It was for the start of 2010 that I’d made a resolution to spend more money on myself.

I’d grown up poor. Not completely broke; my family had a roof over our heads, food on the table, clothes to wear. Can’t say we had much more, though.

But I was smart, got good grades, and got scholarships. I survived the bullies who taunted me about my shabby clothes. I went to college, graduated, and got a good technical job, making real money. Still didn’t seem like much as first, though. But that little turns into a lot after a while. I got my car paid off, so the car payments turned into extra money. I started saving it up, both retirement plan and extra money. I invested some of it, sent some back to my parents, and some to my school.

A few years ago, Mom and Dad both died. I was alone. I didn’t have to be alone. I could go date women, like I did in the past. But that had never worked out. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted in a woman, but I know it wasn’t any of the women I found.

It turned out my parents’ house was in a neighborhood that people wanted to develop, and even though the house was small, the land was worth a lot of money. I got over my sentimentality, rescued the memories from there that needed saving, and sold the house. I used the money to pay off the house I was now buying. Which meant my mortgage payment was a big heap more of extra money I had every month. And that’s why I made the resolution. I was saving entirely too much money to be as sad as I was.

What I ended up doing to satisfy my resolution halfway through the year was buying a sex doll. One of the deluxe ones with the gel body, posable skeleton, a heater so it would match the temperature of a human body, the works. It might sound silly, but it actually worked for me. It was better than me just masturbating without it, even though it made more to clean up. I didn’t use it every day, but it was a kind of pick-me-up when I was feeling down.

Little did I know what the doll would mean starting months later. It changed my view of reality.

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December 21, 2010, well before dawn

I woke up and felt strange. I found that I was lying on the bed, with the sex doll on top of me. That wasn’t how I normally used it in bed. How did that happen? No, wait! That was me up there!

That meant, I quickly realized, I must be the sex doll. Looking down at the boobs on my chest, I quickly realized that was true, even though there was no reason that should be possible.

I rolled over and set my real body down on the bed, with the sex doll body on top of him. He was still hard and still inside me. I pulled off him and got up out of the bed. The feelings I felt when I did that were strange. I had no way to know precisely what a woman’s sexual feelings were like, but I figured even withdrawal should feel somewhat sexual, but it was dry and sterile. I fingered myself a bit, and it was no different than if someone had touched a sensitive but non-sexual part of my skin, like on the earlobe. So I decided I was still a sex doll and not a real woman, yet somehow alive.

The clock said 2:40 AM. I tried to turn on a light and nothing happened, though the digital clock still had power, as did some other devices in my home that showed it with little LED lights.

Outside, it was dead still. No wind, no sound. There was a little light from a street light and I could see trees and such outside, but there was no movement.

I went back to my bedroom, and the clock still said 2:40. Huh? Surely more than a minute had passed.

I went back to the window and stared closely into the dark night. It was very still. Unnaturally still. I saw a shape, floating in the air. Some bird, prowling in the night, but it was frozen in midair, wings apparently flapping but not actually moving. Huh?

I decided I needed to investigate further. I had some clothes for the sex doll, though I had not put any on it last night. I grabbed a dress among those and put it on. I picked up my keys, planning to head out, and realized I had no pockets to carry them in. A woman would have put them in her purse, but I had no such contraption. It was either carry some form of tote bag, or just carry the keys, and for now I chose to insert a finger through the key ring to hold them tightly.

It was indeed still outside. I found the bird, still hovering where I had seen it from my window. I reached up with my hand and stroked it. The feathers felt soft, but it did not react. I moved on.

I walked for a few blocks and saw some other animals also seemingly frozen in place. Down by the mall, I saw a couple homeless people sleeping on benches or in sleeping bags. Then, ahead, I saw another person moving and I went to meet this person.

It was, clearly, once I got close enough to see, another sex doll. She didn’t have any clothes on. I tried to say hello, but found that I couldn’t speak. The other had seen me and perhaps had the same problem, and waved with her right hand, and I did the same.

After a moment, I resorted to drawing letter shapes in the air with my finger, WHAT IS GOING ON

I DONT KNOW, came the response in the same manner.

