“I issued the collection order on George’s adjuvant as you instructed,” Saraceni reported to Ruth. She nodded briefly, still seemingly distracted by thoughts of George’s health. Her laser focus was what made Ruth, so Saraceni knew without it that she was less at ease than she was letting on.
“If he’s not up to par, the adjuvant may provide the extra boost to allow the mission to be completed,” she confirmed. “If we’re lucky.”
“Theoretically based on the other missions where we’ve used adjuvants as a booster, it should work.” Saraceni actually thought about patting her shoulder as he would with any other colleague in this situation, but withdrew his hand without detection, deciding better of it.
“When will she arrive?” Ruth asked.
“I just put in the order for her collection, but obviously the highest priority. Clara herself is doing it. There’s no way to tell whether it’s today or tomorrow though.” He paused and then added reflectively, “If it’s tomorrow it should be in the earlier part of the morning, however.”
“If George simply doesn’t wake up today, and we have to ship him to core medical, we could always try it with her in his place. It would be better than the otherwise gaping hole he will leave in the mission team. God, I wish we could just put an experienced operator in there.” Ruth grinded her teeth a bit as she spoke.
“I know, but if we could’ve done that, we wouldn’t have recruited about half this team at all yet. They have the Pheres configuration in their soul maps. No substitute,” he concluded as they walked into the room. The recruits did not scramble to their seats as they usually did, but instead merely shifted their attention to Saraceni and Ruth. Juliet looked calm, almost placid, as if the outburst had done her good.
‘Perhaps they all should try it’ Stone mused to himself, thinking if they could just get past this part and focused on the mission, everything would pull together. He’d worked many missions in his last years of Circle 2 training where things needed to gel just right in order to be effective. Monitoring in The Cupel showed that, too-it was all about timing. People would wait and wait for a breakthrough, frustrated because they are unable to force things forward, and then suddenly the breakthrough would come. Not always without assistance, he knew, but sometimes.
“How’s George?” Enam broke the silence.
“The same,” Saraceni confirmed. He looked at Ruth who again displayed the briefest flicker of a distant look in her deep blue eyes, so he added, “but we have reason to hope he may wake up today.” The recruits nodded in assent, welcoming what seemed like promising news. Thirty seconds of quasi-optimistic calm spread over the group, the gentle glow of the orb pulsating in rhythmic waves.
Suddenly, Wood raced into the room, knocking over a stool at the lab counter on the way. He was flicking all the monitors on as fast as he could, one after another, until every display was lit up. He tried to show formal courtesy to Ruth by looking at her, but interrupted with bursts of attention toward the monitors, this looked odd.
“Ma’am, they are after the adjuvant!” he shouted.
“How do they know?” Saraceni asked.
“They intercepted our communication to Clara,” he reported. “I don’t know how.”
Ruth knew the answer. She turned to Saraceni, “The decoherence. It must be compromising the encryption.” Next she turned her attention to the monitors.
“How long?” she asked.
“Five minutes, maybe ten,” Wood added. For the first time since his assignment had been split from Wood, Stone felt a pang of regret that he’d not been monitoring with him.
“Okay, I see Clara. She’s already en route.” She punched a few buttons and the screen magnified. A small girl of four years old was reading with a flashlight in her bed. Her mother was asleep in another room. Ruth pulled up a side-by-side view of the house layout next to the video. The girl’s room was at the front right corner of the house, and the mother’s room was at the back left corner of the house. On the video, an apparent burglar lurked outside her window, while a second worked near the power grid for the house.
“There they are. Damn, how’d their agents get there so fast?” Ruth muttered. She pulled up the implantation program and focused it on the tiny girl.
Phoebe Jacob was quietly reading “Geraldine Belinda”, a book her father had left her. She quietly whispered the words to herself as she read, not yet having mastered the art of reading silently. She was, after all, four years old.
