Undoubtedly Shea and the other doctors are in consultation with the psychologists of the CIA, guessing where I might have gone. My parents are dead, so the CIA is turning its attention to my friends, asking whether I’ve contacted them; they’ll maintain surveillance on them in the event I do. A regrettable invasion of their privacy, but it isn’t a pressing matter.
It’s unlikely that the CIA will treat any of their agents with hormone K to locate me. As I myself demonstrate, a super-intelligent person is too difficult to control. However, I’ll keep track of the other patients, in case the government decides to recruit them.
The quotidian patterns of society are revealed without my making an effort. I walk down the street, watching people go about their business, and though not a word is spoken, the subtext is conspicuous. A young couple strolls by, the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other. Apprehension flickers and becomes steady as a businessman, fearful of his supervisor, begins to doubt a decision he made earlier today. A woman wears a mantle of simulated sophistication, but it slips when it brushes past the genuine article.
As always, the roles one plays become recognizable only with greater maturity. To me, these people seem like children on a playground; I’m amused by their earnestness, and embarrassed to remember myself doing those same things. Their activities are appropriate for them, but I couldn’t bear to participate now; when I became a man, I put away childish things. I will deal with the world of normal humans only as needed to support myself.
I acquire years of education each week, assembling ever-larger patterns. I view the tapestry of human knowledge from a broader perspective than anyone ever has before; I can fill gaps in the design where scholars never even noticed a lack, and enrich the texture in places that they felt were complete.
The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like ‘optics’ or ‘thermodynamics’ are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artificially generating spherically symmetric gravity fields.
Having realized this, however, I won’t build such a device, or any other. It would require many custom-built components, all difficult and time-consuming to procure. Furthermore, actually constructing the device wouldn’t give me any particular satisfaction, since I already know it would work, and it wouldn’t illuminate any new gestalts.
I’m writing part of an extended poem, as an experiment; after I’ve finished one canto, I’ll be able to choose an approach for integrating the patterns within all the arts. I’m employing six modern and four ancient languages; they include most of the significant worldviews of human civilization. Each one provides different shades of meaning and poetic effects; some of the juxtapositions are delightful. Each line of the poem contains neologisms, born by extruding words through the declensions of another language. If I were to complete the entire piece, it could be thought of as Finnegans Wake multiplied by Pound’s Cantos.
The CIA interrupts my work; they’re baiting a trap for me. After two months of trying, they’ve accepted that they can’t locate me by conventional methods, so they’ve turned to more drastic measures. The news services report that the girlfriend of a deranged murderer has been charged with aiding and abetting his escape. The name given is Connie Perritt, someone I was seeing last year. If it goes to trial, it’s a foregone conclusion that she’ll be sentenced to a lengthy prison term; the CIA is hoping that I won’t allow that. They expect me to attempt a maneuver that will expose me to capture.
Connie’s preliminary hearing is tomorrow. They’ll ensure that she’s released on bail, through a bondsman if necessary, to give me an opportunity to contact her. Then they’ll saturate the area around her apartment with undercover agents to wait for me.
I begin editing the first image on-screen. These digital photos are so minimal compared to holos, but they serve the purpose. The photos, taken yesterday, show the exterior of Connie’s apartment building, the street out front, and nearby intersections. I move the cursor across the screen, drawing small crosshairs in certain locations on the images. A window, with lights out but curtains open, in the building diagonally opposite. A street vendor two blocks from the rear of the building.
I mark six locations altogether. They indicate where CIA agents were waiting last night, when Connie went back to her apartment. Having been cued by the videotapes of me in the hospital, they knew what to look for in all male or ambiguous passers-by: the confident, level gait. Their expectations worked against them; I simply lengthened my stride, bobbed my head up and down a bit, reduced my arm motion. That and some atypical clothes were sufficient for them to ignore me as I walked through the area.
At the bottom of one photo I type the radio frequency used by the agents for communication, and an equation describing the scrambling algorithm employed. Once I’ve finished, I transmit the images to the Director of the CIA. The implication is clear: I could kill his undercover agents at any time, unless they withdraw.
To have them drop charges against Connie, and for a more permanent deterrent against the CIA’s distractions, I shall have to do some more work.
Pattern recognition again, but this time it’s of a mundane variety. Thousands of pages of reports, memos, correspondence; each one is a dot of color in a pointillist painting. I step back from this panorama, watching for lines and edges to emerge and create a pattern. The megabytes that I scanned constituted only a fraction of the complete records for the period I investigated, but they were enough.
What I’ve found is rather ordinary, far simpler than the plot of a spy novel. The Director of the CIA was aware of a terrorist group’s plan to bomb the Washington D.C. metro system. He let the bombing occur, in order to gain congressional approval for the use of extreme measures against that group. A congressman’s son was among the casualties, and the CIA Director was given a free hand in handling the terrorists. While his plans aren’t actually stated in CIA records, they’re implied quite clearly. The relevant memos make only oblique references, and they float in a sea of innocuous documents; if an investigating committee were to read all of the records, the evidence would be drowned out by the noise. However, a distillation of the incriminating memos would certainly convince the press.
I send the list of memos to the Director of the CIA, with a note: Don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you. He’ll realize that he has no alternative.
This little episode has reinforced my opinion of the affairs of the world; I could detect clandestine ploys everywhere if I kept informed about current events, but none of them would be interesting. I shall resume my studies.
Control over my body continues to grow. By now I could walk on hot coals or stick needles in my arm, if I were so inclined. However, my interest in Eastern meditation is limited to its application to physical control; no meditative trance I can attain is nearly as desirable to me as my mental state when I assemble gestalts out of elemental data.