The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter
A novella in 8 episodes. Episode 1: Check Your Local Listings
(Edit: I am having to resend this for storage purposes on my end. Apologies for the duplicate email in your inbox!)
This was supposed to be her break.
Hello, faithful VDL readers! You are now witnessing a little experiment of mine. I am serializing a novella here on this very platform. No gatekeepers, no imprints. Just me, the writer, and you, the reader anxious to find out what happens next.
Feel the mindmeld!
The novella is called The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter. It is about old TV shows. It is about childhood friends. It is about small towns. It is about shadowy conspiracies. It is about a young woman looking for her old friend, fearing it’s too late.
TUGMS tells the story of Emma Henig, an aspiring filmmaker working a low-level job in the documentary division of NowPlay, a global streaming platform. Emma is hired to help produce Fan Files, a docudrama series about fan culture. She lands the job thanks to her childhood connection with a notable fandom streamer and online personality named Melinda Midge. Melinda is the self-appointed expert of a short-lived TV show called MindShifter, which aired in the early 2000s. MindShifter is best-known, though, for its connection to national tragedy: one of the actors on the show was killed during the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Melinda believes the actor’s death is a piece of a far larger puzzle.
Emma returns to her Indiana hometown, along with the NowPlay documentary crew, to film a segment with Melinda. But before she can—Melinda vanishes, leaving only a mysterious message for Emma. To find her friend, and salvage her career, Emma must search through her own past to uncover the answers.
In the first episode, Emma receives a strange message from her friend Melinda—a message that leads her to a strange confrontation.
Episodes will be released every Thursday over the next eight weeks. Episodes one and two will be free. The rest will be available for paid subscribers, all of whom are extremely cool and smell good. Subscribe to follow along!
Episode 1. Check Your Local Listings
Melinda Midge’s final message was a single word, mispelled: p0pcorrn.
The ping of Emma’s phone awoke her. She picked it up, held it above her face. 6:02am. The glowing square the only illumination in the hotel room.
She responded. What is this? Are you okay? Again, and again, to no response.
A joke? Melinda pulling her chain? Typical. Yet Emma couldn’t dismiss it. So much–too much–was riding on this. On Melinda, and on Emma’s access to her. Melinda had granted that to Emma, and no one else. She had made herself very, very clear on that point. If an obstacle appeared, or if–please God, don’t let it be–Melinda were to renege, the whole episode would get scrapped. Emma would lose her job. Her only door, slammed shut.
She had to do it. She had to tell Dorothy.
She tumbled out of bed, heaved herself up from the floor. Opened the door and stepped into the hallway, squinting in the unforgiving fluorescence. Dorothy was in 213. Emma knocked, her nerves audible in each rap.
Dorothy opened the door immediately. No tumbling out of bed, no fumbling for her phone. From the look of it, she had just completed yoga routine, and was in the middle of applying her outfit for the day. Standard pieces—jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, sweater, vest—yet each of them chosen and arranged with such care that she could pose for a clothing ad and not miss a beat. A producer’s sense of style. Authoritative yet calming.
She buttoned her jeans and folded her T-shirt over her torso. Emma tensed, awkward at the appearance of so much of her skin. Dorothy adopted a soothing tone of voice, escorting the two of them past the moment.
“Something wrong?” she said. Emma showed her Melinda’s message: p0pcorrn. Dorothy said, “What does it mean?”
Emma did not answer her question. Instead, she stated a command. Surprising herself with how flatly she stated it. The story consultant telling the producer what needed to be done. She said, “We have to go. Now.”
Dorothy did not balk. Did not question either Emma’s intuition or her authority. “Yes,” she said, donning her vest and completing her outfit. Her urgency confirming Emma’s fear that, yes, something was indeed wrong.
They strode to Dorothy’s car. A rental, acquired at the airport yesterday. The film crew arriving at Fort Wayne after two connecting flights, then driving the forty-five minutes to Denmark. Denmark, Indiana. Emma’s hometown. The town she had escaped, off to film school and entry-level gigs and lugging boom mics. The town where Melinda had remained.
