Flightsuit

by Deaderick, Tom

  This must be what it feels like for him, he thought grimly. He smiled and pulled his hands away from the little package. It dropped to the floor, hesitated a moment and then flashed around the corner.

  Taylor turned, waiting to snare another thought and find out if his experiment worked.

  45

  Leo watched Taylor. There was nothing else he could do. His arms stretched out at his sides and legs held firmly by the suit. The guy was either his last hope or…

  He asked, "Who are you?" He wondered if the man owned the suit. He seemed to be familiar with it and wasn't paralyzed by touching it.

  Then a voice cracked like thunder. "I AM," it said. The sound came from all around as if the air itself spoke. He looked around trying to locate the sound, listening for it to repeat. When he looked back to the man, he was smiling.

  46

  Taylor signaled Leo to "be quiet" by putting his finger against lips. Then the air voice said loudly, I think we can do better than that now. I know that you hear me. Taylor was quickly adapting to his new ability, beginning to package thoughts he wanted to send to the boy with less concentration. He was impatient for the boy to figure out what was happening. The intercepted thoughts suggested he was beginning to catch on.

  Those are my thoughts you're hearing boy.

  Leo's eyes locked on Taylor's lips as the air voice spoke. They never moved.

  "What…," Leo started, his own voice startlingly weak and small compared to the booming air voice. He stopped when Taylor shook his head in frustration. The air voice said, no.

  Talking in my mind, Leo thought.

  Taylor nodded, relieved to move on. Yes, it works. No need for words between us at this point, Taylor thought, or ever. He was careful not to package the "or ever" part and monitored Leo's thoughts to make certain he didn't receive it. Good. I alone control communication.

  A shattering scream of images and sound blasted Taylor. The maze of the boy's mind turned translucent and became only an overlay, replaced by a virtual duplicate of the clearing. Both the maze and the clearing were visible, with the clearing feeling dominant and tangible. In his mind he saw the boy and himself crumpled to the ground prostrate with a giant orange-red figure, like a menacing ape before them. It towered over them, halfway as tall as the ruler-straight trees behind it. Its face was angry and frustrated. Its all-black eyes peered at him under cavern brows. The alien air it breathed was a bellows of furious frustration. It was covered in short fur, with longer growth on forearms and lower legs. Muscle and tendons stretched the skin taut. The creature raised its gaze from Taylor and looked skyward. Its fingers stretched into the sky, then tightened into fists. It pulled the closed fists down into its chest and held still for a moment. Then with horrifying violence it slammed both fists into the ground on both sides of Taylor. The vision was incredibly detailed. As its giant fists smashed into stony ground, bits of rock exploded from the ground around Taylor, the impact shaking this vision earth. The giant creature lowered its face down to Taylor. Each exhalation from the gigantic thing made him stagger. Its eye was close enough that Taylor's imagined self could reach out to touch it, if he could ever force himself to move under its monstrous, barely contained fury. He wondered what would happen to his mind if the creature closed him in its immense grip and crushed. Would he die? Would his body live with a mind that was crushed? He wanted desperately to keep the creature calm.

  Outside Taylor's mind, a second passed for Leo with the man's eyes wide open and far away.

  This has been inside me, Taylor thought, looking at the great black eye. This monstrous inhuman thing hid inside my mind. While I worked to build the company, while I met with people, even when I…Taylor stopped mid-thought realizing all the women he'd been with while a furious angry, alien, thing hunched behind his eyes, watching. Taylor shuddered and tried to swallow.

  The timesharing, his thoughts staggered slowly into daylight, that wasn't me at all, was it? The thing pulled back, staring at his face. It wasn't, Taylor thought, feeling certainty behind the thought. It was you. The creature's huge head pulled back inches more. You can be here, Taylor spread his arms to indicate the imagined version of the cliff face, in my mind, because your (people?), (kind?), because you communicate with each other through something like the timesharing network you created between me and the people around me. Taylor sensed some subtle, almost imperceptible relaxing by the creature as if a door was slowly cracking in the frustrating prison it had made for itself in his mind.

  The creature settled back on its haunches further, giving Taylor a hard stare. Taylor thought the stare meant, stay there. Then he followed the creature's gaze to the boy, or where he'd last seen the boy. The boy's image had faded while Taylor and the creature interacted. Taylor looked around the cliff clearing. The scene from his mind felt identical to the physical world version at first, but as his eyes scanned for the boy, he noticed that detail seemed to fill in only after he focused on it. As his eyes first moved toward something, like the large rock near the edge, it felt the same as its physical counterpart at first even though his mind, or the creature's, painted the details in after he was looking at it for a moment. The mental image seemed to only have minimum necessary detail at any moment. Looking out over the cliff at the surrounding mountains was especially disconcerting. The mountains almost seemed to have more detail in periphery than when he stared directly at them. Probably never a change in distant detail here, he thought. There's no point to it. The feeling that my peripheral vision is chasing after more detail might be because my mind is used to seeing vague representations in the peripheral and not accustomed to a lack of detail straight ahead. He kept his view close in as much as possible to avoid the unsettling, magnetic draw of his eyes trying to bring the mountains into focus.

