Chapter 15
Caleb changed out of the clothes that he had been wearing for the last two days. In preparation for whatever Yukio was going to have him do, Caleb tried to focus and concentrate his physical, human mind. While he stretched, he tried to come to grips with the “awakening” he had experienced. Coming out of the tank was one of the most confusing things he had ever gone through. One minute, he was still “inside” the giant Cray supercomputer. The next minute, he was alive inside of the weird, fleshy thing that now housed his mind and soul. All of his planning and calculations had come down to the point where the clear cylindrical tank drained. After climbing out, Caleb had fallen to the ground and vomited. Then, he cried. He had seen movie files when he was virtual, and he knew what crying looked like. It was weird to be on the inside of it though. The pain was the worst! Not the physical pain, though that was rather intense, it was the emotional pain. Up until that moment, he was just an artificial intelligence construct. He could process the emotion and calculate the outcomes and circumstances, but feeling it for the first time was absolute torture!
In the quiet lab, he had stumbled around like a newborn giraffe. The light from the bright florescent fixtures hurt his head, and everything was spinning like a whirlpool. Once he finally got his bearings, he was able to sit down and take stock of his surroundings and his new life.
After realizing that he was going to be okay, his thoughts immediately turned to Kelley. He was anxious to hold her for the first time. He wanted to use all of his new senses to experience her. She was truly the object of his affection, and perhaps infatuation. Caleb wanted to feel, smell, see, and hear her in the actual living world.
He had tirelessly researched white papers and lab files to compile his information for the transfer to a living, breathing human being. Now, he sat there trying to make his mind work.
Like some kind of new vision, he began to see waves of light and sound. Radio waves from every part of the spectrum filled his vision. He likened them to the Aurora Borealis lights. All of those swirling, mixing colors that spoke to him like their own private language.
In the quiet little bedroom, Caleb saw his new perspective unfold in front of him. All he could say was, “Wow!”
With Kelley fast asleep again, he took a bus to the college where Yukio lectured. He was so in tune, that he would be able to sense if anybody from Allied Biotech got off a plane or bus, or anything. He felt secure in leaving Kelley to catch up on her rest.
When he finally got off at the school, the sky had turned dusk blue. Only a few passing students and faculty were present. After roaming the unfamiliar hallways, he found Yukio standing in a large lecture hall. The chairs had been moved over to the corners of the room, leaving a large and open area. What did he have planned?
Caleb came in after removing his shoes. He gave Yukio a polite and informal bow.
“Ah Caleb! I have done some research into your possible abilities!” Yukio said with politely reserved excitement.
“We're not going to spar or anything, are we?” Caleb asked with a chuckle.
Yukio waved his hand dismissively and said, “No no, nothing like that. I want you to sit with me in the middle of the floor right here.” He beckoned Caleb to come and sit as he did.
Caleb was still a little confused as he sat cross-legged in the middle of the cavernous room. “So, what now?”
“I want you to tell me what you feel like. What are you feeling right this instant?” Yukio inquired.
“Um, I'm feeling a little confused.” Caleb said with a smirk.
“No! What emotions, what senses, what is your vision like?” Yukio probed.
“Well, before I came over here, my vision started doing this thing where I can see radio waves and..., stuff. Not only can I sense these like I did before, but I can see them. I can even wave my hand around in them like it's smoke. Does that make any sense?”
“Oh yes! I was studying this very subject this morning before my lecture. That is, until the school lost power.” He looked at Caleb, who tried his best to not look guilty!
“So, you know about it? What is it?” Caleb asked.
“You are seeing information in its physical form. All of those little swirls and colors, they are data being generated by the masses. You are the only one who can actually see them. Can you see them now?”
Caleb paused and said, “Yeah, I can! There's not as much of it here, but I can still see it.”
Yukio stood up and stretched his legs. “I want you to try and control it. Not just with your mind, but also with your hands. Think of it like Tai Chi. You are interacting with the energy of your environment.”
Caleb closed his eyes. He could still see the swirling colors even then. With an open hand, he waved around in it. The colors mixed and changed while they spun into individual tendrils and eddys. There was a loud noise as a nearby LCD monitor exploded. Caleb opened his eyes to see the fragmented plastic and electronics that now littered the floor.
