Beyond Regeneration

by Jenny Schwartz

  She slid out of the car, feeling wary. The house looked so ordinary, except that if one knew to look, lights and cameras were set into the eaves over windows and doors.

  Nicola treated it all with the obliviousness of custom. “This way.”

  Inside, the house continued its contemporary design with smooth functional lines, no-color walls and bare floorboards. The hall ran midway through the center of the house before it connected at right angles to another passage running the length of the house.

  “To the right,” Nicola directed. “Aaron and Ted are in the living room.”

  The living room was a gigantic room with a wall of windows looking out to the ocean. Here, after the comfortable dimness of the passage, the light dazzled.

  Charley blinked. Against the uninformative stylism of the contemporary look, the posing of three enormous stone jars reminiscent of Ali Baba stood out, and on the far wall a Persian carpet with a dramatic swirl of turquoise and sunset colors was clearly meant to command attention. Yet it failed. It was the three young people who dominated the room, as Nicola quickly joined her colleagues and dealt with introductions.

  Ted Rovnik was an Aryan dream: blue eyes, fair hair, six feet of tanned muscular fitness, with a sharp nose and cheekbones. He held Charley’s gaze and his hand clasp was firm.

  Aaron was shorter and broader. He had sandy hair and freckles, and sympathetic hazel eyes. “We don’t bite.” His tone was gentler than the words.

  Charley relaxed a fraction, only belatedly aware of her betraying body language. She was holding herself rigid and away.

  “Have a seat.” Nicola curled up in a corner of the sofa where Aaron had been sitting.

  Charley sat in the closest chair, an armchair in butter yellow leather that could have swallowed two of her with room left over.

  Ted sat on the sofa facing Nicola and Aaron. He looked at Aaron and nodded.

  Aaron cleared his throat. “We want to tell you about sensory bio-enhancement. I’m not sure what, if anything, Jack has told you about it, but it’s more than the scientific change he focuses on. Successfully implanting animal senses in us does more than just extend those senses. Somehow, it changes not who you are.” He paused, as if searching for the right words. The easy fluency of his opening statement evaporated. “It’s like the world is different and your place in it, too.”

  Charley put aside her interest in the QNA to try and follow his thought as closely as she could. “Philosophers and scientists of the mind say we construct the world—in the sense of understanding it—from the report of our senses.”

  “Yes.” Nicola was impatient. “We’ve read those books, and hundreds of articles, but there is a difference between the words and the lived experience. Our world has changed because we sense it differently.”

  “I guess it would,” Charley said, slowly. “Have you discussed the changes with Jack?”

  “Of course,” Nicola snapped.

  “John isn’t a psychologist,” Ted added.

  Charley waited from him to continue.

  But it was Aaron who finished the thought, lowering the tension in the exchange with his comment and his grin. “No. The army sent a psych, instead.”

  Nicola snorted. “Him!”

  “But we had fun with him,” Aaron reminded her, his smile lurking.

  “His report said exactly what we wanted,” Ted said, seriously.

  “And what was that?” Charley asked. The exchange between the trio was enlightening, but she was interested in an expert’s opinion.

  “Oh, that we’re all normal, healthy young people. The psychiatrist thought we were the last word in sane—of course, no one had briefed him on our sensory enhancements.”

  Charley’s eyes widened. “What good was the psychiatrist if he was uninformed?”

  “The powers that be just wanted confirmation that the experiment didn’t have any bad effects, like insanity,” Nicola said.

  Aaron crossed his eyes and pulled his face into a gargoyle sneer.

  Unless they were pretending—or scary thought, had crossed the sanity line—the trio weren’t bothered by fears of negative psychological impacts from sensory bio-enhancement. Even without Aaron’s clowning, there was a dismissiveness in the trio’s attitude to psychological damage that hinted that their experience had moved beyond an interim adjustment phase.

  Charley absorbed the idea gradually. These three, the first superhumans, had made the transition not only physically, but mentally.

