"Oh, by the way," said Kat through the car's speakers as the other girl tentatively got in the front passenger seat. "I don't think we told each other our names. I'm Kat. You?" The car started to seemingly drive itself, as the steering wheel and pedals moved on their own. The car moved with a precision unlike anything she had ever seen before, as if driving came just as naturally as moving her own body.

The woman was too busy processing what just happened to realize that Kat was expecting a response. "Hello, earth to...whatever your name is." Kat's voice was heard again. "Can you hear me? You okay? You seem kind of stunned for some reason."

"Oh, sorry, I'm Alyssa," she replied, in a tone that made it clear her mind was preoccupied with something much bigger. "But...what in the world...what...how did you do that?!?" asked Alyssa, in amazement and disbelief at what she had seen, and continued to see. "What is it you're doing?"

"What do you mean?" asked Kat's voice. "I'm just driving the car. You never seen someone drive this way before or something?"

"You just touched the dashboard...and got sucked into it--" Alyssa yelled, not in fear or anger but just confusion and shock, "--and now you're inside it, and controlling it!"

"Yeah, so? I just imprinted; haven't you done it?"

"Im...print...ed?"

"You know, when you merge yourself with something and become it. Everyone does it."

At this point Alyssa thought she must be on some kind of hidden camera show, with super high-tech special effects she didn't even know were possible. "Okay, you got me. What's going on here? This is a prank show, isn't it?"

"Seriously? What's wrong with you?" asked Kat's voice as she stopped the car. "You're acting like you've never imprinted or even heard of it before!" She emerged from the car, the surface of the driver's seat rippling as her body slid out and the car's color went back to normal. "This is completely new to you?" she asked, her hands in the air in a surprised gesture.

Alyssa's silence answered her question.

Kat sank back into the seat, the car's color changing once again, as the car resumed moving. Even after seeing her do it multiple times, Alyssa still couldn't help but stare slack-jawed, never having seen anything like it before.

"Wow. Okay. I'll show you more when we get to your house, all right?"

-----

Kat pulled into the driveway and emerged from the hood, sliding off onto her feet.

Alyssa walked into her house with Kat in tow. She sat down on her couch. "Nice place," said Kat, looking around.

"Okay, so let's start from the beginning," Alyssa said. "You touched my car, and your whole body was sucked into it."

"Yep, that's imprinting. You touch something and will yourself into it, and you basically become it. You're saying you've never done it or even seen it in your life?"

"And then you made the car drive itself, and you spoke to me through the radio."

"Well, it's not so much that I made the car drive itself, more that I was the car, so I moved it just like I move my human body," Kat explained. "And the stereo speakers were basically part of my body too, just like my vocal cords are now, so I could use them to talk to you."

"No wonder you were driving so well!" Alyssa exclaimed. "Seriously, I haven't even seen professionals who can drive that precisely."

"Really?" Kat asked quizzically. "What kinds of professionals have you seen? Wouldn't they drive just like I did? They probably wouldn't have a weird, human-body-controlled car like you have."

"You sure you're not putting me on? That's the only kind of car I've ever seen or heard of, and again, I've never even known that imprinting was a thing," replied Alyssa. "Well there's those new self-driving cars they're working on, but those are controlled by computers, not people with weird 'imprinting' abilities."

"Here, let me show you," said Kat. "Mind if I use this?" she asked as she sat at the table that held Alyssa's laptop.

"Sure thing," said Alyssa.

Kat opened Google and searched for "car photos", figuring it wouldn't be any harder than that to find a picture of the kind of car she was familiar with. That was, after all, the "normal" kind of car, and the only kind she had ever even heard of until recently. To her surprise, however, every single picture showed the same kind of car Alyssa had. "Wait, what?" Kat said as she opened Wikipedia and searched for "imprinting". She looked through the list of articles matching that term for the one about the ability that had been a normal thing her whole life. "Imprinting (psychology)"? No, that wasn't it. Organizational theory? Certainly not that. Genomic imprinting? Metabolic imprinting? Molecular imprinting? Those sounded more or less like the type of thing she was looking for, but their descriptions were all completely unrelated. And except for the last one, they were really a stretch anyway.

"Why can't I find anything?" Kat said, annoyed. It almost seemed like the town where she had found herself was like China or North Korea, where the government censored the Internet to keep people unaware of certain things they thought would threaten their power. But of all the things to censor, why this? It didn't make any sense.

"Hold on, let me take a closer look," said Kat as she placed her hand on the laptop, imprinting on it. As Kat vanished into it, like Alyssa's car, the laptop turned black, its lights and accents becoming the same shade of hot pink. The manufacturer's logo on the lid shimmered and was replaced by the logo from her black T-shirt, a stylized white cat face with black star-shaped eyes, and a pink polka-dot pattern appeared surrounding it.

Alyssa was, of course, amazed to see Kat do her trick once more. From all she had seen her whole life, it just didn't seem like something that was even remotely possible. But there it was, happening right before her eyes, and for the third time at that.

She had already made that quite clear to her new friend, however; she didn't need to say it again. "What are you doing in there?" was all Alyssa asked, as she watched windows rapidly open and close on the screen.

As expected, Kat spoke to Alyssa through the computer's speakers. "I just want to look through all these search results quicker," she said. "The keyboard's good for quick things, but if you really want to do anything serious, it's much better to connect with the computer on a personal level." She knew this wasn't what Kat meant, but Alyssa laughed as Kat's words gave her the idea of someone in a romantic relationship with their computer. Actually, hadn't she seen a movie about that a couple years ago?

"What's it like in there?" Alyssa asked. "And what can you do exactly?"

"Well, again, right now I basically am the computer," explained Kat's voice. "So everything on the computer I just know, because it's basically in my brain right now."

