The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  Chuck felt a warm rush of satisfaction . . . that guttered when cold reality hit him:

  He had no means of retreat.

  He looked around, and there was nowhere to go. This was not a computer simulation. Nor was it an empty mechanism. This was a melding with another mind—another metabolism—and Chuck had no idea how to extricate himself safely.

  Panic surged. His heart rate spiked. So did Joey’s.

  No, no, no, no, no. He couldn’t let that happen. Moreover, he was uncertain if the vessels he had pinched off or mended would hold if Joey’s blood pressure rose. He had to find a way out without putting that to the test.

  Chuck calmed himself with a surge of will. Returned to a familiar mantra. His hand was still touching Joey’s injured side. Could he backtrack along that channel if he imagined he could?

  Almost the moment he had the thought, the connection was broken. Someone had moved his hand. In the welter of confusion that caused, Chuck somehow understood that he was no longer securely tethered to his own body. He was stranded inside Joey Blossom . . . and there was no way out.

  Afterward, Lanfen couldn’t explain when she first realized something was wrong. Not with Joey—what was wrong with Joey was horrifically clear—but with Chuck.

  He’d gone to his knees beside the Sho-Pai engineer, pulled Roboticus away, and extended a hand to the hideously broken rib cage. And there he’d frozen in an attitude of intense listening or . . . prayer, perhaps. In the seconds that followed, the others gathered around, Mini bursting into tears; Lorstad calling for the doctors to be brought; Giles rushing into the outer room; Alexis standing, immobile, her face a blank mask.

  Lanfen and Eugene both reached for Joey’s body to straighten it. Lanfen was repelled by what she could only describe as a mental shock, as if her questing hands had met with an electrical charge. Euge reeled back as well, their eyes meeting in a startled recognition that they’d shared that hefty charge of mental energy. It could only have come from Chuck.

  Lanfen looked down at Joey’s side again and failed to stifle a gasp of horror; the engineer’s rib cage was reinflating, returning to its normal shape. She reached reflexively, but tentatively for his wrist, laying cautious fingers against the blood vessels there, feeling for and finding his pulse. It steadied under her fingertips.

  She heard Lorstad bark something at Alexis in a foreign language—something that sent the woman storming from the lab. Lanfen looked back and saw the change in Joey’s face—an indefinable relaxation of his features. And then . . .

  Nothing.

  She glanced at Chuck. His expression was intent, his brow knit, his eyes open but unfocused. And in those eyes . . .

  Lanfen’s pulse raced. She was suddenly and emphatically convinced that she knew what was happening inside Joey Blossom, and equally convinced that Chuck needed her help. She reached for Chuck’s hand where it rested on Joey’s chest, but Lorstad got there first and pushed both their hands away.

  “The doctors are on their way, Dr. Brenton,” he said, then frowned and repeated, “Dr. Brenton . . .”

  Chuck collapsed to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The other members of his team reacted with inarticulate cries of fear and concern. Lanfen pulled him into her arms, grasped his hand, and set it gently back on Joey Blossom’s chest. She spared only a second to say, “Everyone stand back,” then closed her eyes and went quickly into the same prep routine she used to inhabit one of her ninja bots.

  Then she dove into Joey Blossom’s brain.

  For all his practice with sims and bots, Chuck did not have Lanfen’s experience with the very literal ins and outs of remote kinesis. Nor had he yet aspired to her ability to inhabit a mechanism and her own body at the same time. “Look before you leap” seemed the operative aphorism in this case, but if he had looked, Joey might be dead.

  As it was, Chuck wasn’t sure what would happen when the engineer regained consciousness. He was sure of nothing, in fact, except that he needed help.

  So he prayed.

  The prayer was wordless and came from the depths of his soul. He wanted nothing so much as to have not killed both himself and Joey through his instinctive but rash actions. He half-expected that the answer would be his own extinction and was surprised when he was suddenly aware of another presence with him inside Joey Blossom. At first, he thought it must be Joey regaining consciousness, and panicked anew. But he realized that he knew this presence well; it was familiar, comforting, and steady.

