Buffalito Bundle

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  On the video I watched the technicians on the other side of the sealed chamber with a Rhine deck and other classic trappings of ESP testing. They pressed the backs of cards to the window, and through his sobs Jayasuriya identified an endless procession of wavy lines, circles, and diamonds. I zipped through what must have been hours of that sort of stuff. Jayasuriya aced all the tests, a perfect score for receptive telepathy, as if he needed further proof that he had Meyerson's. Eventually they let him sleep. I zipped through that too. I'd seen people sleep before. I imagine they expected him to die before morning., but he didn't. He awoke early and resumed documenting his personal descent into hell.

  This third day of vids was worse. He knew the data from all the previous victims, must have gone through it routinely hundreds of times. They'd been long dead by this point. What was different? It showed on his face. His eyes were wide, his jaw firm with some resolution. He was calculating it, remembering how long after exposure everyone one of the previous victims had lived. He had to be wondering if he was just taking a little longer to burn out his brain or if he might somehow survive. The technicians safely on their side of the containment room had to be thinking it too. His former co-workers knew they might never get another opportunity like this and wanted to run every test under the sun. Bastards.

  Jayasuriya raced around the room, clutching his head in his hands. He refused all of the other tests they'd brought. He barked at them, short one and two syllable words utterances. Names. Places. Dates. None of it meant anything to me but it had an effect on the techs. They responded with screaming. Jayasuriya's remarks stretched out into full sentences. He was speaking all the nasty little secrets that had leaked from the technicians and into his mind. They fled but the camera kept recording.

  Jayasuriya collapsed into a sobbing heap in the middle of his chamber. He whimpered, and I could make out a few words and phrases as his body was wracked with convulsions—“it cycles” and “ranges and durations”—on and on for more than an hour before he abruptly stopped.

  I watched him get to his feet, panting and shuddering but recovered from his seizure. He washed his face and changed into a clean jumpsuit. He combed his hair and presented himself to the camera. He was obviously trying very hard to compose himself, stopping and starting over several times before he could get his voice to work without stammering.

  “You don't understand. This is different from the others. It's not... it's not just short range. It keeps changing.” He was burning up, drenched with sweat. He took a long drink from a water bottle and tried again.

  “It's like a field, radiating outward from me. We knew that, documented that with the others. But this is different. The size of it keeps changing. It expands and contracts. You need to time it, I... I think the duration of each, wide and narrow, is growing every cycle, but I can't be sure. Even when the field is tight I can't think clearly for very long. I can't shut off your thoughts, and I can't ignore them. All of you inside the field, all of your thoughts are shouting at me.”

  He turned away, stomped a circuit of his containment room and ended up back in front of the main camera.

  “It's wide now, the field. I don't know for how long, an hour? Maybe more, before it retracts again. But it's still growing. I know what's in every mind in this facility.”

  Jayasuriya threw his water bottle down. His expression changed, not a smile exactly, but there was something like hope in his eyes. He ran his hands through his hair, wiped the sweat from his forehead, licked his lips.

  “In all of you. I know who knows about the accident. I can hear the thoughts of who's watching me right now, watching each of the feeds from this camera. I don't want to die like this, here, like some specimen, and I know who can help me. I want out. Now. Or I swear the world will find out what you did in Manitoba last summer. I'm not going to die like a lab rat. Get me out or I'll—”

  The video went dead. Nothing but static. I hit the zip button and moved forward through more than an hour of snow before a picture came back. When it did the door was unsealed and Dr. Jayasuriya was gone.

  I checked out the sandwiches that Davies had mentioned. Egg salad, tuna salad, peanut butter and jelly. I took one of each. I opted for a PBJ for myself and Reggie jumped up next to me on the couch demanding his share. Instead, I tore the other sandwiches into quarters and tossed them towards the door, stealing bites of my own sandwich in-between. Reggie loved the game, flinging himself into the air to snatch the treats in mid-flight and then race back for more. He had just gobbled down the last of them when Davies returned.

