The Talented (16 page)

The balls rose into the air and circled around my body, joining three others already orbiting at a steady ten foot radius. The six balls accelerated until they made a blurred ring, creating a cool breeze in the already chilly underground bunker.

“Up!!! Get up, Adam!! Get your focus back on your training, now!!!” Harrison commanded. He was right. My mind had drifted to the past week, trying to process all that had happened.

Taking a deep breath, I turned my focus to the memories one more time so that I could let them go and focus on the present.

Alicia. We flew back together to Detroit, barely speaking. At first she seemed angry with me, but that soon gave way to a forced indifference, as if I suddenly became invisible to her. As we were walking out of the airport in Detroit, a stocky man in a dark suit held a sign that read “Alicia Usher”. We got in his limo and only then did Alicia speak.

“He lied, Adam. Make him prove to you that those people are alive, okay? Promise me that you will do that much.”

“Alicia, it’s the first thing I plan to do. There is a method to my madness, but I can’t tell you about it because I’m afraid to even say it out loud, but please try to trust me.”

She turned to me and whispered, “I know. It isn’t hard to guess what you might be trying to do. If I can guess it, you bet Harrison will figure it out, so be careful, okay? Promise?”

I gently caressed her cheek with my fingertips and leaned toward her, our lips meeting in a soft, slow kiss. Afterwards, our lips still almost touching, I whispered, “I promise.”

We arrived at the Usher home in the suburb of Troy late in the evening. It was a very nice house, recently built. Some might even accuse it of being a McMansion, though I’m not really sure what that means. It was big and deluxe looking, but nowhere near the size and splendor of Stuart’s place. Deon Usher sat on the front steps, no longer wearing the flashy purple suit, now in a nice polo shirt and khakis. At his height he looked like a retired basketball player headed for the golf course, or a least he looked that way to my stereotype-influenced mind. You would think that living in Detroit would have cured me of that kind of thinking, but apparently not.

Alicia clung to my side as we approached. We had managed to squeeze in a little shopping before our flight, so she looked great in her jeans and yellow blouse. At first donning his usual stoic expression, Deon’s eyes widened in shock when he saw his daughter walk up, all grown up and looking healthy.

On the other hand, Alicia remained guarded and a bit aloof as she said, “Hi Daddy.”

“Good to see you, baby girl,” he drawled in that rich baritone of his. They embraced stiffly before Alicia took her shopping bags and entered his house. I stayed out on the steps with Mr. Usher. He reached behind his back and whipped something out and slapped it into my hand. The leather felt familiar and comforting. My wallet.

“Thanks,” he said, “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

“It was a pleasure,” I replied, “Your daughter is an amazing person.”

His eyes flashed for a moment as he wondered what Alicia and I had been up to all this time. Even through his barrier, that thought broadcast loud and clear.

“Is she really clean and sober?” he asked.

“Completely. No drugs at all. Make sure she has plenty of clean drinking water at all times. If she gets dehydrated even a little she will freak out.”

Deon looked me up and down with his cold appraising eyes. “You’re different,” he commented, “physically, I mean. You taking steroids or something?”

That drew a short laugh out of me, “I wish it were that simple. Lets just say that there is a bit more to me than I have let on.”

“I see,” said Deon, the gears turning in his mind. “That day in my office. You could have busted that desk lock in a second, couldn’t you? And you could also have blown past me with some of your voodoo power. Am I right?”

Deciding to trust him a little, I replied, “It would have been easy.”

“Why then,” he asked, “Why didn’t you do that? Why did you make the deal with me to find my daughter?”

“For one thing,” I replied, “Your desk was nice. I didn’t want to break it, okay? And about blowing past you? That would have meant hurting you physically. Because your mind is so strong, I would pretty much have to break it apart to influence it, and that would have been wrong on so many levels. Besides, your request was something I would have done anyway, if asked in the right way.”

“Oh, so you will be giving me my money back then?”

“Money?” I looked in the wallet in my hands and it was packed with hundred dollar bills.

