by Jeremy Flagg
“They’re tracing,” shouted another.
Spoofing. Redirecting. Ghosting. Breaking down virtual walls was nothing new to them. Thousands of files were exposed for the taking. No doubt one of his new found companions attempted to back up the sensitive files.
His computer highlighted a file. Small crossbones appeared next to its name. His virus detection popped up a notification. “Trojan files,” he mumbled to himself.
“We have Trojans,” Ned yelled to the crowd. As fast as he yelled, David sent a virus script to the group through a virtual portal.
“They’re not going to find it,” David mumbled.
“What are you saying?”
Ned’s voice tapered off as the room went white. David’s muscles spasmed, tensing hard enough that he fell out of the chair onto the ground. Bright colors flashed in and out of focus until all that remained was a bright blur. The pain coursed through his brain, the fire behind his eyes seeming to spread through his muscles. Nails scraped the warped floorboards, searching for something to ground him.
The gym grew distant, as if he were remembering them from a horror movie. The agony subsided, gone faster than it started. There was no sound, no sensations brushing against his skin, no light reaching his eyes. His mind remained functioning, his thoughts grasping at what was happening even if his body seemed to be dead.
I’m dead. A stroke perhaps?
He only had moments before the lack of oxygen started eating away at his brain. If they could revive him, he had a chance to survive as the person he once was.
Pounding on his chest brought him hurdling upward into a sitting position. Light blasted his eyes and every click of a mouse sounded like hammering. The air raced into his lungs, forcing him to gasp loudly.
“Don’t stop.”
Ariel. The mentalist hovered over him, her hand making tiny movements. His body rose from the ground, each of his limbs gently cradled as she set him back into his chair. She closed the distance between them, inspecting his eyes. “You had a seizure.” She lifted his lids to inspect more closely. “You—”
“I was dead for one minute and sixteen seconds.”
“Very precise of you.”
He reached for his keyboard.
“No, you need to leave.” She spoke as if it was more of a fact than a command.
As he continued typing, she backed away. His fingers touched the keys lightly, grazing them just enough to register with the computer. He moved faster, determined to prove himself to the mentalist. Even Ned eyed him from his own keyboard, unsure of what to say.
David attempted to put his death aside. He had stared down death, and lived. The world seemed brighter, the air crisper, as if his senses were experiencing it all for the first time.
Scanning the screen monitor, he understood there was no archive of footage. If it existed, they were smart, storing it offline, away from any technology capable of granting him access. Instead of seeking Eleanor, he turned the computer’s attention toward the name “Ariel.” Where Eleanor seemed like a ghost, an abundance of data existed based on the mentalist.
“She was part of a government project.” At David’s words, Ned’s eyes popped up from his screen, his right eyebrow arched, giving away his curiosity. “Ariel belonged to a project authorized by the president. She was one of them...”
“They found us,” a woman furthest from them bellowed.
The mentalist soared upward. “Take what you can and go. They’ll have cops here within two minutes, the military within five.”
“How do we find you?” asked one of the hackers.
David ignored the woman barking orders. A double click of the track pad on his laptop opened a video. He couldn’t place the location, but he recognized the young girl in it. In an identical pose, suspended from the air, she jerked weapons from the hands of security guards. The weapons disassembled, each screw deftly pulled from its socket, every part levitating in front of the face of its owner.
Ned grabbed his computer and tossed it into his backpack. “We need to get out of here.”
The room was almost vacant. The hackers ran through the back, computers under their arms as they bust through exit doors into the alley. Sirens blared. Their screeching, undulating pitch forced David to cover his ears. The flashing red and blue lights from outside lit up the windows of the gymnasium, casting shadows back and forth.
“They’re here,” Ned mouthed.
Two officers proceeded through the doors, their weapons drawn. A younger female led the charge, her older partner covering her rear. The moment they entered the gym, they appeared confused. David couldn’t hear their yelling, just watched as their mouths moved, their guns pointing in his general direction. The younger officer didn’t see the mentalist, but the slack jaw of her companion gave away his observation.
Both officers were hurled, seeming to be sucked backward by the lobby itself. The doors slammed shut and several tables slid in place to prevent the officers from coming back in. The sound of steel bending broke through the sirens as the doorframe crushed in on itself, the metal wedging in a way that would make the entrance useless.
“I said get out.”
High in the rafters, a man with a rifle pointed it at Ariel. As quickly as the red appeared on her collar bone he pulled the trigger. David screamed. “No!”
He expected her shoulder to be removed, an explosion of flesh and bones. Instead, a narrow object projected itself into her body. Ariel winced at the dart piercing her skin. A growl spilled out of her lips as she whipped her hand backward. The man perched near the ceiling flew forward, landing on the ground and skidding to a stop.
Ned ducked, hiding partially under the table, motioning for David to follow. David understood that she would only be able to protect them for so long. The space between her blinks started to shorten and each time her eyes closed, he worried they wouldn’t open again. One moment she floated several feet in the air, the next she collapsed on the floor. He assumed the tranquilizer had been dosed with fentanyl, enough to make her sluggish but not to put her to sleep.