  Ted’s return to topic confirmed her suspicions.

  “Sensory bio-e changes our sensory experience, and that changes who we are. It’s hard to find existing words to describe it.” He shrugged. “Which isn’t surprising. Language was constructed to communicate humans’ usual experience. Our experience goes beyond human, and language hasn’t caught up with it, yet.”

  “If there’s no language.” Charley struggled with the philosophical implications of Ted’s statement. “How do you conceptualize your experience?”

  Nicola nodded her approval of the question. “That’s it, exactly.”

  But Ted wasn’t prepared to jump ahead just yet, and Aaron’s hand came down on Nicola’s wrist and gave it an admonishing shake.

  Charley waited, clearly the trio had an agreed approach for sharing information with her. They were building towards something, but what could they possibly want from her?

  First Solomon, now them. What did people think she provided—access to Jack?

  Ted continued with his careful elaboration of their experience. “Some of the consequences of bio-e are unexpected. I received an eagle’s sight, but it wasn’t just my distance vision that sharpened. I can see the detail of insects, the beauty of the small world that we normally overlook. The change in perception affected the whole basis of my life. My world view changed. From being agnostic, I now believe in God, in a loving intelligence looking after us all and interested in every detail.”

  Charley shifted back in her seat, startled by the introduction of religion. She looked from Ted to Aaron and Nicola.

  Aaron shook his head. “No. Nicola and I started as apathetic believers—a lapsed Catholic and a beer-drinking Baptist—and there we remain. Ted’s is the only religious conversion.” But there was no mockery in his tone.

  “Maybe it’s personal. I might have had a religious conversion without the sensory bio-e. Anyway, belief in a greater being is a widespread human phenomena.” Ted drew a deep breath. “My experience gets weirder.”

  Charley thought of her emotional reaction to the QNA. Ted’s revelation would have to be stupendously weird to top that. “You’d be amazed what I can believe.”

  He didn’t need her encouragement. He launched straight in to his semi-confession. “Bio-e does more than extend human senses. I see things humans don’t know exist. Human senses don’t register the existence of creatures I’m catching glimpses of. Strange creatures. Maybe they’re what cats see when they stare at nothing.”

  Do they talk to you? Charley almost asked. She caught herself. She didn’t want to give away her crazy thoughts concerning the QNA until she knew where Ted, Nicola and Aaron were headed with their conversation. Instead, she shaped a typical journalistically-skeptical question. “Could they be visual hallucinations, an effect of adjusting to the bio-enhancements?”

  Nicola folded her arms. “That’s what I said you’d say, which is why we haven’t told anyone else.”

  Ted ignored her. He smiled at Charley, a surprisingly sweet, persuasive smile. “Once you’ve accepted one improbability, like bio-enhancement, others follow easily.”

  She suspected he was right. If you were on a roll, accepting the incredible as real, why draw a haphazard line in the sand beyond which you wouldn’t venture?

  Hell, maybe the QNA were sentient!

  “Huh.” Nicola wasn’t prepared to coax Charley into accepting Ted’s story. She looked at Charley with something just short of a glare. She appeared irresistibly like a mother tiger defending
her cubs. A metaphorical tail was lashing. The trio was tight-knit and protective of each other.

  Charley was aware that once more she stood outside a charmed circle.

  “Ssh, Nic.” Aaron looked keenly at Charley. “Do we make you uncomfortable?”

  She registered her continuing defensive posture, that she cupped the stump of her arm, and her legs were crossed. She uncrossed them, but before she could answer, Aaron continued his thought.

  “I wonder sometimes if our isolation has made us obnoxious. It’s easy to become self-absorbed dealing with the physical and mental changes of sensory bio-enhancement.”

  Nicola frowned at him. “We’re not selfish.” And that was that for Aaron. Nicola turned to Charley. “We care about the world.” For the first time she sounded young and naive. Idealistic. Perhaps it was her passionately simple language. “We’re studying how to use our new abilities to make a better world.”