“As we agreed. You take care of yourself, Sharpe,” Deon said, then pointed sternly, “But stay out of my casino, you hear? Go rip off someone else.”

Thinking that one over, I finally replied, “My gambling days are over, I think.”

“Good,” Usher said, then added, “Go on, get out of here,” then walked inside to join his daughter.

After that was over, I proceeded to my home, the good old Book Cadillac Hotel. The pile of bills and junk mail filled my entire mailbox, and I barely got in the front door of my condo when a voice in the dark room made me jump.

“Took you long enough.” The heavily muscled man with the neatly trimmed beard looked odd in shorts and a t-shirt, looking a bit like the Incredible Hulk on vacation. Harrison sat at my desk chair looking as if he owned the place.

“How long have you been sitting there in the dark waiting to surprise me?” I asked, “It isn’t my birthday, you know.”

“Remotely viewing the future is not an exact science, Adam. I didn’t know exactly when you would return.”

“Speaking of science,” I began, “Are you seriously teleporting across the country? Isn’t that a bit comic book, even for you? How do you do that?”

“It isn’t complicated, but it is quite a strain. Only a class A psi can attempt it, and even most of them aren’t strong enough. You just remotely view a place anywhere on earth, then focus on your physical body and clothes, creating tiny Mandellian threads all over your body, connecting to the other place. Then you do a quantum leap across the threads from once place to another. The matter you displace on the other side, hopefully just air, travels back to the space you formerly occupied. Don’t worry about partial leaps…if you do not have the power or focus to do it right, then all you will do is give yourself a migraine.”

I pondered that for a moment. The concept made sense, I suppose, but where does it end? What else can I do? But more than anything else…

“What are we, really?” I asked the big man. “Why can we do these things?”

With an amused, almost paternal look on his face, Harrison replied, “Jumping right into your lessons, are we? Good. Shows enthusiasm. Too bad we don’t have all the answers. Science is an excellent way to reveal how the physical work operates. It rarely can tell us why.”

“Aren’t there any theories?” I persisted.

Harrison stared at me a moment, apparently deciding how to answer.

“Yes, there are a few theories, none of them proven. In the days of the Program there was a secret society that claimed to have the answer. They all had the crazy belief that people with psionic talent all descend from the gods of early humanity.”

I was not amused. “Come again? Are you serious? That’s insane.”

“Serious as a heart attack,” Harrison replied, “Look, I’m not taking about mythical characters like Zeus and Thor…those guys are fictional as far as anyone knows. Probably. What I’m talking about was a human species that may have shared the earth with the Neanderthals and Modern Humans. When I was in the Program, they called the species Homo Illuminatus. Enlightened Man. The species developed in isolation on an island that was once located in the Mediterranean Sea, but is now deep underwater, probably the result of an earthquake.”

Wait,” I said doubtfully, “Are you really talking about Atlantis? Fish people with tridents?”

“No, damn you! Stop interrupting!” Harrison shouted as the veins running across his right temple stood out in stark relief. I think I was getting to him. Good.

Harrison stood and continued, “The story bears resemblance to Atlantis, and perhaps the story of Atlantis may have originated from the history of Homo Illuminatus, but there is no evidence of that. The important fact is that we once shared the planet with a race of human that evolved to have incredible innate psionic abilities. They lived like gods, commanding the beasts to do their bidding. The lack of sophistication of their cave drawings and architecture suggest that they were no more intelligent in the traditional sense than modern humans, perhaps less. They did not speak at all, and relied on a combination of telepathy and a crude predecessor of hieroglyphics to communicate. After the destruction of the island, the survivors disbursed into family units. Those families encountered modern humans, and briefly ruled them as god-kings. As the centuries passed, interbreeding diluted the psionic abilities, and those who still had the gift were usually mentally unstable. By the dawn of recorded history, Homo Illuminati were a distant memory, and became the source of myth and legend.”

“Sorry,” I said while shaking my head, “This makes no sense at all. If this were true it would have been discovered by regular anthropologists. It would be all over the Discovery channel.”

