by Linda Hawley
His eyebrows went up at that. “What do you remember?”
“I was my soul, my energy, and I was separate from my physical body. That means that our bodies are not really us. Without the constraints of my physical body, I was able to float, as my spirit, watching and observing others. I heard what others thought. As my body was in the hospital bed, I floated around my room, listening to the people who were there, or I’d go into the halls and watch and listen to people as they passed by.”
“Oh man. That’s incredible. What did you say when you woke up from the coma?”
“Well, it was very difficult to explain. I was only twelve years old. Basically, no one believed me. My mother thought I was brain damaged. So I kept my secret. From that moment on, I knew that I didn’t have to be constrained by my body.”
“That must have been difficult, having no one believe you.”
“It was.”
“Was anything different when you recovered?”
“My dreaming became even more vivid. I mean, since I was a little girl I’ve had remarkable dreams, but after the accident, I noticed that bits of my dreams would sometimes come true.”
Paul was nodding, and I could see that he was processing everything I was telling him.
“Perhaps because I’ve been dealing with the paranormal for most of my life, I am able to manage that doorway between the unconscious and conscious mind. Maybe that’s why I’m alive.”
“Maybe.” He seemed to agree.
“My friends that I worked with all those years…maybe their minds couldn’t handle that open doorway…”
“So you’re the only person alive who can handle this kind of swinging doorway between the conscious and subconscious?”
“Well, from the original program, yes.”
“So if you’re the best at the technique, why has the government allowed you to walk free?”
“What could they gain by taking me?”
He paused, looking into my eyes. “A weapon,” he replied solemnly.
Chapter 24
BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON
The Year 2015
Our conversation dwindled to a stop soon after that. Paul could tell I was tired, so he kissed me on the forehead and left. I was tired of thinking about the CIA, remote viewing, and anything else about having been a remote spy. I just wanted to go to bed.
As I lay there, I took a deep breath and thought about what Paul had said about RFID.
Radio frequency technology had been around since Marlin Perkins hosted Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on television. That was in the days of rabbit-ear antennas that you had to position correctly in order to see the image on your TV, and you had to get up off the sofa to change the channel. For twenty-seven years, Perkins radio tagged animals. That’s how most older Americans remembered the first use of radio frequency technology. But it was used before then by the allies in World War II, as a means of identifying whether the planes coming in were friend or foe.
The newest generation of RFID tags was called the Mu2 Chip. It was far smaller than the size of a freckle on a person’s face and more than one hundred times thinner than a single piece of paper. The Japanese corporation Hitachi developed it. The tiny mini-dot stored data that could identify and track, it had no need for battery power, and it could operate in both moisture and heat. With the Mu2 chip, RFID was no longer simply a device to relay information. Now it stored information in a database where that data could be quickly and easily retrieved by computers.
RFID was a global initiative and was always kept quiet. India’s secretive RFID initiative, called Aadhaar, was exposed by an article in the Wall Street Journal five years ago. India not only had an initiative to tag all its citizens with the Mu chip, but they also added an iris and fingerprint biometric scan to their data collection strategy and then assigned a unique twelve-digit number to every one of their 1.2 billion souls. Rice farmers and rural shop owners who had never even seen a computer or biometric scanner were awakened by officials the night before they were to report to their mobile scan center. It took the government five years and billions of dollars, but India did indeed achieve its goal. All Indian citizens could now be tracked with a Mu chip embedded in their passports, driver's licenses, ration cards, and health-insurance cards. The Indian government employed fear to convince their parliament to approve the tagging of citizens. It is that same rhetoric of fear that was used to convince governments in countries all around the world to use RFID on their citizens, including America.
In the early part of the new century, the government touted RFID’s use for animal disease control, in case of mad cow disease, hoof-and-mouth disease, swine flu, avian flu, and other outbreaks. The government used the fear of pandemics to make it mandatory that all animals were chipped, including all pets. That was the first step in desensitizing the population to acceptance of RFID. Added to that was the lobbying efforts of the RFID industry—which is worth thirty billion dollars today. Those lobbyists kicked up their persuasiveness after the 9-11 attacks in 2001, using fear to convince the government that they could prevent terrorism in America by tracking everyone in the country. Out of the nineteen terrorists of 9-11, nine of them had obtained Virginia driver’s licenses. After 9-11, Virginia was the first state to use terrorism fear to mandate RFID chips in its driver’s licenses. After Virginia, many states followed, and then the federal government mandated that all states adopt tracking. In 2006, the United States started chipping its citizens through passports, recording the date, time, and place of entries and exits from the USA. After 2014, no one could participate in American society without an RFID. Driving a car, opening a bank account, getting a loan, buying real estate or a new car, or traveling outside the country all required RFID.
