Something's Wrong With Mindy

From the outside looking in, the Martins led the ideal life. They lived in a beautiful pale-yellow house with a perfectly manicured lawn and a variety of stunning rose bushes out front, the envy of all who saw them. They were tall, blonde, blue-eyed, athletic, and physically perfect according to society’s current set of standards.

Aaron and Inez were the perfect married couple – beautiful and happy with what appeared to be a model relationship. Marcia and Mindy were their perfect children – bright, beautiful, blonde twin girls who were on the honor roll at school and wildly popular. Girls everyone wanted to be like, but didn’t envy a bit because they were just too darned likable.

Aaron worked as a doctor at the most prestigious hospital in the area, yet he always found the time to mow the lawn on the weekends and bond with his children in the evenings. Inez owned a successful little garden shop downtown where she sold everything people needed to grow perfect roses just like hers in yards of their own. But she, of course, always managed to be home in time to have a hot, homemade meal on the table for her family and any guests who might be coming over.

Marcia and Mindy were both on track to follow in their father’s footsteps and become doctors themselves one day, of course. After all, perfect children wanted to be like their parents and to grow up to please them, as well as to contribute to society in correct, socially acceptable ways. Both Aaron and Inez had agreed early on that they’d like the girls to be doctors, so that was naturally what the girls wanted, too.

In Happydale, the pristine and exclusive suburb where the Martins lived, everything was ideal. It rarely rained or snowed. And when those things did happen, it was only ever in moderation and never, ever to the point of inconvenience for any of the residents.

A Happydale life was, for all intents and purposes, the ideal dream life every human wanted for themselves. So you can imagine what a stir it caused when Mindy experienced an awakening that found her thinking otherwise.

*

It wasn’t that Mindy didn’t love her family or like her life. It was just that something had always been a little bit left of center about it all from where she personally stood. For example, there was her sister Marcia.

She and Marcia were supposed to be twins, basically two versions of the same person, genetically speaking. They were supposed to be so close and so fully connected that they could finish each other’s sentences, just like all the fictional twins in the movies and books they grew up loving. But Mindy couldn’t think of a single time she really knew what her sister was thinking or vice versa.

Marcia had a very docile temperament and seemed more than happy to spend her life going along to get along. She liked everyone, enjoyed all of her classes, never argued with their parents, and was totally on board with the idea of being a doctor like their father one day, just as their parents wanted for them.

Mindy, on the other hand, was realizing that she had many questions about life, not to mention feelings about a lot of things that often differed wildly from those of her sister or her parents.

For instance, why did she have to be a doctor? What about all the other wonderful, well-paying, very commendable professions a person could go into? And why did she have to like everything about school or about the way her life was set up? Because she didn’t particularly enjoy gym, math, or chemistry as far as her classes went, but she loved art, English, and creative writing.

She did like to read, though, while no one else she knew really did.

And she didn’t understand what was so great about being popular or why it was so important to her entire family to be well-liked by literally everyone. Because Mindy was realizing she just plain didn’t like certain people. She found some folks to be insipid, ignorant, or just plain boring, and she really didn’t understand why that was such a bad thing.

Mindy also had questions about Happydale and why things there didn’t seem to be the same way they were in the books she read. In books, things didn’t go people’s way sometimes.

People questioned things. They questioned other people. They questioned themselves. And then they evolved based on what they learned from that questioning process, from trying different approaches, and especially from falling down a couple of times along the way.

Mindy didn’t know anyone else who did those things, except for her. And anytime she’d ever tried to bring some of these thoughts she had up for discussion – with her parents, with her teachers – they seemed incredibly confused, as if she had just suddenly started speaking some foreign language they didn’t understand.

Sometimes she felt crazy. She knew there was something else to this world she lived in, perhaps even something lurking behind the glossy façade of Happydale and all the people who lived there. But it also struck her as decidedly odd that no one else seemed to sense it.

How could she be the only one and still be sane?

*

Baz’s eighteen eyes squinted skeptically at the holographic screen that displayed all the data on Happydale at a glance for his omniscient convenience. He tapped the touch-sensitive display in a couple of places with one of his ten tentacles to dig deeper into specific aspects of the information available to him.

His species had created numerous controlled environments for the observation and safekeeping of the humans they cultivated for the convenience of their society. After all, humans were so useful. They were an excellent source of nutrients and energy, not to mention fascinating to observe or even to keep as pets.

But their intelligence and capacity for reason made humans an incredibly difficult species to contain, control, and manage sustainably on an ongoing basis. In most cases, it was best to keep them suspended in an entirely false reality that was like a highly idealized version of the now-defunct blue planet they used to inhabit.

Without challenges or worries, most humans were happy to simply march through their lives without ever asking a single question or yearning for a single thing they didn’t already have. But every once in a while, there’d be a specimen that proved unexpectedly problematic.

Take Specimen 987, for instance, the being Baz and his team had dubbed Mindy. She’d always been a bit of an anomaly compared to the rest of her otherwise model family. But now that she was maturing, she was quickly showing warning signs that she would eventually reject her programming and the false reality of Happydale.

Baz knew his supervisors were not going to like this. Human beings were intelligent, but they were followers, too. So even one human who thought differently – acted differently – could influence others. And if experience had taught him anything, it’s that ideas were a cancer that could quickly spread until it had infected entire communities.

And once that happened, there wasn’t much to be done save for total extermination. But humans were expensive to raise and breed, so that was something to be avoided at all costs. Thankfully, Baz already had an idea. It had worked before, and he was pretty sure it would work this time, too.

*

If Mindy had been wondering whether she was crazy before, she was nearly certain of it now that the nightmares had started. They’d come out of nowhere – horrible, tactile nightmares about groups of massive, tentacled creatures with countless eyes that glistened like black drops of crude oil on the pavement.

In the dreams, she was always strapped to a table in a stark, white room that looked completely unlike anything she had ever seen before in real life. And the creatures were performing what felt like tests, poking and prodding, injecting her with substances that paralyzed her and made her drift in and out of consciousness.

But the dream last night had been particularly strange and disturbingly realistic. One of the creatures had actually implanted something in her brain at one point, and she had woken up feeling completely different, calmer, more at peace with herself than she’d felt for a long time.

In fact, the dream had felt so real that Mindy actually plunged the fingers of her right hand into her blonde hair and felt her scalp at the spot where the strange implant had supposedly been placed in her head. She half expected to feel a bald patch, a scar, or a sore spot that felt different from the rest of her head. But there was nothing.

“I really must be insane,” Mindy said to herself, shaking her head and chuckling in relief at the absence of any evidence that aliens really had been putting things into her head.

And with that, Mindy got dressed and cheerfully went downstairs to breakfast. She felt great for the first time in a long time, if she was being honest with herself. She even realized she was looking forward to gym class for… well… the first time ever. Amazing what a good night’s sleep could do for someone, nightmares or not.