Brain Wave

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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sasha
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Brain Wave

Post by sasha » January 14th, 2018, 1:38 pm

 
Temple impatiently tossed the magazine aside and uncrossed his legs so he could lean forward to browse through the others scattered across the low coffee table before him. The metal helmet shielding from electrical interference the electrodes taped to his shaved head slipped just enough to one side to chafe his forehead and tug painfully at a few of the wires. It did nothing to alleviate his already dark mood of bored frustration.

“Goddammit, Barton,” he snarled while readjusting the headgear. “Couldn’t you at least get me some fresh reading material?”

A voice crackled from the intercom loudspeaker on the wall. “Any requests?”

“Anything!” Temple snapped. “As long as it doesn’t concern military hardware, battlefield tactics, or chain of command! Something with fishing tackle, woodworking projects, or boobs might be nice.”

“I’ll send someone out,” the loudspeaker answered.

The large housefly that had earlier found its way in stirred again, roused perhaps by an errant air current, dropping from where it had parked itself on the ceiling and began to make another lazy orbit around the room. Still nursing his pique, Temple irately watched it spiral slowly overhead, too far up for him to reach.

He focused his attention on it and squinted in concentration. Die, he thought. Die.

It stopped abruptly in mid-air and dropped vertically to the floor, where it hit the tile and lay still. In the silence of the room, Temple even thought he had heard the faint sound it made on impact.

Somewhere a solid-state relay toggled and a spike appeared on an oscilloscope trace traveling across computer screens in another room.

The loudspeaker crackled again. “Stu? We’ve just registered an event. Anything you can tell us?”

Temple shut his eyes with an exasperated sigh and shook his head. Jesus Christ, Barton, he thought. Yes, another event… “I just killed a fly, is all,” he said.

“A fly? Did you swat it, or – “ and here Barton trailed off.

“Or,” Temple replied. “Or.”

The faint buzzing of the loudspeaker informed Temple that the mic at Barton’s end was still open. Eventually Barton cleared his throat and asked, “So you didn’t actually physically touch it, but…”

“But I did the usual.” He rose to his feet from the couch and stretched. How much longer? How much more of this sensory deprivation tank must I endure? “For Christ’s sake, Barton, let me out of here. You’ve had me in this Petri dish for, what, two months now, and haven’t learned a fucking thing.”

“Well – that’s not strictly true, you know.” What Barton’s voice lacked in conviction it made up for in desperation. “We don’t know exactly how you do these –“

Stunts, Temple thought bitterly. Parlor tricks.

“…these transactions; but we’ve got some fascinating data unique to your neurophysiology that may offer clues.”

Transactions unique to my neurophysiology, Temple thought wryly. Look at the unique and curious specimen, Honey! But don’t stick your fingers in the cage…

“The appearance of low-frequency delta waves just prior to a telepathic event – like in dreaming – totally unexpected. And signals of an entirely unknown nature whenever you remotely affect objects – like the fly…”

“Or like the dice I can make land any way I want, or nudge the cue ball just enough to ensure I can always beat your ass at pool, or ‘predict’ the spin of a roulette wheel,” Temple snapped. “You can tell me what my brain’s doing, but not how or why. You’re like the meteorologists who can forecast yesterday’s weather with 100% accuracy.”

“Again, not entirely true,” Barton replied, and something in his delivery caught Temple’s attention. He closed his eyes and listened for the Subtext.

The Others…

Others? He opened his eyes and frowned. What “others”? Other what? It didn’t make sense. He felt there was more to this iceberg than met the eye, so he closed his eyes again and listened harder. But the signal had been lost.

“Okay, Stu, we’re getting another indication here… one we’ve seen before when you’re…” There was a long pause from the loudspeaker; then, “You’re eavesdropping again, aren’t you?”

Barton’s team had apparently learned more than he’d given them credit for, he realized. When he’d first agreed to become their lab animal, his brain wave patterns were wholly unknown to them. Now, it seemed, they were becoming familiar enough with them to read their meaning.

“What did you mean by ‘Others’, Barton?”

After a long pause, Barton sighed, and Temple thought he read resignation and guilt in the Subtext. Barton was, if nothing else, an honest man.

“Shortly after we found you, the National Science Foundation grant dried up because they thought we weren’t progressing quickly enough,” Barton slowly explained. “When the project adminstrators announced they were going to pull the plug, DARPA stepped in.”

DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: the military think tank. “I’d figured out that much just from the reading material you supplied me with – tanks, battle fatigues, stars and stripes. What ‘Others’?”