I shrugged, and continued the direction that coming to meet her had taken me around the mall, and she followed. After a moment, I stopped and turned to my follower to introduce myself. IM JAKE, I spelled out, assuming this sex doll might be in a similar situation as me and not find the male name strange.

MIKE, she wrote.

We passed a couple people who were walking on the street but were just as frozen in place as the bird was. As we got around the other side of the mall, there were two more non-frozen people who seemed to be talking, and we went to them. As we got close, we saw that one of them, who looked more like a mannequin than a sex doll, was doing the talking, and a male sex doll was speaking like we’d been doing by drawing words in the air. He seemed to write THANK YOU and left as we were approaching.

The mannequin, a male one in proper clothes, turned to us and said, “Greetings. I’m Pedro. You are probably wondering what is going on.”

YES, Mike and I each drew in the air.

“This happens during every total lunar eclipse. I’ve been experiencing it since the eclipses of 2003, but I’ve met some people who knew of it years before that, and it’s probably been happening for a very long time. The people I have worked with think that when the moon goes totally dark, it unlocks a perpendicular time stream in which each person’s spirit is projected into something they are touching, usually an item of clothing or bedsheet. In those cases, the person doesn’t have any sensations and misses it. Only if the person gets projected into an effigy of a living thing do they animate it. Most of the people we have gotten have been using or fell asleep on top of sex dolls, but once they know about it, they can plan for it, like I do now. If you want to be able to speak, you have to put something like a speaker cone into your doll. It doesn’t have to be wired to anything, but the front side of the speaker should face outside air, such as if it is installed in the mouth. It doesn’t matter where on earth you are; even if you can’t see the moon, it still happens.”

The man opened his mouth and it appeared he had a small light inside there, too. I could see the speaker he had at the back of his mouth.

HOW LONG DOES THIS LAST, I drew in the air.

“It doesn’t take any time in the real world, but the perpendicular time stream seems to last as long for us who are animated in it as the totality of the lunar eclipse does. For this eclipse, it’ll be an hour and 14 minutes, and we’re about about halfway into that. When it’s over, you will snap back into your body and your sex doll will go back where it was when the eclipse started. Anything you moved goes back, too. Basically, anything we do in the perpendicular time doesn’t affect the regular time stream, except that you will remember it.”

OK SPEAKER, I drew, then pointed at my mouth, then NEXT ECLIPSE

“It’s about 6 months away. NASA has a page with eclipse times, but we also have a board on the internet that has the information. perp.time”

And he spelled it out for us.

“You will need an account to be allowed to do or see anything on the site. Account creation requires this master password. Please pass it around only in the perpendicular time. The password is CarlJackson, with the initials C and J capitalized and no space. Once you go there you can make your own personal account, and then you won’t need this password anymore except to introduce other people.”

I spelled out PERP.TIME and CARLJACKSON using oversized C and J to distinguish them, since I was using all capitals to make it easier to understand my letters.

“Correct. The next eclipse won’t be in the middle of the night like this one, and I think it lasts a bit longer. You’ll probably be awake for it. You want to be naked and sitting or lying on top of your mannequin so that you’re touching nothing else. That way, the only possibility is that you go into the mannequin.”

MEET HERE? I drew, including the question mark. I wanted to make clear it was a suggestion, not a command.

Mike gave a thumbs up, but Pedro said, “No. I will be moving on to other places, to connect with other people who are entering perpendicular time. But you two are welcome to meet here.”

OK THANKS, I drew. And Mike and I turned away.

WHAT NOW, Mike drew.

NOT MUCH TIME LEFT, I replied. MEET ON PERPTIME LATER.

Mike gave me a thumbs up, and I looked to see if I could find the person, I assumed a woman, who had animated a male sex doll who was there before us. She’d left quickly as we arrived, and I could not see her now.

Mike and I finished our lap around the mall, and about that point the eclipse time ended.

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December 11, 2010, near dawn

I found myself back in my bed, hours later, in my normal male body, which had apparently never woken up, and was still on top of the sex doll I’d taken an overnight jaunt in. Just like Pedro told me would happen, nothing I did in perpendicular time had an effect on the real world. But I remembered what happened in precise detail.

