Oracle

by Douglas E. Richards

  “She needs to die in the right way. Under the right circumstances. So if they leave together, capture them quickly and then knock her out. I’ll tell you where to deliver her. It will complicate the plans my human associates have made, but with a little improvisation, we should still be able to achieve our goal.”

  “Understood.”

  “And Tiparax,” added the commander, “if things do play out this way, I need you to knock her out gently. Without causing any obvious physical damage.”

  “Of course you do,” said Tiparax bitterly, not bothering to hide his disappointment.

  4

  Anna Abbott was about to continue speaking when the waiter returned with their main courses, each a colorful work of art sitting in the middle of a large white plate, a fairly standard canvas used by gourmet chefs to make the various bright garnishes and colorful sauce drizzles used in their creations pop against the snowy background.

  Professor Tom Vega waited as patiently as he could for Anna to sample her main course, bourbon pecan chicken, and chase it with a swallow of red wine, never taking his eyes from her, and leaving his own meal untouched.

  Anna nodded. “Okay,” she began, “here goes nothing. I’ll just come out with it. My recipe for success. Where is a drum roll when you need one?”

  Vega’s face remained impassive. This professor was an odd duck, but her instincts continued to indicate that he was harmless, and very interested in what she had to say.

  “My secret is simple,” said Anna. “I’ve learned to hone and trust my intuition.”

  Vega’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond.

  “But that’s just the punchline,” she added. “There’s a lot more to it than you might imagine.”

  “I’m sure there is,” he said evenly.

  “It goes without saying that this is a discussion,” said Anna. “So feel free to interrupt with questions when you have them.”

  “Thank you. May I ask one now?”

  “You just did,” she said with a grin, deciding she could at least amuse herself, even if her audience was a bit stone-faced. “But feel free to ask another,” she said, trying to keep a straight face.

  The professor proceeded as if she hadn’t even spoken. “How long have you been relying on this, ah . . . intuition of yours?” he asked.

  Anna sighed. “Since the evening my parents were murdered. We had just come home from the movies, and were about to enter the house, when I got this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like something wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my mind was screaming at me not to let my parents go inside. I looked around, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Yet something was. I just felt this dread, this unease.”

  “Did you try to warn your parents?”

  “I did. I told them we couldn’t go in. But I couldn’t explain why. Since I was only seven, they chalked it up to an overactive imagination. And who could blame them?”

  She paused, remembering, and then drained half of her goblet of wine. “So they told me that everything was fine,” she continued, “and promised we’d all be okay. Then they tried to humor me. They said that they would go inside and check it out. They’d leave me in the closed garage for just a minute, and then come get me when they made sure the coast was clear.

  “I told them this wasn’t good enough, that they couldn’t go inside, even to check it out, but even I was beginning to question myself. I had no reason for feeling the way I felt. So when they assured me that I was worried about nothing, and insisted that I wait there while they checked it out, I finally agreed.”

  Vega nodded soberly. “That is truly horrible,” he said, not needing her to spell out what had happened next. “Do you think that leaving you behind saved your life?”

  “It’s unclear. I won’t describe the incident. But I did end up hiding in the garage. If I had been with them in the house, would the intruders really have killed a seven-year-old girl? Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Her eyes became moist. “But even if they had chosen to spare me,” she continued somberly, “if I had entered with my parents, I would have seen them being killed. Losing them the way I did was traumatic enough. I can’t even imagine the basket case I would have become had this played out differently.”

  Anna frowned and drained the remaining wine in her glass. “But that’s the last I’ll be talking about this,” she said. “The key is that this incident led me to have faith in my gut more than anything else ever could have. From then on, I began to trust my intuition, even if it was faint and vague. And it has served me well.”

  The professor quickly swallowed the forkful of swordfish he had taken while she was speaking. “Surely there must be more to it than just this,” he said.

  “Plenty more,” said Anna. “And don’t call me Shirley,” she deadpanned, unable to resist.

  Thomas Vega’s stony expression remained, just as she had now come to expect.

  “I’m not trying to minimize what you’re telling me,” he said, “but this isn’t much of a revelation. It’s not out of the mainstream. It’s the very definition of mainstream. Every detective who ever lived claims to rely on their gut when they’re working cases. So what makes your intuition different than theirs? Better than theirs?”

  “Because I make use of true intuition,” replied Anna, “while they only scratch the surface. They trust their conscious mind to make observations and draw conclusions. If a suspect is shifty, or is sweating in a cool room, that makes them suspicious. Of course it does. They think they’re using intuition, and they are to a very small degree. But they’re mostly relying on indicators that they’re consciously aware of.”

  “And you?”

  “I rely on indicators that I’m unaware of. The unconscious is where the magic happens. Relying on conscious awareness to guide you is only marginally effective. Other detectives will go on about using their gut, but they use it much less than they think, and they fool themselves about how helpful it is. Most detectives think they have a keen sense of when someone is lying. But studies have shown that they’re not much better at catching lies than the average person on the street.”

  “Are you saying that you are?”

