Quantum Lens

by Douglas E. Richards

  Eben Martin would be the only person ever to know where Craft and Alyssa were located. Even Adam Turco, whom Martin had come to like and trust, was not privy to this information, although he at least knew the country they were in.

  Costa Rica was a paradise. Located on the Central American isthmus, with a population just over four million, it bordered both the Caribbean to the east and the Pacific to the west, and featured over eight hundred miles of coastline. While it was sandwiched between Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south, it had been a democracy since 1949, and was one of the most stable and prosperous countries in the region. Topologically, Costa Rica’s altitude varied from sea level to over twelve thousand feet, and fully two hundred volcanoes made their home in this country, including several that were active.

  Martin had bought a home for them in Costa Rica before they left, sight unseen, using an untraceable dummy corporation, based on a description on the Internet that read, “spectacular mountain retreat with breathtaking views.”

  While they had never visited the property, he and Craft had taken a virtual tour online, and it did not disappoint. They had purchased the estate for two million dollars, and Martin paid another hundred thousand to ensure the transaction was closed immediately.

  A main house and guest house were situated on fifty acres just up from the base of a mountain. While the guest house was tiny compared to its glorious parent, it alone would have more than sufficed for their needs. The property was touted as a nature lovers paradise, and in this case the Internet hadn’t lied. Paradise was the right word. They wouldn’t have been able to touch this estate for even ten million dollars back in The States.

  The main house was open and airy, with vaulted ceilings, limestone floors, and towering windows that provided panoramic views of the mountains, valley, and the Turrialba Volcano far off in the distance. The top floor of the three story structure contained an open-air balcony more spacious than any room in Alyssa’s home back in Indiana.

  Craft had immediately set up banking and Martin had seen to it that a hundred thousand dollars was wired in to get them started. Craft had retained a considerable percentage of the fifty million dollars he had made years before, but now that he was on the lam he was unable to touch it. This was when it paid to have friends so wealthy that they considered several million dollars to be pocket change.

  Alyssa had originally questioned Craft’s decision to bring Eben Martin onboard, but she had to admit he had done the right thing. And she didn’t think this change of opinion had occurred because she had been seduced by luxury—private jets, islands, and spacious, glorious compounds with guest homes—but because strategic moves that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to make became easy, and she was convinced that Martin was a very good man.

  They settled in quickly and Alyssa went right to work performing her narco-hypnotic magic. Craft had expected she would need an EEG device, which could measure electrical activity in the brain and detect changes with millisecond resolution, but he learned that the video game start-up, HeadRush Virtuality, had improved the resolution and accuracy of EEG technology fifty-fold.

  The HeadRush controller was expensive, and the company still only offered a limited number of games. But Alyssa didn’t care about games. The system couldn’t have been more ideal for her needs. When it had first come out, she had a team study it and modify it to her specifications.

  Players wore tight mesh elastic caps that pressed an array of hundreds of BB-sized nodes firmly against their heads. An algorithm in the game controller would allow wearers to train the game to react to electrical patterns in their brains, allowing them to control game avatars using thoughts alone. Although the training was simple and could be accomplished in less than an hour, the technology behind the device was stunningly sophisticated, and hadn’t been available anywhere in the world even a year earlier.

  A specialist on one of Greg Elovic’s other Black Ops computer and electronics teams had worked with Alyssa to develop software that could be easily uploaded into the game controller, allowing her to view the brain activity being analyzed by the cap’s many nodes on a computer screen, and to modify the nodes to deliver electrical pulses to order as well.

  This allowed Alyssa to identify key areas of the brain involved in the basic placebo response and combine drugs, hypnosis, and stimulation of these neuronal pathways to dramatically enhance the effect. Alyssa liked to think that great scientists invented technologies to achieve their goals, but never failed to modify existing technologies to suit their needs whenever possible. Why reinvent the wheel when there was so much else that needed to be done?

  She and Craft had brought several HeadRush game consoles with them to Costa Rica, which each included two elastic skullcaps, and Alyssa successfully uploaded the software that she had retrieved from her lab, Modified Headrush 188. As the name implied, a hundred and eighty-seven iterations had been tried before the system finally worked with the precision and effectiveness that Alyssa had required.

  They spent an hour calibrating the strength of Craft’s ability to wield zero point energy, to get a baseline, and then Alyssa began. She had him wear the skull cap for almost an entire day, during which she mapped his brain activity when he was using the field, both defensively, without conscious control, and offensively—performing what he called feeble acts of telekinesis.

  She also asked him questions about his level of belief, his certainty, that he could accomplish certain tasks, such as correctly adding two single-digit numbers, opening an unlocked door, and so on. Since his certainty was absolute in these cases, she was able to record his brain patterns associated with absolute confidence. She also had him focus on tasks he knew he could not do, like playing a perfect rendition of Beethoven’s fifth symphony on the piano. Since Brennan Craft had yet to master chopsticks, his extreme lack of confidence was understandable.

