The links in this article go to YouTube. At the end there is a playlist of all the songs.

January 22, 2007

Saturday I learned the lie everybody around here has been living.

Some people here randomly at some point in their lives, commonly during teen years but sometimes at other times, develop powers. I thought that was a thing that only happened in the comic books, but it’s real. At least, here in Normal it is. It doesn’t happen elsewhere, or else those other places are hiding it as well as the people of Normal try to.

They hid it from me successfully until they decided I needed to know. And that need was because one of the boys in my gym class developed a power that changed him into a girl, so she’s going to be dressing and showering with the girls now and not with me; that was the thing they couldn’t hide with magic.

I had been in the locker room with her when two other boys who apparently already knew the secret were shoving her around and announced she was a girl to everybody. It didn’t make any sense to me; I didn’t see a girl. But now I know. A magic spell over the whole city of Normal hides abnormal things from people who don’t know; now that I know, they told me I’m going to see changed people in my school, my neighborhood, and elsewhere in Normal.

And I did. Come gym class today, I discovered not only is she now a girl, but a bird-girl, covered with feathers from head to toe. And she had the feathers since the start of the month, but the spell hid them from me. I’ve seen a few other obviously changed people today, and there’s no telling how many of my classmates have powers that you just can’t see.

And this explains why that one radio station KNRM plays so much comic book music. I thought we just had a lot of fans here, but it’s actually personal for a bunch of people. But, for now at least, I’m just David Daniels, 13-year-old middle-school student with no powers.

---

February 12, 2007

The whole powers thing has mostly seemed overblown. After the first week I didn’t encounter any more people with obvious powers. There were only a few and none of them seemed to have great powers. Maybe some people here get cool powers, but I talked with the bird girl today at lunch. She didn’t want to be a bird, didn’t want to be a girl, and doesn’t even fly. And she has to deal with laying a big egg every month instead of periods; I don’t know whether that is a plus or minus, but if she hadn’t gotten stuck being a girl she wouldn’t have periods or eggs. If that’s what powers are like, no thanks.

---

June 8, 2007

Today I got the creepiest feeling listening to KNRM. I don’t know why. They were playing one of those comic book songs that are so popular here, “My Secret Origin” by Ookla the Mok.

I’m waiting for my Lady of the Lake to come and crown me king.

I’m waiting for my rocket to land so I can get my power ring.

I’m waiting for my radioactive meteorite to fall.

I’m waiting but I ain’t got no goddamn meteorite at all.

I’m waiting for my story to begin.

In Normal, it was really only the meteor which gave everybody their powers, and it fell a long time ago and just keeps on giving. That other stuff is just fiction. But it’s clear why this song resonates with people here. I’ve seen that powers can mess some people up more than it helps them, but there are plenty of people who’d rather roll the dice and hope for an interesting life with powers rather than live a boring one, not that there is really anything they can do to influence it except stay in Normal. I’m still not convinced.

But I’ve heard the song before, lots of times, several times since I learned powers here are real, and it didn’t affect me like it did tonight. I had to change the station to one of the ones with normal music. Any other station, really.

---

June 9, 2007

I was kind of bored, studying for finals, and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” was on the radio it happened. Well into the song, but still before it should have been over, the music stopped. Not because somebody turned the music off, but because I was in a different place. There was a weird building with a big pyramid in front of it. You could see the framework inside holding up the pyramid. A lot of people were scattered around a large plaza.

I was there for a few seconds, and then the music resumed and I was back with my study materials. I wondered if I was studying too hard and starting to lose it, and I decided to take a break in any case.

I mentioned it to Mom, and she suggested maybe it was a power. So now I was watching for it to happen again.

---

June 16, 2007

School was over and I was home for the summer. Normal was throwing a sort of city-wide party to celebrate summer, and I got together with my girlfriend Kendra for a walk through the festivities.

There was one guy who was doing his best Sinatra impression, crooning “My Kind of Town” ... and suddenly I was somewhere else. There was a train running on tracks above the road. “Wait!” I thought. “Chicago! The El! That song was about Chicago...”

By the time I finished that thought I was back beside Kendra.

“David! What happened? You disappeared for a few seconds.”

‘Kendra, I think it’s a power.”

Just then I was back in Chicago again for as short a visit as the first one.

When I returned, I started running, yelling back to Kendra, “I gotta get home and tell Mom.” She ran after me, and caught up to me because I blinked out once more before it stopped.

“Mom! It happened again!”

“What happened, David?”

“My power took me to another place. And Kendra saw it.”

Kendra was there beside me now. “Yeah, like David said, he disappeared from beside me for a few seconds. It happened three times.”

“OK. You said that happened before, so tell me specifically what happened this time.”

“A guy in the square was doing a Frank Sinatra impression, singing ‘My Kind of Town,’ a song about Chicago. And then there was a train on tracks above the road. I’ve never actually been there to see it myself, but I thought that could be the El that Chicago is famous for.”