“Adam, we are talking about prehistory. They were a very small species which shared the Stone Age world with the Neanderthals and other early humans. In addition to that, they were not as advanced as the others in terms of tool-making and cave art and left little behind. What little archeological evidence there was of their existence has been attributed to the Neanderthals. Either way, it’s just a theory based on dreams. Remote viewing into thousands of years in the past. Chances are that it’s all rubbish.”

“Fine,” I said, “but for arguments’ sake, if you assume all that is true, then how do you explain you and I? How much ’enlightened’ DNA could we possibly have?”

Leaning in with excitement, Harrison answered, “Plenty, and all because of the misguided eugenics experiment that became the Program. Those bastards bred humans like animals, selecting for psionic traits the way chickens are bred to produce more meat. I was born near the end of the fifth generation, the last successful one. Kate and Stuart are on opposite ends of the sixth generation; Stuart and Tracy being among the oldest, Kate one of the youngest. The sixth generation was a catastrophe, with a 98% failure rate. Failure meant either total insanity or major physical deformity.”

“That explains you,” I persisted, “but what about me? I’m a good five years younger than Kate at least, and I was never a part of the Program.”

“Good point. The seventh generation never happened because the Program headquarters burned to the ground. None of the sixth generation have been able to bear children, no one really knows why. However, my girlfriend at the time was early sixth generation, just like Stuart, but vastly more powerful. The night of the fire she was supposed to meet me off campus, but she never arrived.  I assumed she didn’t survive.” Harrison stopped and looked away. “She was pregnant…”

A question that I dared not ask froze before leaving my lips. We both stood there, unable to break the silence. Finally, we spoke together.

“My mother?”

“…with you.”

So there it was. That was the link that connected me to all these people, which meant…oh no, please no…

Barely choking out the words, I asked, “Are you my…father?”

Harrison still looked away, but responded bitterly, “Maybe. Who knows? Your mother was a free spirit, and I suspect that she was seeing someone else. But it’s possible.” He finally met my eyes. “You look like Clare. So she gave you up for adoption?”

In a daze, I muttered, “Yeah, I had adoptive parents…for a while, anyway.”

Harrison’s eyes grew wide as he caught a brief glimpse of my memory of being abandoned at St. Jude’s. I quickly tightened my grip on my thoughts, invoking the vault image.

“A bank vault?” Harrison mused, “Pretty textbook. Who taught you that?”

Not wanting to discuss it, I replied, “A friend. So what happens now?”

“Now we leap to the Alliance branch office, get your new quarters all squared away. Do not pack anything, you will have everything you need there. You ready?”

“No. But that never stopped you before.”

The giant guy smiled for once, then said, “Okay, first you need to lock onto my core Mandellian thread.”

Reaching out to him mentally, I probed his forehead until, by God, there it was. Locking onto his core Mandellian thread felt like grabbing a live electrical wire. How does that much power go unnoticed? Gritting my teeth, I focused harder onto the thread, and a grey haze settled over my vision, as if all the color in the world had bled away. In its place, however, I could see a halo of light enveloping Harrison’s body. The light was made up of tiny strands that slightly resembled fiber optic threads. They were increasing in number, making it hard to see the man underneath. From the lower middle portion of his forehead sprouted a massive horn of light as thick as my arm. Fighting to maintain my focus, I looked down at my body, which didn’t seem to have any threads at all. Slowing my breathing, I felt out my own core Mandellian thread, and from there filled my body with awareness. Small pinpoints of light began to emerge all over me with an almost blinding intensity. The feeling of raw power swelled in my chest, then the world erupted in light. Harrison’s consciousness seemed to guide me to remotely view a huge circular room with a domed ceiling and no windows. The image increased in clarity with each second, the details popping out in high definition. More pinpoints of light erupted in the shape of Harrison’s body, and I struggled to follow suit. The first Mandellian thread to make the leap was on my arm, and it literally felt like someone plucked a hair off of it. It hurt. Pushing harder, the plucking feeling spread all over my body until it reached the point of agony. Suddenly, it all stopped, and I collapsed to the floor, coughing and gasping for air.

“It didn’t work,” I coughed out, “We haven’t gone any…where?”