The Army would probably find something for me to do if I sat here long enough; even if it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, there’s always a shortage of people. Someone would notice, and an enterprising commander would decide I was just the warm body he needed.
In the meantime, I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, certainly not the REMF’s in the Colonel’s Club, even if I ignored him and went back there. He hadn't specifically ordered me to stay away, after all.
The shrinks have a name for everything now, including this; it's called SAD, Social Anxiety Disorder. Maybe that was all it was, but it was equally likely that I had nothing I could discuss with others. What could I tell them, describe using my Talent to kill people I’d never met?
I couldn't even discuss the questions I had about the ethics of coming into a country that wasn't mine and killing people. Never mind that I was sent here, or that I hadn't thought the matter through before I accepted the assignment, there's something basically wrong with that idea.
If there's a redeeming feature about the Taliban, murderous medieval thugs that they are, they're easy to hate. I rationalized my way through the ethics question by realizing that I was not only defending myself and my fellow soldiers, I was defending the ordinary people of Pakistan.
The rationalization worked, most of the time.
Likely it was all just part of the PTSD.
The random thoughts finally quit chasing themselves through my mind and I slept.
#
I glanced at my watch. It was 0423, and the room was dark and silent. Something had woke me from the best sleep I’d had in weeks.
Too often it's a mortar bomb that drops in, the jihadist version of an alarm clock, but not this time; my nerves were tingling again, more so than usual.
I scanned my immediate surroundings, augmenting the usual sound-sight-smell-touch with my abilities; it takes less than a second and I sensed nothing different. I was in the same nearly-dark room, uniforms hanging in the wall locker, boots by my bunk. My M4 stood ready by the foot of the bed. There was a curtained window above the bed, but I never opened it because there was nothing to see outside. Nothing there but a gray concrete barrier.
An open shelf unit held underwear, a duffle bag with extra uniforms sat by the locker. There was a folding chair, a small table that held a switched-off laptop computer and printer across from the locker. I had used the computer to research ethics after coming to Afghanistan. There was also a flat-screen TV on a plastic stand by the table, not that I ever watched the thing. A microwave for heating MRE’s and occasionally something more edible stood on another table along the wall.
Same old, same old; living in a box eight feet by eleven doesn’t allow for a lot of creativity. Things could have been worse. At least I had a bottom unit; the CHU’s were stacked two high, with a metal stair leading to the upper level. Newly-arrived lieutenants got those.
It could have been worse even than that; some of the enlisted people were still living in tents.
The only thing that felt different now was the extra tingle along my nerves. It was almost time to get up anyway; maybe that’s what the tingle was about.
I pulled on my boots and headed for the latrine. I became aware of the tingle again while I was there, so I finished up and headed back to my CHU, fully awake now and seeking with my Talent.
Telepathy is funny. It works best between TPs, and it works best of all when you know the other telepath and have communicated with him before. We call it ‘comming’, short for communicating. The common word describes something quite uncommon, the ability of minds to sync with each other and pass ideas. It’s not exactly a voice speaking, but that’s the way my mind interprets it, just a still, small voice that can be heard clearly even if there is background noise. The ‘voice’ overrides external noise in the same way your own thoughts do. I could comm with Surfer and a few others, he could even pick up considerable amounts of what normals were thinking.
It’s a question of resonance, I think. Let your nervous system link with the other persons, achieve resonance. He’s also trying to join with you, so your mind soon syncs with his and you’re ready to comm. Achieving synchronicity is something like a dance. That’s the main reason I don’t care much for Surfer; he ‘leads’, and he’s much stronger than I am. Stronger at telepathy, anyway; there aren’t any good words to explain it. He forces the resonance before I’m ready. He’s strong enough to make the TP work, even with me. But that’s who it was, and his attempt to force my mind to sync with his had brought me awake. In seconds we had a link.
<You know what time it is, Asshole? >
Think of a middle-of-the-night phone call from someone you don’t like. Factor in being short of sleep, then include the nightmares and headaches. This was the best sleep I’d had in more than a week, aftermath of my little contretemps with the Colonel, and I resented the wakeup call.
<Important to you, anyway. It’s your nickel.>
<The G-man isn’t there anymore. That important to you?>
G, for Garbage…you had to rummage around in his thoughts a while to know why that handle stuck to him…was one of the guys in school that I had established a friendly relationship with. As much of a relationship as I had with anyone, anyway.
We’re like cats, except more so. It’s probably a side effect of the Talent, an increased reserve around others. The G man and I had linked a few times after leaving the School but the intervals had gradually gotten longer. He wasn’t close to me in geographic terms and it just wasn’t worth the headache. Anyway, he wouldn't have understood what had happened after I left the School.
I thought about it and realized it had been at least a couple of months since I had commed with anyone. Time flies, even when you’re not having fun.
