Part 19

Melody adapted quickly. When she woke, with no ill effects, her worries about having been “manipulated” into going to sleep vanished.

She went back to Noel Wilson’s notes and stopped only long enough to eat something for lunch. When she went to the bathroom, she took papers with her.

Finally, at five P.M. Chinese takeout arrived and Melody stretched and relaxed in the single upholstered chair in the room. Between bites, she told us what she’d learned.

“Noel hypothesized that the marriage of ESP and telekinesis could be used at the molecular level to cure disease. For example, viruses could be destroyed in ways that pharmaceuticals can’t do. He believed that this only takes a tiny amount of energy, about the same thing a gamma ray does when it causes a mutation. He foresaw a time when groups of medical practitioners will be able to cure cancer by working in teams to eradicate the cancer cells without cutting the body open at all. Clogged coronary arteries could be cleaned out with non-invasive mental surgery. It would take twenty or thirty people on one team, working together to bring about that kind of change, and there would be the need for thousands of teams. That would be expensive, but the cost savings in future treatments and avoidance of surgery would more than pay for it. Plus anyone who was enabled to do this would have employment for life.”

“Grand hopes,” I said.

“Not so grand, if Bobby can do that kind of thing,” said Melody. “That’s why Noel did illegal and completely unethical experiments on Bobby. He needed to know if it would work before he could go public and ‘try to prove it.’”

“I can see how a lot of people would love that,” I said, “but I can also see how there’s be a lot of push-back. He’d be putting whole medical industries out of business.”

“But all those people could get gene therapy and become the new healers!” said Melody.

“Okay, but that’s not the real problem,” I said. “The real problem is that something like that could be used for wonderful things, but could also be used for terrible things.”

“I know Bobby would never hurt anyone,” said Melody.

“We’re talking about choosing thousands and thousands of people to make into supermen. You and I both know there’d be at least one bad apple who would appear. Let’s be honest. There would be hundreds. And they’d use their minds to rape and pillage.”

“The others could stop them,” suggested Melody.

“Now we have a police force that will be using this technology. Next will be armies. It’s Pandora’s box.”

Melody thought. “Okay, we establish an exhaustive vetting system to take only those people who are psychologically fit to have this power. We also control the process so that only a select few know how to perform the procedure.”

“So, in the beginning, only the rich will be able to afford the treatments,” I said, continuing to play the Devil’s advocate. “There would be riots in the streets.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” cried the frustrated woman. She’d seen the Garden of Eden, but the gate had a big padlock on it.

“I’ll be honest. I don’t know,” I said. “How hard is it to do the procedure? Professor Wilson did it to his five-year-old.”

“He used homologous recombination, extracting some of Bobby’s DNA and breaking the chain at the location where he believed the desired gene was. Then, after snipping out the gene he wanted to get rid of, he recombined the DNA and waited to see what would happen. It’s not difficult, exactly, but it’s unbelievably dangerous to do it the way he did it.”

“Why?”

“What if he got the wrong gene? What if he cut it in the wrong place? What if it didn’t recombine correctly? A thousand things could have gone wrong, and he did it three times in the same subject!”

“Okay, so what if the wrong things happened?”

“He could have crippled his own son. He could have turned him into Godzilla, for all I know. That’s why the research on this kind of thing is taking so long.”

“But he didn’t screw it up,” I said. “Bobby turned out pretty well.”

“Bobby was turned into the most important human being on Earth,” said Melody, gravely. “Bobby was also turned into the person who will be the most feared person on the planet. You said he could take care of himself. Tell me about that.”

So I told her about throwing things at him, and the staples, and BB gun, and about how Gator worked with us until Bobby could slow a bullet to about 370 feet per second, which even a light ballistic vest would stop handily. They make clothes with panels of Kevlar sewn into them. He could wear body armor that looked like a suit jacket.

I admitted we were less sure about Bobby’s ability to recognize a shooter before he shot, but Bobby said he wasn’t worried.

“This is too much,” said Melody.

“Can I calm you?” asked Bobby.

“Is this something I’ll feel?” she asked.

He nodded.

