CHAPTER 19 — ENTANGLED
Charlotte Jenkins reached her apartment at ten minutes past midnight. At the request of Lucas, she had gone to the facility and signed on to work at six in the morning, two hours earlier than specified in her contract. Lucas had wanted her to go over Jane Connor’s case file again. He was looking for something specific.
As Charlotte entered her apartment, she took off her coat and felt tremendous relief. She turned to the wall-mounted digital display that controlled most of the apartment’s functions. After turning up the heat, Charlotte proceeded to the kitchen, where she made herself tea. She was at the back of the penthouse, overlooking a beautiful terraced garden five floors below. As she stirred the hot water, Charlotte recalled the conversation she had with Lucas earlier.
She had arrived in his office with two cups of coffee, her tablet held only semi securely under her arm. Lucas looked at her and regarded her for only a split second before returning to his terminal. Even that was enough to give her a mild tremor. I’ve to get out of here, she thought briefly, resisting the urge to gasp in his presence. The coffee cups trembled imperceptibly in her hands for a brief second as she walked across the room.
He told her in that distant, brusque voice that there was a possibility that Jane was exhibiting some new, heretofore unseen ability that they hadn’t yet detected. He suggested that the girl was somehow able to extend her abilities to those around her, amplifying their psionic potential. This thought had scared Charlotte, but not in the same way it scared Lucas.
Charlotte was scared for the same reasons anybody else would be: people with “Vision” were different. They were new, and they were unknown. But Lucas’ fear, she thought, came from another place. She had watched him over the previous year during which she had been subordinate to him, and some of his behaviour had truly disturbed her. She walked into the facility most days with a lingering pain in her neck, and her car was littered with empty bottles of aspirin.
She would find herself, in the few quiet moments she had, wondering what she was doing there. She felt trapped by Lucas. Worse, the appearance of the Atlantic Object (something she knew very little about) had changed everything. Whereas before she had felt that she could extricate herself from the environment if she tried, she now felt that she was truly treading in deep waters.
Presently, she sat on the white sofa in her large living room. She sipped her tea and wiped a tear from her eye. The apartment was absolutely exquisite, and the most beautiful furniture adorned it. She could afford it with her bloated salary. But it was also empty. It seemed, somehow, like a shell to her—that it wasn’t really hers.
She had been chosen for the task because of her background in psychology and the fact that her doctoral thesis specialised in the emergence of people with Ethereal Vision. Its title had been Vision from another perspective: on the emergence of the macro manifestation of psychokinesis. She had completed that work five years ago.
She smiled to herself as she remembered herself back then; the abandon of writing that thesis washed back over her. She had worn shorts and tank tops in the summer as she had gone to Central Park some days to work. She had pet dogs as they walked by with their owners. She had strolled around the city eating ice cream and had met college friends on beautiful, sunlit days. Where were those friends now? All through that time, her thoughts had been filled with the wonder of what these new discoveries—the emergence of these new faculties—meant for the world.
She had fallen since then, though; that was the feeling she had about herself now. Writing that thesis, she thought, had probably been the most interesting thing she had ever done in her life. She recalled that one day in the city, when her work on it was nearing completion, she had looked up at the sun through sunglasses.
The world had shimmered inside her for a moment then. Her mind seemed to vanish, and she suddenly felt as though the Universe was looking back at her. For a few brief seconds, everything was beautiful: the filth caked into the sidewalk, the green summer leaves as the breeze swished through them gently, the honking horns and the puppy jumping up to grasp his leash in his mouth. For a moment, it all seemed to speak to her. Then, just a moment later, it had been gone and in the years that followed she had fallen.
She wondered again how she had gotten here. She had always had an undeniable attraction to this new and emerging reality of psionic ability; in retrospect, she supposed it was all inevitable. Her thesis had flagged the attention of the committee, and she had been offered a research position.
A year later, she was offered a job as an advisor and assistant at the New York facility, and she accepted it, thinking it would be an interesting position to have. It had proved interesting, but only in a strange, unworldly sense. In that first year she had seen the ethereals perform astonishing feats during their rehabilitation sessions.
They had lit fires and levitated marbles, all while the scientists and technicians took readings of what they were doing. Only in the last eight months had that become an issue of concern for her, as the reasoning behind what they were doing shifted dramatically. Now she was working directly for Lucas.
She sipped her tea in silence, the knot in her stomach refusing to go away. The large flatscreen television sat dormant and unused in the corner and reflected the moon that spilled light through the large, curved glass window at the front of the room. She reached for her cell phone and scrolled to her parents’ home number. The last call was listed as having taken place four months previously. She was about to call when she hesitated and placed the phone back on the sofa cushion. It had taken her this long to understand that she had distanced herself from them out of shame.