  Lanfen.

  How he knew it was Lanfen, he had no idea, but he knew. He also knew that she wanted him to put himself in her hands, to trust him in a way he had never trusted anyone.

  He did it without hesitation or doubt.

  She had somehow renewed the connection with his own body and brain and now walked him through his return. As she led him, she helped him understand that he needed to think about the physical connection as a pathway that could be followed. It wasn’t, of course—not in any real sense—but Chuck knew that wielding zeta abilities was largely about visualization leading to actualization.

  Follow me, Lanfen said, and he obeyed, treading a trail of light through a virtual wood. She led him to a bridge over a chasm and “told” him to walk back to familiar territory—back to himself.

  Leap of faith, he thought, and stepped out of Joey Blossom and back into his own familiar turf.

  He came to cradled in comfort and warmth, opened his eyes, and found himself staring up at Lanfen. She leaned over him, their foreheads touching, her silken veil of hair shielding their faces. He was stunned. Awed. It was more intimate than a kiss. More centering than a meditation.

  Chuck took a deep breath that he was certain beyond doubt Lanfen breathed with him. “Thank you,” he murmured.

  “Welcome,” she said.

  She raised her head and the real world rushed back in with all its sound and movement. Hands lifted him up, set him on his feet, sat him down. Doctors arrived from the medical wing with a gurney and a crash cart. Chuck watched as Dr. Pence worked over Joey, checking his vitals, sliding him onto a backboard and lifting him carefully onto the gurney before wheeling him away.

  “Will he be all right?” Eugene asked.

  Dr. Pence flashed him a glance and nodded. “I believe so. He seems to have sustained a mild trauma to the head and his right side. We’ll do X-rays, CAT scan, MRI, and EKG, but his pulse is strong. What happened to him?”

  Lorstad met Chuck’s eyes briefly. “He was hit by a heavy, flying object. With that, to be exact.” Lorstad gestured at the damaged robot.

  The doctor opened her mouth as if to ask how that might have happened, then closed it again. “We’ll be very thorough,” she said, and followed the gurney from the lab.

  Beyond the door of the lab, Chuck could see the Center staff clustered in little groups, watching Joey’s progress toward the medical wing of the complex. Some of them had surely seen what had happened to their colleague. Chuck wondered what they would make of it.

  Someone moved to block his line of sight. He looked up to see Lorstad regarding him with unconcealed—and quite intense—interest. No, more than interest—a dark, electric zeal. “Charles,” the older man said, “what did you do?”

  Charles had no idea how to answer that question.

  Chapter 11

  Black Ops

  In all the time they had been at the Center, Lorstad had never before taken any of his guests into his personal sanctum. His spacious office was in the lowest level of the main house but had a large, oval window that overlooked the floor of the central cavern. It even afforded a partial view of Chuck’s lab. He knew there were also electronic and perhaps extrasensory surveillance devices as well. He even knew where they were—Lanfen had shown him, having learned to sense them. She was teaching him to do the same.

  Chuck read this change of venue as an attempt to both inspire and convey trust. Clearly he had been admitted inside the private workspace of the Benefactor leader
with hopes he might reciprocate by divulging insights of his own.

  “So, you have not been entirely honest with me, Charles.” Lorstad sat behind a large desk of anodized aluminum, his hands steepled before him on the desktop. “You have been practicing your own kinetic talents. Talents that seem unique to you.”

  “That’s not a fair assessment, Kristian. I never tried to keep it a secret. I’ve just been focused on your problem and only pursue my own pastimes after hours. And, to be fair, you haven’t been forthcoming with me, either. If Alexis hadn’t pushed the point, would you have told us what you gleaned from Mini and Lanfen’s tests?”

