Telekinetic

by Laurence E. Dahners

  Telekinetic

  a Hyllis family story #1

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2014 Laurence E Dahners

  Kindle Edition

  Author’s Note

  This book is the first of the “Hyllis family” series

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Contents

  Preprologue

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  Author’s Afterword

  Preprologue

  Trailing his family through the mall, Russ tried to stifle his annoyance at being dragged to the mall. His wife had guilted him into coming along this morning by reminding him of how little time he’d spent with their boys this week. Two hours of shopping wasn’t on his list of enjoyable ways to spend time with his sons.

  Knowing it would piss her off, he stopped to look at a magician. The man, a kid really, had set up a little table. Presumably he had been authorized to do so by the mall authority. A “tips” box had been prominently displayed.

  Russ had always been interested in sleight of hand and enjoyed performing small “coin hiding” tricks himself. The kid didn’t seem to be much of a showman though. He looked about fifteen and wore an ordinary short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. At present he was simply sitting behind his little table with his eyes closed. He looked like he was sleeping sitting up.

  The table had a sign hanging by tape from the front of it. It had been printed on ordinary 8.5 x 11 printer paper using a huge font with a lot of curlicues. It only said “Magician.” Russ thought to himself that the kid should have his name or stage name on the sign if he hoped to promote himself. The only thing sitting on the table other than the tips box was a dried bean.

  At least it looked like a dry bean.

  Russ stood and studied the setup for a moment. It seemed so amateurish that he felt sure he should be moving along. Whatever the kid could do was certain to be a disappointment. Or maybe he was just minding the table until the real magician came back. Yet, somehow, he felt undeniably curious about whether it was simply amateur, or some kind of understated presentation. He took a sip of his Diet Coke. When the kid had not moved for a full minute, Russ finally said, “Are you going to give a show?”

  The kid’s eyes blinked open, looking a little startled. “Um, yeah, sorry, I got a headache from the las’ show.” He gave a little grin, “But it’s mostly worn off.” He glanced around, “Is ‘dere anyone else to watch?”

  People were moving by, but Russ was the only one in front of the table or showing any interest. The kid looked… unintelligent, as if there was something wrong with him. Russ felt frustrated, he wanted to move along himself, but at the same time had this desperate nagging feeling that he wanted to see whatever the kid did! Presumably, someone at the mall had thought his performance interesting enough to book him? Russ looked to s in ee where his family was and saw that his wife and two sons had stopped and were looking back at him. Feeling sure he was going to look like an idiot, he waved them back to him.

  His two boys enthusiastically ran his way. Sally looked pissed like she usually did when he got distracted by something she felt was unimportant, but after holding her hands out, palms up as if to say, “what?” she started his way as well. Russ turned to the kid and said, “Okay, we have an audience of four. Show us your shtick.”

  The kid frowned, “Shtick?”

  Russ rolled his eyes, “Your show… whatever you do. Do it.”

  “Oh.” The kid looked down at the table and the bean floated up off of the table’s surface.

  Russ’s first thought was that the showmanship was absolutely terrible. No buildup, no wand waving, no facial expressions indicating great effort. Just the bean floating up into the air!

  As if suddenly remembering something, the kid reached out and passed his hand underneath the bean, then over the bean to show that nothing supported it. Dropping his hands to his sides he continued eyeing the bean as it began to slowly trace out a large figure “8” pattern above the top of the table.

  A wash of irritation came over Russ at the low level of professionalism this kid displayed, but that sensation gave way to fascination as he realized that he simply could not explain how the kid was doing it! He crouched to look at it from a different angle and moved closer to be sure he couldn’t see anything holding the bean up. It floated about 6 inches high, far too high for some kind of magnetic repulsion. He looked under the table but it appeared completely ordinary.

  The kid said, “You wanna pass your own han’ over and under it?”

  Startled, Russ stood up, staring at the magician in disbelief, “Really?”

  The kid only nodded.

  Russ’s son said, “How’s he doing it Daddy?”

  Russ shook his head in irritation. He put his soda bottle between his knees and reached out to pass one hand under and another over the bean at the same time. He grinned to himself, knowing that the magician had intended him to use one hand to go over, then under, checking one side of the bean at a time.

  His hands didn’t encounter anything, yet the bean continued insolently floating there!

  Russ leaned forward to see if there could be something holding it up from the side where the kid sat. He didn’t see anything. Without waiting for permission, he passed his hand between the bean and the magician. Still nothing, though the bean dropped a little bit as his hand went between it and the kid.

  The kid said, “Sorry, I can’t hold it up so good if’n I can’ see it.”

  Eyes widening at this statement, Russ said, “Can you fly it away from the table?”

  “Oh, sure.” The bean moved out away from the table, then up in the air to about a height of 10 feet where it described a large circle then sailed smoothly back to land on the table. The kid said, “Tha’s ‘bout as far as I can send it when I’m tired, sorry.”

