Mind's Eye

by Douglas E. Richards

  But when I’m with you, I don’t believe this anymore. You’re like a mind-altering drug. One that I fear may be very bad for my health.

  Besides, being the girl a celebrity dated before his fame, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, before being tossed aside for something better, just isn’t my style.

  So I’m leaving. I need time to get away from your zone of charisma. Time to think. And you need time as well.

  Don’t worry, I’ll check in with Ed Cowan every few days. I’ve taken some of your poker winnings so I can stay off the grid until he tells me it’s safe to stick my head up again. Maybe one day I’ll be able to call you and see how you’re doing. But I suspect this will be too painful to do for some time to come.

  Good luck, Nick. You’re a wonderful man, and I wish you nothing but the best. I know I’ll be reading and seeing all about you in the days ahead.

  With fondest memories,

  Megan.”

  Altschuler looked up from the letter. Heather’s eyes had teared up, and Hall still looked like he had been hit by a train.

  Altschuler could only imagine what Hall must be feeling. How would he feel if Heather walked out of his life, just when they had made such a great connection? How would he feel knowing the reason for it wasn’t something he had done, but simply because she had fallen for him too hard. What a brutal irony. What a bitter pill that would be to swallow.

  Suddenly, as Altschuler looked on, Hall’s expression went from utterly despondent to furious in the blink of an eye. He jumped up off the bed. “Wait here,” he said as he raced by them to the door, still shirtless.

  Altschuler and Heather ignored Hall’s instructions and rushed after him.

  Hall marched straight for Eric Trout, who had manned the graveyard shift while his partner slept, and was due to be spelled shortly. “Anything interesting happen last night or this morning?” asked Hall in a venomous tone.

  Trout was taken aback. “No. We still seem to be locked down tight.”

  “Really?” thundered Hall. “Are you that incompetent? Do you know that Megan Emerson isn’t in this so-called safe house anymore? Do you know that?” he shouted.

  From the look on Trout’s face, it was obvious that he didn’t. “That’s impossible.”

  “I’m fucking positive!” shouted Hall. “So how is that you don’t know that? Weren’t you and your partner watching the doors? Watching your video? How could you let her just waltz out of here?”

  Trout’s lip curled up into a snarl, and he looked about ready to crush Hall’s windpipe, but managed to control himself. He was being paid to protect these people, not kill them.

  “Tanya,” he said to his tablet computer with barely contained fury. “Did Megan Emerson leave the premises?” He shot Hall a contemptuous look, as though he was sure Hall was about to be proven wrong and shown to be a hotheaded jackass.

  “Yes. Megan Emerson left at three thirteen this morning,” replied a soothing, unflappable computer voice.

  “What?” barked Trout, horrified. “Why wasn’t I alerted?”

  “Megan Emerson was listed as a resident. I’ve been programmed to ignore the comings and goings of residents.”

  “God dammit!” screamed Trout. “What kind of fucked up . . .”

  Trout paused and visibly tried to get a grip on himself. He turned to Hall, his eyes still burning. “I apologize, Nick. This is idiotic programming, which I’ll fix. This shouldn’t have happened without me knowing it. But I can’t be everywhere at once,” he continued, anger seeping into his tone despite his best efforts. “So if Megan decided she wanted to wait until I couldn’t see her and slip out, there’s nothing I can do about it. At the end of the day, I can only protect people who want to be protected. If she’s suicidal enough to leave here, she takes her chances. Where the fuck did she go, anyway?”

  Hall’s demeanor had changed again, and now he looked like a whipped puppy. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “She just left. She plans to stay off the grid and check in with Cowan every few days.”

  Hall turned and walked away without another word, and Altschuler and Heather followed him back into his bedroom, where he sat on the bed once more.

  “Nick,” said Heather, “are you going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said woodenly, but it was clear he was devastated.

  Altschuler stared at what now appeared to be the shell of a man, and decided he needed to play the heavy. Not that he wanted to kick a man when he was down, but too much was going on, and they owed it to Nick—and themselves—to deliver a dose of reality.

  “I feel horrible for you, Nick,” he began. “But the timing here isn’t great. Cameron’s press conference is less than an hour away. After that, all hell breaks loose. Not to mention powerful people are still trying to kill you, at least until you can prove your ESP is gone. Again, I can’t tell you how much I feel for you, Nick. But I worry about your ability to weather this storm if you can’t shake this off. It’s like going into a hot zone with an impaired immune system.”

  Heather lowered her eyes, but nodded her agreement.

  Hall opened his mouth to speak but shut it once again. He stared at Altschuler and then Heather for several seconds. Finally, his right hand balled up into an unconscious fist and he rose from the bed.

  “You’re right!” he said. “You’re absolutely right. No more moping around. I don’t have the luxury. And do you know what else? I’m going to get her back! As soon as I convince Girdler I’m clean. I don’t care what it takes. I’m going to convince her that I don’t care about Alicia, and I don’t care about fame, and I don’t care about any girls I might meet in the future. I won’t stop until she reconsiders. She thinks she’s stubborn. Well, she ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  Altschuler studied the steely gleam in Hall’s eye and the resolve in his expression, and a faint smile came over his face. There were no guarantees in life, he thought. Maybe Nick Hall would fail to get Megan back, after all. But Alex Altschuler would be the last man on earth to bet against him.

