by Jack L Knapp
The office space was a perk of her administrative duties, and also recognition of what she could do for the surgeons. They were unaware of exactly how she did what she did, but she inspired confidence in them. And surgeons, even good surgeons, need all the confidence they can get.
“I’ve made contact with Surfer several times, once by telephone, and the other way is getting easier all the time,” she said. “But I’ve never contacted anyone except Surfer that way. I can pick up something from others, emotions, but they can’t hear me. Surfer says you can.”
She hesitated.
She hesitated again, then vocalized, “I thought I was going crazy at first. It was really difficult. Then one day I picked up something during a surgery; I could hear the patient and he was…well, he was terrified, and I thought he was screaming. Then I noticed that the surgeon hadn’t realized the patient wasn’t under the anesthesia and had started to cut. He was opening up the abdominal cavity.
“I said I’d noticed something, and the surgeon stopped and conferred with the anesthesiologist. They waited while he took another look at the brain waves, an EEG, you know? So he increased the medications, the brain waves went back to what’s expected during surgery, and then the surgeon went on with his work. That was the first time, but it’s happened again since then. That was the first time I felt that I had objective evidence that I wasn’t really crazy!”
“My talents aren’t in communication, Colonel. I can do only a little with that Talent, but I have some other things I can do. I can manipulate objects at a distance. Psychokinesis is the term, some call it telekinesis. We refer to it as PK, it's a kind of shorthand. I have good strength and really good control at close range, not as good at a distance.
“It’s a tradeoff, I think. I have only limited communication abilities but good PK; I have other Talents too, even a little precognition. I get feelings that I should or shouldn’t do something. Think of them as hunches. Old timers where I grew up used that term; they’d say ‘I’ve got a hunch...’, and my version is a little bit better. I get hunches, just not enough to be called precognition.
“I also have a kind of protective field, a manifestation of the PK I think. I’ve thought I might be able to maintain two fields, two layers using the PK; maybe I'm pulling one tight against the other, compressing the air between them, or maybe the layers are ionized. Whatever it is that I’m doing, nothing solid gets through the field as long as it's in place and close to my body.
“Anyway, it’s only an idea. I’ve noticed a flash when the field forms, and that might come from heating. Maybe the ions happen because the air is heated. I don’t even know if the bubble would be available in vacuum or under water, or if it would work there if I tried it. I’m only guessing. And I've never heard of anyone who has anything like what I have, so I couldn’t compare my Talents with those of someone else. There may be others who have undiscovered natural Talents, just like you have TP even though you didn’t go through the School. If there are people who can form and manipulate the bubble, I don't know who they are. I also don’t want to mess around with the field to see if I can figure out more about how it works; it’s good enough and I need it as long as I’m over here.
“I have reasonably good control over the bubble. I cause it to form when I want and I can change the size a little bit, expand it or shrink it, even though there are tradeoffs when I do that. Strength and volume are not independent. What I mean is, that when I extend the field to make it larger, it gets weaker.
“I can’t walk very well when I'm in the bubble. There’s nothing for my feet to push against. I also can’t use my PK while I’m inside the field.
“Anyway, I call it the ‘bubble’ and it protects me, but it hasn’t helped me protect anyone else.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You seem to be unhappy with your gifts. I have nothing like what you have but, I’m satisfied with what I’ve been able to accomplish. I don’t know what I could have done if I had your abilities; I don’t think they are suited to medicine. I’m just very happy I can help people.”
“It’s the ethics of what I’ve been doing, Colonel. I started reading up on ethics when this job first began bothering me. I looked up every source of information I could find, everyone from Aristotle to the modern thinkers, John Rawls, Kant, Paul and Elder, people like that. I thought they might know more about what I was feeling. But they had no idea of the kind of stress you feel when people working with you get killed and you can’t do anything. Or when you use this magical Talent to kill people. You use your Talent to save lives, sure, I can see the ethics in what you do; you treat our soldiers and even the enemy. But I can’t find any overriding ethic to explain what I'm doing here, in someone else’s country, using my Talents to kill them. If there’s an ethic for being an armed invader, I haven’t found it. I use my abilities against them, because if I don't my own soldiers would die, and so would a lot of locals who aren't interested in jihad. But if we weren't here, I wouldn't need to do that. I've never managed to get my mind around it.
"Now I just try to protect my own men, and sometimes I can't. I take out patrols, because if I didn't, someone else would. I also go on solo patrols at night to interrupt the flow of ammunition coming in
"Some of the time I can do stuff, but other times I'm as helpless as anyone else. It hurts, down deep.
“Our ethics seem absolute, but they're not. And the enemy here…” he hesitated. “...some of these guys are just scum, using religion mixed with murder to gain power. They’ll do anything to keep control, to stay on top. The power is for themselves personally, or sometimes it's for their tribe or their religion.
