Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (16 page)

Following another
link, she clicks through a sequence of pages until a photo stops her cold. The Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, world’s largest office building, near the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia.

Bingo
.

The Pentagon.
She fiddles with Google Earth until she has a clear satellite view looking down on the pentagram shape. The five sides of the immense building are each 900 feet long. Seems big enough. There’s a central courtyard with trees, crisscrossing walkways, a smaller pentagram-shaped building in the center, the hot dog stand, according to the article. That shouldn’t get in the way.

There is nothing in the conjuring texts she’s read or heard of that says the conjurer
must be in direct presence of the destination pentagram.
Intention is everything
. If it works, her mother will appear there, Tharcia will see her. She reaches into her back pocket, pulls out the folded paper. She flattens it on the bench beside the computer, and is struck with dismay. She cannot read what it says.

T
he wrinkled page is in her open, loopy handwriting, but is not what she recalls when first she found it in the hallway. Then, it was a poem, an affirmation, sounding like a spell. Now, it is a sequence of nonsense syllables, twenty-five lines in five-line stanzas. Silently, she attempts to pronounce the syllables. Weird, but she can do it. Enough crazy things have happened, a piece of paper that changes itself, or maybe her head is tripping.
Well?

Tharcia steadies herself on her goal.
Intention.
She determines to read through the page while looking at the computer image of the Pentagon. Visualize her mother there. Not clear what might come after that, maybe they can Skype. Clearing her throat, she begins haltingly to pronounce the unfamiliar sounds. Abruptly, something clicks. She is able to read and pronounce the unfamiliar symbols with clarity. At least to Tharcia it seems like clarity.

She’s into the second stanza when a
shiver of dizziness passes through her. As she reads, her awareness eases out the back of her head, rises up, she’s looking down at herself from high in the metal rafters. Sees a blonde girl standing alone near a sunny window in a dark space, reading nonsense syllables from a paper in her hand. A sudden rush of fear. Tharcia’s mind forms the idea of running out the door, finds herself unable to move. Mesmerized in the sensation of floating above her body. There arises a sense of overwhelming love and peace, she feels herself moving upward toward a lighted passageway among sweet-smelling flowers. Tharcia watches,
something watches
, as the small figure below in the white jeans and
Goddess Culture
T-shirt utters unknown sounds in hypnotic cadence.

The lighted passageway
opens to infinite depth. In the center gathers a bright shape, four legs, long mane, a tail, a beautiful horse of whitest white, calling to her from graceful nobility, asking her help. Deeply wanting something she alone can give. She knows this presence, longs to give something.
Give what?

Tharcia finishes reading
, comes to her senses, the paper clutched in a tight fist. Stares fixedly at the image of the Pentagon on the screen. Minutes pass. Nothing happens.

With a
dejected release of breath, she moves to shut down Clay’s computer. A video window pops up on the screen. It’s Clay, speaking to the camera. She stares. The video appears recorded on this very spot, inside Clay’s workshop, the small airplane behind him. Tharcia can’t hear what he’s saying.

Aware she’s being a little snoop, yet avidly curious
, she adjusts the speaker level, hears his voice speaking low and steady. She clicks back to the beginning. On the small screen, Clay’s image settles before the camera. His eyes are shut. He begins to speak.

“
Aham Brahmasmi.
My meditation today is around the power of self-realization. Beyond our senses, everything arises from a single consciousness, called by many names. The universe, God, the field. May each person find within themselves the power of their own creative intention to admit this consciousness.

“
Aham Brahmasmi
. Today I meditate on Tharcia. May she release her beliefs of limitation, admit to possibilities she cannot imagine, let go her safe resistance. May she find herself in the field of unlimited abundance, may she find joy and safety on her journey. May she realize that her mother loved her deeply, whatever her own limitations. May Tharcia unlock her heart to receive her mother’s love and allow it to flow to her easily. May she own the certain expectation of bliss, may she know that what she wants, desires her equally. May she remain always safe on her journey and bring harm to no one.

“
Aham Brahmasmi
. May Tharcia know that her search requires only awareness, intention, and silence.
Aham Brahmasmi
.
”

The video ends, the window disappears. Tharcia gazes at the blank screen until it
shimmers in her vision. She slams the laptop closed, pockets the paper. Looks up at the dark rafters behind her, sees nothing. Makes her way quickly toward the sunlit doorway.

Seeing
her dusty car, memory hits. The language lesson. She’d spent an hour repeating nonsense phrases in total darkness.
What was that?
She shuffles through the box of CDs, sees nothing unusual. Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, French. She starts the player. The CD is in French, not the gibberish lingo she’d practiced that night, the language of the spell poem. Ejects the disk, reads the label.
Bonus CD! Boudoir French! Master the Language of Love with real conversational examples! Ooh-la-la.

Slamming the car door,
Tharcia shakes her head.
Marketing people.

The noise and commotion died out days ago. Everyone has left the unusual building. Around him a constellation of metallic objects hangs suspended in his protective armor, their fierce energies held fast. At some future moment that energy will be released.

He is feeling
curiosity. No human could have found the ancient text to summon him. Mortals summon lesser demons, this is completely new in his experience. He carefully thinks through the possibilities. Two answers come. It could be a wizard powerful enough to snub his nose at conventional physics, the shape of space and time, the age-old rules of conjuring. But all those ancient
Brujos
are known and can be accounted for. Or, it could be some hapless fool who got lucky and will soon show up, have time for one sphincter-grinding glimpse of fate. Just prior to having his head crushed to a pulp.