“Her pigtails danced,” the small high voice whispered and Phoebe looked at the accompanying picture of Geraldine’s pigtails dancing in the air when she was instantly filled with dread. Inexplicably, the worst feeling she had ever known came over her and she was terrified. For a moment, she was so scared, she couldn’t even move. Ruth adjusted the controls downward slightly and typed some instructions into the command. Phoebe then had the idea she should turn off her flashlight. She did so, and slid out of bed and onto the floor. Her very first thought, her own, was to run to her mother’s room, but she suddenly had the idea she wouldn’t make it that far. Next she considered climbing under the bed, but knew that would be the first place they would look. She finally crawled as quietly as she could to her closet and opened it as slowly and quietly as she could. The burglar was now peering in her window, but he did not see the door close slowly as it was nestled against the corner most in his peripheral vision.
“How far is Clara? His guys are getting close.” Ruth shouted.
“Two minutes, maybe three still,” Saraceni responded, having taken up residence at the opposing bank of monitors, following the project architect as she raced to the scene.
“Thank God we sent the master soulweaver,” Saraceni confirmed, “can you imagine if that assignment had gone to someone else? They’d never make it.”
“She’ll make it,” Ruth muttered desperately, but her tone was less certain, “She has to.”
“What’s going on?” Juliet asked.
“No time,” Saraceni answered, “just wait.”
“Kyle, Stone, feel free to narrate but just don’t interrupt,” Ruth added, punching more buttons, changing the view on the display to the closet interior. Phoebe was there, breathing very fast and louder than she wanted, but she didn’t know how to keep herself quiet. She wanted to cry, but restrained, knowing this would not help. She thought if she stayed as quiet as possible, maybe they wouldn’t find her. The girl wriggled her small frame behind some of the hanging clothes, pulling an old bathrobe over herself for concealment.
Outside, the other emissary snipped the wires to the alarm system. True, it would trip an indicator at the alarm company, but the delay in time was all they needed to grab the girl. He nodded to the second man in black who then cut the window glass with a circular cutter and flipped the window lock as simply as a light switch. ‘Not even cube locks’ he thought to himself, amazed at the stupidity of these people in the suburbs. He knew who the family was, had read about them in the paper, and marveled at how it had never occurred to him before that day to nab the girl and hold her for ransom. ‘Easy money’ he thought. A career criminal, he frequently felt compelled to commit various crimes, some so violent he tried to forget them afterwards. His gloved hand slowly slid open the window.
“These are assignees of the dark forces.” Kyle whispered, “They don’t even know it wasn’t their idea, not really.”
“Why do they want her?” Juliet asked, concerned. Jane held her hand over her mouth as she watched the screen.
“We have to help her!” Jane squeaked.
“We are. We have our top architect on the way. THE master weaver. She’s almost there, see Saraceni’s screen.” He explained, “They want her because we need her and they found out about it.”
“Is she one of you returned?” Gabriel asked, assuming this small girl was a friend of theirs.
“No, she was to be a recruit, later on in this life, but now we had to issue a collection order for her, because of George,” Kyle
answered hurriedly. The masked man climbed in the window and snatched back the covers to the bed that Phoebe had left in a rumpled mess when she gently slid out from beneath them. The bed was empty. He dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. The second man appeared at the window, standing just outside waiting to be handed the girl. The first man looked at him and shook his head. Gabriel’s monitor showed a ball of light racing to the location. It turned down the main street of the young girl’s town.
“Why does she need to be collected-because of George?” Juliet asked Stone as they watched.
“She was his daughter, in The Cupel I mean, a complementary soul who we engineered into the daughter placement to further her learning. But he had to come back early, and now she’ll have to be recruited early, too,” Stone whispered to the recruits, who had moved to be almost huddled together.
“Phoebe Jacob,” Gabriel said loud enough for all to hear. “She was there with the Governor, I mean, George, at the Africa project kickoff.” The group was silenced as the intruder finished looking in the attached bathroom and made his way toward the closet. He took one step and heard a creek on the hardwood floor in the hall. He stopped in his tracks on the carpeted floor of Phoebe’s room. He heard another creek. He withdrew a gun and stared intently at the doorway. Jingles, the cat, appeared and hissed at the man. He closed the door silently and continued toward the closet. He opened it swiftly and saw nothing, but the involuntary draw of breath that Phoebe took was audible. She then remained silent, trying to trick him into thinking she wasn’t there. His eyes adjusted and he could tell where the silhouetted shape of the girl stood behind the bathrobe. He leaned in, knowing if he was fast enough, he could cover her mouth before she could scream. Tears began to stream down Phoebe’s tiny face, but she did not cry out loud. She didn’t think she could scream if she wanted to, but she had no time to find out. The man descended on her like a falcon, pressing his hand against her mouth, the bathrobe in between, in one swift motion.
