by Michael Priv
Daevika looked away. Kevin quietly loaded up his plate with eggs Benedict. The two shared a knowing glance. They knew the truth. Silence enveloped them, their secret uniting them now and forever, as secrets always do.
Can’t say I’d often heard such animated discussions about the past. We were usually a lot more relaxed about these things. There were always wars. Somebody always won, somebody lost. People got killed all the time in great numbers, both the winners and the losers. Romans got wiped out because of some strategic error, so what? Was it important to anybody now? Apparently so.
Linda followed the conversation with a scowl of doubt on her face. “Picky, do you think they discussed real events?” she whispered to me.
“I’m sure they did, hon,” I replied. “They couldn’t have invented the same event from two different perspectives and agree on the outcome and have other participants speak up. It must’ve happened.”
“And they seemed so invested in this argument,” Linda agreed. The most fascinating part of the exchange we ’d just witnessed was that the local one-lifers were getting their memories restored. That wasn’t a usual thing at all. As Dr. Rosenthal explained it, they were hypnotically wired against recovering this knowledge. That was the entire gist of the forever dead sentence they all served. Or was this an anomaly? An isolated occurrence? Could Linda be helped? Never heard of any such possibility before. It was frightening to get my hopes up so high.
The other notable peculiarity was that the discussion took place at a public gathering. The participants freely discussed these things with no concern for being immediately shipped to the nearest funny farm. All the guests in this building knew the truth, which made it the best place on Earth, in my book. The place to be free. Freedom. Wait a minute… No, this knowledge that people shared couldn’t be all of the Freedom, but it could be a part of it.
I was so fascinated with the argument that I almost missed the other important part of the presentation—the food. Boy, it was a good breakfast! Too bad we weren’t very hungry.
41 General Brell in his present incarnation looked like a retired, wealthy businessman. A lean, medium height, healthy-looking gentleman in his early seventies, Brell was cleanly shaven and wore clothing that looked expensive, way above my pay grade. And Brell looked perfectly sane to me, as expected.
We were ushered to his office on Level Minus Three by Liran a bit later in the day. The huge desk had a neat stack of folders and a glass with pens and pencils. Bookcases full of books lined the office walls. The portrait of Mozart was an unexpected addition to the décor.
Brell ’s baby-blue eyes were calm, kind, and relentless. If I looked straight into his eyes, I had to fight the urge to break down on the spot, drop to my knees and babble out everything I ever did that I didn’t feel good about, including stealing pocket change from my mom at the age of ten in Modesto, or accidentally blowing up a space freighter with the entire crew as a lowly engine room hand fifteen and a half million years ago just off Alpha Psamatei.
The most remarkable thing about Brell was his presence. When he stood next to me, boy, I knew it. It felt kind of like swallowing a huge balloon. The familiar great space opened in me, creating calmness and strength within, which wasme. My breath caught, my stomach tightened, as if I were suspended in the infinite vastness of space. How did he do it? Only the truly great could simply yank you up to their level. That kind of an experience causes your belly to tighten, and you get kind of giddy, like vertigo. In a word, WOW!
“Good afternoon, General, sir!” I barked involuntarily, jumping up from my chair when I felt that familiar explosive expansion of my space.
“Grach? Good to see you again, boy. You found me, just as you promised. Thank you.”
He remembered my promise. And he knew my name. How flattering! I felt truly pleased. We shook hands. I sat down. “And you.” He turned to Linda. “Heard a lot about you, my dear.” Linda looked at him wide-eyed. Suddenly she smiled with tears I her eyes.
“Everything will be okay, right, sir? I really feel it now. It will be all right.” Linda sobbed. A relaxed smile lit up Brell’s face. “You’re a lovely being, Linda. Just want to cuddle with her all the time, don’t you?” He was talking to me now.
“ Sir, yes, sir!” I confirmed.
Linda laughed.
