shirt and pants. Sure enough, I was like the invisible man. Everything I had been wearing, except for my shoes, were shadowless. But the new set of clothes still had shadows, and did my shadow-casting for me, albeit without a head and forearms.

Everything I had been wearing that didn't cast a shadow, Thea gathered carefully into a bag, and set aside, as though it were either contaminated, or very valuable. I wanted to think of it as the latter, but couldn't help suspecting the former.

"What's happening here is impossible," she said as she fell into an armchair.

"And yet," I said, laid out on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

"An absence of an absence is a substance. A shadow is not a thing. It is an absence of a thing. It is the absence of light that got interrupted from point A to point B. A hole. And how would a hole disappear?"

She paused, and I realized she was waiting for me to answer. "It would get filled in," I said.

"Right. So what we're talking about here is this hole in the light getting filled in with more light."

"More light?" My brain was tired. It was harder to walk through the logic puzzle from inside of it.

"Yes, because you're still reflecting light. So the light that would have made it to that wall, for instance, is getting stopped by you, and the shadowless shirt, for instance, and reflected back, just like normal. It's the only way I can see you, and we can see the shirt. So there has to be MORE light that's filling in the hole."

I sat up. "That means I'm doubling the light."

She nodded. "Maybe. I mean that's literally what it *looks* like."

"So where's that extra light coming from?"

"There's the question," she said. "...Or it could be a glitch in the matrix."

"The simulation theory," I said, referring to the popular stoner idea that maybe we all live in a giant computer simulation.

She nodded again. "It might be a better explanation for what's going on than the doubling of light. But I'm not a scientist. We need some kind of scientist. A physicist or something."

"Do you know one of those?" I was pretty sure I didn't.

"Maybe. Anyway it wouldn't be hard to find someone."

Then she gave me a look that inspired anxiety. I swallowed. "What are you suggesting?"

"People need to see this."

"I don't know," I said too quickly, imagining the hurricane of attention that would rush in if word really got out about all this.

"Think about it," Thea said. "If something happens one time, to you, the likelihood of it happening again, to someone else, is very high. And whoever is first gets to be the most famous."

"I don't want to be most famous." As soon as I said it, I realized with a mild shock that it was true. I wouldn't mind being rich, but the idea of not being able to go outside without being stared at mortified me.

"Reg listen to me. We live in a world where when weird shit happens to you, you seize the opportunity to get attention. It's as natural as breathing to anyone under the age of 20 by now. That attention is leverage. It'll let you maximize the potential benefit of...whatever is happening to you."

She was telling me I could turn this phenomenon into an opportunity. But was the cost of that kind of public scrutiny worth the potential upsides?

For the next couple of hours, I resisted the idea. By the time she won me over (she was much better at arguing, for obvious reasons), it was too late.

Some guy, younger than me -- a teenager, it looked like -- had filmed a bunch of the same types of things we had with his buddies and uploaded it on Reddit. Of course the initial response was disbelief. People were impressed at the special effects, but unconvinced.

So they'd gone live. For more than an hour, this kid and his friends chatted with a sharply growing audience, taking requests for all kinds of creative tricks. And then, with almost no explanation, they'd cut the feed.

"They got offers." Thea said. They probably kept the feed up until someone convinced them they could make a whole lot more money by going exclusive. "This guy will pop up again soon. Probably tomorrow. TikTok or YouTube. Sponsored."

She sounded disappointed. I couldn't blame her.

"So I'm not first," I said. "Is it still worth going public?"

"Absolutely." No hesitation. "This kid is going to be king, but there's still lower lordships up for grabs. Now that this is out there, anyone else who has this happening to them is going to come forward, so we gotta be fast."

She had her phone out, and was in the process of trimming clips out of the videos she'd filmed since she arrived.

"I don't know," I protested.

"Just trust me."

After chewing the inside of my mouth for a minute, watching her work on those clips, then looking up expectantly at me before posting them, I finally said, "OK. Do it."

What could I say? She's all I had.

Which is, in retrospect, why I wish I had refused.

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