Discovery (Science of Psionics Book #1) Page 3

  “Maybe I will, but not right now. I’ll have to let the one we’re currently experiencing settle into my skull before there can be any room for something even weirder,” she said, laughing. She looked thoughtful for a moment before continuing. “How are you handling this so calmly?”

  “You think I’m calm?” I asked with a sardonic laugh. “I almost left a brown stain on the seat of my chair when it first happened. If anything, I’m still in shock and will maybe settle down to a mere panic level in a few days… if I’m lucky.”

  She nodded in understanding. “I can relate to that, alright. In fact, I think I want to take a nice long walk to help me clear my head a bit.”

  “Go ahead, if you think you’ll be ok, but be extra careful. Mountain paths or county roads are dangerous when your head’s not screwed on straight.”

  She nodded vaguely in my direction, “Yeah, yeah.”

  “I mean it. I don’t want you walking off a cliff, or into traffic,” I chided.

  “Yes sir!” she replied, snapping me a quick salute. “I’m always careful, you’re the absentminded one.”

  “See that it remains that way then. I’ll do a bit more research while you’re gone, and maybe that’ll help me to focus better.”

  Wishing me luck, she left to go change into something more appropriate for a hike. Fifteen minutes later, I heard her go out the patio door. Spinning my chair back to face my computer, I stared at the screen for several minutes without really seeing it. Giving up for the moment, I got out of my chair and started pacing.

  “Ok,” I said to myself. “Putting the how and why of things aside for a moment, let’s look at the ramifications. Is this a permanent thing, or will we go back to normal soon? Do we announce it to the world? Keep it to ourselves or maybe tell a few select people? What are the limits of what we can do, and is it safe to keep trying to do things this way?” I wasn’t expecting to come up with any answers yet, but asking questions helped me to organize my thoughts.

  Let’s assume that this thing is permanent. If it goes away, then we can just chalk this up as a moment of shared lunacy and move on. If it doesn’t go away, then sooner or later, someone will find out. But does that mean that we tell people in advance, or try to keep things a secret for as long as possible. I did figure out that any decision to tell someone should come from both of us.

  Now let’s look at safety. So far, there didn’t seem to be much danger, unless you count the risk of impaling yourself with something due to lack of control. Then again, what would happen if I tried to do something that I didn’t have enough power to accomplish? Maybe my brain would melt or explode or something. We might have been walking a razors edge over a pit every time we used this thing. Testing the limits is important. It needs to be done slowly and carefully, since there is no possible way to evaluate the risks in advance.

  If I was to analyze this as a thermodynamic system, I would have to look at the work done, compared to the energy used. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change form as either heat or work. If Linda agrees that we should tell people about this, perhaps I could get some of my old lab rat buddies up in Edmonton to help evaluate and quantify things.

  For now, though, I needed to get back to my research on the subject. The more I know about the basic theory, the less risk there should be attempting the practical. Sighing, I sat down and began typing out my next search query. This could wind up being a long day.

  Chapter 5

  Linda: A Dream Revisited

  I was glad that Mark admitted to not being quite as calm and collected as he had appeared to be. I may have spent the morning thus far using this strange new ability in a casual manner, but every action that I performed frightened me down to the very core of my being. I don’t think that anyone could be calm when confronted with impossibility like this. Not even my friends Sid and Sara Jensen, who were both ex-rangers and highly decorated from a tour of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  After changing into clothes suitable for a hike up the mountain trails, I put on my boots and stepped out onto the back deck. Looking around, but not quite focusing on anything in particular, I came to a decision. Raising my arms above me, I leaped up off the deck and floated into the crisp clear sunlight in my back yard. Since my dream had reminded me of the lovely pond, I decided it was a good time to pay it a visit. Turning to the right, I started to follow the little stream that wound its way up the hillside.

  Gaining confidence, I slowly increased my speed. Following the gurgling stream up higher, I enjoyed the tranquility of the mountain which was broken only by bird song or the occasional chatter of a startled squirrel. I had rarely gone this way, due to the roughness of the trail leading up to it, but what was difficult on the ground, was easy when above it.

  As I rounded the last bend and it came into view, I paused for a moment to savor the sight of the water sparkling in the sunlight. The serene feeling that had been building inside me on my journey here suddenly faded as it dawned on me… I wasn’t just getting the idea from my dream, this was the dream: right in front of me was the mama dear with her baby, drinking from the pool. I waited for it, and yes, the doe suddenly raised her head, looking at me and tensed, preparing for flight.

  With much wonderment and more than a little trepidation, I gave myself over and said the words I had spoken in my dream. “Peace, little darling, I won’t hurt you.” The deer looked at me for a moment longer before resuming her drinking. My heart soared with joy and amazement that such a beautiful dream could be reality.

  As a young girl, I’d had the not-uncommon brushes with déjà vu, so really this wasn’t too much different. I could wrap my mind around this, I was sure of it. I slowly lowered myself down to the close edge of the pool where it started to tumble down as the stream which I had followed. I took a drink, then stretched out and closed my eyes, luxuriating in the feel of the hot sunlight on my body.