I felt increasingly elated for no apparent reason. “I didn’t expect you’d remember me, sir, or recognize me even if you did. I was a lowly nobody.” I couldn’t wipe the silly grin off my face. All the problems vanished. I felt awesome.
“ No such thing as a nobody, Grach. Everybody is somebody and you especially so. But you know that already. You’re just being coy with me.” He chuckled.
I was beside myself with joy that we were sitting in his office together—the General and I. “ I do remember you very well, and I did recognize you, Grach. Do you prefer Grach or Norman or some other name?” Brell asked me.
“I prefer Norman, sir.”
“Sure. Call me Bob.”
“Okay, sir.”
“Okay, Bob,” Brell corrected me. “Okay, Bob.”
“ Good.” Brell looked into my eyes. My breath caught again. I coughed. “I know you, Norman. You are a lot smarter, a lot better and a lot stronger than you let on. And a lot more responsible than you like to admit.”
Responsible? Who, me?Or some other Grach? Brell ’s eyes crinkled in a warm smile that made me feel even better, if that was even possible. “But most importantly, you’re quite literally unstoppable, if you decide to be.”
Unstoppable? Me?I thought I was depressedand introverted. Wait, I guess I am unstoppable.Look atmenow, I got this far. “That’s why I noticed you. And I really like Linda—a clean, lovely spirit. I’m happy the two of you stopped by. Thank you very much.” “ Pleasure is all ours, sir, thank you for this visit, but we haven’t just stopped by. The Guards sent me, sir. I mean, Bob,” I replied, still grinning. “They want to take your statement. I’m supposed to convince you to meet with the Station Chief.”
Brell sat back at his desk. “Not entirely true. They’ve been trying to get rid of me for a long time. I’m not going anywhere. My work’s too important.”
“I don’t get why they keep you alive.” “ Bumping me off on many occasions in the past never did them any good. They never succeeded in brainwashing me, either. Their thought injections are a joke. They have as much power on you as you grant them, and not a Joule more. That’s all they got on you, remember that.” Bob peered into my eyes intently.
He must’ve thought Stan brainwashed me. I kept silent, holding his gaze. He nodded his approval and continued, “Things have changed now. Not only did they fail to kill me on several occasions when they caught up with me, but they even fought a battle, protecting me some years back against the Chinese. The School was in Tibet at the time. More recently, they also alerted me to some official local investigation against some of my disciples in South America, strong-armed the opposition and destroyed all their records. Long story. But, yes, they help me now as their new strategy. They keep me alive. This way, they can track me. With a body, I can be identified and pinned down to a location. If I didn’t have a body right now, who knows where I’d turn up.”
“I got it. You’re more dangerous to them dead than alive.” “That seems to be their view at the moment. Things could change fast. Do you know why they want me out of here?” “Because you’re wanted for court-martial?” “ Nonsense. Stan couldn’t care less. They want me out or at least cooperating, because I set people free. That’s what we do here, we set people free. What is this planet?”
“A prison,” I replied. “Exactly.” Brell got up and walked over to a large chart on the wall, outlining some kind of a procedure. “We set the convicts free,” he repeated, pointing at the chart. “I’ve been plotting the map out of here for a very long time, but I’ve only had occasional success till recently. The procedure is refined, and I do get stable and consistent results now, albeit still a slow process.”<
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“With all respect, sir, I mean Bob, you setting the convicts free… how many of them did you free all the way out of here so far?” “Over three thousand.” I whistled softly. “Does it bother you that these criminals had been duly convicted in the court of law? I can see how the Guards may feel a little peeved about you unleashing onto the society convicted criminals, found unfit to live among people by a court of law. Just saying.”
“That’s assuming the duly-convened court divvies out real justice,” Linda interjected. “Do they?” Linda stared at Bob with the wide-eyed expectation of a little kid on Santa Claus’ lap in a mall.
