by Koby E Hill
“Well, that was a desperate situation Claire, and a rare occurrence. I can’t really get that far anymore.”
“I’m sure you can.”
Alice sighed. The flickering of colors was dimming in her left-eye vision, returning to the standard dull grey outlines. “Fine. I know that it was intentional. One of the team leads has a cottage not far from him. They have a very loose mind.”
“Easy for you then, I suppose.”
The two stared at each other for a moment. Claire smiled, before rolling onto her stomach and inching closer to Alice. Alice instinctually flinched in response to her skin. “Come on, Alice,” Claire leaned her head onto Alice’s shoulder, pressing her breasts against her back. She breathed deeply for a moment, soaking in the sound of the rain’s heavy thump. “If this truly is the last time I’m going to see you, you have to let me do this. Close your eyes.”
First Alice sighed theatrically, then managed to settle herself down enough to close her eyes. She was right, after all. It was more realistic to treat this moment as the last, rather than hold out onto a pointless future.
Claire started moving her finger down behind Alice’s knee, and slowly moved a single finger upward over her bare bum, side, and spine. Alice could feel herself resisting a shiver, as well as cringe. The sensation was pleasurable but also felt like a hot iron was running over her skin. She connected with every skin cell, every associated neuron firing, every associated memory that the touch conjured rising like a cactus in a desert. She moaned through her nose as Claire pressed her lips against her ear. Her whisper tickled, and calmed her senses. “It could have been like this all the time—every day, every night. You could have had this. I could have had you.”
Alice could hear the tightness in Claire’s throat. Alice sat up suddenly on the bed, and propped herself up on her knees. She took Claire’s face in her cupped hands, and guided her upward. Soon, they were both kneeling on her bed, watching each other.
“I couldn’t make you happy, Claire. Not for a lifetime. But for the moments we had, I was able to grasp a sliver of it. That’s all I’m meant for.”
Claire grabbed both of Alice’s hands off of her face and placed them on her chest. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You are so much more than someone’s handgun, Alice.”
“Stop, Claire. We’ve been over this.”
“I really don’t give a shit. Matter, time, and space, that exists independently in our lives can coexist, Alice. You said it to me yourself. I don’t need to be bound to you. I only need to be beside you.”
Alice carefully lifted Claire’s hands off of her chest, and kissed them both quickly. “This really is a fruitless conversation.” Alice turned her body around the bed and began getting dressed. Her left eye was entirely closed now, and the muscles of her body tensed, in something resembling sadness.
“I would understand if Shane isn’t doing it for you lately. Maybe you just found your preference when it felt too late. There’s a lot of other women out there who would give anything to wake up next to you.”
Alice spoke with her back to Claire, who by then was also retrieving her clothing and putting it back on. She finally turned to find Claire fully clothed, shoving her left arm into her now-wrinkled white blazer. She ran her fingers through her hair, retaining the original slicked-back look from when they first encountered one another. “My goal was never to fall in love with a woman, Alice, trust me. But once it happened, there wasn’t really too much I could do about it.”
Alice ran a hand through her own hair. She didn’t pause anymore at the gap that sprang up over her scar. It was still wet from the rain, and from the sweat of their love-making.
Alice walked over to Claire’s side of the bed. She stood directly in front of her and took one of her cheeks in her hands. Claire’s eyes were cast downward, then rose up to meet Alice’s.
“I am sorry, Claire. I truly am. All I’ve ever wanted for you was for you to find someone better, someone who can embrace all of you, and cherish it.”
They stared into each other’s eyes, moisture rising in Claire’s elegant pool of glass. She sniffed, then smiled, grabbing onto the hand that held her face and kissing it with a warm breath. She sighed deeply into it, taking in the scent and the moment of departure. Claire then lifted Alice’s thumb, placing it in the middle of her forehead.
“I’m ready to go now.”
Alice caressed her forehead. “How far from the house?”
“At least a kilometer out. Maybe just outside that teashop nearby.”
Alice pressed harder onto her skull. Claire took her face, and forced their lips together. They kissed a desperate kiss, one that was long and passionate, clinging to its final breathless parting. “Try not to forget me, okay?”
Alice opened her left eye entirely, engulfing Claire’s bewitching stare. “It’s not possible.”
At the same time that Alice had opened her injured eye, she pressed her thumb hard against Claire’s skull. Light shot outward from her pores and sang a high-pitch hum as Alice moved her with her mind into a bus stop just outside a teashop of her home, some 100 kilometers away. She would snap into existence there, a little breathless and disoriented, but most importantly, she’d be safe.
This process hit Alice with an abrupt bout of fatigue that slammed into her chest and pushed her onto the floor. She, too, was a little breathless, but not confused. She leaned over onto the floor, clasping her stomach with one hand, and her eyes with the other. She’d supposed that the sex and the transporting must have been too much for her, as she did her best to avoid vomiting onto her wooden floors. Instead, she crawled toward the front door, which was nearby and seemed to be left ajar. It tapped lightly in the wind.