  Russ stood staring at the bean, occasionally shifting his attention to the kid, then back to the bean. Without asking permission he picked up the bean. It seemed a perfectly ordinary dried black bean.

  The kid had a vacuous expression on his face. He didn’t offer to perform any other tricks.

  Mind racing, trying to come up with some explanation for how the kid had done what he had done, Russ finished the last swallow of Diet Coke in his bottle.

  As the bottle tipped up into his field of view, Russ had another idea. “This bottle is clear. Could you float the bean down into it and let me screw the lid on?” he said, setting the bottle on the table.

  “Sure, but tha’s gotta be my last trick. I’ze started gettin’ a headache again.” The bean floated up into the air, went over the opening at the top of the bottle and settled down into it.

  Eyes wide, Russ screwed the lid back on the bottle. The whole time the bean remained floating in the middle of the bottle. Nothing could be holding it up now! No threads, no blowing air, no magnetic fields at this distance. Nothing! Russ took his hands away and stared as the bean continued floating inside the bottle for another few seconds.

  The bean fell to the bottom of the bottle and the kid said, “I guess I done this too many times today. Most times I could do a better show than that one, but now every time I do the trick, my headache starts up right off.”

  Sally said brightly, “Well, that was a cool trick! But, we’ve still got to get our shopping done. Let’s go honey.”

  Russ felt irritated. How could she not grasp how amazing this was? “You guys go shopping. I’ve got to u
nderstand this.” He knew Sally would make him pay for this later. He’d be due for the cold shoulder at least.

  He was beginning to think… Russ turned to the kid and reached for his wallet. Dropping a ten dollar bill in the tip box raised the kid’s interest level quite a bit. “Can you move anything else? Or only beans?”

  “Sure,” the kid looked around, as if searching for something to move, then his eyes went back to the tip box. Russ’s ten dollar bill floated up out of the tip box and over to the kid’s hand. The kid winced a little, then, as he stuffed the bill in his pocket, said, “Tha’s really all I can do. My head’s really gonna hurt if I do another one.”

  Head whirling, Russ thought to himself, he really is telekinetic! After another moment, he said, “Can I get a DNA sample?”

  “A wha’?”

  “Just a swab of the inside of your cheek.”

  “Got’s to ask my brother.” He jerked his head off to the side, presumably indicating his brother.

  Russ turned to look, thinking to find a fully grown brother watching from that direction. Instead, the only person that direction was a kid sitting on a bench, reading.

  The magician said, “Jerome.” The kid on the bench looked up from his book. At a wave from the magician he got up and started their way. The magician frowned and said, “Dis’ guy wants ta swab my cheek. Is that okay? He tip ten dollar.”

  Russ looked back and forth from one to the other. They looked much alike, so presumably they really were brothers. The magician looked about fifteen, while his brother looked about twelve. Could the magician kid really be asking his little brother’s permission for something?

  The younger kid, Jerome, studied Russ. As opposed to the magician’s, his eyes looked highly intelligent. “You’re wanting DNA?” He asked.

  Startled by the younger boy’s perceptive question, Russ merely nodded.

  “You’ve realized he really is psychokinetic?”

  Russ nodded again.

  “And you think you can find something on his DNA that lets him do it?”

  Russ shrugged, “Maybe?”

  The kid cocked his head, “Are you some kind of PhD DNA researcher?”

  Russ snorted, “I don’t have a PhD. I actually work in a DNA research lab. The people with the PhDs don’t really know how to do the research. I’m the one who gets stuff done.”

  “You have a DNA sampling kit with you?”

  “No, but I can go to the CVS there,” he nodded towards the store down the mall about 50 feet, “and get Q-tips and baggies to take a sample with.”

  Jerome raised an eyebrow, “You probably want a sample from his brother to compare it to don’t you?”

  Russ nodded, again astonished by the brightness of the younger brother.

  “Hundred dollars.”

  Russ raised his eyebrows, “A hundred dollars? Just to swab the inside of your cheeks?”

  The kid grinned at him, “Cheap at that price.”

  Russ rolled his eyes. “I’ll be right back,” he said, starting for the CVS.”

  ***

  Russ only fell a little behind on his assigned work while running comparisons of the two kids’ DNA. At first he worried that he wouldn’t be able to tell which of the differences between the two kids genes were responsible for the telekinesis. However, a run he snuck in on the lab’s supercomputer account identified all but one of the many differences to be well-known genetic variations.

  The final one had never been described before.

  It wasn’t a very long piece of DNA.

  He could…

  ***

  The cloned telekinetic DNA tantalized Russ for months. He wondered how he could test it. There would be no way to evaluate telekinesis in an animal model even if he did slip some in to one of the lab’s mice.

  But maybe he could test it for safety? He would need a vector to insert the DNA. Since he wanted the DNA to be inserted into every cell in the recipient’s body, he thought a viral vector would be best. Viral vectors were used in the lab by some of the other technicians. Russ had never used a virus, but in principle it would involve putting the telekinetic DNA into the empty outer shell of a virus that no longer had its own DNA. Then you injected the viral shells containing the telekinetic DNA into your recipient. The viral shells transferred that DNA into the recipient’s cells. The virus itself couldn’t reproduce because it lacked its own DNA.

