Chapter 292: Killing Some Time, Before It's Time for Some Killing

Friday, February 17 to Sunday, February 19, 2006

My plan was basically just to settle down and wait until the next déjà vu, which should be in three days, as each merge quarters the wait. [[The per-mind chance of a déjà vu doesn't change, but there are twice as many minds to have a déjà vu from, and twice as many to have it to, so they occur four times more often.]] If the baddies start doing something that looks too scary, or my increased appetite makes debilitating starvation too likely, then I'll start my escape bid early. That wouldn't be ideal, but it did have a reasonable chance of success. I could black out the building easily, so the darkness would give me some time to work with. Having eight times more NP force would help a great deal, hopefully permitting me to force the elevator lobby doors open. It also gave me the ability to fly, which was a very helpful development. I figured I had better than a 50% chance of getting out without leaving evidence behind that would point to me having extraordinary powers, especially if I could choose to escape at night, so I could fly away from the scene cleanly. That wasn't my preferred way of escaping though, as it'd result in a huge manhunt for me, which could cause all sorts of shit and even danger for my families. It'd also make it much riskier for me to rejoin my families if the authorities were crawling all over Corvallis.

#4: <Hi, my name's Mark. Who are you guys?>

#9: <We're pretty pissed off guys, is who we are. I hope Asshole spends the rest of his life too scared to have a jack-off in case it kills him too.>

Our asshole asked, "Why is your EEG so high?"

"Good grief! Have you ever seen Jessica Alba? I bet you're gay, aren't you? Perving at a naked guy all the time, and you're certainly anal enough."

#12: <One thing I REALLY want to do is see if we can extend our sight blob range by diligently practicing with it. I'd like to find where Asshole is so we can buy time more naturally, and also watch to see how the computer center does its backups.>

#3: <That's a very smart idea. At a guess, I'd say your IQ was around 147? At the moment, anyway.>

#13: <That was a nice surprise, wasn't it? I wonder how much of IQ is from the brain, and how much is from the mind?>

#1: <Presumably mostly from the brain, because we think it's our brain's reorganization that got us up to 147. Plus there's the issue of what the hell is a mind anyway? I still haven't got my head around that one.>

#5: <This feels emotionally different than the last merge. 3B was a wreck back then, but 4B is okay now, aren't you?>

#16: <Yeah. It feels very different from the last merge. Not sentencing Prof to death certainly helps, and I think we understand that we are already dead to our families. It's only a matter of what proportion of us can come back from this underground grave.>

#14: <We don't have ANY connection to our real life now, so it seems unreal. Not even our ring. I don't suppose you guys found our stuff, did you?>

#4: <No. The Medical COO certainly hasn't got it. We tried quite hard to find it, but it must be out of range. Let's try #12's idea with the sight blob while we're talking.>

As expected, the range was the normal limit, but I would keep doing a lot of sight blobbing, so maybe it might improve. It never had before, but there was no harm in trying, and it would be extremely reassuring if I could extend my range to the surface so I could plan my entire escape before any of it started, rather than having to start escaping without any idea of how to achieve the final stages. It would be very good to know whether or not the front door of this place opened into the middle of an army base, for example.

I more thoroughly tested my other abilities:

• I could tell from my own body that proximity had much greater detail, and that I was giving off four times as much ki as before. I confirmed the proximity radius by moving to one end of the room where I used EKP to radiate ki away from a point ten feet from me. My ki disappeared from my sense at a place that looked to be twelve feet away.

• NP was much stronger. I used it to lift 99% of my body weight, and we still had plenty of minds left over. That'd save bus fare. The amount of lift each mind could generate was consistent with what I expected my NP force to be, about 410 kg plus what I called the "Training Bonus". We (both 4A and 4B) been practicing consciously projecting ki for 10 months now, so that was a +50% bonus, making 615 kg (1,350 pounds). (I knew from previous experience that the +5% per month continued to be +5% even when the amount of force increased dramatically during a déjà vu, and I'd just confirmed it continued to apply after a merge. A couple of minutes ago, the training bonus had added 26 kg to my total force, and now it was adding 205. That was VERY welcome, as it could possibly save my life.) [[The "training bonus" was a learned skill, so it augmented whatever ki I could normally tap from the Universe, rather than being an increase of a certain number of kilograms.]]

