by Jack L Knapp
I knew her shock as the same thing happened to her. I didn’t read her thoughts, I understood them. I knew them more intimately than anything I had imagined was possible; I thought her thoughts, she thought mine.
It can't be explained; it's something that must be experienced.
I was trying to hold onto my concentration and not let go of my body. If that happened, would I, that core of my mind that I call 'me', die? Would the two of us be trapped in her body, or both of our personalities enter my body? Could we both die because each separate consciousness was no longer anchored to a body? I felt her panic as she knew my thoughts; my fear was her fear, and my sense that danger surrounded us was her danger too.
I don’t know how long the melding lasted; it could have been a minute, it could have lasted a second, it might have been an hour. When I finally began to regain my own senses, slowly separating from what I’d been when I was T/Shezzie, I was stiff and sweat-soaked.
I would be very careful before I allowed this to happen again!
During the time that the melding lasted, I knew her thoughts. They were my thoughts just as mine became hers. I was Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt, I was Shezzie, yet I was also T as I replayed her thoughts, the ones that had also been mine during the time we were joined, her sense of T; the feeling was now fixed indelibly in my mind.
The best possible sexual experience, the joining of two people that takes place during the act, might be compared to strolling up a hill.
We had just climbed Mount Everest.
#
LTC Schmidt/Shezzie:
I felt the link form. There were fragments of words and a flavor of emotion, but then more suddenly flooded through. I was Schmidt, I was Shezzie, but I was also T, and I could tell not only his thoughts and emotions but also the thought processes he was using. I wondered for a brief moment if he could sense the same about me? Then I knew he could, almost as soon as the thought formed.
I felt my own mind attempting to mesh with his, then the two joined and a shared consciousness took over. It was not intentional on my/our part; instead, it was more like something took over that was as automatic as breathing.
Even during the most successful empathetic connections I had established, there had been nothing approaching this.
I shared a fleeting thought about time, but it was soon washed away by the flood of impressions and thoughts that overwhelmed my own thoughts, and then incorporated my thinking and personality with his. The only word I/we knew that could even come close to describing what was happening to us was ‘gestalt’. It was an incomplete concept; I/we had no words for what was happening, but I suddenly felt a kind of strange feeling of aggression overlay my own emotions. It was not an emotion I was accustomed to feeling. The link with Surfer had been strong, but it was nothing compared with what was happening to me now. I lost my sense of being a woman. I felt, for the first time ever, what it was to be a man.
How long did the process take? There was no sense of time passing while the meld lasted, but finally I was Shezzie again and my identity as T began to fade. I could sense more of my own personality, less of his, and the connection diminished; finally it was only a faint residue of what we’d had.
I had a splitting headache. I had felt T’s headache too.
I looked at Chief Tagliaferro, T, across the room. He had his eyes closed and there were deep wrinkles in his forehead. I could still feel his pain as well as my own; my Talent for empathy gave me that. Well, if he was feeling what I was feeling, he had reasons for that look.
T:
I/she croaked, “Maybe we could take a break for a while. There’s a bunk if you need one. None of the nurses are using it now. If you don’t want to go back to your quarters, I mean. I….”
My/her mind was fuzzy. It was difficult to formulate and hold a simple thought long enough to form a sentence.
I could hear Shezzie/T mutter something. I/she caught “…quarters…” and I/he got up and let myself out.
#
Link finally broken, Shezzie nervously picked three APC’s from a jar in the cabinet. A bottle of cold water washed them down and she grabbed a banana from a bowl that sat on the small fridge in the corner. She didn’t want it, but she needed the APC’s to take the edge off the headache, and the banana would help offset the acidity of the tablets.
She sat there, just looking at the walls, for a long time.
There were noises in the corridor, nurses returning from wherever they’d been. The sounds brought her back to full awareness. The headache was finally gone, but now it was replaced by a feel of strangeness. Something about herself was different.
Shezzie had no idea what the feeling was or what she should be doing. Was this what drugs felt like to the user? She lacked words to think about how she felt, and that in itself was strange. After all the years of knowing herself and feeling comfortable with her own feelings and thoughts, everything was now different.
She showered and changed before leaving for the dining facility. Strangeness or not, hunger was still ordinary enough.
She was working on a second cup of coffee before she realized that she could sense the people around her better than ever before. Was that newly-strengthened ability what was causing the feeling of strange? It was interesting, for a time, to just look around at someone and, without any real effort, be aware of his or her mood. It wasn’t like listening to them speak, it was instead a highly-advanced sense that went deeper than words, something like anyone might feel when they were in the presence of deep anger or sadness. Now she was getting much more information and the emotions didn’t have to be particularly strong. Words convey thoughts and feelings; she was bypassing the words and picking up not only their feelings but even some of their thoughts, directly, in the same way she knew her own thoughts when they formed.
