Chapter 3

Beep, Beep, Beep,

Waking up I could sense that something was wrong. That beeping noise reminded me of something but for some reason I could not think what it could be. Opening my eyes was like looking through a California fog where the maximum distance you could see was no more than about ten feet. The beeping continued to nag me as I laid there for a while trying to understand what it meant. My sense of smell returned telling me that I was in a doctor's office. The problem was that I knew that I was not in a doctor's office as I did not remember that beeping whenever my mother took me to see one. Thinking about my predicament along with the beeping gave me the answer as I remembered how my mother loved the television show ER. Opening my eyes I was expecting to see all the normal hospital equipment that I was familiar with from watching television. I was shocked to see that instead of the scene I envisioned with the sanitized white walls, the walls were gray with none of the equipment around me.

The room I was in if you could call it that was lighted but looking up I could not tell from where the light came from. What illumination there was in the room seemed to be coming from nowhere but it was there. I was still looking up thinking how weird all this was as the last thing I remembered before waking up here was kneeling by a guy that had been knocked through an electrical box with a bicycle nearby that had been in an accident.

I remember looking at him using my focus but a haze that I had never seen during any of my practice sessions with Master Kim obscured him. Reaching through the haze to roll him over I touch him then there was the pain. Pain so bad that even now that memory made me want to get sick. Looking around the room again I knew that this was not like any hospital room I had ever seen. I was thinking that this was the strangest room for a hospital as there was nothing here.

"I doubt that you would ever see a room like this, considering that I made it out of your mind." A voice called out from somewhere in the room.

"What do you mean?" I asked, as I looked around for the source of the voice as I was more curious than frightened as I knew I was alone here.

Looking around I finally spotted him, I could see that he was an adult with close cropped brown hair. From what I could see, he wore glasses and had a nice suit on. As for what he was doing, he was sitting casually in a recliner dressed like Lawrence Fishburn with his long trench coat from the movie 'The Matrix'. I was worried now as he was not there a moment ago when I looked around the room.

Answering slowly, he said, "I made this room in your mind."

"Huh?"

Smiling, he said, "Not the most intelligent answer but considering where we are it might be appropriate."

"Where the hell am I and who the hell are you?"

"This may take a while, I think it might be better if we sit down and talk."

When he said that another chair appeared not more than six feet away from him, both chairs were fine leather, to me they looked like the nice chairs that Neo and Morpheus were sitting in when he found out about the Matrix.

Not knowing what else to do when things just started appearing in front of me, I screamed, "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE!"

"Settle down, I have done nothing."

"LIKE HELL, where did this chair come from when you mentioned that I should sit down?"

"That is not me doing that, when I mentioned that we should sit down I simply found a memory of them in your mind and I created them here. All I did was to make you think that they appeared. They are nothing more than a figment of our collective imagination. If you want them gone, just think about standing back in this room without the chairs."

Just like that both chairs were just gone, just as fast as the second one had appeared. Thinking I might like to sit down again I imagined two recliners facing each other, before I could even say the words they were there.

Before I could say anything the guy sat down saying, "Thank you, if we are going to be here discussing our mutual situation, we might as well be comfortable."

"Just tell me what is going on!" I hate to say it but I was beginning to panic.

As he took his seat, he motioned for me to join him. When I did not immediately join him, he motioned with his hand, then added, "I'm not one for begging but, please?"

Looking around I could see that running away was not an option at the moment as I had no idea where I was or even what direction I should run. Thinking back to the lessons of my Sensei about patience, I sat down deciding to bide my time until an opportunity presented itself. Seeing nothing, I sat down in the offered chair.

After I was sitting comfortably, he answered, "Now to your first and most important question, I have no idea what is going on here. The last thought I had before waking up here was that I was going to kill the next person that touched me. I was hoping that it would be the driver that ran me down. Unfortunately, you touched me instead. What I don't understand is why you and I are not dead. As for myself, I knew that I was already dead that was why I was going to kill who ever hit me. Since I was touching that box I had more than enough power to blow you into next week, hell next year.