“Could be. Chicago isn’t the only city with elevated trains, but it makes sense. You were listening to music the other time, too, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m going to get you a testing appointment with NANA. Until then, just to be safe, try to avoid music, OK?”

“OK, I’ll try.”

So Kendra stayed with me the rest of the day, and she called home.

“Hi, Mom. I’m still with David. Yes, we’re both safe, but we’re going to be staying at his house for a while because of a possible issue with him developing a power. Yes, I’ll keep you updated.”

We talked about various things, including when Kendra’s brother developed electrical powers two years ago and burned out every electronic device in their house. It cost some money to replace those things, but they’ve started recovering the money. Now they now live off the grid, as her brother charges up a big battery periodically to run everything in their house.

Testing

June 18, 2007

They couldn’t get me a testing appointment until Monday, not because it was Sunday yesterday, but because they wanted to have a teleporter, a GPS tracking device, something to hide my teleports from outsiders, and a bunch of songs on hand. There were actually three people there for my testing.

“Hi, David, I’m Chris. I’m going to be in charge of your testing.”

“I’m Cynthia. I’m a skilled teleporter, and I’m here to rescue you if you end up somewhere that you need it.”

“And I’m Fred. I make magic charms that all our teleporters carry which help hide their comings and goings from outsiders. The charms don’t make them invisible; they just make it so that people don’t notice teleporters suddenly appearing and suddenly disappearing. If you don’t pop out immediately, you would be able to interact with people normally while you are there.”

Fred came over and handed me two charms on necklaces. He continued, “The second one is a magical GPS tracker. It won’t be blocked in any way by the don’t-notice-me charm, and it sends its location back magically to the receiver Cynthia is holding, anywhere in the world, not dependent on the Internet or cell access, and it never has to be recharged.”

Chris said, “Now I want you to tell me what powers you experienced.”

“The first time was about a week ago. I was studying and I had the radio on and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” was on when suddenly I was some other place. There was a strange looking building with a pyramid in front of it that you could see partially through. You could see a lattice structure supporting the pyramid.”

“Well, the most famous pyramid like that is at the Louvre in Paris.”

Chris typed out some commands on a computer and a picture of it showed up on a large screen on one wall of the room we were all in.

“No, that’s not it,” I told him. “The pyramid, I couldn’t say for sure, but that was not the building next to it. The building was not fancy like that, just weird.”

He did some searches and then up popped the right building. “That’s it!” I exclaimed.

“The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. That’s certainly one way of interpreting the heart of rock and roll. Now I want to test this point, now that you have those charms on. I’m going to play the song here - I have the entire catalogs from several of the local radio stations on this computer - and we’re going to see when you teleport.”

It was weird. The song mentions a whole bunch of cities, but I didn’t go to any of those, until, in what turned out to be the last segment of the song which mentions cities, right after he sings “The heart of rock and roll is still beating” he says “in Cleveland.” That’s when I teleported. After I came back, I didn’t teleport again as the song finished, but when he replayed the song I teleported at that point, and to the same location. Cynthia came and watched me the first time, close enough that I could see her, but the second time she didn’t, and I saw her taking notes when I returned.

“You went to the same spot both times,” Cynthia commented.

“Well, we’ve established that that part of that song makes you teleport to that location. If we can figure out other teleports maybe we can understand more precisely how your power works.”

So they tested me with a recording of the real Sinatra singing “My Kind of Town” and confirmed I was going to a spot next to the El, the same spot, and after I came back, each time that he sang “Chicago” I went there again, which was several times. And of course Sinatra has an even more famous city song, “New York, New York.” Indeed, that took me to a place I could see several of the famous buildings in New York City which I recognized, even though I didn’t know what some of them were called.

Next they tried “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston, which is a somewhat fictionalized story about the band itself, and starts “Well, we were just another band out of Boston.” That line sent me to some place in Boston. I didn’t know the specific location I ended up, but I did know about the Citgo sign by Fenway Park, and I saw that. Cynthia confirmed I was in that area.

“One of the stations has a DJ originally from Boston who moved here to retire, and when his powers rejuvenated him, he restarted his career at a station here. So we have a whole bunch of Boston songs. Let’s see if they all take you to the same place.”

They didn’t. “MTA” by the Kingston Trio, popularly known as “Charlie on the MTA,” was a song about Boston’s subway system, and it specifically mentions Scollay Square station. I ended up inside a station called Government Center, but they explained to me that it’s the same station, just renamed. There’s a more recent and slightly modified punk version of the song by the Dropkick Murphys which took me to the same spot. They played “Dirty Water” by The Standells which I thought was strange, but it took me to a park which ran along part of the Charles River, which they explained is where the dirty water in the song is found (and each “dirty water” took me there). But “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison took me to a spot along the Mystic River, a smaller one that flows into the Charles, and thankfully not actually into the river.