This was supposed to be her break. Her exclusive access to Melinda Midge granting her the promotion to story consultant. She was in the room, she was on the call. If this went well, she might be a producer herself, this time next year. Maybe even a director, if she could put her pitch deck together. The fulfillment of the dreams she had dreamt here, in Indiana, where nothing happened.
Unless Melinda was about to destroy that. Unless she had lured her out here with the intention of doing so.
Dorothy drove, while Emma sat in the passenger seat. Her same position as a child, a young girl, a teenager. Her and her mother driving around town, just the two of them. Swim meets. 4-H fairs. The regional art competition in Fort Wayne, headlights boring through the night. Her accomplishments fueling the rocket boosters that would enable her to achieve escape velocity.
“Are you alright there?” Dorothy speaking. Concerned that Emma might not be able to hold it together. “It’s just . . .” Emma began, but could not find her way to the end. “Subjects get nervous,” said Dorothy. “It’s a natural part of the process. It can help, even. Make them more responsive.”
But her reassurances did not work. Emma remained doubtful. “It’s just . . .” she tried again, then managed to continue, “this feels bad. This feels like she’s bailing on us.”
“I can do the talking if you need me to,” said Dorothy. More reassurance. More kindness. It was maddening. Emma wanted her to yell, to pound the wheel, to berate her incompetence. It was what she deserved.
Melinda lived in an apartment complex down the road from Menard’s. Dorothy parked in the lot. She got out first and walked toward the exterior staircase, while Emma shuffled along the asphalt. The emergency dissipating.
They walked up the stairs. Melinda’s apartment was on the third floor. The bright orange sunrise blinded them. Dorothy put on her sunglasses, while Emma shaded her always-bespectacled eyes with her hands. At the door, Dorothy raised her hand to knock. But the movement remained incomplete. Her arm hung in the air. Her gaze, from behind her sunglasses, alighted upon the doorknob.
The door was unlocked.
Unlocked, and slightly ajar. Dorothy stepped back, glanced at Emma. Her turn to hesitate now. “Should we—” she began, but could not finish. Emma’s earlier sense of doubt, of violation, built in intensity. But it must have breached some barrier, for rather than freeze in place, it spurned her to act. She opened the unlocked door and stepped inside.
No light was on. Stillness hung in the air. Particles unmoored by another’s presence. “Melinda?” Emma said, to no response.
Her vision went cinematographic, panning slowly across the darkened apartment. The familiar posters on the walls, the books and toys arranged on the shelves. Her chair before her desk, where she spoke into the camera with great animation and authority. The pleasant background clutter from Melinda’s videos. Placed in the center of the wall, like an icon above an altar, was the framed poster for MindShifter. The characters arranged in a V. Agent Thomas Trammer at the right-hand apex, with a look of annoyance on his face; Dr. Delano Rathbone at the left-hand apex, looking on with amusement; and front and center, 11-year-old Eliza Danvers, eyes raised to see the countless different futures only she could perceive.
She padded across the apartment, her feet moving of their own accord. Approaching the bedroom. Finding it closed. And seeing, between the bottom of the door and the floor, a strip of light. Then, slowly, a shadow passing over it.
Her hand reached out, gripped the doorknob. Felt it turning. “Wait—” Dorothy called out from behind, but she paid her no heed. Opened the door to whatever fate she would find there.
A hectic tableau erupted. Disparate, forceful actions that would not cohere in her mind.
Once she opened the door, she felt the presence more than she saw it. The Figure. A shard of darkness in the bedroom, humanoid in shape. Something like its head turning toward her—then—a terrible rush of motion. The Figure, flung toward her. Knocking her off her feet. Herself, falling. Landing on the floor. The wind knocked out of her, her throat gasping.