  “Somebody let him out,” I said through a mouthful of crunchy peanut butter.

  Davies nodded. He had taken the seat behind the desk. He queued up the last bit of video and we watched it again.

  “Everything on that level can be operated remotely,” he said. “It's a security precaution, part of the quarantine protocols. Each of the facility's isolation chambers has a main control room, a backup control panel elsewhere in the complex, and a master override in still a third spot. We don't yet know which of them turned off the cameras and unlocked the doors. A hundred people who could have done it, and if we take Dr. Jayasuriya at his word, he was in the minds of all of them.”

  “Okay, but how many of them have spent the summer in Canada?”

  “Mr. Conroy, you're not here to assist with that aspect of the investigation. My people are well qualified to handle it. I need you to help me find Dr. Jayasuriya.”

  “Honestly, Agent Davies, I don't see how you expect me to have any special insight.”

  “Seriously? You lied, successfully, to the Arconi, beings who know when they are being told a falsehood. You're a mentalist, Conroy, I need you to think like Jayasuriya and give us the insight we need to pick him up.” He slumped in his chair looking very tired. “I'm aware you're a long shot, but if you can offer even a slight impression, well, that's more than I have to go on now.”

  “I'm a hypnotist,” I said, “not a mentalist.”

  “What you are is a potential asset.” Davies sat up, all trace of weariness gone. “This is a matter of national security, and if you can't see that and volunteer your cooperation I'm more than willing to apply some leverage.” He tapped something on the desk and a moment later two of his cookie cutter men in black came into the room. One held a large net on a pole and the other pushed a wheeled cage. Their full attention was on my buffalito, with the kind of focus normally reserved for an armed assailant.

  “Wait,” I said, “just a minute—”

  The one with the net swooped in and with a practiced scooping motion snared Reggie. His partner had the lid of the cage open and in seconds the two had my buffalito imprisoned.

  “Your pet will be fine, Mr. Conroy. This is just so you'll appreciate the severity of the situation.”

  “Reggie is a companion animal, not a pet. And if anything, you should be more worried about what he'll do to your people than anything they might be able to do to him.” Both of his goons flinched when I said it.

  “Put it in quarantine 3J.” Davies waved a hand and one of his operatives wheeled the cage out of the office and into the hall. Reggie had been acting like it was just another game, right up until he couldn't see me any more. He howled.

  I started to rise but the remaining goon drew a stun baton and waved me back to the couch.

  “Reggie, it's okay. You're okay. I'll come get you soon.”

  The howling stopped, replaced by a low whimper. The guy with the stun baton joined his partner in the hall, closing the door behind him.

  “Now then,” said Davies. “Focus. What did you learn from the vid?”

  What had I seen that they might have missed? I hadn't a clue. How could I know?

  “The formulas he wrote on the board. What was that about?”

  “An untested theory,” said Davies. “One of the directions his research was taking was to develop a drug to block telepathy, based on the histology from the previous victims.”

&
nbsp; I shook my head. “Histology?”

  “Tissue samples. Brain tissue in this case. Jayasuriya believed he was close. He'd been running simulations.”

  “So, there might be a cure?”

  “Not a cure, no. The formula is highly toxic. Even if it worked, it wouldn't be sustainable. Anything more than a few doses and telepathy wouldn't be an issue, the treatment would kill the user outright.”

  Grim stuff, and yet... “I wouldn't rule it out. Neither of us can know what it's like suddenly having thousands of people in your head all at once. Maybe Jayasuriya would risk death if it buys him time to get where he's going.”

  “Going? He's not going anywhere. My people are combing every inch of Atlanta.”

  “Why?”

  Davies looked at me like I'd grown a second head. “Excuse me?”

  “Why on Earth are you searching Atlanta for him? He's not going to be anywhere in the city.”

  Davies straightened and stared. “Why do you say that?”

