Seven Point Eight (56 page)

Her eyes widened.

“Please tell me that you’re gonna reveal all.”

“I think you’re going to find out,” he reassured her.

He posed the final question.

“Why do you want to join this project?”

She sat back in her chair, feeling more relaxed and confident.

“I wanna open my mind,” she responded, “nothing else to say really, my aim in life is to experiment, see everything there is to see, know everything there is to know, feel everything there is to feel. That’s my goal.”

Paul had already decided, Angelina had made the team.

Tyrone Simpson, Angelina’s Black American partner, sat in the interview seat next. His afro equalled hers, although he had a more mellow side to his personality. Tyrone gave almost identical answers to Angelina, and Paul soon realised he couldn’t have one without the other. It would be a pleasure to work with them.

He interviewed Nicholas Blair next, a tall man with fair, curly hair and piercing blue eyes. His reserved manner belied his eloquence, yet he seemed perceptive and knowledgeable. He’d given the presentation on the Lost Library of Alexandria.

On being asked if he’d ever taken hallucinogenic drugs or marijuana, he answered, “Once or twice, I wondered what I could learn from it.”

“And did you learn anything from it?”

“I’m not sure… I mean, I didn’t learn anything factual, I analysed the experience although it’s sometimes hard for my scientific brain to switch off. More than anything it opened my mind, made me aware that possibly there is something more to life.”

Another solid contender, Paul questioned him further.

“Would you take LSD again?”

Nicholas considered the question carefully.

“Maybe another type of hallucinogen, I want a different experience.”

When Paul queried his most profound moment, the answer took him by surprise.

“When I first read about the lost library of
Alexandria
, the idea of a vast collection of knowledge that has vanished forever… It inspired and saddened me at the same time. I always wonder what books it contained, what information…”

“And what are your reasons for wanting to join the project?”

“The potential for knowledge,” he answered. “I want to learn something few people will get the chance to experience.”

It seemed a reasonable motivation, and Paul decided he liked Nicholas, so he remained a strong contender.

Kevin Whitehouse, a balding man in his forties, failed to inspire Paul even though he’d travelled around the world. He appeared to be fascinated with the physical world, and had an anti-drugs stance, therefore didn’t seem open minded enough to withstand the very surreal nature of the journeys.

Samantha Thane impressed Paul in the psychometric testing but like Kevin, didn’t reflect the out-of-the-box thinking he sought.

However, Sonya Marsh warmed Paul’s heart with her musical appreciation. A petite woman with copper hair and freckles, she wanted to join the project as her experiences would hopefully inspire her to write beautiful music. Paul highlighted her as another strong contender.

Curtis Jacobs also managed to impress Paul. Although still an engineering student, he hoped to build a robot in the future. Averagely attractive, he had shoulder length brown hair and a slim build. Like many young people coming of age in the sixties, he’d dabbled with hallucinogenic drugs and rated it as his most profound experience to date. His reasons for joining the team were spiritual ones, inspired by his drug experiences. Paul wanted him on the project.

Jane Berry and Sally Harper had traditional concepts of the world around them, which left Dominique Benitez to potentially fill the last vacancy. Something about her reminded him of Tahra, although she had huge brown eyes instead, and the fiery intensity expected from a Spanish woman. However, she concealed a personal tragedy. It transpired she sought sanctuary from an abusive boyfriend and for that reason, he wanted to rule her out but Tahra stepped in.

“It will empower her, she’s a strong woman and she can take the demands of the project.”

“She’ll be a wild card,” Paul protested. “Although her psychometric tests were sound, I’m worried about her.”

“I’ll look after her,” Tahra insisted.

Out of the remaining available candidates, she seemed the better choice. Dominique therefore joined the team, along with Angelina, Tyrone, Nicholas, Sonya, and Curtis. Now he had a complete crew.

***

On the morning of September the 21
^st
1966, the autumn equinox, Tahra mentally prepared herself to begin guiding the residents of The Institute. She listened to the new Beatles L.P, ‘Revolver’, over a cup of tea and several slices of toast, wishing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a more cheerful tune. Shortly after, the six residents of The Institute arrived at the farmhouse ready to begin phase one of their involvement in the project. Oscar and George had already had a trip in the machine but the others hadn’t, so Paul decided to minimise their exposure while they orientated themselves.

Emilie, Sakie, Beth, and Peter had a brief out of body experience courtesy of the machine. They responded positively and Paul sent them for a medical with Dr. Harrow, who was contracted to Max’s facilities on a part-time basis.

During that time, the residents of The Institute enjoyed staying with Paul and Tahra. The residents quickly understood they were in a relationship, which Tahra felt a little uneasy about but they promised to keep it a secret. If anything, it felt good to be part of their lives again, since Tahra had been absent frequently and Paul had hardly seen them since 1962. They laughed and joked like old times, sharing good food and fine wine while discussing the project.

