The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  “Oh, c’mon!” Eugene protested. “Are you saying that what Mini or Lanfen does—or what any of the Zetas do—is a form of astral projection?”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Lorstad asked. “Your Zetas, as you call them, can reach beyond their physical reality to manipulate external objects.” He turned to look at Mini, who was circling the immersion tanks, her eyes as big as half-dollars in the muted light of the room. “Mini, here, projects objects that exist only in her mind out into the so-called real world, where they take on the appearance of being real. What is that, if not a form of astral projection?”

  “Astral projection,” said Lanfen quietly, “is a projection of the self.”

  “Astral projection,” said Eugene, mimicking her quiet tone, “is a myth.”

  “Then what is it we all do?” Lorstad underscored his words by turning to look at a lighted control console along the wall. On a sloping panel, a fader moved and the ambient light in the room increased. It decreased again with a concomitant downward movement of the fader. “Or at least what some of us do.”

  Eugene frowned and cut a swift glance toward Mini. “It’s just . . . that whole astral thing. It sounds so . . . unscientific.”

  “So does saying we’re made of star stuff,” said Dice wryly. “But it happens to also be true.”

  “Maybe it’s just the terminology that’s bothering you, so how about we stick to ‘out-of-body experience’; does that sound a bit more scientific?” Mini joined with a grin and tilt of the head.

  “When you’re in this state, what happens?” Chuck asked, ignoring the asides. “Guided meditation? Mental suggestion?”

  “Guided exploration—or perhaps, observation—is more accurate. And, yes, suggestion. We come here”—he reached out to lay a hand on the closest tank—“to immerse ourselves in our selves. To reopen neural pathways and retrain our minds to their higher functions.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Lanfen. “You mean, you lose your abilities over time? How can that be?”

  Lorstad smiled crookedly. “You find that strange? We find it strange—and immensely hopeful—that you have learned to achieve zeta states and capacities in such a way that mere practice makes perfect.”

  “There’s someone in there.”

  Chuck turned at the sound of Mini’s voice to see her staring down into a port in the lid of the farther of the two isolation tanks. The expression on her face wavered between horror and fascination.

  “It’s Alexis,” Lorstad told them, moving to stand next to Mini.

  Chuck followed. Through the port, he could see the woman floating in a thick liquid—almost a gel—that was tinted turquoise like the water in some ornamental fountains. She wore a formfitting dry suit and her face was half-obscured by a helm that included black goggles that wrapped around to also cover her ears.

  “How long will she need to be in there?” he asked.

  In answer, Lorstad glanced at a display built into the curving side of the machine. Chuck assumed it showed Alexis’s vital signs and probably other information as well, such as the temperature of the solution she was floating in.

  “She went in at ten p.m. last night. She should be emerging in the next half hour or so.”

  Chuck glanced at his watch. It was nine thirty in the morning. “That’s a long session.”

  “Yet short compared to the hours spent there during the initiation process.”

  Mini turned to look up at Lorstad, a frown creasing her brow. “You mean she slept in there?”

  “Not slept. The binaural tones put her in a state of deep meditation. But the flashes are to keep her from entering REM sleep.”

  Chuck nodded. He now understood why the Benefactors were so eager to find an alternative to their process of “learning” to produce psychokinetic abilities.

  A chime sounded in the chamber, echoing strangely off the walls. On the console a light flashed. A moment later a pair of technicians—a man and a woman—entered the room from an entrance obscured by Alexis’s SDU. They hesitated when they saw the group standing between the two tanks.

  “Good morning, sir,” said the woman with a deferential nod to Lorstad. “Will you be staying for Ms. Bruinsma’s emergence?”

  “I think not, Dr. Pence. We’ll leave you to your ministrations.” He started to turn, to lead Chuck’s team from the room, then paused. “You haven’t met our guests. Dr. Dana Pence, Niles O’Hare, these are Doctors Charles Brenton, Daisuke Kobayashi, and Eugene Pozniaki, Ms. Chen Lanfen, Ms. Minerva Mause. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Pence and her assistant are members of our staff here at the Center.”

