by Fiona Quinn
Spyder seemed completely at ease, staring up at the Wyoming night sky as it filled to overflowing with stars—so many that it made my distinguishing constellations all but impossible.
The general tipped his head toward Spyder. “Spyder said you needed to ask some questions about remote viewing work as a matter of some urgency.” He took his long stick and poked the fire until a fountain of sparks flew into the air. “Things he couldn’t answer for you himself.”
“I. . . Spyder, are you a remote viewer?”
“No, Lexicon, but while the Galaxy Project was in operation, I benefitted considerably from their intelligence-gathering. Indeed, it saved my life more than once. But I only know how to apply the information, not how it was procured.”
“Yes, sir.” I focused on the general. “I was hoping you would shed some light for me, please. I came across a file that I want to show you.” I brought my backpack with me and sat beside him, pulled out the papers I’d photographed from General Elliot’s file, and handed them over.
General Coleridge reached for the reports and read them carefully. I moved back over to my original space so he didn’t feel crowded. So I didn’t feel overwhelmed.
His gaze raised and held on my face. “You seemed to have survived just fine,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I think this assignment might have had longer-reaching effects, and that’s why I asked to speak with you.”
He nodded. “This work is part of the unexplained world, but it is extremely well-documented and absolutely nothing like the woo woo stuff portrayed in the media.”
“Sir, I’m not judgmental about your project. I’ve had enough inexplicable paranormal experiences in my lifetime to know not to believe or disbelieve any given situation, but to assess the merits of each. You don’t need to tread cautiously with me. I’m here to understand a set of circumstances.”
“I always like to check in with folks before I start spouting off about a bunch of things that are meaningless to them. How about you start off by giving me a bit from your understanding of these reports and what a remote viewer does?”
“Yes, sir.” I knew it was a test of some kind. Surely he wasn’t checking on my vocabulary. Maybe he wanted to hear the terms I used to assess whether I was a pain-in-the-keister reporter here to mock him in print—again.
He settled back, stretching his legs out toward the fire and crossing them at the ankle.
I cleared my throat and sent a quick glance over to Spyder. Spyder had closed his eyes with his hands behind his head, and looked like he had melded with the universe.
“Back during the Cold War,” I began. “The military approached you with a problem. The assignment was to help develop the Galaxy Project.”
The general nodded and looked like he had settled in for a good story. I wasn’t sure I could deliver.
“The military’s remote viewing team was located out of Fort Meade, Maryland. Close enough to DC and far enough away, too, I suppose. A little physical distance was probably good for the project, since Galaxy was never popular.”
“My dear, ‘never popular’ is putting it mildly. We had to fight tooth and nail for every cent we got to fund us. We had to fight against the debunkers and naysayers.”
“But Galaxy had scientists. Statisticians. . .”
“You’re right.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “It should have made things simple. But it was too scary a thought for most folks.”
“Too scary?”
“We’ll get to that part, I promise. You can’t talk about this subject long before you get the daylights scared out of you. So, the problem was that the statistician was pitted in this contest against a debunker. The statistician, she was mad as hell that the senate asked her to quantify and qualify our effectiveness, and yet all of the data was redacted or classified.”
“She couldn’t. I mean, what was she supposed to do with no data?”
“Exactly. From the record, she was able to prove we had a good program going on. We were making a big impact on the safety of our country.”
“But there was a debunker?”
“A debunker with a massive ego problem. He hated the idea that he would be proven wrong. So he got nasty. He leaked certain information to the media. All of it looked like the government was paying us high wages to stare goats to death — to try to stop a goat’s heart from beating with our ‘laser-eyed vision.’” He made his eyes all crazy and held his arms out like a zombie’s. He sniffed loudly, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. A body language tell for disdain.
“When that got out to the public, the senators didn’t want Galaxy’s woo-woo crap to muck up their next election cycle.” The general spun his hands in the air like he was a character out of Sorcerer’s Apprentice. “They distanced themselves as quick as they could—tried to save face by making us the brunt of their jokes. Media had such a great time with the idea that the taxpayer had wasted twenty-million dollars on a bunch of guys dancing in the incense vapors that we lost all of our funding.” He stared into the fire, then wiped his hand across his nose again. “One day I woke up without a job. All of the remote viewers were let go. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “With no employment prospects.”
“I’m sorry, sir. That seems so wrong.” I sat cross-legged with my gloved hands entwined in my lap, leaning forward to sop up his every word. “You defended your country honorably, if unconventionally, and to lose your job . . . They didn’t reassign you all?”
“I was retirement age and had my twenty years in with the army, so I was fine. I get my pension, and I do some side work doing remote viewing for a bunch of companies and some individuals. Others were not in my position. Imagine trying to find a decent-paying job when you can’t account for the last so many years of your life because your work is classified. If you do tell someone what you did, well they’d laugh you right out the door. It looked on paper like we’d been in prison or homeless on the street with drug problems.” He glanced over at Spyder, who gave him a nod without opening his eyes – how could Spyder do that? — then the General’s focus landed on me. “Some guys tried their hand at memoirs to bring in revenue and to get some of the real story out into the mainstream—maybe balance the hilarity.” Even through the curtain of smoke, I could see his jaw tightened. “What we did saved lives. There’s nothing funny about our work.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve read all of the autobiographies I could find. They don’t look like they were financially successful. Not enough to support someone.”