<What are you trying to say? He’s not answering or he lost his ability or something?>
<I think he’s dead. I think most of the people who were at the School are dead. I’ve been checking in with G man once a week, a few others now and then, but I can’t find anyone now. I can’t link with anybody but you and Shezzie, and Shezzie wasn’t at the School.>
<Who’s Shezzie?>
<You probably don’t know her. I found her by accident, after we left school. She’s pretty strong, a wild Talent that the recruiters never found.>
What the hell kind of name was Shezzie, anyway? But still, all the others dead? Some kind of side effect of the Talent? What if it turned out to be burnout of the nervous system, whatever had caused our headaches but carried to the next stage? And a wild Talent? Theoretically, it was possible; we’d wondered about that. Could someone develop paranormal abilities without the computers? The thoughts raced through my mind.
<Wait one. I’m going to try to link with G.>
I tried. It’s not a question of trying harder; you just let your TP ‘roam’ and gradually feed in ‘power’, waiting to feel an answering tingle when you made contact. I fed in all the energy my system would take and I got--nothing. If Surfer couldn't reach people, there was virtually no chance I could, but I needed to try in order to be sure.
I could feel stuff; I sensed people, some sleeping, a couple more-or-less alert. I was probably picking up the duty crew who were always at work in the compound, but the contact was not enough to do more than gather vague feelings. I could feel their awareness but not their thoughts or emotions. All I got was a kind of shadowy knowledge that there were people nearby, which meant that my ability was working.
But I felt nothing at all from any of my School contacts, and there should have been someone starting to nibble at my TP by now. I could still feel the resonance with Surfer but that was all, just Surfer and the shadowy touches from nearby normals.
<OK; I’m getting nothing. What are you trying to say? Is there some side effect that burns out the nerves, maybe kills us or something? Like the headaches, but worse?>
<Well, maybe; I guess I can’t rule it out
. It's not the headaches though, because they go away after a while. I haven’t had one for almost a year. But that’s not what I’ve found out.
<There was a guy that didn’t get all the way through the School, worked in recruiting and helped the administrators. I found I could link with him if we were close by, you know?>
Surfer had more talent for TP, I’d had more PK. He’d have lost a PK pillow fight, but to give him his due he could link to damn near anybody. Differences in nervous system structure, I suppose. I’d seen him, standing there, no expression, and you just knew the bastard was comming with someone and also probably spreading rumors and gossip about you. I’d practiced some of the early itching attacks on him. That took the bland expression off his face damned quick. I don’t know if he knew it was me doing it, but I’ll bet he suspected.
<OK, you could link with him. Rub it in, Surfer; is there a point to this?>
<He said he overheard something, just a loose thought. He had a tiny bit of TP but it never became reliable, that’s why he flunked out. Anyway, he picked up something the command staff never told us about. They never trusted us; the AI programs were developing our Talents and the people in charge had to work through the ones who couldn’t finish the program to even know what we were doing. It worried the administrators, handing us an ability they couldn’t control.>
I thought about what he was telling me. Some of the administrators had been OK but others had clearly been in the wrong job. The veterans and field agents had been mostly human, but some of the others…well, they’d have recognized Colonel Arschloch as a fellow achiever. They were the same type of bastard, probably starched their underwear and ironed military creases in.
<I know the kind you mean. No-Talent types, all about giving orders. They were all for the government service and military application part, at least with me, but they never understood about Talent. If they hadn’t had a few low-grade Talents to serve as a bridge between them and us they’d never have gotten anything done.>
<Got it in one. There was a buck general, Humbley or something like that. Remember him?>
I remembered him, corncob up his ass, no sense of humor at all. One of the other guys, G maybe, had tickled him one day. He had not been amused. Good thing he couldn’t prove anything, but he’d known that something was going on. For sure, he’d known one of us had done something, just not who or what.
<Henderson, maybe? Something like that? He took over the School after we were halfway through. I wondered back then if he would have even let us finish the course if he’d been in charge from the beginning?>
<That’s him, Henderson. My contact heard something, and I’ve done some checking since. I think what we discovered came from Henderson, or maybe it originated with someone higher up. Anyway, Henderson was the one in command when it happened. He ordered the control put in.>
<What control? What are you talking about?>
I was wide awake now.
<They put an implant in us. They drugged the food I think, some kind of slow acting soporific. When we went to sleep, they sent a med crew around and put us under deep enough to implant a fail-safe control in the back of our necks. Yours, mine, everyone who hadn’t already been dismissed from the School. They didn’t bother with the ones who had flunked out.
<The implant’s a receiver with a small explosive charge aimed at the spinal cord. It’s right behind the spine, between two of the bones and almost touching the disk. The idea is that if we stop responding to orders or if we get too independent, they use the radio receiver to fire the explosive.>
I felt a chill.