"Wait, everything?" asked Alyssa, blushing. She hadn't given Kat permission to go through her personal files, but in Kat's defense, it's not like she was specifically trying to. They just happened to be visible to her as a result of what she was doing.

"Yeah, probably should have asked you first," Kat apologized. "Sorry."

"It's fine," said Alyssa, relieved that Kat didn't seem to care about any of the more...personal stuff she had on her laptop. "But what else can you do in there?"

"As I said, the computer is me right now," Kat explained. "You know how you just know how to move your body, and you do it without having to think of how? It's just like that, only with everything the computer can do." Kat continued. "For instance, I have a screen I can show things on."

Alyssa saw a video of their earlier conversation appear on the screen, taken from Kat's perspective. "You recorded me?" she asked, not offended but curious as to why.

"Well, I guess you could kind of say that, but not with a video camera," Kat explained. "I'm showing you my memory of the conversation."

"That is so cool," said Alyssa in amazement. "What else can you do?"

"Well, I can carry out complicated things in my head a lot faster, and math is super easy for me right now," Kat said. "Plus I can remember a lot more at once."

"Makes sense," Alyssa said, wondering what it felt like to become another object and take on all its characteristics like that.

"Oh, watch this," Kat said. "I don't even have to be the whole computer itself." The laptop's colors went back to normal as Kat's personality left that part, and as Alyssa watched, an image of Kat gradually faded into view on the screen, sitting on the bottom edge of a window, her feet dangling beneath her. "Hi there!" She waved to Alyssa from inside the computer screen.

"That's just...incredible," said Alyssa. A smile appeared on her face as she thought of a possibility that hadn't occurred to her until then. "You've got to teach me how to do that myself."

"Well for all my life, it's just been a normal thing that everyone could do. It's not really something you had to learn, so I'd think you could easily learn it. Except..." Kat looked deep in thought as she remembered why she had entered the computer in the first place. "Hold on just a minute," said Kat as she jumped off the edge of the window, falling past the bottom of the screen as her personality entered the laptop's hardware once more, changing its design as before. Windows started opening and closing again as Alyssa saw earlier. Shortly after, the altered colors faded from the laptop as Kat's digital body once again appeared on the screen, walking in from the edge with one hand on her hip.

"This is very strange," said Kat. "As far as I can tell, it's like suddenly I'm the only person who's ever heard of imprinting, in the whole world. It's almost as if I somehow entered a parallel univ--" Kat stopped mid-sentence as the earlier events of the day came back to her. "Wait, did I...?"

"What?" asked Alyssa, concerned.

"Remember I told you I crashed my car?" asked Kat.

"Yeah, what about it?" said Alyssa.

"Here, this is what happened to me. I meant to tell you about it earlier, but since I'm here I might as well show you...just watch." Kat said as she snapped her fingers, subtly gesturing to her side as a window appeared displaying a video.

Alyssa watched as she saw what looked like a recording from the front of a car, taken close to the surface of the road. Suddenly, the flash of light occurred, and a tree seemed to appear out of nowhere. The perspective suddenly shifted to outside the vehicle, as it crashed into the tree. The car looked somewhat strange to Alyssa. It only had a single seat, presumably for a passenger, as no steering wheel or other driving controls were visible. This was clearly the type of car that Kat was used to.

When the video ended, Kat reached up and jumped, slamming her fist onto the window's close button. The window disappeared, and Kat leapt through the air toward the front of the screen. She jumped much higher than she could in her physical body, doing a mid-air flip, and emerged from the surface of the screen as it rippled. As she emerged from the screen, her body quickly grew to its normal size, as she landed cleanly in the chair she had been sitting in before she had become the computer. "Tada," she said with a smile, raising her arms.

"So what happened?" asked Alyssa.

"Couldn't you see?" replied Kat. "That flash of light must have somehow transported me to another dimension. Don't know how or why, and until now I didn't even know there were any other dimensions to travel to." Kat had a look of realization. "...And that's why my cell phone wouldn't work! The cell phone company in this dimension doesn't have any record of me, so my phone wasn't activated!"

"That's certainly a lot to take in," said Alyssa. "But you've shown me something even stranger than that, so it's not hard for me to believe. You certainly seem like you came from another dimension, the way you seem unfamiliar with this world. Then of course there's that awesome ability you showed me, that I've never seen anyone have in my life. Do people from your dimension have any other weird powers like that?"

"Well remember, to me it's not a 'weird power'; it's something perfectly normal," explained Kat, crossing her arms. "And until just now I thought that was the case here as well," she continued. "So if there is anything else I can do that people in your world can't, I wouldn't know it as such."

"Okay, well you can stay here with me until you find a way back home," said Alyssa. "I'll let you know if I see you do anything else that's strange to me."

"Thank you so much!" said Kat. "When I do find a way home though, I hope we'll still be able to visit each other when we want! You're a good friend."

"Aww, thanks!" said Alyssa, putting her arm around Kat and giving her a pat on the shoulder.

"And don't worry," said Kat, raising her index finger. "I'll try everything I can to let you do what I can do."

"You think I'll be able to?"

"I don't know, but I sure hope so," said Kat. "It's such a useful ability, and really I can't imagine how anyone could do without it. I'd hate for you, or anyone in this world for that matter, to miss out on it."

"Thank you so much!" said Alyssa. "I'd have so much fun with it too."

"Yeah, you certainly can," said Kat. "We'll do some more stuff tomorrow though; I really need to get some sleep."

"Okay, good night!" said Alyssa.

"Night," said Kat, as she lay down on the couch.

Alyssa walked to her bedroom, turning off the light for Kat on the way out.