This time I drew a smiley on the page, although I knew that the director was only misleading us and that there would be no new training. Not with me dead, anyway. Did that mean that he knew or suspected that I would be talking to Liv and wanted to make me feel safe? The director was devious enough and thorough enough to think about that. There were a million things that I wanted to know and I prepared to dig deeper into Liv’s mind, to look for her memories of the meeting with the director, but right then the doctor stepped onto the porch.
“Turn it off,” he ordered. “You shouldn’t overdo it. It’s not good for you or for the equipment.”
It felt like someone had yanked me back physically from Liv’s room. I turned the pisspot off and sat straight up. I gazed at him with my most dangerous expression, and I can look nasty when I want to.
“Don’t you ever again interrupt my work in this way, do you understand? And speak softly, don’t yell! What were you thinking?”
The doctor was visibly taken aback for a moment, but only for a moment.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “It won’t happen again, but you mustn’t overdo it. From now on, I will limit off-mission usage. Now hand it to me.”
I gave the thing back without looking at him, and he turned away without further comments. I remained in that seat on the porch until I started to feel the cold, and then I went to my room and climbed into bed without undressing. Perhaps it was the separation from Liv, or the impending mission (or the fact that powerful people were plotting to get me killed, which I found hard to keep off my mind), or the atmosphere of the cottage, but for the first time in a long time, I felt miserable.
CHAPTER 10
The next day I woke up feeling despondent. Breakfast was yummy, though, and it lifted my spirit a tiny little bit. After breakfast, not having much to do until noon when we were supposed to start training, I decided to take a walk up the hill. A security agent was assigned to my outing. There were three of them with us, and two were called Tom and Jerry, figure that! Anyway, mine sounded eager to accompany me, until I disabused him of the idea that we would be going on a romantic side-by-side stroll.
“Tom—you are Tom, right?”
“Yes, Miss Tessa.”
“Not Jerry?” I said, with a wicked smile, to set the tone of our relationship at the outset.
“No, Miss Tessa, not Jerry.”
“I like to be alone, so please stay out of sight, okay?”
“But I need to be close enough to protect you,” he argued.
“I don’t expect the bees or the butterflies to attack me, but if they do, you can sprint up the hill and save me.”
The poor guy turned red in the face, nodded, and swallowed, and that was the end of discussion.
Getting to the top of the hill was an easy walk, and I sat on the grass, gazing at the breathtaking scenery around me. I don’t do much introspection, as a rule, but I found myself thinking about things I usually push away from my mind. The past, present, and future, for example. I have put my past behind me. I have made peace with bad things, and I realize the good ones I have in my life; but right then, on that Swiss hill, I was still angry that I had been robbed of a normal life. I missed everything that girls my age experience, at least if you believe what you see on TV. Boys, for instance. And when I say boys, I don’t mean sex. I had plenty of that at the training center and then at my permanent base, but with very little romance. Oh, I’d had my fair share of romance in high school, and a heartbreak to boot, but never got farther than second base with anyone. The spark was simply not there to make it worthwhile.
At basic training there was this boy, Gary, who was actually the first with whom I went all the way. I don’t think I actually loved him, but I did like him a lot, and I had just celebrated my fifteenth birthday, so I was worrying that I was on my way to becoming a spinster unless I did something about it. It happened during the first of our exploration weeks when we were taken camping and instructed in all kinds of survival techniques. Why you need survival techniques when your job is to be shut in a room with a pencil and paper, is beyond me, but our group consisted of young people destined for different jobs than I was, and maybe for them this training made more sense than it did for me.
We were given severely strict instructions forbidding boys and girls from intimate interaction, which, as it turned out, were given tongue-in-cheek, and we soon understood that the opposite was the intention. It helped us to realize that when we found plenty of condoms beside the coffee machine and saw that our instructors had become practically blind and deaf to our movements after dinner. There were times when the night activity in the camp was so hectic that we couldn’t help bumping into each other in the dark, on our way to some place we had no business being. And, of course, because engaging in all that was prohibited, we enjoyed it so much more. I think it was smart of them, because without a way to burn off our hormones we would have become restless and unhappy. Instead, people showed up to morning classes with a smile on their faces.
Gary flunked the test at the end of our outdoor instruction period, so one day he simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. It wasn’t difficult to replace him, however. By then, everybody understood the rules of the game, and so we picked partners without much need for courtship. It was fun, in a way, but also sort of empty, because the tension was lost, and sex was no longer something magic or special. In retrospective, I realized that we were driven to it on purpose. It was part of the need to condition us to become soulless executives who don’t let sentiment interfere with their work. The bastards!
It was then that I discovered that girls are different. You can find pleasure with a girl—a different kind of physical pleasure, for sure—and still get that flutter in your stomach that you no longer felt with boys. With a girl it was … how can I explain … less mechanical, longer lasting, and not so intense. But with Aline—that was her name—I could bring myself to feel again. She was the one I went to when I had the blues, when I needed someone to hold me and not speak. That does not mean that I stopped liking boys. I did and I do, a lot, but for altogether different reasons.