“Wait, how many rivers in Boston have songs about them?”

“Well, I threw that one in as a kind of a test,” Chris explained. “That song isn’t actually about the Mystic River, but especially because he ‘sails into the Mystic’ at one point, a lot of people think it is. Some of these other locations have been mentioned just once in a song with other locations also mentioned, but the most well known bits are where you ended up. Several of Boston’s subway stations are mentioned in “MTA,” but Scollay Square where his wife gives him the sandwich is what people remember most. So it might be that popular opinion has something to do with it. It’s clearly not your belief, though, because you had no idea about the Dirty Water song until after you teleported to the Charles. I want to try other tests, but it’ll take some time to set them up. What happens if you hear a song that is clearly about a particular place but it’s brand new and doesn’t have any popularity at all? I don’t have one, but I know somebody who might.”

He came up with several more New York songs, and some Los Angeles ones including “I Love LA” by Randy Newman, and these songs took me all over those cities. “Land Down Under” by Men at Work took me to a spot where I could see Sydney Opera House every time the title was sung. The song is only generically about the entire country, and in parts of it, a man from Australia who isn’t actually in Australia when the singer encounters him, but that was one of the most iconic sights there.

We took a break, and then they provided me with an iPod and showed me how to use it. The songs I’d just been teleporting from listening to were on it, and I was going to either listen to a prepared list of songs or put one on repeat and see if I could stay there and walk around the area, whether it would keep teleporting me back to the starting spot, or whatever else might happen. And it turned out that as long as the song was playing uninterrupted, even looping back to the start of the song after it was finished, I stayed there and could move about. It didn’t keep teleporting me back to the landing point. If another song started after the one ended, I still stayed where I was, until I reached a teleport trigger in another song. This was good. I could actually go somewhere and do something, though I had to be listening to music continuously to stay there.

When I came back from this set of tests, they had brought a space suit into the room.

“You’re going to send me to space? Why do you even have a space suit?”

“Well, some of the people with zero-gravity-based flying powers can escape the atmosphere, and they need something like this if they do. But what we’re actually going to do is send you to the moon. Your GPS won’t work there, but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out if that’s where you are.”

They played “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra. Obviously one of the stations had somebody who loved his songs. But nothing happened.

“Why didn’t it work?” I asked.

“Most likely, your power isn’t strong enough. Australia is on the other side of the world, but the moon is 30 times as far away.”

After I got out of the space suit, we had a break for lunch, and after lunch, they tested whether I had any other powers. At first the tests were unassisted by music, to get a feel for my abilities, but then they had me repeating tests with various songs playing, a lot of them from KNRM’s catalog of comic book music. REM’s “I Am Superman” didn’t make me literally Superman, and I wasn’t able to fly, but I could run faster and lift more weight when the song was playing. The theme from Spider-Man, whether the new cover by Michael Bublé or the classic version, didn’t let me shoot webs from my fingers, but it did let me climb the wall. “A Little Prayer (Wolverine’s Theme)” by Jewel did nothing at all for me; I didn’t get adamantium claws, didn’t heal unusually fast, and didn’t get augmented sight and smell. “Das Uber Tuber” didn’t turn me into whatever that Mr. Potato Head character in the song was meant to be. But that reminded me of something.

“Hey, while you have Ookla the Mok playing, can you try ‘My Secret Origin’? The day before I teleported for the first time, that song was playing and I got a really weird feeling. If it was a power, I didn’t notice what. But whatever it was creeped me out so much I had to turn it off. That’s how I ended up on a regular station the next day.”

Chris played the song, and nothing happened. They let it play all the way to the end.

“Nope, nothing this time. Maybe it wasn’t the song.”

Chris suggested, “It still could have been. I have a couple ideas, but heck if we can ever test them. The song is about getting powers, so one possibility is that it gave you the power, and the feeling was the result of your body changing to have your power. Unless we have a song that takes away your power so that we can use the song to give it back, we could never test it, and I don’t know what would do that, anyway. My second idea is that it lets you detect when somebody is in the process of gaining powers. And you happened to hear it when you were gaining yours. Massive coincidence if it happened, and pretty massive coincidence if you ever hear the song again at the same moment you are near someone else gaining powers, depending on how close you actually have to be. The farther the distance, the more likely and less useful it is. If you simply detected that someone in Normal was getting powers, what are we going to do, do test everybody?”

I laughed.

“Let’s just forget about that power until we get more evidence. If you ever get that feeling again, or anything weird during that song, make a note and let me know. But I do have one more important test for you. Hang on a sec.”

Chris left and came back with an assistant, each of them pulling a clothes rack with various shirts and jackets hanging from it.

“I know you take your clothes and other carried items with you when you teleport. I want to find the limit. I’m going to put ‘Dirty Water’ on, and each time you come back here, grab one more shirt or jacket and add it to what you have on already. Cynthia’s going to go watch if anything falls off there and I’ll watch here.”

