BRAINSTORM Page 30

  “Robert, listen,” Sunny said. “You wanted to hear more of what I know. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about you and Dan.” She tried to sit up but fell back down. I helped her, and she sat on the edge of the table, holding her head as I steadied her with one hand. “You two weren’t merely experiments for Vanzandtz back in college. You exhibited talent, however uncultivated, in all the tested fields of psychic abilities. You not only showed a high level of telepathic, but also telekinetic power. But what both of you really excelled at was remote viewing. Do you know what that is?”

  “We don’t have time, now, Sunny,” I told her and gently forced her to lie back on the table.

  “We don’t have time for me not to tell you,” she said as I went to the back of the door. “Do you know?”

  I watched the knob as Sunny trained her last two bullets on it. “I think so.”

  “Dan soon became the best remote viewer the U.S. government had. He was so good, the DIA brought him into their Grill Flame project, and he was their top RV. He could do anything, see the future, the past, transcend space and time to distant sites.”

  I was astonished and unbelieving. “Sunny, I don’t believe that nonsense. It’s fairy-tale stuff.”

  “Believe it. It happened.”

  “How’s it going to help us now? Dan isn’t here.”

  “But don’t you see? You were just as good as Dan. You can do what he did.”

  “Okay, say I am. What am I going to do, grab a hold of you and sweep us away to some time in the past or future, so that we don’t get killed?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Only your consciousness travels—sees. Your body stays here.”

  “Great, our bodies stay here and get shot full of holes while our consciousnesses fly off to Shangri-La.”

  “No, I don’t know how it can be useful,” she said and seemed to consider it. Her eyes lit up. “How about if you go into the future a few seconds, maybe half a minute, and view what will happen?”

  “What, watch us die in the future, then relive it in the present? Even if I could, that’s ridiculous.”

  “No, see the future and then prevent it in the present.”

  “Could Dan do that?”

  “I don’t know. When he was with Grill Flame, he said he could see the future, but couldn’t affect it because he had no physical existence in that dimension. But if we knew the future now, exactly what will happen, we can react to change it. Then, the future that originally appears to you won’t happen.”

  “God, this is crazy!”

  “I know it sounds nuts, but what do we have to lose? You can do it, just like Dan did.”

  “Okay, so how do I do this remote viewing stuff?”

  “Since you don’t remember, this is really going to sound insane to you. Just go along with me, okay—and know it works, that it’s been done thousands of times. The U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions developing it.”

  “Now, you’re really making me skeptical.”

  “Just listen. The CIA called SCANATE—scanning by coordinate. An assistant—me—selects a time and place to view and assigns it two sets of numbers or coordinates. The numbers actually have little importance. They’re mostly a point for the viewer’s concentration. The viewer then applies his full concentration to those numbers. The talented remote viewer enters a state of total consciousness and concentration and his psyche transcends into a dimension without physical being. It’s a place where time and space have no importance. Nothing he sees really exists but are only symbols for information he can view. Dan told me that what most advanced viewers see is what they call the universal matrix, generally appearing as a three dimensional grid of numbers, letters and symbols. They can be thought of as anchors or reference points. He finds the numbers the assistant has assigned to the target scene and is able to access that time and place to view, not physically but more as an audience to what is like a virtual reality movie. Although he can touch, feel, taste, hear and see, he cannot actually move anything, or affect anything in that dimension.”

  This was all too far out. What had already happened to me over the past eighteen hours had been incredible, and now this—to step completely away from reality, no matter how bizarre it had become, and transcend into a different dimension?

  Sunny said, “We’re wasting time. Let’s try it. Fast forward. The numbers are four, eight, seven, nine and three, five, two, six. Concentrate.”