  There were murmured greetings all around. Chuck felt awkward. There was a strange tension in the room that he couldn’t quite fathom. He pondered it as they made their way back to the elevator. Just before they entered, he paused and gestured back down the corridor.

  “How many of those immersion units do you have?”

  “Twenty. Only half of them are used at any given time. The others serve as backup and emergency units.”

  Chuck frowned, doing the math in his head. “You have about—what—eighty to one hundred people working here at the Center—”

  “Closer to one hundred fifty if you include the maintenance and housekeeping crew.”

  “That’s not nearly enough SDUs for that many people.”

  Lorstad blinked, then laughed. “Only a fraction of the people here use the units, Dr. Brenton. There are perhaps twenty of us here at maximum at any given moment. Right now, for example, there are only eight.”

  “‘Us?’” echoed Eugene, just as Dice asked at the same time, “Eight of what?”

  “Eight Learned. Eight like me.”

  “And Alexis,” added Chuck.

  “Yes. The others—the staff—are . . . well, they’re normal.” Lorstad’s gaze skimmed Eugene’s and Dice’s faces.

  “Mundanes, you mean,” said Dice.

  “Muggles,” said Eugene, “like me.”

  Lorstad shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand the references.”

  “No,” said Euge. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Ah.”

  Lorstad led them into the elevator and back up to their lab, where he excused himself, but not before he had fixed Chuck with his piercing gaze and said, “You understand now why it’s of great interest to us that we learn to employ our talents as you have. I would therefore like to begin undergoing your training process as soon as possible. And I would encourage you, Doctor, to put all necessary effort into formulating what best ensures success.”

  Chuck nodded and watched Lorstad leave the lab, the semitransparent doors gliding closed behind him. He was still nodding thoughtfully when the others surrounded him.

  “What was all that about?” Dice asked him. “What makes our machinery so much better than theirs?”

  “REM sleep, for one thing. When they’re in the tank, they can’t go into REM sleep. That severely limits how often and how long they can enter the state necessary to . . . recharge or retrain themselves.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Mini. “Why would they avoid REM sleep? That’s where lucid dreams are born.”

  “Yes, but if you’re going to take conscious external control, then you have to be in a waking state. It may be a meditative state or an altered state of some sort, but you are awake, not sleeping. During sleep, all the activity is interior, and the whole point of their therapy is to cause it to manifest in the outside world by intention.”

  “Why is that a problem, though?” asked Mini. “I mean, why is avoiding REM sleep a limitation?”

  Eugene answered her. “If a human being goes too long without REM sleep, they lose the ability to function mentally. Eventually it can lead to psychosis and even death.”

  “Then why risk it?” Mini asked.

  “Because their tech does work,” said Chuck. “It’s just inefficient. They’d have to spend far longer in the tank than was healthy to maintain their abilities at the levels Mini and
Lanfen do naturally. And it’s not just the REM sleep problem. They’d have to be catheterized repeatedly, kept on antibiotics—plus, their muscles would atrophy over extended periods. And yet, how much would we risk for our abilities.” Now that Chuck had developed his own zeta waves, he found it hard to imagine going back. Mini nodded at that, but still seemed unsure.

  “But why?” she asked. “Why are they so dependent on the machines? I mean why doesn’t the—the charge last?”

  Chuck shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

  “I think I might know,” murmured Lanfen. Her dark eyes were solemn as they met Chuck’s. “Lorstad said it: they learn to work outside the body. Detached from the body.”

  “And you don’t?” asked Euge.

  Lanfen shook her head. Chuck realized that he and Mini were echoing the movement. He stopped.

  “I can’t speak for Mini,” Lanfen continued, “but when I’m . . . practicing kinetoquism I’m projecting from the body, but I’m still attached to it somehow. Anchored.”

  “Yes,” Mini agreed. “Me too.”

  “When I—when we—stop projecting, we’re recharging naturally, without even thinking about it. Our meditative state is self-generated and our capacities are rooted in our selves, in our consciousness; it recharges via the physical generation of energy. What they’re doing is actually cutting them off from a natural energy source and creating a dependency on those machines.”