With her ear to the floor, she felt the vibrations as The Figure dashed across the apartment. Dorothy cried out, a wordless yelp. The Figure paused in the doorway and looked back. Regarded Emma with its faceless face. Then left, out the door and down the stairs. A shard of darkness in the light of dawn.
[Excerpt from The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter by Melinda Midge]
Only a single image survives from “Zero Hour,” the second-season premiere that never aired. The show canceled following the death of one of its actors on that Tuesday morning, when history ended at last, or began again, depending on who you asked. The image appeared in the September 8-14, 2001 issue of TV Guide, in the local listings section. An advertisement meant to make sure viewers tuned in.
The image shows the face of young Eliza Danvers. Her eyes are closed. Toggling through the different realities. Trying to find the one where she can warn Dr. Rathbone, to save him from the fate that has already been put into motion.
Across the image reads the breathless tagline:
The fate of the world rests in the mind of one young girl.
Promising much while revealing little. Just like any good copywriter is trained to do.
In the listings, however, slightly more information is provided in the episode description. Slightly.
6pm. MindShifter. Season premiere! To save Dr. Rathbone, Eliza must enlist the help of an unlikely ally. (Written by Jane Penny.)
A plot point! Albeit one almost entirely lacking in detail. Read closely, however, and one can infer more than the writers of TV Guide may have intended.
The “unlikely ally” of the episode description, combined with the fact that the episode is written, not by creator Paul Gass, but by acclaimed yet controversial staff writer Jane Penny, makes one possibility all but certain. The ally is none other than Henry, the mindshifter gone rogue, who represents at once a hope and a threat to young Eliza. Perhaps Henry assists Eliza in rescuing Dr. Rathbone from some uncertain fate, thereby saving the very man Henry blames for the death of his own family?
The viewers at home would never know, however. “Zero Hour” would forever remain unaired, pulled from the schedule at the last minute in light of the tragedy that rocked the world. Out of a sense of respect for the dead, yes, as an actor from the show died that morning, aboard one of the planes, but also, according to vague industry rumors, due to the nature of the show itself. “Zero Hour,” the rumors held, dealt with an act of terror itself, some eerily prescient spectacle of violence. Such an episode would have come off as insensitive to a nation in shock, and so it was pulled from the airwaves, much like “Killing in the Name” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” among dozens of other songs, were pulled from radio play.
There was one difference, however.
Had “Zero Hour” aired as intended, the effect would have been nothing short of miraculous. The dead would have been raised. The now-dead actor in the credits brought back to life. For the writer of the episode, Jane Penny, knew what was coming, and labored to prevent it from coming about. Labor that was no less heroic for being, ultimately, a failure.
Emma Henig: her full name, as it appeared in the credits of the projects she worked on. If it appeared at all. PRODUCTION ASSISTANT…EMMA HENIG, in 8-point font, alongside a dozen other names. Fellow twentysomethings with dreams of success and student loan debt.
A PA’s role was to be invisible. Invisible, yet industrious. Slip into the contours of the cobbler’s shop while he slept and finish making shoes for him. She was expected to fetch coffee, carry lighting rigs, escort subjects from set-up to set-up, all while remaining unnoticed and anonymous. And she did–she was good at it. She knew that about herself. She had to, as no one else noticed her for long enough to offer a compliment.
Flitting about in the corners of every production, she longed to reach the center. Take the reins as a producer or director. Give orders others would carry out.
She was at the center now. The entire production had been summoned to Melinda Midge’s apartment, where an altercation had occurred. The authorities were present. Two police officers, whose gaze imbued every object they beheld with suspicion. The posters, the toys. Dorothy answered their questions thoroughly, the consummate professional. Emma longed to be in her place. For though she occupied the eye of this particular storm, there was nothing for her to do. No orders for her to give. Only to confirm the account Dorothy gave to the officers. She was even more lowly than a PA, now. She was a victim.