  “Yes!” she said firmly. “Much better. Their intuition helps them very little. Because their hunches are almost entirely rooted in conscious observation, conscious logic, conscious connecting of the dots. I, on the other hand, give myself over to my unconscious.”

  “I see,” said the professor.

  Anna shook her head. “Of course you don’t. Which is why I never discuss this with others. Because it sounds mystical. But it isn’t. It’s pure science. But few have the interest, or patience, to allow me to fully explain.”

  “I wouldn’t care if it was all mystical,” said Vega. “For someone with your track record, if you told me your secret was traveling to other dimensions to consult with elves, I’d take you seriously. So please continue.”

  The briefest of smiles flashed over Anna’s face and then vanished. “When I was thirteen,” she said, “I began researching intuition. By then, it had served me well for many years. I vowed to learn everything I could about it. Was it just voodoo? Magic? Or was it not even a real thing? Maybe I was just fooling myself, remembering when my intuition was right, and discounting when it was wrong. I started researching this topic then, and I’ve never stopped. So while I don’t have any formal training in neuroscience, I’ve become quite the armchair expert.”

  “So you believe intuition falls under the category of neuroscience?”

  Anna swallowed another forkful of pecan chicken as the waiter came over and refilled her goblet of wine. “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” she continued when the waiter left. “And it falls under psychology as well. I wrote a piece about the powers of intuition many years ago for a psychology blog, just before I joined the force. But after that I made it a point to never delve into this subject matter, or disclose to others just how potent a force intuition has been in my lif
e. And I’ve never shared the uncanny successes I’ve had with it, even in the piece I wrote. When I told people about it as a kid, most thought I was a nut, or just trying to get attention. I’d have had better luck telling them I could perform witchcraft.”

  “Then thank you for sharing this now,” said Vega earnestly. “I’m honored.”

  “Don’t be. I’m only doing this because my intuition is telling me that I should.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” said Vega with just the hint of a smile. “I’m liking your intuition already.”

  Anna studied her dinner companion for several seconds. You could say what you wanted about his limited sense of humor, but he was in awe of her solve rate, and relentlessly positive about her.

  “So let me start explaining the science of it for you,” she said finally. “The first and most important thing to know is that our unconscious minds are vastly superior to our conscious ones. Vastly.”

  Vega considered this statement. “Doesn’t unconscious mean asleep?”

  “Yes, but it’s also defined as the part of the mind that’s inaccessible to our consciousness. I often call it our hidden mind. While it operates in the shadows, it largely dictates everything about us. Behavior. Emotion. Beliefs. Actions. The word subconscious means something very similar, so I’ll go ahead and use this term from here on out.”

  Vega nodded.

  “Almost every one of us fools ourselves into believing we’re in charge,” continued Anna. “But we aren’t. Not really. The vast, vast majority of who we are and how we behave is governed by this hidden region of our brain. Our subconscious mind is a brilliant puppet master, calling the shots while keeping us blissfully unaware that its hand is up our back the whole time. A great idea comes to me and I say, ‘Wow, I’m a genius. Way to go, Anna.’ But most of the time, it isn’t Anna Abbott who came up with the idea. It was my subconscious mind, working on it for hours and days and feeding it to me from behind the scenes. And counting on me to take full credit.

  “And it’s not just eureka moments that stem from the subconscious, it’s countless everyday decisions. If you’re instructed to move either your right or left hand—your choice—an experimenter can tell from subconscious brain activity which hand you’re going to choose before you even know. There have been many such experiments demonstrating that countless decisions we’re certain we are making at the conscious level are really being made for us in our hidden minds.”

  “Why aren’t these experiments more widely known?” asked Vega.

  Anna shrugged. “I don’t know. But if you search the web for ‘does your subconscious mind make decisions’ you’ll find them for yourself. But it is widely known, at least, that our hidden minds take care of our breathing, the beating of our hearts, the sexual response, and so on.”

  “Surely the sexual response is driven by the conscious mind.”

  Anna grinned, but decided not to make the don’t call me Shirley joke again. “It isn’t,” she replied instead. “You can’t order up arousal on demand. If you’re standing over a bloody, maggot-infested carcass that stinks of rotting flesh, and your conscious mind orders your arm to move, it will move. Every time. But try ordering your sexual organ to become aroused while you’re gazing at a corpse, standing within a cloud of stench, and see what happens.”

  Vega’s face contorted into a look of pure disgust. “I see your point.”

  “We have little conscious control of what causes us to become sexually aroused. But a rotting corpse is most likely to cause us to become repulsed. Arousal, revulsion, fear—these things just happen. We aren’t in charge. And if we had to consciously think about breathing in and out, making our hearts beat, and so on, we’d be unable to focus on anything else. So all of this machinery is hardwired in.”

  The professor nodded. “Go on,” he said.

  “Almost a third of the neurons in your brain are devoted to vision,” she continued. “A third. Everything you see enters your brain upside down, backwards, and two-dimensional—with a large blind spot to boot. But you don’t see things this way. Your mighty hidden mind adjusts it for you. But if you think that’s a neat trick, here’s one that’s even better. There are specially designed fun-house glasses that flip the world upside down. If you were to wear these glasses continuously, at first you’d be helpless. But after a few days of wearing them, your hidden mind would completely remap the input, spatially, and flip the world right-side up for you again.”