• I didn't want to test how bright light blobs could get, but heat blobs were noticeably hotter, as indicated by the animals I tested them on moving away from the uncomfortable heat source much more than when I'd benchmarked their reaction a few days ago.

• We could now make 16 NP-fingertips per mind, each from roughly 1/8th to 8 inches in diameter, and with a noticeable increase in the range of shapes they could adopt. Light blobs (zero emitting ones) were similarly more flexible in the range of shapes they could adopt. With 256 possible light blobs of moderately flexible shapes, I'd be able to make some interesting visual effects now.

• The Blinks Allowed Effect (how long I could take my eyes off my ki-effects, or how long NP-fingertips could exist beyond my maximum range of five hundred feet before they self-canceled) now lasted for 8 seconds. That was a VERY convenient time.

Now I needed to know whether I could adjust my body enough to become a ten-fingered, short, Black boy. What I most wanted was to find out very quickly that my body now had enough adaptability, because that would save me from having to do another merge. The next déjà vu was probably only two to four days away, giving very little time for my body to react; not that I want to stay here ANY longer than I have to.

I spent some time staring at my hands, eight minds wishing very hard for my missing finger to regrow, while the other seven (one was on duty) wished for the ring finger on the other hand to shorten. Back when my body had grown more muscular, it hadn't needed me to stare longingly at it, but I was putting everything I could into getting my two fingers to change, including radiating ki from hand to hand. I glanced at my armpit from time to time too, thinking dark thoughts. It'd also be nice to regrow the bone inside the borehole in my skull, but that could wait for later.

Meanwhile, Asshole had been yelling at me because my EEG results had changed so much. I'd yelled back at him, and we'd had a mutually unsatisfactory exchange. I couldn't turn half my minds off even if I wanted to, which I didn't, so I might as well insult Asshole during my refusals to explain what I was doing. Over recent days the mind control theory had fallen out of favor. It hadn't been disproved because that was impossible, but it was considered increasingly unlikely. The scientists were more and more interested in the experiments that were getting results, because many of them were obtaining VERY interesting data. So Asshole wasn't as aggressively frightened as he used to be about anything EEG related.

The nurse and two large male helpers arrived (I'd seen the helpers many times before, as I was always well guarded for anything other than routine visits by a nurse for food, washes, blood samples, etc.). They ordered me around, did some tests on me, played with the EEG helmet and machine, and generally achieved nothing toward understanding what was going on. They strapped me immovably into the bed and then a doctor and some technicians arrived and they tried really hard to find out what was going wrong, again finding no explanation for the impossible readings (now twice as impossible as the previous impossible readings). Once they'd given up, they left me strapped to the bed as one of my punishments for misbehaving. I'd tried blaming Jessica Alba for her effect on my hormones, but they didn't fall for it. I'd been strapped down for punishment before. It lasts until the next time they need me mobile for another experiment.

While that was going on, I was carrying on with my much more interesting internal conversations and tests. To a large extent, what the CIA did to me now was largely irrelevant, just so long as it left me capable of making my escape, whenever that would be. I hoped it'd be before the next déjà vu, as I didn't want to merge again if I could avoid it.

I'd already done all the planning I could think of (eight minds can think of a LOT of plans over several days), so I didn't have much to do. I went through all my sensible plans with 4B, checking to see if they'd had any good ideas 4A hadn't. Large chunks of my plans were guesswork, and our opinions of some of the guesses were dependent on our moods as much as anything else, so there were differences between 4A and 4B, but they were inconsequential.

I also double-checked as much of my plans as possible. Things like making sure the money I'd hidden was still where I'd put it, checking that I could still create NP-points in front of sight blobs that were outside of my room (it would've been very embarrassing to find out after starting my escape that I'd lost that ability). Very importantly, I determined that I was now able to stop the elevator lobby doors from closing. I only did so briefly, but my NP was easily strong enough now. However, unless the big emergency doors were weaker than the smaller, per-elevator doors, I'd not be able to hold both sets open. That required a fair amount of thought. Could I, for example, rush into the elevator shaft, fly up to the ground level, and get out of the shaft there, before the alarm was sounded. If I could move that fast, did I want to appear in the ground level without having had time to do any scouting of it? How would I distract everyone long enough to stop someone hitting the alarm button before I'd gotten out at the ground level? Just killing all the power wouldn't give me any time, because the emergency doors were designed to close in the event of a power failure (it required power to hold them open).

