Part IV - 1: Sharing With My Buddies

Two weeks later on the first day of spring, Joey and I were sitting at my kitchen table after having our after school snack. Joey was twirling my coin slowly, concentrating on it.

"I still don't get anything. It... just makes my fingers feel warm and tingly. That's all... "

"Come on, Joey. You're right there. I can see it in your head. You're just right at the edge of getting it."

He sat there, struggling, concentrating, even going a little bug eyed. He still couldn't bridge that gap.

"Aaaccck!" he said suddenly, dropping the coin and putting his hand over his left eye and forehead.

"What?!" I said. I was having problems getting his thoughts. Something disrupted them.

"My head hurts... " He was then holding his head with both hands. "Shit, Tim. I think I strained... Ow, ow, OW! SHIT!"

He almost slammed his head onto the table, and had his arms wrapped around the back of his head.

"Joe? Come on, Joey. Speak to me. I can't get in your head," I said starting to panic.

His response was only to groan and rock his head back and forth.

I kept trying to focus on Joey's mind, but it wasn't making sense to me. It was there, but his pain seemed to be confusing his thoughts enough to confuse my own. I kept sensing something, but every time I tracked it down, it turned out to be from the coin, not Joey.

"The COIN! Joey here... Hold the coin!" I said, forcing it into his hand.

"Uuuuuggggh" he said. The coin did seem to be helping. Either that, or it had been a coincidence that the pain started to reduce.

After a few minutes, I was able to access his thoughts. It was a little weird feeling at first. Sorta like walking into your own room where everything there was familiar, except someone had painted it all bright pink.

Joey sat up, and wiped his tears from the pain on his shirt sleeve.

"Shit, I need some aspirin... " he said.

I got him some, and asked, "You feeling okay? Your head feels kinda strange."

"Yeah, I think so. But could you turn off that radio? It's driving me nuts."

I looked at him like he was already nuts as he swallowed the aspirin with his soda.

"Uh, Joey? The radio isn't on... "

"Huh? Then what am I hearing?"

I poked around his senses, but wasn't getting anything from his ears.

"I can't hear anything, and your ears aren't either. What does it sound like?"

"A bunch of noise... Sorta like someone talking gibberish. No full words, just... like part of words. But they're not English words either... "

"Hmmm," I said, getting up and walking around the table.

"Hey, I gotta go pee," Joey said, getting up. "I almost did it in my pants a few minutes ago."

As he started walking into the living room towards the bathroom, he stopped.

"What?" I asked.

He turned around, his face with an expression of concentration. "The noise... When I walked out of the room, it like... got softer."

He walked back to the table, turning his head like he was trying to pinpoint a noise. "Shit. You're right about it not being a sound. I turn my head and it doesn't fade or anything, you know?" He started to take steps forwards and backwards, then left and right.

"What are you doing now? You look like a bumper car who's been surrounded."

"I'm trying to home in, dork." He started doing his little shuffle making his way around one side of the table. When he started to keep going past the table, he stopped, turned around and said, "Holy Shit, Tim! I think it's... the coin!"

We both stared at the red coin sitting on the table where he had left it. I reached out with my mind, and felt the coin. It did almost feel like it was talking gibberish.

"Yeah, I guess you can say it's spitting out parts of words. But more like... the letters words are made out of," I said.

"Wow! Hey, I guess you were right. I was just right at the edge. I didn't know it was gonna hurt to cross it though... " Joey said, not taking his eyes off the coin.

"Hey, pick it up and find out how it feels to ya now," I suggested.

"Okay," he said as he did so. "Uhm... warm tingly. Maybe a little stronger, but not anything really... wait a second... "

I waited a lot longer than a second. More like over a minute, and then he just sank down in the chair and closed his eyes. I let him take his time.

After I sat down with him, I could feel his concentration in the air. It felt almost electric.

"Whoa, Joey... I can feel you thinking without... What the... You're picking up something... or something... What is it?"

He stayed silent, motionless. I would have been worried if I hadn't been able to feel his mind working like some kind of supercomputer. I kept trying to probe what he was doing, but it was... incomprehensible to me. All I got was a bunch of weird shapes, spinning, turning, sometimes colliding with other. He kept doing the same thing over and over, but each time with a different shape or pair of shapes.