Before long, they received another orientation in the machine, had a medical, and all four confirmed they were ready for the next step. Tahra led two separate excursions into the serpent realm, due to its beauty and lack of hostile beings. All four agreed they’d experienced something profound, that it felt realer than real, and that it radically altered their view of reality and the universe.

“You know,” Beth said, “I get the feeling we’ll never be the same after this project.”

Paul agreed. “It is life changing, and you can’t fail to be touched by the experience. It takes away the loneliness of existence.”

He took statements from them individually, finding their reports remarkably consistent, demonstrating impressive reliability. It became clear that the frequencies didn’t give random results, but that each combination correlated with a different world, or dimension.

Over the next two weeks, they made a follow up visit to the serpent realm and a subsequent visit to the emotion world, again with Tahra guiding them two at a time. By the middle of October, they were addicted to the journeys in the machine and were ready to explore a new world. Paul warned them of the uncharted territory, and they understood the risks, realising the field would power down after twenty minutes, bringing them home to their bodies.

Paul expressed a desire to go back in the machine so taught Oscar how to oversee the process, clearly instructing him on the sequence in which the frequencies and field needed to boot up. The hatch closed, the field powered up to the sound of ‘New World Symphony’ and Paul, Tahra and Sakie were hurled out of their bodies.

***

Tahra, Sakie, and I emerged in a world vastly different to anything we’d seen before. A deafening noise, or electronic screech pierced my ‘eardrums’ and disturbed me due to being so relentless. I couldn’t pinpoint the source, in fact, it seemed to be generated by the very medium of space we found ourselves in. The screech changed pitch and modulation, but it never let up.

I looked over to find a likeness of Tahra and Sakie beside me, equally horrified by the horrendous noise. It felt as if it were trying to invade our brains, attempting to penetrate the grey matter and communicate with the electrical impulses travelling along the neurons and across the synapses. After a while, we began to adjust to the intense environment and tried to focus on the visual aspects of this world.

The fabric of this world looked like the white noise you see on your television screen when it isn’t tuned into a station. The individual points of light jiggled and danced in a kind of cosmic waltz, spinning each other around giddily. I found it necessary to focus hard here, because at first glance you couldn’t see anything but once you accustomed your consciousness to its wavelength, you realised how busy it was.

In between the dancing points of light, I noticed other points of light that flashed on and off in miniature explosions. They weren’t dancing though, they were jumping. These points of light were, perhaps, travelling through this fabric of white noise. I wondered if these points of light were some kind of craft or vehicle, and if so, were there any forms of life inside them?

“We need to find the entities that inhabit this place,” I said, aware that the field would power down before long.

Tahra and Sakie agreed, although we didn’t have a clue how to enter the craft, or contact potential entities.

“I think we need to focus on a point of light and jump onto it before it pops up somewhere else,” Tahra suggested.

“It would need to be the same point of light, we don’t want to lose each other,” I said.

“But we are too big,” Sakie protested.

“Size has no relevance when in non-physical form,” I reassured her.

“I’ll choose a point and tow you,” Tahra decided.

A moment later, Sakie and I felt ourselves being pulled, or more accurately, being dragged at high speed. We hurtled towards a point of light and I felt as if we suddenly converted to quick time. Everything exploded across my field of vision so fast that I couldn’t take it in, and I had to re-focus my consciousness to adjust to this flow of time.

When I’d done this, I began to realise a standard flow of time didn’t exist here. Inside the point of light, I saw a very small, whitish-grey person with black beady eyes and no discernable sexual features. It appeared to jump through the fabric of time, like watching a reel of film not as a continuous movie, but sampling a bit here and there from different points in the reel. It seemed truly weird, for one moment it faced us, ready to communicate, then within the blink of an eye, it carried out something randomly different, like checking the controls on its ship of light. Was the entity subject to the bizarre rule of time here, or was it manipulating time as a means to an end?

“How do we communicate with it?” Tahra said.

“With great difficulty,” I answered.

The entity acknowledged our presence and pondered our bewilderment. Maybe we could attempt to initiate a conversation.

“Why does time flow in no logical order here?” I asked.

The entity continued to appear at different points in the craft, but it inputted a sequence at the control panel and some semblance of logic seemed to appear in the interior of the craft.

“Time is not what it seems,” the little being responded. “It does not flow in one direction, in fact, it has no direction at all. I have merely created an illusion inside this craft that time flows, so that you can have this conversation with me.”

“Is there any meaning to the flow of time, or is it an illusion’?” I enquired, realising that he’d done us a favour creating an artificial arrow of time.

“The future exists simultaneously with the past, and simultaneously with the present. All is one. The difference between past, present and future is an illusion.”

“But why do we have time if it has no real meaning?” Tahra questioned.