Mindguard (34 page)

Ross had no
problems moving through the darkness. With all the ship’s doors now stuck open,
he quickly made his way to the garage. There, they found the remaining members
of Tamisa’s team – Dieter Muench, Matt Harris and Adrian Lucas – waiting for
them. Their weapons were aimed at Ross and Tamisa. Ross made a gesture of the
head towards the captive woman and smirked.

“Seems I got
myself a damsel in distress,” he said.

“Take him down,”
Tamisa ordered with what was left of her voice. None of the enforcers made any
move.

“I will kill
her,” Ross shouted. The men did not look like they doubted him. 

“Take him down,
that is an order!” Tamisa had intended to yell, but only a pathetic whisper
came out of her hurting throat. Muench looked at her with sad eyes, as if he
wished he could trade places with her.

“I’m sorry
ma’am, you know the protocol. If you are a hostage… your orders are invalid.
Stand down, men!”

“Muench… do the
right thing,” she begged, but the veteran shook his head and said nothing. The
garage contained two land vehicles. Ross smiled and slowly walked to the
nearest one. He ordered Tamisa to open it and when she refused to give the
vocal command, he assured her that he’d have ‘the old bastard’ do it instead.
The woman complied and the next thing she knew they were inside. There were
three seats: a driver’s seat in front and two behind it. Ross sat at the
driver’s seat but didn’t let go of his hostage. 

“Transfer
controls to me,” he said. She did, when she realized that he no longer had any
reason to keep her alive if she didn’t obey. All she wanted now was to survive,
so that she may get her revenge on him.  He took off so fast the vehicle
almost flew out of the spacecraft. Once he found himself outside, he opened the
door to his left. “You owe me, girl,” he said and threw her out.

She hit the
ground so hard she almost lost consciousness. As she struggled to her feet,
watching Ross disappear into the distance in a cloud of dust, there was only
one thing she could think of:
You should have killed me!

Muench and the
other two Enforcers caught up with her. They all seemed relieved to see she was
all right. “Awaiting orders, ma’am,” Muench said. She ignored him and ran past
her confused team mates, back into the ship’s garage. They could merely watch
as Tamisa boarded the second vehicle and took off in pursuit of
Ross.  

Actors on a stage
try to deceive you. They feign emotions and say: this is real, this is how I
really feel, who I really am. But their emotions are not authentic, for they do
not come from an instinctual reaction, but from a deliberate thought process.
No matter how convincing, they are fabricated. Like an actor, a mindguard too
displays fabricated feelings. Like actors they deceive you not because they
mean you harm, but in order to better relate to you. For they can feel no
genuine emotions, not in the way non-mindguards do. Emotions come from
instinct. But the mindguard’s brain functions with incredible speed. Mindguards
assess and conclude much faster than their instincts have time to react. That
is what makes them unique among men. They are not the slaves of their
instincts, nor are they the slaves of their minds. Instead, they
are
their minds.

Samuel Weixman,
Strengths
and Limitations of a Mindguard

Sheldon could
feel his body slithering towards death. He had no time to look back on his
life. At that moment, the only thing keeping him alert was adrenaline. With
every passing second, the enforcers could be drawing nearer. Sophie had to wait
for the generator to recharge. If the enforcers got to them before that, it
will all have been for nothing.

Sheldon was
aware that he had made it easier for his enemies to track them down by using
the gateway to travel closer to the Bankarr mountains. There had been no other
way. He could never have walked the distance; he could barely stand. Perhaps
Sophie would have been safer on her own, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave
her alone. At this point, she didn’t so much need a mindguard as she did a
friend.

She was
frightened. She was hurt and betrayed. He was afraid she wouldn’t be able to
continue on her own. Sheldon was determined to stay alive, long enough to make
sure the girl made it to safety. In his own way he had grown fond of her. She
was honest and loyal in a way that most people weren’t. She had felt the bitter
pain of betrayal and the paralyzing fear of having her life threatened. It
seemed that the only person she trusted now was Sheldon. He was not used to
being granted this form of trust. People always had faith in his ability. They
fought for his services because they were confident that he was the greatest
mindguard in the world. But Sophie trusted his
character
.

