Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (9 page)

Dr.
Novak sits a little straighter. “You were naked too?”

“
I'm not sure. I wasn't aware of looking at myself. Anyway I noticed the bodies around me, and it seemed that lots of ‘em were dead. Some were waking up from their own dreams, same as me. There was fear, longing, despair. These people were all lined up for some kind of processing and there were many souls waiting in line, some crying. The air was red and there were demonic winged things flying around. And in this place, I now felt it was a factory, we were laying dead bodies on an escalator after peeling off the skins. This was supposedly to release their souls. The skins were tied into big bundles and demons took them away with forklifts. Demons with big teeth were eating my flesh before it was removed. I felt filthy, I felt worthless to be naked with them. I woke up with tears.” She dare not mention the gross thing forcing her mouth open.

Novak
holds out a tissue. Tharcia doesn’t notice she’d begun to weep while relating the dream.

“
It has an effect on you.”

Dabbing her eyes she nods
yes.

“
What do you think is happening in the dream?”

“Lust?”

Dr. Novak nods. “That could be one aspect. Animalistic and carnal desires could mean the dream is completely sexual.”

“
Being eaten alive? Doesn’t seem sexy to me.”

“
Biting during intercourse is a deep drive, the lovers wish to consume each other. The crocodile brain, earliest developed brain function. Were the demons using their mouths on you sexually? Or were they consuming your flesh?”

“They had big teeth sunk into my legs.”

“Well, if you consider yourself on your own now, unattached, the fact there were so many people present in the dream might show that you want to be promiscuous. Or be the center of attention.”

“I don’t like it.”

“In dreams, we often play all the parts. So, when you see someone else in a dream, this can show your response to aspects of yourself. If the demon is eating you, perhaps you see yourself as desirable.”

“I don’t like it.”

“It?”

“Being the center of attention. I prefer to stay on the side of things.”
Still, in Tharcia’s heart of hearts, she holds a mental image of herself at center stage, able to command a room, happy within herself.

“Thank you.
Did you feel fear in the dream?”

“
No. It was like a movie. I only got emotional when I woke up.”

“
Emotional about what?”

“
It was my mom. It was like she had been processed there before. She wasn’t in the dream but I was trying to find her. I cry about her easily. I defend against it by being super mean sometimes.” Tharcia’s own words surprise her. Never before has she articulated the thought. Knows she’s purposely difficult for other people.

“
Mean to who, Tharcia?”

“
People. Friends.” She speaks the name almost grudgingly, in a small voice. “Clay.”

To the
psychologist it looks like Tharcia has for the moment shrunk to the size of a small girl abandoned on a busy street, waiting for her father to take her safe home. She has said little about the man she lives with, was close-mouthed about the relationship except that it is non-sexual, an old friend of her mother’s. Possibly this Clay is the father, but he is never the issue, always kind, supportive, always taken for granted, a known quantity that is safe but not central to her search.

Dr. Novak
wants to talk about her sexuality, interested in the fact that the girl has loved only females since becoming sexual in mid-teens, no sex with males. Wants to examine why she separated from her girlfriend. Novak senses an even larger truth kept from view, but the girl maintains stubborn focus on anger toward her mom.

Tharcia’s
overpowering conscious desire is to know where her mom is, which must be hell, all the bad things she did. To her, to Clay, and others. Tharcia is certain her mom is a demon by now. There are spells to summon demons. She is getting closer.

If that doesn’t work
she has another plan. It fills her with fear. She believes she will see her mother when she herself dies. Deeply fascinated about the other side of death, at dark moments she wills it to be soon. She can’t tell the shrink she thinks of killing herself, for that or any reason. The doctor is bound by law to report any patient who claims they might hurt themselves or someone else, and Tharcia is not up for anyone meddling in her life. In that moment she senses deep the hollow void within her, where her mother once lived. She’d watched through weeks and months as her mom’s memory grew small with distance, until it fit completely inside her head. Horror unreal. Locked in iron bars of unforgiving anger, Tharcia’s shoulders clench. The doctor comforts her with soft words.

“I can tell you about my twin dream,” Tharcia
says.

“Our hour is almost up.
We’ll cover that next week.”

“Mm. It’
s short.”

“Okay, then tell me.”

“I am walking toward a mirror and see myself. I do all the stuff people do to check out it’s a reflection, like wave, move my head. I get to the mirror and step toward the edge. What comes out behind the mirror is me.”

“Is it another reflection?”

“No. She has different hair, a different face. She talks to me. She says I’m her secret…”

“Interesting. However
I have an emergency call. I’ll make a note to start with that next time.”

Tharcia
has a shopping list. Leaving the psychologist’s office, she stops off at the Sacred Grove bookstore on Soquel before heading up the hill. Although the place is billed as a metaphysical bookstore, she’s on the hunt for ritual items. Specially-dressed, custom-poured beeswax candles, local incense, oils, chemical powders. She is keen on tracking down crystals and spiritual altar pieces. She’d also ordered a grimoire,
The Key of Solomon
. A copy has finally arrived. During her time in the shop, she fills several bags.

Listening to French lessons
on her CD, Tharcia drives quickly up the hill. She needs to build a temple.

General Solberg is at that moment debriefing Dr. Friedman in his temporary swing space office. Friedman has interim findings from the
Fish Jump
meeting interviews.

“We confiscated all water bottles and have analyzed all fluids. No hallucinogens or other
psychoactive substances were present. Our initial assessment and triage of the attendees points to a shared experience, something observed in the room. General, this was no hallucination, no psychogenic fugue, it was something closer to telekinesis or remote viewing. Perhaps events at a distance were observed as taking place in the room, on top of the conference table.”