Now my present was a bit uncertain. When Aline had left, a few months before, I had thought I was through with girls, but Liv had taken me back in a second. Before I met her, I didn’t have anybody I cared about particularly. I did, and do have friends, good ones, with whom I can spend time and have fun, but that’s all they are: friends.
The one thing that weighed on me more than anything else was my family. My parents, my brother Jeff, two years my junior, and my only sister, Michelle, five years older than me, whom I saw every couple of months for weekends or holidays. They know nothing about my work. Everything I do is classified, so my story has always been that I participate in the study of the human brain. But the fact that I couldn’t share my life with them was the reason why I constantly drifted apart from them, to a point when I no longer actually looked forward to going home. We had become strangers, and back at the base I had people who counted more as family to me than my biological family did. It sucked, really, but that’s what it was.
And the future? I didn’t have any plans for the future; how could I? I had signed up for service in the branch of Intelligence that operated the now defunct Remote Viewers Program, and I still had two years to go before the expiration of my contract. But what skills did I have, which I could use outside this organization? Well, I still had some time before I needed to start thinking seriously about it. If I didn’t end up dead, that was.
“Miss Tessa!” came a shout from the bottom of the hill. It brought me back from my dreamy state, and I saw poor Tom waving to me from afar. “Time to go back!” he yelled.
I glanced at my watch. I had been lost in thought for almost two hours, and it was time to go back to reality. I am a realistic girl, as a rule, but that was one piece of reality that I wasn’t looking forward to going back to.
I actually didn’t need any mor
e training. The pisspot and I had become so effective together, that getting into anybody’s head was a matter of seconds to me. Still, I went along with all the stupid tests that Doctor Alexander had invented, which took almost two hours. As I took the pisspot off my head, however, I felt dizzy. For a moment my vision turned black, and I had to grab the chair from which I had just stood up, to keep from falling.
“What’s the matter?” came the worried question from Doctor Alexander.
“Nothing, nothing. Just a slight dizziness. I guess that I’m not used to the heights of the Swiss mountains. It’ll pass in a minute.” I was feeling better already.
“Nonsense. You go to your room now and lie down. I told you that overdoing training was a bad idea. We shouldn’t have done the last drill.”
“I’m better already …”
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t risk you being at less than peak form. Go lie down, and this is an order. Your dinner will be brought to your room.”
Much as I resented being ordered about by him, I rather liked the idea of keeping to myself and skipping dinner with the others. Doctor Alexander slurped his soup, and that was gross.
I went up to my room, took a shower, and by the time I was ready in my PJs, Tom (or Jerry—I still couldn’t tell them apart) arrived with a tray. Dinner consisted of a tasty barley soup, a schnitzel, and some kind of custard, all pretty good. I wolfed everything down, placed the tray on the floor outside my room, locked the door, and lay on the bed to think. I felt relaxed and a bit sleepy, but all of a sudden something made me sit up, my heart beating fast: a voice had just popped up in my head, saying She’s asleep, I guess. That voice had the familiar consistence of somebody else’s thought.
Instinctively, I touched my head to see if the pisspot was still there, but of course it wasn’t and hadn’t been there for more than an hour. So was I hallucinating? I was sure that the voice was Doctor Alexander’s—it is strange how voices can be recognized even when you don’t actually hear them. I lay down, breathing deep breaths to slow down my heartbeat, and in a few moments I was myself again—calm and analytical, as I have been trained to be. How that could have happened, was beyond me, but unless I was going crazy, I had actually read a mind without any external help.
I emptied my mind of those bothering thoughts and opened it in what I hoped was my best receptive mode. In a second I started to hear background noises—well, again, “hear” is not the right word, but you know what I mean. I concentrated on Doctor Alexander, and in a moment I was inside his head. He was in his room, conveniently seated before a window that reflected his image so I had no trouble seeing him through his own eyes. He was talking on the phone, which made it tricky to follow what he was thinking and what he was saying at the same time, but I got the knack of it after a few sentences, and the result was a synthesis of speech and thought. He was talking to the director, and what he was saying spooked me.
“I’m really worried,” he said.
“Why?” the voice of the director reached me through Alexander’s brain.
“Because this is happening all too soon. Based on the rat experiments, I wasn’t expecting this to happen for weeks, perhaps months. But her dizziness tonight might mean that the changes to her brain cells are happening too fast. Much faster than with the rats.”
“And?”
“And she may be damaged before our mission is through. You saw the rats. Outside of the basic vegetative functions, they were unable to do anything. She may turn into a vegetable much too soon. I don’t know; we have no experience with humans. There simply wasn’t enough time to experiment.”
“But you said that what happened to the rats was due to their particular brain structure and that it was unlikely to happen to humans. We also took precautions with Tessa, not to expose her to radiation for too long. We can’t afford placing her in risk.”
