The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  In that moment of awkward silence, the cheerful philistine launched her first attempt to find out more about their host and his compatriots.

  “I guess you’re not from around here,” she teased. “You prefer European art forms with a rich history—symphonic, choral. I get it. I mean, you are from Europe yourself, right?”

  He nodded, setting aside his fork. “I am. I was born in the Netherlands and raised there until I was fourteen.”

  “So how did you get to be part of all this?” Mini’s gesture took in the entire underground facility.

  He dabbed at his lips with a napkin, stalling, obviously trying to figure out how to answer without revealing too much.

  Eventually he said, “I was born into it, actually. Most of us are. It is rare that a prodigy arises from a family outside of the Group.”

  Mini heard the capital G in that last word. “Really? So your mother and father were both . . . talented? I mean, they used the immersion technology?”

  Something dark flitted through Lorstad’s gaze—a momentary displeasure or pain, perhaps, like the tug of a scab on a half-healed wound. Mini put all of her senses to the task of reading the man sitting across from her.

  “Yes. Both of my parents were of the Learned.”

  “Wow. Are they still involved with the Benefactors?”

  “My father died some years ago. My mother is . . . no longer active in the Group. She left to care for my younger sister.”

  The mention of a younger sibling needing parental care prompted an immediate expression of dismay from the softhearted Mini. “What happened? Is your sister ill?”

  Now Lorstad’s face went through a series of minute but perceptible changes that Mini read in swift succession. She saw pain, anger, resolve.

  “My sister . . . my sister was unable to benefit from immersion technology. The sessions unsettled her, caused her to withdraw. She had to be removed from the program and never developed any talent.” He seemed about to say more, then shook his head. “It’s ancient history to me. My mother is doing well, as is Anika. You have siblings, I believe.”

  Mini nodded, recognizing his attempt to shift the conversation for what it was. But that was okay—any good superspy knows they need to play the long game. “Two brothers. Quite a bit older. Very practical men with very practical lives.”

  “Ah. Not creative types like you.”

  “Nooooo, haha.” Her face lit up with a genuine smile, rueful as it was. “I am unique in all my family. I was a sort of late surprise. A fluke.”

  Lorstad tilted his head with a smile. “I imagine you are. Unique, I mean.”

  She blushed slightly. “Thank you.” Mini swallowed and hoped Lorstad didn’t hear her breath quickening. For a split second she lost herself in his deep eyes and basked in the words flowing from his hewn jaw.

  No.

  Looking to now be the one to change the subject, she groped with her mind for a topic, then asked, “So, how old were you when you started your training?”

  “Very young. Six, in fact.”

  “Six? My God, weren’t you terrified?” The question was entirely sincere. The thought of climbing into one of those sensory deprivation tanks made Mini want to crawl out of her skin.

  He shook his head. “Not at all. I regarded it as a great adventure. Besides, I had Alexis.” He said that as one might say, I had my teddy bear.

  “You trained together?”

  “Yes. We usually train children in pairs, so that there is a link or bond forged between the two. We bolster each other’s learning, we encourage each other, we monitor each other to make sure we maintain our health and well-being.”

  “You mean, you make sure you don’t wait too long to—um—to immerse?” She really had to stop thinking of it as “tanking” or she’d slip and say it out loud to one of the Learned and insult them.

  Lorstad smiled. “You were going to say ‘tank,’ weren’t you? It’s all right. We know the staff calls it that. It’s petty, but doesn’t anger us. Well, at least it doesn’t anger most of us.”

  “So you and Alexis are a couple?”

  “Not in the way you and Eugene Pozniaki are a couple. Although, certainly, that sort of relationship between two of the Learned is encouraged. There are not many of us in the world, even after several centuries, so the more children we can produce who share our susceptibilities, the better. I have to say, though, that given the fewness of our numbers, Dr. Brenton’s methodology does rather open up the door to new blood.”

  There was something just a bit too intimate about his regard. It made Mini uncomfortable and brought heat to her cheeks.

  “Why are there so few of you?”

  He shrugged. “We do not always breed true. There are, in every generation, individuals like my sister, Anika, who simply are not successful in awakening their powers. In some generations, they outnumber those who are successful.” He returned his attention to his plate and poked at its contents for a moment before saying, “If it’s not too personal a question, may I ask how serious your relationship with Dr. Pozniaki is?”

  Mini was silent long enough to make him look up at her. She gazed directly into his eyes so that he could not possibly mistake her. “I love him,” she said bluntly. “He loves me. So, it’s very serious.”

  “Ah,” said Lorstad, looking away. “Yes. I see.”

  She felt a pit open in her stomach. It wasn’t that she had feelings like that for Lorstad, but it just felt bad to see a man so obviously trying to mask his hurt—hurt she had caused him, even though it was through no fault of her own. It wasn’t particularly fair of him to expose his emotions so baldly in front of her, but it didn’t change the fact that he had, and—in doing so—she had been forced to shut him down. Putting it aside, Mini gently steered the conversation into a new direction, hopefully helping him save some face while also leading them to the place she wanted this to go.

