Chapter 12: Friday, August 6, 2010

Friday, August 6, 2010

Jake sat at the kitchen table with Jan and the second wave. Leanne, Kara, Julie, and Carol and all the servants except Annabelle were at the Broadman’s new house, giving it a thorough cleaning while they waited for the movers to show up. Brian was still sleeping.

“Here’s how today’s lesson works. It’s been four days since your first treatment. You’ve been able to detect strong primary emotions for several days and now you’re getting to where you can sense more subtle ones. Jan will be our test subject. I’m going to provoke various emotions in her. I’ll give you a few seconds to read them. Any questions?”

“Isn’t that going to be kind of hard on Jan?” Shannon asked. “I mean unless they are all going to be happy emotions.”

“I understand that some of the emotions will be unpleasant,” she said. “But the context matters. I’ll know that what I’m feeling will have been provoked by Jake for this occasion.” She turned to Jake. “You’re not going to rake me over the coals, are you?”

“I had planned on some negative emotions. A broad variety of emotions will make for a more effective lesson. Do you want to reconsider?”

“No, each emotion won’t last long. I should be okay.”

“If you’re sure. I had planned on giving you some nice emotions, too. In fact, here’s the first one.”

Jake activated an array of Jan’s memory recall indexes, bringing up memories of her wedding. He cycled quickly through the events, starting with the wedding ceremony and ending with Jan and Mark leaving the reception while guests threw rice and called out best wishes.

Jan beamed at Jake, her eyes bright.

“Definitely happy,” Nina said.

Shannon smiled at Jan. “You were very excited.”

“And proud, too,” Alice said.

“But there’s nervousness, even fear,” Boris said.

Jake nodded approvingly. “Good. You all picked out specific emotions from an experience that provoked a variety of emotions.”

“What was the experience?” Nina asked.

“That particular matrix of emotions comes courtesy of Jan’s marriage to that handsome catch, Mark Harrison,” Jake said. “Here we go again.”

Jan suddenly looked at Jake with a painful expression.

“Grief, sadness,” Nina said.

Shannon nodded. “Loss and hurt.”

“Betrayal,” Boris said.

Alice looked thoughtful. “There’s an acceptance that lingers as the grief fades away. What happened, Jan?”

“Jake brought back the memory of a romance that ended badly.”

“Those are both old memories that Jan has thought about a lot. That’s why the emotions that are produced are so complicated. Here’s one that’s more spontaneous.”

Jake touched Jan’s arm to maximize his resolution and focused on her unborn baby. Once he had the image firmly in his mind, he sent it to Jan.

“Excitement, again,” Nina said.

“Lots of anxiety,” Boris said.

“I feel something, but I don’t know the name,” Shannon said. “It combines protectiveness and affection and high hopes.”

“Those are maternal instincts,” Alice said.

“Yes, indeed,” Jan said, placing her hands on her belly and giving them a big smile.

Jake smiled back at her fondly before he turned back to the others.

“Here’s one that will come in handy for you, Alice,” Jake said. “I’m going to use Boris to demonstrate.”

Boris looked apprehensive.

“I’m going to say something to our stoical friend here. As I do, I want you all to read his emotions.” Jake turned to Boris. “That very cute and very willing Carol Finch comes up to you, Boris, and says she’s very horny and that you look like just the snack to satisfy her.”

Boris looked startled and then blushed.

“Damn it, Jake,” he barked.

“He’s very embarrassed,” Nina said.

“Yeah, he got there eventually,” Alice said, “but he was excited by the idea at first.”

“I didn’t sense any disinterest or revulsion,” Shannon said. “Boris, I’m not sure that you’re the proper, respectable guy you want us to think you are.”

“Go easy on him,” Jake said. “You’re seeing a very common reaction. Being a man of the heterosexual persuasion, he had a sexual thought when confronted with the idea of an available, sexually-mature young woman. Then social conditioning kicked in and made him resist. And he did, showing that he is a responsible member of society who’s entitled to brag on his impulse control.” Jake turned to Boris. “On behalf of society, I applaud you. Meanwhile, you’re wasting your breath snapping at me. You will be an open book for these women very soon. My little game is nothing compared to what they will see then.”

“I bet you won’t like it either the next time you get put on the spot,” Boris said.

“No, I don’t suppose I will,” Jake said, “but it was for a good cause. I’m sure Alice appreciates your sacrifice. She’s been talking about probing some of the men at work to see if they would be interested in a certain, risky kind of adult entertainment. What we did was for her benefit, to show her one technique for delving into a person’s attitudes.”

“All you did was mentioned Carol to Boris,” Alice said. “What’s so special about that?”

“You’ll notice that Boris didn’t answer, and yet, you now have an in-depth knowledge of his feelings about sex with underage girls. And more than that, you know his real attitude. If you only listened to his answer, he might have told you the truth or he might have lied. With this technique, you know the truth either way. During the coming week, you’ll learn how to dig out thoughts that are buried in the unconscious, but until then, this will help you to learn a person’s attitudes even without reading his thoughts.”

