Rise of the Mystics Read online

  19

  WHEN STEVE said no one lived near the cabin, he meant it. After leaving the highway, we’d taken narrower and narrower roads that soon put us on a dirt road for six miles. By the time we finally pulled up to the cabin, I saw it was actually a small wood house set in a clearing with tall trees on all sides.

  As soon as we stepped through the front door, I felt more comfortable. Steve had parked the car in a small barn, and we were sure to stay inside so no satellites or drones could find us.

  The main room had a fireplace and a tall, peaked ceiling. The kitchen was past the great room, and there were two floors with a total of four bedrooms. Two bathrooms and a crawl space. Steve quickly showed me where everything was, going from room to room, making sure all the blinds were closed.

  The long drive had given me time to process my situation. First-stage acclimation, Steve called it. My brain was scrambling for a context in which I could begin forming a cohesive worldview. My thoughts had to secure themselves to a set of beliefs, like anchor lines, so the brain wouldn’t just float away. It was exhausting, but less so if I just let it happen, Steve said. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, he coached, just like the motto of Special Forces.

  According to him, I was actually better suited than adults to figure out what was happening, because my mind was open, not closed down by preconceived ideas. Perception was almost entirely a by-product of group consciousness. Now I could create my own to some extent.

  So that’s what I tried to do, and he let me by not stuffing my brain with more information.

  “Can I use this one?” I asked, peering around a small room decorated in a kind of pink.

  “Take any one you like. I don’t know how long we’ll be here.” He was still sweating and looking out the windows every few seconds. It was odd, because when we weren’t talking about what was wrong, I sort of forgot that the whole world was looking for us.

  “Can I lie down for a few minutes?” I asked, suddenly aware of how exhausted I was.

  He stepped away from the window. “Of course. You should. Did you know the brain consumes nearly three-quarters of all the energy you put into your body?”

  “Really? The brain doesn’t even move!”

  “Oh, it’s moving, all right. All matter is in movement, billions of vibrations a second. Most subjects who’ve had their memories wiped sleep like cats, eighteen hours a day.” He headed for the door. “Rest as long as you like. I’m going to secure the house and terminate any internet. The television’s old-school, untraceable, so that’s good.”

  “Steve?”

  He turned back. “Yes?”

  “Do you really think we’re going to be okay?”

  He walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I took you from DARPA because I believe in you. I can help, but the best hope we have is letting your mind do what it can do.”

  “What if it can’t do that sort of thing anymore?”

  “You brought down the sky in Project Eden, didn’t you?” He tapped my head. “It’s all in there, waiting for you to access it. Of course you can do that! Right?”

  “Right.” And in that moment I thought, Of course I can do that. But I wasn’t stupid either—we were in a terrible situation.

  But I could trust him. He was the closest I had to a father.

  Actually, he was the only person I knew.

  “I want to try something when you’re ready,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come down when you’ve rested.”

  “Okay.”

  I lay down, exhausted, and I’d only just started wondering how much energy my new brain had used in all of its acclimation before I fell asleep.

  In that sleep, I didn’t dream. Not one stray thought. Or if I did, I didn’t know it when I opened my eyes.

  It was darker. I glanced at the window. Still day, but not for long. I bolted up, disoriented. The events of the day fell into my mind, but the worry I’d felt before was gone. Steve was downstairs, waiting to show me something. Oddly enough, I was more interested in what that was than in the troubles that had brought us to the house.

  But that changed when I stopped at the top of the stairs, staring down at Steve. He was seated on the couch, watching the feed on the wall-mounted television. The news was of me and him, and we weren’t just two small pictures anymore.

  We were half the screen, stacked one on top of the other. To the right of the images, a woman who was an expert on terrorism was speaking.

  “We’ve confirmed that the suspect’s fingerprints were found on several fragments of the bomb casing. It may be hard to imagine that a seventeen-year-old would be capable of such a violent attack, but Rachelle Matthews isn’t just any girl. She was put through a terrible ordeal in Project Eden, punished by a religious fundamentalism that preached the end of the world. It’s easy to see how someone born and bred on religiously motivated hatred and survivalist doctrines could end up with a terrible aversion to the religion that broke her in the first place. The fact that she’s schizophrenic only supports the evidence. She might be a young victim, but make no mistake, this is one very dangerous girl.”

  I stared, hardly able to process what they were saying. I didn’t even remember the history she was talking about.

  “We have to remind the audience that Rachelle Matthews is only a suspect at this point,” someone else was saying, but the expert cut in.

  “We should also remind the audience that she’s not working alone. A post—”

  “Assuming it was her.”

  “Correct. An untraceable statement from a group that identifies itself as Society Against Control claims complicity in the bombing. The fact that she’s on the run with Steve Collingsworth, who may be connected to this society . . . It all adds up to a very disturbing picture.”

  “Steve?”