  “Yeah,” said Eugene quietly, “and muggles like me.”

  Lanfen executed a backward double somersault and landed lightly in an office chair she pulled into her path kinetically while in flight. Her workout complete, she let her momentum carry her chair over to Dice’s workbench. The robotics expert and his newly minted assistant had been working for hours on the robot that Lanfen had already decided would be dubbed Pippin.

  Yes, she knew it was silly to name a machine and to get attached to that machine—which she had signaled she meant to do in the very act of naming it. But it was what she did. Her laptop had a name—Carter, after a favorite TV character played by a favorite actress. Secret agent stories were something she enjoyed losing herself in, and the post–World War II setting was the icing on the cake. Her motorcycle had a name—Bruce, just because it seemed like a Bruce. She wondered what had become of Bruce. The last time she had seen him was when she’d tucked him into the storage unit at her apartment complex.

  She pulled her mind away from her possibly irretrievable life and watched the two men working over Pippin now; she was fascinated by the process of assembling the mechanical frame around the thick cable of spinal column. Dice’s assistant, Joey Blossom, was a young Shoshone-Paiute Indian. He wore his hair long, and braided while he was in the lab. Lanfen had learned that he was from the Duck Valley reservation near Owyhee, Nevada, and had been assigned to the lab because of his background with computers and electronics. He had a master’s degree in computer science and a trade school diploma in electronics and, until he had gotten his job with the Center, had been gainfully employed installing and maintaining the computer system in the Sho-Pai community center in Owyhee. He’d left a high-paying job at a top laboratory to return home to the reservation, to Owyhee, to his family. That might or might not mean the Center was close to the Duck Valley reservation, though the topography looked right for that part of the country.

  One thing was obvious—Joey was good at what he did. So much so that, after only a few days of working with him, Dice trusted him with some of the more exacting work on Pippin’s wiring harness. Dice could be awfully discriminating as to who touched his toys, so this was a glowing testament to Joey’s skill.

  Joey glanced up at Lanfen as she rolled to a stop near the workbench. She sensed equal parts curiosity and unease. Considering whom he worked for, she doubted the unease was caused by her abilities. She smiled at him. He did not smile back.

  “So,” he finally said, when he had a momentary lack of wires in his hands, “you’re a martial arts expert.”

  “I am a practitioner of kung fu, yes.”

  “Pretty impressive, what you were doing there. All the acrobatics and the—the psychokinesis.”

  “Lanfen prefers to think of it as kinetoquism,” said Dice. “Sort of a takeoff on ventriloquism. Instead of throwing her voice, she throws her self.”

  “Her self?” Joey repeated, looking at her more directly.

  “My consciousness. My spirit. I extend it to manipulate the environment.”

  “You believe in the spirit? But you’re a scientist.”

  She laughed at that. “No, I’m a kung fu practitioner. Dice and Eugene and Chuck are scientists. I’m pretty sure Chuck believes in the spirit, too, though.” She turned to Dice. “So, when do you think you’ll be done with my little droid friend, here? I’m bored and lonely and tired of dancing without a partner.”

  Dice grinned at her. “Whiner. You have rolling chairs. Maybe we could bring in the flight cases from the Brewster-Brenton unit and you could roll those around, too. Maybe have kinetic races.”

  They had been able to smuggle a Brewster-Brenton Brain Pattern Monitor with its kinetic converter out of their old lab, along with a Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface (BKKI, aka “Becky”), but they’d been forced to abandon Lanfen’s robot companion, Bilbo. He was still stored (imprisoned, she thought) in the bowels of Deep Shield’s underground facility in the Michaux State Preserve in Pennsylvania.

  “You didn’t answer my question: how long before Pippin is ready for his trial run?”

  Dice glanced at his watch. “I’d say at least another hour. Longer, probably.” His stomach chose that moment to growl loudly and he grimaced. “Well, then there’s that. The spirit is willing, but the body requires food.”