She pushed it open slightly with two fingers, with her eyes forced shut. She spat out what had risen from her stomach and imagined it rushing away with the rain.
If this is love, then fuck.
Chapter 4
A van with tinted windows and removed license plates, picked Alice up the next morning. Its appearance was nothing short of stereotyped, as was the thought that Alice had every time they arrived to transport her. Technically, if she wanted to, she could transport herself, to at least the area just outside the supposedly secure entrance of the facility. But the last time she visited, Alice took it upon herself to conduct her own security assessment. She stood outside the building, and within a few seconds, found herself in the most secluded area of the basement where the most classified of meetings took place. She informed the board of directors of this occurrence, and hence had a large electronically vibration around the circumference of the building. She could still transport herself if she really wanted to, but it could possibly mean losing a limb, or even her life.
Although death provided via electronic theta disruption sounded slightly appealing, she made an agreement to arrive the old-fashioned way.
A man named Perry always drove the van, and once had the audacity to ask Alice to blindfold herself. She informed with much bluster that the blindfold wouldn’t make a difference, and that it actually enhanced her sense of the environment around her. Perry’s frown looked painful on a man of his small stature, so he silently shrugged and threw the blindfold into the passenger’s seat. Since then, Perry and Alice share a very warm but silent relationship. Alice surmised that Perry was fed very little information about the ongoings at Crowden, so the notion of a person being able to sense the outline of their environment with their mind was as close to “Lex Luther” as he was going to get. Alice didn’t mind it, though. She used the three-hour car ride as a chance to focus on the sounds beyond her—the rumbling rude echoes of highway driveway, to slowly rock her into the state of a brief doze.
Alice’s dreams were different from most. This was mainly because she did not consider dreams and memories to exist as separate entities—she could read a person’s thoughts after all. And a person’s thoughts are generally not as linear as the life they attempt to organize. Images happen in i
nstants, which could act as pure fantasy or a blending of fantasy and the harvesting of a memory. Alice’s dreams often consisted of other people’s memories, as well as their thoughts. The only time she was able to easily differentiate a dream from reality was when she dreamt of herself. More often than not, within the dream, Alice is without the injury running over her skull, nor had her eye been damaged beyond recognition. There’s hair in the place of the skull, and she isn’t afraid to walk around with both eyes open. When she wakes up from these dreams, she had to learn to reject the heavy weight of sadness that would follow, to resist engulfing her. This was a sadness that she, too, did not understand, but wasn’t willing to take the time to look into it.
On the trip to Crowden, Alice did indeed dream, but categorized it as wishful thinking jammed together with a memory from her childhood: She was sitting on a tractor with her legs flailing outward, her Father screaming her name out in the distance. In her dream, she remembered turning around to catch his sight but there was an abrupt desire to place her hand over her left eye, and push.
Alice was jostled awake by the sound of the intercom. A familiar voice greeted her wakeful state. “Good morning Alice. What is this week’s password?”
The password to enter the thick electric gateway actually changed daily, but those on the Crowden board thought it clever to catch an attempted perpetrator if the word they caught was a week old. Even if they’d caught the word the day before, and had listened in on the intercom exchange, they’d have believed that the term would get them through a five-day work week.
Passwords were sent to every employee via the disintegrating channel—a section of code delivered through a tiny chip installed into each employee’s brain stem. A password would be triggered every time an employee was 2 minutes away from the facility. After reciting it, it would then instantly disintegrate upon safe passageway through the gates.
But if one were as skilled a psychic as Alice, the word or term could easily be stopped out of the loudest of the humanoid mind. Like, at that moment, the term had been sent to Perry’s chip. He was thinking about it very loudly, and also felt nostalgic with the associated memories with it.
Alice leaned forward over Perry’s head to speak into the intercom. “That’ll be ‘lost paradise’, with a side of fries to go, please.”
There was a pause from the intercom. Then a loud clang that lifted one of the grey doors off the ground sliding upward into a small slot was overheard.
“Very funny, Alice. Meet me in the lobby, post-haste.”
Alice was dropped off and led into the building by two armed guards. The building was high and white, windowless beyond the top towering point that rimmed the circumference of the structure. Crowden could have easily resembled a castle, minus the brickwork and dungeons and moats. There were no corners nor edges, nor a flat roof for enemies to land upon. The roof tipped into a triangular form at the center, and was made of the same electric humming material as the surrounding entryway. The entryway led you to a series of elevators, shooting you quickly to the top where reception could direct your whereabouts. At Crowden, everyone started at the top floor and made their way down. The further down they went, the more classified the secrets, the more sensitive the information attained. Alice met with Craig Archer at the top of the entryway. He was the lead director and employee with the lowest dug office in the institution.
Craig’s hair was thinning, so he compromised with a military-style buzzcut. His penetrating blue eyes matched the sky blue intensity of his knitted tie and coordinated three-piece striped suit. Alice had made more than enough jokes about his closet resembling that of a snotty superman than their ten-year relationship could withstand.
