“The what plane?” Earhart asked. “Project what? You’ll have to excuse me, Commander, but my science is several decades old compared to yours.”
Talbot tapped the side of his head. “The psychometric plane is the one that exists in our heads. What is reality?” He didn’t wait for an answer to the question he posed and Dane knew he had had to answer this question before. “What we perceive it to be. Even though we are all in this room, we are experiencing everything in a slightly different manner as our brain processes the input from our senses.
“An avatar is a form that represents the original in the virtual plane,” Talbot continued answered. “If you play a computer game, whatever form you take in the game is your avatar. We’ve found avatars to be important because it allows the remote viewer to orient oneself in the psychometric plane.”
Earhart shook her head. “I don’t understand. How can reality be different? There is one reality in this timeline.”
Talbot considered her for several seconds, and Dane could almost sense him counting back the years to when she had disappeared into history. “We — scientists — in the last hundred years or so have been digging deeper into the physics of what makes up reality. If you’d asked a scientist a hundred years ago what he thought reality was, he would have said pretty much the same thing you just said.
“For centuries, the most learned men of their age believed that matter and reality consisted of four basic substances: fire, earth, water, and air. We’ve come a long way since then, but it is foolish to believe we have reached the end of that path of knowledge. In some ways, people two hundred years from now may look at us as we look at those who believed in the four base elements composing all matter.”
“That’s if there is anyone around two hundred years from now,” Dane interjected.
That gave Talbot a brief pause before he got back on track with his briefing. “Early in this century, we believed that the atomic level was the basic building block of matter, and thus of reality. But with the subsequent discovery of quarks and further research into quantum physics, the realm of reality has been extended further into levels that couldn’t even be conceptualized by the early atomic scientists.”
Dane glanced over at Ahana. He half expected her to Jump in the fray, but she was quiet, her dark eyes on Talbot, her mind probably somewhere very far away.
“We at Dream Land,” Talbot continued, “believe that the psychometric plane is beyond the plane of quantum physics, which scientists are still groping to understand, although there are some proven laws of physics we can connect to it.”
“Such as?” Dane pressed.
“Think of the psychometric field like a magnetic field,” Talbot suggested. ‘The Earth’s magnetic field is all around us, yet we don’t feel it. We need something special, like a compass, to indicate its existence. In a somewhat different manner gravity is all around us, but we can’t see it, only its effects.
“We call these invisible fields’ hyperfields. Quantum physics, with its quarks and wave theory, is a hyperfield. But there are others. They are around you all the time. In fact, there is a concurrent hyperfield to the quantum physical one. A psychometric field. Existing side by side at times with the real plane, at other times existing very separately from the other. It is the boundary between these two planes that is the entire focus of our efforts at Dream Land. Where We can project into the psychometric and see into the real plane. Without getting into the philosophy of it, a mental field — what you perceive in your brain — is a virtual field. If you perceive something to be with your mind, then it exists in the psychometric field.”
Ahana finally spoke up. “But not in reality.”
“Most physicists would say no, not in reality as it is currently defined,” Talbot agreed. “But if our thoughts are not reality, what are they? Everything humans have ever invented or done has come out of our thoughts. So they are real in some way. Or become real at some point. So there is definitely a link between the psychometric world and the real world. The line between the two is constantly being breached. And that line, with the proper equipment and training, we are able to breach at Dream Land.”
If only they could have linked up Ahana and Talbot at the beginning, Dane thought to himself. He had a feeling this is what the Shadow had managed to do — combine physics with mental power in some fundamental way. As Talbot had said, Dane had seen the results of the two fields meeting when Sin Fen shut the Bermuda Triangle Gate using the abandoned Atlantean pyramid and the power of her mind.
Dane could still see Sin Fen’s skull changing from flesh and bone into crystal and channeling the power coming out of the pyramid against the darkness of the expanding gate. Between that experience and what happened on the Nazca Plain, Dane believed there was a connection between a powerful force deep inside the planet and the ability of the mind to tap into and use that force.
Talbot brought up a new slide. On one side was the label “Real Plane” and on the other was Psychometric Plane.” There was a line linking the two.
‘These two planes exist inside each of us. We have our minds, which operate on the psychometric plane, and then we have our bodies, which operate in the real plane. And they are connected through the nervous system. We can take ideas from the psychometric plane of our imagination and make them real in the physical world, say in a painting or a computer program or a book. And we can process things from the physical world into our brains, remember them, even change them with our thoughts. You have to consider the fact that a memory is not really what happened in real terms, but how we processed what happens. No two people remember things exactly alike.
“That’s not true,” Ahana said. “Everyone in this room would agree that two plus two is four.”
“That’s not a memory,” Talbot said. “That’s a concept that exists on the psychometric plane and resides in our minds. We can share the same concepts but no two memories are alike, much like snowflakes are all different.”
Ahana frowned, but didn’t say anything as she digested this.
Talbot continued. “What we are doing here is trying to shut down-as much as possible-the physical part so we can focus on the mental. Then we link our man with the power of the dolphin’s natural transmitter.”
“What have you achieved?” Dane asked.
“We’ve been able to remote view anywhere on the planet with a high degree of accuracy.”
“Does your man go where he wants to or where the dolphin wants to?” Dane asked.
“That’s an interesting question,” Talbot said. “Most of the time, the dolphin doesn’t seem to” — he searched for a word, then shrugged — “care. Our RVer can tap into its power and project toward a target area. But once in a while, the dolphin seems to be doing, thinking, something else, and the RVer has no control.”
“Where do they go then?” Dane pressed.
Talbot shrugged once more. “We don’t know. That’s what we call a blackout situation. The RVer sees nothing. We usually shut those down pretty quickly as there’s no point in continuing.”
“Can you hook me up?” Dane asked. “To a dolphin?”
“I have trained people who can RV,” Talbot said. “Tell me what you want my men to do, and we’ll get it done.”
“I don’t think they can go where I want to go,” Dane said.
“And where is that?”
“To the Ones Before. And they’re not on this timeline or on this planet.”
CHAPTER TEN
The bridge across the Susquehanna had been burned by the locals, which halted the Confederate advance toward Harrisburg. General Lee received this news without comment. His concern was no longer advancing, it was consolidating. His forces were stretched out over a seventy-mile swath of Pennsylvania, and while there had been minimal resistance o far from the local militia, he knew that Hooker had to be moving toward him. He felt he still had several days to prepare, but then came further bad news: Hooker was no longer in command of the Army of the Potomac.