She wondered what else might have changed as she headed back to the office. She tried to link with T while walking, and the connection was immediate and clear.
She started picking him up even before the link had fully formed.
T:
I was silent for a moment while I thought about what she’d commed. Had she picked up my Talents while we were joined? Could she now perform PK, even have those mysterious hunches I had, and could she also form the bubble at will as I could? Had I gained something from the melding too, perhaps better control of my TP?
Another thought intruded and wouldn’t go away; are there more undiscovered Talents out there? If there was one, Shezzie, there were almost certainly others. And how much Talent did the hidden ones have? What might they be able to do? How strong could they be, considering that they had remained undiscovered? Would they try to contact the rest of us, or would those who'd developed their Talents independently stay below the radar?
For that matter, if the strange melding of personalities and thoughts had given her Talent a boost, could that happen to others? Was it possible that I could awaken Talent in people who'd never shown signs of it before, or could it only happen between people who already had strong abilities? Did both needed to be communicators, TP's?
I didn’t know. It would be something I would want to discuss with Surfer and Shezzie when there was time, when people weren't trying to kill Surfer and me, but I would no longer assume that people who hadn’t been to the School were without Talent.
Chapter Nine
I went to the dining facility for breakfast and it was just like the last time; I was so nervous that I had a difficult time even tasting the food. I managed to stuff in enough calories to dull my hunger before the tension reached unbearable levels, then grabbed a second cup of coffee while trying to watch everyone. My Talent wasn't enough; I kept my head turning, and if anyone was watching they surely noti
ced me. Maybe they thought I was just one more infantryman, recently come in from being out in the shit; those guys are as nervous as a bowl of jelly during an earthquake. Even being back inside the wire takes time to register, not that anyplace over here is 'safe', as civilians understand the term.
I finally took my foam cup of coffee and slipped out the door.
Hopefully, the other diners thought I’d spent too much time in the field. People get the twitches after a while, when everyone and everything is a danger. The locals you encounter might have an AK-47 or a suicide vest under their clothing and that includes the women and kids. Even the land, the trash, the roads hide improvised explosive devices. Although most of us are prepared by our training for the things the enemy can throw our way, the IED’s take us by surprise. And there's always the possibility of what's called 'friendly fire', or blue-on-blue engagements. Walking behind you is a squad of nervous soldiers with loaded M-4’s; if you think accidents don’t happen in a confused situation, you’ve never been in combat.
We’re always tense when we’re in the field, what the troops call being in the shit. There is no such thing as a safe rear area, not as long as you’re in Afghanistan.
The regular grunts had it much worse than the people who don't go outside the wire. Even tanks occasionally get blown up, crewmen get killed, and as for the infantry? They had body armor and some wore the ceramic plates in the vests, but trust me, whatever can blow up a tank can kill infantry. And if the troops weren’t out on patrol, or simply didn’t want to carry the extra weight, they might not be wearing the armor or have the ceramic plates in the vest’s pockets anyway.
If the local walking past you that day decided that you were his ticket to paradise, well…
We were becoming fairly skilled at detecting IED’s. Suicide bombers still got through and they still killed people, locals mostly, but sometimes our people too.
#
I had lived in this environment now for more than a year; I doubt that anyone spends an entire tour over here without being affected.
I didn’t realize it until after I left the dining facility, but I was picking up a lot more of the background murmur of thoughts. I understood more of what people were thinking too, and I just wasn’t used to this much detail; I hadn’t yet learned to winnow what was important from all the other things I was sensing, hearing, or feeling. I now understood what Surfer had tried to explain, back when we were still students.
I concluded that it was something to do with the link I’d had with Shezzie. I had picked up an overlay of her Talent that was just amazing; there was a painting on the wall and suddenly I could pick out colors I’d never seen before. I caught more of people's emotions too, even a few whole thoughts.
Somehow, I even knew that Shezzie was due to start menstruating in a week. She wasn’t thinking of it, but still, I knew. Weird; there was just no other word for it, although maybe amazing worked better as a descriptive term.
Nobody was paying me undue attention as I left--I knew!--so I went back to my CHU. I commed Shezzie, and just like that, I picked up her thoughts. Amazing really was the word that fit best.
By the time I got to her office, we’d caught up on the new developments. I told her about the new sensations I was feeling and my increasing paranoia regarding the probability of having a killing charge in the back of my neck; she told me she felt that she now had much more control of her own Talent.
I had also opened up to her about my decision to leave the country. It wasn’t precognition exactly, but I knew that staying in-country, where I couldn’t blend in except when I was on base and where being on base might get me killed, was no real choice. I had to leave, and I couldn’t let the Army know. For that matter, I couldn't let the agency that had sent me here know. The Army would notify people if I left the country, including the agency, and that would be essentially the same as my telling the others myself. It would surely speed up any attempt on my life.