  Alyssa analyzed all of this data and then drugged and hypnotized him, all the while using the controller to stimulate different areas of his brain. She was confident she had done as good a job as possible. It would have been easier, and faster, to attempt to change his mindset temporarily, through the use of a hypnotic trigger, but her goal was to modify his subconscious permanently, once and for all.

  When she had finished, Craft slept through the night to get the drugs completely out of his system, and then awoke.

  “Are you ready to fully harness the infinite?” asked Alyssa confidently as soon as he had arisen, having been up already for several hours while he slept it off.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Great!” said Alyssa cheerfully. “Let’s do this thing. This is going to work. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life!” she added passionately, wondering if Craft would guess that she had said this to help boost the placebo effect further, as a last effort to exert influence on his subconscious.

  What she was really thinking was that she had done all that she could. That she thought the procedure had gone great, but she had no idea if it would work. And she was hoping like hell that it would.

  But she had gone with, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” having decided that, “I hope like hell this works,” probably wasn’t quite as inspirational to the mysterious, and all important, subconscious she was trying to reach.

  43

  Alyssa’s techniques worked brilliantly.

  Both Craft and Alyssa were euphoric.

  He had been right. It was all about belief. If you were absolutely convinced a sugar pill would cure you, or convinced there was no limit to the energy you could seize from the zero point field, your mind could work miracles.

  At first the increase in Craft’s ability was modest, but measurable. Instead of being able to press down on a scale at ninety-six pounds of force, he could manage a hundred and eight. But even this slight improvement reinforced his belief that the narco-hypnosis had worked, resulting in further increases. Within days Craft’s exponential growth rivale
d even that of Omar Haddad, and in only two weeks he had maxed out, at least judging from his admittedly subjective assessment, since his ability to use zero point energy quickly became immeasurable.

  During this growth spurt he and Alyssa celebrated wildly after each new milestone, as though he were a star gymnast after a flawless performance at the Olympics, and she was his beaming coach. Craft’s success was Alyssa’s success, and arguably, all of humanity’s success.

  Craft spent ninety percent of his waking hours practicing his skills, with Alyssa often an observer or a participant in various experiments he conducted, and the other ten percent in Alyssa’s arms or making love to her. And while he actually could make the earth move during sex, no man in her life had ever been more gentle and attentive. And tireless didn’t even begin to describe him.

  Their feelings for each other continued to intensify, although neither said I love you openly. Alyssa felt as though she was in love but sensed Craft didn’t want to go there this early in the relationship. But love was the elephant in the bedroom, or at least the giant cupid.

  She wasn’t sure why Craft was holding back, since she would catch him gazing at her when he thought she wasn’t watching like a lovesick puppy dog. And she would swear there were times when he was biting his tongue—once literally—to prevent an expression of love from breaking through the fortress of his lips.

  Why fight it so desperately? Here was a man who could stop a Mack Truck, but who was struggling mightily to fight the escape of three tiny words.

  After the second week he concentrated solely on mastering different ways to channel the massive energies he now could harness. No one was more intellectually gifted than Brennan Craft, and he climbed the learning curve on different modalities of directing the energy, including precision uses that he thought of as fine motor control, with remarkable speed.

  The energies he controlled were awesome, and scary. He would melt rock formations the size of houses before Alyssa’s eyes, or make them vanish entirely, in addition to numerous other awe-inspiring demonstrations.

  And he learned how to fly.

  Craft believed he was actually modulating gravity when he did this, decreasing the affect of gravity below him to zero, while increasing the pull of gravity from the space ahead of him millions of fold, so that he was pulled in this direction. He was clumsy during his fist few attempts at flight, but after dozens of hours of practice over another two week period his technique improved dramatically.

  He initially flew low to stay off any radars, and because significant increases in altitude brought bitterly cold temperatures. But he soon learned how to heat the air around him to whatever temperature he wanted, so this was no longer an issue as he tore through the sky like a human missile at hundreds of miles per hour.

  And recently, Craft had become so proficient at flight he had been able to take Alyssa with him, not even having to touch her to direct gravity to propel her forward by his side. Not knowing, of course, how he was accomplishing this feat.

  But while flying with Craft was indescribably exhilarating and wonderful, and should have brought their relationship to new heights, during the few weeks he had been flying, Alyssa felt that their relationship was backsliding. She was at a loss to understand exactly why.

  But Craft was no longer the exact same man with whom she had fallen in love. And he began to treat her poorly on a number of occasions, in ways that were completely out of character. Yet on other occasions, she would still catch him gazing at her with a lovesick expression on his face.

  It almost seemed like a fissure had appeared in his personality. That certain aspects of his behavior had become slightly . . . schizophrenic.

  44

  After Alyssa and Craft had been in Costa Rica for five weeks, Eben Martin came to visit. They had both been keeping Martin posted on their activities on a daily basis, but a visit was long overdue.

  Before Martin left for Costa Rica, he changed his hair from black to salt-and-pepper gray, and applied a flawless fake mustache to match the forged passport Turco had acquired for him in the name Michael Emanuele, removing the mustache when he arrived at Craft’s home in the mountains.

  Martin brought a bottle of wine with him to celebrate, which Alyssa was sure had cost as much as her television, and they shared stories and laughs and had a great first night together.

