Lying askew against the wall, under the splatter pattern of Scott Parrish’s brain, were what looked like a pair of shades only elderly men who just had cataract surgery would be caught wearing. The lenses were massive, large enough to cover half a grown man’s face, and even in the low light, Mathis could tell they were mirrored with the particolored glean of an oil slick.
They could only be a part of the game, so Mathis added them to the pile of accessories. He regarded the amassed collection of gear. He only had two hands and, because he was unskilled in thievery, he hadn’t brought a bag along. He needed to be selective about what to take with him.
As he was trying to decide which things were most important to take, a loud pop sounded in the room, like a small rock had been thrown at the window. With the reflexes of a very old jaguar, Mathis threw himself onto the couch and held his breath.
CHAPTER 19
Raze stepped through the portal and into the den of the Parrish residence. A sluggish movement from the corner of the room caught his eye, a large, lumbering presence hurtled itself onto the couch.
Jesus Christ! Could anything be routine? In the middle of the night, in the quiet of a deserted house, his presence could be sensed easily. He held very still, watching the space where the burly creature fell and hid itself.
He only had to wait a couple of minutes before a massive man-head peeked up from the back of the couch. He looked directly at Raze, but Raze knew he could only see the window that was behind him. After making sure the coast was clear, the man, dressed in full police regalia, stood up.
Well, I’ll be damned! It’s the fuzz from the hospital! What the hell is he doing in here? Raze bided his time, watching to see what the officer was trying to do. This oughtta be good.
The officer walked over to the television and started grabbing items off the floor. He rolled up a glove and shoved it into a pocket, picked up a plastic gun and stuck it in his waistband, then picked up the visor, blinking red from the homing activation and slid them on top of his head.
Holy shit! He’s taking the game, Raze realized with amazement. As soon as he thought he was reigning in the chaos, he met with another snag. The cohesive thread of The Project was fraying into an irreparable mess, more convoluted and out of control by the hour.
Raze watched as the officer fumbled frantically with the game pieces, obviously breaking the law. What could he possibly be thinking?
Raze moved himself directly behind the officer. He placed an etheric palm at the back of the man’s thick neck and switched into receiver mode. The man was transmitting a lot of anxiety. The fear weakened his defenses and amplified his signature. Pulses of maroon, amber and earthy brown flowed from the officer along with the running monolog that was screaming in the cop’s brain.
What am I doing?
Just get the game, and get the fuck out of here! I’ll figure it out later.
I’m a frickin’ idiot!
There’s something to this game, and I’m gonna figure it out.
There was Raze’s answer. The officer suspected there was something more to the game. Hmmm. Impressive intuition, officer. He couldn’t help be amused.
Raze channeled the officer’s base frequency into the storage area of his brain, disengaged, and slipped around to the front of him, noting the stripes on his arm, then reading the name tag on his chest.
Raze moved out of the way as the man stumbled past, in an obvious hurry to leave. You go on ahead, Sergeant Mathis, Raze said to him, I’ll catch up to you later.
The sergeant had only taken one set of visors. Raze needed to get a lock on the second so he would know where to find it when he came in the flesh to repossess it.
Raze checked the shelf, but there were no other blinking lights there. He scanned the room but was unable to locate any pulsing from the second visor. It didn’t make any sense. Both Scott and Blake Parrish would have to have been wearing them in order to transport into The Stratum; and if the police hadn’t confiscated the console or the other pair, they would still be somewhere in this room.
He moved one more time around the room, looking for the beacon, but the second pair of visors was nowhere to be found. He’d have to deal with that later.
He turned his attention to the desk and checked the computer. The screen was asleep, but a green glow from the monitor told Raze that it was still powered on. That was good. The Intercept program he set up in The Womb would be able to access the hard drive and fry it with no problem, wiping out all the incriminating information about Infinium that Scott Parrish had accumulated.
The officer’s meathead bobbed past the window as he tried to make a soft but quick getaway.
“Ta ta for now, Sergeant. I’ll be seeing you soon,” Raze said as he pulled himself backward through the signal line until he felt himself sitting in his chair in the Womb.
CHAPTER 20
Mathis couldn’t get back to his pickup truck fast enough. He was completely freaked out. He nearly shat himself when he’d heard that noise at the window and even after he was sure it was just a settling creak of an old house, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.
Mathis didn’t really believe in ghosts, but he was in the house of a very recent murder victim. The idea gave him the willies. It was probably just his own guilty conscience he felt breathing down his neck—the angel on his shoulder trying to tell him he was making a big mistake, which he ignored.
And now that he’d just successfully committed a felony and violated nearly every article of the Canons of Police Ethics, he wanted to vomit.
He glanced over at the pile of electronics sitting in the passenger seat. What was he fucking thinking? It had seemed like such a good idea before he did it, but now...now what? God forbid if he ever had to explain this to someone, like his future defense attorney. He would only be able to plead sleep-deprived madness.
Mathis started the truck and took off for home. The sooner he got away from the crime scene, the better.