  Lorstad ignored his question to ask one of his own. “What, exactly, are your, ah, ‘pastimes,’ Charles?”

  Chuck decided not to press his own question—for now. “I should think that was obvious. I’m a neuroscientist. I haven’t participated in surgeries for several years, but I’ve been working with medical simulations to at least try to keep my skills up.”

  “What you did just now in the lab was no simulation.”

  “No. It was . . . potentially a mistake. I might have done Joey irreparable damage.” I might have done myself irreparable damage, too.

  “Instead, you saved his life.”

  Chuck looked up and met the other man’s eyes. His expression was not quite dispassionate.

  “I thank you for that,” Lorstad added quietly. “Joey is one of our brightest staffers. I would hate to lose him.”

  “Yes, about that. Alexis—”

  “—will not work with your team any further. Instead, I’m going to assign only novice members of our society to the zeta training and hope that, in the course of training them, you will find a solution to the . . . the problem posed by immersion conditioning. Now, I would like you to be candid with me, Charles. What did you do to Joey Blossom?”

  “All right, but you need to be candid with me first,” Chuck said, finding an opening once more. “Did you intend to let us see the data you gathered from Mini and Lanfen? Or was that yet another thing you didn’t think we needed to know?”

  Lorstad regarded him with a poker face that most certainly concealed frustration, impatience, and calculation. Finally, he said, “I intended to share the data with you as soon as I’d had time to . . . assimilate it and share it with the Council. My primary focus—and I think you will understand this—was what the data meant to the Learned. It was not . . . an easy thing to accept—that we are not changed by our technology in any permanent sense. But I would have shared the information with you. Now, tell me what I need to know. What did you do to Joey Blossom?”

  “I stabilized him.”

  “You did more than that. His ribs were broken. You mended them. We all saw that. He is expected to make a full recovery in the course of the next several days. That is phenomenal. Miraculous, even.”

  Lorstad made a gesture at the wall behind his desk and a flat screen embedded in it came to life, showing a set of X-rays and a CAT scan. Joey’s. Chuck was riveted. The ribs were not pristine—you could tell they’d been broken—but the remodeling was so complete that the breaks looked as if they had been suffered months ago.

  He had done that. It was a sobering realization. He sat back in his chair and tried to take it in.

  “How did you do this, and what part did Ms. Chen play in it?”

  Chuck smiled briefly. “She saved my life.”

  “How?”

  “Ask her.”

  “I did. She said only that she ‘knew the ropes’ better than you did. That you were like a child trying to ride a bicycle without training wheels, realizing only halfway down a steep hill that you still needed them.”

  Chuck’s smile deepened. “She has a way with words.”

  Lorstad leaned forward and once more asked, “What did you do, Charles? How did you save Joey Blossom’s life? Nothing your team has done so far showed any indication that you could . . . that you could inhabit another human being.”

  Chuck jerked his gaze back up to Lorstad’s face. “What?”

  “Ms. Chen inhabits her robots. I assumed that was the method you used as well.”

  And that’s exactly what he’d done. He knew it now. He had done it reflexively, instinctively. But he could not reveal that to Kristian Lorstad. The thought of someone like Alexis being able to reach inside another person and—

  Chuck shivered. It was a thought that sent his mind into full retreat. He had considered only the benevolent medical aspects of the skills he was attempting to learn. Now he wondered if every miracle didn’t have a dark side.

  “No. I doubt it’s possible to ‘inhabit’ another person. There’s an intelligence there that’s not present in a robot. Human beings are not machines. Besides, though I can move things around—remotely run software, manipulate objects—I’ve never come close to doing what Lanfen does when she inhabits a device. Inhabiting another human being . . . it’s unthinkable. I’m a scientist, Kristian. I acted on a scientist’s instinct. I tried to apply what I was learning in my sims.”

  “Without the use of your hands or surgical instruments. Without having to cut the patient open. Again, how?”