  * * *

  It is as if some other part of my consciousness has taken control, and my brain is on autopilot. Without willing to, I find my concentration on those numbers and forget about the deadly world around me. The speaking of the numbers seems to have turned a key and unlocked a door to a place I evidently have been many times before. I feel my head spinning, and I know I am somehow putting myself into a kind of trance. I picture the numbers as if they are in front of me, about an inch tall, three dimensional and illuminated. They float in a sort of black, empty plasma. They begin gyrating, as do I. I rotate slowly at first. Then I become part of a whirling vortex, being sucked into a tiny point of light, which seems miles away, and I compare the experience to that of a mouse in a flushing toilet.

  “What do you see?” I hear Sunny’s voice ask, echoing from somewhere behind the eternal swirling current. It sounds as though she is speaking into a huge steel tank.

  Feeling as though I am under nine Gs of pressure, my voice strains. “Nothing. Darkness. I’m in a whirlpool.”

  The G forces seem to diminish quickly, and I feel only a slight dizziness as I twirl, drawing ever nearer the center. I reach out and grab the gyrating numbers, pulling them protectively into my chest. The luminous figures cling against me like Velcro on felt as I pass through the middle of the vortex. When I come out of it and into total emptiness, a rush unlike any I’ve ever felt surges through my body. My extremities, the tips of my toes, the ends of my fingers, the top of my head, all tingle as if being misted with tiny ice crystals.

  On this end of the vortex is complete peace, quiet. I am floating on what seems to be an invisible cushion of air. In the distance, an object appears, luminous, drifting like a weightless scarf in a gentle breeze. Or no, more as if it is floating in a clear and day-lit sea.

  “Beautiful,” I say without intending to verbalize.

  “What?” comes Sunny’s voice, again from another place, not in the same dimension as I.

  As the drifting entity nears, I recognized a human form, a woman, angelic, and ethereal.

  “An angel,” I say. “A woman.”

  She soon pauses in front of me, and I note her lovely dark hair and the high cheekbones of a Native American Indian. Her garments are airy and near transparent, and the only sort of jewelry she wears is a necklace made of beads. I find familiarity in her eyes, and she smiles and places her hand lightly on mine. I feel a warmth there, but no pressure or weight.

  “Robert,” Sunny says, “are you okay?”

  “Fine, fine,” I answer feeling almost annoyed at Sunny’s interruption. “I think she wants me to go with her—she wants to take me somewhere.”

  Sunny’s voice is eager. “Go with her, Robert. She’ll help you.”

  I abide and float with her in a euphoric feeling of weightlessness. What seems like long minutes pass as we transcended from the vortex, through a constant aurora borealis of shimmering colors. I cannot yet see it, but I am sure she is leading me to the grid of which Sunny has spoken.

  The dark but friendly seraph’s lips do not move, but in my mind I hear her mellifluous words, “I am your friend. In this place nothing exists, yet you will find all answers. It is neither a temporal rift, nor a warp in time. Nor is it a dimension. It is nonexistent except in the mind, and your trips to this place will be measured in seconds, although it may seem to you they last for hours. The more often you visit, the easier and quicker it will become. But remember, your ability to come here is a gift from a higher order for a higher purpose. It is for that purpose you will find answers
to your questions, understand the thoughts of others, transcend space and time—but only for that purpose, and at the choosing of the higher order.”

  She lets go of my hand and motions to the universal matrix before me, and it is as Sunny has said. Enormous. I think of it as a huge library where all that ever was and all that ever will be is filed—a tremendous card catalogue for an omniscient library that is organized into a celestial Dewy Decimal System.

  “My God!” I exclaim.

  “What?” Sunny asks, seeming concerned, perhaps alarmed. “What is it?”

  “I see it. I’m there. It’s huge! Beautiful. Brilliant light. Like a thousand main streets at Christmas.”

  The matrix spreads out in three directions to eternity, and I am floating in cosmic nothing at the intersecting corner of the three never-ending planes. The symbols are perhaps six inches in size and nearly three feet apart. But I know this is only as my mind interprets it.

  When I glance back at the ethereal spirit, she smiles, and I hear, “Tell my love it was not his fault, that I wait for him eagerly when his time also comes. But before that is to pass, he has much to share with the material world.”

