Mindguard

by Andrei Cherascu

  Ross had no problems moving through the darkness. With all the ship’s doors now stuck open, he quickly made his way to the garage. There, they found the remaining members of Tamisa’s team – Dieter Muench, Matt Harris and Adrian Lucas – waiting for them. Their weapons were aimed at Ross and Tamisa. Ross made a gesture of the head towards the captive woman and smirked.

  “Seems I got myself a damsel in distress,” he said.

  “Take him down,” Tamisa ordered with what was left of her voice. None of the enforcers made any move.

  “I will kill her,” Ross shouted. The men did not look like they doubted him.

  “Take him down, that is an order!” Tamisa had intended to yell, but only a pathetic whisper came out of her hurting throat. Muench looked at her with sad eyes, as if he wished he could trade places with her.

  “I’m sorry ma’am, you know the protocol. If you are a hostage… your orders are invalid. Stand down, men!”

  “Muench… do the right thing,” she begged, but the veteran shook his head and said nothing. The garage contained two land vehicles. Ross smiled and slowly walked to the nearest one. He ordered Tamisa to open it and when she refused to give the vocal command, he assured her that he’d have ‘the old bastard’ do it instead. The woman complied and the next thing she knew they were inside. There were three seats: a driver’s seat in front and two behind it. Ross sat at the driver’s seat but didn’t let go of his hostage.

  “Transfer controls to me,” he said. She did, when she realized that he no longer had any reason to keep her alive if she didn’t obey. All she wanted now was to survive, so that she may get her revenge on him. He took off so fast the vehicle almost flew out of the spacecraft. Once he found himself outside, he opened the door to his left. “You owe me, girl,” he said and threw her out.

  She hit the ground so hard she almost lost consciousness. As she struggled to her feet, watching Ross disappear into the distance in a cloud of dust, there was only one thing she could think of: You should have killed me!

  Muench and the other two Enforcers caught up with her. They all seemed relieved to see she was all right. “Awaiting orders, ma’am,” Muench said. She ignored him and ran past her confused team mates, back into the ship’s garage. They could merely watch as Tamisa boarded the second vehicle and took off in pursuit of Ross.

  Chapter 36

  Actors on a stage try to deceive you. They feign emotions and say: this is real, this is how I really feel, who I really am. But their emotions are not authentic, for they do not come from an instinctual reaction, but from a deliberate thought process. No matter how convincing, they are fabricated. Like an actor, a mindguard too displays fabricated feelings. Like actors they deceive you not because they mean you harm, but in order to better relate to you. For they can feel no genuine emotions, not in the way non-mindguards do. Emotions come from instinct. But the mindguard’s brain functions with incredible speed. Mindguards assess and conclude much faster than their instincts have time to react. That is what makes them unique among men. They are not the slaves of their instincts, nor are they the slaves of their minds. Instead, they are their minds.

  Samuel Weixman, Strengths and Limitations of a Mindguard

  Sheldon could feel his body slithering towards death. He had no time to look back on his life. At that moment, the only thing keeping him alert was adrenaline. With every passing second, the enforcers could be drawing nearer. Sophie had to wait for the generator to recharge. If the enforcers got to them before that, it will all have been for nothing.

  Sheldon was aware that he had made it easier for his enemies to track them down by using the gateway to travel closer to the Bankarr mountains. There had been no other way. He could never have walked the distance; he could barely stand. Perhaps Sophie would have been safer on her own, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone. At this point, she didn’t so much need a mindguard as she did a friend.

  She was frightened. She was hurt and betrayed. He was afraid she wouldn’t be able to continue on her own. Sheldon was determined to stay alive, long enough to make sure the girl made it to safety. In his own way he had grown fond of her. She was honest and loyal in a way that most people weren’t. She had felt the bitter pain of betrayal and the paralyzing fear of having her life threatened. It seemed that the only person she trusted now was Sheldon. He was not used to being granted this form of trust. People always had faith in his ability. They fought for his services because they were confident that he was the greatest mindguard in the world. But Sophie trusted his character.

  He looked at her and smiled, though she could not see him. Exhausted, she had dosed off. They had managed to reach their destination after having to pause various times to allow Sheldon to catch his breath. Sophie was constantly turning to check if he was still behind her, if he hadn’t just silently collapsed. When they finally reached the large cave, they had to stop just to marvel at its beauty.

  It was formed in a type of sedimentary rock, similar to limestone. The cave walls sparkled in certain places, creating the impression that it was a geological map of some mysterious galaxy. Hundreds of stalactites were hanging above their heads like so many swords of Damocles. The young woman had looked around, her eyes wide in astonishment. Never had she seemed more vulnerable, never had she more resembled a child. She was a child of light holding inside her mind a grain of darkness.

  Two things had been puzzling Sheldon for some time. The first was the unanswered question: what did Horatio Miller hope to achieve by sending Sophie back to Opus Caine? It had been revealed that Miller had an extreme aversion to what the Opus Caine had become. He was so desperate to keep them away from mankind that he tried to kill his best friend, to stop him from telling the world. So why disclose the secret of their existence to his daughter? Why send her on this dangerous journey to make contact with them? There was only one possible reason why Miller would ever want to return to their planet: to destroy them. But how could he ever achieve that through Sophie? Especially since the girl had no knowledge of the real purpose of the mission?

