The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter

A novella in 8 episodes. Episode 5: The Final Testimony of Jane Penny

MindShifter returns to the airwaves!

Following a brief mid-season hiatus, The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter is back at it once again.

Episode Four ended on quite the cliffhanger. Emma Henig, documentary filmmaker, has been searching for her childhood friend Melinda Midge. Melinda was scheduled to give an on-camera interview about MindShifter, the short-lived TV show with a cult fandom. But Melinda vanished from her apartment before that could happen.

Following clues left on in the comments of YouTube videos, Emma tracked down someone she believed to be Melinda. She was escorted to a hotel room, only to find that inside was . . .

Chloe Rachel Mann? The star of MindShifter? Here, in an Indiana hotel room?

What mysteries will she reveal to Emma??

---

Episode 5: The Final Testimony of Jane Penny

Excerpt from The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter by Melinda Midge:

In 2013, NowPlay acquired the rights to MindShifter, along with a vast array of other IP and media holdings. Unremarkable on its own, as NowPlay conducts similar business every day, bulking up its library with the sort of content that once aired on Saturday afternoons in regional markets. What was unusual was that, when sifting through the paperwork, one discovered it wasn’t an acquiring, technically. It was closer to an uncovering. Coming upon old boxes in the attic. Opening them to discover old VHS tapes and Super 8 reels.

NowPlay did not technically acquire the rights to MindShifter because it had owned them all along. Paperwork indicates that SynTech held the rights to MindShifter, and that SynTech had been one of the companies that helped found NowPlay in the first place. This was a matter of infrastructure more than content at the time, as patent records indicate—the unredacted portions, at least—that NowPlay’s streaming operation draws upon certain SynTech innovations. These innovations helped NowPlay to become the largest global streamer on the market, set to surpass 1 billion subscribers next year.

So when NowPlay acquired the rights to MindShifter from SynTech, that exchange took place through a channel that had existed between the two entities from the very start. And if that channel had existed for so long, what else might have passed through it?

---

One day—all of this had happened over the course of one day. A meager little temporal unit. The message from Melinda, The Figure in her apartment, her mother in the hotel, The Figure once again behind the Penguin Point—all of those events had occurred within one single day, one after another. She was Jack Bauer and this was 24, chasing after her childhood friend like she was a terrorist bent on taking innocent American lives.

What would a terrorist target in Denmark, Indiana? The library? The Walmart? Suicide bomber in aisle 6?

To say nothing of the irruptions of the past into this twist-and-turn-filled present day. Every door she opened, every corner she turned, presented her with some specter from her past. Some trick she had played. Some loved one she had lost contact with. And now, in this hotel room, that felt like the sum total of all hotel rooms everywhere, some actress from some TV show she used to watch with her best and only friend.

Chloe Rachel Mann, like so many other actresses who started working in the industry, had the look that she wasn’t quite all there. An essential aspect of her remained in the past, encased within the twenty-two episodes of MindShifter’s first and only season, like tinctures in bottles on the shelves of an apothecary. This lack made it that much harder for Emma to believe that she was truly seeing Chloe Rachel Mann here before her. Was she dreaming? Was Chloe Rachel Mann dreaming, and Emma no more than a creation of her dream?

Emma said, “Is it you?” She said this to Chloe Rachel Mann, though she couldn’t say what, exactly, her query was attempting to confirm. As in, is it really you? As in, is it really not Melinda?

Chloe Rachel Mann took a cautious step toward her. Not cautious enough, though. Emma’s head swam at the sight of it. The present and the memory of the past overlapping, without quite fitting. Emma, in high school, masking her own face with Chloe Rachel Mann’s headshot; The Figure in the parking lot, masking its own faceless face with that same photo; and Chloe Rachel Mann herself in this hotel room, her face the same face as her headshot, albeit aged adult: which of these happened first? Which was happening now? Which had she only dreamed?

An arm, behind her, taking her by her own arm. Eunice: she guided her to sit down on the bed. She sat there like a patient, while Eunice and Chloe Rachel Mann stood like nurse and doctor. Also like nurse and doctor, they spoke as if Emma weren’t there.

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “What happened?” Eunice began, “We . . . we . . .” Chloe Rachel Mann crossed her arms, and Eunice finished, “We saw it.”

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “You saw it? With your own eyes? Where?” Emma said, “At Penguin Point.” Chloe Rachel Mann said, “Is that a miniature golf course?” Eunice said, “It’s a restaurant.” She hummed the jingle, as if that would help. It did not. Chloe Rachel Mann stared at her as if she were having an episode of her own.

Emma did not understand the particulars of what they were discussing, but she understood enough to recognize that Chloe Rachel Mann was becoming frustrated with Eunice. This pleased Emma, to see someone else experience a modicum of the frustration and confusion she felt.

Eunice said, “The same restaurant where it happened.” She notched the thumb and forefinger on each of her hands at a precise ninety-degree angle, then placed each hand beside her face. Forming a frame. The suggestion of a tight rectangle. As in a headshot.

Eunice was describing The Figure, yes, but she was also describing the experience The Figure had reenacted. Emma back in high school, taunting Melinda to curry favor with the popular girls, holding young Chloe Rachel Mann’s headshot before her own face. Eunice described it to Chloe Rachel Mann in the most minimal terms. Out of sensitivity to Emma, perhaps. More likely, though, out of familiarity. Chloe Rachel Mann appeared to understand precisely what Eunice meant when she, like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, sketched the rectangle in the air. The whole saga behind it, reduced to shorthand.

Did Chloe Rachel Mann know what Emma had done to humiliate Melinda? Had Melinda fulfilled the fantasy Emma had stoked so cruelly, that of connecting with the star of her favorite TV show? Melinda always insisted that she understood MindShifter in general, and Chloe Rachel Mann in particular, better than anyone. Was Chloe Rachel Mann’s presence in this hotel room indication that Melinda had been right all along?