Bob nodded to Linda fondly and shrugged, “Justice is the way societies defend themselves. It may not look like much of a justice, but it had worked for those societies for a long time. It is what it is, and so here we all are. Okay? Let’s consider rehabilitation now. I should probably explain the process of freeing a being. The Guards pretend not to understand it despite the briefings. You see, they go by the book—or they honestly strive to—and that book contains no provision for convicts’ rehabilitation and release. Nobody is supposedly getting out, ever. That’s their take on the book.”
Seemed about right, but Brell made it sound as if it wasn’t. Nobody ever walked away from the forever-dead sentence; everybody knew that. There was no possibility of release.
“They are mistaken about their own regulations. There is an unstated but obvious release provision.”
“How?!” Linda jumped off her chair. “ People believe that protective screens keep the souls in. They don’t. A spirit itself, a thought entity, cannot possibly be contained. Look, the protective screens block out only the mental mass. By that I mean thoughts, pictures, decisions, identities, stuff like that.”
“How is that?” Linda asked, lost now. “ Hang-ups, losses and failures, self-inflicted limitations, the socially-imposed idiocies we live by, anything we protest against— our entire mental makeover. These things have mass and electrical charge. That is how they keep you here. You carry the mass with you and they found a way to stop the mass with the force field. They don’t lock up you, the spirit, the thought entity. Nobody can possibly hold youanywhere. Essentially, you are a thought. How could you possibly be restricted to a location? The screens only work to keep your mental mass here, but since we are indelibly attached to our masses, we can’t get out. Screens don’t work on spirits with no mental mass. Neither do the screens affect beings with all their mental mass intact traveling in a spaceship, for example. Otherwise, the Guards couldn’t shuttle back and forth and bring in the supplies and replacement troops. The hull of the spaceship is sufficiently impenetrable for the containment field. Their field doesn’t make Earth much of a prison.
“Whoever set up this system didn’t really lock up the spirits or object to prisoners leaving, you see that? But only if they were advanced enough to leave—advanced spiritually or technologically. In other words, you reach a certain level in your development and you’re done, you can go. Nobody actually gives you your freedom back; you simply arefree at that point. That’s the idea. If you can leave, you are rehabilitated. If you are rehabilitated, you can leave. The letter of the law is vague. But the spirit of the law is clear enough.”
“ Can I ask a question, Bob? You mentioned to be free a person had to become spiritually ortechnologically advanced. I don’t see the connection. It seems the more we gain technologically, the more we lose spiritually,” I objected.
“True,” Bob readily agreed. “That is what’s happening here and now. But if a society develops enough technology for interstellar travel without destroying itself, it’d be all right. They must’ve worked something out or they would’ve perished at some point along the line. Nothing is perfect, or they wouldn’t need P-3 to dump their criminals on. There is still criminality, but the society operates on a much higher plane. Makes sense?”
Linda and I nodded. “Got it now,” I said. “So that’s what it’s all about—rehabilitating convicts. Or freeing them?” “ Same thing, actually.” Bob said. “Rehabilitating means freeing. Freeing means rehabilitating. The process of rehabilitation progressively frees them. Nobody, except you, can give you your freedom back anyway—you see that? If you’re a slave to your own phobias, illnesses, and harmful attitudes, you won’t be free no matter where you go. You’ll carry your own jail with you. Only if you get rehabilitated, can you be free.”
“It seems what you are saying,” Linda interjected, “is that being free simply means not having any mental mass. Isn’t that too simple?”
“You got it, Linda. And no, it isn’t simple at all.” “ So how would you accomplish this rehabilitation? What would you need to do?” Linda asked on the edge of her seat with anticipation.
“ Technically, the problem has always been clear.” Bob got up, adjusted his shirt, and walked around the office. I liked watching him walk, talk—anything really. Linda also followed him with luminous eyes. She was clearly happy to be here.
“ All the pictures in your mind are mental mass. Socially induced identities, affiliations, goals, desires, decisions, judgements, upsets, losses, pains, conflicts, attitudes, problems, hates, confusions, phobias—these are created as energy-based pictures, the mental mass. They keep you here. Get rid of those and stop creating new ones and you’re free.”
