Mindguard

by Andrei Cherascu

  Niko gently put his hand on Sheldon’s forehead, to check if he had a fever. His sadness was obvious, the sadness of a healer who could no longer help a fellow human being. Sophie recognized the Niko she had always known, the compassionate man whom she loved like a father. In the shock of the last few hours and the torment over Sheldon’s fate, she had never gotten the opportunity to ask him what happened.

  The whole world thought he was dead and yet there he was, hiding on this godforsaken island. When she finally asked him about this, he closed his eyes as if he had dreaded the question. He looked like a man whose worst nightmare had come true. When he finally opened his eyes, there was much love and sadness in them. The entire moment felt surreal. It made Sophie very anxious.

  “Sophie, I…” He shook his head as if to say ‘no’, like he was trying to stop himself from talking. Then, he looked to the ground and slowly nodded. A feeling of dread overtook her, one that she hadn’t even felt when her life had been in danger. It peaked when he finally worked up the courage to face her and his expression spoke of things she was not sure she wanted to hear. Strangely, it felt like he was about to tell her something she already knew, but refused to acknowledge.

  “You know I love you, Sophie,” he said. “You know I would never lie to you.”

  Without being invited, Sophie sat down on a small wooden chair next to the bed where Sheldon was sleeping. Nikolaos took a seat at the dining table, facing her. When he spoke, it sounded like he was reciting a prayer.

  “A little over two years ago, your father and I set out on one of our travels.”

  Sophie didn’t nod or say ‘I remember’, though she remembered it very well. The last image of her beloved uncle Niko stepping through the gateway on the Miller property, together with her father, would follow her in her dreams for two years.

  She remembered the day her father had come back from that fateful expedition. Word had gotten out about Niko’s disappearance, and press had gathered in the front yard of the Miller estate, waiting for the surviving adventurer to return home. When the gateway appeared, and a pale, thin and visibly shaken Horatio Miller stepped through, he completely ignored the journalists and walked right up to Sophie and her mother. He hugged them both and then told Sophie that her uncle was dead. She remembered it like it had happened five minutes ago, and it hurt just like it did then. But she said nothing, letting him speak instead.

  “There was nothing unusual about this particular expedition,” he continued. “You’ve joined us on some of our travels yourself, you know what it’s like. Some are more dangerous than others but in the end it’s always about the same thing: balance. We had this game we always played. We chose a departure place and from there, we randomly picked an uncharted planet as a destination. We used a personal transporter to open a gateway and send a probe through, only to see if the new place is biologically hospitable to life. If we had a viable atmosphere and survival temperatures, we just stepped through head-first, ready to face any risks the planet could throw at us. We’ve helped chart many new planets this way.

  You see, dear, we knew it was dangerous and foolish. Charting expeditions are usually made up of many men, with tons of equipment, not two hotshot scientists with backpacks and portable gateway generators. It was foolish… but we did it anyway. Sometimes, in a life where there is too much order, you need to insert a trace of chaos, to stop the mind from going numb. Your father and I are men of thought. We spend our lives as prisoners of reflection, moving around in an endless cycle of ideation, constantly absorbed in work that is shaped by our very minds.”

  Sophie inadvertently looked at Sheldon.

  “Sometimes the pressure can be maddening. When you are trapped within the confines of your own head all the time, you start searching for an occasional escape. It keeps you… sane. It keeps you balanced. On that particular journey, we reached Carthan. It was the farthest we had ever traveled. We knew the Djago Desert was dangerous, but with every new trip, we felt like we wanted more. There was a feeling of… bonding, which we both enjoyed. Talk about balance; we were responsible for each other’s well-being. There is no greater symmetry in life. Fighting for survival kept our minds alert in a way that our work in the Mylonas laboratories did not. It was something entirely different. It was freeing. We had to risk our lives to feel that they were even worth fighting for. Carthan and the Djago Desert were the biggest risk we had ever taken.

  We reached Carthan in the morning and stopped only so long as to have breakfast. I am not a man who is easily frightened, but there is something intimidating about that planet. The sound of the permafrost cracking underfoot is menacing. The color of the sky - an off-green - something about it causes severe anxiety. You just feel like you want to leave the place as quickly as possible. Your father felt it too, and he is a lot harder to faze than I. He said something interesting, ‘It is as if the planet is consciously trying to offend the human sensibility’.

  We used the holopad to generate a hypothetical map of the cosmic surroundings based on gravity microanalysis. The device detected four imaginary planets. One of them was so far away, it was almost unreachable by the Muench-Henriksen gateway. There were no other planets in its vicinity, which was odd. It seemed as if that planet was purposefully seeking isolation, which is ridiculous, but it was enough to arouse our curiosity.

  It was farther than any man had ever traveled, that was something we thought we knew for sure. Carthan itself is uninhabited. It was charted, but not yet included in any scientific programs. For all intents and purposes, it’s a dead end. We were sure nobody had ventured beyond Carthan. I can remember the spark of curiosity in your father’s eyes. Surely, he must have seen the same in mine. The problem was that we were receiving a very weak signal and little to no information about that mysterious planet. We sent a mobile probe but the data we received was inconsistent. We had no way of knowing if the planet was hospitable to life or not.”