CHAPTER 21
“Where to begin,” Preston said, mostly to himself, as he jumped off the bed and started pacing around the space again. “I don’t want to put you into too much shock. Not that you haven’t had enough of that today.” He stopped and turned to her. “You know you are in a dream state now, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so the first thing I want you to do is wake up. Then—I want you to fall right back asleep and come back here, got it?”
She didn’t get it.
“It’s really easy. I promise,” he tried again. “The important thing about it is that when you wake up...don’t let yourself get too awake...don’t get out of bed, don’t go to the bathroom, don’t start trying to make sense or analyze this whole ‘dream’. Allow yourself to wake up, see where you are, go back to sleep, and come back here. Baby steps, okay?”
“Okaaay...I guess,” she said. Although it seemed quite impossible to her, she might as well try. Worse case scenario, it didn’t work. Or maybe that would be best case.
Aislen laid back down on the bed and closed her eyes. Her mind was spinning with doubt and uncertainty, but after awhile, she felt herself relax and she started drifting off to sleep.
“Wake up, Aislen,” she heard her father say from across the room. She opened her eyes, expecting him to be standing next to her in the empty space. But she wasn’t there anymore. She was in the dark. She could make out the shapes of a dresser, a mirror, a window, and some posters on a wall.
She put the pieces of the room together and realized she was in Gen’s bedroom, not her own. She could feel her friend’s warm body sprawled out next to her and hear her breathy, little squeaks. Only Gen could snore and sound adorable.
Okay, she thought to herself. Let’s see if this is real or not. She closed her eyes again, breathed deeply, and relaxed into the comfort of the bed. She thought about Preston, the soothing sound of his voice, and the chiffon oasis she had shared with him just moments before.
“See? You
’re a natural.”
She opened her eyes. She was sitting back on the bed and her father was sitting in the chair across from her, a beaming smile on his face.
“Wow. I can slip in and out of delusions with ease. I’m sooooo relieved,” she said.
“Very funny,” he laughed giving her a playful hit on the arm. “Come on, admit it. You’re impressed.”
“Well, okay, maybe a little. But it doesn’t prove I’m not crazy.”
“No. But by the time we’re done, you may need a new definition for crazy. You want to do something really crazy? Something so crazy that it may not be so crazy after all?” He stood up and held his hand out to her.
She hesitated.
“It’s only a dream, Buttercup. Remember?” There was a tease in his smile and a challenge in his eye. She could never resist a challenge. She took his hand and he pulled her out of the chair. “Okay, this time I’m going with you. Close your eyes.”
She closed her eyes. He kept a hold of her hand and moved to stand beside her.
“Let’s go visit, Mom, shall we?”
Aislen opened her eyes to look at him.
“Ah, ah, ah! No peeking.” He brushed his hands over her eyes, closing them again.
“Alright,” he said, his voice becoming soft and melodic. “Take some deep, slow breaths. Get back down in that warm, liquid, sleepy space. Now, I want you to think about home. Imagine you are looking at it on a map, then imagine that you are a bird hovering above your rooftop. Can you see it?”
“Yeah.”
“Now pull that image into a little ball about as big as your fist.”
Aislen watched the image roll itself into a small sphere of energy.
“Let that ball sit there,” Preston said. “What we just did is called evoking. You called forth an itinerary and created the path for it—that is called a signal line. This one is a Geo-Coordinate signal line. If there is a place you want to visit, you can evoke a geo-cord signal and use it to travel there. But let’s do something more advanced, shall we?
“Now I want you to picture your mom. Feel what it is like being around her, what makes her unique and special, and pull that feeling into an image, like you did with home.”
Aislen thought about her mother, how she moved around the kitchen and the house with graceful purpose, her gentle strength when times were hard, and how comforting it felt being wrapped in her arms.
“Next, take that image and those feelings and imagine them as color and shape.”
Aislen watched as her pictures melted into mellow amber and warm gold and spun themselves in a slow whirlpool in her mind.
“Got it?”
“Yes,” Aislen said.
“Now, put that into a ball of energy in front of you.”
Aislen marveled as the colors coalesced into a sphere. The two orbs of energy she created now hovered before her as if awaiting her bidding.
Preston continued, “This sphere is a signature frequency signal line. If you know the place you want to visit, you can evoke a Geo-Cord, but if you want to visit a person, and you do not know where they are, you can create a Sig-Freq line. We are going to use the Signature Frequency to visit Mom.”
“Visit Mom? What???” Aislen opened her eyes and looked at him incredulously.
“Fasten your seatbelt, Buttercup, and get into that sphere,” Preston said.
“But I am too big to fit in there!”
“Your body is too big for that, yes. But your body is really in a bed sleeping. Close your eyes and imagine yourself into the sphere.”
Aislen closed her eyes again and focused back on the golden sphere. In one instant, she was looking at the glowing bundle—in the next, she was inside of it, whorls of color and light tripping around her.