  Craft spent the next morning and afternoon demonstrating his abilities to Martin, who was even more blown away than he expected to be. Once again, no description of these abilities could do justice to the actual demonstrations.

  Finally, in late afternoon, Craft lifted Alyssa and Martin simultaneously for a flight higher up the mountain. When they landed Martin was grinning from ear to ear and had the giddy look of a grade-schooler after his first roller coaster ride.

  “That was un-fucking-believable,” gushed the billionaire to his friend. Like Bren, he seemed to be a throwback to a more genteel time, and he quickly remembered himself and apologized to Alyssa for his language.

  Martin had been so preoccupied by the idea of flying without an airplane that he had barely paid attention to his surroundings, but they finally sank in.

  Craft had brought them to a hard-to-reach spot on the mountain that was unparalleled in its beauty. He had brought Alyssa here before, and they were convinced they were the first people to ever see it.

  They were on a short bluff facing a wide, flat part of a river that flowed down the mountain. Thirty yards distant a glorious waterfall cascaded down a cliff face, framed by trees and tropical flowers, and surrounded by colorful lizards and birds that didn’t know what to make of the three intruders to their realm.

  The waterfall wasn’t uniform, but was six or eight falls, separated slightly from each other, creating a wide, interrupted curtain of beauty shimmering down the cliff, two hundred feet across and fifty feet down. Sun peaked through the canopy at a dozen locations and produced localized rainbows of color through the mists. A Disney artist with the most vibrant of color palettes attempting to create paradise could not have outdone it.

  “Flying is even better than you’d think it would be,” said Martin, turning his head in a long arc, soaking in the magnificence of their surroundings. “But this isn’t too bad either,” he added, his voice awe-struck. “Wow. Why do I feel like Lois Lane on a date?”

  “I thought I was playing the Lois Lane role,” said Alyssa with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Yeah,” said Martin. “I have to give you that. Way to rain on my parade. Now I feel like the third-wheel sidekick, interrupting Louis Lane on a date.”

  Alyssa laughed. “This place is supernaturally beautiful,” she said. “And since I’ve taken the Lois Lane role, it occurs to me that Superman did have some big advantages in the dating scene. Not only could he fly a girl around, which by itself is a pretty appealing quality in a man,” she pointed out, “but he was also able to get to perfect picnic locations.” She raised her eyebrows. “On the other hand, Eben, Superman didn’t have his own 737. I’m guessing women don’t exactly hate that plane of yours.”

  “That really stings,” said Martin, pretended to be hurt. “And here I always thought my success with women was due entirely to my charm and good manners.”

  “Well, I for one,” said Alyssa, “think you’d do great on your looks and personality alone. Even if you didn’t have a plane, and weren’t a billionaire. I mean, even if you only had nine hundred and ninety-nine million dollars, there’s still a chance you could get a girl.”

  The trio laughed, after which they lapsed into a long silence, basking in the beauty all around them. The waterfall gave off a steady roar, but the curtain was thin, so the rush of sound was loud enough to be soothing and exhilarating, but not too loud to make conversation difficult.

  “This really is heaven,” commented Alyssa, breaking the long silence. “Thanks, Clark,” she said to Craft.

  Craft arched one eyebrow. “Since we’ve been speaking of Superman,” he said, “let me ra
ise a subject I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately. Our myths and our entertainment. Why is it that superhero stories resonate so much with us? Our species has been fascinated with these kinds of abilities since the dawn of time.”

  “I don’t know,” said Alyssa dreamily. “But I’m too busy gawking at the scenery to think too hard. Would I be right in guessing you have a theory?”

  “Since I have a theory about nearly everything,” said Craft wryly, “and I brought it up, this isn’t much of a guess.”

  “Are you going to tell us?” said Alyssa.

  “Okay. But only because I want to so badly,” he replied good-naturedly. “Al Yad and I have shown that flying is possible. That any number of miraculous things are possible. I wonder if humans know in our souls that wielding zero point energy is our birthright. Maybe the collective subconscious of our species knows we should be unbounded. Maybe using our mind as a quantum lens is a skill that we somehow collectively forgot.” He tilted his head. “Maybe one the creator made sure we forgot when he limited himself to create us. So we could experience the absolute exuberance we’ve been feeling at its rediscovery. Let’s face it, we’ve all become giddy at being able to soar like . . . well, like Superman—without the outstretched arms.”

  “I haven’t talked about The God Theory with you in some time,” said Martin. “Does Alyssa know about it?”

  “Bren explained it to me,” said Alyssa. “And I read the book myself a few days later.”

  “Pretty interesting, isn’t it?” said Martin. “Even if you don’t subscribe to it.”

  “No doubt about it,” said Alyssa.

  Martin turned to his friend. “I know you believe that at a subconscious level, we may be able to tap into the infinite intelligence you think we’re fragmented from. So what are you saying? That our superhero obsession is because we’ve all had subconscious glimpses of the glorious whole, during which we remember these abilities? Just enough to make us yearn to get them back?”