Parallax (short story)
Parallax, subtitled A Jenny Nowhere story, was the second Jenny Everywhere short story created by Scott Sanford, in 2008. It introduced a version of Jenny Sanford would continue to use in later stories, as well as an attempted reimagining of Jenny Nowhere.
Contents
Plot
Jenny Everywhere has been drinking in a bar with some friends. When she begins to throw nauseus, her friend Kim helps her to the bathroom, where Kim is abruptly hit by a tranquiliser dart from a new arrival: a woman who looks exactly like Jenny Everywhere, clad in a tight leather outfit. She begins to mockingly excuse herself to Jenny for knocking Kim out when she realises that Kim is not in fact out, apparently being immune to the drug she used. The intruder shoots another dart at her, to no avail, and gives up in annoyance, also revealing that she was the one who messed with Jenny's beer. Kim lunges at the intruder, who insists that she is not here to hurt her or Jenny and shifts away.
In a split-second decision, Jenny Everywhere follows the intruder “through” the trail of gleaming energy left behind in the few seconds after she has begun teleporting away. With Jenny having taken Kim along, they find themselves in a brick-walled alley where they corner the intruder again. With Jenny and Kim needling her about her identity, how she knows how to shift and how she knows so much about Jenny Everywhere, she reveals that she used to be an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere herself, until she suffered a freak, one-in-a-billion brain injury which cut off her connection to the Jenny Everywhere psychic network completely, even on a subconscious level. Finding herself an individual, commensurate being for the first time in her life, with a free will that was truly her own, she renamed herself Jenny Nowhere.
With Kim realising that “Nowhere” can replicate the accident artificially and is trying to “liberate” this Jenny, the two shifts begin a shift-chase across dangerous landscapes, where Kim's own special abilities (including levitation) allow Everywhere to keep one step ahead of the “lone Jenny”. However, Nowhere finally checkmates Everywhere by shifting to the middle of the desert near Giza at high noon; Kim cannot bear the sunlight for long, and Everywhere is forced to shift her to safety instead of continuing to chase Nowhere. They find themselves in a tropical jungle where the shade allows Kim to recuperate. Before long, they make the startling discovery that Nowhere followed her there — only to be killed by a dinosaur. Examining the body, Kim discovers that the scar over Nowhere's left ear looked surgical, meaning she was not actually the first, accidental Jenny Nowhere, and the original may have created an unknown number of other Nowheres elsewhere in the Multiverse.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- The Jenny featured in this story looks “maybe Chinese, maybe Native American, maybe not”, with hair which “is short and needs professional attention”. She wears the requisite scarf and goggles, as well as a long coat.
- Jenny Nowhere describes Jenny Everywhere as “an infinite hyper-dimensional entity”.
Jenny Nowhere
- Jenny Nowhere appears as an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere identical to the story's main Jenny, but wearing tight leather clothing instead of the scarf and goggles. It is revealed that the “original” Jenny Nowhere was a Jenny who gained individuality after she was cut off from the Jenny psychic network by a freak accident. She adopted a new name and set about “freeing” other incarnations of Jenny, each in turn becoming a new Jenny Nowhere.
Universes
- The story begins in a largely mundane universe, in an intentionally unnamed city. Kim and the two Jennies then shift to a number of locations, although it is not clear if they are simply travelling in space and time, or changing universe every time.
Other
- Kim displays some knowledge of anatomy, analysing Nowhere's surgery scar as “suggesting brain modification near Broca’s area”.
Continuity
- This story's Jenny went on to become the “default” Jenny of Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories. In his multi-part serial PROSE: Paying It Forward, Cha Ni specifically reminded Jenny of her first confrontation with “her mirror self”. Jenny would also recall her encounter with Nowhere in PROSE: Return of the Puritan Streaker.
- This Jenny also mentioned her encounter with Nowhere in PROSE: So You're Jenny Everywhere.
Behind the scenes
Background
When republishing the story on Dreamwidth in 2021, Scott Sanford appended some commentary looking back at the story:
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Parallax was my second Jenny Everywhere story and the one where I was beginning to get a grip on the kind of Jenny Everywhere I wanted to write about. (No, not ‘drunk and nauseous,’ thank you.) She’s got friends and an unspecified home environment; presumably this Jenny has a whole entourage of supporting characters, though most of them don’t get screen time in this episode. I was ambitious with this one and even if not everything works I think the experiment was on the whole a good one. Riffing off of the last panel of Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, I got to asking the obvious questions it raised. Who is Jenny Nowhere? What does she want, and what relationship does she have to Jenny Everywhere? (At the time, this was all I had to work with; there was an entry in the FAQ but I hadn’t seen the character used elsewhere.) In retrospect I like the explanation I came up with. This Jenny Nowhere is not a cartoon villain or cardboard enemy – she’s an antagonist because she has a validly held belief that clashes horribly with that of our protagonist. Hence the title Parallax... It was also a lot of fun having the different personalities of Everywhere, Nowhere, and Kim bounce off of each other. What’s the deal with Kim anyway? Nobody asked how she levitates. And while we’re on the subject, what about Jenny’s other friends? She came out with at least three other people, none of whom get named – what’s up with them? We leave them in the first scene and never get back to them. Was Jenny just freakishly lucky again or would things have gone pear shaped for Nowhere whoever had taken Jenny to the restroom? Nowhere did say, “I should have expected anyone Jenny Everywhere hung out with would be special. I remember that from when I was Everywhere.” |
| —Scott Sanford |
The implications in Parallax point to Kim being some form of vampire, but this is purposefully left ambiguous. On the topic of Kim's potential vampirism, Sanford later commented on the Jenny Everywhere Discord:
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And yet she never says the V word. No doubt there's a story there. [But] I think Kim is over-exposed in Jenny's circle of friends and shouldn't be front & center in anything else for a while. |
| —Scott Sanford |
Read online
The story is available both on Sanford's original Jenny Everywhere Google Site and on the author's Dreamwidth website. There, it was given some Author's Commentary.
