Near Death (A Jake Townsend Science Fiction, Action and Adventure, Thriller Series Book 1)

by Richard C Hale

  Along with the music came visions flying by on his left and right. It was his whole life. Everything that had ever happened to him. The good on the right, and the bad on the left, but no joy or sorrow accompanied the sights, only a feeling of complete amazement. A final tale of his life and all he had accomplished and all he had failed to do.

  There was no judgment in the visions, only a sense of energy. A sense that his whole life had fueled something greater than himself and he felt proud and honored that it had some purpose he now understood.

  As his dad held his hand and the music and visions surrounded them both, a glowing orb of light appeared over their heads; a golden radiance which pulsed and grew in beauty and brightness. He saw the parade of visions flow into the light, and he felt inexplicably drawn to it.

  There was comfort and peace there. A peace he had never felt before. He moved toward it, his father smiling beside him.

  Frank glanced down and realized the priest and the newly arrived paramedics were frantically working on his dying body. The scene was distant and fuzzy. He couldn’t hear what was being said and his gaze kept wandering toward the light.

  As the paramedics used a defibrillator on Frank, a huge sucking sound invaded the beautiful music and he heard his father say, “It’s not time Frank. Soon.”

  The golden light began to fade and the sucking sound grew louder. Frank lost his grip on his father’s hand and fell back toward his body.

  Blackness followed and he awoke some time later in a hospital room filled with noises and smells from which he wished he could escape. A pang of sorrow and loss swept through him as he realized he was still alive. Then the smiling face of his wife, Eve, came into view and the world was good again.

  Frank cried.

  2

  January 9, 2010 8:30 am

  Orange Park, Florida

  Jake Townsend entered his laboratory and found Peter Vargas hooked up to the machine.

  His assistant, Teri Newton, was connecting leads to Peter’s arms and legs. He frowned. He didn’t like Peter Vargas.

  Jake signaled Teri over as he walked in. She sighed and met him behind the console that housed all the computer components of the system.

  “Why is he here?” Jake whispered.

  “Rachael canceled,” Teri said. “Her aunt is sick and she had to fly to Denver. He was the only one I could get on such short notice.”

  “All right. Nothing we can do about it, I guess. I was just thinking this morning that we shouldn’t have brought him into the program. It’s as if the machine doesn’t like him.”

  The machine Jake was talking about was his own invention. NDEEE was her official name, but he called her Andee for short. The acronym stood for Neurologic Demand Encephalon Electrical Enhancer.

  “Personally, I don’t think Andee likes anyone,” Teri said.

  “She likes me,” Jake said and grinned.

  “She should. You spend enough time with her.”

  “She needs my attention. Until she finds what we’re looking for, I need to baby her.”

  Teri rolled her eyes.

  Jake knew she took some of Andee’s failures personally.

  In the simplest terms, Andee essentially read minds.

  Since there was nothing else out there like it, Jake used the term EEG loosely to describe her, giving him something simple to associate her with so the normal every day layman could grasp a basic concept of her without having to get into all the technical jargon. In reality, she incorporated many different technologies including EEG, CAT, MRI and computer AI, or Artificial Intelligence.

  Andee represented a huge leap in advanced electrical studies of the brain. Not only did she read the electrical activity, she could see a subatomic energy source in the body which had previously been undiscovered. She then attempted to interpret this activity and present it in a visual form. A video.

  In the initial visit to the lab, Peter had been measured for what was essentially a mold that encompassed his whole body. This mold was how Andee was able to read the subatomic energy the body emitted during the session.

  Other leads were connected to his head, arms, legs and torso which not only measured his vital signs, but also brain waves and other electrical activity. There were over one hundred wires attached to Peter, threaded through the body mold and then connected to various electrical components which led away into the ceiling where they fed information to Andee.

  “How’s Andee doing this morning?” Jake asked.

  “She’s a finicky bitch,” Teri said and smiled. “But, I think she’ll hold together.”

  Jake grinned back. Teri had a knack for speaking her mind. Andee was giving them problems.

  Jake helped Teri finish connecting Peter to the system and they chatted about the lab, Encephalographic Systems, and anything else Peter wanted to talk about. He seemed nervous this morning.

  Peter squirmed a bit and Jake asked what was wrong.

  “Something’s digging into my lower back. I think it’s a wire.”

  Teri reached under Peter’s back, and slid one of the wire leads out from under his body.

  “Better?” She asked.

  “Much. Thanks.”

  Jake walked over to the computer terminal and typed in a command.

  A humming noise began from behind the rear wall as the equipment prepared itself for the task at hand. The machine used enormous amounts of energy and a majority of the room space was taken up by cooling equipment used to disperse the heat created from the system.

  The computer which ran Andee was the next level of processing beyond the famous CRAY C90 and T90 computer systems of the nineties. Since Jake had been involved in the development of this new computer, he was allowed the use of one at a reduced cost. His work in the electrical properties of the brain and the algorithms developed from this work had proven invaluable to the software engineers at CRAY. Artificial intelligence was the next big thing on the horizon.