This was supposed to be her ascension. She had been promoted to story consultant for this episode of Fan Files, a series that combined elements of true crime with IP mining, two trusty arrows in NowPlay’s quiver. Drama behind the scenes of Xena: Warrior Princess, the travails of voice actors on the English dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Appeal to the true crime fan’s sense of the lurid, and the modern nerd’s sense of devotion to her favorite franchises, and you had money in the bank. Or eyeballs on the screen, according to the streaming data NowPlay compiled for its in-house reports, reports Emma had never seen for herself, only heard rumors of. The holy writ of a mystery cult.
She had leveraged her promotion through her connection to her childhood friend. She had been taking notes for a meeting, toiling away as Dorothy’s factotum, when the topic of MindShifter came up. The tragedy behind the scenes, the rabid online fanbase. And that one girl’s name? The one with all the videos? Who literally wrote the book on the show? “Melinda Midge,” Emma had offered, causing all heads in the room to swivel toward her. She had their attention, and she took advantage of it. “She’s my friend,” she said. “We grew up together.”
Though ‘friend’ may not have been the most accurate term, at the present moment. Not after what she had done.
Still, overtures were made. Melinda Midge was notoriously press-averse, preferring to communicate directly with her followers. But Emma personally recorded a message, promising that Melinda’s work would be treated with respect, her theories presented clearly and without editorializing, no matter how outlandish.
She was also authorized to offer Melinda quite the catch. If she graced to sit down for the interview, the producers of Fan Files would let her sip from the Holy Grail she had long sought: “Zero Hour,” the unaired second season premiere of MindShifter. NowPlay had acquired the rights to the series, including “Zero Hour,” through some multi-tiered swap with various licensing agencies headquartered in the Pacific Rim and the former Soviet bloc. They had it, and Melinda could watch it when no one else could, if she agreed to speak to the show.
Melinda agreed. No negotiation, even. No back and forth. A simple confirmation. Too easy, Emma had thought. Some trick? A play? But while such worries occurred to her, she did not express them to Dorothy or anyone else, out of a fear that might jinx the project. She made assurances to relevant parties, finagled her access to Melinda into a promotion. Returned to her hometown to interview her childhood friend.
And now sat in that friend’s apartment as a medic checked her pupils with a penlight, to confirm that her fall hadn’t resulted in a concussion.
Finished, the medic conferred with Dorothy, rather than Emma. She cocked her ear like a heliotrope to make out what was said. No clear indication of concussion, but keep an eye out for warning signs. Dizziness, foggy memory. Done, Dorothy allowed the officers to speak to her now, remaining over her shoulder all the while. Her concern was touching, if also proprietary. If this went all the way south, as it looked like it might, Dorothy would get reamed by her superiors at NowPlay too. Since she was higher up the ladder, she had farther to fall.
The officers questioned her as if she were a child. Could she remember, did she see anything. Emma became so frustrated with the condescension that she blurted out, “It’s Melinda. She’s doing all of this.”
“Melinda Midge was the one who assaulted you?” said one of the officers.
She tried to recall ‘the assault,’ as they termed it. The Figure, emerging from the bedroom, moving at unnatural speed. More blur than shape. Did anything about The Figure, from its height to its behavior, indicate that it was Melinda? Emma had not been able to make out its face at all, only blankness where its features should have been. She assumed it wore a balaclava like some vintage terrorist, and that was why she couldn’t offer the least detail regarding The Figure’s appearance. But as she scrolled through her memory, she had to admit the balaclava was an inference on her part, an explanation as to why she couldn’t discern its face. She said none of this to the officers, however. She remained silent, which did nothing to burnish her reliability. Perhaps she did have a concussion after all.
Dorothy suggested to the officers that perhaps now wasn’t the best time to question Emma. One of the officers said, firmly, that the sooner she gave a statement, the better chance they had of finding the perpetrator. Dorothy relented. Following the producer’s maxim: always cooperate with the local authorities. She did, however, glance at Emma. Give them what they want and get this over with, the glance said.
