After two solid hours of trying to get Lorstad to consciously turn off his “power assist”—as Dice referred to it—the Learned leader pulled the neural net from his head and rose.
“This is futile. I would never have imagined that I would regret the powers I have striven so hard to acquire, but I do. I once read of a body of research on blindness demonstrating that, if a man has been sightless for as few as five years, when sight is physically restored, he will find he has lost the mental ability to see.”
Chuck had, of course, read Oliver Sacks’s study of the phenomenon Lorstad described and understood exactly what he was saying. “The brain has rewired itself,” Chuck said quietly. “It’s reassigned sight pathways to other things. But your ‘power assist’ is temporary. Once you’ve let it weaken—”
Lorstad’s face went pale. “I cannot allow it to weaken to that extent, Dr. Brenton. I would be . . . helpless. Blind, deaf, crippled. I am even now nearing a scheduled immersion. If my powers have not ebbed sufficiently by now . . .
“No. We must find a way to work around this. I must either learn to control my autonomic responses, or you must find a way to neutralize them during this process. And,” he added as he strode from the room, “you must determine what factors guarantee success in cultivating zeta powers.”
“Kristian, there may be no guarantee—”
Lorstad stopped at the door and turned back to face them, his expression resolute. “I’ll return tomorrow. I may bring another of the Learned with me to see if perhaps it is merely my peculiar talents that keep me from working with your machineries.” He turned and was gone.
Silence wound its way among Chuck’s team like a cat seeking attention. Glancing up at the fire alarm that wasn’t a fire alarm, Chuck beckoned everyone into his office, where they sat around the small conference table.
Eugene was the first to speak. “Is that . . . ? Was he . . . ? That’s the first time I think I’ve ever seen that man actually verklempt.”
Dice nodded. “He was seriously disturbed.”
“And frightened,” said Mini.
Eugene glanced over at Chuck. “You see that coming, Doc?”
Chuck shook his head. “I did not.” He leaned back against his desk, his eyes unfocused, his mind racing. “What if none of them can learn this without first letting go of their . . .” He struggled for a better term, then gave up. “. . . power assist? If they all have the same attitude toward being vulnerable that Lorstad does, they may never be able to learn our methodology.”
Joey laughed. “That’s damned ironic. The powers they’re so proud of might be the one thing that keeps them from evolving away from needing to tank all the time. It might be easier for someone like me—” He stopped and hung on his own thoughts for a moment; Chuck was pretty sure he knew what they were.
When Joey spoke again, he confirmed it. “Can I learn what Lanfen and Mini do? What I mean, I guess, is will you let me learn it?”
Chuck dreaded the question. He dreaded it because he so much wanted to say yes and knew that if he did, Lorstad would consider it a form of betrayal.
“How would we do that?” Eugene asked. “I mean, you may have noticed that we sort of work in a fish tank.”
“There are ways,” Dice said, the wheels in his head clearly working frantically. “We have a portable Brewster-Brenton unit; Becky and the neural cap are small . . .”
“And,” said Lanfen, “we have our own private exercise room that is not a fish tank.”
Chuck realized he was shaking his head. “I don’t think we need to go to those lengths. We start actively engaging in subterfuge, we will be found out eventually. We’re not CIA material. I think we’ve proved that pretty effectively. We’re scientists about to undertake an experiment that requires a baseline, after all. A normal human brain, untouched by either immersion tech or kinetic tech. We need a control. There’s no reason why Joey can’t be that control.”
The whole team seemed happy with that idea—Joey first and foremost. A wave of something that was almost contentment seemed to infuse the air between them. Chuck certainly felt better now that they had a game plan. He understood the mechanics of that. His sense of autonomy and control had taken a severe beating since their involvement with Deep Shield and subsequent “rescue” by the Benefactors. And for the first time since they escaped from Maryland, he felt as if he had made an autonomous decision.
“His peculiar talents.” Lanfen repeated Lorstad’s words as they watched Dice and Eugene set Joey up with the neural cap from Chuck’s office. “I wonder what they are.”