  Aaron caught one of Nicola’s hands and squeezed it. “Chill. We haven’t told Charley the full story yet.” He looked at Charley and raised an eyebrow. “Do you still want to hear it?”

  “Go on.”

  Aaron did, picking up from Ted’s confession of his experience. “I received a bloodhound’s sense of smell. I don’t know why I was chosen to receive the least glorious sense.” He winked at Nicola. “Except in specialized industries, such as perfumes and some foods, the sense of smell is not respected. However, the bloodhound’s sense of smell opened up a new world. Unlike Ted, I don’t sense unknown creatures, but I do sense the world in a new way. The only language that makes sense in describing it is to use the terminology of sight. I’m not a hundred percent at thinking in smell, yet.”

  “Thinking in smell,” Charley echoed, weakly.

  Aaron grinned. “It’s an art.” He leaned forward. “I can create a mental map of this room using smell. People and animals are easiest of all to perceive. We give off strong, informative smells. I can smell the shape of a body and its state. For example, Charley, I can smell the absence of your left hand. Your right palm is sweating, the scent coming through the rose soap you washed with. There is a gap where your left hand should balance the picture.”

  Charley wiped her palm along her jeans.

  Aaron’s smile was ruefully understanding. “Unsettling, isn’t it? It’s one of the things we have to consider: the invasion of other people’s privacy. We can ‘switch off’ our extended senses. It’s relaxing for our brains to fall back into their old, limited, human sensory processing. But when should we do so?” He waited a beat. “I think I can smell sickness growing in a body, and that’s something I want to explore.”

  “Hearing is different again.” Nicola had her defensiveness under control. “At first I didn’t think I was going to get the sense of a new world that Aaron and Ted had, but I did. It just took longer to train my brain.”

  “It was a bigger shift,” Aaron said. “It required more calculations, and you had to be fast to catch it.”

  “Really fast,” she agreed. “I found that if I focused on a single sound and tracked it, I could hear it bounce off objects. It’s a haphazard form of sonar. It’s not as complete or as clearly defined as Aaron’s vision of the world via smell. But my hearing has improved as the trial hoped. It’s just that I’m less transformed by the experience than Aaron and Ted.”

  “Or that’s what we think so far,” Ted corrected. “It’s all still evolving. I see colors that aren’t in the rainbow. Sometimes I even see energy emanating from people. It’s not an aura, but it’s possible that some people were born with a hint of this enhanced perception and that’s where the notion of auras grew from. It’s as if I see the energy when it’s surplus to the body’s usual state. So I see the energy from a healthy pregnant woman’s belly.”

  Ted paused. Sharing his odd sensory perceptions was obviously difficult for him. “I can see the energy radiating from your arm, Charlotte. Your body hasn’t accepted its loss.”

  That was too close, too confronting. She flinched. “Why did you invite me here, and into your confidence?”

  “John,” Aaron answered succinctly. “He’s never been married, nor has he ever invited anyone to share his house. You’re important to him.”

  “I’m only visiting.” She’d leapt from one sword thrust at her vulnerability to another. She was afraid to be important to another person. “Jack invited me here for the story of bio-enhancement. I’m working.”

  Nicola shrugged. “You’re the anomaly in John’s behavior, maybe a leverage point.”

  Charley bit the inside of her mouth. The pain was more effective than counting to ten in controlling her temper. Arguing about emotions with three strangers was stupid. The crucial point was to understand why the trio were concerned about Jack. She forced herself to lockdown her emotions. “Why do you want Jack’s weak spot?”

  “We don’t, necessarily.” Nicola’s qualification was ominous. “But we do want to know if someone else could manipulate him.”

  “Through me?” Charley asked, horrified and disbelieving.

  “Possibly,” Aaron said. “John has sole control of a revolutionary technology, that makes him both powerful and vulnerable—more so than he thinks.”