  51

  Theia Labs had conducted corporate-sponsored press conferences before, but never in New York. Cameron Fyfe was unable to score a large conference hall in a luxury hotel on short notice, and unsure if he wanted to anyway. The conference ended up being held in a fairly small room at the Hudson Hotel, a lesser known facility that had sprouted up almost a mile from Times Square, with maybe fifteen journalists in attendance. He had intimated to each that they were being given an exclusive on a press conference they would never forget, but after seeing the limited audience and unimpressive setting, the majority began to wonder if they had been misled.

  The press conference wasn’t nearly important enough, or so the world thought, to appear live on any of the many hundreds of available television channels. But it was being videotaped, and could be accessed live on the web.

  When the conference began, there were only five or six TVs tuned in to the web broadcast, including one in the living room of a tract home outside of Sacramento, California. By the time the conference ended, alerted by frantically texted messages from the few attendees, there were thousands.

  At ten o’clock exactly, Fyfe came out onto a raised podium, just to the side of an eight-foot-tall screen that looked like a large picture window behind him. He introduced himself as the interim CEO of Theia Labs and then, without any further preamble, he launched deep into the heart of the matter.

  He began by narrating actual footage of the attack on the Explorer, explaining it had been taken from the computer of Theia Labs’ former CEO, Kelvin Gray, who was now dead—fatally shot several days earlier in a fracas that had ensued when he was confronted about his crimes.

  This opening got the attention of the crowd like nothing ever had in any of their collective experiences. The footage was taken from a helicopter and zoomed in on an oceangoing vessel, almost lost amid an endless, tranquil sea of greenish-blue. As the helicopter got closer, those aboa
rd the Explorer could be seen sprawled out around the deck, in haphazard poses of unconsciousness. Four other large helicopters were swooping in from the other direction, flying low, and soon the unconscious victims were being loaded into the helos like cordwood; presumably to be transferred to another oceangoing vessel within flying distance.

  Fyfe calmly and methodically explained why these people had been kidnapped and killed, and showed evidence of who was responsible, and why. Gray had actually made some video entries, discussing the progress of the experimentation, and Fyfe showed a few minutes of these, just to be certain everyone recognized that Gray was behind this, and seriously deranged.

  Fyfe explained that even as he spoke, hundreds of gigabytes of video and text taken from Gray’s computer, giving clear evidence of his heinous crimes, were being made available to the press, public, and criminal authorities. The evidence would make it clear that Gray was responsible, along with a mysterious man named John Delamater, and that the hundreds of Theia employees and consultants working on projects based on these barbaric experiments had no knowledge of them.

  As planned, Fyfe eloquently expressed, on behalf of the company, his remorse and outrage, and made it clear the families of the victims would be well-compensated for their tragic losses, although he was well aware that nothing could compensate for what had been so ruthlessly taken away from them. He then expressed the intent of Theia’s management to move forward and put this behind the company through philanthropy and improving human lives.

  While he made it clear that nothing could erase the horrific nature of the crime, Theia believed they were now on the verge of a cure for blindness and deafness. He showed a video presentation with a complex, 3-D animation of how implants, connected to electronic retinas and ear drums, could provide a sensory experience indistinguishable from the real thing.

  He played another video demonstrating how thought-powered web surfing could be done in conjunction with the auditory and visual capabilities, and that this too had been perfected, although at a tragic cost in human lives. Society would have to judge if these inventions, paid for with the blood of innocents, would be used, but Fyfe said he hoped that, ultimately, society would not turn its back on such breathtaking advances because of the way they were obtained. That if they were used to benefit society, at least the men and women of the Explorer would not have given their lives for nothing. His oration on these points was nothing short of brilliant.

  Fyfe went on to explain that a single member of the Explorer expedition was still alive, heaping yet another impossible, shocking revelation on top of the others, and serving it to the small audience whose faces had never lost their stunned expressions since the first minutes of his presentation. He then played the video Nick Hall had made, the cherry on top of his sundae of revelations.

  Fyfe explained that there had been recent threats to Hall’s life, so he had gone off the grid, and that no one, including Fyfe himself, knew where he was. When these threats were resolved, he assured his audience, Nick Hall would spend as much time with authorities as they would like, and would demonstrate the functioning of his implants as he had promised on his video.

  Fyfe finished by cautioning that the future of this technology would depend on world opinion and on the regulatory authorities of each sovereign nation, so that even if the technologies had progressed to this point through legitimate means, it could still take several years of testing before they were released to patients or the general public.

  In the hands of someone less skilled, the information Fyfe disclosed might have taken much longer to reveal. But Fyfe knew that he needed to convey it in an hour or less for it to go viral around the world. In an age of ever-shortening attention spans, Fyfe managed to pack a punch the size of an asteroid into every last minute of his presentation.