Right after breakfast I found the web site and used the password to create an account, confirming the thing was not an elaborate dream but something which really happened. During the day I explored the site in detail. There were some useful tools available from the home page including, as promised, the eclipse schedule. But for the most part the site was a forum. The forum was divided into several areas.

• On top was announcements, which had a post welcoming all the newcomers to the site who learned about the site, and in some cases about the ability to use perpendicular time, at last night’s eclipse. There was such an announcement for each eclipse apparently since the site had been running.
• The second section was called Science. There were two sticky posts at the top of that forum, both titled ALL WE KNOW but one for technical details that probably didn’t make sense to anybody who wasn’t a physicist, and one for a non-technical version of how it works, which was a longer version of what Pedro told me last night.
• There was a section for mannequins, a term they used generically for any kind of body that let you get into perpendicular time. A lot of people got in with sex dolls initially, but didn’t want their choice of what a sex partner should look like to be what they looked like in perpendicular time. Almost everybody already had something to get in in the first place, but this gave instructions for adding a speaker, ideas for building different kinds of bodies, and a thread about what worked or didn’t work - what was required for something to count as a body so that someone could experience the perpendicular time.
• Another section was for meetups. This was divided geographically by country and state, province, or region into a huge hierarchical tree.
• And there was a general section with various posts.

Given there were only about 2000 users on the site (before this eclipse anyway; the welcome post said that), I assumed a lot of the geographical areas were empty, and the site organizer had just provided a list of locations from a database. Indeed, many were empty. Picking US states at random from near the top of the alphabetical list, I found Alaska was empty, and in Arizona there was a single thread for Yuma, with one post from a user three years ago who said he was going to be in Yuma for the eclipse that day and gave a location to meet up. The next day, he posted a reply to his own post saying nobody showed up and he didn’t see any wanderers.

I went to my own location and found the post from Pedro for last night. Pedro had already replied saying no other existing users of the site showed up, but that he’d told three new people about the site, so I added a response to him there. I figured Mike would find it, and maybe I’d also find the woman.

In the science section, one post explained the light not coming on. We see in the perpendicular time light that was present when it started, and some of that light bounces off us and things that we move, so we can still see them, but we can’t make new light. The reactions that would generate it simply don’t operate; they’re effectively frozen. It also pointed out something I had missed, which is that those of us moving around in perpendicular time don’t cast shadows, or conversely, shadows for things we have moved will still be there where they were at the start of the perpendicular time. We can operate physical devices like a physical lock with a key, or a combination lock, but an electronic lock is simply inaccessible within perpendicular time. All electronic devices might as well be rocks to us, unless they were displaying the information we wanted when the eclipse started.

In the mannequins section, one post was simply called The Horror. It related details of one woman who arrived in her husband’s body. He had passed away in his sleep beside her and established the rule that a dead body counted. They knew live ones didn’t, or they’d have a lot more people entering perpendicular time in the bodies of their spouses. A moderator had written in bold red text at the top of the first post a request for nobody to attempt to do this on purpose, that we didn’t want perpendicular time to become a land of zombies, but that the post was kept because it provided useful information.

In the general chat there was a long thread entitled How can we make perpendicular time useful? It was hundreds of posts long and somebody was keeping the initial post updated with a brief list of things they’d confirmed wouldn’t work. I’d have to read through it all some time to see if it gave me ideas. According to the summary, because we can’t change the world physically, and we don’t actually get to see into the future, the only things we’d really accomplished were learning that the phenomenon exists and meeting one another. The thread focused on secret information which is normally locked away which we might be able to get access to in perpendicular time and take advantage of, but they didn’t have any firm examples that did anything practical. Nobody had managed to access information they couldn’t get to in the normal world which was somehow useful in a real-world way. There were things like reading the diary of your spouse/girlfriend/some other person you live with or near, which was considered very marginal. You might be able to access it in the real world when they were away, and these days it was more likely to be in a password-protected computer file rather than a book, and you wouldn’t have any access in perpendicular time. The best try of this sort was assuming they’d written down the password someplace secret, and you just found that during the perpendicular time, could actually figure out that that’s what it was the password for, and could open the file later to read it in the real world. There were some longshot ideas involving corporate espionage which seemed feasible, but they’d need a very specific opportunity, and nobody had managed to set one up.