“Well, I was wrong. And I didn’t say that it would not happen, just that it wasn’t likely to happen.”
“That’s not how I remember it, but we’ll talk about it some other time. What do you suggest now?”
“I will stop practicing with her until the mission begins. Hopefully, this will give her some more time before her brain is irreversibly affected. After all, if she’s going to be terminated anyway, it doesn’t matter if she’s damaged, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize the mission.”
“I agree that we need precautions to keep her safe, but how are you going to explain it to her?”
“I will say that the equipment may be overloaded by training, and we need to keep it in good shape for the actual mission.”
“Good. Do that. We can’t jeopardize this operation. To be on the safe side, you are to make sure that she’s not exposed to radiation, even during the mission, to an extent that may cause her damage. Keep me posted.”
The director hung up and I was left with Doctor Alexander’s dark brain, and with a shiver running up and down my spine.
CHAPTER 11
I broke contact with Doctor Alexander. I’d had enough of him, and I needed to think. The situation was clear—being subjected to the equipment enhanced my telepathic abilities but meanwhile damaged my brain cells so I was in danger of winding up a vegetable. Or not. They didn’t really know. On the other hand, the pisspot had done something unexpected to me: apparently it had unleashed my natural telepathic talent. As I had understood from what I was told, reaching a telepathic stage was not a matter of volume as much as the correct tuning of the combined brain waves, and the pisspot had apparently tuned me just right. So I didn’t need the outside help anymore, although I still had to find out how powerful my natural telepathy was. On the other hand, I couldn’t let them know that I had evolved into a natural telepath, because that would only strengthen their resolve to terminate me. I was now much more dangerous than before, the way they looked at it, because I no longer depended on their equipment. I had let myself into a nice, tangled mess, and nothing in my training had prepared me for it.
My mind felt like a beehive, so many were the thoughts that raced through it. One thought in particular jumped at me: Liv! They want her to go into the slipper, which means that they plan to use her as a human guinea pig. I must warn her!
The hour was almost nine p.m., and Liv would be waiting for me to connect. I prayed that my power would be enough to reach her and I closed my eyes, visualizing her face with as much intensity as I could. The image of her room that formed in my mind through her eyes brought a broad smile to my face. It was working! I took possession of her hand and wrote a check mark on the yellow pad on her desk.
You are here! I was waiting for you! Let me tell you what I did today …
Much as I ached to hear from her, to feel that we were having a normal conversation in a world that had nothing else normal left for me, I had to stop her. I took possession of her hand again, and wrote on the paper, this time at length.
“Whatever you do, don’t go into the slipper. Make excuses. Get sick. Break a leg. Anything, but don’t go into it!!!!” I added four exclamation marks for emphasis, and let her body go. It took her a few seconds to read it.
But why? I don’t understand, she thought. I sensed her bewilderment, and I had to write again.
“I can’t explain now,” I wrote. “It’s important that you listen to me. You are in danger. Don’t train with the slipper or any other telepathic equipment. And destroy this paper. It’s important. Do it now. We both are in danger.”
I sensed the turmoil in Liv’s mind. Of course, I had sprung it on her without any preparation, but I had no choice. She was a good, practical girl, though; she got up, tore the sheet into small pieces and flushed it down the toilet.
I trust you, she thought, and I miss you. Now I have to go back, but I have a premonition that I will be too sick to train for a while.
She had placed herself before the mirror in the bathroom and was smiling as she thought that. It filled me with warmth to be able to see her, and I had to pass some of it on to her too.
I took possession of her hand and gently stroked her cheek, then I waved goodbye, and I let go of her.
That evening I spent a little more time hunting around for thoughts, to get a full measure of my new power. I giggled a bit when I found Tom’s mind and dug into it a little, seeing that he was thinking quite impure thoughts about me, the poor guy! But I was too tired to keep this going for long, and after a while I broke contact with the outside world, and in a minute I was sound asleep.
I got up in the morning feeling much better. I sat by my room window for a while, to weigh the situation and decided that I would be okay. I had the advantage of being a step ahead of everybody else, and I was sure that I would pull through. So what if the undersecretary wanted me dead? Who was he, anyway! I may have to make him jump out of a window or something, I thought, and smiled when I pictured it. The feeling of strength the image gave me was enough for me to regain confidence in the future.
I dressed and walked down the stairs toward a delicious smell of coffee and toast. Doctor Alexander was in the kitchen together with the third agent, the one I hadn’t actually met beyond nodding to him on arrival. Perhaps he was my designated executioner, who knew …
“Good morning! How are you feeling today?” asked Doctor Alexander.
“Great. I feel simply great. Is that coffee in that pot over there?”
“Yes,” said the agent who was apparently doubling as a waiter. “Take a seat, and I’ll fix you breakfast.”
“At what time do you want to start training,” I asked, scattering smiles all around to the doctor, to the guard, and to Tom and Jerry who meanwhile had joined us in the kitchen.
Tessa (Tessa Extra-Sensory Agent Book 1) Page 6