After a bit it got difficult to layer on more coats, and Chris clearly realized that and slowed the pace of the repeating segment of the song. Eventially I was struggling under the weight of almost the entire two racks when Chris stopped the music.

“OK, I don’t know if that one fell off because it was too far from your body or too much weight, but we’re going to test it.”

Chris helped me take off and hang up all the extra clothes, and he then put one cost on me and put a bunch of small weights in the pockets. After confirming I could teleport with all that weight, again I added more jackets to it. It took a lot less this time before I stopped bringing all the coats with me. They weighed me with all the coats and confirmed I could take approximately 65 pounds of stuff with me. And then Chris showed up with even more weights, and had me just wear one big parka with lots of big pockets and every time I came back, he handed me more weights to stuff in the pockets. This time, when it got too heavy, the entire parka stayed behind when I teleported. The power treated it as a single unit. The weight was the same.

“That’s useful to know,” I said.

“Well, that’s it for today, Normally it would be the end, period, but there are a lot more songs I’d like to test out but which require more setup. But I’ll let you choose a code name and then go home.”

“Because of the way my power is triggered, I think The Listener is a good name.”

He typed it in. “Looks like that’s available. Not surprising, since I’ve never heard of anybody else with powers like yours.”

---

June 19, 2007

I was back in testing in the morning, and I got to see the other songs they wanted to test.

First off, they brought in a live musician. Not the crooner from the square the other day. This guy wrote his own songs, and he had written a new one in the last couple days about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, because the entire NANA testing group had only been able to find one song about the city and none about the arch. The new song didn’t do anything for me, though, despite being more clearly about the arch than a lot of the songs that did make me teleport were about their subjects. So they decided there was some way my power triggered off popular opinion of the songs, and I couldn’t simply write my own songs to get powers, unless I could get them recorded and recognized by people. They then played the one St. Louis song they knew before, “Meet Me in St. Louis” from one oldies station’s music catalog, and I did get to go to St. Louis, but not to the arch. I was in some park, which Chris explained afterward was in 1904 part of the fairgrounds for the World Fair held there that year. The song was written that year for the fair and that was where the characters were supposed to meet. The arch wasn’t built yet.

Next they took me outside into a field. Chris explained that there was a class for those whose powers let them fly starting next week, and recommended it for me if I could get off the ground, but with a whole playlist of flying songs, including R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” I wasn’t able to get off the ground even for a second, not even wearing cardboard wings. I felt pretty silly, and I didn’t believe I could fly.

“How’s your swimming?” Chris asked me next.

“Um, I think I won’t drown?”

“Well, just in case, we’re going to have a lifeguard on hand.”

He took me to a swimming pool at the college, which he said was the only one in Normal equipped with an underwater sound system, and they’d rented it for an hour. He handed me swim trunks, pointed me at the locker room, and I changed, and went in for a swim. Indeed, I didn’t drown, but I almost did trying to dive and swim underwater. I surfaced and then completed a lap across the pool with some difficulty.

Then they played Ookla the Mok’s “Arthur Curry” which was probably the only song about Aquaman anywhere. I didn’t grow gills or anything, but I did swim better. I wasn’t convinced I couldn’t learn to swim that well just by practicing, without the song, though, and the setup of being able to listen to a song underwater was pretty unlikely. This wasn’t going to be a power I could practically use, and Chris said he only tested it to see if I got any benefit from it. I didn’t get any benefit when he played one of the songs about Superman underwater; in fact, I was actually less coordinated at swimming when my strength was increased above what I was used to.

After I got dried off and changed, they bought me lunch, and we went back into the building for a session of songs that might give me other kinds of powers. Some songs about reading minds, including “Read My Mind” by The Killers which was new and playing on some stations right now, let me read a person’s mind, but only if I was physically touching the person, and the song playing made it hard to concentrate, but I could, for example, identify a card the person had just looked at.

There were also songs that gave me magical abilities, including “Magic” by The Cars, but probably really weak ones, and I also needed to concentrate on the actual magic, and it was hard with the song going. I managed to cast the simplest spell, showing that it could potentially work, but realistically my magic ability was 0. I could see why Chris left these options to day 2.

Chris decided I was pretty safe at this point. Songs that let me do things other than teleport were probably going to give me low-level versions of those powers that I was going to have to work at to do anything at all with, so the main thing was going to be the sometimes uncontrolled teleporting to places that had songs written about them. And with my charm, I wasn’t going to stand out when I did that.

After dinner, I had a long call with Kendra, telling her as much of my experience the last two days as I could.

---

July 2, 2007

Rather than an iPod, I ended up choosing another kind of MP3 player that had a set of programmable buttons. I could set up a series of destinations, each song playing on repeat while it was selected, make playlists with specific sequences of songs (which could also be assigned to those buttons), or search the entire list of songs by first letter of the song title and then scrolling by song to pick a specific song to play.

