by Kal Spriggs
***
The hardest part of the next day came when he tried to get out of bed.
Shaden awoke just before dawn. The sky had just begun to grow light. He stared at the white-painted concrete ceiling and wondered. Why had this happened to him? What had he done to deserve such a curse? He’d never dreamed of having these abilities as a child, had he? What did I want as a child? Surely he’d dreamed of something. All children had dreams… perhaps he just didn’t remember what he’d wanted. That thought bothered him. He joined the military, maybe he’d dreamed of becoming a soldier.
That must be what I dreamed of, he thought, though he felt doubts gnaw at him. Why did his memories seem so... flat? Was this a product of becoming a psychic? Was this why so many went mad and killed? Was he becoming detached from what it was that made him human?
He couldn’t imagine anyone might want psychic abilities. The very thought made him feel unclean. People feared psychics and rightfully so. There were no defenses against con artists who could twist someone’s thoughts or pickpockets who could lift wallets with their minds. There was no way to police them, no means to contain them, nothing short of ESPSec and their containment camps.
Though a worm of worry reminded Shaden that he didn’t really know what happened there. He knew that San Antonio had the main containment camp and that dozens of containment facilities dotted the world. He hadn’t thought about it much beyond that.
A morbid part of him suddenly wondered if he should give it some thought. If Shaden worked for ESPSec, then he would send rogue psychics there when he caught them. And if something happened --something like his previous accident-- he might well go there himself.
He shivered at that. Shaden hoped that if he hurt anyone again they just put him down. He didn’t want to live with that kind of guilt. He had written the letters to the families of the men he killed and to those he’d injured. Doctor Halving had told him he would receive no response. Even so, the guilt and shame gnawed at him. How had it happened? How had he let it happen? Doctor Halving kept the details vague.
A part of him wanted to leave things that way.
A stronger part made him want to know what happened. To avoid another incident like that, he needed to know what caused it. He would pursue his questions with Doctor Halving.
With that determination, he felt his internal arguments still. He would get up and he would go forward with the training. He would learn everything he could from Halving and his teachers and he would do everything he could to repay them all for the opportunity they gave him.
He sat up and felt every muscle in his body protest. The agony shocked him until he remembered Cyrus’s earlier words about his pain.
Shaden winced as he worked his shoulders and rotated his neck. The movements brought a symphony of protests from his sore muscles. Shaden recognized them as good aches, signs that his body could adapt and that he began to build muscle.
He felt an innate stubbornness push him to stand and stretch. It felt both alien and strangely familiar. The alien feeling passed as he set his jaw. Of course he was stubborn, that must have carried him through his prior military training. It would help him to succeed here as well.
Stubborn, he thought with a nod, I’m stubborn.
Shaden didn’t like the taste of failure. The costs would be too high, and he refused to accept the price others around him might bear for it. He would learn to control his powers and he would put them to good use… or he would die trying.
***
Chapter 5
In a society where the state grants all power, it is inevitable that the people who want power over others will seek it from the state. Bullies, sadists, and other types of monster. The worst of the lot are the ones who tell themselves they are doing it for “the greater good” because they are the ones for whom no action is too evil… they are the ones who shipped people like me to internment camps.
--Memoirs of Shaden Mira
The largest hurdle to instigating genesis between the requisite proteins and the test subject’s neurons is the learning process. I wonder how many millions of psychics are latent, utilizing some of their abilities unconsciously, never even realizing the power within? Synthesizing the protein chains is easy and utilizing chemicals and electro-stimuli to fire neurons and force interaction is merely difficult. Generating direct, conscious effort through those synapses and controlling those proteins and thence to the quantum particles they manipulate… that is the part which seems almost impossible.
--Dr. Jonathan Halving, Project Archon Notes.
After a week, Shaden wondered if death was a viable option.