An open terminal on the computer called to him. He typed away, his fingers moving quicker than he imagined possible. Dispatch. GPS. Broadcast. Distributed to every cop car in the city, a set of coordinates directed police cruisers away from their location. A few moments later he successfully changed the street name on all major GPS systems, making it impossible to locate their address via computer.
“I altered the GPS coordinates. We’re safe from cops.”
“David,” Ned said from under the table. “She just killed a man and assaulted two cops.”
He looked to his friend cowering under his plastic fortress. David found it difficult to see the young man who had once introduced him to retro computer games. Ned was gone. David could only see the kid’s face. His eyes were dilated, lids opened past typical size. Eyebrows arched. Together the facial expression read urgency, need, a desire to be gone. The two hundred hairs between the two eyebrows measured one third of an inch, working in unison to tempt David.
The information from a single motion overwhelmed David. He staggered back a step, confused at what his brain had told him. With his eyes closed, the room registered twenty degrees cooler than his body temperature. Based on the angles of the sound reaching his ears, he estimated Ariel at twenty feet from his position. Her moan touched upon 440 hertz, almost maintaining a perfect C.
Clapping sounded from across the room. A man about the same age as Ariel entered the court area. His slow applause dripped with arrogance. David opened his eyes and found the world around him vibrating. Data. Each of his senses absorbed more data than he comprehended; now it seemed as if he was acutely aware of each bit of information.
“You can come back with me, Ariel. The offer for you to join our ranks...”
“No...”
David stepped away from Ned, moving closer to the man and Ariel. There was no doubt, the man with a perfectly groomed goatee had a gun tucked away under h
is left arm. His posture relayed certainty and arrogance. His superiority over the fallen mentalist spoke volumes about what kind of man he was.
Do not resist me, Ariel.
David heard distant whispers from the man. His mouth didn’t move. His eyebrows arched, waiting for a response to a question. A conversation between the two occurred and but not a single word was spoken.
“You’re a telepath,” David said loud enough to grab the man’s attention.
“Ariel, are you recruiting children to do your dirty work?”
“Run,” she groaned. “You can’t—”
“Can’t what?” the man asked. Head cocked to the side, eyebrow raised, lips slightly parted, he watched as David approached. The echo of the room, the warmth, the aroma of cologne mixed with musty air assaulted his senses. Every one of them was on fire, absorbing every bit of information possible. Where he might have once ignored the faint scent or missed the reverberation of sound, his brain processed them all.
Studying the man’s muscles, his stance, and the slight twitch of his hand produced a nearly one-hundred probability that he was about to be shot at. The man would draw the gun, but where would he aim? Data pulsed through David’s synapses to produce a dozen scenarios, each of them more probable than the last.
The weapon flashed and David moved before the bang sounded. His head tilted to the left and with a slight step, he heard the whiz of the bullet zip past his ear. If it had been twenty-four hours earlier, his heart would have seized and he’d have pissed himself at the close call. Now, the proximity to death didn’t faze him as he reflected on the margin of error.
“What the hell?”
“You missed,” David said in a matter of fact tone.
The gun rose once more, the barrel level with his face. Every prediction said this bullet would connect. The man would wait for his attempt to dodge and then fire. The element of surprise wouldn’t protect him again. The most he could do was minimize the probability of death. The firearm jerked from the man’s hand and flew across the room, skidding along the floor.
“Fuck you, Franklin,” Ariel said.
He drew back his foot and kicked her in the chest, sending her rolling onto her back, her eyes closing. Her head went limp. David assumed the telekinetic had finally fallen victim to the tranquilizer.
“What are you?” Franklin asked. His eyes narrowed as he studied David.
David thought it ironic that the telepath had to pose the question. Textbooks said they heard every thought. David wondered if the man could listen to his thoughts, if he was aware of every detail David experienced.
David mustered all the bravado he could and said, “I am giving you a chance to leave.” “Child, I don’t think you understand who I am. Stronger men than you have knelt before me.”
“Stronger, perhaps.”
Franklin’s face twitched, almost as if he winced in pain. David realized the man was incapable of violating his mind. As David turned his newfound abilities to the mentalist, he found there were a million variables relating to the unknowns of telepathy. How fast could they read thoughts? Did they process each thought? How do thoughts travel in space? The more questions David asked, the more his brain formulated statistics for him to analyze the situation. Ultimately it dawned on him why mentalists frightened the rest of the world.
Franklin’s reliance on his abilities and the posh manner in which he dressed gave David a good chance of being able to best him physically. He continued approaching until they were within reach of one another. The man’s fist flew harmlessly past his face and his knee missed by inches. Still, Franklin was a better fighter than expected. Recalculating the odds, David remained certain he had the ability to beat him.
Franklin stepped backward. “You’re a psychic?”
It made sense. David found his brain registering the information from his senses, making predictions based on data they interpreted. From the sound of Franklin’s voice to the manner in which he hunched over, he understood there was an edge of fear wrapping itself about the man. Something about psychics scared him.
