“Damn,” she said, faking disappointment, “and here I thought I could fool you in to thinking I can actually do it. Read what you’re thinking, I mean.”
“You still might,” he smiled back. “Can you tell me where I can find Doctor Boeree?” The question was unnecessary, but that didn’t stop him from asking.
“You’re the Proxy, aren’t you?” she said, her eyes sparkling as if star–struck.
“And if I am?”
“Then you wouldn’t have to ask that question,” she grinned. “If the stories about you are true, that is.”
“I get distracted in here,” he said, which wasn’t far from the truth. For inside the room, everything he had seen before appeared even more pronounced, as if every particle strived towards an even greater amount of disorder than usual.
“I can understand that, actually,” the woman nodded. “Let’s go outside then… to, um, talk. I’m Leah Boeree, by the way.”
CHAPTER 13
Your Mind Is A Vibrational Conduit
They strolled to one of the extended balconies reaching out from the edge of the platform–deck. Leah approached the circular table in the middle and waved a hand over the square device built into it. A stasis field surrounded them. The nanites composing it took on colors and formed an image, easily fooling their brains into thinking they were encompassed by a lush green meadow. Something appeared wrong with the image, however, the clouds never moved. The sky over their heads ended with the view of the upper decks and the pylon above them.
“I never liked the default setting,” Leah admitted.
“I prefer the beach myself, preferably somewhere in the Mediterranean,” Max nodded.
“Sounds nice, actually,” Leah smiled, “any locations in mind?”
Max waved his own hand over the device. It read his wishes and the image around him flickered as if turning a channel on a television. The landscape immediately shifted its view to a beautiful beach. Waves rolled against the sandy shore with soundless continuity and foamed against the rocks not half a kilometer to their right. Seagulls sailed the clear skies, but they too made no sound. The pine trees waved and gently flailed about behind them. A distant part of a peninsula could be seen ahead, milky and distant. The visually warm breaths of the sun engulfed everything, its silver gaze reflected on the calm sea.
“Now if we could only smell and hear this place,” Leah said, drawing an intake of air through her nose, trying to picture the smells in her mind. The feat proved next to impossible, and just like Max, all she got was a nose–full of cleanerbot leftovers.
“I used to live in a place like this,” Max said, “Although slightly more crowded than what you see here.”
“I can imagine,” she nodded, “was it what you’d hoped it would be when you got there?”
“It rarely is. But yes, for a time, it was.”
The color of her hair had changed to light brown in the whiteness of the spire’s light and concealed the sides of her face. Her features were pleasant and seem to give the impression that she smiled a lot. Her yellow eyes defied the laws of pleasantness. A knife couldn’t hope to be as piercing as her eyes. Her smooth eyebrows made his look even darker, shaggier. She had a way of talking which made him want to listen. “I wish I could go to a place like this one day,” she said. “Without all the people.”
“You never been to the ocean?”
“No, but I get to see it from above every day,” she said. “Does that count?”
“I’m not sure it does.”
She sighed. “Yea, I suppose it doesn’t. I just want to experience the calmness and serenity of this for a while, you know? But I’m stuck here, not that I mind it much. I guess my research is why you’re here?”
“Indeed it is,” Max nodded, still mesmerized by the strands of good intent permeating out of her skull in waves of pleasantry. Light yellows, greens and blues coalesced to become one, yet still, somehow, each color managed to remain separate as it touched his face and produced emotions he craved to feel but would not admit it ever since his wife departed. He swallowed a gulp of emotional debris, as though her words had produced a slumping glacier of remembrance, the deluge of which had caught in his throat. “But I must know,” he continued, “what is it that you do here, exactly?”
Leah’s eyes lit up. Max noticed an immediate change in her mood. He remembered the last time he had seen eyes spark up such. It was when someone would ask his wife about her children. It become clear this woman valued her work beyond anything else she possessed.
“It’s all about radiation,” she grinned.
Max noticed they were both still standing for some reason. He pulled out a chair. The seat swayed as it floated. He said, “Have a seat, explain it all to me.”
The mag–couch produced a warble, like a charging electric coil, then quieted as it settled under Leah’s meager weight. Max sat down as well, opposite to her, resting his elbows on the mag–seat and looked into her eyes. “You were saying?”
She smiled again, the sight of it trumping any view of an ocean or green vista the nanites around him could hope to conjure up. Despite himself, he smiled as well.
Leah slumped back in her chair. “In the past,” she began, “we, and by ‘we’ I mean they, have not done much research when it comes to radiation. Well, that’s not necessarily true, but in my opinion, they have not done the right research.”
“In what regard?”
“To a lack of any real instruments for measuring the effects of radiation on the human mind, and more precisely the effects it can produce with conjuncture with consciousness, we always believed radiation is nothing but bad. It basically ruins molecules and transforms the way they are structured upon the fabric of reality itself. In a way, it disrupts molecular bonds, knocks atoms out of the whole structure and what have you, and that holds true for most forms of radiation. But imagine that string theory is true, and that each sub–atomic particle is actually a vibrating and oscillating string. Now imagine radiation as a set of strings that vibrate differently than the string they hit and voila, radiation ruins the symphony. It screws it up.”