His lungs burned and his legs felt wobbly as he stumbled up to the top of the hill where Angel awaited him. He staggered past her and began the long downhill jog past the mostly-empty buildings of Doctor Halving’s facility. He wanted to collapse. His mind gave him all kinds of excuses. He flashed past mental images of falling to the ground, how to best fake an injury so his run would finally end. He drove himself onward. Shaden had ceased to see Angel and her angry face. He’d ceased to see anything but the road down the hill. That road led to a winding path at the base that led to the three hundred and forty-seven uneven stone steps that led to the top.
And then he would start down the hill again.
“How’s it going?” A voice asked from next to him.
Shaden stumbled, surprised at a sound beyond his own labored breath and Angel’s even stride. He glanced to his left to see a man match his stride. “Wonderful,” Shaden gasped, “you?”
“Not bad,” the stranger answered as he loped alongside Shaden with as little apparent effort as Angel. “How about you, Angel?”
Shaden’s physical trainer didn’t respond for a moment. Shaden felt a moment of hope that the exercise winded her. She dashed that hope a moment later when she answered in a clipped and angry voice, “I suppose you’re here because Halving sent you?”
“Yeah,” the newcomer smirked, “I got the kid, you can take off.”
Angel didn’t say another word, but took off at a ninety degree angle to the road. Before Shaden’s exhausted brain could register it, she had gone.
Shaden began to slow, but the stranger kept his easy lope and Shaden staggered after him. They reached the hill’s base and the other man led them away from the road out along the pier and finally out onto the break-water for the small waterfront. As they reached the end, the other man slowed to a walk and stopped.
Shaden lurched to a walk. He rested his hands on his hips and gasped for air for a long while. The spots in his vision slowly went away and the ache in his chest eased. For a moment, Shaden's gaze went to the city skyline. The tall buildings of New York lay just across the harbor and --for a moment-- he wished he could go there and see the sights.
“Angel working you a little hard?” the man asked.
Shaden heard something in the other’s voice that made him feel slightly uneasy. He turned to face the other man. “No, I can handle it.” He would not give up, he could do this.
Shaden took a moment to study the stranger, presumably his new teacher. The stocky, blonde-haired man could have come from a military recruiter photo. His square jaw, white, even teeth and calm blue eyes gave Shaden a brief surge of jealousy. It didn’t seem fair that a real person looked that good.
“Angel likes to make things a little rough, if you take my meaning,” the other man chuckled. “So if you got any issues, let me know, I can… work off some of her aggression.” He gave a leer and a wink at Shaden.
Shaden stared at the other man for a moment without understanding. Then he flushed darkly and turned away in embarrassment, “Uh, no thanks.” He felt slightly nauseated by the smirk on the other man’s face.
His new teacher chuckled again, “Yeah, well, offer stands. I’m Mark Janecek by the way, and I’m going to teach you in the afternoons. Cyrus and his mumbo-jumbo got shifted to the evenings. That’s in case you get insomnia or something.”
“Huh?” Shaden asked.
Janecek smiled broadly, “Crazy old man will put you to sleep in a heartbeat, am I right?”
Shaden blinked, he’d found Cyrus’s instruction confusing and exhausting at times, but not boring. Yet there was an… arrogance in Janecek’s face that suggested simple agreement would be the best course. Shaden nodded hesitantly.
“Well, unlike that old freak, I’ll teach you things of real use. Psychokinesis, also known as telekinesis by the ignorant, and as PK by anyone who doesn’t want a mouthful.” Janecek took a seat on one of the wooden piles that supported the break-water. “You know what I’m talking about?”
“Um, moving things with your mind?” Shaden asked.
Janecek gave him a belittling smile, “Eh, more or less. That encompasses a lot more than stuff like this.” A stray splinter rose from the wooden dock to hover in the air between them. Janecek flipped the piece of wood off into the water. “PK has a few areas. There’s what we call Macro PK and Micro PK. Macro is all the big stuff, things you can see. Generally, people find it easier to learn, but it takes a lot more effort to use.”
“That’s what you just did with the splinter?” Shaden asked.