Finally, Joey made a grimace of discomfort. I felt the electricity in the air fade away, then he opened his eyes and made a face of dire need.

"What? Does it hurt again?" I asked as he got up kinda funny.

"No, man. I gotta pee!" he said. He hobbled to the bathroom as fast as he could.

"What were you doing?" I called after him. "What was all those shapes you were twirling in your head?"

"I was... ahhhhhh... " he said as he released his bladder. "I was trying to fit shapes to those... things coming out of the coin. I think I've got three of them figured out. Hey, go get some paper and a pencil. I want to draw them."

"Okay... Hey, you mean you can see the symbols?" I asked as I ran and got some paper from my room.

"Yeah, I guess you can say that. Not really see them, just sorta feel their shape. Sorta like I'm a blind man with those magnetic numbers and letters you get as a kid. I pick one up and run my fingers over them. Except... " He paused as he zipped up and flushed.

"Except they are like flying in the air, and they don't stop for me to feel them. I have to keep feeling them as they fly by. And they don't seem to repeat in any order.

"But I think these three are right," he said as he sat down and took the pencil. "They were repeated a lot, and I think they go together more than others. Sorta like... uhm... what's a word used a lot... "

"Sex?"

"No... stupid. Like, uhm... I know! Like 'the'. You use it all the time. See? I just used it. And it's part of a bunch of other words too. Like 'they', 'there', uhm... I know there are others... "

"Yeah, okay... Do you have any idea how many different symbols there are? I mean, maybe if there are twenty six, they could just be the alphabet, but with goofy shapes. If we could figure out what letter stands for which, we could like figure out what it is saying... "

He stopped drawing a moment to think. "I... don't... think they could just be translated like that. I'm pretty sure there are more than twenty-six of them. More like two hundred and six. Maybe more."

"Oh... " I said. I watched him as he kept drawing, then erasing, then drawing again. It took him a while, but after staring at the three figures on the paper for almost three minutes without making any changes, he sighed and put down the pencil.

"Okay, I guess that's right... " he said, passing the paper to me.

I sat there, staring at what would become the very first of thousands of such symbols Joey and I would record in the next several years. But for now, the figures on that piece of paper were strangely familiar, but a mystery to me as to what they were about.

"Hey, do you remember my nightmare? The part about when the man was taking me over? I saw symbols sorta like these... I wonder if... Hey! And when my mom was trying to force me to live in the nurse's office... I remember! The command she was using! It was a SYMBOL!"

"You mean, these things are what you use to... control people with?"

"I think so. I mean it would make sense, I guess. I've only seen them in my dreams though."

"Hey, try making my hand open and close, and I'll try and see if I can get anything from you... " Joey said excitedly.

"Okay... " I waited as he closed his eyes and started to concentrate.

"Shit," he said opening his eyes. "All I can feel is the coin."

"Okay, I'll just put it in my room."

When I came back, Joey was already concentrating. I felt like I had walked into a room that was built out of a huge TV screen. The closer I got to Joey, the stronger the tingly feeling from a screen's surface became. There really wasn't any static electricity, it just felt like it.

I started to make Joey's hand clasp and unclasp. I didn't try to see what was going on it Joey's head, just in case that would interfere with his sensing of the hand commands. His hand was starting to get tired, so I had it move onto the table and just tapped his index finger. I got bored with that after ten minutes, so I started to tap each finger in order, then tried to do it faster and keep them going without a pause between his index finger and pinkie taps.

"Hey, not so fast. I can't catch them like that... " Joey muttered.

I slowed them down, and just kept the pattern up for a while. I finally was bored out of mind enough that I started to get a little horny. I moved his hand down to his crotch, and had it squeezing it. It was a repeating pattern, and I was beginning to wonder if Joey was even noticing it.

Finally, he just grinned, and gave out a frustrated huff. "You know, it's kinda hard to to concentrate while you're doing that."