He looked at her
and smiled, though she could not see him. Exhausted, she had dosed off. They
had managed to reach their destination after having to pause various times to
allow Sheldon to catch his breath. Sophie was constantly turning to check if he
was still behind her, if he hadn’t just silently collapsed. When they finally
reached the large cave, they had to stop just to marvel at its beauty.

It was formed in
a type of sedimentary rock, similar to limestone. The cave walls sparkled in
certain places, creating the impression that it was a geological map of some
mysterious galaxy. Hundreds of stalactites were hanging above their heads like
so many swords of Damocles. The young woman had looked around, her eyes wide in
astonishment. Never had she seemed more vulnerable, never had she more
resembled a child. She was a child of light holding inside her mind a grain of
darkness.

Two things had
been puzzling Sheldon for some time. The first was the unanswered question:
what did Horatio Miller hope to achieve by sending Sophie back to Opus Caine?
It had been revealed that Miller had an extreme aversion to what the Opus Caine
had become. He was so desperate to keep them away from mankind that he tried to
kill his best friend, to stop him from telling the world. So why disclose the
secret of their existence to his daughter? Why send her on this dangerous
journey to make contact with them? There was only one possible reason why
Miller would ever want to return to their planet: to destroy them. But how
could he ever achieve that through Sophie? Especially since the girl had no
knowledge of the real purpose of the mission?

The second
question was one that had plagued him from the beginning: what
was
that
dark spot in Sophie’s thought timbre? Her timbre was one of the brightest and
purest he had encountered in his career. However, there was one element - a
void-like entity - that contrasted with the rest, as if it were synthetic and
not truly part of her mind. At first, he thought it was a result of Miller’s
influence on her, that his venomous mind had interacted with hers so intensely
it had left a mark. He had seen something like that happen before, but never so
strongly. But a long time had passed since she had been around Miller and the
dark spot had not decreased.

With the
struggle to control his own failing mind, he had lacked the energy to piece
everything together. Now that he knew the truth about Opus Caine and Miller’s
deception, the dark spot became more important than ever. He had tried reading
her thoughts - gently, without bothering her. Still, the void remained
inaccessible. It was as though it was not woven into the fabric of her mind,
but stitched onto it. An outside intervention of great complexity.

His mind circled
the darkness. He tried to project his own thoughts onto it, but the darkness
reacted like a mental black hole. It absorbed everything and gave back nothing.
Was it the very information package he had been hired to guard? It was certainly
a form of cognition, but it was neither a thought nor a memory. At least not
something that the brain had constructed naturally. Sheldon was intrigued by
this unnatural cerebral entity. He told Sophie to get some rest while they
waited for the portable gateway generator to recharge. That’s when she fell
asleep.

Sheldon was
happy she did, because the mind was infinitely easier to access when the body
was sleeping. Usually, a person’s thoughts revealed themselves to him in
patterns of complex codes. The Weixman Barrier was the cerebral construction
that prevented him from decoding them. With the barrier gone and the carrier
asleep, her thoughts appeared as clearly as a holorecording.

He could see the
physical  projection of himself inside her mind. He was in a cave, the
same one in which their physical bodies rested. Her thoughts sparkled on the
cave walls. The dark spot was there too, only a few feet away from Sheldon. A
sphere of nothing, just big enough to contain his nothing-body.  He took a
few thought-steps forward and entered the void.