  The boy had vanished. He was gone. Taylor looked back to the creature. It hadn't moved. While Taylor had scanned around the virtual clearing, it had not moved. It stared at the ground to his right. Taylor looked at the ground and saw nothing. He looked back at the creature to be sure it was looking at the same spot. It was, but there was nothing there. Gradually, he became aware of a shimmer in the space beside him, like heat haze rising from sunbaked rocks. The haze thickened into a form. Hiding, he thought. The boy was trying to hide from it. He was able to hide from me, but not the creature. It knew right where he was, like a cat allowing a mouse to run between its paws as it pretends to be bored and disinterested. He tried to swallow something caught in his thought. He's not disinterested at all. He's keenly interested. In both of us, Taylor thought.

  Taylor thought some unheard communication was occurring between the creature and the boy. He drew the maze back into focus by pulling into himself and making his virtual self heavier. As he pulled the maze view toward him, he realized how natural this control of focus felt. It came to him as naturally as using hands to bring something closer even though it had no comparison in the physical world. He released his pull on the maze and watched it fade back again, replaced by the imagined view of the mountain clearing. He relaxed still more and saw the physical clearing again, felt the sun's warmth on his face and heard birds calling in the woods. Not a second has passed, he decided. I could pull myself down into our minds and experience the equivalent of weeks or even years in the span of a second here. Taylor considered his situation. He'd stolen a unique piece of what turned out to be an alien armor, a flightsuit apparently capable of independent space travel, from the NSA. They would eventually identify him as a suspect given his sudden, unannounced departure. He'd sacrificed his ability to generate revenue from his company ever again. Topping it off, he had a hateful, frustrated alien in his mind that could easily control him through incapacitating painful attacks. Drawing back into himself and away from his uncertain future was irresistible. He was relieved for a 'time-out' that stopped or slowed the ticking bomb the creature had made of his life. He tightened his view again and watched the physical detail fade into the imagined clearing. Then he reeled in t
he maze of the boy's mind. He was knee-deep in a river of swimming thoughts. He snatched one from its path and tore it open.

  He heard the boy's voice plead for understanding, what is happening to me?

  Good question, Taylor thought to himself. He relaxed his pull on the maze, coming back into the imaginary clearing. The creature was still staring intently into the boy crouched at its feet, trying ineffectively to hide. Taylor considered how one went about clearing his throat in an imaginary world and decided against it. Probably best to just look at it for bit and let it see that I have a question. Which did work. The creature turned its black bowling ball eyes to Taylor and waited.

  Taylor asked, what are you going to do with me? He braced himself expecting a barrage of images and screams. Instead, he saw endless black space through a clear helmet as if he were inside the armor. The face reflected back on the inside of the helmet was the orange-red ape. There was a sensation of movement without any visual point of reference. After a while, he noticed several of the stars directly in front of him growing brighter. Then they grew larger and he recognized them as planets. He saw Jupiter swell to eclipse the other stars and felt a sensation of falling into it. He expected to crash into it. His depth perception and sense of distance were frighteningly off. The sphere might be smaller and closer or larger and further away. He half expected the giant ball to brush his equally giant shoulder. He tumbled toward it, closer and closer. He closed his eyes, expecting impact. Feeling nothing, he opened his eyes and turned his head to see Jupiter falling away. Relief washed over him and he turned to look ahead. He saw a small blue shape growing larger. The revelation continued for some time. Occasionally, there was a pause and he'd be aware of the creature watching him to make sure he understood. Its patience surprised him. It's important to his plans that I understand, Taylor realized. When he saw something he didn't understand, he thought a question to the creature. Somehow, it understood his questions and provided memories of its own or pieces of his memories in response.

  And Taylor came to understand its plan.

  47

  Something amazing is happening to you boy, Taylor packaged his thought and sent it into the maze.

  Well, that's good news, thought Leo back. I thought it was something awful. Leo wondered if sarcasm worked with ESP.

  Nope, he decided when the booming response came back.

  You've found something that's unique in all the world. Mountains of gold yet to be unearthed and treasures of every kind in the world, and all of them combined aren't as special as this flightsuit you've found. All other treasures came from the earth. Only this one didn't.

  I'll take the gold, Leo thought.

  A laugh like rumbling thunder over the mountains surrounded Leo.

  After a pause, the thunder spoke again. It was created so far away the light from its home world can't even be detected from here. A place so far away that mankind will never reach it. So far away that for all intents and purposes, it is unreachable – like Heaven, Olympus or Asgard, unreachable.

  The entities' memories were flowing freely to Taylor now.