“Some of them think it’s perfectly ethical to kill anyone who doesn’t believe the way they do; any other belief is wrong, and they’ve been taught that killing the unbeliever is right. The ethics are different, because they’re based on a different culture. There aren’t too many of those people, fortunately. I’ve killed some of the true believers, just like I’ve killed the other kind, and I didn’t have a problem doing that. Believer, nonbeliever, if they’re out killing people, I think it’s ethical to stop them. If they're bringing in weapons or explosives so they can kill even more people, I don't have a problem with that.
“It’s strange,” he mused, “the power guys were relatively easy to find. A lot of them hang out around the mosques. Some of it’s wrapped up in their religion, some of it’s not. Maybe studying their religion makes them think that they deserve to have power over others.”
There was a wry expression on his face. “It’s the everyday guy in the street who’s most likely to be a true believer. The insiders know about the huge gaps in their philosophy, and they don’t seem to care.
“So yeah, I’m not happy. I should be able to go out alone, but the Army won’t let me do that and I can't explain why I should do it that way. I have to take a squad along, at least I do if the Army knows about what I'm doing. There’s no way I can tell the Army why I’d rather be alone on patrol.
“At first the major insisted I take out a full platoon on patrol, but that was too cumbersome and we took more casualties; we almost never made contact with the enemy, either, just IED’s. Now the patrols I lead are squad-sized, and I still manage to get some of them killed.
“It’s the remote bombs that really bother me, the ones that trigger by some kind of automatic switch. I can feel it if there’s a finger waiting to push a button, some of the time at least. I feel strong emotion from the trigger-man when he’s about to push the switch. But if it’s on remote, maybe with som
e kind of a mechanical trigger, there’s nothing to feel. Maybe I’ll pick up a clue from the background or something, but that’s not fast enough to be a real help to anyone but myself.”
She was thoughtful and just listened through his explanation. “I would normally schedule you some time with a counselor; We’ve got a number of mental health professionals on staff. But there’s no way we could tell them the real reason you’re having problems.”
“What are they going to tell me that I haven’t thought of myself, Colonel? I spent a lot of time in front of a laptop, googling morality and philosophy and ethics and anything related that cropped up; I was trying to find some way to apply what I found to what I am and what I do. But nothing ever seemed to fit. Nothing helped.
"I have bad dreams almost every night and that gives me a real incentive to look for answers. I have nightmares about the things I’ve seen, and I think the confusion I feel may be why. If I was certain, maybe...but I'm not, and I get nightmares. I'm pretty sure I've got PTSD, but I can't talk to anyone about it.
"I don’t see a real face during the nightmares, except for that little girl, and sometimes I recognize the guys who were on patrol with me. I realize what I'm seeing in my dreams are my soldiers, the ones who died while under my command. I hear myself telling them that I only killed them by accident, maybe because I was careless, or maybe because I’ve got a Talent for killing. It’s hard, when that happens. I wake up wondering if that’s really why they’re dead. I know when I'm awake that I didn't kill them, the jihadists did, but that's not how it happens in my dreams.
“I just wish I could get a normal night’s sleep. Every time I go out, I know I have a chance of picking up more bad dreams. I wonder if it makes me hesitate, causes me to take too long to act. I don’t think it’s happened yet, but it might.”
Her Talent had expressed itself, without training, as increased empathy. Even suppressed by the control that T/Tagliaferro had learned from being around others during his time at the School, the raw emotions seethed and finally spilled over.
She’d never felt anything this strong. Swirling anger, sorrow, sadness, resentment at those who’d trained him and then used his Talents for trivial matters; in the end, he felt that he'd done nothing that ordinary trained infantrymen couldn’t have done. Indeed, he was doing the things they did all the time. And over the sea of emotion, she picked up an exhausted impression of sorrow and regret, for doing the things he’d had to do because of where he was.
She realized that the young CWO was close to the edge. He might well slip into madness, and she wondered what that might be like, a mad Talent able to employ psychokinesis without rational control.
Suddenly she had a thought; perhaps this was what her own developing Talent was about. Her contributions to surgery had been valuable, but only to the individual patient and to the doctors so that their morale was lifted by increased success.
Here was a chance to aid one whose need was greater, and who might be able to have a profound effect on more people than the doctors ever could.
For now, she determined to do all that she could to help him work his way through his mental torment.
Chapter Eight
I don’t remember ever opening up like that to anyone before. I couldn’t tell if it was some effect of Shezzie’s Talent or if she was just naturally easy to talk to, but I’d spilled my guts for fair; it was too early to tell if that would help or hurt me. I hoped she would have some kind of idea about dealing with my problem. Maybe she could talk a surgeon into removing the control in my neck; she was a nurse, so they might listen to her where they'd simply blow me off. Worse, they might turn me in, report to their own superiors that I'd asked them to operate. Just who they'd turn me in to was problematic, but I understood that letting anyone up the chain of command know that I knew about the bomb would increase my danger.