A flash of light burst open in front of her, expanding into a hole of brilliant white that sucked her inside. Suddenly she was flying, or falling, she couldn’t tell which. Before she could scream, her ears popped loudly. Startled, she opened her eyes. Her father stood beside her and together they were in her mother’s room, right beside her bed.
“Holy dog shit,” Aislen let out in a long breath. She looked down on the bed at her mother, as she slept peacefully. The auburn of her hair was loose and fanned out like a flame across her pillow. “Are we really here?”
“Yes,” Preston answered.
Though she had the whole bed to herself, Sabine was sleeping on the far right side, leaving the left side of the bed empty. Aislen knew she always slept that way. There was a noticeable indent on that side of the bed. It was as if her mother held that space open, thinking that one day she would open her eyes and someone would be there looking back at her. Aislen knew that someone she was waiting for was her father.
“This seems wrong. I feel like we are violating her privacy.”
“We are,” Preston confessed. “That’s good. You have ethics. There are those who use this technology who believe if people are not at a level where they are aware, then any boundary can be crossed. They believe that the unconscious human is nothing more than an animal, or worse, a maggot. So they do whatever they want. ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them’ so to speak.
“But really, we are invading her space. We are taking advantage of her unconsciousness.”
Her mother stirred in the bed and opened her eyes. She looked directly at them, squinting her eyes to try and see better.
Aislen gasped.
“Still, Aislen,” Preston said.
They stood motionless while her mother watched in their direction for a while, then drifted back off to sleep. Aislen glanced at Preston, but he was still looking at her mom. Longing was evident in his expression, along with the deepest sadness that she had ever seen.
He pulled his gaze away and looked back at Aislen. “Close your eyes, Aislen, and go back the way we came.”
Aislen closed her eyes, thought again about how they got to her mother’s room, about the seamless blend of color and shape. Her ears popped and they were both standing back where they started.
Aislen plopped down on the bed, dumbstruck. Preston pulled the chair up and faced her, waiting for her to speak.
“You do that all the time, don’t you?” she finally said.
“Yes.”
“I’ve felt it.”
“Yes. So does she.”
“Why? Why do you do that? Why do you torment her that way?”
“Because...” His voice faltered. He looked down at his feet for a long time, then looked back up at her. “Because I can’t get near you any other way. Not without putting both of you in danger.”
The bitter ball she’d carried in her heart for a lifetime ruptured. The realization that he hadn’t abandoned them for his own selfish reasons, as she had believed, overwhelmed her and she burst into tears. He had really wanted to be with them. He actually did love them. Preston reached his arms around her and held her while she cried.
Soon grief gave way to anger—anger at whoever was responsible for denying her and her mother a relationship with him and a normal life together. She stopped crying and looked up at her father.
“Who are they, Dad?”
Preston looked surprised, his face softening with emotion. Aislen realized it was the first time the she had called him ‘Dad’, acknowledged him with the endearment. She thought of all the suffering he must have gone through, all that he had been denied during his lifetime and she got even angrier.
“Who are they? I need to know! Why are they after you? What are they doing?”
Preston shook his head. “Not yet, Aislen. I know you want the answers. And over time you will get them. I promise. But there is so much more that you need to learn first, so you can be prepared.
“Right now, you need to get back. It’s nearly morning. You need to take it easy today. Rest. Drink lots of water. Think about what has happened tonight, but try not to judge it, invalidate it, or explain it. Your brain will try to, but just let it be. Don’t talk about it with anyone just y
et. And whatever you do, don’t mention my name. Later, if you are ready for more, come back here.”
“How will I know how to get back?”
“Do what I said...and when you are ready, follow this.”
Preston held his palm face up in front of him. An orb materialized and hovered in the center of it and he extended it toward her. It was breathtaking; a multifaceted diamond that flashed with sparks of every color and hue in the spectrum.
“Take it, Buttercup. And come back to visit me.”
Mesmerized, she reached a finger up to touch it, but instead, it instantly absorbed into the palm of her hand. She gasped and opened her eyes into the blaze of morning sunshine.
CHAPTER 22
Mathis had to pee. He’d been tossing and turning for hours trying to ignore the ballooning pressure of his bladder, and now he was ready to piss the bed.
Reluctantly, he flopped himself out of bed and shuffled down the hall, holding on to his willie so it wouldn’t pre-ejaculate urine before he reached the pot.
He sat down on the toilet. This was for the best. He didn’t need his wang flying around like an out-of-control fire hose and wizzing all over the walls. He rested his head in his hands and took a four-minute nap while his penis did its business. He didn’t bother flushing the toilet.
He was parched. He shuffled toward the kitchen with his eyes closed, hoping to wet his whistle and get back in bed before he fully woke up. It was a straight shot down the hall from the john to the fridge. He knew it by heart. He opened the refrigerator door, reached into the beer bank, pulled out the first thing that caught his finger’s attention, twisted the top off, and guzzled half of it down.
Then he made his first mistake of the day. He opened an eye. He had no good reason for doing it. He had been managing blind just fine. But his right eyelid cracked open involuntarily mid-swallow and spotted the shiny, black monolith sitting on the counter.
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