David lunged. Right fist blocked as expected. Left shoved down. Franklin didn’t counter with a knee to the gut. Instead, his right hand latched on to the back of David’s neck and pulled him closer, their foreheads now pressed against one another.
“I can hear you in there,” the man hissed.
“Let go.” At one point David would have flinched at the touch of some unknown man. He frequently had to remind himself not to recoil at his mother’s touch. Now, the unwanted contact had less impact on his emotional state and more to do with the probability that Franklin’s telepathy strengthened through touch.
“Telepathy is like listening to the static on the television. We’re not so different, you and I. I have to filter out the noise or I’d go crazy.”
David struggled, but the man’s grip only tightened as his other hand rested the side of his face. There were no statistics, no numbers, just a vast sea of unknowns presenting themselves to him.
He staggered backward as the man released him. Moments ago he stood in the gym of an abandoned building, and now he occupied a room with no walls, no floor, and no ceiling, just an infinite white space. Despite his senses telling him they had transported to a sterile room, he knew something was wrong and at the middle of it, the telepath.
“Welcome to—”
“A construct created by your telepathy which you’re forcing me to partake in? Is this the metaphorical space between us? Did your mind create it or does it exist on its own?”
“What are you, David?”
“You can read my thoughts now?” The more experience he gathered from Franklin, the more the equations filled themselves in. “Of course you can, this space allows you to focus your abilities on just me.”
“You’re not a psychic.”
David shook his head. “I’m sure if you gave me a few minutes I could predict the future.”
“Can you see if you get out of this alive?”
Variables rendered the question unanswerable.
The man moved faster. His clenched knuckles, covered in silver metal, connected with David’s jaw, knocking the spit from his mouth. He spun with the impact of the blow, falling to the ground. Blood trickled from his lip. He wondered if any of his teeth had been loosened enough to fall out.
A glint of steel flashed as a dagger filled Franklin’s grip. David was certain the brass knuckles weren’t there before, nor that he had a knife within reach until now. The blade dragged across his cheek and his initial reaction was to hiss and pull back. He should have felt pain, perhaps fear, but something didn’t register correctly with his senses.
“It’s not real,” he breathed.
David studied the man. About the telepath, a bright red aura flashed. The light leapt from the man, driving into David’s chest. Pain seared through his body for a fraction of a second. None of it was real. Telepathy had the potential to fool the mind into thinking it was in distress, at least the average mind.
“You’re not human. Nobody has been capable of resisting me.”
“Can’t read my mind—”
“I said resist, imbecile.” The light concentrated around the telepath’s hand; tiny sparks of red flared in his palm. With a flick of the wrist, energy jumped forward like before. David dove to the side, trying to avoid the momentary pain. He didn’t have time to climb to his feet as Franklin lifted him by his armpits, raising him into the air.
“David Stiles. Curious. You support this woman—”
David lifted his legs and slammed the heels against Franklin’s chest. He didn’t budge. The laws of physics would have sent him flying across the room. Here, wherever that might be, did not adhere to principles of the natural world.
“A letter from Eleanor?” Franklin’s free hand ignited. Without hesitating he shoved his fingers into David’s scalp, digging through the mirage of flesh and bone until he reached the brain. Waves of pain washed through David as he attempte
d resisting. With time he would be able to fight back, but for now, even his new abilities couldn’t compete with the experience of the telepath.
Heat splattered across his face. He stood in the gymnasium again. The hole in Franklin’s face, just left of where his eye should be, exposed bits of skull and brain. Franklin’s body suddenly became heavy, sliding down David’s chest. He pushed the man’s upright corpse off to one side, letting him fall with a thud on the ground.
Blood streaked along the ground, littered with chunks of bone and grey matter. David turned, tracing the trajectory of the splatter. The gun fell from Ned’s outstretched hands. His friend shook uncontrollably. They had come to change the world and Ned found himself a killer.
“You saved my life,” David said, surprised by the outcome.
“We need to go.” Ned’s voice trembled more than his hands. His horrified facial expression faded as he stared blankly at the dead body.
David agreed. Ned would continue to fall into shock and there was no telling if Franklin had friends waiting for him. David eyed the woman on the floor, scared of what craziness she introduced them to. Whatever she had started, David understood nothing would be the same again. As he estimated the distance of the sirens, he knew something had changed that evening.
“Get Ariel,” he said.
He stepped up to a deserted computer and stared at the keyboard. His fingers speedily clacked away. He opened a terminal and sent a message any of the hackers would find if they went looking.
“We survived. We will persist. The rebellion begins today. - David.” He eyed the message for a moment. Everybody needed hope, faith their cause could survive. For all they knew Ariel had died. He hit the delete key several times, removing his name. With several clicks of the keyboard he realized he joined a resistance.
“...Dav5d.”
Jasmine
February 13, 1992
My Dearest Jasmine,
I have seen a series of events and plucked on the threads of destiny to reach this far after my death. Of all the Children I’ve contacted, only you have a murky future. You can question my intentions or the paradox of foreseeing my own death. Ever the soldier, I can assure you, you are indeed human. Do not let the burden of the present prevent your future from unfolding.