"Now to your next question, where are we? The answer to that as close as I can guess is that we are inside your head and you have always been here. Myself, I guess that I am now a passenger that got picked up when I discharged the energy I was storing. Maybe this whole thing is due to the fact I let everything out as my last thought before dying was to kill. Since all memories are stored as electrical impulses in the brain when I forced all the power from me, you got me along for the ride too."

"You figured this all out just now?" I asked.

"Not really, I have been here for a while now as you have been lying unconscious. Because of that I have no idea how long but it has been long enough that I started to poke around in your head looking at your memories trying to figure out who you are and why were you the first to touch me. What I found not only told me that I had hit the wrong target and I am sorry for that but that you are also a very angry young man. I will say that your memories were as disjointed as anyone that I have ever seen. I started to organize..."

Raising my hand to get him to stop talking, I asked, "What do you mean you were looking at my memories? How in the hell do you do that? Finally what do you mean that you were reorganizing them?"

"To answer the last question first I would say that I have no idea how I know how I am doing this. All I can say is that when I woke up in your mind I was bored at first I was just poking around but after a while I started searching for memories that linked together. Once that started I started to reorganize what I was seeing and I have been doing that ever since until just now when I felt the disturbance of you waking up. Now as to your first question I think it would be better if I started back at the beginning. Let me go through all of this and then we can discuss it more."

Seeing me nod, he started.

"My name is or was Peter Wynans. Until a month ago, I was classified as an asset of our great and benevolent government." Holding up his hand to forestall my question he continued saying, "I was eight years old when I first heard the doctors call me that. What started it all was that my whole family was involved in a car crash and all of them were killed and I was left in a coma for more than two weeks.

From what I found out was that while I was unconscious my ability appeared and started to drain and shut down every machine they connected me to. It did not take long for someone from the government to figure out something was going on and they started to run tests on me to find out what was happening. By the time I woke up from my coma I was in some government hospital being told that I was all alone and that the rest of my family was dead. Being told my parents were dead shocked me and my handlers took advantage of that and had me under control for years."

"What ability are you talking about?"

"I can drain electricity and dissipate it into the ground."

"That does not sound too bad." I answered.

"Your right that was all I did for the first few years they just studied me. When I was sixteen they changed their research and instead of studying what I could do they tried to turn me into a weapon with the stored power. When I realized what they wanted I stopped and simply stated that I could not discharge the electricity I stored in the way they wanted. After months of trying different ways to make me into a weapon they changed my testing again and instead made me a mobile blackout machine. By that I mean that they would get me into an area where they were trying to operate and they would have me cause a blackout. The military had other ways to cause a blackout but those always left behind evidence, when they would send me in the only evidence from me would be the footprints of my boots.

"By the time I turned eighteen I was tired of being used as a science experiment and when I complained they offered me some freedom. Their idea of freedom was a joke in that they offered me the chance to join the army but even there I always had a minder so their freedom was an illusion. I was given specialized training in sabotage along with a lot of other training. The training was fun enough until I was sent overseas to the big sandbox also called Iraq. At first they were careful how they used me since no one really knew what I could do.

"Heck I did not know what all I could do. They were careful using me, never where the others were working but close enough that when they started they had me drain the power to an area so that they could move in. Other than my two permanent handlers no one ever knew what it was that I was doing as they had me floating between different units. They had me doing that for a year before they brought me back to the States. I had gotten wind that they were bringing me back to study only now I was strong enough that I could fight back and I managed to escape. You remember the power outage last month in Denver?"

I had read about the blackout in Brodie's morning paper so I nodded again.

"That was me. I wanted some time off and my handlers decided that I was being lazy. We were outside of Denver being moved again when I decided that I had had enough of their goodness. I decided to leave and as I was being moved for the umpteenth time, my handlers stopped at a McDonald's for food for all of us. Excusing myself to go to the restroom I found an open door to the storage/ electrical room, being there alone I grabbed the leads and pulled. I was pissed and in grabbing the power I let my anger get the better of me and I kept pulling and before I knew it people were panicking as the blackout was total with the only illumination being from cars and trucks on the road everything else that was tied to the grid was out.

