Rise of the Mystics Read online

  Who are you, dear daughter?

  They had told me that was my mother’s voice, speaking from the grave. Just an old memory fragment from Eden.

  Re-member your true name.

  They knew I was hearing things—no hiding that with the Mindflex on my head. They also knew I was getting much better at ignoring the voices.

  Charlene stood, retrieved a clear glass from the cupboard, filled it with water at the sink, and set it down on a silver disk five feet in front of me. The nickel-plated sensor would read even the slightest change in the atoms contained in the glass and the water.

  “Ready when you are,” she said.

  We’d done this exercise twice in the last week. Focus on the glass and imagine boiling the water. Impossible, naturally, but that was the point. My brain had learned to see the water boiling with my intention to see it in that state. A hallucination I could control.

  “Why, if we already know what I’m going to see?” I asked.

  “For two reasons. The first is as a simple exercise in retraining your brain. See if you can observe what’s really happening.”

  “The water not moving.”

  “That’s right, even though you think it is. Can you think of it boiling but still see it as it really is—not moving? That’s what we still haven’t achieved. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  I stared at the glass of water and focused all of my thoughts on seeing it bubbling, boiling, changing, heating, as if I really had that power, like someone from a comic book.

  Return to the truth of who you’ve always been, dear daughter.

  The auditory hallucination of my mother’s voice distracted me. I dismissed the interruption, drew a deep breath, and began again.

  Focus . . .

  Less than five seconds passed before I saw the water’s surface shimmer, as if the glass was vibrating and agitating the surface of the liquid inside. Small bubbles formed in the water and rose.

  Within ten seconds the water was bubbling.

  “There,” I said, looking up at her.

  “You’re done?”

  “I’m done.”

  “You saw the water bubbling?”

  I glanced at the water and saw that it was still again. But I already knew that I’d only imagined that boiling.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “Did your sensors pick up any change in the water?” It sounded ridiculous to me, but they seemed to think it might be possible, so I was a little disappointed when she shook her head.

  “No.”

  “All in my mind.”

  “But what a beautiful mind it is. Want to go again?”

  STEVE COLLINGSWORTH stood next to DARPA’s director, Theresa Williams, watching Rachelle through the one-way glass, arms crossed. Next to them: Bill Hammond, leader of the now-defunct Project Eden.

  It would be an understatement to say that Steve had developed a profound interest in the girl wearing blue jeans, a black shirt, and a new pair of red Converse tennis shoes. Everything about Rachelle fascinated him—the way she flipped her black hair when it hung in her eyes, the way she walked, light as a feather, the way she read her surroundings like a book.

  The way she could transform the physical state of water through thought alone.

  Real. All of it.

  “She moved before Charlene bumped the coffee cup,” the director said. “Ten seconds and the water boils. She’s getting stronger.” Eyes on Steve. “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “It’s nothing new.”

  “What is new is the ease with which she’s doing it.”

  “Which is why you’re here, watching what we’re watching.”

  Theresa looked at the data on the monitor as if to convince herself that what she’d just seen had actually happened.

  Steve nodded at the screen. “You see the energy readings. Her operational field extends at least ten feet from her body.” Charlene’s field extended the mere six inches typical of most humans. “We’re still no closer to understanding where all that extra energy comes from.”

  They’d long ago developed instruments sensitive enough to read a person’s energy field in the same way a less sensitive monitor could read a light bulb’s energy from a distance. Human beings, like all matter, were made of energy—99.999 percent of flesh and bone consisted of empty space charged by energy fields that held atoms and subatomic particles in a perceivable form.

  Humans “saw” matter, when what really existed was collapsed energy. Part of what the human eye couldn’t see was the energy field extending beyond a body, a field that changed dramatically depending on the body’s brain activity. Fear limited the frequency of that field, retracting it to within an inch of the typical body. Feelings of gratitude and love operated at a different frequency and expanded the field to several feet in most human bodies.

  Most. Not Rachelle’s. Hers was much stronger and extended much farther.

  Theresa nodded at the monitors, voice tight. “I’m not sure you fully appreciate the danger a person with her abilities poses to a world that essentially runs on information. She proved as much when you put her on television four months ago.”

  Steve had allowed Rachelle one field interview on an ABC affiliate the same day she’d collapsed Eden. He’d asked her to keep it simple, so she had. She said nothing about Vlad Smith.

  His motivation had been split. In part he wanted to protect himself from DARPA’s backlash—any firing of him, the man who’d rushed in to help save so many souls, would only raise suspicions among the public. In part he hoped to put Rachelle in the nation’s consciousness, thereby protecting her as well.

  The brief interview with the blind girl who could now see had gone viral. As had the few seconds in that interview when she’d told the reporter, Robert Martin, that he didn’t need to worry about his daughter because she was in a better place now. The camera caught his stunned reply: How could she have known that he’d lost his unborn daughter when his wife was killed in a car accident three months earlier? They hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy. Rachelle offered no response.

  Speculation ran rampant as social media and news pundits ran with the story. She became the face of Eden, DARPA’s mind-blowing memory-manipulation experiment.