Jake continued the lesson. He had just finished the tenth exercise when the doorbell rang.

Jake cast out to see who was there.

“Shit, it’s Donna Glenn,” he said.

“Glenn? Isn’t she the reporter you were feeding the Cox stories to?” Boris said.

“Yes, that’s her,” Jake said.

Annabelle walked into the kitchen.

“A visitor for you, Jake. She says her name is Donna Glenn.”

“Well, let’s get the most out of this that we can. We’ll incorporate Donna into the lesson. All of you are showing good discrimination at reading emotions. When I bring Donna in, pay close attention to what she’s feeling. But don’t focus just on her. Try to read her, me, and Jan in turn. Try to absorb the entire emotional landscape of ... of, well, whatever it is Donna’s here to do.”

Jake went to the front hall where Donna was standing, looking pensive. She was thinner than she had been before the accident but looked like she had mostly recovered. Her hair was very short, maybe only an inch long. They must have shaved it off at the hospital.

“Hello, Donna,” he said, reaching out to offer her a hug. “It’s a surprise to...”

Jake froze. He read Donna’s mind only to find her reading him back.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

“I’m not going crazy, am I, Jake? Something really happened to me, didn’t it?”

“Darlin’, it sure seems that way to me. Come on back. Let’s get you a cup of coffee and sort things out.”

Jake sifted through her mind as they walked back to the kitchen. He asked Annabelle to bring Donna coffee as they sat at the table. Donna looked around.

“So there are more than just the two of us, Jake,” she said.

“It’s actually a very rare thing, Donna, maybe a hundred in the whole country. But I didn’t expect you to be one of them. You weren’t when I visited you in the hospital.”

“I can barely remember when you came. It was all very dreamlike. If not for the nurses talking about the three people who prayed over me for two days before my miraculous recovery, I would probably have dismissed it as a hallucination.”

“How long have you been able to read minds?”

“It started in the hospital, maybe a week after you left. I had started to recover. I was getting stronger and had finally stopped sleeping all the time. But there were these odd symptoms that seemed to be left over from the accident. I kept feeling things that didn’t make sense, seemingly coming out of left field. They didn’t match up to what I was thinking about. I kept feeling happiness and sadness, hope and despair, hunger and horniness. The doctors couldn’t explain it. They kept studying my brain scans trying to figure out what could be causing it.

“Everything got even more bizarre when I heard my neurologist talking to himself about the interesting paper he could write if only he could find the cause of my strange emotions. When I told him I didn’t want him writing about my condition, he denied everything.

“I should explain that my vision was affected by my injuries. I have what the doctors called visual field defects. The occipital lobe damage was bad enough that it disrupted my vision. It was especially bad at first, and I couldn’t really see the people around me.”

“About then I realized that whenever people were close to me, they kept saying the most bizarre things — things that were rude or irrelevant or off the wall or intensely personal. I thought I was going crazy. I was so freaked out I stopped even telling my doctors about it. I thought they would transfer me to the mental ward.

“It took two weeks before my vision improved enough that I could see that in most cases, the people involved weren’t even moving their lips. It finally clicked what was happening.

“I got out of the hospital yesterday. I went to Jerry Amos’s office in the afternoon to see you, Jake, but Jerry said you didn’t work there anymore. He wouldn’t give me your address, but I read it from his office manager’s mind. Oh, and thanks for the four million dollars, by the way.”

“Don’t thank me. The lawyers talked Cox into doing the right thing.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jake. I read from Jerry’s mind the conversations you had with him. I know that it’s really you giving away Cox’s money.”

“Sorry. It’s reflex for me to deflect attention away. Tell me, what is your range?”

“Range?”

“How far away can you read minds?”

“I can read everyone here, although his is kind of fuzzy,” Donna said, nodding toward Boris, who was sitting across the table, three or four feet away.

“Can you plant thoughts or emotions into others?”

“Not that I know of. Can you guys do that?”

“Most of the people here can. I couldn’t tell you for sure about other mind readers.”

“Why not?”

“It’s the dirty underbelly of the mind-reading world, Donna. They are so afraid that another mind reader is going to make them into slaves that they almost never come into contact with each other. That keeps us from finding much out about other mind readers.”

“But there were three of you at the hospital and there are six of you here.”

“We are the exception, Donna. In fact, our home here is kind of an experiment to see if mind readers can live together. The existence of my fellow mind readers here is something I keep secret from the other telepaths.”

Donna suddenly realized that knowing the secret of someone who could control others came with a peril all its own.

“Fear,” Alice said.

Nina nodded. “Definitely fear.”

Jake took Donna’s hand. “Be at ease, darlin’. I’m pretty sure we can work this out without making you my slave.”

“Jake, you don’t have to twist my arm or anything. I owe you a lot. I’ll do anything you want.”

Jake read her and found it was true. She was completely loyal to him. Why would that be? There was only one other person who could have done that to her. He looked at Jan with a frown. She looked back at him blandly.

“Whoa, do I really think that?” Donna asked. “Did you do something to me, Jake?”

