Chapter 26

Now that the surprise of its existence no longer overwhelmed my normal attention to detail, I took notice of a few of its features. The cavern was not as cold as it looked, nor did my voice echo within it to the degree I expected. With the lights on, darkness existed only at the edges and far corners. The floor of the cavern was covered in a dark gray dust that muffled my footsteps to the point where they didn't echo at all. Still, I didn't want these new details to distract me from our purpose.

"Okay, its the focus thing," I began.

"Yes," Bud confirmed. "Think about what you were seeing when I first asked you to focus on the wall. What eventually happened?"

"Parts of the wall seemed to come into sharper focus," Cooper said. "But every time I tried to concentrate on that part, the focus would shift."

"Right," I agreed, picturing it in my head. "The focus seemed to swirl randomly at first."

"Yeah, but kind of in waves at the same time."

"The strangest thing was when suddenly a piece of whatever part was already focused would seem to jump out more sharply even that it already was."

"Yes!" Bud confirmed again, this time with some excitement. "Now -," we could almost feel him taking a breath and regaining his calm. "This feeling of a new focus building out of the old is one side of the coin."

"Yes, but what's the coin?" Cooper asked.

"No, stay with me now!" Bud rebuked him. "We're almost there. This super-focus is only the beginning. Think if it as if it was sight. Can you see a single grain of sand? Yes you can, but it takes some effort to focus on something that small. Can you see something smaller than a grain of sand? Perhaps, but you might not be able to appreciate the difference in size."

"So what are we seeing?" I asked.

"First, while this sensory information is overlaid atop your vision, it is not sight. Second, the things you are 'sensing' are much smaller than grains of sand. What you are sensing are molecules."

"Molecules!" we simulcast.

"Molecules," Bud repeated. "But sensing them is only the beginning."

"How?" one of us said. "What?" asked the other. Who said which was lost in the moment.

"Right now you are sensing molecules along a cross section of your field of focus. With a depth of focus that is inconsistent and constantly changing. Once you have this sense of yours under better control, you will be able to act on those molecules."

"Act on them?" Cooper asked.

"Move them," he responded.

"Move them," I echoed, trying to understand what he was telling us.

"Telekinesis?" Cooper asked.

"Yes!" Bud said with triumph. "This is to be your super power."

"Telekinesis." I said. "Moving things with our mind?"

"Yes," Bud said with less triumph and more smugness.

"Someone's going to have to get me up to speed on this entire thing," I said finally. "I have some idea of what telekinesis means, and not just because they were still teaching Latin when I was in college. I know what molecules are, and maybe what they are means something different to someone with a modern education than they do to me, but what I'm interpreting you to mean is that we can move individual molecules with our mind."

"Molecular telekinesis," Cooper added.

"Yes, But don't be too hasty in dismissing it because of that," Bud added hastily. "That's where the training comes in, and as you get stronger, you will be able to move increasingly large numbers of molecules, and some molecules will be easier to move collectively than others."

"Like grains of sand?" I said with a laugh.

"And much, much more," Bud said with some humor. "But first things first. We need to see them before we can move them. Now, let's practice!"

And so we did. If you had been an observer, it would have seemed like I was in a staring contest against an invisible opponent at first, but the object of our attention was the dusty cavern floor, or rather the dust of the floor.

"Macroscopically, as your normal vision perceives things, except where you've left footprints from your walking around, the dusty floor is very smooth and featureless," Bud explained. "But your molecular sense sees things microscopically, and seen that way, the surface is anything but smooth. This is part of the first hurdle you must overcome."

"Reconciling the macroscopic and microscopic senses," I reasoned, almost feeling like I was stuck in a Jules Verne fantasy.