  Lanfen hopped up from her chair. “I’ll run down to the canteen and grab you guys some lunch. What do you want? Sandwiches? Salads?”

  Joey blinked. “You’re going to get us lunch?”

  Lanfen shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I? Soup? Duck confit? Filet mignon?”

  “Now you’re just being mean,” said Dice. “Tuna fish sandwich for me if there is such a thing in that gourmet hot spot. And some milk.”

  “Tea is better for the soul.”

  “Not sure I have one.”

  “Joey?” She looked to Dice’s assistant.

  “Same here, only I’ll take a water.”

  “Okay, a couple of tuna sandwiches, one milk, and a water—oh, and two souls.” Lanfen smirked, then saluted and went off to fulfill the orders. She did so in a perfectly nonchalant manner as to assure Joey she did not consider him less than. She stopped off at Chuck’s office first to see if he wanted anything. He was sitting cross-legged on the short sofa across from his desk, pen in hand, frowning at a pad of paper in his lap.

  “Wow, that’s old school,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.

  He blinked and looked up at her. “Oh, uh, yeah. When my thoughts are sluggish, I go into troglodyte mode. Helps . . . sometimes.”

  “What’s the problem you’re working on?” Lanfen wandered into the office and sat down next to him on the sofa, peering at his pad of paper.

  “Lorstad asked me to see if I could come up with a formula for what we do. A sort of overarching equation of the elements of success.”

  “Do you even do math?”

  He laughed. “Of course, I ‘do’ math. If you’re going to go into the sciences—any of them—you have to have a working knowledge of higher math. Although, I have to admit, that’s more of a Matt thing. I’m really missing him right about now.” He hesitated, bouncing the tip of the pen on the pad. “He wanted to come in, you know.”

  “Come in? You mean, he wanted to come here with us?”

  “This was before I called Lorstad. Matt reached out to me to let me know what was happening on his end. He wanted to know where we were so he could join us. I talked him out of it. Said we needed an insider on that end.”

  Lanfen read his face. “Mmm. There’s a big fat but
in there somewhere.”

  Chuck nodded, staring down at the notations he’d been noodling. “I didn’t trust him, Lanfen. I thought maybe he was going to sell us out. After all, he knew better than anyone that without us, there is no Forward Kinetics, no remote robotics program, nothing for General Howard to use.”

  “Tell me you are not feeling guilty about this.” Lanfen grasped Chuck’s upper arm in a firm grip. “Chuck, for God’s sake, that’s absurd. He did sell us out. He lied to you—to all of us. We were worried about getting asked out on a date by the military, and it turns out he’d already accepted a proposal of marriage. I don’t blame you for not trusting him. I would have made the same call.”

  He looked over at her. “First of all—ow! You’ve got a strong grip. Second, really? You think I was justified in being that cautious with Matt?”

  She nodded, letting go of his arm. “Yes. Absolutely. So, don’t second-guess yourself. If you need help with your math, ask Dice.”

  “Dice has enough on his plate.”

  “Yes, but he can still help. Anyway, speaking of plates, I was just on my way to the canteen to procure some sustenance for the geek squad. Want something?”

  Chuck took a deep breath. “Yeah, a break from this.” He tossed the notebook and pencil over onto his desk and quirked an eyebrow at her. “Mind if I tag along?”

  She savored the momentary curl of warmth the thought of his companionship brought, then hopped up from the sofa. “Never. Besides, my food-juggling skills are severely limited.”

  “Huh. I seriously doubt that.” He trailed her from the office, falling into step with her as they entered the long central cavern where the Center staff worked, then turned right toward the canteen and staff lounge.

  “So, talk to me about this formula of yours,” Lanfen said. “I saw a bit of it: N plus C plus R plus something, something . . .”

  “Oh, yeah. I was just toying with elements that go into a successful growth of zeta capacities: natural inclination and/or desire, plus concentration, plus repetition. That’s what I’ve got so far. And I’m not sure if natural inclination is necessary. I mean, clearly it’s helpful to have the natural talent and the desire. Maybe both. But it may just be more a matter of aiding the learning curve than being a binary obstacle.”