Remembering the number of times Lorstad had seemed to move from one place to another without being heard or seen—including his initial appearance at Forward Kinetics—Chuck wondered if he didn’t share some of Lanfen’s propensity for extreme stealth or Mini’s ability to blind someone to her real presence by creating a projection. Maybe Lorstad had some sort of cloaking talent.
“He seems to be really interested in what I can do,” Mini observed. “Maybe he’ll tell me what his ‘superpower’ is if I express interest in it.”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?” said Lanfen, grinning.
Mini grinned back. “Something like that.”
“Only if you’re comfortable doing that,” Chuck said. “I don’t want to put you in any kind of jeopardy with him.”
“He won’t harm me, if that’s what you mean. He . . . cares about me on some level. Maybe just as a scientific curiosity, but I think I’m important to him in some way.” She hesitated, then added, “And he wants something from me. I don’t know what, exactly, but something about my ‘peculiar talent’ means something to him—maybe to his whole organization. I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. I trust my feelings.”
The words were uttered a bit defensively. Chuck put his hand on Mini’s shoulder and squeezed.
“So do we,” he said, and Lanfen echoed, “So do we all.”
Chapter 7
His Peculiar Talents
In Mini’s mind, she was a secret agent on a fact-finding mission, or maybe Black Widow or some other agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. She kicked herself for that fantasy (how juvenile was that?), then kicked herself again for kicking herself. It was in her nature to fantasize—to play games with reality. It fired her imagination and inspired and informed her art. She more than suspected that if she shared her secret-agent fantasy with Chuck, he’d tell her to go with it.
And if she shared it with Eugene, his head would probably explode. The thought made her smile.
So, on her way to keep a luncheon “date” with Lorstad in the Center’s five-star restaurant of a canteen, she marched into Chuck’s office, where he and Eugene were discussing possible means of suppressing Lorstad’s conditioning while he was connected to the Brewster-Brenton monitor.
“I’m off to play Natasha Romanoff,” she said pertly, and grinned.
Chuck laughed. “That’s a good way to think of it. Hold that thought.”
Eugene frowned and his mouth formed a mutinous straight line. “Mini, this isn’t a game. This guy . . . well, I think he has . . . expectations.”
See? Laughter bubbled up in Mini’s throat. “You think he has designs on me?” She made air quotes around the word designs.
Eugene blushed to the roots of his dark, curly hair. “I didn’t say that. I just meant—what you said before—that he wants something from you.”
Chuck glanced from one to the other, then said, “Euge isn’t wrong to remind you to be careful. While they’ve been good enough to take us in, we’re still not really sure what their motives are . . . or how long their goodwill is meant to last.”
Mini gave them both an eye-rolling look. “Okay, Doctors Worrywart. I’ll take all the precautions. But you know, I think what he seems to want most is for me to, I don’t know, approve of what they do. The immersion, I mean. It’s almost as if Kristian feels inferior. Or at least he’s afraid that we’ll think he and the other Benefactors are inferior
because they have to ‘tank’ in order to exhibit their abilities.”
That drew a laugh from Eugene. “Trust me when I say that Kristian doesn’t have an insecure bone in his body. His air of superiority is—”
“Irrelevant,” said Chuck. “Go on, Natasha,” he told Mini. “Off with you. You have a mission to accomplish.”
“Yes, sir.” She gave Chuck a saucy salute, stuck her tongue out at Eugene, and went off to be a superagent.
Eugene slumped in his chair, watching Mini stride purposefully out of the lab. “Well, I managed to screw that up, royally. Now she’s mad at me.”
Chuck followed his gaze. “No, she’s not. If she were mad at you she wouldn’t have stuck her tongue out. She would have just gone.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve known Mini since she was a kid. Yeah, I’m sure. You’re afraid of Lorstad’s influence on her, aren’t you?”
Euge sighed. “Is it that obvious? I just . . . I feel like the odd man out. I’m the only one on the team who doesn’t seem to have any ability to do zeta. Mini . . . Mini is shaping up to have a really wonderful talent. Me, I got bupkis.”