“Not successful, no. Uncle Sam didn’t want them to be. Operatives threatened the editors and publishing houses. Imagine, if you will, being put into a mental health hospital and sedated into a coma to keep you quiet. That’s what happened to one guy on our team. Some of the authors had their homes broken into, and there were a few attempts on their lives. One time, they almost took out one of our viewer’s whole family by setting up a generator in their garage and filling the house with carbon monoxide.”
“But why?” I was horrified that the government I loved and protected might kill an innocent family or treat its military so badly.
“Because if no one took this seriously, then people would stop looking at the program. The US needs this to be a joke, so they can continue their work in secrecy. Make no mistake. We have psychic spies at work today.”
“You said you do remote work for companies. Could you amass information from one company to give to another? That kind of collection isn’t regulated by laws, right?”
“If there were laws regulating such data gathering, it would substantiate that remote viewing was legitimate and scientifically sound. So there are no laws governing this kind of work, and I doubt there ever will be. What we have are ethics. I personally view something like that as industrial espionage. If your intent was to steal someone’s intellectual property, then you are morally corrupted. The individuals participating in Galaxy were above reproach. Highly moral people. But having said that, it doesn’t mea
n that I haven’t done work for industry. I have.”
“I’m sure that you have non-disclosure contracts, but would you consider doing any work on an assignment that targeted Iniquus?”
“General Elliot’s group? Hell no. I respect the man too much. You know he was the general in charge of Galaxy?”
No, I hadn’t known that.
“He put his head on the chopping block to save us. We owe him a debt of gratitude, though some of the remote viewers don’t agree. A couple of ‘em think he didn’t do near enough before we got pitched out or after. They thought we should all have a pension and a letter of recommendation. But no one could do anything for us. We were military pariah.” He rubbed a thumb along his jaw line. “Besides, it would be a lost cause, trying to get anything out of Iniquus’s Headquarters.”
“Could you explain that, sir?”
General Coleridge spread his arms. “Why would a man come here to live? You might ask yourself.”
Truth be told, that’s exactly what I had asked myself. I mean, if he ran out of milk, it was a two-hour haul to the nearest gas station to get gas for another forty-five minutes of driving to the nearest town with a grocery store.
“I want to keep my private life private. I don’t want looky-loos, wannabes, or influencers messing with me. The distance keeps the wannabes away. In order to keep out the remote viewers and the influencers, this place does its job, too. On this land, there was a terrible battle between warring native tribes. The number of lives lost by men, women, and children was just atrocious. It leaves an imprint, forever. So if someone were to task a remote viewer with ‘go check on General Coleridge,’ their awareness would land here, and they’d look for something of significance. What they’d pick up on was the energy imprint of the battle. I know this for a fact. I sent my wife, Emma, out here to sit in different locations in the field, and I tried to see what geometric shapes she held up, using remote viewing—and I’m considered a grandmaster, the big poohbah of this shit—I got nothing from her.”
My brow wrinkled. This was a confusing piece of information. I looked over at Spyder and all I got was a placid expression with a mild amount of interest showing at the corners of his eyes.
“It’s called doorknobbing. Russians did it, Chinese. . . they built their offices next to fairs and circuses, they had their offices on the bottom levels and brothels on the top. Now that was damned distracting.” He chuckled under his breath and ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Yup, anything that is emotion-filled, shiny, or action-packed is a distraction. The way it got the name doorknobbing came from this one time when I was sent to gather information. I thought these would be the most precise observations of my life. I was on it; I mean, really on it. I could tell you every last facet and shape; I could draw it with precision. When I came back, I realized I had spent two hours drawing a damned glass doorknob and missed the whole meeting. Guys got a kick out of teasing me over that one. Hence, doorknobbing.”
“Can art work that way?”
“Absolutely. You know those mobiles General Elliot’s got hung up at Iniquus? Those are doorknobs to keep the competition from exploring things they have no business exploring.”
“What if that art was removed?”
“Then a remote viewer would have access to those buildings.”
“What if you didn’t have art like that? What could you do?”
“To protect yourself?”
“And your environment.”
“Environment isn’t hard. Whirligigs, things that you use in your garden to keep the birds away. Anything distracting. Heavily trafficked highways, sunshine on water–the high-rise apartment building on the Iniquus campus was positioned there because of the water during sunlight, and at night and rainy days there is the stream of car lights from the highway across the way. Action and light? Very effective.”
Oh, now this information, I could use. If what Gater and I were experiencing at Iniquus was the energy stamp of a remote viewer, it cleared up several questions—why did I never feel that feeling in Striker’s apartment or anywhere else, only Iniquus Headquarters? And, was there a mole at Iniquus? It didn’t need to be a mole if by the act of removing the art, access became possible through remote viewing. A shiver moved through my body. If we had opened ourselves up to a remote viewer, absolutely everything was exposed. I forced myself to refocus on what the general was telling me. I needed his knowledge.
