Chapter 4

I drifted after high school, no job, few prospects.

I had a few friends I played role-play games with, and I did a little gambling to keep myself in pocket money. But I was essentially homeless, crashing on someone’s couch when they hosted a game night, mooching a meal and a place to stay when no one was gaming. It was a poor excuse for a life, and I couldn’t see a better future ahead.

As for the gambling, I gained a reputation for being too lucky. My friends soon refused to gamble with me. We were playing with their dice and their cards, and even when they dealt or threw the dice, I won. Not always, but more often than I lost.

I had no reason to cheat. I figured it was skill; I’d learned to trust my hunches. As a result, even carefully-laid poker traps didn’t work and I seemed to instinctively know when it was time to quit. I also instinctively knew when I was over my head, playing against professionals. You can lose your head if you play against the wrong guys and win. The word got around. Even that source of pocket money dried up.

By the time the recruiter approached me, I was ready for a change.

The Agency had received a lot of publicity over the last few years, very little of it good. As a result, they were under a lot of pressure. It made them willing to try different approaches. They also had enough money to fund new and unusual methods that might lead to improvement, even some that might be considered wacky. Someone had heard of the work done by a researcher named Joseph Banks Rhine.

A biologist by training, Rhine had become fascinated by reports of abilities not explainable through ordinary science. He established a lab at Duke University and published books that dealt with his findings. He was arguably the first to put the attempt on a scientific footing, but he wasn’t the last. Even today, the research continues. Some of the people involved are hucksters and frauds. Some ... but not all. Some of the results simply can’t be explained, because they lie outside mainstream science.

Was it possible, using methods that hadn’t been available to Rhine, to take his research to the next level? Could telepathy be made reliable enough that the ability would be useful to an agent? The agency decided to try.

Records describing what Banks had found, the methods he’d used, and documents describing similar efforts by other investigators had been collected, and building on their findings a program was designed. It used new developments in artificial-intelligence programming of advanced computers. This was the Agency’s approach to teaching what had never before been taught.

The theoreticians used positive reinforcement via direct computer interface, the ‘helmet’. Contact points in the plastic helmet linked the computer to the student. Brain waves were sampled using those contacts, amplified by the computer, then fed back through the helmet. In addition to the contact points, the helmet had a faceplate screen where graphic symbols from Rhine’s original experiments were flashed. The computer sampled the student’s responses to the visual stimuli, then reinforced them too. The direct flow of communication between the computer and the student, directed by programs that ‘learned’ while the student did, caused each program to morph during use until it was suited to a single individual. Whatever path that person’s brain discovered, that was what the AI selectively emphasized. An unexpected side effect: the process caused splitting headaches.

There was now a School with banks of computers and helmet interfaces, an AI to direct the learning, but who should be the students? A few experienced agents were sent, but they soon dropped out, not suited to this kind of learning. And yet, abandoning the investment before it paid off seemed unwise. A lot of the agency’s money had already been spent and throwing it away could easily lead to a Congressional investigation.

The School’s interim directors, so named because a permanent director hadn’t yet been appointed, concluded they should try another approach. They would look for people who already showed promise, recruit them, and see how they reacted to the curriculum. Instead of trained agents who might become telepathic communicators, the revised plan was to develop the ability, then train the paranormals to be agents. Security and other agent training could be done later.

The School’s recruiting department, in reality a sub-department of the Agency, had been put to work even while the first agent-students were making a hash of their time under the helmet. Programmers developed a net-search ‘bot and used it to look for the kind of people the new guidelines wanted. Modified from search engines used by information providers, this ‘bot crawled the Web looking for anyone who was too successful. Gamers, gamblers, and others who were too-successful or those showing results not explainable by skill alone were sought out by the ‘bot. I was one of the people it found. Unlike the very successful gamblers who refused to give up their lifestyle, I was ready for a change.

The recruiter’s pitch sounded wonderful, so I jumped at the chance and as it turned out, I would be one of the first to attend the School, and the new group, pre-selected for aptitude, showed immediate success.