“It was me,” Jan said. “It was a precaution and an important one, too, one that Jake is too noble to consider, and that will probably lead to his downfall someday. I was reading you and Jake at the front door. I realized that you were a mind reader, so I made you loyal to him. It’s a way to ensure that you didn’t take control of him.”

“I didn’t even realize it until just now, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him. I was already grateful, but what I’m feeling for him now is much more than that.”

“We’ll figure out what the best thing is to do,” Jake said. “Let me take a look at your brain. Maybe I can figure out why you’ve suddenly become a telepath.”

Jake looked at the mind-reading section of her prefrontal cortex. It looked just like the other mind readers. He followed the input nerves back toward the occipital and parietal lobes. They weren’t particularly efficient, but they did manage to propagate a signal along their entire length, if weakly and with some degradation. He looked at the output nerve. There was a dead region just after it departed her prefrontal cortex. Mind-control signals weren’t getting to the transmitter.

Jake looked up at Jan. She had been following along with him.

“I think we can make an educated guess at what happened,” she said. “We stimulated the entire brain when we were treating the diffuse neuronal injury because it affected the whole network of neurons. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t bother distinguishing which nerves I was working on. I energized all the nerves in the part of her brain that I was responsible for. It was apparently enough to connect the brain centers involved.”

“Except the transmitter,” Jake said.

“So it really was you who saved me,” Donna said.

“The doctors didn’t think you were going to live,” Jake said. “We thought it was your last hope.”

“I owe you all for my life. Do you know about the other effects?”

“No, what effects?” Jan asked.

“I’ve always been pretty smart. I’m pretty sure that I’m a lot smarter now. I can reach better conclusions than I could before on less information. And I’m quicker witted, too. My memory is better. My writing is crisper. I’m going to be a better reporter. And that’s before you factor in that I can read people’s minds now. I’m going to be awesome.”

“But can you be subtle?” Jake asked.

“I suppose. Why?”

“You can’t let on that you can read minds or that you know people who can. The mind-reading community isn’t exactly a democracy. In fact, it’s more like a dictatorship run by thugs. If you irritate them, they will come looking to take control of you.”

“What would irritate them?”

“They enforce three rules.”

“What?”

“First, we are forbidden from approaching each other. Second, we don’t take control of one another. Third, we cannot let outsiders know about our existence. You and Jan have broken two-thirds of the laws today already, and it’s not even lunchtime yet.”

“But I didn’t know,” Donna said, her fear projecting to the others.

“It’s okay, Donna,” Jake said. “We’re on your side, and no one but us knows about you. If you are careful you can probably stay below the radar and never have to deal with the Council.”

“The Council?”

“The bullies who run things.”

“You don’t sound like you’re a member of their fan club.”

“No, there’s a good chance that I’m going to end up in conflict with them.”

Boris cleared his throat. “You shouldn’t say more about that until you know what our relationship is going to be with Donna,” he said.

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Jake, you did say that some mind readers can make others think and feel things, didn’t you?” Donna asked.

“I did.”

“How come I can’t?”

“There’s a nerve that’s critical to that function that isn’t working in you.”

“Like the nerves that help me to read other minds?”

“Jan, Ellen, and I inadvertently fixed those nerves but not the one that lets you control others.”

“Could you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know if I can trust you. Think about all the things you could do if you could make people do what you want. Most of the mind readers I know of use their abilities to do awful things. I won’t be responsible for unleashing that kind of evil.”

“What if I promise not to?”

“No. It doesn’t matter what you promise. You’d have to have the kind of character that would make a promise like that unnecessary.”

“Don’t I?”

“No, I don’t think you do.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at the work you do. Have you ever reported a story that hurt people?”

“Lots of times. That’s my job. You’ve helped me do it. We caused a lot of trouble for Tommy Cox.”

“I’m not talking about exposing corrupt public servants. What you did there was entirely justified because you were protecting the public. It’s the other stories I worry about. Have you ever written a story about someone’s unconventional sexual practices or family secrets? Have you reported weird or embarrassing details about people even though it caused them to be humiliated? And for no better reason than it was a titillating story that would draw readers to you and your newspaper? I remember the story of that addicted baseball player who fell off the wagon for one night last year.”

“That wasn’t me. That was the sportswriters.”

“Would you have written the story if it had been you who had broken it?”

She looked down. “Yes, without hesitation.”

“So do you see my problem? Is it right for me to give you the power to work even greater evil?”

“I didn’t say it was evil.”

“You just admitted that you would have hurt someone for no better reason than to help your career. I’m pretty sure that’s what evil is.”

Donna was becoming upset.

“I was just following the usual practices of my profession.”

“I don’t see that that makes it any less evil,” Jake said.

“Hold on a minute,” Jan said. “This is a bigger problem than I think either of you two realizes. Jake, we’ve already loosed this woman on the world. We have already given her great power, even if it’s not as much as you or I have. And you’ve shown that she has the temperament to use it for evil. Maybe not as evil as Harris or the Council, but she’s still selfish enough to hurt people. It’s not enough to just refrain from giving her yet more power. We’ve got to deal with the problem that we’ve already created.”