  “But you went anyway…”

  She hoped that Niko felt the accusation in her voice: You went anyway, risking your lives as if they belonged only to you and not also to the people who love you.

  “Yes,” Niko answered, tenderly but truthfully. “In those moments, we felt almost drunk, hypnotized by the incredible intellectual rush of discovering new worlds, being the first to step on grounds that had never before been walked by man. The frenzy of exploration is a feeling that is unmatched in human history. The threat of death potentiates it even more.”

  Sophie nodded as if to say ‘I understand’, though the look on her face expressed that she clearly didn’t.

  “Your father entered the planet’s coordinates and dialed. I remember that the last thing I was thinking when we stepped through the wormhole was…” He stopped for a few seconds to chuckle. “Well, actually, I was trying to make a mental calculation in order to figure out our odds of surviving the trip and coming out safely on the other side. I guess there are certain habits you just cannot drop, even in the face of death. I wasn’t finished when we set foot on the planet and I realized that we were still very much alive. From the moment we stepped through, we felt that something about this place was different.”

  “Opus Caine,” Sophie said, pronouncing the words as if they were a magic spell. Niko nodded. “So, your father told you.”

  “Yes, I -”

  “Please…” He silenced her with a gesture of his hand. “I don’t know what your father said, or how much you know. But I am certain that he hasn’t told you everything. Please, just… let me tell you the story… my story… from start to finish.”

  She said nothing. She didn’t want to hear it. She felt that Niko’s story would change her, that it would challenge everything she thought she knew about herself and her life. She felt it. But there was no going back. She remained silent, allowing him to speak.

  “You have no idea how much I wanted to tell this to someone… to anyone… but I couldn’t.” As he spoke, his eyes filled with tears. “The fact that God br
ought you here, so that I my share the story with you of all people, is incredible. You have to believe that every word I speak is the truth.”

  When he said the word ‘truth’, Niko’s face grew dark - the bearer of bad news.

  “The scenery was unbelievable. Remember, I told you about Carthan that it seemed to have been especially designed to repel the human sensibility; this planet was the complete opposite. The temperature, the humidity, the atmospheric pressure, everything was so pleasant. It was like that one perfect spring day you remember from childhood, when it is not too hot and not too cold, but just right. There was a breeze. The sky was covered with clouds of the most wonderful shapes. Light seemed to emanate from inside them, as if they were giant lanterns. I can still see it now, as clearly as if it were right in front of me. The grass was a vibrant green and the trees bore fruit. Sophie, are you familiar with the notion of paradise, the garden of God?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was like that. It was as if the place had been drawn up from man’s ideal image of nature. I started crying because I felt such a strong connection with the world around me. You father started laughing, like a child who just discovered that everything in his room was made from chocolate.” She picked up a strange inflection in his voice, behind which there seemed to be great pain.

  “We sat down on the grass and decided to have a small picnic. Usually, the places we ended up in did not offer us this opportunity. They were mostly hostile and we would have to struggle for survival every second. That was the beauty of our travels together, that was what we craved. But it felt good to be in a place where you could just sit down and enjoy the vast beauty in tranquility, without struggle. You know your father always carried a bottle of wine with him wherever he went. No matter how dangerous a situation, he would always find a place to which to retreat and enjoy a drink. He called wine a ‘beverage suitable for any adventure’. A drop of culture in the harshest surroundings, there was a poetic beauty to it.” Again he chuckled, remembering the adventures of his youth. And again, his face grew dark, as if there was something his heart would not let him forget, even for the briefest of moments.

  “In an hour we were drunk on wine and the effect of breathtaking landscape. We spent most of the time in silence, just admiring the surroundings. Do you remember, Sophie, we never took holo-cams with us, or any other type of recording device. We never did because we felt they would just be distracting. We let our minds record our adventures in our memory, offering them far greater beauty than any technology ever could.”

  Sophie thought about the recording equipment in her backpack. She wondered if it still worked after their dive into the river on Noriado.

  “Anyway,” Nikolaos continued, “We were on a hill overlooking a splendid valley. It was so amazingly similar to Terra Antiqua, even the rays of sunshine felt like those of Old Earth. Your father must have spent more than fifteen minutes just looking around, admiring he view. When he saw it, he thought the wine was playing tricks on his mind.”

  “Smoke,” she said, for she had heard this before and was anticipating the part where it would become a different story.

  “Yes, Sophie. He saw smoke. On that distant world, farther than the scope of humanity’s imagination, there was a fire.”

  ●

  “For a long time, we stared in disbelief. I thought I saw a trace of anger on your father’s face. Perhaps he was upset that someone had discovered this… paradise… before us. Whatever his initial feelings, they quickly gave way to interest. In the end, your father and I are both creatures of curiosity. The allure of the mystery was too great.

  We started walking in that direction, passing fields of wondrous, colorful flowers and orchards of splendid alien trees and shrubs, so pleasing to the eye. We walked in silence. Our minds were trying to come to terms with this discovery, what it could mean. Reason dictated that we were about to make contact with the first form of non-human intelligence, something that science had dreamt of since before the discovery of the Muench-Henriksen gateways. Except everything about that planet felt so… human.

