Hall seemed to hang on her every word. She understood why he was so interested in learning about her. They were fighting for their lives together. And he had no past of his own. But she also didn’t want to be the sole focus of attention.
“I’m afraid that’s it. For now, at least. And you can’t be told the essence of a person, anyway. That’s something you have to experience. Their sense of humor, their values, their demeanor, that sort of thing. My favorite flavor of ice cream doesn’t seem all that important at the moment.”
Hall tilted his head. Chocolate peanut butter, he thought.
Megan’s eyes narrowed. “Hey! I read that,” she said. “So have you become able to read my mind, too?” she asked worriedly.
Hall winced, obviously embarrassed that she had caught his unspoken words. “No. Still can’t,” he said. “But you caught me. I must have thought that pretty loudly. I hope you aren’t offended, but I took a thorough look at your Facebook page while I was playing poker. Among other surfing expeditions. You know, when I had dropped out of a hand and was bored.”
“I see,” she said noncommittally.
“You don’t post there very often, and I have a feeling I wasn’t a power user either, but I have to say that Facebook does a good job of sharing background information. I’ve read most of your two hundred and fourteen ‘likes.’ Chocolate peanut butter is one of them. I also know your favorite books, bands, movies, sports teams, activities, and interests. Really sorry about that.”
She stared at him for a moment and then said, “Don’t be. I guess I posted them for a reason. And now I don’t have to waste time telling you what I like,” she added with a smile. Her smile vanished quickly and she looked deeply into his eyes. “So you still can’t read me?”
“Right.”
“Any further thoughts on why not?”
Megan didn’t want to admit it, but when he was in her office and had wondered if his inability to read her thoughts was due to her having an unusually weak mind, this had struck a nerve, an insecurity she had thought had been completely excised. But apparently not. She had struggled in grade school and her first two years of high school, especially in subjects like math and science. She was convinced her mind did work differently than others. For a long time in school she was sure she was an idiot, and her self-esteem had plummeted.
But it gradually dawned on her that she wasn’t an idiot. Not totally. In math and science, yes. But in the realm of creative thinking, she came to realize she was a sighted person in the kingdom of the blind. Because as much as she seemed unable to process algebra and geometry, she was a savant when it came to pure creativity.
And not just in graphic design. In everything. Coming up with ideas for the company picnic. Throwing parties. Wording invitations. Writing poetry. She came to be thought of as a one-woman idea machine. The kind who could take four or five mundane office items and turn them into fifteen different stunning decorations.
And she could figure out the most complex fictional mysteries. She was almost always able to see the coming plot twists, even when those who excelled at academics missed them entirely. So maybe she did have a different style of intellect. She thought her self-esteem had become off the charts high, but Hall’s offhanded remark had shown her that the scars of her early struggles in school still remained, as did deep-seated doubts.
“Scoping you out on Facebook wasn’t all I did last night,” said Hall. “I did some research on ESP as well. But nothing I learned suggested a reason why a mind reader might be unable to read certain people. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if I found a manual on exactly how ESP works in the first place. Because no one knows. After all, no one’s had it before. Not really. If they had, parapsychologists wouldn’t need to perform statistical tests in an attempt to demonstrate it. They could demonstrate it instantly, beyond question, the way I did with you and the paramedics.”
“Do you think there are others out there you can’t read?”
“I’d be amazed if there aren’t. You’re unique, but I can’t believe you’re that unique. The question is, how many people are like you? One in a hundred? One in a thousand?”
“You haven’t encountered anyone else you can’t read so far, though, right?”
“Right. As far as I know. Although I haven’t made much of an effort to find any. But we’ll probably never figure out why you’re different. Why are some people allergic to peanuts while most people aren’t? There are endless examples of significant traits appearing in the population at very low levels.”
“And I’m sure you could cite them all for me, couldn’t you, Dr. Cyberspace?” said Megan wryly.
She took a long drink from her bottle of water, savoring the cold, refreshing liquid as it traveled down her throat. Fearing for her very life had changed her perspective, freed her from petty, everyday worries, and seemed to make her better able to appreciate simple pleasures.
“So how is it that you knew to come back for me? You hear hundreds of voices in your head all the time, right? From miles around you? So how did you know when those men had found your car in our lot?”
“Great question. Their thoughts when they saw the car, and were licking their chops to come after me, emerged like a neon sign from the sea of noise. And this isn’t the first time this has happened. I’ve had thoughts stand out this way before. And they’ve always been thoughts that were vitally important for me to know. If it wasn’t for this, I’d be long dead.”
“Wow, Nick. It almost seems like you have a higher power looking out for you.”
Hall shook his head. “As much as I can use all the help I can get, I don’t think that’s the explanation. I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on.”
She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“It’s called the cocktail party effect. Have you heard of it?”