“How about Shackleford’s thesis, the high frequency gravitational
thought waves? Did you test that model?”

Friedman groans inwardly. He hasn’t allowed
Dr. Shackleford anywhere near his subjects or the data. Yet. “
Folie à deux
is French for ‘a madness shared by two’ or shared psychosis. A psychiatric syndrome in which a delusional belief is transmitted between individuals. Some call it shared psychotic disorder although I feel the term misleading. There are documented cases of people suffering from psychosis, either independently or imposed by a thought leader. Psychosis from electromagnetic fields or water-borne substances. Specters, UFOs, antiphotons, ghostly presence, all that sort.”

“And?”

“Eighty-seven percent of the subjects reported no unusual sensations after the event seemed to be over.”

“Shock and surprise?”

“What I mean by that General, is no dizziness or fainting spells, no sense of
deja-vu
, no sense of forgetfulness or not knowing what day or time it was. All subjects took it as an actual event with no boundary shock or discontinuity.”

Solberg shakes his head. “What I’m getting, Arnie,
a highly extreme event actually happened.”

“Sir, that is a valid conclusion. Reality is being messed with, not people’s heads. What’s more, the floor near the table is wet, it squished when we walked on it.”

“Tangible illusion.”

“Just so. We tested the oxygen concentration of the air, inspected the HVAC ducts right back to fresh inflow air. We
ruled out anoxia, which can cause sensory distortion and hallucinations.”

“Arnie, could this be related to the Pentagon visitor? A force field? A portal allowing access to another place, another dimension?”

“Well, for what it’s worth it fits our graph of anomalous events. But those questions are out of my area. I am investigating it as a collective paranormal experience. Other strange events are accelerating by the hour.”

“
So bottom line, you are saying…”

“The Fish Jump
happened, Ralph. For those few seconds, it was entirely real.”

Clay enjoys a peaceful day among tall redwoods, if you call riding a bicycle wildly down twisty dirt trails littered with rocks and washouts a peaceful activity. When his wheat-straw hair flies in dusty breeze and everything’s a blur it’s normal life for him and a way to clear his mind of things, such as the unpleasant arrival of an old nemesis claiming to be Tharcia’s father. Her harsh indifference, their puzzling estrangement. The tough-guy homicide cop tracking a random lead. Leaving white rage behind in the autumn air on his KHS Tucson twenty-niner, he has a couple of hours to shake things off, sweat and feel normal.

Cicero Clay was born in Manhattan Beach California 39 years ago to a couple who deeply loved one another and already had a boy aged four. Both parents now dead, his dad in a highway crash
while Clay was in high school and the mom five years after, of inoperable cancer. The name Cicero was his dad’s fancy idea. An avid reader, a history buff, the elder Clay decided his second son would be named for the ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. Call it fate, call it karma, but bad luck seems to follow Clay as often as the good. The unusual name had made him the butt of schoolyard jokes and turned him into a scrapper growing up.

Clay
’s long legs now a blur on the pedals. Eyes behind his Fossil shades can be gray green to clear blue. He runs a business out of his shop, buying and selling aircraft parts. He’s bought and restored two vintage airplanes and has a project on the go, a 1970s-era Formula One racer. He wants to complete it, maybe race it, trade it and move on. He does not get attached to things, loves his simple life in the redwood grove.

At a particular spot, Clay leaves the trail, jinks
the bike between rocks trees and brush a quarter mile to an overlook of Monterey Bay. Sits against a rock, removes the bicycle helmet. Takes a deep breath.

A thing Clay learned in prison, aside from the
hyper-aggressive response that had decked Porterfield, was to examine his social conditioning. During a month in solitary, he’d stumbled into a drifting bliss of transcendent silence. In it he’d learned to let everything drop away, to forget things that concern him. He seeks this state every day. When it clicks, Tharcia’s distance, the dark blot of prison on his life, all become part of a natural ebb and flow.

A quote
and a toothache had started him along that road. The quote, something his dad liked to repeat, from his namesake Cicero, about gratitude.
The greatest of virtues and parent of all others
.

The toothache.
Any disturbance or irritation while in solitary confinement soon grows out of proportion, there is meager stimulation in an 8-by-10 pen with only yourself. The steady throbbing in his jaw was knocking on the door of agony when Clay noticed that the pain receded while he focused on gratitude. The meditating was tricky to bring into focus. Keeping at it day after day, pushing the pain back and exploring his mind, Clay saw that gratitude is not about thankfulness for a thing, not about an object. It is about the joy of being. During months filled with negativity, the slam of iron bars and constant threat of lockup gangs, gratitude became his private oasis.

Once out o
f the hole, the prison staff approved of his more malleable disposition. It was an illusion. Clay had become a better actor. Instead of losing his identity, he had found a vital grip on it. He stuck with gratitude meditation because it kept him sane. Sitting against the familiar rock, he finds his way back to gratitude now.

Clay’s
vision of being happy is being in a family. His birth family had crumbled to bits. Caring for his mom before she died had scared off a potential lady friend. Getting arrested and sent to prison had cost him another. Finding Tharcia’s mother again just weeks before she got herself killed reminded him of love’s intensity and closeness. He visualizes a home life with a playful and intelligent woman. One who could be close to Tharcia, help her grow as only a woman can.

Tharcia. They’d shared a
rapport before her mom’s death. After, Clay offered her a room in his house, thinking she would go back to university once she sorted herself out. He’d only the fuzziest idea of what would come after. For a time, they depended on one another emotionally. Circumstantially, they could be family, yet no father-daughter relationship has surfaced. Clay is far beyond expecting her to call him Dad.