“We’ve since found four others like you. None of them possess your range of skills, but some surpass you in particular areas. We’re especially interested in the clairvoyant two buildings over.”

“Why?” Temple asked. “Does the Pentagon intend to turn us into some kind of super-secret elite commando team?”

“No, no” Barton hastily answered. “Nothing like that.”

The Subtext seemed to say he was telling the truth – or at least partially. And partial truths lend themselves beautifully to camouflaging outright lies. What was he hiding?

He unfocused his eyes and cast his mind up through the wiring harness attached to his head, through the air between the transmitter in the helmet and the receiver above the ceiling, along the ductwork through which the cabling passed, into the signal processing equipment, and ultimately to the keyboard upon which Barton’s fingers lightly rested. Psychic warfare… remote intelligence gatheRing-around-the-rosie, ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky, the rain in Spainis mainlyfourscoreandsevenyearsagoIhaveadreamthatsonesmallstepnothingtofearbutfearitself…

He pulled back, baffled by this sudden wall of noise. He’d never met this kind of resistance before, and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Barton wasn’t stupid, but neither was he especially tactically-minded. He was pretty much a typical, low-level scientist – diligent, focused, motivated by intellectual curiosity, politically unambitious and naïve. It seemed unlikely that he’d take the time to develop ways to mask his thoughts – even if he’d had the time.

But the Department of Defense was footing the bill for the team of which Barton was a small part, most likely because they felt there might be a big payoff down the road. And one reason they might think this was that Barton’s team might not have been the first to set off down this road – that someone else had been there, too, and saw big dividends from this line of research.

CIA? NSA? OICI? Any number of clandestine groups might have made exploratory forays into psychic research with unsavory intent, and found the avenue a promising one… implying that Big Brother might be a whole lot bigger than a hotshot telepath who hustled crapshooters and pool sharks for petty cash, and occasionally beat the house at Foxwoods and Atlantic City.

The stakes in this game had gotten higher than he was willing to bankroll.

Enough.

He lifted the helmet and began peeling off the wires taped to his head.

“Wait! Stu, wait!” Barton protested, but Temple cut him off. “I volunteered for this fool’s venture on the basis of your assurance that six weeks would be more than enough time for all that computer horsepower to explain how I do what I do,” he snapped, “and so far all you can tell me is some technobabble about delta waves, synaptic signatures, and ‘atypical neural oscillations’ Oh, and that the US military is paying for it all.” He dropped the now-disconnected cable harness and its shroud to the floor. “I’m done, man,” he growled. “I didn’t sign on to enlist in the army. The food here sucks, I’m sick of watching the same DVDs over and over, and it’s pointless to play cards with you guys because I can read your minds just as easily as those goddamned magazines I’ve read and re-read so many times!” He retrieved a suitcase from the small closet he’d been provided, unlatched it, and placed it on the cot. “I’m outta here, man,” he repeated. “Sayonara. Hasta la vista. Ciao, au revoir, auf wieder sehen. Toodle-oo, Barton.”

He carelessly pulled his clothes off hangers and out of drawers and stuffed them into the case. He snapped it shut with finality and crossed the room to the door. Without a backward look, he opened it and looked out into the hallway. It was empty. He stepped through, shut the door behind him, and headed towards the exit sign.

“Excuse me, sir? Mr. Temple?” He turned to see a young man in uniform at the other end of the hall who had just rounded a corner and was now striding rapidly towards him. The three-striped insignia on his upper arm identified him as a sergeant.

Temple paused, his eyes moving from the soldier’s face to his sidearm and back, and decided he could wait long enough for him to catch up. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?” he asked.

“I think you know,” the young soldier answered cryptically, with an equally cryptic smile.

Temple narrowed his eyes and Listened. Detain… Delay… “I take it you’re here to try talking me out of going AWOL,” he said sardonically.

“Talking would be preferable, yes,” the sergeant replied. He still wore a smile, but it was not an amiable one. Temple glanced again at the sidearm, on which the sergeant’s hand now rested. Negotiate if possible…

(And if not…)

Temple had been unprepared for hardball. He looked back into the young man’s eyes and envisioned the carotid artery below them, delivering freshly oxygenated blood to the brain. It would take only a brief interruption of that flow to keel the young man over in a faint. He narrowed his eyes and concentrated his gaze on the area alongside the soldier’s windpipe.

The next thing he knew he was lying on his back on the floor, the soldier squatting beside him, loosening his collar. “Feeling better now, sir?” he asked. “It looked like you bumped your elbow pretty hard when you fell.”