  Alarmed, DARPA spun their own version of the events: All in Eden had signed up for the project in full knowledge of the experiment’s parameters, designed to measure the effects of memories on both physiological and psychological behavior. What all of the residents, including Rachelle, believed was radically subject to alterations made to their memories within the context of the experiment. Whatever they thought had happened hadn’t necessarily happened at all.

  What had happened was classified. End of story.

  Still, conspiracy theorists made their hay for a couple of months before the story finally died. Everyone wanted to know: How could Rachelle have known that Robert Martin had lost his daughter?

  DARPA went silent. They sequestered Rachelle along with her father, David. They simply couldn’t allow someone who could read thoughts to roam free.

  Within a week of sequestering her, the director concluded that the only way to protect both Rachelle and DARPA was through a radical, drug-induced recontextualization of her memories. And of her mind-reading skills. And of her dreams of another world, from which she claimed all her skills had come. Memory wipes wouldn’t work with her—they’d tried—but old-fashioned brainwashing might.

  Despite Steve’s strong objections, they proceeded, first by dosing both Rachelle’s and David’s water with Rexpinal each night to suppress their capacity to dream. Dreams gone, they’d wiped David’s memory entirely using a procedure called MEP, or Memory Editing Protocol.

  In 2017, using engram cells to trace the specific location of memories, MIT had first discovered the mechanism for short- and long-term memory storage. At the outset, memories were simultaneously recorded in both the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex as pre
viously theorized. The amygdala stored short-term memories. It took two weeks for the brain to decide whether the memories in the prefrontal cortex were worth holding on to. If so, the memory became long-term, stored there. If not, the memory was deleted.

  All DARPA had to do to wipe a brain of all memories was replicate the brain’s process of purging itself.

  But the process that worked with others didn’t work with Rachelle. Unable to reformat her brain, they’d begun systematic sessions of deconstruction. Old school. The administration of both psychotropic and hallucinogenic drugs had scrambled her mind, leaving her to finally accept that her memories of Eden weren’t real.

  Over the course of three months, she’d embraced the only diagnosis that made any sense: severe schizophrenia triggered by the trauma of her experience.

  Nothing could be further from the truth, but there it was.

  Steve turned to Bill Hammond. “I’ve never doubted the danger she poses. I’m also aware of the danger to Rachelle.”

  “An unfortunate consequence,” Bill returned. “You know as well as anyone that she’s a liability.”

  “A liability? She’s the single greatest opportunity for consciousness research this or any organization has stumbled on. I agreed to go along only because it gave us access to a mind that’s clearly operating outside our best models. Rachelle understands that much and is agreeable. But I’ve never liked the deception.”

  “And what precisely have we learned about consciousness in the last four months? We have to weigh the danger she presents with these parlor tricks.”

  “There’s clearly a field outside of her mind that she’s able to access,” Steve shot back. “We don’t know how external consciousness can be accessed, but we’re just getting started. I think—”

  “Consciousness outside the mind? We all know consciousness is generated by the mind. Our brains make us conscious.”

  “So says prevailing science, but from what I’m seeing, Rachelle defies that science. We have to figure out how and why. Isn’t that what we’re doing here?”

  A slight grin of disbelief crossed Bill’s face. “Need I remind you that spirituality isn’t science? The brain isn’t receiving consciousness from a higher source as if the mind was some kind of antenna. It’s generating it between the neurons.”

  Steve peered through the window where Rachelle was on her third or fourth successful attempt to stimulate the water using her thoughts alone. To his left, Theresa watched in silence, letting them go on.

  The water was boiling.

  “And I suppose you have a logical explanation for how she can affect water at a distance of seven feet,” Steve said. “Any of your models allow for telekinesis?”

  “Clearly there’s a quantum field between them. ‘Spooky action at a distance,’ as Einstein called it. But the brain’s creating it, not receiving it. Regardless, I doubt our research into one subject’s ability to influence the quantum field is going to redefine science. Particularly a subject who presents such a risk.”

  “A risk due to her ability to hear thoughts, which also defies our understanding of consciousness. She’s far too valuable to treat with such low regard. We should at least reconsider our approach,” Steve insisted.

  “And what approach would you suggest?” Theresa asked, turning.

  “Bring her in. Tell her everything we’ve done and why. Ask for her help in decoding her own mind. If she can boil water with her thoughts, maybe she can solve problems not even our best quantum computers can.”

  “You want to tell her that she’s not, nor ever has been, schizophrenic?” Bill cut in. “That we’ve deliberately scrambled her brain with drugs? That we shut down her dreaming to hamstring her? You can’t be serious.”

  “You mean the dreams of a world that at least offered an explanation for Vlad Smith? The dreams that somehow manifested her sight and the tattoo on her shoulder? We still have no explanation for Vlad, and we all know Eden had no access to holographic dye technology.”

  Bill looked stunned. It was probably the bit about her dreams offering an explanation for Vlad Smith. An explanation, maybe, but not one that could be taken seriously.