"Taking advantage of the darkness I excused myself from my handlers and disappeared. At first I just tried to hide around town but with my handlers sparing no expense I soon found a truck driver who hated the government as much as I did. He took sympathy on my plight and gave me a ride out of of Denver. After that I took up hitchhiking, grabbing rides with various truckers, with their help I managed to stay a few steps ahead of my handlers. When I came to Boise it was an accident that made me stop running as the truck I was riding in broke down. Deciding that I did not want to stay in town I headed out and I found an old abandoned line shack. Do you remember the smoke early in the day that you found me?"

I nodded again.

"Well the smoke was from me." Smiling he added, "Well not so much from myself but from the people that they sent to bring me back. When I escaped I vowed that I would never return. I had told them once before when they were close to leave me alone, well they didn't take the hint. The smoke you saw this morning was from the two helicopters that they brought in with their capture teams to bring me back. They got too close and I brought them down."

"How did you do that? Let me guess, you had a heat seeking missile and you shot them down?" said with a short bark of laughter.

"No nothing like that, personally I think my way was better but the result was the same in that they are dead and I am ... well I am here stuck with you."

With my own smile, I said, "If you are here in my head and this is all real, then I think that you are dead."

He smiled at my remark, then offered, "Yes, I think that would be true but as of right now and this conversation I have no idea as to what happened but as I have seen things and done things that most people would consider impossible, I would say that all things are possible."

"Then let me ask what exactly did you do to bring down two helicopters then?" I asked.

"My ability to drain electricity has gotten stronger over the years. When they first started using me I had to be in contact with what I was going to drain. While I was working on shutting down grids I noticed that my abilities were growing and that I no longer had to be in contact with the grid all I needed was to be close maybe fifty meters or so. This morning the helicopters were two hundred meters off and I shut them both down so I was still getting stronger. That was until their chase teams ran me down while I was trying to escape yet again. How they found me, I don't know but since I am dead now I guess it is a moot point.

"Now let me ask you a couple of questions. For my first question, how did you survive my discharge?"

I laughed, looking at him I laughed some more, saying, "I have no fucking clue, I'm not even sure I believe you and your claim of being able to drain electricity. Now if I do not believe you to be able to do that what in hell makes you think that I have a clue as to what happened to us. Heck this all could be a bad dream that I am having. Now if that is the case, maybe what happened is that when I touched you, you were still touching a wire and I became the most convenient ground for you and this is all a bad dream or I am in the hospital.

"All I do remember was that when I rode my bike over the rise all I could see were two SUV's pulling away from where you were. When I got there I saw your bike mangled like it had been hit by a car and your body knocked through the power box. Not knowing what had happened to you I brought up my focus to see if I could tell where you were hurt."

"What are you talking about when you say you looked at me with your focus?" Peter asked.

Thinking about it for a second, I answered, "Actually I have no idea. My focus is something that my Sensei and I were working on. Actually it would be more accurate to say that he was working on his and I was working on mine. The easiest way I have to describe my focus would be like how someone would meditate before they would break a board at a martial arts competition. Only my Sensei and I were working on something that went well past that." I could see his confusion so I continued, "What he told me..."

I paused at his upraised hand, he was looking through me for a second then his eyes refocused and all he said was, "Interesting."

After a few more seconds, he looked at me saying, "Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore. That was one hell of a conversation you had with him."looked at me for another second then said, "Let's make a deal, right now neither of us has an idea as to what is going on here. I or should I say, we, both should be dead but we aren't. The only guess I have to our current situation is that you said you were using your focus when you touched me. Maybe there was something in that, that allowed you or should I say us to survive. So the question now is what do we do about this situation."

"Well I don't know about you but I want to get the hell out of here, maybe when I wake up this will all be a bad dream and you will be gone."

"Well if you know how to do that go for it since I do not have a clue. Still, right now I have another question for you. What was this haze you mentioned that was around me before you touched me?"