"I'm not doing it... It's your hand... "

He opened his eyes and said, "Well I'll need my hand if I'm going to draw these... "

We spent the next couple of hours just working on the hand symbols. He kept having me do a certain movement of his hand whenever he couldn't remember the shape of the symbol he was drawing, which was often. These seemed to be a little harder to draw than the coin's three symbols. Of the six we worked on, it quickly become apparent that they all had the basic shape. But there were many little points and edges that were different.

It was almost as if they were all the same symbol, but some edges had been hit by a hammer, and in other places they had little extra pieces added on. Something like the differences between the letter E and F. We didn't realize it that afternoon, but if we had made cardboard cutouts of those command symbols Joey drew, we would have used exactly the same about of cardboard for each symbol. Whereever a dent occurred, the 'volume' lost was made up somewhere else on the figure.

(Strangely enough, the symbols do appear to have three dimensions. But the third does not have any significance. All of the features are in the two dimensional form, and that was lucky for us. I can't imagine Joey and I having to draw three dimensional symbols. We do it all the time now, using computers to simulate different combinations of symbols as they interact with others. Joey did all of that in his head. The reasons will come out much later in the story.)

When my mother got home, we showed her the drawings. Joey had to go home to eat, and then we both had homework. Especially me, since I had gotten pretty behind. I don't know why it took me so long to figure out I could just copy what other people knew into my own head, but that didn't happen for a couple more weeks. Until then, I had to do the work just like everyone else.

Because of all the time I had been out of school, Higgs didn't allow us to get out of class until I was caught up, even after I showed him the drawings. He did, however, talk to me and Joey considerably about them. His interest in them was almost as great as mine and Joey's. Higgs believed that they could be of great scientific value, if and when we ever figured out how they worked.

"I understand how you wouldn't want to reveal you discoveries to the world right now. But perhaps in ten or twenty years, you will feel different. I really feel you are working on something that shouldn't be kept secret forever. I'll help you as much as I can, as long as you boys remember that your education comes first."

(Like I had mentioned earlier, he guided our research more than I had realized. Not just by letting us do it on school time, but he also contributed a lot of the good ideas. I'm not going go into great detail about his inputs, because quite frankly I don't remember most of them. We had many conferences together, and we all contributed to the ideas that came out. But he directed our talks in a manner that got us to where we needed to go. Without his insight and structure, we would have never gotten past just drawing a bunch of symbols.)

Suzi, Joey, and I didn't fool around at all until the weekend. And then we didn't really do much then. Joey and I were too involved in the symbols, and we all were still sorta all hornied out. But we all looked forward to the next weekend at my father's, probably for slightly different reasons.

It wasn't until the following Monday, exactly three weeks after meeting my dad, that Suzi suddenly remembered something at lunch.

"Joey! You were supposed to be my servant last month at lunch!" Suzi suddenly exclaimed.

We were sitting at our usual table with Joey, me, Suzi, Brad, Mindy and Vito. John had been sitting with some other friends ever since I, and then Joey started to sit with Suzi and her friends. Lex didn't go to this high school, so Brad was the only one left from the old Jr. High group who still sat with us. Mindy was one of Suzi's friends, Marsha and a few others formed their own separate table because there were just too many people. Vito was a tenth grader who had hooked up with Mindy, and we all liked him. He has pretty funny, and he didn't seem to mind he was sitting with a bunch of freshmen.

Besides, Mindy was a babe, and before Vito showed up, I was worried she would join the other girls. It wasn't that I had a problem with Marsha and that gang, they were really pretty nice. But they abandoned us, not the other way around, and Marsha still held a grudge against me for stealing Suzi from her.

But today, it would have been much easier if it had just been the three of us.

"Servant?" Mindy exclaimed.

"Shit. I was hoping you wouldn't ever remember that," Joey said sinking in his chair.

"Servant?" Mindy repeated.

"Well, tomorrow your gonna pay up, mister," Suzi said with a wicked grin.

"Servant? Hello? Can anybody hear me?"

"Suzi beat Joey, er, wrestling," I told Mindy.

"Wresting?" Mindy started again.

"Yeah, but you lost to Wanda, and you didn't have to be her servant," Joey said darkly.