  “So, you have to immerse yourselves fairly often, then, to keep your abilities strong. Well maybe not you; you seem to be very skilled in all of this, if skilled is even the right word. I still can’t help but wonder, though, isn’t that inconvenient? I mean it must take a lot of discipline and just, I don’t know, endurance.”

  “Not so much. At my level of experience, I must immerse perhaps once a week for several hours. But yes, when you first undergo the entrainment, you must spend significant time in the isolation chambers being conditioned to make use of your talents.”

  Mini propped her elbows on the table, put her chin in her hands, and gave him a look that her father had said could melt iron. “And what are your talents, Kristian? I’ve seen you move objects and you seem to be able to enter and leave rooms without being noticed. Is stealth your area of expertise? Some kind of psychonaut ninja?”

  Now he looked coy. The smile lingered around his lips and his eyes said eloquently that he was not about to tell all. “Quantum physics is my area of expertise,” he said, “as art is yours. But even with my understanding of . . . certain features of the physical universe, I am unable to do what you do. To create solid, programmable constructs so real as to deceive even our friends in Deep Shield—that, Mini, opens up a realm of possibilities that even as old an organization as the Benefactors has not been able to breach. Our talents, once programmed, do not grow—do not evolve. And if we do not return again and again for entrainment therapy, they deteriorate. I am hoping to have the results of the tests you and Ms. Chen underwent. You and your Dr. Brenton hold the key.” A shadow touched his expression. “I hope he is able to determine how that key will unlock our full potential.”

  “He will,” Mini said with complete conviction. If there were one thing she was sure of, it was Chuck Brenton’s talent for finding answers. She smiled back at Lorstad and pondered her next question . . .

  The strains of The Magic Flute submerged into a far simpler, more primal rhythm—a heartbeat, an ocean, musical breathing. His eyes played with the pulses and streamers of light fed to them by his blackou
t goggles. They sought patterns. The human eye—the human brain—always seeks patterns. It is a way of understanding the world. He used to try not to see them. He used to pull his eyes out of the seductive ebb and flow of light, then realized it was self-defeating. He was trying to establish control of his thoughts at too gross a level. With that wisdom, he learned to let his eyes roam where they would.

  Was it possible that he now needed to attempt that control again? The thought escaped his grasp almost as soon as he had it. Deeper. His eyes sought to focus on different aspects of the projection—on the flashes of brilliance, then on the darkness opposite, then on the strands of colorful filament that wove among them.

  Was darkness opposite? Was it not just absence? Were the flashes of brilliance revelations in photonic form?

  He became intensely aware of his body and its shape and form as if his consciousness were pouring into it from the outside, filling it. With every pulse of light, with every beat of sound, he felt as if waves of sense lapped at his skin, but from the inside. His skin felt transparent. How could one feel transparent? He’d wondered that at first. Now he simply accepted that it was so. He floated. He filled with sound and swam in light. The pattern became a pathway. He followed it. It led out of the cave of the physical world and into a greater realm. He was looking down on himself in the tank; then he was looking down on the tank. The room was empty except for a technician checking his vitals on a monitor. He “saw” these things, but understood on some level that without rods and cones and retinas, he could not be said to see. He perceived.

  The first time he had achieved this state—the out-of-body experience—he thought he had imagined it. His father had said nothing about it and he assumed, until he compared notes with Alexis, that it was just a flight of fancy. That was when he’d discovered that only some of the Benefactors had OBEs. He did. Alexis did. His mother had before . . .

  He veered away from that train of thought.

  He hadn’t believed it. Had wanted proof. Alexis had given it to him by entering the Therapy Lab while he was in immersion and making a video of herself doing a series of things. When he’d come out, she had him describe what he had “seen” her do. Then they’d watched her video together.

  Now he no longer doubted what he saw during an OBE. It was the OBEs, after all, that had begun him thinking about quantum entanglement, its application in the world beyond the immersion tank, and the lengths to which it might be taken. Kristian Lorstad had welcomed Charles Brenton’s new technologies, viewing them as a way to extend and grow the powers of the Learned.

  Now, as he perceived Brenton’s team working with one of his staff and witnessed how easily that individual acquired the rudimentary ability to push the tiny robot around the room, to move a mouse pointer across a screen merely through the use of his very normal, very average human mind, he was no longer so certain of what zeta capacities augured. What if he were unable to ever learn to use his native, unenhanced abilities to do what he could now do through external conditioning? What if Brenton’s technology did not grant him evolving powers, but robbed him of what he had? Robbed him of what made him Learned, what made him someone apart. Devolving . . . it was too much a price to pay if none of it worked. Then there was the unthinkable:

  What if the Zetas thrived and made him and his society obsolete?

  These ordinary people learned these amazing skills apparently through nothing more than practice. They did this in a fraction of the time it took him and his fellow Learned to achieve similar yet admittedly inferior results. And if more people than not can achieve the zeta state? What that meant for his society paled compared to the implications it held for humanity as a whole.