“Wow! I didn't even try that time! Normally, I have to be really mad to make something happen.” He said in astonishment.
“Excellent!” Yukio was ecstatic. “You need to remember how this feels. This will help you to control your abilities better. If you become too angry, there is a chance that harm could come to you or others. You will need to be vigilant in your quest for self-discipline.”
Yukio began to pack up his things as Caleb stood there dumbfounded. “Can I offer you a ride back to my house? I'm sure Kelley is awake by now.” He offered to Caleb.
“Wait, isn't there gonna be some kind of training? I need to know how to unlock my full potential. I need to know how to control it once it is unlocked-”
Yukio held up his hand, “Caleb chan, you are the only one of your kind. You know more about this than anyone in the world. You will be teaching all of us!”
He could only muster a confused shrug while he followed Yukio to his car.
In the oily dark of Yokohama, Ivanna and her cohorts stepped out of a black limousine. There would be more people arriving soon. She would need as many people as she could get. Brookstone was sending a whole team of specialists to handle this job. They were already down three top level guys, and one combat chopper team, but they held their contract with Allied Bio in high regard. The thought of bending personnel to her will was pleasing, as always, to Ivanna. With the money they would get from selling Caleb and his technology to the highest bidder, she could buy a small country.
Boone stepped out of the limo and cracked his neck. Evan followed, and Charles stepped out while checking his phone.
“Hey, did you have your bank accounts drained too?” He asked Evan.
“What?” Evan responded. He was feeling both the jet lag, and the residual effects of the beating that Caleb had given him. “No, I got a truckload of lab quality insects dropped off at my house though. Not that it mattered anyway, the Ministry of Judicial Services already knocked down my door and seized everything of value.” He said with a sigh.
“Shut up you two!” Ivanna growled at them. She opened her compact and checked her eyeliner in the resulting silence.
“I had one of the engineers at Allied whip up something to keep Caleb at bay while we get him loaded up.” She reached into her attaché and pulled out a small box with a stubby antenna protruding from it. There was a small black knob on the side as well.
“What’s that?” Boone asked.
“This is a device that mimics every known bandwidth in the radio spectrum. Since our little Caleb uses these same signals to control everything, this should block his ability to do so.” She said with a little smile. Evan and Charlie were still a little creeped out by the powerful woman as they looked on at the device.
“Well, we should be rendezvousing with the rest of the crew soon. You can try out your little toy then.” Boone replied.
Caleb slept fitfully. He was a little crestfallen at the “training” session that he had gone through with Yukio. He was expectin
g meditation, philosophy, anything besides sitting in an empty room and blowing up a computer monitor with his mind. While he rode home with Yukio, he looked out the window at the darkness. While looking at the passing lights, he tried to feel more information. He could now cause street lights to randomly flicker and brighten, but what good would that do him?
Allied Biotech, and their army of private mercenaries, was going to be here anytime. Caleb knew that they would find him eventually. Since they traveled by private jet all the time, it was harder to track them in the system. While he slept at night, his active mind would wander and find new things to penetrate and access. The first night at Yukio's house, Caleb's mind found a nuclear power plant's control schematics at random. Now, the dark of night did nothing for him, and he decided to amble downstairs to look for coffee in the small kitchen.
As he quietly opened the cabinets, he could hear Kelley snoring upstairs. He marveled at the ability for such a petite woman to make so much noise! Yukio came around the corner in the dark little kitchen. He nearly scared Caleb half to death while he stumbled around in his kimono-style robe.
“Caleb! Can you not sleep?”
Standing in only his cargo pants, he continued to look around for any kind of coffee. “No, not at all. Do you have coffee here by any chance?” He asked.
Yukio mover around him to dig into the far recesses under the sink. “Here you go.” He said, offering a small glass container of instant coffee to Caleb.
Caleb looked at the instructions on the side of the container and shrugged. While he scooped an unusually large amount of the stuff into a cup, Yukio said something that chilled him to the bone.
“When the world finds out about you, someone will try to kill you.”
The little man's voice was calm and introspective, but Caleb was still shocked to be dealing with the subject of mortality so early into his new life as a human being. “I guess it's just the natural order of things.” He responded with a resigning shrug.