“Don’t we always think in pictures? How else?” I asked. “Instantaneous, clear, creative and effortless thinking is always conceptual—no pictures. Creative people, like artists or writers, use conceptual thinking. This ability to deal only in concepts can be rehabilitated. Short of that rehabilitation, beings are compulsively attached to their pictures and other mental masses and for that reason alone suffer from a multitude of illnesses and mental problems. All beings anywhere, and all convicts on P-3, obsessively and unknowingly create mental mass and then hold on to it. Just a part of being alive. That imprisons them on many different levels no matter where they are. Right?”
“Right,” I agreed. “The task of freeing spirits seems formidable.” “ Theoretically, the solution is easy. If you’re creating and holding on to the mental masses unknowingly and obsessively, all you have to do is start controlling this process to enable you to stop doing it at will.”
“How do you do that?” I asked, expecting a revelation. Bob shrugged. “The basic idea was to take each line of obsessive behavior, such as relationship problems or fear of heights, for example, or hang-ups on any subject, like money, sex, or spiders, or whatever. Every single line must be isolated and first cleaned up of misdeeds and secrets, so the subject regains the ability to take ownership of it, and then the subject consciously invents and uncreates the same or similar pictures, problems, fears or hates, in other words, masses, until the process is no longer automatic. Thus, the subject restores the ability to control the process.”
“Cool!” Linda clapped her hands. “Remarkable results , yes. Therapy of this kind brings people to entirely new levels of health and abilities. However, in terms of dropping all the masses, it’s proven a failure. People never un-create all their masses. Then, given a bit of time, they wrap themselves in new masses, partially nullifying the therapy and reverting to an improved version of their normal human self. You can make better humans that way, but you can’t set them free.”
“But you did find the solution, right?” Linda asked. “Obviously, since you set thousands of people free.” Bob nodded. “Based on my research, I finally concluded that the solution was in disregarding the mental masses entirely and working only on increasing their spiritual awareness and abilities to the point where they gain control of any and all energy manifestations, especially those of their own manufacture, such as, but not limited to, the mental mass.”
I didn’t get it. “Bob, didn’t you say energy manifestations? First, we were talking about mental mass, then energy. Mental energy? Is mass and energy the same thing?”
Bob glanced at me. “There is only energy, nothing else, only vibration, orig
inated in thought—this being a thought universe. Do you understand that this is a thought universe? This whole universe is continuously thought-up into existence and we all participate in its creation. Okay?”
Linda, not committed, made a vague sound. I fidgeted as, honestly, I wasn’t fully getting it either. Brell took it for a “yes” and continued. “Mass is an energy manifestation. Mass is solidified energy. Look at quantum physics with its wave functions. Think about the concept of the wave characteristics of matter. Those are
e nergycharacteristics of matter. A particle exists everywhere at the same time akin to a radio signal. We are talking about a field of energy now. An electron has a wavelength, obviously, since it is energy. But an electron also has mass, since it’s a particle of matter. So, is it energy or matter? It is neither and both at the same time. You have your transition point right there. This has been known here on Earth for over a hundred years. Matter is a form of energy.”
“I see now. You bring people up to the point where they simply un-create all their masses at will?” I asked. “ I bring them up to the level where they can un-create any energy at will, or they can create any energy at will. They may or may not choose to shed all their masses; they may or may not choose to penetrate the screen and escape. They can do whatever they choose, they are free.”
“Wow!” I breathed out.
“You think this is a ‘wow?’” Bob chuckled again. “I envy the two of you. You are about to uncover the key mystery of the universe.” The keymystery. Linda and I glanced at each other. I felt silly as I wasn’t fully getting most of it, but Linda’s luminous gaze betrayed the intensity of her cognitive processes.
General Brell perched on the corner of the desk and peered at us, squinting. “You don’t know your power, kids. You’re formidable, all-commanding energy entities. You create energy by thought.” Bob added, “You do it all the time.”