“But there are lots of things that can be distractions, especially for someone in the process of training. Lots of what Spyder calls ‘humanity-cluttered ether’, don’t you, Spyder? And he’s right. Human thought and movement fogs the area with our collective unconscious. Mornings, before people are awake and moving, are the easiest times to see clearly both into our own thoughts and into other’s thoughts.”
I looked over at Spyder, and he gave me a broad wink and a smile.
“Now, here’s another important piece of information for ya,” General Coleridge said. “I can tell you what not to do. Don’t surround yourself in a bubble of white light. And certainly don’t wear some kind of ward-off-the-evil talisman.”
“Because?”
“They don’t work. I loved it when I came upon a person with a white light bubble or trinket. They relied on these things to protect themselves and became lazy sons of bitches. Easiest thing in the world to reach in and take whatever information I wanted. All I had to do was ask, ‘Show me what they’re trying to protect.’ Now, if I came upon someone who had a ritual of grounding, meditating and controlling their minds . . .? Let me explain it this way, it was like the white light guy was porous, and I could push right in. The grounded guy – the one who practiced good ‘brain hygiene’, if you will—was dense, impenetrable. I could see them, couldn’t see into them. Spyder’s that way. Dense.” General Coleridge laughed like he had told the best joke.
The general was right – as the possibilities and ramifications of our enemies having these skills sank in, it scared the daylights out of me.
Twenty-Six
Headlights bounced toward us, then spun around as the general’s wife, Emma Coleridge, backed her Jeep up close to our bonfire. Spyder went over to greet her. “What are you two laughing about?” she asked.
“Oh, just old friends reminiscing,” Spyder said as he followed around to the back of the truck and popped open the tailgate.
She reached in and pulled a quilt to the edge. She’d arranged everything for dinner. My stomach growled loudly.
“Hear her stomach, Emma?” the general asked. “She’s got psychic skills - knows what’s coming is going to be some kind of good.” He fixed his bright blue eyes on me. “And you’re right. I married a damned fine cook.”
We sat quietly around the fire with our plates in our laps. A wolf called out in the distance. It sounded so forlorn. I wholeheartedly agreed with this solo wolf’s lamentations. I missed my team. I wondered what Striker and Vine were up to. I tore off a chunk of bread with my teeth. Probably not the best idea to speculate. I’d bet they weren’t enjoying nearly as nice a night or nearly as delicious a dinner as we were.
Mrs. Coleridge had made us moose stew with rolls, and apple bread pudding for dessert. The warmth from the food in my stomach radiated through my body, and I felt comfortable and sleepy. The general reached behind the backside of our log, pulled out his guitar, and strummed a melody that seemed to exactly accompany the wolf’s song. Lying back, I felt peace descend over me. Like there was nothing separating me from God and the universe. It was a moment of perfection. Sheer contentedness.
Eventually, General Coleridge got up, poked the fire until sparks flew into the air, and threw another log on, telling me that he planned for this conversation to go on for a while yet.
I turned to Mrs. Coleridge. “You’re married to the guy who was tasked with developing Galaxy. What was that like?”
“I was, and still am, mostly in the dark–classified information. They say it’s all been released to the public. B
ut Pat says they picked a very careful and damning one percent to release. It’s been an interesting life, with him keeping everything secret. Made for some very quiet dinners. I couldn’t be prouder, though. My husband took on a daunting task with very little in the way of exterior reward. It had to be done – but most people are too self-preserving to do it. I always said Galaxy was a suicide mission. Messed up a lot of lives.”
“Who would have been tapped for this kind of project, sir?”
“Lucky people,” the general said.
Mrs. Coleridge laughed and patted her husband’s knee.
I smiled. “You feel lucky to have been selected?”
“Not what I meant,” said the general. “One of the things that brought someone to our attention was, when they were placed in extreme circumstances, they survived when others didn’t. People who seemed to be charmed, and made the right decisions when their fellow soldiers did not. Now, more interesting is who would continue with our program. I’d say those who stuck with it had a combination of desire and focus, quality of training, and natural talent mixed in equal portions. That could get you the skillset needed. But you had to have your head on right. Ego.” He tapped his head then his heart. “The ego is always a problem with this kind of stuff. Gets in the way. You can’t imagine how hard it is to stay humble when you can see and do some of the things that we could see and do. Self-interest and self-importance are bad for business. They shut you down faster than anything else I’ve seen. Remaining humble is incredibly important. As remote viewers soon learn, we are but a speck of sand, less than a speck of sand, in the grand desert of life. Not having a firm grip on this notion can exacerbate one’s mental instability.”
I pulled my knees snug to my torso and wrapped my arms around them. “I saw the tasking envelope asking, ‘How was I doing? Where was I?’ How would someone find me? What other kinds of things could be discovered out through remote viewing?”
“We have protocols for different requirements. For example, we would approach a target in a specific way for binary answers,” he said.