And then I tested out lots more songs to see if they would teleport me. At this point, I was testing songs with cities and landmarks in their titles or in their lyrics (to the extent I could search for that), and trying to find them on YouTube or anywhere. Just two weeks after my testing I’d built up a list of 200 usable songs, of which I’d acquired copies of 40 from a mixture of online purchases and used CD stores.

NANA had given me the magically connected GPS unit, which recorded places I had recently been detected so I could record them in a spreadsheet along with the songs that took me there. I also had a private Google map with numbered pins at the locations that matched to rows in the spreadsheet. I was hoping to eventually find routes to get anywhere in the world, though I expected there would be locations that weren’t practical to reach.

---

July 29, 2007

I was done with the city-name songs after a couple weeks, and since then I had just been trying to listen to a variety of music in case something else interesting comes up, often switching radio stations when a song that was clearly having no effect came on. And I did find more of those songs.

But then when Helen Reddy’s song “I Am Woman” was playing, suddenly I discovered that I was one. Well, a girl.

“Mom!”

I shut off the music and went to find her. And she was running to me at my scream.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Helen Reddy was singing ‘I Am Woman’ and she made me into one.”

“Are you still female?”

I looked at myself. The small boobs under my T-shirt that I had first noticed were still there. I stuck a hand down into my shorts.

“100% girl,” I replied.

“Your voice changed, too. You sound a lot like you did a couple years ago before your voice started to change. I mean, before you started developing a man’s voice.”

“Hmm, I didn’t notice. But now that you mention it, I can tell my voice is different. But why didn’t I change back when I turned off the music?”

“I don’t know. But maybe we can play a different song to change you back.”

“Hmm. That’s a good idea. But what song celebrates being a man?”

“Try ‘Macho Man.’ It’s a song by the Village People.”

I found the song on YouTube, played it, and soon found myself back in the body I was used to. And stayed there after I stopped the song.

“Well that’s a relief. Thanks, Mom.”

Mom didn’t let it end there, though. She had me turn female again and gave me a long talk, similar to one I’d before, but from a girl’s viewpoint. Instead of being careful not to get a girl pregnant, it was being careful to avoid letting myself get pregnant. I assured her I had no interest in changing into a girl, but since I could never be sure I had 100% control of this power, Mom insisted on giving me the whole talk.

---

July 31, 2007

Of course this meant I needed another round of testing. This was thankfully short and I never left the building, but I had my tracker just in case. Chris was there to lead it again.

There weren’t many songs that turned me into a girl, but “(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” did it. They’d brought a doctor in this time to examine me, inside and out. I learned that a “physical” exam for a woman means looking inside the vagina. That was weird and unpleasant. At least he said I looked normal. He also gave me a close study outside my body, and pointed out to me in a mirror the subtle differences when I changed. The hair on top of my head stayed the same, but the tiny trace of a mustache I’d started to grow, really just a few hairs and not anything people would actually notice as a mustache, was gone when I was a girl. The similarly sparse hair that had started to grow on my arms wasn’t completely absent, but there was even less of it when I was a girl. And my Adam’s apple had vanished, and my waist was a little narrower and my hips a little wider. The doctor explained how women’s hips looked wider because their legs were actually farther apart to allow space for the birth canal. He explained that the breasts and hips would probably both get larger as I got older, assuming that the woman I was changing into aged at the same rate I did.

What was more surprising was that any gender-bending songs, such as “Lola” and even the last verse of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” where the roles are reversed, made me a mixture of male and female. I still had my developing breasts, and the extra hair had vanished, but I had my male voice, Adam’s apple, and everything below the waist was male.

The doctor explained, “This state is common for transsexuals. They take hormones that allow their breasts to grow, remove their body hair with electrolysis, and dress and live as a woman in this form. It’s as far as many of them ever go.”

“How much farther could they go?”

“Well, outside Normal, they get surgery to remove their male genitals and give them the semblance of female genitals. It’s never fully functional but ideally they get a vagina that they can use for sex.”

“And here, obviously it happens automatically sometimes.”

“Yes. Some people get powers which change their genitals to the opposite sex, and sometimes this makes them fully functional as the other sex. In other cases they may have partial or abnormal sexual function. A lucky few like you have the ability to go back and forth and can choose which they prefer. Some shapeshifters also can choose bodies of either gender. Among those who don’t get powers, there are still some who seek to change, but usually they seek out magic users for a chance at full sexual function. There’s still no guarantee, but it’s been successful for some.”

I thought about asking about the failed cases, but decided not to. Instead, I asked, “I’m not really considering it, but suppose I did want to become female. How would I update records that say I’m male?”

The doctor handed this question over to Chris, who explained, “I’m glad you asked. Because of the kind of gender change that is available everywhere, there are systems for updating your gender in any kind of record that tracks gender. For those people who experience a one-time gender change, NANA helps with those updates. For your case, where you might go back and forth, what we would do is update that charm that hides your teleports to also deal with the gender on your ID.”