The hallway seemed too bright, and flickered and wavered around the edges as he worked himself up to a sitting position. “What the fuck happened?” he mumbled.

“I got you before you got me,” the soldier said. He stood and extended his hand. “Now get up.”

Temple accepted the hand and rose unsteadily to his feet. He was still a bit woozy, but his head was clearing. He regarded the young man with confusion. “You mean – can you – you can do things, too?”

The sergeant was noncomital. “I’m not at liberty to discuss this with you in detail, sir. However, be assured that we have learned a lot more than you give us credit for.”

Temple remembered the wall of noise he’d encountered while probing Barton’s mind. The sergeant smiled. “That’s right,” he said. “That was us.”

Temple considered this for a moment. “Well,” he finally said. “It appears my work here is done. You’ve got what you came for.” Then as a sarcastic afterthought, he added “You’re welcome.”

The sergeant’s smile was not an assuring one. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he said. “You still think all of this –“ and he gestured around the corridor, towards the lab and Temple’s apartment, “- that all of this is about you. You still think you’re the star of the show, the master magician, the mind-reading Svengali whose astounding feats of mentalism leave audiences trembling in awe.” The smile faded, but his fixed unblinking stare did not. “You five are not the subjects here, Temple,” he said. “You’re just the controls. The ‘Before’ specimens. And we can’t have you wandering the streets, drawing attention to what we’re accomplishing here.” His hand, Temple noted, had returned to the handle of his weapon.

Temple tried deflecting the sergeant’s hand away from the holster, but this thoughts were brushed away as casually as one might wave away a mosquito, and the young man’s fingers closed around the handle. In desperation he focused his thoughts on the man’s beating heart… Stop… he thought. Stop…

But a blinding flash of light exploded behind his eyes, his legs were no longer there, and before he hit the floor his world had gone black…
 
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 
 
The nurse opened the door and stood aside to let the two orderlies proceed ahead of her. “Good morning, Mr. Temple!” she chirped, though the glance she exchanged with the orderlies was less than cheerful.

Temple sat slumped in his wheelchair, his head tilted to one side, his eyes vacant, a thin strand of saliva drooling from the corner of his mouth staining the lapel of his bathrobe with its wetness. His fingers drummed incessantly on the arm of the chair:

 
taptaptap… tap tap tap… taptaptap…     taptaptap… tap tap tap… taptaptap…
 
One of the orderlies set the breakfast tray down and looked back inquiringly to the nurse. The nurse nodded, so she took the napkin from the tray and wiped his mouth.

The nurse turned to the other orderly, a clean-cut young man no more than 30. “Stroke,” she whispered. “Poor thing just sits there all day, staring at nothing, idly drumming his fingers.”

Perhaps they were too contemporary, too young, too oblivious, to discern any pattern to the drumbeat. Perhaps in this day of global positioning, digital speech synthesis, and 256-bit encryption, they were unaware of those curious relics of the past now relegated to arcane corners of communication that have passed out of the public consciousness and into its forgotten subconscious. Perhaps even if they had heard of Morse code, the meaning of the message might no longer be remembered. But it was the best Temple could muster:

 
taptaptap… tap tap tap… taptaptap…      taptaptap… tap tap tap… taptaptap…

ditditdit… dah dah dah… ditditdit…     ditditdit… dah dah dah… ditditdit…

S… O… S…     S… O… S…
 
 
 
1/14/2018
Last edited by sasha on February 16th, 2018, 12:13 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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STUPID BOB
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Re: Brain Wave

Post by STUPID BOB » January 23rd, 2018, 4:14 pm

Outstanding
Carpe Delirium

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stilltrucking
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Re: Brain Wave

Post by stilltrucking » January 24th, 2018, 4:01 am

that story is well worth the ink it took me to print it.
a long scroll for my tired eyes to read on screen
but a treat of a read on paper

thanks

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sasha
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Re: Brain Wave

Post by sasha » January 24th, 2018, 10:27 am

bob, -truck - thank you kindly, both - appreciate the comments, happy you enjoyed the tale
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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the mingo
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Re: Brain Wave

Post by the mingo » January 26th, 2018, 1:08 pm

<* 8) *> Enjoyed
Doll, you may have found a place of rest but I'm still on the trail.

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sasha
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Re: Brain Wave

Post by sasha » January 27th, 2018, 1:49 pm

the mingo wrote:
January 26th, 2018, 1:08 pm
<* 8) *> Enjoyed
:) thx M!
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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