She told him to go ahead and he “hugged” her. I saw the alarm in her eyes as she felt it, and then the serene look in them as her fears went away. Well, maybe not “away” but at least they were tamped down.

“That’s amazing,” she said. “What else can you do like that?”

Bobby trusted her. I was a little more worried. She knew enough to cause us real problems if she was caught and interrogated. Then again, Bobby could get her out of interrogation if she was caught. Nobody on his “team” could be captured and kept in detention, if Bobby didn’t want them to be in detention.

Bobby told her about spoofing the cops who had arrested me, and about how he’d studied the mentally ill man who had hallucinations, and had learned how to “sort of encourage” other minds hallucinate. He admitted that he had no idea what such hallucinations might be like. He told her about stretching the distance between neurons so that nerve impulses were interrupted, and how that could paralyze someone. She interrupted him at that point.

“Show me,” she said. “Make it so I can’t move this finger.” She held up her left hand and pointed to her middle finger.

“Make a fist,” said Bobby.

When she did, her middle finger stayed straight.

“Oh my God!” she gasped.

Her face took on a look of concentration. Her whole hand went slack and drooped.

“Okay. Stop. This is freaking me out.”

Instantly she had the use of her hand back again. She flexed it four or five times, as if she couldn’t believe it worked again. She looked at me.

“They’re going to be terrified of him,” she whispered.

“I know,” I said. “But we know he’s a sweetheart.”

“Do we?” For the first time Melody sounded both unsure and worried.

“Let him dream about you. Then you’ll know how he feels.” I winced. “No. Bad idea.”

“Why?” Melody looked guarded.

“What happens in his dreams feels real.”

“What happens in his dreams,” she asked. “And how do you feel them?”

“We’ve gotten close. He’s a teenager. He has ... those dreams, if you know what I mean. I found myself in one of them one night and, somehow, I could feel what he was dreaming of doing with me. It was terrifying, but at the same time luscious and beautiful. Since then he’s learned how to build a sort of wall so his dreams don’t leak out, unless I want them to.”

“You ... want them to,” she said. She looked at me askance.

“Hey,” I said. “They’re just dreams. And I gave up men to join the convent.”

“I think you’re supposed to give up thinking about men, too,” said Melody.

“Which is why I decided, after a few years of prayer and reflection, that maybe being a nun wasn’t for me.”

“And did you decide this before you went on the run with him and he dreamed about you ... or after.”

“They’re very realistic dreams,” I sighed. “Very. Speaking of which, when we were watching you, it looked like you don’t have a boyfriend. Is that correct?”

“You were watching me?”

“They might have been watching you,” I said, shrugging.

“Yeah. Now that I know what I know, I get that. Do they know about all this?”

“No, except for what he did to their people. He’s a complete wild card right now, as far as they’re concerned. But answer the question, please. Is some guy going to want to know where you’ve been?”

“Not like you mean. After Noel, I couldn’t bring myself to get my heart broken again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s been okay, I guess. I submerge myself in my work. Or I did. Now I won’t be able to concentrate on it at all.”

“Can you go back there and keep this secret?”

“Of course I can. This is cutting edge stuff, and they don’t like cutting edge, at least not all-speed-ahead cutting edge. I still can’t believe there weren’t any undesirable side effects of his procedure.”

“Maybe there were,” I said. “We don’t actually know. All I know is that, once he learns how to do something, and practices it, he gets better and stronger fast. Like how fast he was able to disable your finger. He had to find the nerves and do what he does, and he did it all in seconds. And he’s learning new things every day.”

“His telekinesis and psychokinesis might get stronger with use and practice, but what I’m excited about is his ESP. Who knows where that could go?”

“I never thought of him seeing colors as ESP,” I said.

“It’s energy he’s seeing. I’d bet my last paycheck on that. We know that the brain sends out energy waves. We just never figured out how to capture them, other than with an EEG. It’s not my field, but I did a paper on it in my undergraduate work. I also bet that’s how he can sense synapses. There’s energy jumping across them. And he can manipulate the gaps? Really?”

“He did it to you.”