  No. It mustn’t happen that way.

  He withdrew his consciousness from the kinetics lab and returned to revisit his conversation with Mini.

  It was dark in the lab outside Chuck’s private office—after hours for the Center staff. Even Eugene was gone—off to have dinner with Mini. Chuck stared at the screen of his laptop, focused on the scanned image of a human male in a virtual OR, brain exposed. He adjusted the neural net on his head and focused on the brain. This software with a VR helm and gloves allowed the clinician to pick up the model of the patient’s brain and manipulate it, turning it, zooming in on parts of special interest.

  This patient had suffered an accident that had taken his eyesight. When an operation had restored his sight some five years later, he had been unable to form coherent images despite the fact that his eyes were fully operational once more. Five years without sight had rewired his synapses. Based on the discussion with Kristian earlier, Chuck had pored over the man’s MRIs and PET and CAT scans. With the virtual reality technology, he was now able to view the brain in three dimensions, and he had been able to see, in real time, how the organ had rerouted its signals to work around the missing sense of sight.

  Yet even that tech had not allowed him to reach into the scanned brain mentally and attempt to return the synapses to their pre-accident patterns. Nor was there any surgical technique in either Chuck’s experience or research as a scientist capable of that delicate an operation. But there was one thing . . . and he was hoping that zeta abilities might bridge the gap between knowledge and technology.

  He knew what the pattern looked like in a sighted brain—knew which areas lit up, and in what order—as the mind worked at recognizing a face or a place or an object. It should be possible, he told himself, for one who understood the brain’s currents to manipulate them, to guide the energies into particular channels, to order the sequence in which the synapses fired. So he held his patient’s virtual brain in equally immaterial hands and imagined himself drawing a line for the neurons to follow—a circuit down which he wanted the impulses to travel.

  The virtual synapses obeyed. The brain lit up in its proper sequence and the retrofit pathways were abandoned. Were this his actual patient, his brain would interpret sight again as it had before. The question before Chuck Brenton: could he effect such a change in real neurons and synapses as he had in the electrical impulses and photons of a computer-generated program?

  Well, why not? After all, weren’t photons and electrons and neurons all just units of energy? If you could manipulate one unit of energy, why couldn’t you manipulate others?

  For the second time that day, Chuck had an Absolute Zero Moment. He was a trained neuroscientist; he understood the minute workings of the brain and had built his career on its relationship to the human mind. He had now trained himself to manipulate units of energy, too, and matter was simply energy in a different form. Knowing that, what was there he couldn’t interact with?

  The thought was amazing, as were its possibilities, but just as quickly as it came, he was brought up short. Fine, Chuck, he thought, but how do I prove that in a medical setting without causing someone irreparable harm? Reaching into a brain or some other physical organ—even with invisible fingers of sense—was potentially dangerous. A sneeze, a stray thought, a moment of inattention could kill or maim. He recalled Mike Yenotov’s early work with mechanical devices—especially the John Deere front loader—and remembered Mike’s concern that he might lose focus, a potentially deadly event even when manually handling heavy equipment.

  The explosive demise of the Washington Monument came unbidden to mind. Chuck had feared a deadly loss of focus—had worked hard with the team to figure out contingency plans for that—but not intentional mayhem. Had he misread Mike and the others? Had that potential for violence always been there, or was it merely the circumstances they found themselves in? He had to know, he realized. He had to know because all this was, in some measure, his doing. No, he didn’t attack the monument himself, but he did open Pandora’s box. Did the process of becoming a Zeta somehow alter their psyches? Would his companions be affected, Lanfen or Mini? He shook the thought away.

  He stood and removed the neural cap from his head, only then noticing that he had never connected it to the kinetic interface. He flushed cold
and hot in turns, realizing that he had taken a leap in his own evolution without even being aware of it—and yet didn’t that in a way prove his theory of distraction he had discussed with Eugene? He set the net back on its stand with shaking hands. His first impulse was to tell everyone on the team. His second was to keep it to himself or to tell only Lanfen. For reasons he could not have articulated, he chose door number two.

  Chapter 8

  Catching the Wave

  “We’re back on the grid.” Tim’s voice held a note of wonder—or perhaps it was merely surprise. He hesitated, eyeing the display in front of him. “Well, at least we’re connected to something outside this damned mountain besides TV broadcast feeds.”

  Sara and Mike both came to peer over his shoulder. The display showed the face of a young woman—a stranger. She was in air force uniform—pale blue shirt, navy blue tie. Her hair was pulled back into a braid. She was brunette and when she turned her head to speak to someone to one side, her delicate features reminded Mike painfully of his daughter, Darya.

  “Doctor?” she said. “I have a connection, I think, but I can’t see or hear anything. They’re jamming from their end.”

  A man came into view—a familiar one.

  Tim grinned. “It’s Dr. Matt!” He cocked his head back to look up at Sara. “We want to talk to him . . . right?”

  Sara nodded. “Indeed we do. Don’t open us up yet, though. First—” She turned to Mike. “Get your bots ready for reconnaissance.”