GOG was vehemently against using RFID on citizens. From the organization’s perspective, civil liberties were forfeited when RFID was employed. Our individuality was lost because governments using RFID expected their citizens to live inside the box; outside-the-box citizens were flagged as noncompliant. With the power granted to the government through the technology, citizens had no second chances. With RFID, it was easy for the government to spy on its citizens domestically, because everyone’s movements were charted in databases. The newest chips could be read from a few hundred feet away or by satellites, making the peeking threat easier. Peeking could be done by governments, organizations, or individuals—like stalkers who wanted to follow their prey. The GOG underground organization saw RFIDs as a means to punish citizens who didn’t follow a conformist way of thinking.
In 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of RFIDs in humans, and human trials of implanted chips had begun. First the trials were voluntary. Subjects were implanted with their medical record information to supposedly speed up care in hospitals. Again the government used fear to entice citizens to voluntarily participate. Then in 2014, all violent or deviant convicted criminals were required to be implanted with an RFID upon their parole from prison, for a period of time determined by each parole board. Politicians raved about this mandate, saying it was the end to repeat offenders, especially in crimes against children. With this positive spin, the idea of chipping humans seemed viable for community safety.
Once a person was chipped, there was little escape, which was why GOG fought against it so vehemently. There were ways to disable an RFID, such as the sharp tap from a hammer or by cooking it in your microwave. But as soon as the technology was disabled, it would go offline in the government’s database, and the person it belonged to was flagged for noncompliance. So far there was no viable way to disable the chip without getting caught.
What would Marlin Perkins think of tagging humans? I wondered. Maybe it’s best that he’s not around to see the results.
Chapter 25
BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON
The Year 2015
It was nearing my birthday, and I was dreading going to the DMV to renew my driver’s license. It wasn’t just the jail-like photo they
would take, but the grief I felt over the loss of my privacy, knowing that I was surrendering myself to an RFID tracking chip. Not to mention the fact that dealing with DMV employees was like walking into a hive of African bees—they were just waiting for a reason to sting you.
I parked and then went into the building, took my wait-till-hell-freezes-over number, and took a seat in the third row from the back, on the end. I wanted to sit in the back row, or I would have settled for the one in front of it, but every seat was taken in the back two rows. The first eight rows were empty, with the exception of one pimply-faced high school eager beaver, who had no idea what was in store for him when he took the driving test.
Thirty-five minutes later, I heard number forty-nine called. I was up. I rose and shot for the lighted arrow, maneuvering into my lane.
“Yes?” the woman behind the counter said flatly, not making eye contact.
Would it kill her to act like a human being?
“I need my driver’s license renewed,” I said, impersonating her monotonous voice.
“Got the form?” she asked, still not looking up.
I passed my paper across the wide counter.
“Is this address correct?”
“Yes.”
She punched some things into the computer.
“The computer says it’s wrong.”
“Huh?” I responded, dumbfounded.
“The computer says this address is wrong,” she repeated, slower this time, as though I were dense.
“Well it’s the only one I have, regardless of whether the computer likes it or not,” I responded curtly.
“If it’s not a valid address, you can’t use it.”
“It is a valid address.”
“Todd,” the woman shouted, apparently to a higher-up. “Can you come here?”
Great.
Todd approached, not looking at me, and asked the woman, “What’s wrong?”
“Her address isn’t valid.”
“Yes it is,” I countered, standing firmly.
Both Todd and the woman ignored me.
“The form says ‘Lane,’ and you typed in ‘Street,’” Todd said.
I could have sworn I heard him mutter “you idiot” under his breath.
Todd walked away, scorning. The woman’s head ducked slightly, her cheeks blooming in pink.
“Sixty-eight dollars,” she demanded, averting her eyes.
I slid a hundred-dollar bill over the counter.
“Don’t you have something smaller?” she asked with disgust, not touching the bill but staring at it.
“Nope,” I said curtly, though I knew I did.
She took the edge of the bill and disdainfully put it in the bottom of her cash drawer and then gave me thirty-two dollars back by simply setting it on the counter. I took the money and put it in my wallet.
“Wait over there until your name is called for your photo,” she said, pointing.
I waited again. No shocker there.
In fifteen minutes, my name was called to have my photo taken.
I really wanted to take a pair of those google-eyed glasses and put them on for the photo, surprising the amateur photographer, but I guessed she probably wouldn’t think it was funny. I decided to go the depressed, straight-face route.
After my picture was taken, I waited again. My name was finally called, my prison photo was released, and I had my new driver’s license in hand, tracking me wherever I went.