  “A question?” Peter asked. “How much radiation are you guys pumping into me?”

  “None,” Teri said. “The system’s connections to you are only listening devices. All the high voltage and radioactive components of the machine are shielded from us by the protective material in the walls and ceiling. Jake and I would be growing third arms or large warts on our bodies if these shields were not in place. You can relax. It’s all good.”

  Peter seemed satisfied with this answer.

  He took a deep breath and sighed. He appeared to be relaxing, his heart rate and breathing showing this. They were ready to begin.

  When Jake had begun testing with Andee, he had started with normal subjects, people without Near Death Experiences. The program had grown rapidly during the first year, but then stagnated when progress slowed and glitches in the system hampered further developments. His sponsors were expecting more and he had struggled trying to give them what they wanted: Unlimited access to the human mind.

  Then Beth had died and everything shut down.

  He couldn’t go on. At least until he discovered Andee may be able to help his grief. She might be able see into a place no one had ever gone before.

  And Jake needed to find a way to that place.

  3

  April, 2009

  9 Months Earlier

  Orange Park, Florida

  Jake would never have considered putting someone with a Near Death Experience into the machine had it not been for the death of his wife.

  While he held her in his arms, the life running out of her onto the cold, black asphalt, she said things that still haunted him. Things which didn’t make sense at the time. And as his life stagnated and he floundered, trying to make some sense of her words, he became aware of others with similar experiences.

  After meeting a man one day whose daughter died in his arms, uttering startlingly similar things as Jake’s wife Beth, the man told him there were people who had survived their brush with death and carried what he called Near Death Experiences around with them f
or the rest of their lives. Experiences which seemed to share certain traits and characteristics.

  Jake went online, searching out people with these unusual encounters, hoping to find some answers to his questions, but no one he contacted provided any clarity on the matter and his wife’s confusing last words remained a mystery to him. Most of the people didn’t want to talk about what happened.

  Desperately searching for any clue, he decided he would seek and find test subjects with these unique experiences, and by looking into these people’s minds, hopefully begin to understand, and perhaps, even find what was missing in his life. His wife.

  * * *

  The first subject with a Near Death Experience came to the lab almost a year ago.

  It was spring in north Florida and everything was blooming. The days were warming up into the eighties and the nights were cool and sometimes chilly. Pollen counts were high and the hay fever sufferers were miserable.

  Sara McClaughlin was horribly congested and watery eyed as she entered the lab for the first time. As she shook Jake and Teri’s hands, she sneezed and apologized, then blew her nose in a pink handkerchief. Jake thought, This should be good.

  Before any experiments were conducted, Jake and Teri interviewed the subjects and had them tell their story. Jake wanted to hear details of the NDE before any interaction with Andee took place.

  With this first subject, he believed he would watch Sara’s experience unfold on the computer monitors, but this was, as yet, an untested system with this type of activity and he wanted a preview of what had happened to Sara. She also needed to be measured for the body mold and necessary leads for the experiment.

  Sara enthusiastically told them how she had drowned in a pond behind her house when she was eleven and had seen her own body from above as paramedics worked on her. Her grandma, who had passed away the previous year, was there with her, along with her cousin Jenny, who had died three years earlier.

  Her story was typical, in that she saw a bright light and visions of her life flashed by her into the light. ‘A happy song was playing,’ as she put it, and everything was peaceful. She was drawn to the luminous area and yet reluctant to go to it. Her grandma and cousin were gently guiding her that way when a great thump was heard and felt on her chest.

  Sara’s attention was ripped from the beckoning glow and became focused on the scene below her as the paramedic raised his fist and brought it down hard on the middle of her chest. The precordial thump he performed was heard louder this time and even caused Sara to gasp as she felt her chest rocked from the blow.

  As she plummeted back to her body, she heard her grandma say, ‘Charlotte and Madison,’ and she knew these would be the names of her two daughters. Then Grandma and Jenny were gone, the light, extinguished, and darkness invaded her world until she awoke three days later in the children’s ICU at Baptist Medical Center.

  The first two words out of her mouth were the names of her unborn daughters.

  Sara had been given a glimpse into her future.

  When Sara returned the following week, after the mold had been fabricated and the computer programmed for her electrical leads, she was still having problems with her hay fever. As they talked and chatted while preparing her for the session, she would periodically sneeze or blow her nose. This wreaked havoc on the sensors and Jake thought they would have to postpone the experiment. She offered to take some Sudafed but Jake said no. He didn’t want any type of drug in her system which might encourage skepticism later as to the effects it may have had on the outcome. They would just see how things went.

  As the experiment began, Sara was asked to think about her Near Death Experience, her NDE.

  The scene unfolded in front of them with sparkling clarity. The video Andee produced was nothing less than spectacular. It was almost film-like in its quality. The detail and subtle nuances were leaps and bounds above the interpretations of the normal test subjects and Jake’s awe and excitement was tangible. He couldn’t stop grinning.