  He talked to one of the other techs over lunch. The principles and methods for making a viral vector seemed simple enough…

  Creating the viral shells containing the telekinetic DNA caused a couple of significant delays in Dr. Ameil’s research, but Russ got away with blaming the delays on a faulty reagent. He also had to stay late a couple of nights to do some work down in the lab where they routinely created viral vectors. He wondered to himself why he was putting in so much effort on something he couldn’t imagine actually trying.

  Russ had his telekinetic DNA in its viral vector and all ready to go. He really should stop this… whatever it was. A frivolous mental exercise. An obsession for which he only had a partial solution. After all, the only way to adequately test the DNA would be to administer it to a human. The only human who could adequately evaluate the effects of the DNA was himself. He’d already broken all kinds of rules, breaking one more wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if something about this DNA made the test subject sick…

  He didn’t really want to be the test subject.

  Then Charles River sent the lab 101 mice instead of 100 for Ameil’s next experiment. It wasn’t an uncommon mistake; Russ figured the guys who filled the orders just didn’t count all that carefully when they were putting the mice in the shipping containers. Russ realized he could just give mouse #101 his virus and claim that he just put the mouse in as an “extra” in group C of Ameil’s study. Then he would say that mouse 101 died prematurely and it wouldn’t even foul up Ameil’s research.

  Mouse 101 turned out not to be a very good mouse anyway, getting sick and losing weight. Russ was frustrated; he would have to find another mouse to test the safety of the viral vector. He took the mouse down to sacrifice it. He had intended to kill it early anyway since it needed to be excluded from Ameil’s work. As he picked it up to put it in the CO2 chamber, he took one last look at it. For a moment he wondered if it could be sick because of the DNA insertion rather than just coincidentally. Could he have made an error in one of the steps intended to be sure that there was no viral DNA in the viral shells? Maybe the DNA I inserted combined with the viral DNA in some kind of…

  The sick mouse sneezed…

  Prologue

  The worldwide “super flu” pandemic has been traced back to a ‘case zero.’ Case zero was a Russell Phillips who worked as a research tech at the University of Pittsburgh. Although the laboratory where Phillips worked did use viral vectors for DNA insertion, Phillips apparently did not work in that part of the lab. It seems unlikely that anyone will ever determine whether Phillips might have associated with someone who actually did use viral vectors because the exceedingly high mortality of the super flu has resulted in the death of everyone who worked in that lab. Even the hospital at the University of Pittsburgh where Phillips first sought treatment is now an empty shell.

  It seems a moot point as this efficient viral killer has spread extremely rapidly and, no matter where it blossoms, it seems to kill approximately 95% of its victims. Somehow the virus got loose in the CDC and decimated the scientists there before they even began working on it. Medical facilities around the world have collapsed as physicians and researchers die or flee for their own lives.

  Experts predict that about half of the survivors of the virus will be killed by the collapse of civilization. If indeed the world’s population of 7 billion is reduced to 175,000,000, a population density not seen since about 1000 A.D., it seems unlikely that anyone will be interested in exactly who killed us all. They’ll just be trying to survive the end of civilization as we know it. Presumably, somed
ay, when civilization reestablishes itself, someone may be interested in these words.

  As I write this I’ve developed a headache and have started to cough…

  Chapter One

  Tarc stepped into the kitchen, carrying a full strap of firewood. He set it down; then bent to stack the pieces.

  Behind him Daussie quietly said, “Tarc, I’ll stack the wood if you’ll take these two plates to the big men by the fireplace.”

  Tarc rolled his eyes, “You’re the server. I do the grunt work.” She always claims she’s not strong enough to carry wood, he thought with irritation.

  His mother speared him with an eye, “Tarc, you take the plates to those two men. They’re… not nice people.”

  “If so, why do I have to deal with them?!”

  “Tarc!” She paused, frowning, then shook her head, “Just take it to them.”

  With a long suffering sigh, Tarc stood and turned. He grabbed the two plates of roast pork and potatoes and headed for the door. Behind him Daussie crouched over the firewood.

  Out in the main room of the tavern Tarc immediately saw the two men near the fireplace. Unkempt, they looked like they must be travelers. Something about their bearing made Tarc think they must once have been soldiers. However, the active soldiers that Tarc had seen looked much more professional than these men. Tarc approached their table and set down the two plates. To his astonishment, the big man reached a meaty paw out towards Tarc’s waist.

  The man’s hand stopped suddenly when he’d lifted his eyes enough to see who’d delivered the plates. “Hey,” he said, eyes narrowing, “where’s the cute little blonde?”

  Tarc had stepped back to avoid the hand. After a mental hiccough, he realized the man was talking about his sister! “Um, she’s working in the kitchen.”