As he dragged her out of the closet, her arms and legs flailed about, but were too short to really reach him or do any damage. Jingles the cat started meowing an eerie meow on the other side of the closed door, like a banshee call. In 5 seconds, he was handing the girl off to the man outside the window. The streak of light on Saraceni’s monitor turned down the street toward the Governor’s mansion, where Phoebe and her mother still lived until a permanent replacement would be named. The man ran across the lawn with the little girl still kicking and flailing, but he had her firmly in his grasp. As the second man exited the window and moved to catch up with him, a dark figure appeared by the truck in Saraceni’s monitor.
“What the hell is that?!?” Running Wolf exclaimed.
“Dark Janae,” Kyle answered, riveted on the screen. The ball of light appeared and passing right over the men and the little girl, the kicking and flailing suddenly stopped. Phoebe’s body went limp. The dark shadow figure retreated and the first man put Phoebe’s body in the truck and they both hopped in, crouched down out of sight.
“What did you do-suffocate her?” the first man barked.
“No, I didn’t, I mean,” the second man stuttered as he removed the tangled robe from Phoebe’s body to get a look at her, “She must’ve passed out or something.” They examined her body. It was lifeless.
“I swear. She was breathing. She must’ve had a heart attack or something.” The man felt a pang of guilt. This wasn’t even his type of job. He wasn’t sure why he even accepted it when it was changed from the originally-planned robbery, and now he really felt badly about it.
“Whatever, we were going to kill her anyway,” the other man responded without any hint of inflection in his voice, “let’s dump the body before dawn and then we can hit the Mom up for the ransom money.” Saraceni shut off the monitor.
“What happened?” Jane cried out. “That poor little girl! To die so horribly! She was terrified!”
“She won’t remember it,” Stone reassured her, “We won’t download that portion of her memory.”
“So we got her, that light-thing, it’s bringing her here?” Juliet asked.
“Sending her here,” Kyle corrected, “but yeah. We got her.” They breathed a collective sigh of relief. These dramatic outbursts were becoming more common. Wasn’t this supposed to be this peaceful, enlightened place? It didn’t feel like it. Ruth turned off the monitors and pushed herself back, pausing a full moment in silence before turning to the recruits.
“That was Clara,” she explained, “She is one of our three master weavers. No one else but her could’ve pulled that off. We are so lucky Phoebe is out of peril.”
“Is she human?” Chandra asked.
“Phoebe? Of course!” Ruth answered.
“No, the other one. The light-thing, Clara? Is she an angel?” Chandra pursued.
“No, not an angel, but she’s not human right now. She is just her soul, her energy alone, no body. We have an order of architects who can work in The Cupel without bodies due to their experience. The rest of our people need bodies when we are there, same as anyone,” Ruth explained.
“So, you have people that are there that are from here, going through to learn, and then you have these souls without bodies-do they all just impose their will on everyone else?” Chandra seemed concerned. Saraceni intervened.
“Chandra, there are three levels of our beings in The Cupel, and then the people that are first born there. We have people who have returned to reset, who usually have a higher task and purpose, though it is not known to them because they don’t have overt memory from here, then we have the order of the Janae, who may visit in pure soul form and actually weave and shape outcomes there. From here we can only influence, not actually weave. Lastly, we have the order of Kajika.” Saraceni explained.
“Walks without sound,” Enam translated the phrase. Saraceni turned toward him.
“Yes. The Kajika are given human bodies and live lives among the people in The Cupel, but they are not there for resetting and they retain their full memory. They help guide in a more overt way, as friends, coworkers, messengers,” Saraceni continued.
“So George wasn’t one of those Kajika because he didn’t remember who he was, what his assignment was?” Chandra sought to clarify.