“But thanks to advancements in technology, we have been able to discover an altogether more subtle effect. An effect some forms of radiation produce in the brain. For instance, it was believed only thick layers of lead could stop radiation from spreading out, and to some degree that is totally correct, yet beta radiation can be stopped by a bundle of molecules no thicker than your skin. Yet it’s this beta radiation which produces the most subtle effects of all, you see, simply because it’s so weak, we don’t even notice what part of it doesn’t get bounced of the skin.”
“Intriguing. What effects does it produce in conjuncture with the brain?”
“If, for instance, very small amounts of it can be projected onto specific spots of the brain, specifically the regions that produce and compile images, the effects would conjure any image desired by whoever did the projecting, provided of course that that person knew what they were doing. Potentially, it came make anyone believe with absolute certainty that what they are seeing, or had seen, was real, while the actual image was brought to life by a series of small vibrations correlating directly with the brain’s natural beta frequency. Which, as you might know, is the normal state of awareness when not asleep.”
Max was astounded. The idea of producing images the eyes do not see but the brain does wasn’t what fascinated him at all, people have been using such technology for years in almost all aspects of computing and entertainment which involved a visual interface. But for the task to be successful, one needed some sort of a device to interface with the brain in a specific way. With what Leah had described, a person wouldn’t even know they were being afflicted by a mind–altering vibration.
A thought immediately sprung to mind, a connection between what he had just heard and what he was experiencing suddenly dawned on him.
“Would this have any other effects on the brain?” he asked.
> “The hypothesis hasn’t been tested out yet, at least not extensively,” Leah admitted, “but our initial experiments proved more than adequately that, given the proper means and funding, we couldn’t proceed in this direction and not discover something extraordinary. I mean, I’m sure it’s not hard for a person like you to imagine that there’s a deeper truth behind our material universe. One which in our current ways of thinking will forever remain hidden. I’m sure you’re aware of the mystics and holy men who, since times before we even knew of what the stars represented, were doing things and performing feats considered impossible by normal human standards.”
“I am aware of such things, yes,” Max nodded.
“It seems to me,” Leah continued, “that the very nature and the means by which we need to perform the tests required to see and observe this underlining fabric of interconnected possibility is impossible to achieve, since to do it we would need to use a material device in hopes of peering into the immaterial, what I call the universal consciousness. There’s an inherent paradox entwined in such a feat, I think, which prevents us from doing this. So instead when we try, we only find new particles or make them up in order to explain the intrinsic order which we manifest in our observations and require in our calculations.”
“True,” Max said. “You believe your research could somehow apply our own consciousness to the equation of finding and mapping the immaterial? But in this case, how would we know what’s a projection of our minds and what we hoped to find, and what’s actually there?”
“You and I both know science today is only as good as the apparatus witch which research and observation can be conducted. But we already have the most advanced apparatus. We already have all the ideas, science only helps us to actualize them, not necessarily perceive them as they truly are. The explanation is not the explained.”
“How does this relate to conjuring images in the brain?” Max asked.
“This is but the first step,” Leah said. “I believe my research has the capability of pushing the intrinsic oneness and interconnectivity of all things from the realm of mysticism and into the realm of science by proving that consciousness itself surrounds the brain, and in fact manifests it. In other words, we have discovered that there seems to be a subtle layer about all living brain tissue which can be influenced and in turn influence the brain and body. I know it’s a dried up word, but being trapped in a world where things need to be explained with words, and for lack of a better and more suiting terminology, an aura.”
“You can see it, can’t you?” The question erased the smile off her face and left her stammering for a moment.
She fumbled her first word before regaining confidence. “I,” she said, embarrassed still. “I believe so.”
Since Max had seen her, he had the feeling this was the case. He could often see her looking at something beyond and around him, as if she was seeing something others didn’t, perhaps even reading or somehow interpreting it. “How long?” he asked.
“Since I was a little,” she admitted. “I’ve always been reluctant to admit it. For a time I even thought everyone else could see this mist as well, until I discovered almost no one does. I know most people who claim they can them are considered crazy, or somehow ill, or even liars, hell, I can totally see how one would think that. But how can you explain that some of these people can simply know what is wrong with you by just looking at you, or know what mood you are in, or even where a cancer is growing. For instance, I know you have something wrong with your eyes, and that you are suffering from some kind of brain issue. I’m sorry to have said it if it upsets you. But how would I know that? This isn’t something I made up to make myself feel better. There are numerous instances of people like me all over history, some of them even catalogued and proven they can do what they claim. Yet the majority ignores this. To this day, I cannot understand this.”
“I have personally seen doctors,” she said, “I have seen psychiatrists, there is nothing physically wrong with me. I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this. I guess I figured you would understand after all the things I have heard.”
“You have no idea,” Max said.
“So you believe me?”
