Part 26

If it sounds like all this was pretty seamless, it wasn’t. Not at all. There were seams everywhere. Communication, in those early days, was difficult, primarily because it seemed like we needed to communicate with another team member all the time. In those days, everybody had their own job to do, and Bobby was extracurricular to those jobs. Bobby wanted to do things, but needed to explore his abilities and practice, as well.

Initially, for purposes of security, Jane moved us into a safe-house that had twenty-four hour security. We let her think her guards were necessary, even though they probably weren’t. The guards had no idea who they were protecting, but didn’t really care. And, to be honest, that freed Bobby’s attention up for other things. She wanted to assign people to go with us, but I reminded her Bobby could protect us. A rapid reaction force was available whenever we were out and about, anyway.

Because all information on Bobby was classified Top Secret and Need To Know, the United States Attorney General opened a file on the homicide of Roger Jacobson and reviewed “the investigation”. He determined there was no probable cause to believe that Robert Wilson had committed a crime, and that, therefore, no charges would be brought against him. He shook Bobby’s hand and said, “You’re free to go. Don’t get into any trouble.”

Bobby and I slept together like married people. All reservations and modesty were gone. We made love most nights, in a variety of ways, some mental, some physical.

Mother Mary came to live with us, and sniffed her disapproval of our fornication.

“Marry him,” she said, sternly.

“He hasn’t asked me,” I replied.

She called Bobby into the room.

“You must stop sinning or marry Olivia,” she ordered.

“Okay,” he said, happily.

“Okay, which one?” I asked.

I felt his mental hands on my breasts.

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

I married a man eight years younger than me. Mother Mary and Melody were my bridesmaids.

Keeping him a secret was harder than we thought it would be. Things he did were newsworthy. Over the next two years three terrorist plots were foiled and over sixty dangerous fugitives were captured. Doctors from all over the world came to America to find out about the phenomenal successes being realized in the field of oncology.

As a personal favor to me Bobby worked with some wounded warriors, helping them in ways surgeons could not. That drew the attention of the medical community, too. His work with patients with PTSD was less noticeable. He simply sat in on group therapy sessions and did some painting. He couldn’t cure them, but he could lessen their anxiety enough that they could make improvement on their own. With the relief he could give them, there was definite improvement.

A NASA satellite malfunctioned when the order to flip a switch failed. We got that information in the newspaper. Discreet inquiries got us enough information from NASA engineers that Bobby tried projecting his telekinetic abilities that far. The malfunction “cleared itself”. Bobby said it was easy. Distance was not an issue.

When Bobby started curing people with spinal injuries that had paralyzed them, an investigative reporter got interested and hypothesized there was a new, maybe unapproved drug or procedure being used. He began interviewing everyone he could identify who was a “new friend” of a patient like this. Then he investigated those people. When he tried to investigate “Bobby Wilson”, he ran into a blank wall. Mister Wilson was busy and the reporter didn’t have an appointment. When he tried to make an appointment, none were available. The team had decided, unanimously, that long term memory should be off limits, and Bobby agreed, so that wasn’t an option. Eliminating him wasn’t an acceptable option. We didn’t think buying him off would work. Nor would being ordered to stop his investigation by either the NSA or [redacted]. All that would do was whet his appetite. We could probably get to his boss, but if his boss told him to back off, that might solidify, in his mind, that something really big was going on. He was going to gnaw on this bone regardless of what we did.

In the end, it was Bobby who came up with the solution. He moved the bone somewhere else.

“I don’t have to be there to do what I do,” he said. “I can stay here and do it. He’ll be watching me, and things will happen that I obviously couldn’t have done because he was watching me while it happened.”

It took another two months, during which the reporter couldn’t get an appointment because Bobby was recovering from an unspecified accident that kept him in bed and sedated. Meanwhile two more high profile paralysis victims made miraculous recoveries that the medical folks couldn’t explain. One was an Olympic gymnast who had been struck by a motorcycle and suffered a broken spine. The other was a college student who had been wheelchair bound for more than ten years. It took the entire two months for Bobby to effect the needed changes to cure their injuries. It involved restructuring bones and ligaments, moving millions of molecules, a few at a time, until everything was as it should be, again.

He let the physical therapy people take care of regaining muscular facility.

Those cures got the reporter off his back, but they raised the general interest level of millions of people.

By the time we had our first candidate for gene therapy, a fourteen-year-old girl, the whole world knew “something” was going on in the U.S. There were wild rumors of all kinds, and the supermarket tabloids were full of them. Aliens had landed and were doing all these things. Angels had come to Earth to perform miracles. Church attendance increased, even though no church claimed responsibility.

A handful of charlatans did claim responsibility, but they were unmasked easily. None could perform a miracle on command.

We reached the threshold the whole team had agonized over for six years.

Gene editing.

It still wasn’t legal for human beings. We were less concerned about that, than we were about the ethical issues. We had to move forward, whether it was strictly legal or not. Did we alter the candidate’s genes without her approval? With her approval, but without her parents’ knowledge? What if we asked the parents and they refused? Should we go ahead, anyway? Even if everybody agreed, how could we ensure security until the girl had control over her new powers? What if it didn’t work? If it did work, would they manifest in the same way Bobby’s had?

The questions drove us all crazy.

We needed this girl to become like Bobby. He needed her. The world needed her.

But could this be done without us starting a chain reaction that could go beyond our control?

Bobby started spending more time with the candidate, whose name was Felicia. She was one of the cancer patients Bobby had cured, and a slot in the school had been offered to her single mom “because Felicia got behind while she was sick.” It had been a Godsend for her mother, who was already at the end of her rope when her daughter mysteriously got better. Felicia was eight when she started “makeup school”. Now she was fourteen.

As part of the ethics training all students were involved in, a lot of it was done by question, followed by discussion. The question might be asked: “If you could stop two people from arguing with just your mental powers, would you do that?” Then that scenario would be discussed. It might be pointed out that arguments, in and of themselves, can be healthy. They can be a normal process of discovery, which lead to resolution of a problem. Stopping an argument like that might be counter-productive. But it would also be pointed out that arguments can also be harmful, generating negative emotion that might spill over into violence.

All sides of an issue were discussed and analyzed. There were lots and lots of “If you could do this ... would you?” type questions.

What all the students learned was that human interactions are almost never simple, and that there are very few easy answers to questions.