  The second question was one that had plagued him from the beginning: what was that dark spot in Sophie’s thought timbre? Her timbre was one of the brightest and purest he had encountered in his career. However, there was one element - a void-like entity - that contrasted with the rest, as if it were synthetic and not truly part of her mind. At first, he thought it was a result of Miller’s influence on her, that his venomous mind had interacted with hers so intensely it had left a mark. He had seen something like that happen before, but never so strongly. But a long time had passed since she had been around Miller and the dark spot had not decreased.

  With the struggle to control his own failing mind, he had lacked the energy to piece everything together. Now that he knew the truth about Opus Caine and Miller’s deception, the dark spot became more important than ever. He had tried reading her thoughts - gently, without bothering her. Still, the void remained inaccessible. It was as though it was not woven into the fabric of her mind, but stitched onto it. An outside intervention of great complexity.

  His mind circled the darkness. He tried to project his own thoughts onto it, but the darkness reacted like a mental black hole. It absorbed everything and gave back nothing. Was it the very information package he had been hired to guard? It was certainly a form of cognition, but it was neither a thought nor a memory. At least not something that the brain had constructed naturally. Sheldon was intrigued by this unnatural cerebral entity. He told Sophie to get some rest while they waited for the portable gateway generator to recharge. That’s when she fell asleep.

  Sheldon was happy she did, because the mind was infinitely easier to access when the body was sleeping. Usually, a person’s thoughts revealed themselves to him in patterns of complex codes. The Weixman Barrier was the cerebral construction that prevented him from decoding them. With the barrier gone and the carrier asleep, her thoughts appeared as clearly as a holorecording.

  He cou
ld see the physical projection of himself inside her mind. He was in a cave, the same one in which their physical bodies rested. Her thoughts sparkled on the cave walls. The dark spot was there too, only a few feet away from Sheldon. A sphere of nothing, just big enough to contain his nothing-body. He took a few thought-steps forward and entered the void.

  Inside the mental black hole, he found a singularity. Formed from a cosmic noise made of fractions of memories, thoughts and sensory information, the object had neither shape, nor color. There was no way to imagine it, but he could sense that it was there. He invited it inside his mind. With it, came a story:

  Sophie Gaumont and Horatio Miller were in a room that looked like it could be the educator’s office. Sophie sat on a chair and Miller stood in front of her. The girl looked unresponsive, as if she were sleeping with her eyes open. Sheldon realized that the small device in Horatio’s hand had modified the patterns of her synapses, sending her brain into an altered state. She was essentially hypnotized. He recognized the device: a portable, artificial mindguard, but one that had been noticeably modified. A holo-user-interface had been added in place of the regular touchscreen.

  “My darling,” the Horatio-thought said, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” the girl answered in a voice devoid of any inflections.

  “Good.”

  He used his fingers to create a symbol on the holoscreen. The device began interacting with Sophie’s brain in a way that Sheldon had thought impossible. It was sending a telepathic message to the young girl’s mind. In essence, Horatio had found a way to turn a holo-mindguard into a telepath, bypassing the programmed Weixman Barrier.

  How ironic, thought Sheldon. He was disappointed that, given his own situation, he had not been able to suspect the nature of the weapon. For the first time Sheldon felt a great admiration for Miller. The man was truly one of the world’s most brilliant scientists. Whether neurological or technological, the Weixman Barriers had always been considered impenetrable. His grandfather’s disease, from which he too was suffering, proved that the Weixman Barriers in human beings could be broken by a pathological condition. The technological barriers had been broken by Miller. Only Horatio Miller and nature itself had ever been able to conquer this powerful mental fort. That was impressive.

  The usual information packages came in the form of natural memories or information, uploaded onto memory insertions. It all depended on the size of the data being transported. This was not a regular information package. It was being transmitted to the girl’s mind as a cluster of random thoughts. Images, sounds, smells, partial memories, artificial stimuli, fragmented equations, formulas and arbitrary information had been archived and compressed into a dense package, hidden in the most subtle layers of her consciousness.

  The archive had been designed to decompress only when receiving a clear signal: the brain’s interaction with the Opus Caine neuraltranscendence field. At that moment, the vast quantity of information would disperse into Sophie’s mind, sending an amalgam of stimuli that would cause all her neurons to fire at the same time. The physical result would be simultaneous hemorrhages in every region of the brain, causing instant death.

  Now it all made sense. Because Sophie’s mind would, at that point, be in telepathic contact with the Opus Caine, this thought-virus would instantly spread throughout the megamind. It would cause a chain reaction that would kill all physical bodies, no matter how they might have evolved. In one single blow, the Opus Caine would be wiped out. Their togetherness would become their demise. Horatio Miller must have surely been delighted with this concept.

  The thought-Sheldon took one thought-step back. He exited the void and contemplated it in its entirety. He remembered an ominous saying: ‘What was once thought, can never be un-thought.’