Janecek pulled a small tobacco tin out of his pocket and filled his lower lip with dip. He smiled around the swollen lip, “Yep, pretty impressive to the ignorant. Useful in combat, good for starting the coffee machine before you want to get out of bed, and helpful to get the one night stand out the door before she gets annoying.”
Shaden smiled weakly as the other man chuckled again. “So Micro PK?” He prompted. He felt uncomfortable with how quickly Janecek’s discussions turned to women. It was almost like he viewed them as an object.
Janecek shrugged, “Micro PK has a lot of areas; some of them are pretty specialized. Some of it is just very fine control of Macro PK and some of it requires totally different abilities. It’s all pretty difficult to learn without some training in the main areas of PK.” Janecek spat over the side into the water below. “I’ll start you out with standard PK. Jonathan Halving said you’ve a talent for it. You’ve manifested it before, so we’ll have a base to build on.”
Shaden nodded slowly, “Okay... where do we begin?”
“Well, an easy task first.” Janecek spat into the water again and then turned to face the gap between the breakwater and the shore. He took two quick steps and leaped.
Janecek soared over the gap and landed lightly on his feet on the other side. He turned and smiled at Shaden across the thirty feet of murky green water. “Your turn.”
Shaden moved up to the edge and stared down at the dirty water. A sheen of oil lay across the choppy waves. He looked up and caught Janecek’s arrogant blue eyes. A part of him wanted to deny what he just had seen. Shaden couldn’t help but feel this was an impossible task… yet Halving had sent Janecek to teach him and Janecek seemed to think he could do it. If Halving thought he could do this, then Shaden had to learn. “How?” Shaden asked finally.
Janecek gave him a cocky smile. “When you use Macro PK, initially, you only have push and pull. Take a couple running steps and just push off with your mind. When you approach the far side, slow your decent. Easy stuff.”
“Okay,” Shaden said. He backed up a few feet. He took a deep breath and let it out. His sweat-sodden clothing felt cold now in the fall wind coming off the water. The brisk, Atlantic breeze and gray, overcast sky seemed to make the pier and green water seem to stand out from reality. Everything had a crisp, solid feeling to it and for a moment, his mind felt more clear than any time he could remember. It was almost as if a haze had lifted from his mind.
Shaden took two long strides and jumped, pushing out with his mind as he did so. He rose into the air, buoyed by his leap... and fell almost straight down into the cold water.
Shaden bobbed sputtering to the surface a moment later.
His instructor had collapsed in laughter on the pier. “Oh, that was great!” Janecek wheezed. “The look on your face was… well, priceless. You looked so eager!”
Shaden ground his teeth and swam quickly to the shore-side pier and pulled himself up the worn wooden ladder. He shivered, for the cold water had sucked all the heat out of his body. He sat on the edge of the pier and forced the anger away. The humiliation he felt didn’t help.
“Well, that was productive,” Janecek said. “You should probably get a shower and some lunch, and we can really start training after that. Be sure you wash that harbor water off you, wouldn’t want you mutating or something.” The Janecek turned away and Shaden could still hear him chuckle as he loped off in the direction of the dining hall.
Shaden lay back on the pier and let his legs dangle towards the water. His body ached with cold. He felt the rough, aged planks of the pier in his back. His new teacher’s petty cruelty had struck him a surprise blow. Angel was always angry with everyone, but even so, she never mistreated him. Cyrus had shown apathy towards Shaden’s aches and pains, but had at least shown him basic courtesy.
This… Shaden didn’t know what to do. Should he complain to Doctor Halving? Had he misunderstood Janecek’s intentions? Perhaps it was only in good fun. Shaden didn’t know how to deal with it and part of him just wanted to ignore the behavior and hope that it wouldn’t manifest again. Still, his instincts warned him that Janecek had meant it exactly the way it had come across.
***
“Okay, you got to put yourself in the right frame of mind, kid.” Janecek said later that afternoon. Shaden looked up from the handful of pebbles he had tried to shift for the past few hours.
