Left-Handed Tuesday

"Left-Handed Tuesday" is included as prelude No. 12 in *The Juno Contingency (novel).*

## Teaser

A secluded rural town deals with a natural disaster that impossibly severs all contact with the outside world and leads to bizarre occurrences.

## Plot

### 1. Bloody Sunday

Lacey Corrigan is a high school senior in her hometown of Harrah, Washington, a small village in the Pacific northwest. She and her boyfriend, fellow senior Chalmer, are out stargazing when Lacey brings up college again and how she's applying to the University of Washington to study physics. She wants Chalmer to come with her, but Chalmer wants to stay in Harrah, saying they have everything they need here. Lacey insists she wants to see the world, but Chalmer just points at his new Starlink internet dish and says that the world has already come to them. Lacey is frustrated that she is making no headway in this old argument with Chalmer.

Lacey takes Chalmer home to dinner with her father, Sheriff Corrigan. She lectures Chalmer on his lack of ambition, and the Sheriff joins in, saying Lacey won't wait for Chalmer once she's met all the university boys.

They are interrupted when the Sheriff's office calls about a complaint against Preacher Tillis, the leader of a local millenarianist cult. The Sheriff has always suspected Tillis of aberrant behavior, and the office reports a runaway who escaped from his camp and is claiming abuse. The Sheriff is eager to arrest the Preacher but fears the strength of his cult, so he deputizes several townsfolk and heads out to arrest him. Lacey and Chalmer stow away in the back of the Sheriff's truck, as she has always disliked Tillis and wants to see his arrest.

At the millenarianist compound a tense standoff develops, with armed guards refusing entry to the Sheriff's posse. Preacher Tillis ultimately appears and instructs his cult to lay down their arms, invoking Christ-like imagery as he surrenders himself to "these Pharisees." The Sheriff's posse drives the Preacher back to the town jail. Lacey and Chalmer are eventually discovered, displeasing the Sheriff.

As the Preacher is being booked, a massive earthquake shakes the town, far longer and stronger than any in living memory. The power cuts out, so Lacey and Chalmer fire up the station's diesel generator while the Sheriff goes door to door doing wellness checks. After the power is restored, they find the town's phone lines and internet links are broken. Chalmer goes to get his Starlink dish to check on the earthquake's magnitude and contact emergency services. When he tries to use the terminal, however, it is unable to connect to any orbiting satellites. Chalmer is mystified how an earthquake could sever his link to space.

### 2. Left-Handed Tuesday

The next day the townsfolk gather to complain about the continued power outage. The Sheriff sends a deputy to the nearby town to raise help, but the man returns an hour later reporting that a huge rock slide has covered the western road out of Harrah. Chalmer and Lacey drive out and deploy a drone to survey the damage. They find it's not just a rock slide but an entire mountain that is suddenly blocking the way out of the village. On top of Starlink being offline, Chalmer chalks this up as another "impossibility" they have to rationalize.

Chalmer suggests they visit a hermit named Beardsley, who is known to have additional satellite communications equipment. They drive a dozen miles north to Beardsley's hut, crossing rough terrain. When they arrive, Beardsley at first greets them warmly from a distance but then pulls his shotgun and warns them off. Chalmer tries to approach but Beardsley fires warning shots and grazes him with buckshot. Lacey helps him retreat back to their car, then they see Beardsley jump into his own truck and drive madly away from town. After the incident, driving back to town, Lacey reflects that there is usually a strong scent of dill at Beardsley, but today it was suddenly all spearmint.

Lacey and Chalmer return to town where the Sheriff is dealing with mounting unrest among the townsfolk about the inability to contact the outside world. More people report strange instances of destruction in town apparently unconnected with the earthquake. Trucks full of armed cult members arrive and agitate for the Preacher to be released.

The Sheriff has Lacey and Chalmer stay barricaded with him in the jail that night to keep them all safe from the cult. Chalmer stays with her in her cell. The next morning they are woken by screaming, and they run outside to see people shrieking and pointing at the sun. The cloud cover of yesterday has partially lifted, allowing everyone to see that the sun is now rising in the west.

The townsfolk are stupefied by the reverse sunrise. From his cell, the Preacher starts paraphrasing the Quran as the Book of Revelations, declaiming:

> *"The Hour of Revelation shall come when the sun riseth in the West! Of those who witness this, all shall have faith, but nigh is the hour when faith shall be of no benefit!"*
>
>

His cult prostates themselves and demands the Sheriff release the Preacher so they may face the end of days. Instead the Sheriff returns to the jail and tries in vain to contact the state marshalls in the next county.