They ended up taking new pictures of me as female and intersex, and updating the charm so that when I change in the presence of people who don’t know about powers, they won’t notice, and making it so that my ID would match my appearance and gender as each person saw it, treating the intersex form as female. And since David was a weird name for a girl, my name was now legally going to be Robin, though I planned on still going by David unless I had a real reason to do otherwise. Robin was still going to be male in all the records that mattered, but when I was in an obviously female body, the ID I carried with me would show me as female.

High School

August 20, 2007

It was time to go back to school, and because of that, I was ending my research into songs that could give me powers. Sure, if something happened, I’d take note of it, but I wasn’t going to spend an hour or more every day trying to listen to different music in order to find songs that worked for me. It’s going to be high school now, and I’m sure I’ll have enough to spend my time on without finding the 200th song that will teleport me to a unique location.

---

September 2, 2007

Two weeks in, and I can only say it’s not as different as I thought it would be. The kids are bigger. The girls have boobs. The classes are more advanced. But it’s not fundamentally different from middle school. It’s like Middle School: The Next Generation.

---

October 31, 2007

I had been tempted to put on a mix of songs and go trick-or-treating in different cities, a few minutes per city, but Mom convinced me it was a bad idea. But I still wanted to go out. I decided instead to pick the most outrageous looking character to dress as. There were many possibilities, but ultimately I chose to dress as Mr. Mxyzptlk.

Mixy, as he is sometimes called since his actual name pronounces most of those consonants as separate syllables and so is quite long to say, is one of Superman’s occasional enemies. He’s one of the more obscure characters, and I couldn’t find the costume locally and had to order it. Fortunately, it came in time. I’m sure some people would not know who I was dressed as, but with how comic-obsessed the powers had made many kids here, I’m sure some people would. I hoped I was at least unique.

He’s a bald man with white hair on the sides, who wears a purple derby hat covering part of his bald head. The costume came with a skullcap/wig with the hat attached, and also matching white stick-on eyebrows. The rest of the costume was an orange long-sleeved shirt with a V neck and purple bits that stuck out over the shoulders, orange pants, and purple gloves and boots.

It started out OK. There were some houses playing music, but it was the typical Halloween monster stuff and didn’t have any effect on me. It was fine until one of the houses started playing the theme from Ghostbusters. And I guess I’d never tried this song. It teleported me, I guess to wherever the movie was supposed to be. When I got there, rather than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, there was a huge, more than eight foot tall, perhaps 12 foot long statue of a lioness, and the song “I Am Woman” was blasting out. Hear me roar, indeed. So naturally I turned female as I popped back to Normal, and then I hurried to get away from the Ghostbusters house. I ran and ran, teleporting back in front of the lioness three times before I got out of range of the song in Normal, and I kept running for quite a while more.

After crossing one final street to put distance between myself and the Ghostbusters house, I stopped to get my bearings. I was going to go trick-or-treating around the next block, but was trying to decide between turning left and going straight. To my surprise, Supergirl was coming at me from both directions, one of them accompanied by Superman, and between that and the worry about being female in public, I tripped over my own feet and fell. Both Supergirls helped me up.

“Thank you,” I said.

I was going to introduce myself to them as David, but I realized I had just spoken with my female voice, and after a moment I remembered my new name. I said, “My name’s Robin.”

The Supergirl who was with Superman was named Freddy, and her (his?) Superman was named Bella. The second Supergirl introduced herself as George, Shelly, and also as Samantha. I was glad I’d only given one name, though they probably still thought it was weird a girl was dressed in a male costume. Too late, I thought to exchange numbers with them in case they had any advice about changing gender. Surely at least one of that group had changed! But by the time I did, they were lost in the crowd. I looked around and I could not see them.

I started to pull out my music player and turn myself male again, but I realized I didn’t know where I was; in fleeing the Ghostbusters house I’d gotten myself lost. I decided I should quit instead. I used my cell phone to call Mom to come pick me up. I was able to read street names off a sign and she located it on a map. She told me she needed 10 minutes to get here, maybe 15 with kids crossing the road, so I walked that one block and met Mom just as she was arriving at the corner I had indicated, not having spotted the Superfriends.

“How did you end up way over here?” she asked when I got into the car.

“I got scared and ran. I got lost.”

I told her the whole story to explain how I got scared.

---

December 25, 2007

I had gone months without identifying any more songs that teleported me, but mostly because I had probably found all the easy ones and because I hadn’t been trying. I’d worked more on getting copies of them I could carry with me on my player, and I had most of them by now. For Christmas my parents got me 25 CDs with a total of 31 of the difficult-to-find songs on them.