She complied. She gave the officers a flat recitation of what had occurred, free of speculation. Melinda’s message, coming here with Dorothy, getting knocked to the ground by an unknown assailant. The officer asked to see Melinda’s message. She showed them her phone: p0pcorrn. When they asked what it meant, she said she had no clue. Which was true enough.
Statement given, the officers turned their attention away from her and toward the apartment. “You won’t find anything,” she said. Dorothy glared at her. Don’t antagonize them. The officers, however, didn’t acknowledge her.
Once the medic okayed her, she stood under Dorothy’s assistance. Dorothy led her to the door, out of Melinda’s apartment, but Emma resisted. Though she knew that nothing of consequence would be found there, that Melinda had staged the scene to frustrate any inquiry, official or otherwise, she still couldn’t shake the sense that, by leaving the apartment, she was admitting defeat. Conceding victory to Melinda. Her own career over just when it appeared to begin.
Dorothy drove the two of them back to the hotel. She affixed an earpiece in her ear and got on a call. Though Emma couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, she could tell who Dorothy was speaking to. NowPlay. Some executive there, the one who authorized the paychecks, who occupied an office Emma had never set foot in. And never would, the way things were going.
“Subject presented as uncooperative…Authorities were called, yes…no, none…no, yes…give me the–no, yes…just give me the day. It’s all paid for anyway.”
The call ended. Dorothy said nothing about it. Said nothing at all. Parked in the lot, got out and strode toward the hotel entrance. Emma trotted to keep up. Once Dorothy was inside the lobby, though, she stopped so suddenly that Emma almost ran into her. Dorothy said nothing about that, either. Instead, she said, “What do you think is going on?”
Sugarcoating would only anger her. Emma attempted to be as blunt as possible. She said, “I think Melinda is messing with us. I don’t think she ever planned to sit down for this interview. She lured us out here with the intention of humiliating us. Humiliating me. Knocking me to the ground as she stormed out.”
“So that—that person in the apartment was her?” said Dorothy. “Has to be,” said Emma. Though Dorothy’s aversion to describing the person found there made her see that she didn’t quite believe it herself. It was not Melinda who knocked her over; it was The Figure. Was Melinda The Figure in disguise, like some dinner theater Phantom of the Opera? Logically, that was the clearest explanation. But logic didn’t sway Emma. Nor Dorothy, it seemed.
Dorothy gathered silence around herself, to the point where Emma felt its pressure upon her ears. Dorothy said, “The two of you—what happened?”
The two of them. Melinda and Emma, unlikely friends. Emma the sidekick to Melinda’s superhero. Or the Sancho Panza to her Don Quixote, perhaps. For belief, to the point of delusion, was always her superpower. Even now, stumbling through the maze Melinda had constructed, Emma could not help but admire, even envy, her passion. Her planning. Her conviction. Melinda always knew she was right and would not be told otherwise. Emma felt so needy in comparison, so desperate for validation. Validation from her teachers in film school, from her superiors on shoots, from seasoned producers like Dorothy. Documentary production was a rigid hierarchy, where titles conferred honor and status as in a royal court. She craved that validation, and that very craving meant no one would want to give it to her. Such desperation was off-putting, especially in a young woman. That was why she seized on her connection to Melinda. The only resource she possessed that might curry favor with the queen.
She couldn’t lie to Dorothy. She told her what she had managed to hide from everyone else. She said, “We had a fight, back in high school. She was furious. Wouldn’t talk to me. This interview, this would have been the first time we spoke, in person, since then.”
“You haven’t been in contact with her since high school?” said Dorothy.
Emma’s silence was her answer.
Dorothy said, “What was the fight about?”
She couldn’t lie. Not even if she wanted to. Not to Dorothy. “I played a trick on her,” she said.
And now Melinda was playing one on her.
Tune in next week for the thrilling continuation! Same VDL time, same VDL channel!