Chapter 3

The rest of the time with her was spent having Sue leading me through more exercises to improve my MR abilities. She had started me on the mind shielding where I could keep another mind reader from digging deeper than I wanted her to go. This was a lot easier to do than either Sue or I expected. “Liz, it looks like your ESP skills are off the chart already. Let’s go through the full blocking routine one more time, and if it works, we will go on to something else.”

Wow, that was heady news, if you will pardon the pun. Yes, I could block Sue either partially or completely, as I chose. “Liz, I need to talk to some other people before we go any further, so I will shut down for now. I’ll talk with you tomorrow, though. Good night for now.”

Well, that was the end of that for now, but I had a lot to think about. I’ll admit that I was busting to tell somebody about my ESP skills, but I did remember my promise, so I kept quiet.

I was surprised when Sue contacted me earlier than usual. “Liz, I got the answers to my questions from my bosses, and they want me to push your training as fast as possible. Plans at this end have changed, but I am not supposed to give you any hint beyond saying that. Right now, we are going to start your training on defensive skills.”

That was when I learned to “freeze” air or water by TK to make the molecules hold their positions. Once the air or water was frozen, nothing could move the molecules until I withdrew my TK command. Furthermore, no other TK expert could counter my command, so the frozen water or air became an impenetrable shield. The first day was spent in learning how to do that and getting my speed up to its maximum. Sue said, “Liz, I am very impressed. You are now fast enough that you could stop a bullet in mid-flight if you knew when it was to be fired. In fact, you could do that now, because you could use MR to know when the shooter was about to pull the trigger.

“Tomorrow, we will work on giving you a body shield of frozen air. See you then.”

“Oh, Boy, I could hardly wait. With a body shield, I could imagine myself immune to bumps and falls. I wondered how long it would be before I could give up the walker. Ever since I discovered TK flying, I have not needed it except as camouflage.

I was so excited over the prospect of a full body shield, or what I called body armor, that I had trouble falling asleep. Then I tried something new: I ordered my body to go to sleep and to wake up at 7:30 AM when I usually started getting ready for breakfast. It worked!

My formal therapy was now finished, but I did still see Dr. Anson on occasion to make sure that the nerve repair was holding. She told me, “You have advanced so quickly that we have gone back to work on primates to try to find out why the medicines worked so much faster on you than they did on the primates. Who knows how long that is going to take?”

I asked Sue about that, and she gave me some vague answers that sounded a lot like “we have no idea.” Oh, well, I was just happy that the drugs did work on me.

It took only a few minutes to learn how to apply the body armor, but it had to be adjusted so that it moved freely with my skin. I managed to get it to pass enough oxygen molecules to let me breathe, and I could selectively adjust the penetration of food and waste products through it so nobody would notice the change. Light, of course, was not blocked so that I could see as well as I ever could. A few minor adjustments around my ears fixed the sound problem.

The next step was mind-control (MC). That one gave me a lot of trouble because I was not sure that it was ethical. Sue explained it this way: “If someone was about to shoot you or a member of your family, would you want to prevent it? Of course you would! I have already given you several ways you could do that, but none of them are absolutely fail-safe. The one absolutely reliable way to prevent it that I know of is to make the person’s mind drop the idea. That’s what I mean by mind control.”

“Okay, Sue, now that you put it that way, I can see a valid reason for using that ability. The problem is, who am I going to practice on? Can I practice on members of my family without them being harmed or catching on to me?”

“You have a good point, Liz. Suppose I bring in someone who has been convicted of a serious crime and is due to be executed. We can offer him the chance to serve a life sentence instead if he agrees to be your practice target. Will that satisfy your reservations?”

“Yeah, I guess so, but he would have to tell me himself that he agreed to the change. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Certainly, it may take a few days to find a suitable person to be your practice dummy. Oh, you understand that was just a figure of speech?”

“Yeah, I’m okay with it. So, let’s get started.”

That was when my lessons in MC started. Yeah, it was more complicated and difficult than I expected. The complexity and difficulty faded away as I learned the technique, and it became second nature for me. By the time I was ready to practice on a live human being, I did not have to think about the details—they just came naturally.

I was able to control the mind of the person whom I was using as a practice dummy at my first try. I was feeling very good about my command of the technique, but I detected that there was something wrong. I didn’t say anything to Sue about that, but decided to try to find out the problem on my own. I was using that as a test of my new abilities, but I would ask Sue about it if I did run into trouble. At this point, I just looked at myself as a student.

Sue said, “You did well enough on acquiring the skill of mind control, that we want to jump you into something that is the most difficult of all: teleportation, or TP. We’ll have to start off slowly so that you don’t cause a major disaster, but all of us believe that you can learn to do it without that happening if you progress slowly.

“The amount of energy required is the limiting factor. The mass of the object being teleported and the distance the object is being moved control the amount of energy needed. The more of either one—the greater the energy involved.

“Where you get the energy is important. Everything that you have done so far has depended on the energy you got from the food you ate.”

I interrupted with, “Yeah, Mom has said that I was going to get fat from all of the food I was consuming, and I needed to get more exercise.”

“Okay, I’m glad that you mentioned that. We will concentrate on your energy source so that you will not need to eat or drink, except for social requirements. I don’t know if you have heard of it, but there is something call Dark Energy that permeates the universe. I will teach you how to tap that to replace the energy that you now get from food.

“The food you eat will just go through your digestive system normally, but none of it will be used to fuel your body. You will be living off of Dark Energy. Don’t worry, there is so much Dark Energy in the universe that you will never make a noticeable dent in it. By the time we get through with your lessons, you will be tapping Dark Energy automatically and will never have to consciously think about it. Okay, shall we start?”

There followed a set of very tiring lessons on trapping and using Dark Energy, but the tired feeling began to disappear by supper time. School was about to start, and Mom was out with the kids on a shopping spree. Dad was at work, so I was at home by myself. She had fixed me a light lunch that was in the refrigerator, and I was so engrossed in my lessons that I forgot all about lunch. I had already absorbed enough Dark Energy that I was not hungry.

Thank goodness that I noticed the time. I literally flew to the refrigerator and dumped the sandwiches that Mom had fixed. She had fixed three, so I left one to show that I was not eating as much as before. That should make her feel better. When I got back to my room, Sue said that she would teach me how to return material objects to Dark Energy after this set of lessons was finished.