  That might not have been the best decision. My brain immediately kicked in and a sense of panic began to grow inside me. This was simply not normal. Suddenly, I badly wanted to go back home. I was scared of the implications of what just happened, and needed the security of my own four walls around me. As soon as my legs felt like they would support me, I started off down the trail.

  I had barely gotten a dozen steps along the way when my feet flew out from under me as I stepped on a slippery patch of mud. Flailing my arms, I braced myself for hitting the rocky ground, but found myself floating a few scant inches short of impact. I had instinctively saved myself from the fall by using this strange new ability. No longer trusting my feet to a path made treacherous from the storm, I raised myself to vertical and carefully floated my way back down.

  By the time I arrived back at home I had calmed down a bit, although I found that my thoughts were no less chaotic. I stepped inside, kicked off my boots, and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. After guzzling about a third of the bottle, I put the cap back on and wandered over to the office to see how Mark was making out with his research.

  “Hey babe,” he said, turning toward me as I stepped into the room. “That was a lot quicker than I thought. I figured you would be gone until at least mid-afternoon.”

  “What can I say; I just flew up the mountainside … literally.”

  He threw me a sharp glance and said “Sounds fun, but we really should take this slowly and carefully. There’s no telling what kind of danger or cost is involved in doing this kind of stuff. No work can be performed without using energy of some kind.”

  “That’s real world physics, and this is magic. The rules may not apply.”

  “I refuse to believe in something that ignores basic laws of nature,” he replied with scorn. “We may not yet know the rules of this stuff, but thermodynamics is universal, and therefore has to somehow apply.”

  “By definition, laws of nature cannot apply to that which is unnatural,” I countered.

  “All systems follow rules, and I refuse to believe that psionics
, however unnatural they may seem to us now, don’t follow at least similar rules to that which we know. We just have to figure them out.”

  “Well genius, figure this one out,” I said, and then related to him my experiences up the mountain and how they so closely mirrored my dream.

  He sat still for a minute with a look of deep concentration on his face before turning back to his computer and pulling up a website that he had bookmarked. After the site loaded, he scrolled down a few pages, and then paused to read. He nodded his head after a moment, and then scrolled the web page a bit more before pausing to read again.

  Finally turning back to me, he said “The first part, dreaming about what you would do before it happened, would appear to be clairvoyance or precognition. Also in there, would probably be telepathy with the deer, or animal mind speech to be more specific.” He thought for a moment. “This would mean that our abilities are not just limited to the kinetic lines of psionics, but are of a much broader spectrum.”

  “Oh good,” I said with heavy sarcasm coloring my voice. “I do so hate to be limited to the same boring old stuff.”

  “The disturbing part,” he continued unfazed, “is that you have demonstrated multiple times that you are using the ability without conscious thought. You dreamed the events of this morning while still asleep, as well as levitating. You also calmed the deer without trying, and you stopped yourself from a fall.” Pondering a moment, he said “I guess that I used it like that as well, when it first happened with the coffee cup falling.”

  “Out of all that happened to us today, why is that the most disturbing part?”

  “It bothers me more not that we can do these things, but that we can do them subconsciously. Trying to pretend that these powers don’t exist won’t work. Sooner or later we would do something by reflex and the secret would be out. If we’re out in public and get startled, we might automatically react and do something stupid. We’ll need to discuss that in more detail later, but for right now, my gut instinct is to tell nobody about this unless we’re both completely sure they can be trusted.”

  “Yeah, I don’t particularly relish the thought of being called psycho or freak. What do you think our next step should be?”

  “I think we should spend some time trying to carefully figure out the limits of what we can do. We should work on mastering control of the abilities, but slowly in case it’s like working a new set of muscles. Perhaps after that, we could try to perform a few of the other psionic abilities on the list that I collected from my searches. Then we can decide what we want to do about sharing our secrets.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable plan, when do we start?” I asked.

  “Give me fifteen minutes or so to finish looking through these last few links that I have open, and then we can give it a go.”

  “In that case, I’ll go put together some lunch for us.”

  “Just make sure to do it by hand,” he admonished. “We need to be logical and thorough before we do something we might regret.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him as I turned to walk away, but I silently agreed with him. I wasn’t totally convinced that the dangers he was worried about were real, but I trusted his instincts. They had served him well for all the years he was doing research and development up in Canada.

  I quickly put a substantial lunch platter together for us consisting of sandwiches, fruit, a bag of chips, and a couple of sodas. Walking back to the office, I saw that Mark was still bent over his computer doing his research, so I put the tray on the table next to him and fixed myself up a plate to take back to my chair. “Eat up. The web will still be there if you look away for a few minutes,” I said, putting action to words as I took a bite of my own sandwich.

  Nodding agreement, he turned his attention to the tray and quickly inhaled his lunch with the same single minded intensity that he gave to his research. “There’s a lot of interesting information on psionics that I’ve read so far. If circumstances were a little bit different, I would put this together as a basis for a new science fiction book.”