<Holy shit! You’re sure about this?>
<Pretty sure. I had an x-ray done. Another one of my friends has access to a dental machine, and while the image we got wasn’t great it was good enough. All I could make out was a blurry spot on the X-ray film, but yeah, there's something in the back of my neck. With dental machines, I guess they’re not as strong or as focused as a full-body machine. Anyway, there’s not supposed to be anything there except bone and cartilage and muscle. This fuzzy-looking thing didn’t match any of those.>
<Why a dental machine? Why not just get an X ray done?>
< I didn’t want to go to a doctor, especially one who was being paid by the School. The administrators have to be watching us to make sure we don’t find out what they’ve done, maybe get this thing taken out. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but what if they put some kind of booby trap in? Something that would make this thing blow if anyone tried to remove it? Or maybe they would trigger it if they thought we even suspected something was in there?>
I thought about it. How to find out for sure? How to find out if they had done me too, or maybe only Surfer? Could he be wrong? Still, I had sensed no contact from anyone. If Surfer was wrong, how could that be explained?
<Does the girl you mentioned know about this?>
<She will; I’m going to comm her next. She’s over there, somewhere near you. I’m not sure exactly where she is, but she told me she was in Afghanistan the first time I made contact.
<But she didn’t go through the School, and anyway it’s closed now. The administrators shut it down a month ago. Now that I think about it, that may have something to do with people dying. They may be cleaning up loose ends.>
<OK, thanks for warning me. Back to you in a day or so?>
<Be careful. If they find out we know about the implants, we won’t last long. I’m already hiding out, just in case. They had me working as a communicator and analyst, but I didn’t go to work this morning and I plan to be long gone before they start looking for me.>
<I understand. Good luck; I may have to do that too. I wonder if they can send someone after me over here? It can’t be easy just putting one of their people on a military flight, but maybe they’ve already got agents in-country. How do they trigger this thing, anyway?>
<It has to be some kind of hand-held transmitter. It’s the same thing that veterinarians use to query a RFID chip, the radio-frequency identification implant. The transmitter has to use a coded transmission and I'm sure it can only operate over a short range. Think of a TV controller, something like that; TV clickers use coded transmissions, so punching the off button for the satellite receiver doesn’t automatically shut off the TV and the Blu-Ray too. Same technology, I’ll bet. They would want to be able to fire the implant on command but not have it triggered by accident. A microwave oven won’t set it off. Maybe.>
<Thanks a bunch. I’ll comm you later, and thanks again for the warning.>
#
I let my nervous system relax and he was gone, just a faint buzzing that quickly faded. He was probably comming Shezzie now.
How had he found her? It might be that he was like me, not revealing how strong his Talent really was. He might even have been hiding his true strength from the rest of us. Could he be that far advanced, that much stronger than anyone else? Could he just reach out and read someone’s mind on the other side of the world, while everyone else was forced to fumble around picking up emotions and fragments of thought?
I had a little TP Talent, a tiny bit of PreCog, and a lot of PK. I had the body-control Talent too; the normal body already has the ability to recognize infection and fight it off; my body-control Talent is just an advance over that, a greater ability to neutralize toxins such as alcohol and break down strange chemicals like acetylsalicylic acid faster. It’s the same ability that every normal has except that mine is stronger.
Could there also be people who had full PreCog ability? People who could see tomorrow or next year, even ten years into the future?
The thought triggered a memory. There had been two people who mysteriously disappeared halfway through the course; they hadn’t been sent somewhere, because the administration came around asking if any of us knew where they’d gone. Could they have been PreCogs who had foreseen the explosive implants and vanished before the administrators put the devices in?
If so, where were they now? And how could the School's admi
nistrators find someone who could see the future, maybe even change it before it happened?
Wherever they were, those two, I wished them well. If they really had that much precognition, they might prevent a great catastrophe from happening.
Meantime, I had enough problems of my own to deal with. I probably had an explosive charge in my neck, and a lot of people from the School had gone silent. They were likely dead, as Surfer believed.
And I was in limbo, stuck here in the compound like a sacrificial goat, waiting for someone with a TV clicker to switch me off permanently. Could this be why I was no longer taking patrols out? Had someone decided to make it easier for an assassin to find me?
Was this why there were no orders for me to return to the States?
Chapter Five
No way I was going back to sleep. Damn Surfer anyway; he could have waited until morning!
I grabbed a towel and my bag of shaving gear and headed across to the bathroom for a quick shave and shower. Finished, I hung the towel on a rack in the CHU to dry and tossed my dirty ACU at the laundry bag. It missed, so I reached out with my Talent and picked the uniform up. That part was easy, but stuffing it into the laundry bag was impossible. Finally I dropped the uniform, brought the bag over, then picked the uniform up and bagged it by hand.
It would have been easier to do without the PK; everything is very close in a CHU, but you get lazy after a while. It’s worth a small grin, picking up a dirty uniform and laundry bag without having to take the three steps to where they're laying.
Using PK for innocent fun is not the same as tangling a jihadist’s foot, yanking on his rifle while he was trying to point it at one of my guys, or picking up dead and wounded kids after an attack. I needed all the humor I could find, even if it was only a small thing.