  “Jayasuriya told you himself. His telepathy, he said it was like a field projecting around him, alternately contracting and expanding. I'm assuming that the times when it was fully expanded was when he was screaming because he was reading everyone in the facility and probably a ways beyond. Didn't you see it on his face? He couldn't shut them out. That's what drove him to escape, not fear of his own death. He had to escape the shouting in his mind. So he left.”

  “That doesn't explain why he wouldn't be in Atlanta,” said Davies. Something in his pocket chose that moment to buzz, but he ignored it.

  “There are over six million people in the greater Atlanta metro area. Jayasuriya was trying to get away from people, away from all those extraneous minds. He wouldn't go to ground in the city, he'd be desperate to reach somewhere, anywhere, with a much lower population density.”

  “And the cycles of telepathy...”

  I nodded. “Yeah, if he's going to move, it would happen when his field is pulled in, when he's dealing with only the minds immediately around him. But if it keeps cycling, he'll have a limited window to get out of town. Which is why he might risk that drug, to extend that time.”

  “You just earned your sandwich, Conroy.”

  His pocket buzzed again. At the same time something in the hallway began scratching at the door. Davies withdrew his phone and stared at it.

  “Your animal… ate through its cage before my men could get it into quarantine. It's loose in the building.”

  I bit any remark about escapes being a regular thing at the CDC this week, but less out of good sense and more because the scratching at the door resolved into Reggie chewing a hole in it and sticking his head through. Davies lowered his phone and just stared at my buffalito.

  “Leverage is a funny thing” I said. At the sound of my voice Reggie took a few more bites out of the door and pushed his way into the room. An instant later he had raced across the room and launched himself into my arms.

  Give him some credit, Davies recovered pretty quickly from his first experience of what a buffalo dog could do and got back on task. He nodded at me and then slammed a hand on the desk. It chirped in response, and he spoke to the open air. “I want teams at every compounding pharmacy within a hundred miles of this facility.” He jumped to his feet and rushed out the door. I could hear him shouting instructions as he ran down the hallway, trailed by the two black suits that had been guarding the door. I waited a moment, stuck my head out and looked up and down the corridor. Empty. It seemed like a good time to take a walk.

  I ruffled Reggie's fur and he responded with a good-natured fart of pure oxygen, the trademark of buffalitos everywhere. I held him up in front of me and let him lick my face.

  “Who's a good boy? You are, yes you are.” I didn't feel a bit of guilt over him ruining the door and hoped that Davies would personally get stuck with the bill. It would serve him right for trying to lock Reggie away. I carried my buffalito down the hall and we took the elevator to the lobby. A very helpful receptionist called a cab for us. Dr. Jayasuriya wasn't my problem, but as I headed back to the resort I realized that maybe Davies had been right. I could help. It wasn't my experience with alien telepaths he needed, but my skills as a hypnotist.

  It always helps to know people. In this case, the resort owner. She was a bit put out with me for complicating her life, but the majority of her irritation fell on Davies's people for canceling my show. As far as she was concerned, I was the victim, an old friend who'd been screwed over by a faceless government agency. Or something like that. The point was, with barely half an hour to spare, my evening show was back on schedule. Part of me wanted to pass, to get on a plane and get out of Atlanta. But my ego wouldn't let me. I had to see if the ideas I'd had on ride back from the CDC would work. Also, I suspected Davies was playing me, that he'd left me free leave, confident he could scoop me up again if he wanted. He might even come to regret that decision when he learned what I could do.

  It wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine that a highly trained and newly telepathic researcher with two doctorates could outsmart a bunch of federal agents. I'd lay strong odds that Davies's search would come up empty. Maybe that's an unfair characterization of a federal agency, but it never hurts to have some insurance. With that in mind, I borrowed access to a Globalink terminal in the lobby and did some research before going on stage.

