At the stage of true enlightenment.
He thought of the Buddhas. Of the mystics and saviors who had come and gone.
Missing that one most crucial element.
Memory. Retainment.
They looked to the Dalai Lama in this age, the reincarnation of his most blessed wise one.
All that was right in thought, wrong in practice.
He had them all beat. He and the other Followers. The Circle.
Focus.
Concentrating all his wide-reaching awareness down to a single point. Ignore the man in the tank.
Back to the woman, to Jaclyn, who presided over the tank with the other four assistants in this second sublevel of the drug manufacturing plant. She came with an iPad displaying an aerial photo.
She stopped at his command. Held it up and scrutinized it: snowy setting, a view from high above. Google Satellite maybe. He knew they’d been looking, co-opting the cameras and feeds from satellites, traffic cams, ATMs and the like across the world. Employing facial recognition and other tools.
Time stamps displayed a scene first from last night, under a bright aurora in Alaska…
An elderly woman by the looks of it, with a stroller holding two toddlers, heading for the cabin.
The next image: the same woman likely, sans-coat, face down in the snow. No sign of the tykes.
Jaclyn smiled.
Very well, the thought came. You may wake me, this is what I sought. You’ve done well.
And in the tank, with the water flooding out through the floor vents, Raiden descended and returned to his body. His mind sparked back and resumed control of the cold limbs and willed the muscles to flex and work once more.
He pulled the tube from his mouth, and along with the saline and chlorinated water, he could almost taste the pure flavor of victory.
“We have them. Alaska… find me the nearest military unit. And a susceptible commander.”
8
Phoebe found her way to a back office on the floor, adjacent to the one Caleb had just commandeered for privacy. She needed space, needed isolation, and most of all — needed to be away from the windows. Didn’t want to be distracted or tempted to look down on the chaos below. Or to be a target. If they could fire RPGs at a helicopter, she guessed bulletproof windows might not be adequate protection.
A glance back through the window revealed a bustle of action around the main area, which made her uncomfortable. A lot of agent-type men in dark suits were setting up equipment, trying to reach others and coordinate mobile communications. A few others just stood around as security and seemed okay for now.
She hoped these guys were all, as Edgerrin said, with some sort of psychic ability that nullified the onslaught of full awareness. Otherwise…
She was glad she locked the door. Moving to the window, she hesitated but felt she should close the blinds in here. Didn’t want to be distracted while she went into her trance. She needed to be confident she wouldn’t be disturbed. However, she didn’t want to miss anything, and wasn’t sure Caleb was in the right mind to notice threats now. Not with the weight of all this on his shoulders. The ultimate guilt, and all this responsibility. He would do anything to atone, she knew, and would overlook the basic things around him in service of fixing it all.
He needed her to be aware. To support and protect him. To save him from himself — which she hadn’t been able to do on Long Island.
Hand on the blinds’ release, she hesitated, watching her brother in the next room. He disconnected the livestream to Edgerrin and walked to the window. Back to her, he looked out at the city, at the world.
A changed world. A world he had in part wanted to create, ever since that day emerging from under the Alexandrian harbor with the key to ultimate knowledge in his hand. He had wanted to release all that wisdom all to the world, but then he saw the wisdom in restraint.
Now, despite all those precautions, the dam had been broken.
But this, it wasn’t full knowledge, Phoebe knew.
It was chaos. It was anything but provident information carefully allocated and available for analysis. It was the absolute opposite of organization and method. This was a bombardment of the psyche of every living human not otherwise buffered by pre-existing constraints.
Or, she thought, whatever else might be blocking this ‘curse’. Some medicine people were taking that had an unintended side effect.
Focus, she thought. Let Victoria and the new recruits handle that part. You have your own objectives.
She did, and reluctantly she closed the blinds on her introspective brother, wishing she could alleviate his pain in some way, but knowing this might be a path he needed to tread alone.
It was time. Time to find Orlando.
As much as she ached for him, despite all his quirks and aggravating ticks, she loved the lug more than anything. Except maybe the two joys he had given her. What we did together, as he was so fond of describing their act of procreation.
She let her mind go free as she sat in the cushy leather office chair, sliding it away from the meeting table and releasing the lock so she could lean back and stare up at the perforated ceiling tiles.
Half-expecting to see a couple pencils stuck up there, as Orlando loved to spend his time perfecting the pencil-dart-in-the-ceiling trick, she let her eyes glaze over the tiles, allowing the lack of patterns to the indentations and marks create a map of sorts. Roads leading this way and that. Bridges from one land to another…
Focus slipped, shadows merged, darkness swirled, and she saw…
Him.
Orlando, but not Orlando.
A collection of numerical data, a binary blur of golden luminescence. He was here and yet gone. In a different place and time, a different…
Just. Different. Reading his location was like opening a book entirely written in a different language and not understanding one symbol.
Couldn’t find him, and then…
Change the question.
Where did they take him originally?
Two things were going on. One, she realized, was beyond her understanding now, beyond anyone’s. But what she had to be able to determine was Orlando’s physical location. Not the presence of his consciousness. That was the wrong question.
Body, not mind.
Where is ‘he’?
That was the key question.
The collection of biological material, water, bones and muscle, nerves and cells and molecules that made up her husband. That she could find.
And did.
The image came to mind quickly: A white room.
A table. Electrodes, monitors.
Where?
She backs up, retreating from the room. A stark, long hallway. Other doors, other… patients?
Someone — something down the hall. Behind another door.
She shivers.
It’s a woman, but… much more. She’s…
Familiar
A smell of ancient rock and jasmine, the sound of a subterranean waterfall, and kind, sad eyes…
Was this—?
Fingers press against the glass, leaving glowing fingerprints and—
She’s gone.
Blasting up, through more levels of hallways and experimental lab rooms, server stations, and then layers of rock and earth. Up — into the air, into the blue sky, looking down on a fenced in area, a collection of buildings, what looks like…