  “Seems hard to believe,” said Vega.

  “I suspect the experimenters were surprised, as well.”

  “So the bottom line,” said the professor, “is that there’s lots of magic going on under the hood that we’re completely unaware of.”

  “Exactly,” said Anna. “But not just unaware of. Unable to affect one way or another. But I’ll say more about that later. First, let me give you one more example of the power of our hidden minds. Imagine speaking quickly for several minutes. Now think about the hundreds of perfectly choreographed movements your teeth, lips, and tongue have to make at lightning speed to make this happen—which you aren’t even aware of. Why not? Because your subconscious mind takes care of the complex task of forming words for you,” she added. “Effortlessly. If you had to consciously control all of these mouth movements, you’d never get a sentence out.”

  Vega nodded thoughtfully. “After a lifetime of speaking,” he said, “I have to admit that I’ve never really thought about the complex mechanics of it before.”

  “Few do,” said Anna. “Reading, touch-typing, playing the piano. All very similar. All completely handled by the subconscious once you’ve achieved a certain level of proficiency.

  “Our brains contain over a hundred billion neurons,” she continued, “allowing for a nearly infinite number of potential states. Orders of magnitude more than our most sophisticated computers. Our minds put the greatest supercomputers to shame. It doesn’t seem that way, because we aren’t consciously wired for math, and computers are. But when it comes to pattern recognition, figuring out how to catch a baseball, monitoring our environment, and versatile, general intelligence, our minds are unmatched. Unfortunately, many of these capabilities reside in our subconscious, beyond our conscious reach.”

  She paused to let this sink in. “And even in math, our subconscious minds are quite accomplished. If the ability to calculate square roots had been important for our survival, had helped early man hunt the mastodon, I’m sure our hidden minds would have established a pathway to feed these answers to us. But we do have impressive math abilities. They’re just hidden. You’d be amazed by how many complex calculations the subconscious minds of our primitive ancestors had to make to determine the proper trajectories of the spears they were throwing.”

  Anna took another sip of wine. “We get a glimpse of the brain’s mathematical prowess from autistic savants,” she continued. “Some can multiply huge numbers, or take square roots, almost instantly. Whereas we have to strain and concentrate with our conscious minds to do even simple calculations, they can tap into their subconscious, solving what to us are impossible problems with effortless ease. They just instantly see the answer.”

  “Excellent point,” said Vega. “And something else I never stopped to think about before.”

  The detective raised her eyebrows. “And even this is just scratching the surface of what the subconscious can do. Our hidden mind knows endless things, has endless capabilities, that we can’t even begin to fathom. It has an almost god-like ability to recognize patterns and draw connections and conclusions within a mountain of seemingly unrelated data. And our hidden minds are far more observant than we are, and far more astute.

  “But here’s the tragedy. We have a rocket engine under the hood that we can barely tap. Because while our hidden mind is far superior to our conscious mind, we have no access. We can’t direct it, or control it. It’s completely walled off from us.”

  Anna shrugged. “Now, a minuscule percentage of people do
have a tiny crack in the wall that separates their conscious and subconscious minds,” she added. “Which explains the math abilities of autistic savants, for example. They can somehow peer through this crack and instantly pull out the square root of any number, which their subconscious has effortlessly calculated for them. But you and I can’t.”

  “So why are we built this way?” said Vega. “Why have such a powerful engine if we can’t tap it?”

  “Sucks, doesn’t it?” said Anna. “But let’s talk about whys another time. For now, let’s just accept that this is the way it is. This is the way our minds are built. Our hidden mind, our subconscious, is flat out astonishing. It excels at nearly everything.”

  She frowned. “With the one big exception that I just noted—it’s horrible at communicating with us. Yes, it excels at controlling us. At dictating our opinions, likes, who we’re attracted to, and many of our actions and ideas. But this isn’t the same as two-way communication. If it wants to actually tell us precisely what it’s figured out, it has little ability to do so. It can sometimes find a path to reach us through dreams, which are a very poor and unreliable channel of communication. And it can trigger clammy palms, a sick feeling in the gut, an increase in heart rate, and so on. Pathetically weak attempts that most of us choose to ignore. But that’s about it.”

  “I see,” said Vega thoughtfully. “So this is your definition of intuition. Inside our heads, we have a brilliant stranger who knows a lot more than we do, and who draws better and faster conclusions. But it’s a stranger who isn’t able to explain what it knows, or how it knows it.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “A fascinating theory.”

  Anna shook her head. “Not just theory,” she replied. “Fact. Based on any number of observations and experiments. For example, you can have study participants repeatedly choose cards from four decks, with rewards given for high cards. And you can rig the decks so that two are markedly better than the other two. Based on tiny heart rate and perspiration changes when they reached for the bad decks, scientists discovered that subjects’ hidden minds, on average, figured out which two were the bad ones after choosing only ten cards. But their conscious minds didn’t figure it out until after they had chosen eighty.”