Megan searched her memory. She had heard the phrase, but she didn’t know anything about it. She admitted as much.
“Has this ever happened to you, Megan? You’re in a big crowd, where dozens of conversations are going on at the same time, totally focused on your own conversation. The endless other conversations around you are like white noise, and you aren’t listening to them at all. But then you hear your name from somewhere in the room. Clear as a bell. It just kind of stands out from the background.”
Megan nodded thoughtfully. “Now that you mention it . . . yeah. I totally know what you mean.”
“Almost everyone has experienced something like this. So how did your name suddenly stand out from a jumble of noise you weren’t paying any attention to? Well, this curious effect has been thoroughly studied.”
“The cocktail party effect?”
“Right.”
“Good name for it,” said Megan with a smile. “So how does it work?”
“The gist of it is that people soak up far more information than we realize. All the time. At the subconscious level, we’re monitoring everything. But our subconscious can’t bring all of it to our conscious attention or we’d drown. Too much information. So in the party example, your brain is taking in all of the conversations around you, but sparing you from having to deal with them. So you can focus on your own conversation. But when your subconscious hears your name, or the words, ‘run, the house is on fire,’ or something else of great interest to you, it decides that this is important information and brings it to your conscious attention. It seems like magic. It’s not that you’re suddenly paying attention. Part of you was always paying attention. You just didn’t know it.”
“That is so cool,” said Megan. “How’d you even know where to begin looking that up?”
“I didn’t look it up. That’s something I actually knew—without the Internet. Because I think it’s very cool, too, so wherever I learned it, probably in a class at some point in my sordid past, it must have stuck with me. I think I’ve forgotten a bunch of fascinating examples of this effect, but I do remember one more. Take a new mother, completely exhausted. She can slee
p soundly through the loudest thunderstorm, no problem. But if her baby makes the softest whimper, she bolts awake like she was electrocuted. How does that work? The answer, again, is that the mom’s subconscious heard both events. For the thunderstorm it said, ‘Just a stupid thunderstorm. No need to disturb the weary boss.’ For the baby, it heard the low whimper and shot it up to her conscious mind immediately for further attention.”
“Fascinating,” said Megan. “So your guess is that the same effect is working with your psychic background noise.”
“Exactly.”
“Makes sense to me. And it seems I owe my life to this effect.”
“You and me both,” said Hall.
Megan hadn’t thought it possible to explain how Hall had been alerted, out of the blue, to information that was critical to him. But this only went to show, when you didn’t know what you didn’t know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.
16
Hall asked to pause the conversation briefly while he cast his mind out as widely as he could, straining to detect anyone who might suspect where he and Megan were now hiding. He had done this periodically since they arrived, just as an added precaution. Once again, he detected nothing that might worry them.
“So let’s get back to you,” said Megan when he had finished. “You have brain implants that let you surf the web. You have ESP. And you’ve lost your memory. Those three things have to be related. You couldn’t just coincidentally have that much weird stuff going on inside your head.”
“Yeah, it’s a real party in here,” he commented, rolling his eyes. “I’m almost certain the Internet and ESP are somehow related. The memory loss, not as much. I did seem to have some head trauma when I came to in the dumpster. And I read the thoughts of the first guy who tried to kill me. Apparently, I had led them on a big chase. But I don’t remember that. So maybe I had the ESP and Internet going for me, and only lost my memory recently.”
“If the Internet ability and ESP are related, the next question is: are they related on purpose?”
Hall shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“You seem awfully articulate and educated to me. You think maybe you invented the implants? Used yourself as a guinea pig? You think you might be a mad scientist?”
He smiled. “I prefer the term, angry.”
Megan laughed.
“It’s a valid question,” said Hall. “But the answer is no. I don’t have memory of myself, but I know what I know. And I know what I don’t know. Remember how I knew the Margaret Thatcher quote? Well, I’m sure I know nothing about the brain, or how implants might work. And I’m sure I know nothing about ESP.”
“Why don’t you tell me everything that happened to you before you met me.”
Hall did so as thoroughly as he possibly could, describing how he had killed Baldino at the Shell gas station, the incident with Radich at the mini-mart, and how he had narrowly avoided another assassin heading toward him on the road, all compliments of the cocktail party effect.
“So why do you think they’re after you?” asked Megan when he had finished.
Hall told her his theory that maybe he had read something he shouldn’t have in someone’s mind, but she was skeptical. “It seems to me they don’t even know about your ESP,” she said. “I think they’re after you for your web surfing ability alone.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s obvious,” she replied. “The killers after you all thought they could surprise you. If they would have known about your psychic abilities, they would never have made that assumption.”
“You’re right! That is obvious. How did I miss that?” he said, shaking his head. “So do you think the guy at the top of the pyramid, the guy in charge, knew about it but didn’t tell them?”