  He ended the conference at exactly eleven a.m., said he would not be taking any questions, and left before anyone knew what was happening.

  Even so, had he not thought ahead and made sure two Cowan-hired men were present to run interference, he would have been swarmed by the small group of journalists before he could get near an exit. As it was, he slid safely into a car waiting for him outside of the hotel, was driven to a nearby helipad, and in less than an hour was boarding the private jet he had chartered to fly him to California.

  52

  The fallout from the conference was everything the civilians in the Sacramento safe house thought it would be. Within five hours, over four hundred million people around the world had viewed all or part of it. The initial speculation was that it was a hoax, especially since Nick Hall was conveniently unavailable for corroboration.

  But as investigators, journalists, and citizens poured over the hundreds of hours of video and thousands of pages of additional evidence Fyfe had downloaded to public sites, many were now convinced it was all true, and the world was abuzz with visions of a technological and medical revolution beyond all others.

  There were debates, both on television and online, about the ethics of using the results of illegal experimentation, but the sentiment was hugely in favor of doing so, as had been obvious since Fyfe had asked Altschuler if he would suppress the absolute cure for cancer just because Hitler had discovered it. Of course the answer was no.

  Debates raged on, centering principally on the addictive potential of the technology, and asking the question, at what point do we stop being human? Many had also seized upon other key controversies: porn, lack of privacy, anything said near someone else potentially recorded for all eternity, and so on.

  Hall’s photo was downloaded millions of times, and Hall sightings were reported in dozens of countries, with citizens of each hoping to spot him with all the fervor of kids trying to find the golden ticket in a Willy Wonka contest.

  And this was just the tip of the iceberg, since many had yet to learn of the story and many still believed it to be a hoax. When the story was absolutely proven out, things would really start popping.

  Every last Theia Labs employee was visited by the media and hounded for interviews. The press breathlessly reported that the one man they most wanted to interview, Alex Altschuler, Gray’s second-in-command, was nowhere to be found, despite their best efforts.

  But the employees they did reach reported that they hadn’t been aware Kelvin Gray was dead, and that while Theia was working in this general technological realm, they didn’t know anything about these breakthroughs, and were just as shocked as everyone else.

  Most Theia employees confessed they had thought Kelvin Gray to be a model CEO; handsome, brilliant, a great orator, and a kind and generous man. But as difficult as it was to believe he had committed such atrocities, the evidence was compelling.

  Almost six hours after the press conference had ended, Fyfe called Altschuler to let him know that he had landed in California and should arrive at the safe house within an hour or two with Ed Cowan. He said he was looking forward to seeing them all, but especially to meeting the man of the hour, the newly famous Nick Hall.

  Hall still wasn’t himself. And Megan’s absence was deeply felt by Altschuler and Heather as well, who had both gained quite an affection for her in the short time they had known her. But they were so high from their newfound relationship that even if their mood were dampened by half, they would still be euphoric.

  Right after Fyfe’s call, the group of three civilians returned to the TV vigil they had been maintaining since the press conference many hours earlier, surfing news channels and Internet reaction to the conference. Hall and Altschuler were both using their internal Internet connections as well, and if they found something truly noteworthy they would throw it up on the television for all to see.

  They were watching a news program, which was reporting that a pentagon source had confirmed the authenticity of the Explorer footage Fyfe had shown, when Alex Altschuler gasped.

  “Holy shit!” he said to his two companions. “You need to see this.”

  Moments later it was up on the main TV.
It was an online teaser for an article scheduled to run on the front page of the Iowa Gazette the next morning. It was entitled, “ESP: Did Theia Labs Leave Something Out?”

  Hall’s mouth fell open. “But how could they possibly suspect?” he said.

  “You’re not going to love the answer,” said Altschuler, gesturing to the screen.

  Hall and Heather read the short article in silence.

  The writer, Janet Hollinger, described how she had received an e-mail addressed to her and over forty other journalists the previous Thursday. The message had indicated it was from someone named Nick Hall, who had no memory, could surf the web with this thoughts, and was desperately reaching out to anyone he could, believing his life was in imminent danger. Oh, and it had also contained one other minor detail.

  Hall had claimed to be able to read minds!

  The teaser displayed Hall’s entire message, in full, and was basically identical to the one he had sent to the police and government types, the contents of which he had read from the mind of Justin Girdler. But Girdler had not been aware Hall had also sent the message to a second batch of addressees.

  Janet Hollinger went on to explain how she got hundreds of hoax e-mails each year, but happened to read this one since it was even more creative and farfetched than most. She suspected spam filters had prevented it from being seen by many of her colleagues, and any others who did read it had certainly also thought it was a hoax. How else could it have been seen at the time? Alerted by her, a number of other journalists were confirming that they had now found the message in their spam folders or deleted message archives as well.

  When Janet Hollinger had seen a video of the recent press conference, she had remembered the e-mail. Her paper had then conducted a quick investigation, which the expanded story the next morning would describe in greater detail.