Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (42 page)

“Rayna!”  This time she was sure
she heard it. But it wasn’t Keith’s voice. It was Marsden. “Help
me!” he yelled.

Milgrom’s wheelchair was on the
ground, and Marsden was struggling to right it and get the CDN
director back into it before a zapper beam could catch her where
she lay, unprotected and unmoving, on the grass. For a moment,
Rayna was frozen with indecision. Then, without warning, she felt
her eyes roll back in her head. Every nerve in her body seemed to
tingle, and she felt a powerful surge of energy explode outward
from a place inside her that she never knew existed. At last, she
slumped to the ground, unconscious, as millions of subatomic
particles began to vibrate in unison, singing a song that instilled
their rhythm in the harmonic oscillations of other particles and
wrote their own definition of reality.

The first thing Rayna saw when she
awoke in the hospital was the full size holovision stage in the
center of the ward. She couldn’t very well miss it. The figures on
the stage seemed to be talking directly to her.

“Miss Kingman!” a plump, middle-aged
nurse with a kind face greeted as she approached Rayna’s bed.
“We’re so glad to have you back with us!”

“How long have I...?”

“It’s been six days, Miss
Kingman.”  The nurse checked the readings on a biomonitor next
to the bed and tapped in a notation that would be recorded on
Rayna’s medical chart for future reference. “Your parents will be
furious with us for sending them away now that you’re finally
awake. But we just didn’t know when you’d be coming around. Doctor
finally got them to go home around 10 o’clock last night. They’ve
been practically camping out in the waiting room since you were
brought in from the park.”

Rayna nodded at the nurse dully and
inhaled the scent of hospital disinfectant.

“You seem to be fine, Miss Kingman.
Fortunately, the zapper beams didn’t get you when you passed out.
There was no indication that anything fell on you, either. Do you
remember being hit by anything?”

“Well, no, I....”

The nurse screwed her face into a
puzzled frown.

“Is something wrong?” Rayna
asked.

 “
Oh—no.” the nurse answered
quickly. “We’ve just been wondering what put you into that coma in
the first place. Your bioreadings have all been basically normal,
and there was no indication of any head trauma. Some unusual brain
activity for a little while, but everything’s been completely
normal for the last 11 hours.”

A sudden movement drew Rayna’s
attention back to the holovision stage.

“...and he will be brought before a
court martial to answer for his deeds,”
a heavy-jowled,
silver-haired man in the uniform of a retired Merchant Fleet
admiral was saying.

“What’s that all about?” Rayna asked
the nurse, who continued to monitor the bioreadings.

“Hmmm?  Oh, that. It’s Ethan
Rensselaer. They arrested him last night.”  She stepped back
and clucked to herself. “Ethan Rensselaer a traitor!  And I
was going to vote for him for senator!  Guess you never really
know about people.”  She shook her head and resumed checking
bioreadings. “The whole thing was so bizarre, anyhow. I mean, the
way everything just stopped all of a sudden.”

The blood froze in Rayna’s
veins.

“Turns out Rensselaer was involved in
some kind of plot to start a war with the colonies. Rensselaer and
some ex-Merchant Fleet officer. I can’t remember his name. They
found him dead in a hotel room across from the park. The other guy,
I mean, not Rensselaer. A zapper got him right through the window,
they say.” 

The nurse’s expression turned hard.
“Got just what he deserved, far as I’m concerned. We had 123
casualties right here from the Roberts Park attack, including
everybody on this ward.” 

Rayna shifted her body for a better
look at her fellow patients, about a dozen of them in beds
arranged, horseshoe-like, around the holovision stage.

“Only 19 deaths, thank God,” the nurse
continued, “but altogether, over 10,000 people dead or hurt badly
enough to be hospitalized. And all from just a few minutes of
shooting.” 

Rayna waited expectantly as the nurse
adjusted various tubes and connections, but apparently the time for
explanations was over. “Doctor will be in to see you later. If you
need anything, just press this button.” 

Rayna watched the receding, white-clad
figure for a moment, then glanced back toward the holovision stage.
She wasn’t prepared for what she saw. There, speaking calmly before
the holovision audience, was an obviously fit Derek
Marsden.

Rayna’s gasp had been one of surprise,
but her next breath was one of exultant relief. Tears welled up in
her eyes and eased their way down her cheeks as Derek filled in
some of the details of the past few days:  Like Derek, Althea
had survived attack. Then, with the cooperation of the colonial
CDN’s Juan Laguna, they had been able to reestablish authentic
communications with the colonies, using an experimental hyperwave
system. Good thing, too, because the colonies also had been
receiving faked messages calculated to stir up hostilities. A
little longer, and Tauber’s effort to provoke a war might well have
succeeded.

  
As the holovision
broadcast turned to other matters, Rayna looked in vain for a
tissue, finally drying her eyes on a corner of the sheet that
covered her. The HV sounds were an unheeded cushion of protective
background noise. Her mind urged her body to relax, but the harder
she tried, the more her muscles resisted the effort.

 
Come on!  She knew now
that Althea and Derek were safe. Tauber’s would-be war and all his
Operation Strong Man plans were as dead as he was. Everything seems
to have turned out all right. So what am I worried
about? 

Despite herself, she stiffened even
more at the unspoken question. She knew precisely what she was
worried about. She had suspected it from the moment the nurse
mentioned her “unusual brain activity,” knew it with absolute
certainty from the first reference to the mysteriously sudden
cessation of zapper fire.

Alec Zorne’s book explained some of
it:  Genetic mutations in certain individuals had given them
psychic abilities that were generally unrecognized in homo sapiens.
“The next step in the evolution of humanity,” Zorne had called it.
But Zorne didn’t have to live with it.