She clambered desperately for her father’s voice. What would he tell her? If only she could have his counsel for five minutes. That could be the balm that solved everything. But even if she did speak to him, what could she possibly tell him that wouldn’t breach her disclosure contract? The answer was obvious: nothing. A single tear streaked down her right cheek. She wiped it away.
In that moment, she decided that she would have to do something. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do, but she had to take responsibility for her situation, even if it meant sacrificing her career and her job. In truth, these things didn’t mean that much to her anymore. She turned instinctively and walked into the kitchen.
She pulled out the drawer where her Taser was stored and placed it on the counter. She reached underneath into the recess in the wood there and found the cold metal. She pulled it out and looked at it. It was a sophisticated weapon, capable of disabling anyone within less than half a second of impact. She recalled the recoil from the weapon. The force had trembled up her arms when she had fired it during her training. The blue-white bolts of energy that the weapon fired were powerful and delivered a devastating surge of energy. It was something she had adamantly refused to have anything to do with, but she had been forced to take it as part of her contract.
She looked at it, holding it sideways in her hand. What exactly are you going to do with this? she wondered. The girl with the blonde hair came to mind: Jane. Charlotte had read her case file; she practically knew it by heart. The girl was from Dublin, Ireland. Her mother was an artist. Her father had left their family shortly after a dramatic car accident. It was suspected that the accident had precipitated the emergence of Jane’s massive psychokinetic ability. It had caused one of the most dramatic spikes of such activity ever recorded. Jane had levitated the car and prevented it from falling into a valley below. Charlotte felt a pang of guilt now and gritted her teeth as the guilt quickly turned to anger.
She looked down at the weapon again. Whatever the Atlantic Object turned out to be, of one thing she was certain: it was not meant for them. It was not meant for people without Vision.
She herself had surmised that it had been waiting for mankind to reach the evolutionary precipice whereby this “vision” could show up and activate it. Charlotte guessed that who or whatever had left it there had determined that
evolution on earth could someday give rise to intelligent life. This, in turn, could give rise to life capable of affecting the Universe with the power of thought alone.
Her thoughts drifted from the object to the Taser in her hand and the current difficulty she faced. As she looked at the Taser, she thought of the psionic suppression devices. She had access to the control room. A few well-aimed shots could take out the main generator; it could give them a chance to escape.
The gravity of what she was considering descended on her. She rechecked all the case files as the eight names flashed across her mind. None of them had done anything significantly damaging, and none of them had proved that they were a great danger to the world. In regard to Jane specifically, there was no actual evidence that she had done anything wrong, despite Lucas’ protestations to the contrary.
There were doctored files that she had received from him suggesting that Jane had caused a car to crash, injuring a passenger for no good reason. Charlotte had worked with Lucas long enough to know almost immediately which files were doctored and which were genuine accounts. It had grown into an intuitive faculty. She had done her own research and made her own phone calls from a private, secured phone line. The report she received contradicted everything in the file Lucas gave her.
There was another concern that Lucas seemed to be ignoring: the dangerous radical group—Ethereal End—that constantly threatened the ethereals. They had received encoded video messages from the group in the previous weeks. Some of the messages were now leaking onto the internet. Until very recently, the group had kept these messages out of the public’s direct line of sight, but it was changing that tactic now.
One of the messages had appeared on the internet and gone viral. It had been viewed millions of times by the public. News stations around the world had broadcast parts of it, although many of them seemed reluctant to go into any detailed commentary about it. The existence of the facilities had now breached the sphere of public awareness, a thought that made Charlotte tremble.
She prepared for bed, deciding that these endless ruminations were not accomplishing anything. She left the Taser next to her on the nightstand.
Charlotte woke hours later and sat up placidly in bed. She rested on her right hand and looked out the window at the moon, which had descended quite a bit in the sky. She was unaware of this, but she was still in a slight hypnagogic state.
An ominous feeling came over her as she looked at the moon; she was totally unaware of her surroundings. Images flashed in her mind of massive and primal forces of nature: pulsars whirling in the dark of space, exploding stars and planets crashing into dust.
After a moment during which her mind drifted through these elemental forces, Charlotte lay back down in her bed. She was asleep again almost immediately. Behind her, the diminishing moonlight glinted off the metallic edge of the advanced weapon she had left sitting on her nightstand.
The Ethereal Vision Page 33