  He grabbed the remote, killed the picture, and jumped up. “You’re awake! Sorry, I just checked in on you and you were sound asleep.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Don’t pay any attention to that,” he said, motioning to the TV with the remote, then tossing it on the couch. “Nothing new, we’re just being framed, that’s all.”

  “But why?”

  And then I remembered why. Vlad was going to finish what he’d started. And neither Steve nor I had any idea what that was.

  “Never mind.”

  “Did you dream?”

  “No.” I walked down the stairs, aware of each time my feet touched the wood. Wood. There was something amazing about the wood, I thought. It used to be a tree but now it was a step. Strange how my mind jumped from worrying about the news of me to the wonder of the wood. Lack of context, maybe.

  “. . . thirsty?” Steve was asking.

  “I’m good. So you were going to show me something.”

  “Yes.” He hurried to his right, jittery, then turned back. “Now?”

  “When else?”

  “Okay, right. Now. Sit.” He patted the couch. “Sit here.”

  I sat.

  “Okay.” He dragged the small glass coffee table to the edge of the rug. “Need some space. Okay, a little context, right?”

  “Right.”

  He began to pace on the rug. “Okay, the only hope we really have is you, like I was saying earlier. More specifically, your brain. No matter how you slice or dice this, one thing’s clear: someone out there sees you as a threat. And not just a little threat because you’re able to read people’s minds—which you can no longer do anyway. Follow?”

  Made sense. I nodded.

  “Which means you must have more power than either of us understands.”

  That made less sense, but he kept talking.

  “We have to figure out what’s so threatening to them. We’ve seen you do plenty that defies our understanding of nature, but what would push them to such extremes? What’s really happening here?”

  I sat mesmerized. He kept pacing, hands on his hips now.

  “It
was the business of this other world you and your father claimed to have tapped into that finally got me thinking. I’m going to put it in the simplest terms I can, using basic science.”

  He stopped, lifting a finger.

  “But first some context. You have to understand that everything you can see, hear, smell, feel, and even think of is actually energy expressing itself at different frequencies. The whole universe, even the densest matter, is energy. Problem is, most of it—seventy-three percent according to our best models—is actually in frequencies that the human senses can’t detect. Case in point: there’s enough energy in one cubic meter of empty space to vaporize all the oceans of the world. We just don’t have the technology to see all that energy, understand how it’s really working, or harness it. Follow?”

  “Follow.”

  “Even more, the forces that make our world what it is seem to be outside space and time. We see the effects in experiments but don’t know how they work. Albert Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’”

  “Spooky action?” I said. “Scary?”

  “Well, it can be. The unknown is always a bit frightening to the brain. Point is, all material expression is actually energy, and that energy is originating beyond space and time. We perceive the material world, but we don’t see how it really is. Which makes what we perceive a kind of illusion. Clear?”

  I nodded. “Clear enough.”

  “The biggest challenge that we scientists face is what we call the observation problem. One thing we’ve known for over a hundred years is that things exist only when we measure or observe them. When we perceive them. Somehow energy collapses into our perception of it as things like tables and chairs only as we observe it as a table or chair. Thousands of experiments have shown this to be the case at the subatomic scale, but we don’t know how it’s happening. Figuring out how is the single greatest problem facing science—this is the observation problem.”

  “So we’re making up the chair, not looking at it?” I said.

  “Not that, but something like that. Or maybe that, no one really knows. Our collective consciousness manifests the world we see in the way we observe it. Most scientists still refuse to consider the possibility that a higher consciousness exists. They insist that all consciousness comes from the brain, and when the brain dies, no soul or consciousness survives it. It’s called materialism.”

  “But you think differently,” I said. “You think that our brains are like radios, receiving certain frequencies. So everything is consciousness, but when we see the table we’re only seeing what it is at a certain frequency. From a higher perspective, it would look like energy.”

  He looked at me, surprised. “Yes. Where’d you get that?”

  I wondered the same thing myself. “I don’t know. Just popped into my head.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I grinned. “Pretty good, huh? And I saw the radio on the table.”

  He bounded over to the side table and picked up the small black radio. Set it on the rug in front of me.

  “Scientists are beginning to call that type of consciousness ‘quantum consciousness.’ A force beyond time and space activated by our own consciousness.”

  “God?”

  “No, not God, assuming you believe in God, but—”

  “Of course God is real,” I said. “Even atheists believe in God, right? They just call it something else. At the very least, God is where everything comes from.”

  He hesitated. “This stuff is just popping into your head?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Okay then, God. But quantum consciousness wouldn’t be infinite. It would be something an infinite God created. Regardless, what if our brains are like this radio? Like a radio, we can only pick up certain frequencies, so we operate within those limited frequencies. Still follow?”

  “Yup.”

  “Now let’s pretend that the way you tune this particular radio is by raising it or lowering it. So down here”—he dropped to one knee and held the radio just above the ground—“on terra firma, we only pick up lower frequencies, stuff we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears, measure with our instruments, et cetera.” He stood, raising the radio higher. “But if we lift the radio up here, we encounter totally different frequencies. New music that supersedes the lower frequencies.”

