Colonel Metter stared at the woman. “Ma’am, with all due respect to you, and I don’t know you or what your role in this whole thing is, the men in my battalion are the best soldiers in the world. They are some of the best people in the world. Don’t stand up there and try to put me waist deep in bullshit. Just tell me what I need to know.”
A red flush had climbed Hammond’s cheeks, her face tightening. “All right, Colonel. Much of the science we are dealing with on the psychometric or virtual plane is un-proven, or even if proven, not completely understood. Our philosophy at Bright Gate is to concern ourselves with what works, sometimes well before we even have a clue as to why or exactly how it works. Unlike our counterparts at the universities, we are pragmatic first and foremost. While they dabble in theory, we have gone places they only chat about over a glass of wine at academic receptions.
“As Agent Raisor has indicated, Operation Psychic Warrior has been under development for many years. The basic concept is to project not just a remote-viewing capability into the psychometric plane, which we have already accomplished, but an actual capability to project an avatar into the virtual plane, travel along jump points to the target, or far point, and then out of the virtual or psychometric plane into the real plane at the far point.”
“Whoa!” Colonel Metter interrupted. “Some background and definitions would be helpful. What the hell is an avatar?”
“An avatar is a form that represents the original in the virtual plane,” Hammond answered. “If you play a computer game, whatever form you take in the game is your avatar. In Psychic Warrior we go one step further. We can take that avatar from the virtual plane into the real plane at the far point. We make the avatar real.”
“What the hell is the virtual plane?” Metter asked. “And the real plane?”
Hammond considered her audience for a few seconds, then spoke. “Scientists in the last couple of hundred years have been digging deeper into the physics of what makes up reality. If you’d asked a scientist two hundred years ago what they thought reality was, you would have gotten a very different answer than a hundred years ago, and fifty years ago, and so on.
“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 have made great strides 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.
“Early in this century it was believed that the atomic level was the basic building block of matter, and thus of reality. But with the discovery of such things as 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.
“We at Bright Gate believe the psychometric plane is beyond the plane of quantum physics, which scientists are still groping to understand. We call it the astral or virtual plane, and there are some proven laws of physics we can connect to it.” She smiled. “I don’t think we need to get into the nuts and bolts of the theory, do you?”
Colonel Metter glanced at Dalton, who returned the look, his face telling the colonel what he thought. “As a matter of fact,” Metter said, “I think we do.”
Hammond frowned. “Well, let me see if I can lay it out moving from the known to the unknown. You are all aware that there is such a thing as a magnetic field, which your compasses work off of?” With four heads nodding, she continued. “You are also aware that electricity can produce an electromagnetic field. But have you ever wondered what produces the electromagnetic field? What it is made of?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. “We call fields which produce the electromagnetic field, 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 virtual field. It is this virtual field that is the psychometric plane; the two terms are synonymous. Existing side by side at times with the real plane, at other times existing very separately from each other. It is the boundary between these two planes that is the entire focus of our efforts at Bright Gate.
“And 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 virtual field.”
“But not in reality,” Dalton interjected.
“Most physicists would say no, not in reality as it is currently defined,” Hammond said. “But if our thoughts are not reality, what are they? Everything man has ever invented or done has come out of his thoughts. So they are real in some way. So I say yes. I say that there is a link between the virtual world and the real world. That the line between the two is an artificial one that is constantly being breached. And that, with the proper equipment and training, we are able to breach at Bright Gate and will continue to go through with Psychic Warrior.”
“You say?” Colonel Metter said. “Is there any proof?”
“I’ve been there,” Hammond said. “I’ve been on the psychometric plane.”
“And what happened?” Captain Anderson asked.
“I RVed— remote viewed— at several points on the globe.”
“An out-of-body experience?” Dalton asked.
“You could call it that,” Hammond said, “but that is a crude simplification of a complex process.”
“How do you know it wasn’t just a hallucination?” Dalton asked.
Hammond smiled, revealing even white teeth. “It might have been what you call a hallucination, but does that make it any less real? When we checked, we found out that what I saw was real, so how I saw is not as important as the fact that I saw it. I existed in the virtual world and saw the real.”
She tapped the side of her head. “We must stop limiting our minds with the boundaries of our physical brains. We accept that we can impart what exists in our minds to others through speech, or through the visual spectrum, or any of the senses in various modes. To understand Psychic Warrior, you have to consider that there is another way to bring our minds out of the physical limitations of our bodies beyond the methods that we use every day. Those of you who were in Trojan Warrior were introduced to these concepts.”
Hammond clicked through the slides quickly until she came to the one she wanted.
“These are the two planes I am talking about. Think about it. They quite clearly 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 somehow they are connected, are they not? We can take ideas from the psychometric/virtual plane of our imagination and make them real in the physical world, say in a painting. And we can process things from the physical world into our brains, remember them, even change them with our thoughts!
“What my remote viewers are able to do is travel outside of the confines of their physical brains on the psychometric plane and observe what is happening at a distance on the real plane. It is the greatest journey man has ever made! Far more significant than the first travelers across the oceans or even our journey to the moon.”
“But you’re talking about something very different with Psychic Warrior,” Captain Anderson noted.
Hammond nodded. “Yes. What we plan to do with the Psychic Warrior is travel along the psychometric plane, then not only ‘see’ into the real world at a remote location, but act in it through the projected avatar.”