Microstory 1187: Joanna Zegers

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Joanna Zegers wasn’t the only person who could be invisible, but she was the only one who couldn’t turn visible. She was a normal baby at birth. Her parents took fine care of her, and had no reason to believe something was wrong. When she was six years old, she thought her family was playing a trick on her when they started acting like they couldn’t find her. She kept hopping around and laughing, trying to get them to see her, but they couldn’t. They, in fact, thought someone was playing a cruel trick on them, and had perhaps hidden little speakers around their house. They could hear Joanna’s voice, but not see her. She never got over this affliction. In this universe, invisibility did not bend light, or form illusions. All it did was take take a snapshot of a region of space, at some point in time, then overlay that in front of what people should be seeing when Joanna was standing there. To explain another way, even when an individual is standing in front of a box of tissues, that box still exists. It doesn’t get removed from reality just because no one is observing it. What Joanna’s power—if you could rightly call it that—did was show what the table and tissue box would look like if she weren’t blocking its view. The Zegers didn’t know what they were going to do with her. The library didn’t have any answers for them. There were no publicly-known cases of something like this having happened. They couldn’t send her to school in this condition. They couldn’t even take her to any medical professionals. Doctor-patient confidentiality might not have extended to a transdimensional alien robot from the future, or whatever she was. Instead, they kept her home, claiming to neighbors that she contracted a disease that prevented her from being able to go out in the sun. It wasn’t entirely untrue anyway. Then the world changed, and they gained access to a whole new resource.

Somebody invented this technology called the world wide web, which allowed them to seek information from all over the globe; as far as they knew, anonymously. Most of the info out there was garbage. People thought they were just making up an unoriginal story. Others played along, just to troll them. There was one man, however, who knew what they were talking about. The leader of an intelligence cooperative named Demcov Sands reached out, and made every effort to prove that he was legit. He said that he could help Joanna understand what she was, and lead a healthy life. He couldn’t promise he could figure out how to make her visible again, but he would help in anyway possible. There were no other people in the Interagency Alliance Commission who had time powers, but Sands had knowledge of the future, and knew it one day would. He took Joanna in, and helped her continue her studies in a safe environment, surrounded by people who specialized in keeping secrets. Her parents were worried about letting their daughter live at a spy agency headquarters, but Sands promised them she would never be in danger, and that he was not intending to groom her for spycraft. It was the best place for her to be at the time, but once she grew up, she could decide what she wanted to do with her life, just like everyone else. True to this promise, the IAC taught her everything she would have learned at a normal school. She didn’t want to become a spy; a decision everyone knew she would make. She did want to help, however, so Sands started teaching her about the world of salmon and choosers. He introduced her to some friends, and made the entirety of time and space available to her desires. She chose to move to the future, where she worked as Head of Security at Beaver Haven Rehabilitation Center. She became responsible for the daily ongoing safety or hundreds of prisoners from all over spacetime, and those whose lives they would threaten.