  “And you think that’s what I can do?”

  “Yes. I think you have the capacity to rise into a higher state of consciousness that’s beyond time and space. It’s the only thing that can possibly explain how you see things happening before they happen. Spooky action at a distance.”

  “I can do that?” The thought made my heart beat a little faster.

  “You’ve done it a hundred times. We’ve measured and recorded it over and over. It’s nothing short of miraculous, which is impossible in the mind of science. Meaning maybe all the claims of spontaneous healings and other miraculous events that have been recorded in history really did happen. Someone, somewhere, activated a higher power beyond space and time, and that power changed matter within time.”

  “God,” I said.

  “If you will, God. Though I don’t believe in God the way you seem to. The fact that you even have a belief about God surprises me. You have no context for it. Religious belief is one thing that always vanishes in the MEP.”

  I stared at him. “Maybe you should believe.”

  “If it means becoming anything like you, I will,” he said with a wink.

  “So this is what you wanted to show me?”

  “Not yet. One more thing. Your dreams.” He set the radio on the fireplace mantel. “I think your dreams are real. At least as real as what we perceive to be real in this world. Whatever you can do in your dreams, you can do here, because you know you can. You believe it. You’ve actually experienced it by rising into higher consciousness.”

  “But can’t you bring your radio higher? Then you could do what I did too.”

  “The rest of us can’t because we don’t know we can. We believe we can’t, so we can’t. But you can. I think you’re the leading edge of a whole new way of being in the world.”

  “You mean I have faith,” I said. Again, I was surprised that these ideas seemed plain to me. Maybe because in a way I had the mind of a child and it was easy for children to believe things.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Faith. Now that I think about it, it’s the fulfillment of what the mystics have always insisted. Whatever is asked in a higher power is done. ‘You will do what I do and even greater things’—Jesus said something like that. Problem is, few if any of us really operate in that higher power, or we would see it all the time. Knowing, belief, faith—they’re all the same. It’s what’s activating knowledge in you right now. Stuff you shouldn’t know after going through an MEP.”

  I stared at the lamp and thought about who he was saying I was and what I could supposedly do, and I knew he must be right.

  “You’re right,” I said. “That is something.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said, smiling.

  “No? What is?”

  He walked to the bar between the great room and the kitchen, picked up a clear glass of water, and set it down in the middle of the rug.

  “You don’t remember any of this, but you could do things with water. Make it boil in a few seconds just by concentrating on it. We told you it was all in your mind and you believed it because of the drugs, but it was real. And that was with a doped-up mind.”

  He stood back, fingers trembling.

  “Look at me, Rachelle.” His eyes sparkled. “You have more power than you can begin to imagine. I need you to know that when they reformatted your mind, they also wiped out all the old paradigms that told you what couldn’t be done. All the fears and doubts that limited you. You have the mind of a child who knows what the rest of us, beaten up by life in the physical world, don’t know. Anything is possible. Because you’ve already experienced that higher frequ
ency, you can do it again. You could walk on water if you knew you could. Do you hear me?”

  “I can?” Maybe he was only trying to boost my belief. If so, it was working.

  “You can. So do it for me now. Instead of looking at the water as a liquid, see it as the energy it is, and change its physical manifestation.”

  I looked at the glass sitting there. “Now?”

  “Now.”

  So I did. In my mind’s eye, I saw the cup as swirling energy and me with a light that was God flowing through me, connecting with the glass. It was all in my imagination, but imagination was actually image making, and in my wild creativity, I saw the water turn to light and rise from the glass. Out of the glass. Up into the air, then back down—plop—into the glass.

  Steve grunted and I looked at him. “What?” His eyes were round like saucers. I looked back at the glass sitting there on the floor, unchanged. “What is it?”

  “You . . . You didn’t see that?”

  “I was just getting started. I saw it in my mind but I—”

  “It wasn’t just in your mind!” He took another step back. “Do it again.”

  I’d done it? But of course I had. Now totally excited, I turned my head back to the glass and did more. I lifted the whole glass with water so that it was floating about four feet above the ground. The water glowed because I was seeing it as energy.

  I saw it all right there in front of me, only this time I knew it wasn’t only in my imagination. Or maybe it was, but if so, the whole world was an imagination, subject to belief and faith.

  Steve was stepping forward, eyes fixed on the glass. “Can you hold it there?”

  “Sure.” I was grinning like a monkey. “I can do other things too.”

  “Just hold it there.” He lifted his arm and reached toward the glass. When his hand was maybe six inches away, energy sparked on his fingertip and he jerked it back.

  “Cool, huh?” I said. “Watch this.”

  I lifted the water out of the glass and threw it toward him. It collapsed back into liquid and splashed his face. Steve gasped, jumping back, face and shirt soaked. The glass fell to the rug with a thump.