When I got into my BYD, I sat in the driver’s seat and looked at the license. At a glance, it seemed perfectly harmless. But in this one piece of plastic, my civil liberties were violated, and it was mandatory in order to participate in American society. I could not drive out of the parking lot in the car that I owned free and clear without this card. As I sat there, I thought about the nameless Canadian whom I had challenged before he became a member of GOG. He’d said, “…if I attend a gun show, all a government employee has to do is hold an RFID reader nearby, and he can ID me, because my driver’s license is in my wallet…this is an invasion of my privacy…” He was right. I had done nothing but serve my country faithfully, and I was being tracked just because I was an American.
I thought about what I knew about disabling RFIDs. I knew people who had disabled the tag through various methods, but the complication was that the government would know about it immediately by the driver’s license number going offline. The best option was to clone your RFID chip—but the risk of being found out was high. The government had a dedicated team of developers constantly working on refining their cloning-detection software, and if you were found out, it was an automatic felony with prison time. None of these options seemed very appealing to me.
I felt the Herkimer diamond around my neck, removed it, and looked at it in the sunlight coming through the car window. The prisms made me think of how quartz could create an electric field, making it act like a circuit. Paul said that voltage was produced across the crystal's face, making it vibrate at a certain frequency, the crystal maintaining that constant frequency. If regular quartz crystals could be a circuit, creating a force field, and could create a frequency, could a phantom Herkimer do even more? I looked at the crystal in my hand and noticed how it was so clear, with one perfect crystal formed inside the outer one.
Can this super-charged crystal be used to disrupt RFID? I wondered, looking at the phantom Herkimer in one hand and my new driver’s license in the other.
I looked at the DMV building out the car window.
All that personal information was stored in a database somewhere. I wondered if the database itself could be disrupted and corrupted using a force field created by my Herkimer. But that would be destruction of government property, I thought. I could be thrown in jail for that.
The Canadian RFID program was run the same way as ours, with a database holding personal information. I wondered if I could use remote viewing, bringing my Herkimer with me, to disrupt the Canadian RFID database and its backup. It would be my first test—if I could do it.
I pulled the safe phone out of my purse, assembled it, and placed my call to the Canadian contact number I had memorized.
“B40 for coordinates, soon,” I said, leaving the message.
I set my watch timer for the four-minute window I had.
One minute later, my phone rang.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Code?”
“Salmon.”
“Victoria,” she confirmed.
“I need map coordinates for the B.C. driver’s license data center and the backup location.”
“I’ll call you back.”
I pulled out the small clipboard that I started carrying in my purse, along with a pencil, to record the longitude and latitude of the data centers. I’m sure they knew where the Canadian government stored its primary database that held citizens’ RFID data, but they’d have to pull up the actual coordinates, and the same for the backup data center.
My phone rang a minute later.
“Yes?”
“Code?”
“Salmon.”
“Victoria.”
She gave me the coordinates.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“No.”
“Stay safe.”
Chapter 26
BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON
The Year 2015
I drove to Marine Park at the edge of Fairhaven. Marine Park was located right on Bellingham’s bay, and I liked to sit in my car and watch the water. The sea always relaxed me, and I thought it was a peaceful and secluded place to remote view.
Pushing back my seat, I put the clipboard and pencil in my lap and felt the Herkimer that was suspended from my neck. I looked at the coordinates on the paper in front of me, studying the information until I had it memorized. I took a deep breath and began to visualize what I was going to do.
Ann, it’s just like when you try to remember where you might have left your car keys. It’s that easy, I coached myself.
I could see a four-lane highway dead end into a mountainside cave. Catty-corner was an enormous paved parking lot; it was at least two acres in size. The parking lot was a staging area for building materials. Obviously something was being built inside the cave. There was also a helipad painted on the lot off to one side. At the cave’s entrance, there was a huge arched tunnel with massive stone and steel doors. The doors were closed.
Inside was a self-contained government facility, equipped with its own geothermal power generator. There were bunking rooms, food storage, and an indoor greenhouse to grow food. Clearly the facility was intended to remain running 24/7 and was protected from outside harm.
Inside the gigantic cave, there were two digital-media rooms, where the RFID storage-array networks were housed. One storage array was for live data, and the other was a mirror of the original database. The second was an emergency machine, used to restore the original data if something corrupted it. The network arrays were nearly perfect; they were isolated from the main database, and information would flow at the speed of light from the data center to this media room.
I began to look inside the RFID array to find a root directory. After finding it, I saw the subdirectory named privacy.
The privacy folder listed a multitude of indexes and folders that stored all the RFID and personal tracking data the government had collected—it was all there. I saw the privacy folder, and then I visualized each record as it was stored on the underlying disk drives, as digital zeros and ones. I had captured the actual storage ability in my mind. Each zero and one represented information stored on the physical location of a magnetic drive that could be turned off, which was represented by a zero, or turned on, which was represented by a one.