“You’re right. He did it fast, too,” she murmured.

“He has to be fast. He worked on that hard when we worked with Gator. He had to be able to react to a bullet within half a second, to be able to affect it.”

“That was from far away, right?”

I nodded.

“What happens if it’s closer? Will he still have half a second?”

I shook my head.

“No, but if the shooter is closer Bobby will be able to see him sooner and divine his intent. He got a lot of experience at identifying suspicion and animosity, aimed toward him.”

“A hit man might not be feeling any animosity or suspicion.”

“Yes, but the fundamentals of shooting require a certain mindset, and that’s what Gator and I tried to teach him how to look for.”

“How far away can he ‘see’ someone’s mind?”

“Bobby?” I called out. He was reading a book and looked up. “Where’s Gator?”

He closed his eyes.

“He’s shooting at somebody,” he said.

“What?” I sat up, alert.

“His brain looks like he’s ... no, he just pulled the trigger. Now he looks happy. He’s at that base we went to.”

“He’s an instructor there,” I said. “He must have just done a demonstration.”

“That’s just the freakiest shit I’ve ever heard of,” sighed Melody.

I told her about photographs, and how we didn’t know why some had colors in them and some didn’t. I told her my theory about printers and cameras.

“We can check that,” she said. “We’ll take our own pictures.”

“We’d need to get a variety of cameras,” I said.

“Why? We can start by just using a phone,” she said. She pulled hers out and whirled it in the air.

“Shit!” I groaned. “I forgot about your phone. They can track it.”

“But they’re not looking for me,” she said.

That was true. If anyone had been watching her, they’d have crashed through our motel room door hours ago.

“Better safe than sorry,” I said. “When we meet again, you need to leave the phone somewhere else.”

“Okay. But I can take some pictures now.”

She snapped me, and then snapped Bobby. I called him over and he looked at the tiny pictures on the screen. He took the phone and peered at it.

“Wow. Is that really what I look like?”

“What do you see?”

“It’s like rainbows are shooting out of me, all over the place,” he said.

“How about Tiffany?” asked Melody.

“She looks normal.”

“Well, we know one thing,” said Melody. “If Bobby ever sees somebody else like him, he’ll know it instantly.”

I thought about that. I told Bobby to build a wall. When he said he had it, I took another picture of him.

When we looked at it, he looked “dead”.

“I called in sick,” said Melody, when I came out of the bathroom. I had taken a shower.

“That’s two days in a row. Will that draw any attention?”

“I told them I have the flu. People who have the flu are a pariah where I work. Don’t want some virus getting into the labs. I can probably milk it for two more days.”

“What then?” I asked.

“That was what I was going to ask you,” she said. “Where do we go from here?”

“Are you finished with his papers?”

“His papers will take a year or more to go through on a scientific level, but I have the gist of what he did and what he was hoping for.”

“How do you think we should handle him turning himself in?”

“I don’t want him to do that,” she said. I took a breath to explain how the NSA would never stop looking for him, but she waved me down and went on. “I know he has to do that, though. The question is, how do we do it in a way that will protect him the most?”

“We?” I frowned. “Look, Melody, you’ve been more helpful than you’ll ever know, but allying yourself with us is a life sentence. People will want to get to you to find out what you know. They might even torture you.”

“Not if Bobby stops them.”

“What if they shoot him and he can’t deflect the bullet? What if it hits him in the head, instead of his vest? What if they drug his food? There are a million ways this could go badly and Bobby wouldn’t be able to protect you. But if nobody knows you’re involved, you’re our ace in the hole. You’ll have the research. If we disappear into a black hole, you can go to the international science publications and blow it wide open. If other countries find out about him and know he’s being held somewhere, or was killed by the United States, it could mean war. You’ve seen what he can do, felt what he can do. We’ll make videos of him using his talents and you’ll have those, too. In the movies, the good guy always says the information is safe with another person and that if anything happens to him, it will go public. You can be our safety net.”

“That all sounds wonderful, as a plot for a movie, but if I’m a secret, I can’t help you develop his abilities,” she said. “I’m the expert you can call on for advice.”

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