“Really?” Chuck asked with a quirk of his eyebrow.
“I mean, I’ve got nothing to offer her.”
“How about the fact that you love her. That’s not nothing.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No ‘but,’ Eugene. I know Lorstad and his associates see some sort of line of demarcation between ‘the Learned’ and the rest of us. Mini doesn’t. Lanfen doesn’t.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Euge . . .”
Eugene raised a hand. “I’m serious, Doc. You and Dice aren’t full-fledged Zetas, but you at least got the damn training wheels off. I can’t even make Roboticus shimmy without the spangly hairnet.”
Chuck puzzled over that. It was true. Eugene could manipulate his favorite machineries relatively well for a novice as long as he was wearing the neural net. The moment it came off, or Becky was shut down, he was as unable as most human beings to manipulate his environment. There hadn’t really been time to ask why and seek answers, but maybe there would be now, under the guise of working out Lorstad’s problem.
“Well, you’re ahead of the game then. Lorstad can’t even make Roboticus shimmy with the spangly hairnet. At least, not without cheating.”
That thought seemed to make Eugene feel marginally better. He sat up straighter in his chair and rolled it closer to the desk where his laptop sat, back to back with Chuck’s. “That’s true, isn’t it? Maybe if we can crack Lorstad’s code, we can crack mine.”
Chuck gave up trying to convince Eugene that he didn’t need to be a Zeta to win Mini’s continued love and admiration, so instead he agreed that maybe their new line of research would yield fruit.
“This other thing Lorstad’s got you working out,” Euge said. “This hierarchy of requisites in zeta development—it’s really related to this, isn’t it? I mean, that’s why he pushed you just now to keep after the ‘formula,’ right?”
Chuck sighed. “Right. And he seems unwilling to suppose that there might not be any such formula. Some things can’t be quantified . . . or at least they resist quantification. This may be one of them.”
“Ha. Don’t let Matt Streegman ever hear you say that. He’d think that was next door to heresy.” He paused to give Chuck a speculative look. “What if it does turn out to be one of those unquantifiable things?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure Lorstad would accept that.”
“If we find a way to get around his problem, though, won’t that answer his question about what conditions are required for zeta mastery?”
Chuck considered that. “It might. Or it might only answer his question—not the question. For example, his difficulty with zeta might be resolved by eliminating something he’s doing rather than identifying something he’s not doing. That doesn’t answer the larger question of what conditions need to be in place in general to facilitate zeta mastery.”
Eugene frowned. “Are you sure? I mean, we already discovered that one of the conditions needs to be the elimination of certain mental habits that get in the way of learning. What if the reason he can’t even generate gamma waves and the reason I can’t are actually the same—some mental habit that’s getting in the way?”
Some questions, when asked, cause the universe to hold its breath. At least, that was the way Chuck experienced them. He thought of them as Absolute Zero Moments—moments when the entire creation seemed to slow to complete stillness and time simply ceased to exist. He found himself, now, in a breathless state of suspended animation, with the completely absurd conviction that Eugene was right. That led him to the next question: If he were right, what did it mean? Was there a singular mental habit that might result in both Lorstad’s and Eugene’s difficulties in creating gamma or zeta waves?
He thought back to the barriers the Deep Shield operatives had struggled to break through. Barriers that had to do not just with their military training, but with the mental and emotional conditions that had caused them to be particularly responsive to that training. One factor had been a certain linearity of thought—an orderliness that militated against spontaneity and multitasking. That, in turn, was rooted in an expectation that the world worked in a particular way—and not in a way that allowed someone to actively manipulate reality at the quantum level.
Faith, Lanfen had called it. Their early Deep Shield recruits had no faith that they could do what Lanfen and the other Zetas did. Their particular internal worlds did not operate that way, nor did their environment encourage them to imagine that they could.