Elegant, stylish, buzzing Craig. He looked down immediately at his watch as Alice stepped out of the elevator.
“You’re late.”
“Time is relative isn’t it, Mr. Archer? And hello to you, too.”
“I left your welcome basket in your quarters. Come on, then.” He motioned with his chin for the armed guards to leave and started walking down the curved hallway toward another elevator.
“We’ve been in talks for weeks with this assignment, so I’ll have to catch you up fast.”
Alice speed-walked beside him with her hands in her pockets. “What else is new Craig, honestly?”
Craig watched his feet as he zipped down the highway. “We’ve been able to get into contact a handful of times, but this one’s tricky. Tricky and possibly previously trained.”
Alice watched as the offices of the barely-employed glided past her like a carousel ride. Alice had once overheard that those employed on Crowden’s first floor (the floors descended in number rather than ascended) were sworn to secrecy for one year, and were unable to contact the outside world for the same duration. They lived at Crowden at the securely locked and monitored the second floor.
Craig once compared the isolated dedication to that of a NASA astronaut.
Even to a loner like Alice, who preferred to be around fewer possibilities of human interaction, the description sounded challenging.
“Have you felt anything different, Alice?” They’d arrived at another elevator, a large red cube that was also sanctioned off from the general public’s employed population. This elevator required Craig’s fingerprint, along with the answer to the question that enquired about his most recent literary conquering. Today’s was “War and Peace”.
After Craig had uttered the answer into the monitor, the two stepped inside. “Maybe something’s slightly off. But that happens with me every now and then, anyway. I haven’t been anywhere quiet enough to tap into anything notable.”
Craig had pressed the button for the lowest floor—25. This was how Alice knew that something serious was going on. They were headed for the QR immediately—the Quiet Room—with little to no briefing. Even though Craig always appeared to be heading somewhere urgently, there was something more dire about his presence this time that Alice was a fan about.
His finger lingered on the button as they descended into the earth. He looked sideways and down at her, with a concerned furrowed brow. Alice smiled in response. “What is it?”
Finally, Craig smiled back. “Emmett thinks it’s a woman.”
The elevator stopped a few seconds later and parted to reveal an oak-finished floor and ceiling. Craig walked forward while his dress shoes serenaded the surrounding.
“And you thought I would be satisfied to hear that?”
Alice followed Craig past a series of framed photos that dictated the beginning of Crowden, their successes, as well as their downfalls. For the average viewer, they looked like randomly-placed newspaper clippings. For the employees of Crowden, a silent history sat between them.
“No, I thought you’d be happy to have a different challenge. Emmett thought you’d like to hear that.”
Alice scoffed. “Was it Emmett who tried tapping it? Or Tobias?”
“Tobias made the guess that it might be a woman this time. But the last word and consensus are entirely up to you.”
They stopped at another door— it was black without a feature to identify it as one. Craig pressed his finger over the scanner, and recited his most recently least favored line of poetry: “And to the left, three yards beyond, you see a little muddy pond.” The door slid open with dramatic righteousness.
“Wordsworth?”
Craig nodded and cringed. “We all have off days. It keeps me humble.”
A long black table greeted Alice and Craig with only four other occupants. They all sat huddled on one side of it, waiting with weary and slightly irritated looks.
Emmett was the oldest psy, and had been working for Crowden since it came into existence some 20 years ago. He grew up suppressing most of his abilities and thrived off constant invisible competition with Alice. Despite existing as the oldest psy assigned at Crowden, Emmett still possessed the pervasive inability to harness his powers. He helped Craig invent the Quiet Room for Alice years ago, and has
been trying to use it as a therapeutic tool to eventually one-up her ever since.
Tobias was a young lost soul, closer to the loner personality type like Alice. He wanted to do his work and get it over with. Emmett and Craig had found him in a juvenile detention center, serving time for drug use and assault with a weapon. They had caught wind of his abilities when he tried to escape by transporting himself through a chain-link fence during his free time one afternoon. He’d mostly succeeded, but lost two fingers in the process. He was mainly part of information extraction because he possessed the trustworthy trait of lacking an ego, as well as being surrounded by shame for what he had done to others in the past.
Ella was a woman in her early 30s, with who Alice felt she related the most. She was a musician as a child, with the ability to play multiple instruments such as the violin, piano, mandolin, and the viola before her 10th birthday. She was feeling numbness in her hands and feet when she was 19, and was soon diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She was unable to follow her dreams of being a professional musician, with weakness in her hands increasing rapidly, but found a calling that would divert her grief. She had thought that perhaps, as a child, she could hear voices at night. She rejected these occurrences as childlike flights of fancy until she was 20 and coping with the inability to use her fingers. It was the voice of her grandmother, informing her that music thrived inside the mind and could not be limited by the body. It did not take long for Ella to realize that the voices she was hearing as she fell asleep at night were the voices of the dead. She’d learned to isolate her ability, and was discovered by Crowden barely a year later.