Chapter 8

“How long have you had this ability to ‘jump’ from place to place?”

“About a year,” Eitan said. The doctor felt like a concentrated generator of dark energy, pulsing.

Dr. Hobart exhaled. He took off his glasses and laid them next to his coffee cup. The private club served coffee in an elegant pot with bone china service. “I thought we were meeting off campus to discuss where you were deciding to go to college. I’ve spent days poring over your transcripts and your teachers’ evaluations. Your sister was a battle royale and I expected you to be a soft sell for my alma mater. Instead, you lay the greatest leap in human evolution since the invention of language. You couldn’t tell me earlier?”

Eitan sighed. “First, I needed to explore this new ability by myself, without the constraints you would have imposed. This jumping is about me, not about the ability. Second, you have a track record of acting impulsively without consulting anyone, including the patient. No one has forgotten my first and second nano series. Third and final, it has taken me three months to get you out of your lab to a location where we have privacy, and no one can easily eavesdrop. Akemi, Sten and I all agree that we do not trust Dr. Whitcomb or his motives. We don’t think that you should either.”

“You haven’t been arbitrary at least,” Dr. Hobart said. “Still, we must investigate this new ability. I need you in a lab.”

“I’ve been in Joseph’s lab,” Eitan said. “There is nothing in your lab that will make a difference. You cannot put sensors or trackers on me because they don’t jump with me. I can’t even wear a belt buckle; I cannot transfer it with me. If I wrap some bills around a credit card with a rubber band, I can pull it off; but if I try to take my wallet, forget it.”

“How far can you go?”

“Jumping is not about geography,” Eitan said. “It is about the ability to sense the quality of location and the type of energy generated through the thread by the person I sense. People have unique dark energy signatures. Joseph hypothesizes that dark energy is a combination of several or many energy sources. Sten thinks that String Theory or as he has taken to calling it, Thread Theory, is much more descriptive of dark energy than the other known forms of energy.”

Dr. Hobart had picked up his glasses and was wiping the lenses with a lens cloth embroidered with the H logo. “I can follow what you are saying, but energy physics on a galactic scale exceeds my expertise. I’m astounded, I’m humbled, and I’m frightened.”

“Frightened?” Eitan asked, hoping that his warning had penetrated the doctor’s tunnel vision.

“Have I created a Frankenstein, of course,” Dr. Hobart said.

“Akemi said that if I was a monster, Nikki would have already put me down, hard and decisively.”

“I knew I liked that woman,” Dr. Hobart said with a slight chuckle. He put his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Still, the question of what sort of tool this jumping is and how it can, should and will be used is on the table. Further, can this ability be replicated in others? Where in the body does this ability reside? How do you cognitively activate it or deactivate it? Does it strengthen like a muscle or is it like the strength of one’s eyesight, determined by one’s physiology?”

“The village med lab already sent you my last blood and tissues samples taken a few weeks ago,” Eitan said. “Those are good questions, but I cannot answer them for you. I can’t do it in a lab either. There are two more things to add though.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow.

“Both Sten and I no longer feel comfortable or welcome at the main campus. Dr. Whitcomb and his staff have become downright antagonistic when we show up for lab time in the different labs. We’ve talked it over with Joseph and Nikki, and they’re ambivalent at this point. They trust us and what we’re reporting to them.”

“As you well know, I ceded a good deal of day-to-day duties to others in order to return to my research,” Dr. Hobart said. “I would expect some changes from my less-than-corporate approach to the research and development teams, which my shareholders always held over my head. To be clear, neither Dr. Whitcomb nor his teams know anything of the specific experimental nature of your nano or your siblings’ nano. They work retail, as I call it.

“Also, my personal team has been mostly dismantled and is now spread across the planet. They’re not coming back. Your data is kept offsite, in a secure location that only I know. Rest assured, I trust no one with this information. However, I will have a word with Whitcomb.”

“Please don’t,” Eitan said. “You’ve stopped bragging about us on the main campus as far as we can tell. Akemi believes that your employees now view the three of us as spoiled children upon whom you dote. ‘Saving the orphan children’ has been an excellent excuse and a cover that we never knew we would need. We would rather you downplay our exposure as we come into our adulthood, or our nano-hood as Akemi calls it.”

“What about your lab time?” Dr. Hobert asked.

“Sten is going to Chile to intern under the astrophysicist Frances Rochenbacher this summer. His lab will be the observatory. I’ve already been offered early admission to Yale, which puts me an hour away from Akemi by train. I don’t need another lab class on my transcript. What I’m trying to say is all of us will be far removed from the village and from Seattle, which we need at this point in time.”

“You have thought this through,” Dr. Hobart said, looking upset.

“You created us, Dr. H,” Eitan said. “We are grateful, and we certainly don’t want to hurt you or Joseph or Nikki. None of us anticipated what potential your inventions would ignite. If anything was guessed, it was Sten’s academic success. We’re only entering prodigy territory with him now and he is a year behind me. Akemi is ready to start her master’s degree in social science statistics as a junior. She is already building models of behavioral universes. You are going to be proud of us.”

Dr. Hobart took a deep breath and took a sip of his now cold coffee. “You mentioned two items.”

“Camille,” Eitan said. “Are she and her team on the Hobart payroll?”

“You are asking if there is loose end, I conjecture,” Dr. Hobart said. “Camille is an employee of the foundation, which has no connection to the corporation or the corporation’s principals, except for me. I can see where you would be concerned if your paranoia is justified. I will speak with her as I think we both agree this is her area of expertise.”