  Steve continued in a more measured tone. “Okay, so we don’t tell her we’ve cut off her dreams. The rest, yes. I think I could bring her in gently. Nothing would surprise her anymore.”

  The director crossed her arms and paced, eyes still on Rachelle. “From the beginning our process has been to use a sequential regimen of drugs that systematically impairs her brain functions, hoping to isolate the neural regions responsible for the skills she demonstrates. That would prove useful to us, no question. Unfortunately, other than shutting down her dreams, we’ve been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, her power is increasing. You can understand how that might concern some people.”

  “Concern who? The military? The administration? Fear of the unknown, I get that, but—”

  “Some risks overshadow any potential reward, Steve. DARPA’s own history has proven that much. Which is why I’m ordering the initiation of the new MEP.”

  Steve felt the blood drain from his face. Rather than replacing old memories with new ones, the new Memory Editing Protocol was designed to essentially reboot the brain, retaining only those systems integral to motor and logical functions. It had been tested on three volunteers, all of whose minds were reduced to those of young children in adult bodies. Two died within weeks.

  “Please tell me this is only a stray thought.”

  “We’ve been preparing for it all along,” Theresa said.

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “We!” she snapped. “Surely you knew it could come to this.”

  “I knew we would eventually find a solution short of eradicating the finest brain since Einstein’s. There’s no telling what the MEP will do to her!”

  The director shook her head. “I’m sorry, Steve, this one’s over my head. In a perfect world, I’d give you all the time you need, but it’s out of my control.”

  He pushed back the fear lapping at his mind. It was the first time she’d admitted that someone else was pulling the strings.

  She looked at him, eyes soft. “If it helps, I can have someone else—”

  “No, she needs me by her side. Just because we’ve drugged her into oblivion doesn’t mean she can’t detect threats.”

  “You sure she won’t pick up those threats from your mind?” Bill said.

  “She probably will, but my presence will mitigate them. She trusts me.”

  It felt like betrayal because it was. On the other side of the glass, both Rachelle and Charlene were laughing about something.

  He swallowed. “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  2

  WHO WAS I, lying on the ground in the Elyonite dungeon, alone and afraid? For the hundredth time I rehearsed what I knew, hoping it would calm my fear.

  I was Rachelle, the 49th Mystic, destined to bring the sword of truth to the world. Then the lion would lie down with the lamb, as foretold. I knew that I could only bring the truth as I re-cognized myself as the daughter of Elyon, already one with him Inchristi. To this end, I had to find the Five Seals of Truth, and I had to find them quickly or the Realm of Mystics would be destroyed.

  Against the Fifth Seal there was no defense. Until all five were a part of me, their power was limited. Three seals already branded my right shoulder.

  Two seals to find, and time was marching on without me. Vlad was now in this world, determined to stop me before I could accomplish my mission. My father was captive somewhere in this world. The thought left me numb.

  I’d been in that deep hole for a week. Days and nights were indistinguishable in a darkness broken only by the coming and going of torches, when the Elyonite guards brought me slop that passed as food and emptied the bucket I used to relieve myself. Other than those guards, I’d neither seen nor heard anyone.

  Not Jacob, not Samuel, not Talya, not Justin. No one.

  The last time I’d dreame
d was that first night, after they took Jacob and left me alone. I wasn’t dreaming because they were lacing my water with the rhambutan fruit, which prevented dreams. In that last dream of Eden, Utah, I’d found the Third Seal and brought down the synthetic sky that blinded the town. The Elyonites had blinded me after sentencing me as a heretic, but when I found that Third Seal, I’d regained my eyesight in both worlds.

  After five or six days in the darkness, all I seemed to have were the three seals on my arm to remind me of a mission that had begun to feel hopeless.

  That’s who I was as I lay in the Elyonite dungeon on Other Earth.

  At least that was one me.

  The other me was on Earth, and I had no idea where or what was happening to me there, if anything. Neither did I know how much time had passed on Earth. Talya said that if I wasn’t dreaming in either reality, there would essentially be two of me, one in each reality, each living her own separate life, oblivious to the other’s circumstances until one of us dreamed again.

  I knew I wasn’t dreaming in the dungeon. And I had no reason to think that I wasn’t dreaming on Earth, but somewhere in those long dark days and nights, the fear that something had happened to me on Earth entered my mind and stuck.

  For all I knew, I wasn’t dreaming on Earth either, and a whole month or year had passed there.

  I stood up from the blanket and crossed to the bars. I looked down the dark passageway, hoping for light. None. Of course not. There never was. So I crossed my arms and began to pace to ease the aches in my knees and hips and get my blood moving.

  One thing about such a cramped space: pain and stiffness.

  I paced back and forth, lost in thought again, stepping the minutes away, wondering what was happening beyond my cell. During the first several days, I would count my short laps in the cell, back and forth, back and forth, up to four hundred once. Counting helped keep my mind off all the things I didn’t know, but it wasn’t working these last few days.

  The counting no longer interested me enough to replace the endless stream of questions.

  Where was my father? Was he in pain? I could imagine him with Vlad, being manipulated to some terrible end. He had the book with him, right? Was Vlad going to force him to—