Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (8 page)

Evening, and the prisoner, so cunning, thought Jimmy, a man rich in talents and knowledge, once a powerful and secretive force upon the earth, slept. Not long afterward, the lights in the cell automatically switched off. Jimmy, who had learned some tricks from the manual—an unmarked binder stuffed in one of the wall cabinets— switched on the night vision, rendering everything in the next room a grainy green.

He zoomed in on the prisoner's back, the man having settled securely into the mattress. For all his cleverness and capabilities, his mind at rest would be defenseless.

The space between them, Jimmy's cautious construct, welcomed Jimmy back. He stood before the screen, hands splayed in open air, eyes shut. He felt forward along the gray passage.

At some point, he became aware of his hands at his sides, his head slumped down. More tired than he had realized, he must have fallen asleep. That would not do.

In the dark room, he banged his hip against the long table when he turned for bed. Yes, he was too tired to properly do his job.

Twice that night, he awoke startled from dreams.

Mouth stuffed with dirt, he twisted through the earth. He felt no panic, though unaware that he was dreaming. This would be his life from now on. There should have been no light, yet his eyes could see the solid rock parting for him as he shifted. He knew he wasn't alone. Others were coming.

He woke with a gummy tongue, tasting bitter stone. He remembered putting a rock in his mouth as a child, hiding a piece of mica from a friend's collection, then spitting it back out.

The second dream—and this he knew to be a dream—placed him in the old man's cell. Seated on a chair, arms bound behind him, perhaps by chains, he stared at the yellow wall, knowing he was watched from the other side—not only by Methusaleh himself, but by a crowd. Obscurely, he saw them, smoky images beyond the barrier, tier upon tier of silent witnesses. How ashamed he felt. He cried in an unaccustomed way, mouth severely downturned, cheeks sore from salt. When he woke, he touched his face and found it dry.

He swore aloud. Above the door hung an old-style analog clock, its white face faintly lambent. Three in the morning. He needed more sleep.

He dreamed and did not wake, turned in his sleep, then dreamed again.

Morning came obscurely, Jimmy waking in the dark, uncertain where he was. Even after he sat up, saw the outline of objects by the clock's spectral glow, and determined his whereabouts, he felt bereft of a context. Not waiting to come fully to himself, he left the room for the bathroom in his quarters.

Splashing water on his face, he remained unresolved, as if he'd not completely solidified from some half-immaterial state. He glanced into his own eyes. He sensed that, prior to waking, he had glancingly seen some insight just before it vanished around a corner. It left him unable to meet his own eyes. Looking aside, he brushed his teeth, washclothed his pits and privates, then left the bathroom to change into fresh clothes, all still stuffed in his duffel, his final tan shirt wrinkled. He frowned at the shirt, but put it on, eager to get back to the passageway. An answer would be waiting there.

No matter the physical position he assumed, the prisoner appeared, shortly after every meal, to nap. After breakfast, cross-legged, he sat facing away from Jimmy. Now relatively adept with the technology, Jimmy placed his palm on the screen, waited till a green image of his palm glowed beneath his hand, then dragged his hand to spin the image, stopping when he reached the view from the opposite side of the room. Shuteyed, the prisoner's head dipped lower with each moment. Now was the time to work with him. Unhurried, Jimmy pulled the wheeled chair before the screen.

The passageway pulsed with his heartbeat. Each beat moved him closer to the man at the other end. He saw him at rest, chin on chest.
I know you,
he told that still figure.
Your secrets require your silence. Your silence is your integrity. I understand.

You want to do what's right.

The head came up. Small lights appeared in the face: the wetness of the man's eyes. They returned Jimmy's gaze, and it made him halt. He felt the words slip from his mouth and hands and clatter along the passageway like dropped tools.

Jimmy blinked. There sat the prisoner, head down, unchanged.

Jimmy struggled to move his tongue. Desperately thirsty, he drank all of one water bottle, wishing he had ice, feeling the start of a headache.

Seeing himself as if from behind, he thought,
You are patient and open. You listen before you judge. You want only to help.