“Yes. George was there to be reset. After a certain number of lives here, we are required to complete one cycle in The Cupel. It serves to cleanse our souls of certain buildups and reset our ability to upload the collected information at the end of a cycle here,” Saraceni explained.
“So every so often we have to go there and not know who we really are in order to keep our souls functioning properly.” Kyle added.
“Shouldn’t our souls work in a way that they don’t need to be forcibly reset?” Juliet said skeptically.
“And so they did,” Ruth clarified, “before The Cupel, but introducing that quantum subsystem introduced some additional complexities here, and that’s one of them. It is worth the tradeoff, I assure you.” Juliet said nothing further, but she wasn’t so sure. The Cupel sounded like a huge compromise to this world, the real Earth, and as far as she could see, the arguments against it were as strong as those for it.
“So these Kajika, if they know they are there for a reason, do we ever know it or are they always in stealth mode?” Jack asked.
“They are often quiet, unobtrusive individuals who go unnoticed. Occasionally their assignment is to directly teach,” Saraceni answered.
“For example?” Gabriel prodded.
“For example, Ghandi, Kant, DaVinci,” Kyle relayed proudly. Saraceni provided a slight warning look to proceed no further. Though accurate, these were not the examples he would have chosen.
“And the reset ones, they have missions and don’t know it, how do they ever succeed?” Jane asked.
“Each person’s soul guides them. We are preprogrammed. We don’t need a lot of guidance and cajoling to reach our destiny, just a clear path. If a soul has a particular talent, it will ma
terialize over and over again, out of their very DNA. We help steer with our monitoring and influencing techniques, or the occasional assignment of a Kajika or Janae in very critical times, as you saw today, but you are speaking of less than one hundredth of one percent of all forward motion.” Saraceni answered.
“Like who, give me an example of that kind.” Juliet pressed.
“Galileo and Tesla, same person-reset through different lifetimes,” Gabriel turned to Stone.
“I thought you said that dark shadow after Phoebe was called a Janae? If Janae are people’s souls without bodies from here, why was it trying to harm her?” Saraceni jumped in, resuming his finesses for teaching which far outweighed the explanations Kyle and Stone had been trying to distribute.
“There are Dark Janae and Light Janae,” Saraceni began, “ The Light Janae are from our teams, for the most part, except for a few we see occasionally that seem to have no known origin.”
“They’re just there, but no one knows why?” Gabriel pursued
“Yes, but they are always helpful, so we do not mind or question their presence, but welcome it.” Saraceni responded.
“And the dark? Who sent them? And why didn’t they just go into Phoebe’s room to get her?” David Running Wolf had an eerie feeling even just asking the question. He had seen things like the shadow on the monitor in his dream-state and with his grandfather, a Shaman, as a boy. He once walked into a room where a baby had died and knew that it had just been there. Just seeing it again made the hair on his neck and arms stand up.
“We had protected that residence-they could not enter directly, so manipulated the men to achieve their end. As to who controls them, some are independent, so to speak. As you’ve seen from your soul maps, each soul is born with certain proclivities. Well, souls with a disproportionate amount of dark matter DNA are, by their very nature, driven to deconstruct rather than construct. Some of them don’t even know why they do it. Those are exactly the sort who became disruptive thinkers in our world and brought us to the edge of destruction.” Saraceni paused, taking a sip of water. He noticed how tired the group looked. They would need to begin mission training very soon and he had a fleeting thought of failure in looking at them before he continued. “Most of them, however, are aligned with a group with no name. We call their group collectively the Duister, and they are led by a man named Valswak. They have the same levels of operators as us-their Dark Janae operating without bodies, agents on the ground with memory and bodies, and then agents in bodies with no memory, but missions to destroy. They intercede into the system, marrying others only to destroy the family, starting unnecessary wars, leading others astray, committing abuses on children. Some are afflicted to a lesser extent and merely seek to undo what we have done, but they don’t hurt others proactively. They just lack any faith, or drive to serve the greater good, which is present in most people. They operate solely for themselves.”
The Cupel Recruits Page 19