I would really like to avoid another merge if I could. I figured I had somewhat more than a 50% chance of escaping without leaving freaky evidence behind (I couldn't risk my family's lives so I had to plan for leaving no evidence), but that was still too risky. One possibility was to use the enormous increase in NP force - to 5,000 kg (5.5 tons) - I'd get during the next déjà vu. I wouldn't be able to escape during then because that much activity would cause it to cancel, but maybe I could stay in bed and use the force to do enough damage to usefully increase my chance of escaping after the déjà vu ended. I'd thought about that several times over the last few days, but now that the first merge had happened and my escape attempt was getting closer, I was much more focused on the possibility.

There was a great deal to think about, and getting our escape right on the first attempt was very important, so we had a very intense internal conversation. You'd be amazed how little time it took for us to get much of it done. Not only can we talk very rapidly internally, but 4A and 4B had spent several days going over the same plans repeatedly, so they'd developed a great deal of understanding and shorthand ways of conveying issues. When we were discussing it among the sixteen of us (fifteen really, as one was always on duty), those advantages still applied. We had one small disadvantage initially, as we couldn't share each other's memories or recognize each other's ki-effects across the 4A/4B divide, but those limitations went away a few minutes later; even faster than they had after our previous merge.

We planned, prepared, checked and double-checked. We'd done much of it before, but even just one new idea could make a difference between life and death, and some of our plans had to be kept up to date as circumstances changed. For example, the vials we wanted to use in some of the plans were moved around from time to time.

Once 4A and 4B had compared all their plans, had discussed them as much as possible, and done everything that could be done to improve on them, it was then a matter of killing time until the action would start. That would be when one of the following circumstances happened:

• I got evidence that my body could change enough to create an effective disguise AND I was pretty sure I could get away safely without leaving evidence of my having extraordinary abilities. It was too soon to know about the former, and the latter was questionable, so both of them getting the green light was unlikely. However, I knew that if my body did start changing wonderfully, then I'd be seriously tempted to try for an escape. It was not ideal, but I wanted as many of my families to get their Mark back as possible. I hated the idea of needlessly making more of my families suffer never knowing what had happened to me (I was damned sure the Government would never tell them). If my disguise ability improved significantly, it would be a very tough call whether or not to play safe and wait for another merge.

• The baddies started doing something that scared me into action. My chance of escape was good enough to make an attempt preferable to being subjected to something terrible that would prevent my future escape attempts, or risked the Big Secret being divulged. As I always had been, I was trying to read as much of my file as possible, so I could get a feel for how much time I had before something terrible was done to me. The computer security in this place was fucking high though, so I only got very frustrating, over-the-shoulder reads at very small portions of my file.

• Hunger drove me to act. I expected to get even hungrier soon, because of the eight extra minds. Possibly so hungry that I was forced to escape.

• The next déjà vu arrived. If it arrived quickly, in six hours say, we might pass on it, preferring to give our bodies time to demonstrate whether they could adjust. That'd be a tricky decision to make because the baddies could slip drugs into our food at any time, and then it could all be over. On the other hand, finding out we didn't have to do another merge meant fewer of my grieving families.

I spent some time wondering whether we might have any more special abilities. I tried the two abilities right at the top of my usual wish list: multiple sight blobs and even just one sound blob. There was no improvement: sight was still confusingly superimposed and sound was a non-starter. I probably had a few days to kill, so I would practice with eyes open and a sight blob going, even when the baddies were keeping me busy on their various experiments. That'd still leave us with thirteen minds to work on our own plans (losing one each to being centered, talking to the baddies, and experimenting with the sight blob).

Half an hour after they'd left me, the nurse and doctor arrived back to check my EEG cap and the machine it was plugged into. They must have been confused over the values it was still producing, what with there being sixteen minds in my head! I didn't feel sorry for their confusion.

The nurse and doctor poked around for a while, checking all the connections were tight, dials set correctly, etc. In the course of which they turned the display on so I got to see what the new system's display looked like. It was identical to the old, not greatly improved as I'd expected, which confused me. [[The display is a gross average of most of the electrodes. The real value of the new system was having an expert play back specific electrodes; or pairs of electrodes really, because EEGs measure voltage differences. Some of my EEG tests when I'd first woken up in this place, such as seeing whether creating blobs and centering made a difference, had given me misleading answers. The scientists were getting far more information from me than I thought they were because they were able to play back the EEG recordings for specific pairs of electrodes.]]