I wondered briefly why they hadn’t already come for me, but then decided that I understood; they’d want to go after the ones who’d gone through the School, who could communicate well and be able to alert the other graduates, if they found out what was happening. My poor skills at communication were well known, so that likely put me at the bottom of the termination list. Also, I was out of the country and surrounded by soldiers, as well as being under military control. Less danger all around to them; they could let me wait until they finished off the others.
Possession of advanced telepath skills might have become a sentence of death. The assassinations were almost certainly coming from the same people who had recruited and trained us; no one else had full knowledge of what the psionic training School had produced. For some reason, when they realized they still had no real control over us after we’d completed the training other than terminating us, they’d ended the School and likely had decided to clean up their operation by eliminating what the School had produced.
Their objective had been to train communicators, telepaths, undetectable and unjammable; computers can eventually decode any electronic communication. It might take a long time, but a more advanced computer could shorten the time considerably, and computers were becoming more powerful every year. Plus there might be a breakthrough, something not expected. Quantum computing, perhaps, or even something not yet imagined. Secret electronic communications would almost certainly be less secret over time. But telepaths, TP’s, couldn’t be jammed and they couldn’t be intercepted; it required two minds melding into resonance, and that eliminated at one time all the problems that came with electronic communications. I wasn’t the type they’d been after, but so long as I kept developing, they’d kept me in training, and it was always possible that my TP skills had reached a plateau, and more practice might suddenly cause improvement.
Would the people from the School be willing to wait until I returned to the US before coming after me? They might, but I couldn’t count on it, and a wrong guess would get me killed.
The School's administration had no way of knowing that my communication skills had drastically improved overnight, or that Surfer had made me aware of the missing telepaths. But if I made one wrong move now, they’d suspect, and the hunt for me would be on.
There was a simple solution to that; don’t make a mistake.
Shezzie and I soon found out, by accident at first, that there had been even more changes than I realized. She had somehow picked up my abilities through the link. She didn’t have my skill at PK, at least not yet, and she was still shaky when using the ‘bubble’, but the ability was there. I didn’t know if she had any PreCog, since she hadn't mentioned the kind of hunches I get. She might have picked it up from my subconscious mind when we linked, or maybe she was now holding things back from me; heh, she might have caught some of my paranoia as well as my Talents!
Well, if she was keeping secrets, why not? Everyone is entitled to a few of those.
#
We tried that close, intense link again under more controlled conditions, but this time it had no effect so far as we could tell. Whatever changes the melding had caused, it appeared that any future improvements would depend on development of the Talents within the person, based on what had already occurred.
A breeze had sprung up and there was blowing sand in the air. I didn’t have any patrol duty scheduled and Shezzie had finished whatever paperwork she had to do; she wasn’t scheduled for surgery unless casualties began coming in, and so far as either of us knew, there were no engagements ongoing that involved troops assigned to the compound. We spent that entire afternoon in Shezzie’s office, talking about what had happened, exploring her new Talents. We had the time, so I coached her through a few exercises using her PK and let her bring up her bubble field a couple of times, then practice expanding and contracting it. I also had a few warnings for her.
“The field can protect you, but it’s a mixed blessing. It’s always at minimum size and greatest strength when you first form it; nothing
at all gets through it then, or at least nothing’s ever gotten through mine. Not even air; if you keep it small for too long, you’ll pass out. You might even damage your brain from lack of oxygen, unless the field fails as you become unconscious. I don’t think you can kill yourself by keeping the field in place, but I don’t know that for sure. I got light-headed a couple of times until I figured out what I was doing wrong.
“The trick is to expand the field as far as you can, out to the point where it begins to fade out. Air will then leak in or out across the bubble's barrier and you get gas exchange, oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. You can also get larger particles passing the barrier, small pieces of shrapnel and maybe even bullets coming through the boundary, but if anything does get through, it won’t travel in a straight line. It’s like light passing through water, it doesn’t keep the same course. Even weakened, the barrier is enough to deflect particles that cross it.
“Things that hit the bubble will bounce off if it’s strong enough, or be deflected if the field won’t keep them out. But if the force that hits your field is strong enough, you'll be the one that is bounced away. Newton's physics still work.”
She was silent while I went through this.
“So if you were in water, you might be able to keep water out, but you wouldn’t have air to breathe? You might kill yourself or drown when the field collapsed,” she concluded.
I thought about it; I could see no reason why she wasn’t correct.
“I think you’re right. Best not to test it, in my opinion.
“There’s something else. Your concentration right now isn’t great, and if you lose concentration when you’re in danger, the field might not protect you. I've been caught in an explosion when an IED blew up while I was in my bubble; the blast bounced me off a wall, but if I hadn't kept my bubble in place, the impact would have killed me or at least caused severe injuries.