  Leo watched the man's face. It moved only slightly, as if he were asleep. His attention is somewhere else, Leo decided. It's totally creepy to hear the guy's thoughts while he stands there staring like a mindless zombie with his face twitching.

  The man's booming thought said, and you have something that traveled here, from there.

  Leo kept still. He noticed something else. As he'd been talking with the man, he kept remembering things from his own past. At first, it seemed his mind was wandering as the man droned on, but as one memory followed another, he was beginning to think there was something else going on. Right now Leo remembered sitting in bed with his mother. The memory was so clear it overwhelmed his focus, pushing even the boom of the man's ESP voice into the background. The memory was so much nicer than his present situation and it drew him in. He was glad to escape into it. He felt soft, warm sunlight on his bare shoulder as evening sun came through his bedroom window.

  He remembered sitting partly on his Mother's lap, her arm wrapped around him. She was reading his favorite book, outgrown now, but not forgotten. It was about a little prince who lived all alone on a small asteroid. Listening to his mother read about the little prince's discoveries made him feel safe and at peace, following the little boy's curious footsteps. Even as a much younger boy, the little prince's freedom, living all alone on his own tiny asteroid held an allure in his child's heart. Every day, the little prince decided what he would do. One day the little prince left his asteroid to explore the wider universe, leaving behind the world he knew and loved, to see what he might be missing. Even a young boy like Leo could tell the little prince's adventures weren't always happy, but there was always the reassurance that he could return home. In the story, a snake told the little prince that his bite would send the boy back home. When Leo was very young, this seemed like magic and he, like the little prince, believed the snake. As he grew older, he realized that being bitten by a snake in the desert might have killed the little prince and that maybe the only way the little prince could return home was to die.

  He remembered his mother trying to gently ease his attention away from the little prince's fate. She wanted him to keep believing in the storybook magic and not think about dying. The diversions she tried to give him only made him feel something important was being hidden from his young curiosity, out of his mother's good intentions – but still hidden. Like all children he saw anything hidden as something to be discovered, not realizing there is no way back to what can be lost in the knowledge.

  He learned many things from the story. He learned that the future is not always as nice as the past and he learned that no matter how many assurances adults gave children about dying, they still weren't certain themselves. The little prince went to an unknown place. Maybe it was a nice place and maybe it wasn't, but what it was for sure was unknown.

  Leo returned from the memory, listening again to the man.

  They are explorers and adventurers, the man continued. In their culture those who explore furthest, overcome the greatest risks and learn the most are elevated. Thousands of their youngest travel from their home world in these suits, recording everything they see to bring back and increase their society's knowledge and experiences.

  They are long-lived, but even with their long lifetimes, few of their explorers come back to enjoy the pleasures of a successful exploration. Traveling the great distances between stars takes a long time, even for them. The few who come back cause long celebrations and enjoy the greatest pleasures of their society. When he left, only a handful had returned, those who were fortunate enough for their destinations to be closest.

  He wasn't so lucky. He drew a faraway destination, a long trip.

  They travel out, speed increasing second after second. They have technologies far ahead of ours… so far. We are primitive. The suit has something that our scientists call a "Neutrino Mill". These are microscopic engines wrapped in a layer inside the flightsuit. These Neutrino Mills generate power from tiny, almost weightless particles that pass through everything, including us. More than 100 trillion Neutrinos pass through each of us every second. The flightsuit generates a tiny amount of energy from each one that passes through it, giving it a limitless power supply anywhere in the universe and avoiding a need for power storage.

  Even with the great speed they achieve, the trip out takes years. For the adventurers to bring back knowledge, they needed something faster for return trips.

  48

  They are virtually fearless explorers, Taylor continued, but he's still afraid of the return trip.

  The flightsuit's life support, its recording systems and its weapons are technology that's commonplace in their society, proven and dependable. The return trip technology is all new and there's a terrible cost.

  As Taylor told him about the alien and the suit he was trapped in, Leo's mind wandered. He remembered experiences he'd forgotten lon
g ago. It was so pleasant after the terror he'd felt over the last hours to recall the safety and warmth of times with his mother. He remembered things he hadn't thought of in years. It was like finding forgotten photographs in the attic and seeing himself in situations he barely remembered. He remembered his first day of school. The tiny desk with his books stacked in the brown metal box under the seat. He'd anxiously carried the books around in the new backpack his mother bought him for a week before school started. He sat in the exact middle of the little chair and kept his feet perfectly still. It seemed to Leo that the other kids knew what to expect, but it was all new to him. Many of them had older brothers or sisters and somehow gained from their experiences. Leo remembered feeling scared and afraid, not knowing what would happen next.

  The return trip technology works like an ejection seat in some ways. I've heard stories of fighter pilots here on Earth. They say using the ejection seat is the second last thing they want to do. Blowing explosives directly underneath your seat is obviously dangerous. Pilots that eject have been permanently injured and sometimes never fly again. Still, it's better than the alternative, I guess.