  I am not ashamed to admit that my thoughts wandered towards prophecies from the ages past. As we drew nearer, we could see houses, many of them. There was no place for doubt: It was a town and it had been built by men just like us. In the center of the small village was a larger house. It was the only one from which smoke arose, and I clearly remember a sudden realization that the smoke was a signal, one designed for us to see. I feared that we might be walking into a trap, but the attraction of discovery was stronger. As we were about to reach the nearest houses, it spoke to us.”

  “The village,” Sophie said. She remembered the exhilaration she had felt when she had first heard the story.

  “It did not speak with a voice,” Nikolaos said, his own voice but a murmur now. “Not in the way I speak to you now. It did not say ‘We are the Opus Caine’ but we knew that was what they were. Little by little we discovered more about them, as though we were reading a book that was revealing itself to us one page at a time. Everything was happening here.” He pointed at his head. “We had not yet seen a single human being. We stopped in front of the entrance, which was marked by a totem pole with a design we had never seen before. We were unable to take another step. It was as if we feared that the town was merely a holoprojection meant to deceive us and that taking a step forward would have us falling off the edge of the world. We merely stood in place, listening to what the Opus Caine were revealing to us, listening – but not with our ears. The story continued to tell itself.

  It was the year 2091 and mankind had just started spreading throughout the universe, conquering new territories. Two great discoveries had altered the course of human history. One was the discovery of the human brain’s capacity for telepathic communication, on April 4th of 2049. The other was space travel through the Muench-Henriksen wormholes.

  From the start, telepathy was viewed with distrust and caused great dissension. The gene therapy that activated this latent ability was only available to the very wealthy. That brought about great anxiety and lead to civil unrest. The gap between social classes widened. The middle and lower classes were unhappy. Laws were created to regulate the use of telepathy but thoughtcrimes grew in frequency. Illegal drugs that enhanced telepathic communication appeared on the black market and their effects were unstable and dangerous.

  As violence grew, widespread anarchy became a constant threat to society. By 2063 the entire world was at war. The Telepathic Registration Act of 2064 severely restricted inter-mind communication. But in the field of science, telepathy lead to marvelous results, most importantly the Muench-Henriksen gateways, which have revolutionized space travel and the neuroinsertions that have strengthened the human body. Clearly, this was proof that telepathy was not only a tool for violence but also for the advancement of the human race.

  Telepathic cooperation was possible. When it became clear that it will soon be completely outlawed, seven hundred and ninety-two powerful telepaths fled the confines of the IFCO. Back then, it was still called the United Governments of Earth. They fled because, in spite of the anarchy, in spite of the violence, they still believed that telepathy could be controlled, that it could be used to benefit mankind, to build bridges between minds and, implicitly, between souls. To end suffering and bring humanity closer to its Creator.”

  Sophie knew that the last statement had not been suggested by the Opus Caine. Nikolaos had drawn that conclusion for himself.

  “Telepathy as a gift and not a curse. The end of individual suffering and the dawn of collective empathy. That had been the dream of doctor Whitman Caine. The seven-hundred and ninety-two telepaths who fled, knew that this dream could never be fulfilled on Old Earth or any other place under the control of the United Governments. They knew that once mankind branded something as evil, its fate was forever sealed. So they decided to flee. To flee as mortal men and someday return as something else, something greater – the final stage of man’s e
volution.

  They called themselves Opus Caine – the Work of Caine – in honor of the man who had wanted to bring us together, but had died broken hearted. They chose the name in the ancient language of science. They fled as fast and as far as they could, where they thought nobody would know to look. They used the collective power of their minds to shield themselves from those who might follow, so they may become invisible. Even the planet had no discernable neuraltranscendence field. They hoped that mankind would forget them. And we did. Like a dog chasing a vehicle, we soon forgot and continued on the path on which we find ourselves today. Meanwhile the Opus Caine started building a new society, on this far-away planet they named after themselves. It was a society shaped by a never-before-seen intellect, with the capacity of seven-hundred and ninety-two minds. Forgotten by the human race and far from the threat of any potential enemy, the Opus Caine were free to evolve. And they did. They found balance in this new state of consciousness, they developed as one single being. Without the confines of individuality, without the boundaries of selfishness, the Opus Caine managed an enormous evolutionary leap, jumping millennia in mere decades.

  The more they harvested the power of their collective mind, the more they learned to control it. Without the burden of self, they opened new doors, discovered abilities no one would have ever imagined possible. They found new ways of interacting with the world around them, when they discovered that a powerful enough mind could transcend even matter. Nature was now at their command. They shaped that once hostile world into a paradise, terraformed by their own imagination.

  Their power grew every single day and with that power grew their love. Their love for us, for this universe for which they now felt a newfound responsibility. They had conquered self, they had conquered mind and matter but, most importantly, they had conquered death. You see, their minds were now one. When a body withered and died, the mind remained in place, unaffected, for it was the same mind that rested in the body of a newborn child. Do you know what this means, Sophie?” She said nothing.