Shezzie had latched onto the description of my Talents and appeared to have glossed over the struggle I'd had, trying to develop an ethic for using them or at least come to terms with what I was expected to do.
“How do you manage to actually move an object at a distance? Do you have to grab it or something?” She was clearly intrigued. I suppose it had become such an everyday act in my mind that I no longer wondered about it or found it remarkable.
“I have to...well, it’s complicated. I ‘feel’ the object, using the PK. I need to sense all of it, top to bottom and side to side, and then I need some idea of the object's depth and rough shape. That need to visualize everything is what makes moving larger things difficult. It’s not the weight so much as it is forming a mental picture of all that bulk, sensing its shape and relationship to the ground. Even after I do that, precise control is much more difficult than simply lifting things.
"Moving a small or medium sized rock got pretty easy after the first few exercises. I simply grabbed whatever I was concentrating on and the energy to lift it came from the surroundings. Really, there’s nothing to it. I channeled the energy, focused it around the object, visualized it separating from what it was resting on so that the distance between the two increased, and it lifted.
“Flipping a penny when it was lying on the ground, that was a stone bitch. It was an excellent exercise, but I got chunks of dirt and weeds from around the penny when I tried turning it over. That took a couple of weeks effort. I did it, finally, after a lot of practice. It’s hard to explain. It’s not just the visualizing of the penny, it’s also excluding everything around it when I pick it up. And then, after I got it off the ground, I had to rotate it in the air, keeping it under constant control so that it landed with the other face up when I let it drop.
“There aren’t any words for what I'm doing, and humans think in words, so it’s not easy to think about things involving Talent. I can’t move anything at all if my personal field, the bubble, is in place. I think it takes all the resources that my PK ability can muster to hold the bubble around me.
“The field weakens when I make it larger. When I first form the bubble, it’s always in close and it’s pretty impenetrable to anything solid; I can’t claim that it’s absolutely impenetrable, but so far nothing has managed to get through. When I expand it to a larger size, though, things like air molecules pass through the barrier. I think that even those tiny objects are slowed down when they cross the bubble and they don’t travel in a straight line. It’s kind of like they were deflected at an angle, if you understand my meaning. The air getting through is a good thing, too; if I keep the bubble tight around me, I might suffocate if I hold it too long. I don't know if the bubble would fail when I passed out, and I'm not anxious to find out. I just use a practical approach, keep the bubble as tight as I have to, but just that, not try to keep it tight all the time.
“And I don’t try to make the field larger if there’s a high wind. The field acts like a big balloon, but with the center of it anchored around me. I’m not exactly centered, because gravity drags me toward the ground until the gap under my feet is thinner than the space over my head. Anyway, the wind blows the bubble in the same way it would blow a balloon and that carries me along. It was disconcerting the first time it happened, but then it became a game. It was the best way I found to teach myself concentration. If you can still concentrate while the bubble is drifting downwind and you’re rolling head-over-heels, that’s real control! Anyway, I call the practice game ‘tumbling’.
“My feet aren’t in contact with anything when I'm inside the bubble. I start to float so there’s nothing to push against. If I expand the field to the full limits...I reach that limit when it's just short of failing, popping like that balloon I mentioned...then I sag below the center, but I’m still likely to be a meter or so off the ground. Newton was right, there must be an equal and opposite reaction for movement to take place, and in the bubble I can’t get that reaction by pushing against the ground. The most I can do is overbalance and cause the bubble to rotate as I begin to tumble. I have a little bit of directional control through t
ilting my head and shifting my weight, but as you might suspect, it’s only a little.
“The first time I used the bubble during a windy day, I found myself upside down and lost my concentration. I landed on my shoulder, fell over, and finally ended up piled against a wall.”
“Would it be easier to explain if we linked through our Talent, T? You say your communication ability is weaker, but maybe my Talent can help.”
I nodded. I should have thought of that myself. After all, I’d been through the School.
“Let’s try it. I’ll try to establish resonance with you if you want.”
“No,” she said. “I think we both try, and just see how it goes. I’m not very accustomed to actually linking my thoughts with someone, and I had never tried it with anyone close by before you and it didn't feel comfortable even then. I mostly have just shared the emotions of others and picked up fragments of their thoughts. Fear and feelings of pain are very strong, and it’s easy for me to feel those. Just trying to sense someone’s mind, read their surface thoughts, is a lot harder. I think my first link to Surfer was his doing more than mine, even if the link appeared to be very strong after we got it established.”
I watched her expression slacken as she began concentrating. I let my own Talent roam and quickly sensed hers.
Then it happened. Before I even realized it, before I could do anything to change what we were doing, my mind…altered.
This was nothing like what I’d experienced with Surfer. I felt her thoughts at first, then began to lose my own sense of identity. I felt myself blur, the self-identity that's at my mental core linked and I became two people, T and Shezzie, not one or the other, yet never quite a single entity. It was as if the two personalities were layers, stacked against each other, then blending into almost-oneness.