  Originally, Jake and Teri considered hypnotizing their subjects for the memory to be fully recalled, but as he watched Sara’s experience unfold, he realized that was unnecessary. Her memory of the experience was phenomenal and the clarity profound.

  Then, the first anomaly showed up.

  Andee had the ability to produce an audio track along with the visual representation the computer drew. When Sara’s NDE started, the sound seemed normal, but then suddenly changed. A loud distorted screeching noise came blaring out of the speaker system and he cringed.

  At first, Jake thought it a minor glitch in the system, a hiccup in the power. The machine was using about seventy percent of its available resources, which was way above anything they had yet seen, and this concerned him.

  Jake reached to turn the volume down as Sara said, “What’s happening?! Is everything ok?”

  With the loss of concentration on her part, the visualization changed on the monitors and the screeching sound stopped.

  “Yes,” Jake said. “We were getting some kind of distortion of the audio during your recall and we’re not sure what it is. We’ve never had that happen before. Were there any strange sounds going on at that point in your experience?”

  “No. Not really.” Sara said. “Except, maybe the music, but I wouldn’t call it strange. It was beautiful and happy.”

  Jake thought about this and asked, “Was this music something you recognized? Like your favorite song?”

  “No.” Sara said. “I’d never heard it before. It was so beautiful and full though, it felt like it had presence. Not just sound. It was all around and inside me too. A part of me.”

  “All right,” Jake said. “Do you think you can continue?”

  “Yes, for a little while longer anyway. This contraption over me is making it hard to breathe and I’m feeling a little confined at the moment.”

  Just then, Sara sneezed. A warning light lit up on the console indicating a loss of communication in a section of the sub atomic energy collector. The body mold.

  Jake swore under his breath. “Great. Now what?”

  “Her sneeze probably blew some particles on to the sensing fabric,” Teri said. “I should be able to bypass that section, but we’ll be losing data from that part over the face.”

  “Do it. We’ll have to make some modifications to the body mold later."

  As Teri typed commands into the computer, Jake stepped around the console and stood next to Sara.

  “Your sneeze may have affected some of the sensors in the body mold and Teri is working on a fix to compensate for this. Are you hanging in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give us a couple of minutes and we’ll start over again. If you think you need to sneeze again, try turning your head to the side. That will prevent saliva droplets from spraying over the section of the mold above your face. Do you have room to do that? Try it.”

  “I think so—yes, I can turn a little but my nose bangs into the side of the mold.”

  “All right, do the best you can.” He returned to the other side of the computer console.

  Teri nodded and said, “Got it.”

  “Good, let’s try again. Sara? Can you start at the beginning? I’d like to see if this sound anomaly shows up in the same place, if at all.”

  Sara said, “Of course.”

  The horrible, screeching distortion started up again at the same place and Jake made an entry, attenuating the sound so it didn’t overwhelm them. He let the scene continue to play out and as he watched, a section of the video began to distort. Jake frowned as he saw this. Teri pointed to it and Jake nodded his head as if to say, ‘Yes, I see it.’ Another distorted area showed up next to the first and at this point it was obvious what they were.

  Pointing to the distortions Teri said, “Is this Grandma and cousin Jenny? Is this what we’re seeing?”

  Jake nodded slowly. “I think so. Let’s see what develops. Maybe Andee can sort it out as she learns.”

 
A bigger distorted area had begun to form at the far right of the screen and it grew as they watched. Suddenly, the whole screen began to stutter and freeze, repeatedly. Finally the scene changed and was replaced with a dark view of the inside of the body mold.

  Sara had lost her concentration.

  “Get me out of here!” Sara yelled. “I can’t breathe!”

  Jake could hear the panic in her voice as she flailed her arms, pulling on the leads. He thought she would yank them right out of the ceiling. Teri rushed over and began unhooking wires and electrodes as fast as she could, trying to calm Sara down.

  “It’s ok Sara,” Teri said. “Try to slow your breathing down. We’re right here. Take deep breaths and close your eyes. Try to visualize yourself in a huge open meadow with a gentle breeze blowing and wild flowers swaying all around you, sunlight on your face and the scent of the flowers in the air.”

  Sara sneezed.

  “That’s right. You can smell the flowers.”

  Sara showed signs of relaxing and Teri was able to disconnect enough of the leads so she could lift the body mold up and away from over her.

  Sara seemed instantly better.

  “Oh God! I’m so sorry! I feel so foolish! I just lost it.”

  Jake came over and said, “It’s ok. I should apologize to you. We didn’t think about how closed in you would be in this set up. Of course you would feel claustrophobic. We’ll have to make some modifications to the mold.”

  “Yes, please! I don’t think I could get in there again the way it is. I think if my face was open, it would probably be ok.”

  “We could cut that section out,” Teri said. “I’ve already bypassed it in the computer program and since we have this session recorded, we could compare it to future sessions with the modified body mold and see if we’re losing any important data.”