  For the first time, I notice on her necklace of colorful beads is a small arrowhead—and a name comes to my mind, gently placed there as if laid by God on a cushion of silk. Moonfeather. She disappears like a doused light, and still in awe of the lovely entity, I scan about to see where she has gone.

  “Robert, you okay?” Sunny’s voice says, snapping me out of my wonder, invading the peace of the universal matrix.

  I go about the business before me. “Yes, Sunny. I’m starting my search.”

  As I hunt through the numbers, I find I can use them for handholds and pull myself along through the incredible matrix. Almost without thought, I come to a group of familiar numbers, and I pause considering them.

  “I think I found them,” I say and pull the clinging numbers from my chest. They correspond to those surrounding me.

  Sunny calls out, “Take the—”

  I interrupt her, “I know what to do.”

  When I fling my small numerals at the larger figures, they disintegrate in a brilliant flash of light, creating a vertical pool of a reflective, mercury-like liquid in front of me. Perhaps through some sort of instinct or past experience I cannot remember, I am drawn to the pool, face first. Carefully keeping my hands on the numbers at each side, I push my head into it and discover it is not a pool at all but a sort of atomically thin membrane, a doorway into what I seek.

  What I see is terrifying.

  Chapter 30

  The three men rush into the room, their M-16s blazing. The bullets strike and tear at our bodies. Both Sunny and I fall onto the floor, and blood oozes from our corpses.

  I yank my head out of the future and back into the ether’s universal matrix, my eyes wide, pulse racing, breathing rapid. The experience has been so real. I have witnessed my own execution. I wonder how soon this reality will come. I have been groping through the grid work of the matrix for what feels like hours, but I wonder if any time has passed at all. I hope not. If I were to go back to my own time, will I find myself already dead? The thought becomes too mind-boggling.

  Sunny’s voice calls out from the other side, reality, and I am somewhat relieved. “Robert, what’s happening? We have to hurry!”

  I cautiously edge my face back into the portal to the near future. Again, I see the same scene, the three men bolting into the room. This time, I notice the first man comes through with his gun pointed to the far corner away from Sunny, the second comes through pointing at Sunny and the third turns toward me behind the door. Sunny fires her small pistol, but the bullet strikes the first man’s body armor at the shoulder. Again, the bullets riddle our bodies, and we fall to the floor.

  This time, I withdraw my head more slowly, thoughtful of what I have seen.

  “I’m coming,” I tell Sunny, but I need one more look. For a last time, I peek into the future through the portal’s membrane. The first guard comes through, again aiming at the corner. Sunny’s bullet strikes him in the shoulder. The second man comes through, pauses briefly in the doorway, then steps in and fires at Sunny. I see that the only exposed part of his body, the only part unprotected and vulnerable to a bullet, is at the man’s throat. Still in the future vision, as I rush the man who is shooting Sunny, the third man comes through and fires half a magazine of M-16 rounds into my torso.

  Having seen enough, I jerk my head back from the future and grab at the large numbers around me, pulling and pushing. When I reach the outer-space-like void, I swim through the black nothingness toward the vortex, and it comes quickly. I thrust into the ethereal tornado, and there comes a blinding flash.

  * * *

  I found myself back behind the morgue door, Sunny lying on an autopsy table across the room.

  We had mere seconds. I had to decide immediately whether to attempt to take three lives—tell Sunny to shoot the second man in his exposed neck, or go against the odds and try to keep our lives without anyone else loosing theirs.

  I yelled, “Shoot level to the doorknob at the hand of the second man!”

  She frowned, and I knew she was trying to make sense of what I was saying as the door burst open. In that instant, I hoped she would not question what I had said and simply do it.