“No,” replied Megan without hesitation. “He’d be setting up his men to take a fall for no reason. Either tell them what they’re up against, or have them act as spotters. Have them find you and then call in the people who do know what they’re up against. The people who actually have a chance to stop you.”
“I think you’re in the wrong line of work,” said Hall admiringly.
“So they must be after you because of your web surfing ability,” continued Megan, pleased by the compliment, but choosing to ignore it and forge ahead. “Not because of anything having to do with your psychic ability.”
“But then why try to kill me?”
“Maybe this is military technology that’s supposed to be top secret. Like whatever is going on at Area 51. Do you feel like a rogue soldier?” He certainly had the body of an elite soldier, she had to admit, although she was careful not to project this thought.
“No. I’m even more sure I was never a soldier than I am that I didn’t invent the technology in my head.”
“Well, then it seems to me that you can’t be the prototype with this technology. Otherwise, they would be trying to catch you rather than kill you. To study you. If they knew about the ESP, they’d want to take you alive as well.”
“Exactly what I’ve been thinking.”
“If you were the prototype, the question wouldn’t be who would want to grab you for study. The question would be, who wouldn’t? Every industrialist and every corporation on earth, not to mention the government and military of every country on earth, would want you desperately. The industrialists because the technology behind your web surfing abilities would be worth trillions of dollars. And governments and militaries because of the huge advantages this technology would give them. And if the Internet capability alone is enormously valuable, combining this with ESP is unstoppable. You could be a one-man army. A one-man force of nature.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I don’t think you’ve fully grasped the possibilities,” said Megan. “Which is a good thing. I think if you really were a power mad asshole, you’d have done so right away. But think about what you can do. Forget about ESP for a second. While you’re sitting here sipping your Mountain Dew and talking, you could be booking a flight, calling a cab, communicating with multiple people, transferring funds, trading stocks. You get the idea. And anyone with your implants gets an unlimited knowledge boost. You have instant access to trillions of pages of information. You can obtain instant biographical information on anyone you meet, the way you did with me. And the more powerful the person, the more information is online. Plus, you can turn the cloud into your virtual memory, storing anything you want to remember there. Like the train and bus schedules from last night.”
Hall nodded. “And if this technology can convert video and audio into vision and hearing without the use of my eyes or ears, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to go the other way. To convert my vision into video. If so, I could record anything I’m seeing and hearing and save it in the cloud.” His expression reflected awe and fear at the possibilities inherent in the technology.
She stared at him thoughtfully. “It looks like I haven’t fully grasped the possibilities either.”
“They are pretty staggering,” he said. “And sobering.”
“And I think we’re only scratching the surface. Let’s think about special forces soldiers with your implants. They can access any information they need in real time, without anyone knowing they’re doing it. Maps, floor plans for raids, what have you. They can access language translation programs to convert signs and conversations to English for them. You think that might be helpful? They can communicate to each other without anyone knowing it. Their ability to use stealth and deception would increase dramatically. A soldier with these implants could go into a war zone pretending to be with the Red Cross, and while helping to move rubble and not outwardly in communication with anyone, could be deploying entire teams of soldiers. Anyone with implants could direct drones, call in air strikes, and paint targets—not with bulky lasers—but with their eyes, while they’re having tea and crumpets and engaging in polite conversation.”
“And with ESP in the picture?”
�
�Then all bets are off,” replied Megan. “You could get every intimate secret of every billionaire and politician—and believe me, most of them have lots of secrets. You could probably find enough to get many of them thrown in jail, even if it’s as relatively minor an offense as cheating on taxes or insider trading. But even if not, I’d bet, at minimum, they have secrets that could embarrass the hell out of them. So you could blackmail the most powerful men in the world. Or you could fish through the mind of the NSA’s top programmer for backdoor access codes to their computers, and have access to unparalleled records, phone conversations, and intelligence from around the world.”
Megan paused for a drink of water and then continued. “Cheating at poker to win a few thousand dollars is like an adorable schoolyard prank compared to what you could do. You could read the minds of CEOs to get insider information for stock trading. Read combinations to wall safes, the same way you read the combination to deactivate the alarm to this house.”
Hall was staring off into space now, pondering the possibilities. “And that’s not all,” he said softly. “I could be the ultimate identity thief. I could go to a charity event filled with rich people and read their account numbers, passwords, their mothers’ maiden names—the works. I could be dining on expensive lobster while raiding their accounts, transferring their money to accounts I set up in the Caymans, and wiring money to a team of mercenaries to take over a Pacific Island for my own personal use.”
“Why stop with individuals, even if they are super rich. You could get into corporate accounts. Government accounts.”
Hall whistled. “You’re right about this. I never thought through the angles. And I’m sure there’s a lot we’re still missing. Right now, I’ve been a hunted animal. Running blindly and barely staying ahead of the dogs. But if I could get off the mat, get my bearings . . .”
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