Not surprisingly, there was considerable variation in the results; some barely showed improvement, but others became Talents, people with the reliable paranormal abilities the program had been designed to create. But not all the Talents were what the School’s directors wanted, unfortunately. I was the poster child for failure. They wanted a high-level telepath, they got a weak psychokinetic and a Talent whose other abilities were unreliable. Amazing success—when they worked. Unfortunately, today’s success might not be repeated for a month, and next month’s success might take a different direction.

Feast, then famine, equaled failure in the Agency’s view.

I had enjoyed the challenge, at least in the beginning. The School’s structured environment appealed to me, even though the headaches began as soon as I finished my first session under the helmet. I found that the pain was bad, but endurable, and never enough to make me quit. I forced myself to keep going because the alternative was to go back to aimless drifting. The School offered me a chance to do something, maybe to be something more than I’d been! I would not allow myself to fail! I toughed my way through the headaches, and became a marginal telepath almost immediately.

But I reached a plateau, and for whatever reason that was as far as I could go. I tried other approaches, and more-or-less by accident I discovered PK, a marginal, but reliable, psychokinetic ability. Another Talent that showed up during this time was a form of PC, precognition; my hunches, a kind of feeling I had that a prospective choice was right or wrong, got stronger. This skill too wasn’t great, about the same level as my TP, but far better than most normal people have. I couldn’t foretell the future, but my hunches were more reliable now than they’d been back during my gambling days, and they also came more often than before. I told no one about my other abilities, because I had a hunch that said ‘don’t’. I just felt like I didn’t want to tell anyone, so I didn’t.

My strongest Talent, the one I told the School about, was PK, psychokinesis. I learned to move objects using mental power alone. Some call it telekinetics, but I think PK is more descriptive because ‘tele’ implies distance. The PK, unlike the other Talents, kept on growing and even a partial success was welcome after the failures of the agent-students. The program directors kept me in the program to see if my mind-over-matter ability would get strong enough to be useful.

As to how I do what I do, it’s a question of visualizing relationships and then changing them. The process requires energy, but only a little of it comes from me; the rest appears to be ambient energy that my brain channels to change the relationship between objects. Words don’t work very well to describe the process.

I could barely move a pencil around in the beginning, but the ability was immediately reliable. It was always there when I wanted it, and it soon became as automatic as moving an arm or grasping with fingers. It also got stronger with use, and soon I was moving larger, heavier things. The headaches got worse, but the results were so astonishing that I worked my way through the pain. I learned to relax after practice in a darkened room, a cool, wet towel across my eyes. The lack of visual and aural stimulation helped. Medications barely helped and their effect quickly wore off; I had no idea at the time why that was so, it just was.

Mainly, I toughed it out when the headaches came, and kept trying. There are limits, but I’m stronger now than anyone else the School produced. Unlike the others, where occasional PK was more parlor trick than useful ability, my strength kept on growing with practice. The School’s administrators would probably be much more impressed with my abilities now, not that I was going to tell them; what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. Hunches, my version of precognition, had made me wary; I realized that all this expensive computer time wasn’t being provided for me, but for the benefit of the agency. At some point they would expect payback, and that return on investment might not appeal to me.

I didn’t want to be dismissed from the School before I’d learned everything I could. I was suspicious by now, but I cooperated with the administration while they tried to find something I could do; after all, I had no better idea. What else would I do if I didn’t work for the agency, become a professional gambler? Boring, if you have a strong hunch about what cards the other guy’s holding or if you can affect the fall of dice or a roulette ball. Do it to make pocket money if you must, but otherwise it’s a waste of your life.

There was now a permanent administrator for the School, a former Army officer who liked to be addressed as ‘General’, just before the Agency decided to close it down. He decided to see whether I could use my PK in a stressful environment, and the Army in Afghanistan would provide that test.

Some of this I figured out long after the fact, when the final naiveté had been scrubbed away by events.