With those eyes, how could I not? “I see no reason not to.”
“So? What do you think?” Her question snapped Max back to reality, a place he felt exceedingly less comfortable in. Their eyes met. Almost lost in her gaze, her beautiful face, her smile, he found it hard to swallow. For years, he hadn’t felt this weak, this powerless to deny someone what they wanted, or to lie to them.
“I find your research to be engaging, to say the least. I’d like to see it for myself.”
Leah’s smile only widened. It was then that Max noticed her full checks were what made her smile so appealing. Each time her face turned into one of her wide grins, her eyes would narrow, and it was in moments like this he noticed her mixed heritage. He was certain all of the races of the world hid in that expression of hers. He suddenly saw a hologram behind her face, an image of her father looking down on something she had made while still very young. The man examined and smiled down on the contraption, baffled by it. Leah turned her thick–lensed goggles up at him and handed her father another pair. He put them on while she powered up the gun–like machine. It shot out a laser beam of neon blue and, by bouncing the ray of a set of mirrors, heated up the tea inside a glass cup she had placed at the edge of the table. Her father took a sip and said. “You’re a dangerous kid, you know that?”
“I am?” she asked, “Why?”
“Smart and beautiful, that’s why,” the father grinned.
“Are we to get more funding then?” she asked, oblivious to what Max had just seen. The question stopped his thoughts for a moment and erased the hologram. What made this woman believe I had come here for such a purpose in the first place?
“I..” he staggered, “I’ll need to see the research first hand, but the hour is late, would you not rather discuss it some more? Over dinner perhaps?” He had to stall somehow, he needed more time to actually contemplate the ramifications of this.
“Are you asking me out on a date?” she asked, a sly smile creeping over her face.
“If me admitting it is what’ll take for you to agree, then yes, I’m asking you on a date.”
She laughed.
CHAPTER 14
An Uninvited Guest
Leah had offered to choose the spot where they should dine at. Naturally, Max didn’t object, and would sooner strangle the Admin himself than deny her the opportunity. She had chosen a small restaurant, one of the three on the town–sized station. The place itself overlooked the main square, an area he and Bolt had met Zack – the main spot where new arrivals came and went by the means of portals.
He was astounded at how fast the wormholes came into practice.
“Awesome technology, isn’t it?” she asked, referring to the portal that had just popped up. “Takes a bit to get used to the sound it makes tho.”
“I’m not sure I like it yet,” Max admitted – the images of a place between places flashing in his mind.
“How come? Seems like a proper way to get around,” she said.
“It can lead to places that aren’t here, and yet are,” he said. “That’s about as much as I can say.”
With a puzzled look on her face, Leah said, almost demandingly, “You have to tell me more someday.”
“Someday,” he nodded.
The chairs outside the restaurant were wooden and the desks made of clean, white marble, complementing the colors of the station’s own surfaces. The diner reminded him of the cafes he had seen on his travels to France more than fifty years ago. A fiber–roof extended beyond the chairs and tables and the edge of it read “House”. The light around them was that of a spring day.
The Earth spun in its prescribed motion above, dragging the station around it like an impatient mother.
“You come here often?” It felt like such a boring thi
ng to say the moment he uttered it, and he almost felt bad for not having anything better to break the ice with after they had sat down. She picked up on his embarrassment and didn’t seem to mind it at all, in fact, Max could have sworn he sensed her thinking it was actually cute.
“Every day,” she nodded, “they serve the best seafood, in fact, it’s the only place that serves it. I thought you might like to smell and taste a bit of the ocean after seeing it.”
He smiled his own smile at the somewhat pervy thought that lid up in his mind.
“Sushi?” he asked.
“If you like, I was thinking perhaps some calamari.”
“Are you sure you don’t read minds?” he asked with a smile.
The thoughtfulness of Leah’s gesture made his previous question even more shameful to him. For a second, he didn’t know how to continue the conversation, as if words could only ruin the moment. Luckily, the chef himself came up to them after spotting Leah and smiled his own wide grin, which seemed to not only break the ice, but shatter it. She stood up and kissed the man on the cheek. The chef ‘mmmm’d’ as if he had just tasted the most delicious bite of food on a planet.
“Thank you for your kiss, my lady,” he grinned. Affection spread out of the man’s head in a wave of energy which seemed to further relax and disarm even Max. The man was a bit chubby to say the least, his chef’s apron smeared with gravy and sauces of all color as though he were using it to paint with. Max wouldn’t have called the man fat, at least not to his face, but it was clear the man enjoyed the delights of his own cooking perhaps a bit too often.
“I have a fresh batch of squid for you, Leah. It just arrived through not an hour ago,” he said, “Should I bring you and your esteemed friend here the usual?” The man seemed to know who Max was, but decided not to point out the obvious.
“Calamari then?” she asked Max.
“Yep,” Max agreed.
“Good, because you’re not getting anything else,” she said with a tone he couldn’t help but grin over.
“Certainly, my dear,” the chef bowed and walked back into the restaurant.