  Normally I'll begin my act with some simple patter that lays out a few suggestions and allows me to get a feel for who in the audience is most susceptible to trance and will make the best volunteers for the show. Tonight was different. I wanted to engage with as much of the audience as possible, so I laid it on thick. Indirect suggestions, presupposition, semantic word play, neurolinguistic programming, every conceivable trick I had up the sleeve of my tuxedo. I had a message I wanted to plant in the unconscious minds of as many of people as possible. I didn't need them to remember any of it, quite the opposite in fact. I wanted to bury my words and images deep inside them with a time delay that would cause everything to surface later in the night while they slept.

  I cannibalized the earlier matinee's act, tossing away classic bits to make room for the pieces I needed to include. I had five volunteers up on stage and put them into a deeper trance and then altered their perceptions of their identity and situation to great comic effect. Regardless of whatever else I planned, I still had to provide an entertaining show. Usually I'll whisper a two-word trigger phrase to each of my participants, making it up from a flavor and the name of an obscure deity, the kind of combination that no one is going to encounter anywhere else. Tonight I took it in a different direction. All five triggers were the names of obscure diseases and instead of whispering them so only the volunteers heard them, I invited the audience to repeat them along with me, invoking the same language I'd set up at the outset so they'd recall each word at a deeper level. I asked them to focus not on the words themselves, but on the flow of sounds of their syllables. I cautioned them that the words would sound strange, but to just go with them. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Palmoplantar keratoderma. Hepatoerythropoietic porphyria. Methylmalonic acidemia. Thanatophoric dysplasia. Real mouthfuls that I could pronounce only because the Globalink pages I'd visited had an audio option.

  The audience went along with all of it, despite their confusion. Most of them stumbled over the syllables and there may have been a few physicians in the audience who recognized the names and found the whole thing disquieting, but you can't please everyone. Soon enough though, I had the entire audience chanting the trigger words, interspersing the names with the phrase “hey, ho, go with the flow.” So far so good.

  The rest of the show involved turning each of my volunteers into the hero or heroine of a classic musical, warping the time and space to set them all in current day Atlanta. One fellow was Tevye the dairyman from Fiddler on the Roof. Another was Jean Valjean from Les Miserables. I had the evil witch from Wicked, and the title characters from The Return of Aaron Burr and Evita.
I spun them all together, each interacting with the others as if the different storylines meshed and always had. And of course, each had a song to perform and a couple even managed duets. I especially liked it when Tevye and Evita sang a blending of Sunrise Sunset and Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Aaron Burr closed the show, singing about meeting his death at noon in the arms of the wicked witch, lamenting never having been able to enjoy, one last time, the iceberg lettuce wraps available at Flamingo Sal's, a snack shop in the middle of the Atlanta Zoo.

  It didn't make any sense, but it didn't have to. The volunteers believed their parts with passion, and they sold that conviction to the rest of the audience. Three of them even had excellent singing voices. By the time it was over, I'd seeded everything I wanted into the unconscious minds of the audience. I'd find out on the morrow if anything sprang from the planting.

  When I returned to my dressing room after the show, I found Davies waiting for me. He'd made himself comfortable in the guest chair. Reggie had either forgiven or forgotten his earlier incarceration and sat in the agent's lap allowing the fur on his hump to be scritched.

  “You were right,” he said. “My people arrived too late to apprehend him, but a man matching Dr. Jayasuriya's description visited a compounding pharmacy about three miles north of the CDC in the community of North Druid Hills.”

  “That sounds oddly appropriate.”

  Davies scowled. “Not helpful. You know I have a team waiting outside to haul your ass away? Technically, you escaped custody.”

  I waved him off. “Technically, you're lucky I don't slap you with a lawsuit for your attempt to forcibly involve me in your investigation. And more to the point, it's not my job to be helpful.”

  “Yes, well, despite that, you have been. And... I apologize.” He paused. The sour look didn't leave his face, but I wasn't surprised. He didn't strike me as a man who'd had a lot of practice saying he was sorry. “I may have overstepped in my handling of the situation.”