  The first man came through, his weapon pointed to the empty corner. The second man burst in, and Sunny’s gun reported as I went for the third guy’s rifle barrel, which was swinging toward me. I shoved the barrel up as he fired the rifle, the bullets striking the suspended ceiling above. With a kick to his armor-cupped groin, then the knife-edge of my right hand to his neck, he fell unconscious and easily surrendered his weapon. The second guard grasped his wounded hand and his rifle fell to the floor, as Sunny kept the small Beretta aimed at him. The first guard didn’t have a chance to bring his weapon to bear on us before I placed the muzzle of the automatic rifle I had just acquired against the back of his neck and told him, “Don’t.”

  Now what in the hell could we do with prisoners?

  I shoved the guy up against the wall, his face first, and he stood against it spread-eagle.

  What I realized when I looked at this man was unnerving. He was taller than I was, taller than Mike Wu, probably six three or so.

  As I pulled off his protective helmet, I told Sunny, “These aren’t the guys, Sunny. These aren’t the guys Mike Wu sent. They must have run into the others and were helping to find us.”

  I turned to my captive and got up real close and personal to the back of his head. I didn’t need the assault rifle I had in my hands to intimidate him, he probably knew that. Still it made me feel more secure.

  “What about it, dipshit?” I asked him. “Are the rest right outside?”

  He nodded slowly.

  Sunny cried out, “Fast forward.”

  As I look to the door, the doorknob turns.

  * * *

  I find myself in the eternal vortex of space and time once again, traveling through the ethereal gateway into the universal matrix. This time my trip through is accelerated, supercharged. As my spinning stops, the never-ending grid of symbols and figures appear before me, and I realize I have none of my own coordinating numerals for use in relating to my quest of the immediate future. I make the numbers up in my head, and they materialize in front of my eyes like the ones Sunny had given me before. I grab and pull frantically at the grid to find their match, hopeful, somehow, I can uncover the future and the key to stop what seems inevitable.

  I come upon my numbers quickly, drive my face through the reflective portal and begin to view what is to come. Again, a brilliant light flashes unexpectedly.

  Suddenly back in the morgue, I’m watching the door with a sort of ghost-like double vision. The morgue doorknob stops moving in the more opaque view, what I guess is real-time. But the door opens slightly in the ghostly one, which I figure is the future. A voice calls in the present, “Briggs, Carlso
n, you okay?”

  I elbow my prisoner. He knows exactly what I want him to say and the consequences of not obeying.

  “Yeah, we’re okay,” he says. “We got ‘em.”

  I see the door begin to open in the apparition—the future. A head pokes through, and I witness my own see-through, phantom-like arms bring up the M-16 in my hands and shoot at the intruder. Still in the future, they lob a hand grenade through the door, and it cracks onto the floor and explodes in a mighty burst. We are all dead in this blood-splattered and flesh-ripped future, and the double vision ends.

  * * *

  As the door opened in present time reality, I didn’t wait for a head to poke through to shoot. Instead, I pulled my captive from the wall and shoved him toward the face emerging from the doorway. I followed, rushing my prisoner nearly off his feet until we hit the edge of the slightly open door, and I forced him through. I grabbed our other prisoner—the one Sunny shot in the hand—and found a hand grenade hooked at his side. Pulling it free as the other two antagonists rolled out onto the hall floor, I shoved the injured one out the door. After yanking the pin out and tossing the grenade, the only thing I could hear was running feet.

  I went to Sunny and leaned over her body on the table protectively. She was groggy, listless. I felt something slip into my pocket. Without taking the time to check, I figured it was her pistol.

  “You might need this,” she said.

  “Brace yourself, Sunny,” I said, but her eyes were closed, and she didn’t respond. I hugged her tightly.

  * * *

  The explosion throws the door wide, and I feel myself falling toward the floor in slow motion. Once again, I enter the vortex passageway to the matrix.

  I spin rapidly. However, this time in my journey into the ether, Sunny comes with me as I clutch the autopsy table she lays on. We revolve wildly for minutes, hours, or perhaps only milliseconds, until the universal matrix appears before us. And I realize why I have returned.