If the colonel had simply ignored me, I’d have gone back into the woodwork after my third drink. But he hadn’t; ignoring junior officers wasn’t something Colonel Minot did. Even so, I might have played along and let him gnaw on my ass, but he picked the wrong junior officer at the absolute wrong time. What with the nightmares and headaches, I’m about six months behind on sleep.

Had he not come in, I’d have headed back to my CHU in another few minutes. That’s what I did after leaving his office. Maybe I could sleep now. But sleep wouldn’t come, because I kept thinking, wondering. Maybe I’d gone on my last mission? Had the office been following orders when they took me off the patrol roster? Was it simple SOP, standard operating procedures, to take someone with my remaining time in-country off the list?

Maybe I had just dropped through the cracks. I had no duties and apparently the Army had no orders to send me home. A possible explanation occurred to me. It might have happened because the Army doesn’t maintain all my records, only what’s needed for pay and a skimpy personnel file. The School and that three-letter agency have the only records that really matter.

Catch-22, or maybe catch-97 because I couldn’t ask them what they had in mind. There are three different layers of bureaucracy between the agency and me, and since I had no way to directly contact them I was stuck in my own version of purgatory.

Paranoia, possibly. But paranoiacs are sometimes right. I’d done what they sent me to do, served a year in combat and reported back on the effectiveness of my Talent! It would have been nice if they’d let me in on their thinking, but maybe they had reasons to keep those thoughts secret. Maybe the agency didn’t want to bring me home. Had they lost interest in me? I was, after all, a disappointment. Or had they hoped I’d be killed over here, thereby tidying up a loose end? If so, my being taken off the patrol roster had interrupted that plan. Did they intend to just leave me over here?

Was this really paranoia? Maybe, but as the saying has it, even paranoids have enemies. Or was this just another side effect of the PTSD?

In a sense I’d regret departing. I’d be leaving guys behind who’d gone on patrol with me, plus thousands of others I’d never met. Like me, they were stuck here, a long way from home among people who hated us.

The locals hated that we hadn’t been born here, hated that we didn’t believe the way they did, hated us for being here. If they had one overriding wish it was for us to go home, and the sooner the better. I sensed that hatred even more than other soldiers did. My Talent for empathy wasn’t great, but even so I felt the wash of bad feelings surrounding me whenever I was around locals.

Well. The Army would probably find something for me to do if I sat here long enough. Even if it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, there’s always a shortage of people. Someone would notice, and an enterprising commander would decide I was just the warm body he needed. In the meantime, I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, certainly not the REMF’s in the Colonel’s Club, even if I ignored him and went back there. He hadn’t specifically ordered me to stay away, after all. The shrinks have a name for everything now, including this; it’s called SAD, Social Anxiety Disorder. Maybe that was all it was, but it was equally likely I had nothing I could discuss with others. Should I describe how I’d used my Talent to kill people I’d never met? I couldn’t even discuss the questions I had about the ethics of coming into a country that wasn’t mine and killing its people. Never mind that I was sent here or that I hadn’t thought the matter through before I accepted the assignment. There’s something basically wrong with the idea.

If there’s a redeeming feature about the Taliban, murderous medieval thugs that they are, they’re easy to hate. I rationalized my way through the ethics question by realizing that I was not only defending myself and my fellow soldiers, I was defending the ordinary people of Afghanistan and even Pakistan.

The rationalization worked, at least some of the time. Likely it was all just part of the PTSD. The random thoughts finally quit chasing themselves through my mind and I slept.

I glanced at my watch. It was 0423, and the room was dark and silent. Something had interrupted the best sleep I’d had in weeks. Too often it’s a mortar bomb that drops in, the jihadist version of an alarm clock, but not this time; my nerves were tingling again, more so than usual. I scanned my immediate surroundings, augmenting the usual sound-sight-smell-touch with my other senses; it takes less than a second and I noticed nothing that was different. I was in the same nearly-dark room, uniforms hanging in the wall locker, boots by my bunk. My M4 stood ready by the foot of the bed. There was a curtained window above the bed, but I never opened it because there was nothing to see, nothing there but a gray concrete barrier.