“True, but you will need to hide out for a while.” Yukio said.
“I know. I have a fund setup. Plus, I can access anything I need in the virtual world. It's just a matter of laying low until people calm down.” Caleb poured hot water from the sink into his cup. The resulting black sludge made him smile with anticipation as he listened to Yukio.
“You know as well as I do that mankind does not work that way. There will be religious zealots, governments, private corporations. They will all want to claim what you are.”
“I had hoped to change their mind, eventually.” Caleb offered in defense.
“You cannot fight the fears of the public. Once people find out that you were derived from digital information, they will panic. It will make them question everything they hold true about life and humanity.” Yukio said. He watched Caleb with a wary look while he took a rapturous sip of his dark concoction.
“I can only be who and what I am. My first order of business is to keep Kelley safe.”
“How can you do that? Just by being here in the real world, you are putting her at risk-”
They were interrupted by a crash from upstairs. Caleb stopped, and for the first time since he awoke, he noticed that he couldn't see the swirling colors.
Something was very wrong.
As he ran up the stairs, a man dressed all in black met him at the doorway. He shoved the barrel of a rifle right in his face. Caleb had no choice but to put his hands up. He looked over the man's shoulder to see Kelley kneeling on the floor with another man pointing a gun at her.
“Caleb, don't do anything! Please!” Her tear-stained face turned to him just enough so he could see the whites of her eyes in the dark room. The early light of morning was starting to fill the room. Caleb already knew that Ivanna and whatever other group of thugs she had amassed were somewhere close. All he could focus on was the look in her eyes. The same look when Evan assaulted her in the pool. He tried to control his anger. With the new focus he had, it was harder to prevent really bad things from happening.
All of his calculations were coming back bad. Anything he tried would get her killed. He just stood there and fumed. He tried to control his breathing, but it was only doing so much to tamp down his rage.
“Caleb chan! What-” Yukio was cut off by a loud crack that echoed throughout the ground floor.
A single gunshot from the man on the stairs had found its way to Yukio's chest. He crumpled to the floor in the stairway as a large red stain spread on his robe.
“Yukio!” Caleb lost all focus as he ran down to help his friend. Oblivious to the thugs, he reached down and cradled Yukio's body in his arms. The man who had taught him so much, who had tolerated every stupid question and celebrated all of his accomplishments as a budding human being, now lay dying in his arms.
He reached up to Caleb and pulled him close. Caleb listened to his friend as he used his last seconds to communicate one more thought.
“You have all the abilities you need... You will stumble into them like mud puddles first. Then, they will become like water from a tap. You will control that which you currently fear. Just remember to respect and love yourself. You are a human being Caleb, you always were. Even without a body...” Yukio's labored breathing stopped, and his eyes closed.
Caleb's eyes welled. He set Yukio's body down gently on the floor and stood upright. The colors were back, and swirling faster and brighter than they ever were before. He could hear his heart beating, just like he could see the data in front of him. Each beat of his heart made the fractal colors pulse like a stone being tossed into a pool of black, oily water.
The whole house began to shake and tremble. In the back of his mind, he heard the thugs arguing. Their voices carried absolute fear.
“Why did you shoot that guy!?” The one at the top of the stairs yelled. He had completely ignored Kelley as he tried to figure out what was going on.
“He moved! I didn't know what he was gonna do!” The man at the bottom snapped back. “What the fuck is happening!?”
In a fraction of a second, Caleb grabbed the gun from his assailant and held it in his hands. Were he in the assailant's shoes, he would have seen the look of rage in his own eyes. Caleb focused on the man with such intensity, he could see and feel the thug's blood pumping in his body. The man was in his early forties, he had the typical peppered gray hair of a man his age. Oddly, his heart was giving off little jolts of electricity. Caleb puzzled briefly over this until his came to a realization.
A pace maker!
“You know, those pace makers are notoriously insecure...” Caleb warned with a vicious smile.
The assailant looked at Caleb with stark fear while he grabbed and clutched at his chest. After falling to his knees, the man convulsed on the floor where Yukio's body lay.
“Right now, your heart rate is right around four hundred beats per minute. In about two minutes your heart will stop, but not before your own eyes start to bleed.” Caleb said to the man as he flopped around on the floor uncontrollably.