She wondered if her grandfather ever
felt this way as he quietly went about shaping reality—the only
reality Rayna had ever known. Yes, indeed, she was Al Frederick’s
granddaughter. She shivered.

It was clear that she was responsible
for stopping the zapper attacks. While that result certainly
pleased her, the power was terrifying. What else has changed? 
I was out for six days!  What was my unconscious doing all
that time?  She remembered Al’s tale (an old television
program, he’d said) of a man whose psychic energy was released and
channeled by his uncontrolled emotions, with devastating results.
Is that going to happen to me?  Do I really know myself well
enough to be sure about the kind of reality my unconscious might
create?

“Knowledge is the principal enemy of
fear.” 

How many times had she repeated the
adage to her students?  Often enough for them to complete the
phrase by rote as soon as she uttered the first two words. Now she
had to apply it. Somehow, she would have to make sense of what had
happened and come to terms with what that would mean for her
future. It was a challenge. The technical details of Zorne’s
research were hard to follow, and she was no physicist.

Keith could help. With his physics
background, he would....   She cut off the thought that
had quickly started to turn her stomach into Mount Vesuvius and
forced herself back into a more analytical frame of
mind.

Although she may have initiated the
process, the end of the zapper attacks wasn’t all her doing. Keith
had made that much clear. No one person could provide the amount of
psychic energy necessary to influence reality. What her
grandfather—and now she—had done was to act as a catalyst for other
people who had the same basic value system (what Zorne called a
“reality matrix”).

It all had something to do with
harmonic vibrations, Rayna recalled. Just as plucking one string on
a guitar can cause other strings to vibrate, the oscillations
associated with psychic activity set up harmonic vibrations. When
the harmonics are strong enough, a new branch of reality splits
off.

Rayna gave her head a slight shake.
Keith had tried to explain Zorne’s theories several times, but her
interest then had been cool and indirect, prompted by a desire to
know about Al Frederick and his role (if any) in shaping history.
It was different now. Now her interest was intensely personal. If
Rayna Kingman was to survive in this new reality, she realized, she
had to understand. And so, she probed deeply into her memory,
struggling to remember everything Keith had ever said about
reality-matrix physics.

“According to Zorne,” Keith had told
her, “there is an infinite number of alternative
realities.”

“You mean, like parallel universes,
other dimensions, that sort of thing?”

“Not other dimensions, exactly.
Parallel timelines. Other branches of reality. The theory goes all
the way back to the 1950s, when some physicists were trying to
explain quantum mechanics. They call the concept the Many Worlds
Interpretation. I’m oversimplifying, but the idea is that every
flip of a coin, for example, results not in either heads or tails
but in both—heads in one branch of reality and tails in another.
According to the theory, these branches of reality are completely
inaccessible to each other, so that for all practical purposes, we
know only our own reality. But that doesn’t make the other branches
any  less real.  I guess you could say that reality
matrix physics expands on the Many Worlds
Interpretation.”

“How’s that?” 

“Zorne says that a surge of psychic
energy triggered by conflict with a strong reality matrix—what he
called a “psycho-affective spike”—can split reality in the same way
that the flip of a coin does. Of course, since we can only
experience one branch of reality at a time, a psychically induced
split looks like a change in the reality we’re living in. Like when
John Martin Roberts was shot.”

Rayna massaged her temples and gently
deflected a murmur of concern from the patient in the bed to her
right. Think!  What happens to the people who don’t have
special psychic powers but who have compatible reality
matrices?  She frowned in concentration and probed her memory.
Keith had said something about it. Something about a polarizing
effect. Yes!  That was it!  The strength of the harmonic
psychic vibrations in a mind net are directly related to the
strength of a person’s emotional commitment to various aspects of
his or her reality matrix. The stronger the emotional link, the
larger the amplitude of what Zorne called “reality matrix
waves.”

“Once a psycho-affective spike splits
reality,” Keith had explained, “the associated reality matrix acts
like a sort of polarizer, so that people with strong enough
compatible matrices are carried along into the new branch of
reality.”

That means people who don’t have
psychic power themselves still have some control over what kind of
reality they live in, Rayna thought.

“Only if they feel strongly about it,”
she remembered Keith’s insisting. “People who don’t care—really
care—about the kind of universe they live in, just have to take
what they get. They have no influence at all. The polarizing effect
apparently doesn’t screen out conflicting reality matrix waves if
they’re of low amplitude.”

It was odd, Rayna reflected. Her
grandfather’s psychic powers had helped give life to the ideals and
dreams he shared with other people. The process sounded much
simpler than it was. The world didn’t just continue to fit Al
Frederick’s ideal. According to his journal, many things continued
to interfere with his Utopian visions. So he kept releasing new
spikes of psychic energy.

Keith’s explanation had been more
technical. “The initial reality matrix effect gets weaker as new
decisions continue to split that branch of reality into more
branches. Any of the new branches might include things that
conflict with the original reality matrix. In your grandfather’s
case, when the conflict became great enough, it would trigger a new
release of psychic energy. It was a kind of automatic course
correction, with conflicting reality matrix waves again screened
out.”

She mulled it over for a few seconds.
Conflicting waves are screened out. Before she could block it, the
image of Keith Daniels, eyes twinkling impishly as he teased Rayna
about her tennis game, tore through her protective wall of
analytical thought. Other images followed rapidly. Keith sleeping
peacefully beside her the morning after they first made love. Keith
eagerly volunteering to join her in an effort to stop what turned
out to be Tauber’s conspiracy. And, finally, Keith spouting the
Operation Strong Man line, as if what began as merely a role for
him to play had somehow taken him over. Along with the images came
the question she’d been trying to suppress since her first inkling
of what had happened:  Had Keith been screened out of this new
reality?