Ghost Patrol

March 1, 2008

I got a call from NANA today about a job. Not a permanent job, just a thing for today, but they were going to pay me $1000 for about 4 hours’ work if I qualified. The description was something that could only have ever existed in Normal: I was to be a ghost disperser. Mom and Dad were OK with it, and Mom drove me over.

The test to see if I qualified was at the NANA facility where my testing took place, but rather than Chris, there was a woman dressed like a traditional fortune-teller.

“Hi, I’m Stephanie, but for official NANA work today we’ll be using code names. So today you can call me Miss Tix.”

“Mystics? Is there more than one of you?”

“Sorry, it’s M-I-S-S T-I-X, like the name of an unmarried woman. I thought it was funny many years ago.”

“OK, Miss Tix. Then you probably know already, but I’m The Listener.”

“Yes, and welcome. So you’re probably wondering about this job, and why we need a ghost disperser.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a whole lot I can tell you about ghosts, but most of it isn’t relevant to the job today, so I’m going to try to keep it brief. The meteor is like a beacon for ghosts. Wayward ghosts looking for a new home or who are just lost tend to come to Normal because of it. The really lost and listless ones just go straight into the crater.”

“OK. Does that cause a problem?”

“Well, the ghosts all over Normal cause enough problems to keep me and some other people employed full time. The ones in the crater generally don’t, but the problem is the crater is full. Ghosts pass through normal matter as you might think, but they take up space relative to one another, and the crater is full enough of ghosts now that they are starting to back up into the building. We don’t want people being tested to encounter them on top of what else they are doing.”

“So the crater’s here?”

“Yeah. Now I understand you have quite a few different locations you can teleport to.”

Holding up my music player, I replied, “I believe the current count of teleport songs that I actually have copies of on here is 197. There are many cases where more than one song goes to the same city, but I don’t have any duplicates going to the same spot on here.”

“That’s fine. Are any of them within 50 miles of Normal?”

I thought for a moment and then said, “No. None of them are that close.”

“Then we’ll use them all. Can you set your player to cycle through all of those, pause and restart a song, and skip to the next song quickly?”

“Yes, I do have a playlist with all the location songs in it for when I want to go exploring, and I can do those things.”

“Perfect. If you qualify, we’ll have you teleport out once to each spot with 5 or 6 ghosts to get the 1000 done. But I need to run two tests to see if you qualify. If you don’t, you get 50 bucks for coming in to try, and it’s over. If you can do the job, you get $1000 for helping me clear roughly 1000 ghosts. For the first test, just sit down. I need to examine your soul and make sure you can’t be possessed by ghosts.”

“That’s a real thing? People get possessed by ghosts?”

“Yeah. Only some people. I can tell you more about it afterwards if you like. Just be quiet and sit still for a bit so I can check.”

She did whatever it was and declared I was safe from ghost possession.

“Aren’t the ghosts going to possess other people where I drop them off?”

“The ghosts I am having you move are too weak to possess a person. But you’re going to be right at the nexus that attracts ghosts for quite a while and it’s a precaution. And after I learned last year that ghost possession has been even more of a problem in Normal than we thought, I’m really trying to take precautions. And we’ve always taken the precaution to not inundate any one location with ghosts. We spread them around.”

“OK.”

“Now the second test is whether you can carry ghosts with you when you teleport. We had a guy who was doing this for us about once a year, but he passed away last year. I’ve already had nine other teleporters in here who couldn’t do this part. The ghosts just don’t go with them. So I asked you because your teleportation mechanism is unusual. Our old regular also had an unusual mechanism, though not like yours.”

“OK. How am I supposed to carry a ghost?”

She pointed to what I had first thought was just the table in front of us with a weird, quarter-inch-high raised ring about 2 feet in diameter.

“This is a portable summoning circle. And I’ve trapped a ghost in it. Now put on these goggles.”

I put on what she handed me, and WHOA!

“You should now be able to see the ghost in the circle.”

“Yeah. Creepy!”

“OK, pick up the board. Just grab the corner and pull, and pick up the whole thing as it slides off the table. The ghost should go with it.”

I did that, so now I was carrying a ghost.

“OK, now see this part here?”

She pointed out one bit of the raised circle which was different from the rest. There was a handle on it outside the circle.

“Grab onto this handle and yank it out, and the ghost will fly out.”

“It’s OK to release it here?”

“Yes, this is a pretty benign ghost and one I can re-summon easily.”

So I did it, and indeed the ghost flew out of the circle and across the room.

“OK, now put it down.”

I did, and she reattached the piece I pulled loose and did a little ritual and put the ghost back into the circle.

“Now get one of your songs ready to play to teleport you to another city. I’ll hand you the circle immediately as you do, and after you teleport you release it there. Then shut off the music and come back here with the empty circle.”

“You don’t care where?”

“Anywhere outside Normal will be fine.”