Janecek spit into a plastic bottle and gestured with his free hand, “Look, PK is something you gotta pull out of yourself. First time, it takes anger, emotion, something. You’ve done it before, even if you don’t remember it. Get angry, get focused, whatever.” He gave a broad wave.
Shaden looked back down at the rocks. He thought back to the anger and humiliation he’d felt earlier from his instructor. He focused his mind on that and pushed with everything he had.
One of the pebbles trembled ever so slightly.
Janecek spat in derision. “Eh, takes some time to develop the control. I can cover some basic knowledge, let your brain percolate a bit.” The man leaned back against a tree. “I told you about Micro PK, right?”
“Yeah,” Shaden said. He turned his mind away from his frustration at the lack of success and tried to think about the brief lesson he’d received before the humiliating incident with the jump.
“Okay, so there’s a whole lot of areas. Some are just theory, stuff people should be able to do, but no one’s demonstrated the ability or figured out how to yet.” Janecek spat in his bottle again and closed his eyes slightly. “There’s what Jonathan Halving calls molecular PK, the ability to manipulate chemicals and materials with your mind. It’s a pretty unique ability and it requires a lot of control. ESPSec has a handful of tame psychics with that one working in labs where they make special materials and chemical compounds that scientists couldn’t normally replicate without lots of expense. Then there’s EM PK, Electromagnetic Psychokinesis, the ability to channel electricity or create magnetic fields, pretty useful. Rumor has it that a few psychics can actually draw power right off the grid to energize some bigger effects. It occasionally gets called electrokinesis. Then there’s pyrokinesis: the ability to start fires with your mind—”
“How does that work?” Shaden asked. The idea seemed incredible.
“That’s one of the theoretical ones. Lots of comic books and movies, no real data,” Janecek spat into his bottle again. “Essentially, a psychic would excite the molecules of the matter he wanted to ignite. Move ‘em fast enough, and you get heat, then flame. There’s also Cryokinesis, practically the same, just in reverse, essentially pulling the kinetic energy out of the molecules that make up everything.”
“Wow,” Shaden said. His mind seemed to catch on the idea, “Wouldn’t that be like, uh, electrokinesis, then? You could draw energy from the latent heat of objects around
you?”
Janecek grimaced, “Yeah, but it’s just a theory. If you ask me, that’s horse shit, too. That would require a level of fine control that’s just flat out impossible.”
“But—“
“Look, I’m telling you it’s impossible and I’m your fucking teacher, okay?” Janecek snapped. His blue eyes flashed and the way a vein on his temple stood out, it was obvious that Shaden’s question had struck a nerve.
Shaden raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture, “Sorry.” The rage he saw in the other man’s face disturbed him, especially when he thought about Janecek's destructive potential. Shouldn’t his abilities require him to be in better control of himself?
Janecek rolled his shoulders and rotated his neck until it popped. He finally gave a fake smile and then spat in his bottle again. “Okay, so the other theoretical one is Quantum PK. At this point, we’re getting way out there. I personally think it’s left over from the New Age movement back in the day, like palm reading and horoscopes, but, eh, Doctor Halving says it’s theoretically possible.”
“Quantum PK is everything the super-psychics can do in movies and shit,” Janecek said. His lip curled in disdain, “Teleportation, creating matter, shooting laser beams, pretty much crazy stuff.” He shook his head, “From what I can understand, you’d have to be able to understand quantum mechanics innately to achieve it, which would pretty much drive you insane anyway. Oh, and time-travel would be theoretically possible. So if you want to get in high-level arguments with theoretical physicists then I’ll send you their way and you can waste your time.”
Shaden cocked his head, “Time travel?” He wasn’t quite certain if Janecek was feeding him a line or if this was something that was theoretically possible… or how to even think about that if it was possible. It made his head hurt, either way.
Janecek snorted, “Yeah, theory and reality are two different things, remember that.” He smirked, “Just like your little bath earlier. In theory you can do anything. In reality, well, you will just embarrass yourself and give me a good laugh.”