  As Sophie slept a dreamless sleep, Sheldon effortlessly absorbed the void into himself, erasing it from her mind completely. The dark spot vanished. In its place remained only the wonderful light that was Sophie. She was free, the burden lay with him now. And with him, it would soon die.

  Erasing an information package. A while ago, Sheldon would not have imagined it was even possible. Now, he could barely believe how easy it had been. That weapon had been destined to be the death of Opus Caine. Now Sheldon could die as well, knowing that he rescued the world’s greatest intellect from annihilation. He could think of no better way to end a career in the service of the mind.

  ●

  “How long have I been asleep?” she asked.

  “Not long,” Sheldon whispered. “The generator will be fully recharged in seventeen minutes. Then you can leave.”

  “Come with me,” she pleaded. Sheldon smiled. It was a warm, wonderful smile that she had never seen before. It made him look like a different person.

  “That wasn’t part of the mission,” he said softly.

  “Sheldon, please…”

  “Come on, let’s get you ready,” he said before he stopped for a moment as if he had heard something out in the distance. “Unless, of course, you would like to say goodbye to Mac first

  Chapter 37

  Many people ask me what I would say to Sheldon Ayers if he were still alive. My answer is: nothing. I believe the beauty of our historic confrontation lies in the fact that no words were needed. It was a conflict of intellects, that did not require the emotional baggage of spoken words. It’s true, I’ve read his works and studied his life. I will continue to do so as long as I live. He certainly possessed one of the minds that shaped me. In a way, he still does.

  Tamisa Faber, The Minds That Shaped Me, an Autobiography

  Sophie would not have been more surprised if her father himself had suddenly shown up. Ross was wearing only a pair of shorts. She could see that his skin was burned in several places.

  “Mac… how?”

  “There’s very little time, Sophie,” the giant said, forgoing an emotional reunion. Sheldon did not seem at all taken aback by his friend’s sudden reemergence. “The enforcers are here,” he said calmly.

  “Right behind me. They took me hostage, but I got away. Damn Sheldon, you look like crap!”

  “He’s dying,” Sophie said.

  “I’m afraid we both are, honey. They’ll try to kill us the second they see us. I only hope we can stave them off long enough for you to get through the gateway. Time, Sheldon?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Why?” Sophie cried. “Why do they want us dead so badly? And how did you even escape?”

  “There’s no time to explain.”

  “It’s all right,” the mindguard said. He proceeded to thoroughly read his friend’s thoughts, claiming all of his memories, from the moment they parted ways in the woods of Noriado.

  “What the hell?!” Ross yelled.

  “There’s no time to explain,” Sheldon mocked. “If I’m going to die for this, I want to know why. You owe me, Mac.”

  The bodyguard said nothing. He nodded grievously. Sheldon looked at Sophie, then back at Ross. He seemed like he suddenly got an idea. “The woman will come alone,” he said, with the confidence of an oracle.

  ●

  Tamisa no longer had command of her actions. She had been possessed by a strange demon made entirely of rage and hate. It had a thirst for blood. It didn’t think like a human being, but a wild animal, controlling her every move.

  She parked the vehicle right behind the one Ross stole and ordered the holocomputer to display a map of the cave. She memorized it and dashed out. She opened the compartment that served as a trunk. In it were two massive, man-portable energy weapons. Their purpose was to pulverize anything that might block the vehicle’s way. They had not been intended for use on human beings. She picked one of them up and took it with her, to kill Maclaine Ross.

  She climbed the rock wall and found the narrow, tunnel-like opening. The voices of Ross and Ayers could be heard in the distance. She advanced through the narrow passage, until the cave opened up in front of her. She could already see them. Han
ds that were no longer her own pointed the gun at Sophie Gaumont.

  “Sophie,” she yelled, “I’m Field Unit Commander Tamisa Faber. I want you to put your hands up right now and step away from Sheldon Ayers and Maclaine Ross.”

  Like frightened prey, the girl froze in place. “Now!” Tamisa ordered. From the corner of her eye she saw Maclaine Ross’ grip tighten on the gun he stole from her. “Ross, I can kill her, then turn around and kill you, before you even have a chance to finish the thought of pointing that weapon at me. You know that.”

  He seemed conflicted. He wanted to fight, but he knew that she was not bluffing. Strength is a burden, stamina is irrelevant, only speed is key. Villo’s words had never been more true.

  “Start moving right now, Sophie!”

  The girl started moving away from her protectors and Tamisa was just about to say ‘good girl’ when she felt a strange, familiar feeling in her head. There was a presence, slowly creeping in. It wasn’t aggressive, like the times before, but it was just as foreign, just as dangerous. Sheldon Ayers was walking towards her with small, slow steps.

  “What are you doing? Back off, Mr. Ayers!”

  His influence on her mind was starting to grow stronger. “Back off,” she yelled again and pointed the weapon at him, but he continued walking and his mind continued spreading inside hers. She didn’t want to kill him like that, not on his terms. She wanted to do it on her own terms. But what if he took over her mind completely? She remembered Isabel Mensah’s last message to her: “A gift.”