He wonders how contemporary
Brujeria
would come into possession of the text. Throughout human history, that spell has never been recorded, never written into the arcane volumes. Such things are held close, shared verbally, and only among the Defenders from earliest creation. Only a few would be able to pronounce correctly the seven stanzas. Only his split-apart could ever know, unless it was screamed from her very lips through torture.
Impossible
.

His entertainment now is to contemplate, among the seven billion methods he recalls
individually, which he will use to finish this witless fool. He’ll spend little time enjoying that. Being on Earth has aroused his hunger for a more attractive possibility. His One, the object of his eternal quest. For all her obstinacy, her occasional blind rages, her promiscuity, she is the one female who has never in all of deep time left his thoughts. His split-apart, the One with whom he shared his very soul.

She, to whom he had given half his substance, the One he had
carefully imagined as his feminine counterpart, the patient eons seeking permission from the Creator. All had been worth it. But not for her to be set upon by winged creatures with sharp swords, to be rendered into a hundred pieces and cast to dogs, while he was far from her, unknowing. It has taken all the mental presence he commands to resist being eaten from within, during all this time without her.

A thought strikes him. What if this wizard has conjured him from the future? If time is
disrupted, the spell may not yet have been read. He smiles. If that is so, the foolish
Brujo
will become visible to him, the moment this stream of time intersects with the future moment when the spell is cast.

Time is the simplest thing.

A
fter two hours on the hunt for party clothes, Tharcia is on her way up the hill home. She found a cute toreador middy jacket at a thrift shop in Santa Cruz and plans to go clubbing tonight. She has a friend at the University she could call, a student, but is interested in meeting someone new. She tires of girlfriends quickly. Or her hunter does.

As she
drives Highway 9 among tall redwoods, impatient in a line of traffic, the car ahead pulls off the road. Impulsively, she hits the gas to go by, then has to get on the brakes quick because a paramed vehicle and a Sheriff’s car are screaming down on them red lights flashing. She gets herself stopped a foot from the guy’s bumper. The emergency vehicles turn up the hill on Redwood and wail out of sight. The line of cars eases back on the road.

A bloom of morbid curiosity as she approaches
the intersection. Tharcia pulls hard left where the sirens went. They are out of sight around the bends. She rolls her sunroof back and listens.
There
. Certain they are still on Redwood, she floors it. At an intersection two people stand looking up a side street, so she turns that way, drives up a mile and there they are, the ambulance in the driveway of a small home, the Sheriff’s car angled across the patchy front lawn.

She drives ahead
slow and pulls off, no homes here, only trees. Gets out and makes her way into the thicket of brush, follows a game trail toward a Sheriff’s radio that blares scattered dispatch traffic. Walks quiet through the woods, shoving branches out of her path. Sees eaves and a rooftop, little house where the action is.

K
nows she’s being really snoopy and wonders at her intention to stick her nose in some stranger’s business, but it doesn’t stop her. Finds a spot close enough to hear and not be seen. A woman’s desolate wail from a deep well of pain. Crying on the front porch, repeating over and over,
I just found him there
. She goes back into the house.

A few minutes later the
deputy and a paramedic come outside, talk by the cars. She can’t hear much over the radio blare, then things are quiet for a second and she hears clearly the paramedic say the words,
help us cut him down
.

Her heart thuds, the ugly words
brings back too much, the night homicide detectives and a trauma intervention specialist came knocking at her door, saying to her sleepy brain, your mother is dead. Nothing we could do. She is dead.

She is d
ead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

B
oth hands trying to muffle screams that want to come, Tharcia turns back, whipped by branches. Runs, asking over and over in her mind what it means to be dead, what it is like to die, what is left after, asking
why
. She imagines what if God disappeared and took everything in the universe away.
Just finish everything too painful too painful.
In her mind sees the inward fall of stars, planets, galaxies atoms and beings, a blurred reversal of creation, all matter time and space flooding down small to an intense bright dot that flares into blackness.

She stops.
Alone among peaceful trees her astonished mind forms a question.

What?

Blackness is there. Not blackness, a pregnant void. Watches it follow inward to a blinding flare. Still sees blackness, something must be there, a fabric of possibilities. It collapses with a brilliant flash. A depth of potentialities remains, it too falls into blinding light, and again, and again, until unnumbered infinities of all matter things possibilities and ideas that could ever exist accelerate inward, a dot of light expanding in brilliance to fill the entire universe with white light.

Tharcia
comes to her senses standing by her car, her mind peaceful. Occasional traffic on the road. In vision haze her mother’s face shines on her a loving expression. Stab of remorse for all the mother-hatred. Her mom deserves something else from her, something more. Something better, from an infinity of possible Tharcias. But what?

Sitting in her car,
breathing slow. Picks up the rumpled sheets of paper Porterfield left. Reads through it again, stops at the physician’s signature. A lab in Los Gatos, a doctor’s name.
Munoz
. She takes out her phone.

“Know what I think, Boss?” Sami leans back to stretch as she stares at her laptop. Her dark eyes glint, fierce telltale she’s onto something.

The team has reconvened in Next History’s Alexandria
offices. Along with Sami and Strand are Carl Vogt, Gary Charlebois, and Jerry Schumacher. The team returned several hours ago, held still for a rigid security sweep through the offices, and waited as with terse ceremony a U.S. Navy Commander with armed guard handed over a pouch marked
Sensitive Compartmented Information
, five DVD storage devices containing the complete record of the whale procession numeric sequences. Everyone on the team was photographed, signed clearance forms on a tablet, had their ID scanned. A plainclothes guard detail quietly took positions around the entire city block.