He had, it seemed, failed to control his imagination and, again, slipped. He would note this failure, reflect on it, rest, and, in the afternoon, try again
.

Lt. Col. Oblonski oversaw the program for "sensitives." Though a military man, he seemed to Jimmy like the sort who, when he left the service, would never look back. Built of sudden gestures, quick pivots on his heel, and abrupt shifts in volume, Oblonski gave the impression of an ill-contained elemental force. Not the type of soldier to be in charge of a unit—but it was understood that these were desperate times, that the lines had been redrawn, that the enemy was less visible than ever.

They assembled each day in a large shed beyond the base's airfield. All that long winter, this meant humping through thick snow beyond all cleared walkways. Space heaters, their power cords snaking every which way, cluttered the classroom and training rooms like puzzled witnesses. The desks might have been a practical joke, relics from forty years back, each with the wooden top that swung up from beside the nubbly, colorful plastic chair. Discards from decent schools. Most of the team said the symbolism was intentional, that all of them, despite what they'd been told, were castoffs, removed to a marginal space, ignored by the rest of the base.

Oblonski passed around an article on "spooky action at a distance." The piece was written for a general audience, making even the wilder speculations of physicists appear within everyone's mental grasp. Jimmy took away from it that paired particles could influence each other no matter their separation across time or space. It made him think of twins. And since time was only another dimension, it made him think, too, of whether your future self might tug you in its direction, ensuring your destiny.

"You see?" said Oblonski. "The universe is wired this way. Quantum entanglement. Everything's connected."

Lt. Connors, at around forty the oldest woman in the group, said, "Are you suggesting that our 'special abilities,' " she threw up lazy air quotes, "are operating at the
quantum
level?"

"Isn't everything we do operating at the quantum level? Aren't we all just quantum events, circumstances, and accidents at the most minute level all operating together to make a unified being?" When Oblonski got worked up, as he often did, he walked among them and got in their faces. "How do so many disparate cells and chemicals and pathways operate together? Our consciousness creates probabilities out of nothingness. Across numerous unseen dimensions that fold regular space! This," he shouted, slapping his palms to his chest, "is all on the surface. Everything important is going on underneath, deep down,
deep
down. We can't grasp it. But we think you can
do
it."

Connors lifted her head to nod but didn't complete the gesture, evidently concluding, as Jimmy had, that Oblonski hadn't quite made sense. And for all this talk of physics, Jimmy wondered if Connors thought of it, as he did, mystically. But she kept to herself, so they never discussed it.

Taped outside the training rooms, a computer printout in fat letters, centered on a sideways sheet of paper, read ONLY CONNECT. The quote was attributed to E.M. Forster.

"Who's E.M. Forster?" Connors asked, so disdainfully it sounded as though she thought the name was made up.

"British writer," said Oblonski's sergeant major, tugging one unkempt gray eyebrow. "Early twentieth century. Homosexual." They all contemplated the sign as if it went on for paragraphs or required multiple rereadings.

"I doubt this is what he had in mind," Jimmy said.

"Who knows?" the sergeant said. "He wrote some strange things. Writers think wild thoughts. Don't they?"

History, averred Oblonski, provided clarity. He meant to instill in them a commitment to a world made safe through more virtuous methods, methods that required an understanding of another person rather than animosity toward another person. The Inquisition used torture to ruin the body as a way to free the soul, but people would say anything to please their captors and end the pain. The Russians had tried operations that stripped emotion, pain, and will from humans, resulting in self-destructive beings incapable of human reason and self-control. The Chinese process of confession and reeducation created docile citizens no longer able to separate what they said from what they truly believed. In typical American interrogation and psyops techniques, interrogators peeled back a subject's defenses the way you stripped old wallpaper, the destination reached only once every protective surface encountered lay in heaped shreds at your feet. Only the data was important, never the person providing it.

Oblonski assured his unit that their endeavors would be regarded by future generations as humane, nothing like what had come before. They would achieve their aims through understanding—and by helping their subjects find the right path.

Perhaps, Oblonski allowed, the procedure violated the subject's privacy rights. Before such an argument could be made, however, it had to be proven that such a violation had even occurred—and so far, the procedure had drilled in empty wells.