Chuck peered at Eugene over his laptop display. Euge was notorious for his lack of self-confidence; that was his filter on what he could potentially do. Weren’t Lorstad’s externally conditioned talents also a filter that informed his sense of his own potential? A filter that led to a sort of conscious incompetence?
“What?” Eugene asked. “Is my hair sticking out all over?”
Chuck blinked.
“You’re looking at me funny.”
Chuck brought himself back to the problem at hand. “Your hair is fine—well, no, it is sticking up, but that’s not what I was staring at you about. I was just thinking about—well, Lanfen calls it ‘faith.’ Maybe a more scientific way of putting it is . . . unconscious competence.”
Eugene blinked. “What d’you mean?”
“Remember how Lanfen sort of tricked the Deeps into displaying their latent competence with zeta waves by distracting them? By causing them to—I don’t know—forget to filter their behavior through their perceptions about what’s possible? Each of us looks at the world differently and expects reality to behave in a particular way because that’s the way it’s always behaved. We have trouble coping when it doesn’t.”
Eugene went completely still, as if he were having one of those ‘moments’ Chuck had just experienced. As it often did, Eugene’s brain took a hop, skip, and jump over the connective tissue of the thought process and landed on . . . “Wait. That would be an impediment to evolution, wouldn’t it? If you keep expecting A to happen, then you’re not likely to seriously entertain the idea that B can happen. And if B is necessary to reach the next level of evolution, then you’re sort of screwed—evolutionarily speaking.”
“Yes—except for those who can make that leap. They’re the ones who move forward. So, how do we remove that barrier—that expectation?” Chuck asked. “Lanfen did it with the Deeps by involving them in a multitasking exercise that allowed them to forget, for a moment, what they expected they couldn’t do. She . . . surprised them into moving from point A to point B. When Mini first exhibited zeta waves, she was skeptical of her abilities, too. We simply switched off the unit without her knowing it. She still believed she was being aided by the interface and had no reason to doubt.”
Eugene snorted. “I get the sense that Lorstad is not so easily surprised.”
“He was surprised at h
is lack of ability to work with the kinetic system without leaning on his ‘learning.’”
“Touché.”
“Maybe if we can’t suppress Lorstad’s talents, we can distract him from them.” He got up from his desk, the idea settling more firmly in his mind.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go chat with Lanfen. Why don’t you play with this idea a bit more—see if you can’t come up with some other possible solutions?”
“Chuck . . .”
Chuck halted and regarded his protégé over his shoulder.
Euge glanced around the room in tacit acknowledgment of the listening devices. “Should it be going well? I mean, should we have a breakthrough at this point?”
The elephant in the room. They had found themselves training clandestine special ops soldiers under Deep Shield. Now they were trying to unlock abilities in members of a cabal that was equally clandestine—if not more so.
Should it go well?
Chuck inhaled sharply. “For now, this is a good pace. If or when it’s time to apply the brake . . . anyway just keep at it.”
Euge nodded. “Actually,” he said, glancing at the door, “I was feeling a bit peckish. Thought maybe I’d hop down to the canteen and grab a quick bite.”
Chuck speared him with a look that could only be called withering.
“What?” Eugene asked, the picture of perfect innocence.
“Please, Euge. You’re as transparent as our fishbowl lab. Do not do that. Mini would not appreciate being checked up on.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” Eugene looked impossibly hangdog.
“Besides,” Chuck added as he exited the room, “hopping is very undignified.”
“Oh! Oooh!” Eugene called after him. “You made a funny. A very lame funny. See me not laughing?”
Sitting at a table across from each other over lunch, Mini and Lorstad chatted about art and music—two areas in which they had much in common, though Kristian Lorstad did not, as Mini did, appreciate the visceral elegance of rock and roll. In fact, he found it strikingly odd that she could admire both Antonio Vivaldi and Joe Satriani and wax equally eloquent about the vocal talents of Leontyne Price, Tina Turner, and Ronnie James Dio. When she told him that one of her favorite musical collaborations was a live concert duet between Tina Turner and David Bowie on Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” he was struck speechless.
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