"No idea, maybe it is related to your storing power as you call it. Anyways I was just trying my focus when this happened."

"That does not explain why you were using it on me?

"I am still learning how to use it, one of the things that my Master suggested to me was that it could be used to aid in healing my body. But before it could do that you have to understand the body and I was going to use it to look inside you like I have done for myself. That was why I touched you in the first place."

"Healing yourself or others, now that sounds like fantasy."

Getting defensive, I shot back, "Yea, just like being able to store and use electricity."

After a moment he grinned at me saying, "Point taken, so I guess now we wait for something to happen since we both seem to be trapped in here."

"No thanks, I am not that patient," sitting back in the recliner I tried to find my focus. As soon as I settled into the chair my focus was there. That was funny in itself as it usually took a few minutes to become relaxed enough, now it was just there. It felt more like I had never left it in the first place. Thinking back quickly I remembered that I was working with my focus when I touched him, not knowing if that was what caused this mess I put it aside and instead focused on my body.

To say that my body was a wreck would be an understatement. Tracking the path the electrical current took though my body was easy enough to see as the burns and destroyed cells were everywhere starting in my hand where I had touched Peter in the first place. From there the path went up my arm through my chest up my neck and through my head. Once there the path fragmented with a few tendrils passing through my brain and in the end all of them exited through my left eye. Considering the damage I had taken I was thinking of agreeing with Peter that I should have been dead why I wasn't I had no idea but no matter what, I was thankful for that.

There was one thing about the damage I thought was very strange and that was how fast my body was working on repairing the damage. From the cells that had exploded from passing the energy that had become the path of the electrical discharge to the adjacent cells that had died by being nearby. My body was working hard to replace everything that had been damaged. Leaving my body alone to do what it needed to do I decided that it was time to wake up. The first step for me was to open my eyes.

I opened my eyes to the world and immediately felt like I was going to be sick as a Kaleidoscope of colors and images flooded my one good eye. The only reason I think that I did not throw up was that I was too weak to do so and the lights in the room were turned down low. Closing my eye and forcing myself to relax I was able to keep from getting sick.

What I could not control was the beeping that had been consistent while I was talking to Peter. Now instead of the beeping there were several annoying tones emanating from the machines around me. As the warning buzzers continued to whine, I opened my right eye which showed me that I was indeed in a hospital room but everything was blurry with double images that drifted around in my sight. The kaleidoscope of colors and images to me seemed very odd because when I only opened my one good eye I could swear that I was seeing out of both eyes even though I could feel something blocking my vision out of my left eye. Closing my right eye and mentally trying to open my left gave me a kaleidoscope of images and colors as not only was I seeing double but I was also seeing an image from my 'second sight' superimposed on the rest of the blurry image. As it was it was now a triple image and once again I was fighting to keep from being ill. Closing my left eye I was hoping that the beeping and warning signal would soon end.

That was when the room went silent and plunged into darkness. I could tell that with my eyes closed it got noticeably darker in the room. Opening the eye that hurt less showed that indeed the lights and the machines were off. Looking towards the door of the room I could hear the sound of rubber soled shoes squeaking on the floor getting louder as if they were approaching my room. In my mind I heard a gasp followed by laughter then after a few seconds I heard Peter's voice telling me that I had turned off the equipment. Not bothering with my protest that I could not do that he quickly went through the steps as to how he did that and in a blink of an eye when he told me to try all the machines and the lights came back on along with the annoying tones.

The booming sound of the footsteps told me that something large was heading my way. Opening my right eye only hurt slightly less, but when the sound was close I thought my eyes were going again as not only was the image blurry but there was a pattern of blue like surgical scrubs along with a multitude of bright yellow splotches. Watching the shape as he came close I discovered that the splotches of yellow were in fact smiley faces and the scrubs themselves were being stretched to the limit by the biggest black man I had ever laid my eyes on. Even with my blurry eyesight I could tell that this wall in front of me had not missed many meals but on him, it was all muscle.