Oblonski proclaimed that the perfect, "clean" scenario afforded no view of the subject, only the knowledge that another human was on the other side of a wall, but even he had to admit that the procedure didn't seem to work that way. "Remote viewing" might have kept the Soviets busy for decades but had never produced credible intelligence.

Comfortably seated in otherwise blank rooms, they practiced constructing conduits between themselves and a subject, usually an enlisted man who was told he was needed for a sleep study; this could be one-to-one or several-to-one, with either multiple sensitives targeting one person or one sensitive aiming to pick up something from a roomful of people. Sometimes two sensitives would try on each other, awake and aware, maximizing the possibilities just so they could see what a successful contact was like. Convinced that relaxation was crucial, Oblonski encouraged them to offer no resistance, to be open to one another, easing the way for the minds to interact. The room stank with the sweat of their rigor. Oblonski complained about it, told them to avoid tensing the muscles. Jimmy's jaws ached after every attempt.

The level of success between each other was about what they had with the volunteers: glimmers, suspicions, a tickle, an impression. Twice during their training, Jimmy thought he had something more.

They labored like people given the task of dismantling and reassembling a mechanism from another planet, with no clear sense of what tools they might need or which, among the ones they already possessed, might prove to be of use. Oblonski came up with the "alien mechanism" analogy; he additionally compared their task to that of a newborn human learning to make sense of language and sight.

"Problem being," he said, "that we evolved to do those tasks. Have humans evolved to tackle this one? You're going to tell us." Oblonski encouraged his charges, gave them ways to think about themselves and their gifts; however, though himself gifted in ways he alluded to but never discussed, he clearly had no experience treading into this particular and subtle territory.

In the end, Jimmy was among the subset of four trainees who could at least claim that they had "connected." This dispirited group met for one final talk with Oblonski, who, more remote than usual, still insistent but now solemn, stood behind the black, laboratory-style table at the front of his classroom.

"And keep this in mind," he had said in conclusion, leaning both elbows on the table, lowering his head till it nearly touched the surface, then extending his neck beyond the edge, as if he wanted to force this vital truth upon them. "The problem with any tunnel is, it
goes... both... ways".

The scent of ionized air drew him outdoors. Jimmy paced the blacktop by the car pool to see the source of the thunder. Cooler air, something in the sixties, blew at him from across the unthinkably blank stretch to the southeast. It would rain soon. Clouds as lightless as the ocean tumbled above Camp Perilous and out to the horizon. Thunder murmured, coughed, crashed. Fat drops struck the tarvia. Reluctantly, drawn to the inclement weather but not wanting to be caught in the open by lightning, Jimmy stepped backward to the door. The fresh air had felt good, and it felt good, too, to be exposed to some change in the weather, some direct indication that the world kept going in its varied ways outside the base, natural processes had not been completely displaced by clocks and video screens, and the world was not divisible into corridors and cells.

Refreshed, focused, intent, he strode the hallways as though they led directly to his passageway. The putty-colored walls seemed products of his imagination. The approach to his door grew narrow. Peripheral sight fell away. Within his diminished vision, his hand rose from a blank place to grasp the door's lever.

What happened next, he observed as if watching a film from a comfortable seat. Though mildly surprised by his actions, he felt assured of their rightness. It was not, he later told his questioners, as if he were watching the behavior of a stranger. It was as if, instead, he finally saw his true self.

The explosion was followed by a single snap as the hotel window broke, not collapsing, cracked but sustained, and Jimmy propelled himself up and forward so he half-fell off the foot of the bed. Already dressed, he was the first one in the courtyard, but others came foggily and slippered from other doors just after him. He saw light in the air above the downtown and realized he was seeing a fire one street over. The next explosion, only a block away, also along the town's Bavarian-style main strip, all the wakened people saw. The swelling bloom of sound struck the little group and surrounded them. Jimmy felt sweat spread in dots across his back. Then he said aloud, ordering himself, "Move," already moving, while most others, half-dressed, retreated to their rooms.