So it seemed like nobody had any real ideas how perpendicular time could be useful, and I figured it best to simply make sure I could enjoy the extra time I got to live out in another body. What body I would use? There were two main options. I could do like Pedro had done, which was described in a post in the mannequin forum: Buy a used store mannequin, which actually costs only about $75, and cut open the elbows, knees, waist, neck, wrists, ankles, hips if needed, and the chin up to the lower lip, reattaching them with hinges that collectively cost another $75, to get a body with movement comparable to a regular human body. Without the hinges, I’d only have the movement built into the mannequin, which usually included rotating the arms and neck, sometimes the legs and/or waist, and sometimes the forearms. Or I could stick with the body I had, which, due to the gel interior, was flexible enough to bend all the ways a human body should. I’d had no problems with movement in her body last night. In either case I could install a speaker inside the head to get a voice.

I had no particular desire to be a woman, but I also didn’t have a problem with doing so, once or twice a year for an hour or so. The doll body was more flexible and naturally movable than anything I’d be able to build. I just needed to add the speaker, and made that my New Year’s resolution for 2011, to complete before the next eclipse. Mike contacted me and said he was doing the same. That and buying his doll a dress so he didn’t go around the world naked. It was weird, but I’d done it too. Even when it wasn’t our real body, we didn’t feel right going out into the world naked. And not only that, but we had a sense of what was proper for a shapely woman, of the sort our dolls represented, to wear. We could have covered her up with our sweats, as a post in the forum suggested one man did, but we wanted something proper... for a body that wasn’t ours, only visible occasionally to other people who also weren’t in their real bodies.

I set up reminders in my Google calendar for the next four total lunar eclipses, two in 2011 and then two more in 2014. Something about the movements of the sun, moon, and earth made it so that total lunar eclipses tended to come in batches of three or four at roughly six month intervals, separated by spans of two to three years in which there were only partial lunar eclipses, which didn’t trigger perpendicular time. For each eclipse, I set reminders the morning before and 3 days in advance, and after the last of these I set a reminder that it was the last eclipse I’d set up reminders for and I should set more.

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Epilogue

I did notice that the experience changed how I treated the doll. After my first visit, I treated it ... her ... more like a human being than I had before. She came with a stand, which I’d never used, just dumping her on the floor of my closet when I wasn’t using her. Knowing that the doll was going to be my body once in a while, I cared for her. I used the stand, and dressed her in one of her nice dresses (I bought more) when I wasn’t using her. When I did use her, it was more tenderly, like I would treat a real woman, rather than just to make myself feel good. It seemed to enhance the experience for me, too.

I enjoyed my later visits to the perpendicular time in Joanna, the name I’d given the doll and a name which I started using myself while I was there. After a few more eclipses, by spreading out to cover different areas of the city we gathered a group of 20 locals who had access to the perpendicular time. There were people who wanted to spread the word more widely in the real world about how to enter perpendicular time, but nobody could come up with a way to do it that didn’t make you sound like a crackpot. The few people who believed the posts about this and responded saying they had done it successfully were also widely considered crackpots.

And nobody ever really came up with good ways to take advantage of perpendicular time. There was a hacker group that, knowing nothing you did in perpendicular time affected the real world, started physically breaking into office buildings using axes and hammers and looking for passwords written down they could use in real-life break-ins. After three invasions of the same company during different eclipses, they actually succeeded infiltrating the company in real life and stealing some money. But they were caught and went to jail in real life. And that was the end of that line of exploration.

So we just used it as fun time. We met at playgrounds and played around like we were kids. The woman I saw who had been talking to Pedro before I did turned out to be an elderly widow. Her full-body male doll was motorized and she used controls to adjust its activity. She loved perpendicular time because it allowed her to run and play like a kid when her real body was unable to get out much due to arthritis. But after several years of doing this, I did meet another single woman there around my age and we hit it off. After we got married in real life, the next eclipse we held a second wedding, the first ever held within perpendicular time, for all those who cared to visit. The crowd of 44 visitors was the largest ever assembled in perpendicular time.