  Charley stared at the Persian carpet hanging on the wall, and while its colors swirled dizzyingly, she tried to process all the strange information presented to her. The situation was surreal. She was sitting in a rich man’s holiday house, furnished in understated luxury, with the first three examples of what Solomon dreamed would be created superhumans, and the three trial subjects were talking earnestly, credibly, of a new world that surrounded all humans, but was just beyond ordinary perception.

  Her gaze travelled from the carpet, on to the view of the ocean, with the waves washing in relentlessly, and then, back to the three trial subjects.

  They waited, giving her time to think, and regain a precarious equilibrium in her view of the world.

  Staring at them, Charley felt her take on reality shift. She’d misread everything.

  Nicola and Aaron sat hand in hand. Ted sat with his gaze fixed on Charley, and infinity.

  What she’d interpreted, and been repelled by, as arrogant self-confidence in the trio, was really self-belief hard won in their isolated adaption to their sensory bio-enhancements. But there was more to it than that. They were steadied in their new experiences by a strong sense of responsibility for the new technology they embodied and the new world it opened up. Remembering the security force background that all three came from, Charley could see them as three warriors preparing for battle. They would explore their new world and protect it—which lead back to the reason she was here. “You’re worried for Jack?”

  “Yes,” Nicola said.

  “Okay.” Charley wiped her palm against her jeans again. “You’ve invited me here, confided in me, not because I’m a journalist, but because of Jack. What is it that you want me to do?”

  Nicola flashed her an approving smile. “We want you to hold a watching brief for Jack, but also for yourself, in case someone approaches you.”

  Charley thought of Solomon. He’d seen her as a leverage point in dealing with Jack, hadn’t he? She hated the thought of being manipulated by him, or by the three inhabitants of Jabberwocky, even if they were well-intentioned. “I’m to report to you?”

  “No.” Aaron picked up her resistance to the idea. “What you do with the information you gather and the conclusions you draw is your call. We just didn’t want you acting blindly.”

  But Charley didn’t believe that these three were that altruistic. Well-intentioned, maybe, but they weren’t laissez faire. If someone was coming after Jack, then they would naturally come after the trial subjects, too. The trio were including her in their early warning system, that was all.

  Aaron read her skepticism. Maybe he scented it? “I know, you’re questioning why you should trust us, especially after we’ve just told you a very weird story. The decision’s yours—it always is—but at som
e point you will have to decide where you stand.” He threaded his fingers with Nicola’s. “Wherever you go, Charley, you’re part of what’s happening here.”

  “An insignificant part.” She instinctively rejected involvement. Just a few minutes before she’d mourned that she was outside the charmed circle. Now, with the invitation to enter, at least into the fringes, she shied away. This wasn’t her fight—but that wasn’t true, was it? Not if she was communicating with the QNA.

  Too restless to sit still, she stood. “I’d like to leave.”

  Nicola stood. “I’ll drive you back to John’s house.”

  “To New Hope,” Charley amended. She had to start clearing up mysteries, not avoiding them. As it was, it seemed that the mysteries spawned.

  The trio might believe her wild stories of the QNA playing with her emotions, they might even understand it, but she couldn’t share that experience with them without telling Jack—or perhaps, Alan—first.

  It was all so incredible.

  Consciously, she unclenched her fist. What was it Ted had said? Once you believe one improbability, the others are easy. The improbabilities were piling up now; not least, the trio’s belief that she was Jack’s Achilles’ heel. That couldn’t be true.

  Jack was simply an old friend, more Eric’s than hers. He couldn’t want Charley, couldn’t need her? He was simply being kind to her.

  “Thank you for listening to us.” Aaron handled the courtesies for the trio, and his friendly voice brought Charley out of her worries and back to the present.

  Ted smiled at her. “Nice to meet you.”

  A shiver slid down her spine. Ted had mystic’s eyes—why hadn’t she seen that before? Shamans in Africa had looked through people in the same way Ted now studied her. What uncanny creatures did he see hovering around her?