  Hearing that, I almost choked on my sandwich. Leave it to Mark to turn the impossible into the mundane.

  Chapter 6

  Mark: Theory and Practice

  I studied the apple intensely as it rotated slowly in the air, a foot away from my nose. If I concentrated, I could feel that ‘magnetic field’ sort of disturbance that I had discerned before. I was sure that the field was the key to all of this, even though I was no closer to knowing how.

  I glanced over at Linda and saw her staring at the empty soda can floating in front of her, a look of boredom on her face. I was always the one to approach a subject with logic, research, and testing. She was more of the mindset ‘do it now and let someone else figure out the details later.’ The opposing mindsets sometimes caused a bit of friction between us while working on a project, but in the end usually provided a better result.

  “I agreed to start slow with you on this,” she began, “but I didn’t think that you meant baby steps. What’s the point of this anyway?”

  “I’m trying to figure out where the power to do the work is coming from. The limits and dangers change depending if it’s from inside us, from around us, or from somewhere in the firmament.”

  “Alright, Einstein, but hurry up. I already know that I can safely lift myself at one hundred twenty five pounds, so the limit of an empty soda can for a test is a bit silly.”

  I frowned at her impatience, but slowly nodded my acquiescence. “Ok, let’s try a few different things, but through all of them, keep that can aloft as our baseline. See if you can lift me a few inches off of my chair. I’m one sixty five, so that’ll be more than you’ve tried before, but should be ok.” I had barely finished talking before I found myself slowly rising off of my seat. It felt far weirder to float while under someone else’s power than on my own. “Ok, how do you feel? Any strain, pain, or anything else that feels wrong?”

  “Nope,” she replied. “All systems green, so to speak.”

  “Ok, put me down and try to lift yourself up with your chair. That should be approximately the same weight, but without any distance. Force needed should change with both mass and distance.”

  “It feels about the same, but maybe a hair easier,” she answered after completing her task.

  I tried the two tests myself and found them fairly close to the same. I thought about it for a moment and then said “Let’s head outside where we have a bit more room. I want to test the distance thing a little more.”

  “Ok,” she agreed in a hurry.

  We moved outside and set ourselves up about twenty paces apart. “Try now,” I said, doing the same myself. We both rose sporadically, as the feeling of rising from someone else’s control felt very distracting. Distraction aside, it did feel a touch harder with more distance. We had the mental lever, I thought whimsically; maybe we need a mental fulcrum.

  “Ok, put me down and let’s try another twenty paces.” Once in the new positions we did it again, and this time I definitely felt that it took more power to do the job. “Once more, from opposite sides of the yard this time,” I called out. Her lot was about one hundred yards long, and as we reached our positions and began the test, I found that I definitely had to strain in order to lift her up. I lowered her back to the ground and looked around the yard. I saw the ashtray on the patio table and figured that it would do for a comparison test. Yes, that was definitely easier to lift at a distance.

  We were making a good start on gathering data, but I had to admit to myself that the combination of researcher and test subject rarely worked out well. There would always be things missed due to being in the middle of it all. Maybe we could trust my old lab partner Carl. I had just come back from a trip where I helped him calibrate his new lab, and he owed me for that. Plus he mentioned that he was going to take a few weeks off before beginning his testing in there, so he would be free. I decided to talk to Linda about it when we took a break later.

  I walk
ed back toward the house and motioned Linda toward the patio. I pulled out a chair for her before flopping into my own. Talking about the last test, Linda agreed that distance seemed to matter in regards to difficulty. “Let’s try something a tad different,” I said. “Why don’t you reach out and get us a couple of beers.”

  “Hmm …” she started, “Not having line of sight might make it a bit tricky, but I’ll try.”

  It took about three minutes before I saw the patio door slide open and the two bottles of Newcastle float out and toward us. As they neared, their paths diverged slightly, one heading toward each of us. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead as she frowned in concentration.

  “That was trickier than I thought,” she admitted. “Finding the fridge, opening it, trying to grab bottles that I couldn’t see, and then doing all the steps together was tough. I had to get a sort of mental ‘echo’ from things before I could interact with them.”

  “You did great,” I said with enthusiasm. “Multi-tasking at its finest, but you did screw one thing up.”

  “What was that?”

  “You forgot to open them,” I said, giving the bottle caps a mental flip to pop them off.

  “Smart ass,” she replied, taking a long swig from her bottle.

  We sat and relaxed for a while and enjoyed the cold beer in the warm sun. Once finished, I asked “So, do you think you can figure out the telepathy bit from your morning adventure and show me how to do it?”

  “I’m not sure. At the time, I didn’t even realize what I was doing,” she admitted.

  “Give it a try. Read my mind, send me a message, or maybe pretend you’re Snow White and summon up some bluebirds to flutter around your head,” I said smiling. “While you’re working on that, I’ll try and duplicate your beer fetching feat and see if I can feel that mental ‘echo’ you mentioned.”