Chloe Rachel Mann crouched down, hands on her knees. Crouched before Emma. She removed one of her hands and employed it to grip Emma by the jaw like she were a house getting its teeth inspected.

She said, “What did it do?” The Figure. Emma could not respond. Overcome with the absurdity of the tableau she was caught in. Chloe Rachel Mann, Eliza Danvers all grown up, manhandling her in a hotel room. Like some Y/N fan fiction too embarrassing, too needy, for Emma to read for herself.

Chloe Rachel Mann twitched her hand, shaking Emma’s head. Emma said, “It ran.” Chloe Rachel Mann said, “Ran where?” Emma said, “Away. Away from me. When I walked into the apartment and it knocked me down, it was trying to stop me. But I don’t know if it even saw me, if it . . .”

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “What apartment? You said this was at Penguin Palace.” Emma said, “The second time, yes. The first time, this morning, was at Melinda’s apartment.” Chloe Rachel Mann said, “You’ve seen it twice?” She glanced at Eunice, as if she should have known this. Eunice crossed her arms.

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “What did it do?” A strange question, Emma thought. What did she expect it to do? “It ran away,” said Emma. “It saw me, then it ran away.” Eunice said, “Tell her what else.” Now she directed the thumb-and-forefinger, Uma Thurman gesture at Emma. Chloe Rachel Mann scowled in confusion.

Emma said, “It was holding a picture. A headshot, of you. From MindShifter.” Saying the name of the show aloud felt sacrilegious, as if it were one of the hidden names of God. Chloe Rachel Mann, speaking as if she were a priest of the faith that worshiped the God Emma had just blasphemed, said, “A headshot of mine? Like when you humiliated Melinda?”

Since entering the hotel room, and seeing the child-actress-all-grown-up Chloe Rachel Mann standing before her, Emma had assented with all that occurred here, as if it were a dream. All her dreams shared this trait, of a total lack of will, with Emma’s dream-self floating along the current of her own unconscious like a leaf fallen upon a river. Perhaps that was her deepest dream, her unspeakable desire: to abandon all sense of will and go along with what others wished of her. Yet Chloe Rachel Mann’s accusation, in effect, roused her awake. She rediscovered her will and asserted it.

She said, “How do you know about that? What me and Melinda did when we were teenagers? Why do you even care? Why are you even here?”

She felt, as the questions tumbled out of her, that she wasn’t simply asking them of Chloe Rachel Mann. She was asking them of the world, of reality, of the unseen forces that had brought her to this point. This was supposed to be straightforward. Get Melinda to agree to be interviewed for Fan Files. Get a promotion and get control of her own project. Get out of Indiana and never come back.

Yet here she was, back in Indiana, trapped in her stomping grounds like they were quicksand. Chasing after her childhood friend and discovering actresses in hotel rooms.

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “She said you would say something like that. No, not something like that. She said you would say exactly what you just said. Even the little catch in your voice—she called it.”

Emma said, “Who?” Chloe Rachel Mann said, “Her, of course. Melinda. She’s the reason why I’m here, why all of us are here. She’s written all of this out like it’s one of her scripts. You, me, here—we’re just reciting lines to each other, making sure the angles are right. This isn’t a hotel room. This is a set made to look like a hotel room. You, me, even her,” and here she nodded at Eunice, “we’re all just playing our parts. Hitting our marks. Saying our lines.”

Emma said, “I am looking for Melinda. She agreed to sit down for this interview, to let me have this win with my boss. Because if I don’t? That’s it for me. No producer credit. No project of my own. I’ll get fired from NowPlay. I’ll have to move out of the city. I’ll have to come back home. Here. Here! Do you know what that’s like? To admit defeat, retreat from the world and return to the place you tried so hard to escape? To know, definitively, that you’re not good enough to make it, and you were a fool for thinking you could?”

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “You think I don’t know what it means to miss out on your dreams? I was supposed to be a star, to grow up and be a serious actress. Lunches at Spago, designer dresses on red carpets. But my career was over by my thirteenth birthday. I’ve had to live with that ever since. You’ve been a failure for, what, five minutes? And you think that gives you the gravity to tell me what it’s like?”

Emma closed her eyes and raised her hands, fingers spread, as if that would stem the tide that was flooding her. The mattress depressed beneath her as Chloe Rachel Mann sat beside her.

She said, “You weren’t brought here for me to yell at you. I am sorry for that.”

Emma nodded. Apology accepted. She said, “Why was I brought here?”

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “I’m not the one to tell you.” She nodded at Eunice, who knelt to the floor beside the minifridge, where a backpack lay. She unzipped it, reached inside. And withdrew a videotape.

A VHS cassette, the sort that had lined the shelves of Blockbuster and Best Buy in a distant age long since past. The videotape was blank. No sticker on the front, no sharpie on the side indicating time and date.

Eunice set the videotape next to the flatscreen TV. She reached further into the backpack and retrieved a VCR. With the deftness of a neurosurgeon, she hooked up the VCR to the flatscreen TV. Eunice was young enough that she had never used a VCR before. DVDs in her childhood, then the streaming octopus. There was something meticulous to it, witnessing a young person resurrect a dead technology she had never known.

She turned on the TV, steered the remote to input. No missteps, no frustration. She pressed play on the VCR. The familiar bands of static danced across the screen. The image cohered to reveal a woman sitting in an empty room. The walls white.

The woman was Jane Penny. Her face recognizable from the interview with Starlog. Melinda had compiled every story, every mention, of Jane Penny, which meant that Emma had read and watched all of them too. Yet she had never seen this before.

Jane Penny said, “If you’re watching this, I’m already dead.”