### 3. The Sinister Turn

While the police hold off the cult downstairs, Lacey and Chalmer go to the roof to try to reach the outside world with his Starlink dish. Chalmer takes readings of the network and finds that the satellites are indeed transmitting, but they're using the opposite circular polarization as his terminal expects. Lacey asks if there was an upgrade or firmware change to the network that he missed, but Chalmer is unaware. He tries to flip the hardware polarization in his dish but is unsuccessful.

Lacey suddenly stops Chalmer, saying she has a theory that explains everything: that the town has somehow been replaced with a mirror image of itself. That explains why the sun now seems to be rising in the west: the sun is actually still rising in the east, but since the town has been flipped left-to-right it appears as the east to them. That's also why the satellites—unaffected in space—are using the opposite polarization to Chalmer's terminal.

Chalmer asks how everything could still seem normal to them, as their orientation of left and right hasn't changed. Lacey explains that the universe would function almost exactly the same if it were parity-flipped, the only exception being certain exotic weak force interactions. Since their brains were flipped along with the universe, all their knowledge of language, shapes, and left and right have been flipped, as well, which is why they perceive no difference. Lacey suggests the parity inversion happened back when the earthquake cut the town's power. Chalmer suggests maybe this is why Beardsley fired at them: if the incident only affected the vicinity of the town but not Beardsley's hermitage, then he would have seen them and their car drive up as mirror images of themselves. The paranoid Beardsley might have imagined they were contaminated and wanted to protect himself, which is why he held them off with a gun and fled town. Lacey remembers that some scent molecules are stereoisomers of each other, meaning their smells would change under parity inversion—maybe that was why Beardsley's farm smelled completely different.

The sheriff's office is razed with automatic weapons fire as the Preacher's cult commences and all-out assault. Lacey and Chalmer don protective body armor while the outnumbered police force staves them off. Chalmer wants to help the police fight back, but the Sheriff orders him to keep Lacey safe instead. Several officers are injured, but the station holds.

Lacey imagines they could defuse the cult's frenzy if they can prove her theory. Chalmer wonders if they can have his Starlink dish send and receive signals through a mirror in order to reverse the polarization. It sounds stupid enough to Lacey that it might actually work. They set up an experiment in the station's bathroom upstairs, shielding the satellite dish all around with metal except for its view of the mirror. The signal is noisy but Chalmer is finally able to make a connection, confirming Lacey's theory that their polarity is flipped. Lacey tells her father about what's happened, but the Sheriff says he's more concerned about the cult's attack than he is with which way the sun is rising. He tells them to use their internet connection to call for help, but a random spray of gunfire into the station upstairs destroys the Starlink.

### 4. The Klein Bridge

Lacey realizes they have to find what is causing the inversion to shake it off and be able to reach the outside world again. She and Chalmer take some of the station's drones to the roof and fly them out in the cardinal directions, trying to find the bounds of the parity inversion area. They scout out a circular boundary of mismatched terrain and jagged cliffs surrounding the town in a fifteen-mile radius. Lacey realizes this whole spherical section of Earth was probably inverted, and the earthquake they felt was the result of the subterranean aquifers and seismic shifting this caused.

They find the center of the inversion area is six miles out of town and fly a drone there. It holds a large spherical craft surrounded by hundreds of glistening refractive bubbles. Lacey informs the Sheriff of their discovery, and she insists they investigate the source of the inversion. The Sheriff resists, but Lacey says they can't stay parity-flipped forever: amino acids on Earth are all left-handed, meaning they can't even eat food from outside of Harrah anymore. They may not even be able to receive blood transfusions or take normal medicine while their body chemistry is inverted.

The Sheriff ultimately agrees, as the station is close to folding anyway. They rig the Preacher up as a hostage/human shield in one of the department jeeps. The Sheriff, Chalmer, and Lacey make a break for it with the Preacher stowed in their car. The cult pursues, drawing them away from the police station in a high-speed chase. The Sheriff is able to shoot out the vehicles' tires and elude their pursuers. They take the long way around town to their target.

Approaching the unidentified craft, they see the refractive bubbles floating around it are each a few meters in diameter and show fisheye views of the valley from a myriad vantage points. Lacey throws a rock through one of the bubbles and sees it emerge from another bubble in the distance—then enter and emerge from several other bubbles at random angles before finally hitting the ground.

Lacey theorizes the bubbles are actually wormhole mouths crisscrossing spacetime around the craft. The Sheriff asks if it's a "Commie" machine, but Lacey says this might not even be human technology. It's hypothesized that an advanced civilization might use wormholes to fold space and travel without moving. Wormholes are usually modeled as direct passages, but if they were instead configured like Möbius strips—or Klein bottles in 3D—then objects would emerge from the other side of the wormhole with their parity flipped left-to-right. Chalmer suggests this craft—whether human or alien—might be stranded here because its foldspace drive is malfunctioning.

*Read the conclusion "5. Fisheye Vertigo" on Amazon.*