"Yeah, but that's because she was my dad's sla... um, you know."

"What?" Brad said. "What were you going to say?"

The three of us just looked at each other, trying to think of something that sounded like the word slave. We couldn't.

"You don't want to know," I said, reinforcing it with a mental command.

"Yeah, you're right." Brad said.

"So... why were you wrestling?" Mindy asked. "And how did you beat Joey? Did you cheat or something?"

"Uhm, no... I didn't cheat. I just got him in a head lock... " Suzi admitted.

"So, what are you gonna have Joey do?" Vito asked.

"Oh, you'll just have to wait and see tomorrow," Suzi said deviously.

"Shit," Joey said as he sank down even more. "Come on Suz. I wouldn't have made you do anything if I had won... "

"Well, that would have been your dumbness. And I like making you miserable, Joey. You're so cute when you're embarrassed."

"Thanks," Joey said, embarrassed.

"See?" Suzi said, raising Joey's arm up in they air. "He blushes from head to toe. Isn't it... Cute?"

"Well, at least I don't get horny enough to bonk a door knob when I'm embarrassed... " Joey said under his breath. Unfortunately, Mindy heard it.

"What do you mean by that?" Mindy asked. She liked getting the dirt on people.

"Oh, nothing," Joey said, blushing again.

"Hey Tim, what was the one you wrestled like? Was she a blond?" Brad asked.

"Actually I don't really know. Uhm, I guess you could say she was a dirty blond," I said grinning.

"What does that mean?" Vito said.

"Well, I guess you might as well know... " I said still grinning. I looked at Suzi and said, "Go ahead. Tell them what kind of wrestling it was."

Suzi started to blush herself, then said, "It was, er, mud wrestling... "

"Mud wrestling?" Mindy said.

"Ohhh hoho! I would have like to have seen that!" Brad said.

"So were you like in swimming suits? Or what?" Vito asked.

"Yeah, what were we in, Timmy?" Suzi said, trying to put me on the spot.

I wasn't going let her do it me, so I just gave her a toothy smile.

"You're not!" Suzi said. Then she groaned, realizing I meant to tell the truth.

"What? What IS going on with you three?" Mindy said.

I kept my eyed locked on Suzi's blushing face as I said, "It was NUDE mud wrestling... "

"NUDE?" the three of them said as Suzi gave out a different kind of groan. She was starting to get wet from the embarrassment.

"You saw her nude? In mud? And another girl too?" Brad said, flabbergasted.

"You know, I'm starting to wonder if you haven't been drinking some drain cleaner," Vito said. "You expect us to believe you wrestled in mud, with a girl you didn't even know the color of her hair, nude?"

"We did, trust me. That's why they beat us. There wasn't anything to grab a hold of. They slipped through our hands all the time. And they were used to the mud, we weren't."

"Why were they used to the... Don't tell me... " Brad said.

"Suzi! You mean you were wrestling another girl... NAKED?" Mindy said, shocked.

Suzi really started to blush again. She was enjoying it at a certain level, and I was having a ball. I shouldn't have been blabbing my mouth like that, but I couldn't help it.

"Hey, Tim? I think you're starting to get a little carried away. Your gonna make her... uhm... you know... " Joey said.

"Yeah, I know. And she's loving it too," I said.

"Not as much as you are, selfish bastard," Suzi said with a new fire in her eyes.

"Uhm, so like what did you do after you wrestled?" Vito said, trying to defuse some of the tension.

"Uhm, we got cleaned up and had dinner with Tim's dad," Joey said.

"So your dad's rich or something?" Brad asked.

"I guess... " I said, not really wanting to talk about my father.

"You guess?" Suzi said, seeing a chance to turn the tables on me. "He only owns a mansion with who knows how many rooms. Let's see, he has a limo, an army of servants, gold plated trash cans, shall I go on? Timmy?"

"Wow! Dang, Tim... Next time you go over to your dad's house, can I go too?" Brad asked seriously.

Suzi and I looked at each other, seeing we had done something stupid.

"Maybe. Joey, Suz, and I are going up there with my mom to spend the weekend, but we... kinda have plans. Maybe next time?"