  “I had a clear visualization of the affected areas.” That much was true. “That enabled me to use my kinetic abilities to perform the necessary repairs. It was really just a matter of applying my knowledge of human anatomy with my zeta skills.”

  “Impressive. But what function did Ms. Chen perform?”

  “She assisted.”

  Lorstad regarded him levelly. “You are being purposefully obscure, Charles. I beg you not to.”

  Chuck stifled a tickle of anger. “I guess I am being purposefully obscure. Damned frustrating, isn’t it? Now you know how I feel shut up inside your big underground box with little idea of what’s going on in the outside world because of your attempts to keep us focused.”

  “Ah. I see. Yes. Another exchange of information, then? What would you like to know?”

  Chuck sat forward in his chair. “I’ve been in touch with Matt Streegman for some time—”

  Lorstad’s eyebrows collided over the bridge of his nose. “How? You have no access to e-mail.”

  “The Internet. He created a LinkedIn account with a fictitious name and we used coded messages in case someone was monitoring them.” He ignored Lorstad’s narrowing eyes and said, “Anyway, we were in touch when he suddenly went silent. He was trying to get to the government—the real government. He thought he’d made contact, was going to try to negotiate with the Alphas. Then he just stopped communicating with me. I thought maybe he’d managed to get inside the mountain.”

  Lorstad lowered his gaze to the top of his desk. Chuck had the impression of gears turning. “He did manage to get inside the mountain, yes.”

  Chuck exhaled. “All right. That’s good, then. Isn’t it?”

  Lorstad met his gaze. “If I tell you what I know about Dr. Streegman, will you explain Ms. Chen’s role in your treatment of Joey Blossom?”

  “Insofar as I can,” Chuck hedged.

  “Your friend made it into the mountain safely. Unfortunately, he did not make it out safely. He was killed. Electrocuted, apparently.”

  Chuck felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his world. He fought vertigo, his hands gripping the arms of the chair as if he rode a roller coaster. He vaguely heard Lorstad speaking to him, vaguely saw his lips move, but the words were lost in the roar of blood in his ears.

  “So you see,” were the first words he consciously heard the Learned say, “there is nothing to be done. The Alphas are barricaded inside their mountain and seem unwilling to be pried from it.”

  “How do you know this?” Chuck asked, surprised at the rusty sound of his own voice. “How do you know Matt’s dead?”

  “I have means of surveilling the area. It provided me with a record of Dr. Streegman’s body being carried from the mountain by one of the Deep Shield robots.”

  “You’re sure he’s—”

  “There
is no doubt, Charles. I’m sorry. But I thought Dr. Streegman had proven a traitor to your cause. Surely you didn’t trust him.”

  “I didn’t trust him, but he was my partner. My friend. He was also my only means of keeping track of what the Alphas were doing.”

  “I know what the Alphas are doing in a general sense.”

  “That’s great, but you also won’t tell us.”

  Lorstad shrugged. “It would serve no purpose at this juncture.”

  “For you.”

  “However you want to look at it,” Lorstad said with a hint of finality.

  Chuck sighed, but nodded. That was that, then. Matt was gone and they were cut off from the Alphas again.

  “You were going to explain Ms. Chen’s assistance to you. She is not a nurse or a doctor. She has no medical training.”

  “You pulled my hand away,” Chuck said wearily. “Or someone did. Either way, it broke my contact with Joey, and that stopped my manipulation of his injuries. Apparently, I need the physical contact at this point in my development. Who knows, maybe I always will. Lanfen reestablished contact and kept any of you from breaking it again. Her function was to keep anyone else out of the operating theater.”

  “And that saved your life?”

  Chuck groaned inwardly. He’d forgotten having already made that admission. Could he explain that away in some way Lorstad would accept as truth?

  “That was hyperbole. When I broke contact with Joey’s body, it somehow scrambled my synapses. I passed out. When Lanfen put me back in contact with him, it set everything to rights and I was able to complete my work.”