She picked up the circle and made ready to hand it to me. I strapped my player to my arm like was meant for joggers, put the earpieces in my ears, pressed a preset I knew was going to take me to New York City, and took the circle from Miss Tix before the song sent me out. It did, I released the ghost, I shut off the music, and I came back.

“You did it!” Miss Tix cheered.

“Yes, I guess I did. I saw the ghost leave the circle. It’s somewhere in New York City’s Central Park now.”

I set the board down on the table.

“Get your player set up to run through the whole playlist and follow me.”

We went down two levels of basement into the ground, and then we went down a long hallway with a couple turns and finally Miss Tix stopped in front of a door.

“Take off the goggles for now.”

Once I had done so, she opened the door. Inside was a rather large square room, about 40 feet on a side. The floor was actually made of granite paving stones and right in the middle was a round pit with an octagonal railing running all the way around it. There was a weird glow coming up out of the pit.

“I’d like you to meet Freya, Sneak, Dark Vision, and Veda.”

They were standing at four tables which, along with the empty one directly in front of me, were roughly evenly spaced around the pit with about 5 feet of space between each table and the pit. None of them had on the mystical garb Miss Tix wore, but they couldn’t have been a more diverse group. Freya was a tall, somewhat muscular woman with blonde hair and very pale skin. Sneak was an ordinary-looking middle-aged white guy you could have seen anywhere. Dark Vision, despite the name, was a cheerful-looking black woman in her 20s. And Veda was an elderly dark-skinned Indian man with an orange turban covering what I assume was white hair or a bald head, since his mustache and beard were all white.

“Don’t look at the pit with the goggles on. Normally the ghosts are all over this room, but we’ve concentrated them all in the space above the pit for now in a way we can draw out a few at a time quickly. We are all used to the sight, but it would probably be overwhelming for you to see that many ghosts packed together. But go ahead and look in for a moment without the goggles. That’s safe.”

It was clear she meant everybody in the room but myself was used to looking at ghosts. So I walked around the table in front of me and over to the pit, and looked in. The meteor was about 10 feet down, filling almost as big a space as the hole at the top, and it was glowing with a pulsing light. It was hard to say what color it was. It was every color and no color at the same time, but it wasn’t white like I learned in school is the mixture of all the light colors.

I said, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I’m not surprised the source of all our powers looks so freaky. Aren’t the sides of craters usually more sloped?”

Miss Tix, as I expected, had come up to the table I’d just walked around. She responded, “As I understand it, it was originally shaped more like the craters you are thinking of, but past generations filled it in and paved it for more convenient access to study it. At first, only the central part of the crater was paved and this room was built around it. Later, the rest of the crater was filled in and the rest of the building was built above it. When you are done admiring the meteor, come up to the side of this table opposite me, and look at me, keeping your back to the pit.”

I moved as she indicated.

“Now put your goggles on. You should see five ghosts captive in the circle. And if you look carefully to your left and right, without turning all the way around to look at the crater, you should be able to see ghosts in the other two nearest circles as well.”

I did all that. It took a moment to distinguish them all, but I did count five ghosts. “Yes, I see them.”

“OK, is your music player ready?”

I glanced at it. “Yes.”

“Great. I’m going to hand you this one to drop off at wherever your first song goes, and when you come back, set the circle back on the table and sidle your way over to the next table to your left, keeping your back to the pit. And Freya will hand you hers and you take it to the next location, and so on around the circle. It should give each of us time to refill our circles from the pit by the time you get back to us.”

She picked up the circle to be ready to hand it to me, so I took that as the signal to begin and turned on the first song and got the action going. Once I got the hang of it, it took about a minute to start a song, take the circle, get teleported, release the ghosts, come back, and move to the next table, with a few of the songs taking longer to set up when they didn’t teleport me until later in the song. After a couple hours, at one point when I reached Miss Tix she called for a break, and once they had all refilled their circles we all went into another room nearby where somebody had set up lunch for us. Then we went back and did another two hours of moving ghosts out. I realized I was done upon seeing an empty circle at the next table.

“Thanks. We have the ghosts down below the rim of the pit now, You can look at it now, just don’t look down inside.” Miss Tix told me.

After I glanced at it, seeing only a few ghosts high enough to show through the railing, I took off the goggles and handed them back to Miss Tix, and she led me out of the room.

“My coworkers are going to undo the spell that was confining the ghosts to the column over the pit so that the remaining ghosts can spread out the way they normally would gather, and I’m going to go get you paid.”

As we walked, Miss Tix described what happens when people get possessed by ghosts, and in particular, some of the things that had happened in the past. When we got where we were going, I had to sign a form and then the man there made out a $1000 check to me. And shortly Mom picked me up and I was home.

“So did you have an interesting day?” Mom asked.

“Well I learned a bit about ghosts. It was actually a lot of repetitive work, but they pay well. And they apparently are lacking in anybody else who can carry confined ghosts with them when they teleport, so I might get to do this once a year.”

The songs linked in this story are also available as a YouTube playlist.