Inside the
mental black hole, he found a singularity. Formed from a cosmic noise made of
fractions of memories, thoughts and sensory information, the object had neither
shape, nor color. There was no way to imagine it, but he could sense that it
was there. He invited it inside his mind. With it, came a story:

Sophie Gaumont
and Horatio Miller were in a room that looked like it could be the educator’s
office. Sophie sat on a chair and Miller stood in front of her. The girl looked
unresponsive, as if she were sleeping with her eyes open. Sheldon realized that
the small device in Horatio’s hand had modified the patterns of her synapses,
sending her brain into an altered state. She was essentially hypnotized. He
recognized the device: a portable, artificial mindguard, but one that had been
noticeably modified. A holo-user-interface had been added in place of the
regular touchscreen. 

“My darling,”
the Horatio-thought said, “can you hear me?”

“Yes,” the girl
answered in a voice devoid of any inflections.

“Good.”

He used his
fingers to create a symbol on the holoscreen. The device began interacting with
Sophie’s brain in a way that Sheldon had thought impossible. It was sending a
telepathic message to the young girl’s mind. In essence, Horatio had found a
way to turn a holo-mindguard into a telepath, bypassing the programmed Weixman
Barrier.

How ironic
,
thought Sheldon. He was disappointed that, given his own situation, he had not
been able to suspect the nature of the weapon. For the first time Sheldon felt
a great admiration for Miller. The man was truly one of the world’s most
brilliant scientists. Whether neurological or technological, the Weixman
Barriers had always been considered impenetrable. His grandfather’s disease,
from which he too was suffering, proved that the Weixman Barriers in human
beings could be broken by a pathological condition. The technological barriers
had been broken by Miller. Only Horatio Miller and nature itself had ever been
able to conquer this powerful mental fort. That was impressive.

The usual
information packages came in the form of natural memories or information,
uploaded onto memory insertions. It all depended on the size of the data being
transported. This was not a regular information package. It was being
transmitted to the girl’s mind as a cluster of random thoughts. Images, sounds,
smells, partial memories, artificial stimuli, fragmented equations, formulas
and arbitrary information had been archived and compressed into a dense
package, hidden in the most subtle layers of her consciousness.

The archive had
been designed to decompress only when receiving a clear signal: the brain’s
interaction with the Opus Caine neuraltranscendence field. At that moment, the
vast quantity of information would disperse into Sophie’s mind, sending an
amalgam of stimuli that would cause all her neurons to fire at the same time.
The physical result would be simultaneous hemorrhages in every region of the
brain, causing instant death.

Now it all made
sense. Because Sophie’s mind would, at that point, be in telepathic contact
with the Opus Caine, this thought-virus would instantly spread throughout the
megamind. It would cause a chain reaction that would kill all physical bodies,
no matter how they might have evolved. In one single blow, the Opus Caine would
be wiped out. Their togetherness would become their demise. Horatio Miller must
have surely been delighted with this concept.    

The
thought-Sheldon took one thought-step back. He exited the void and contemplated
it in its entirety. He remembered an ominous saying: ‘What was once thought,
can never be un-thought.’

As Sophie slept
a dreamless sleep, Sheldon effortlessly absorbed the void into himself, erasing
it from her mind completely. The dark spot vanished. In its place remained only
the wonderful light that was Sophie. She was free, the burden lay with him now.
And with him, it would soon die.

Erasing an
information package. A while ago, Sheldon would not have imagined it was even
possible. Now, he could barely believe how easy it had been. That weapon had
been destined to be the death of Opus Caine. Now Sheldon could die as well,
knowing that he rescued the world’s greatest intellect from annihilation. He
could think of no better way to end a career in the service of the mind. 

●

“How long have I
been asleep?” she asked.

“Not long,”
Sheldon whispered. “The generator will be fully recharged in seventeen minutes.
Then you can leave.”

“Come with me,”
she pleaded. Sheldon smiled. It was a warm, wonderful smile that she had never
seen before. It made him look like a different person. 

“That wasn’t
part of the mission,” he said softly.

“Sheldon,
please…”

“Come on, let’s
get you ready,” he said before he stopped for a moment as if he had heard
something out in the distance. “Unless, of course, you would like to say
goodbye to Mac first