Skillful Death (6 page)

“Directly in,” he says. “The places and machines I’m experiencing in my dreams are too odd and random to exist. I think my brain is simulating the whole composition of the message and has found a way to send the packets to make it so.”

“Then why just emails?” I ask. “Can you browse the web? Fill out forms? Send a text? Do some online shopping?”

“Most of those things require encryption and certificates. Email is really dumb. It’s just opening a port and sending a packet,” he says.

I nod. I know a few things, but probably not enough to fake my way through this conversation. I decide to try anyway. “And you’ve got a DNS server in your mind? You’re simulating that lookup to resolve the source and destination IPs for your packets?”

“Well, no. I guess not,” he says. “But if my brain can form a packet to send an email, it can surely send a DNS request.”

I narrow my eyes and nod, as if what he’s saying has answered my query. For all I know, it has.

“And what do you want me to do?” I ask.

“You disprove paranormal stuff, right? People come to you convinced that they’re experiencing something paranormal and you make it all normal.”

“I don’t ‘make it’ do anything. I just figure out why they’re wrong or how they’re lying.”

“Same difference to me,” he says. I have something paranormal going on and I want it to stop. Regardless of how you interpret your methods, at the end of the day, my dream emails won’t be paranormal.”

“I’m not going to make them stop, I’m just going to show that it’s an ordinary process,” I say.

“Right, I get it. But I can stop an ordinary process on my own,” he says.

Fair enough
, I think. He has a strange outlook, but at least I can follow his logic.

My first step is a physical examination. I have to know that he’s not carrying a transmitter or anything electronic. This gets a little private.

Then, I pick out a couple of books from the bottom shelf of my little bookcase and flip them open. These are novels by one of my favorite Canadian authors, Robertson Davies. From
Fifth Business
I tell him that Mary Dempster copulates with a tramp because he “wants it so badly.” From
World of Wonders
, I tell him that Paul’s stage name is Mungo Fetch. And then, from no book, only from the back of my head, I tell Ted that “shoddy” is “of longer staple than mungo.” I give him these three pieces of information, make him write them down, and then read them back to me. I’m a firm believer that if you hear, write, read, and then say something, you can keep it in your head for at least twenty-four hours.

With all that done, I’m ready to send him to bed. There’s a small wrinkle in my plan. For his dream emailing to work, his dream has to start as a lucid dream. For Ted to lucid dream, he needs his phone app to make that sound he’s used to train himself. The last thing I want in his room is a communication device. I made him put the phone in a bag in the other room while I told him his three facts, and now he’s proposing that he needs to have it at his bedside while he sleeps.

Ted’s a programmer. I can’t trust that putting his phone in “airplane mode” will definitely disable all its communication capabilities. He probably hacked around that. Luckily, I’ve dealt with a ton of crazy people over the years and some have left things behind. One guy came in claiming that aliens were controlling his right hand with radio waves. He walked in with a Faraday cage clamped around his wrist and encompassing his hand.
 

A Faraday cage is an enclosure made of metal, either solid or mesh, which is designed to block all electromagnetic fields. I put Ted’s phone inside the cage and the signal bars drop from five to one within a few seconds. To get it down to zero bars, I put a frying pan on top of the box, like a hat. His phone says “no signal.” Ted fishes his charging wire through the mesh so the phone won’t go dead in the middle of the night.

Before he showed up, I rigged a couple of night-vision cameras in the little room so I can watch him. I make a pot of coffee and unload a twelve-pack of diet soda into the fridge, so I’ll be set for the night.

I stand in the hall while Ted’s in the bathroom, and then tuck him in.

If I can, I always try to arrange cases so that the investigation is immediate and unscheduled. When he called me that afternoon, I could have scheduled a time for him to come in a few days later. I’d much rather have him drop everything and come in immediately. Give them less chance to prepare, and people show their cards much more easily. My hours are long and erratic. The downside is that I can never keep a decent sleep cycle, or pet, or girlfriend. Those things are overrated anyway.
 

Ted looks like he’s asleep the moment his head hits the pillow. I envy people like that. I put my feet up on my desk and insert my earbuds. This is my ideal setup: podcast in my ears, and two screens in front of me. On one screen, I’ll flip between sports, travel, and shopping channels. On the other screen, I like to find poker. In the best poker coverage—hard to find outside of gambling towns—they’ll give you a chance to read the player before they show you his hole cards. I’m getting better and better at reading the players. I figure I’ll start with the human element and then move on to the statistics of the game after that.

If I can’t find poker coverage on cable, then I can always observe an online game. Obviously, you can’t see the faces online. But you can see how fast people are engaging, get a read on their betting, and see what they’re typing in the chat window. It’s amazing how much you can pick up from those cues.
 

Tonight I have my earbuds and my shopping channel, but my second screen is all Ted. The screen is divided into four blocks: two for night vision, and two for thermal. Everything’s recorded, but I watch live so I can react if I see anything.
 

Nothing happens for a couple of hours. Ted flips and flops a couple of times. Some lady with terrible fingernails and shaky hands is trying to sell silver and jade earrings. Nothing happens. On my podcast, the host is describing a math problem where you have to load-balance three groups of prime factors. My brain only works when it’s over-stimulated.

I keep an eye on the volume meter at the bottom of the display. There’s a microphone on one of the cameras. I figure that when Ted goes into REM sleep, his phone will send out that sound. At least that’s what Ted said would happen. I’m thinking that something went wrong. He should have made it to REM sleep by now. I lean forward to peer at the black and white night-vision image. It looks like his eyes are moving rapidly to me. Could his phone not be able to pick up the REM breathing sounds because of the Faraday cage? That doesn’t make sense.

The volume meter spikes up.

I pull out my earbuds and listen to the speaker.

The volume meter spikes again and I hear the sound. It sounds like a bird whistle. Ted trained himself to recognize this whistle in his dreams. I wonder what Ted is dreaming about.

I hear a little ding. My head turns automatically to look at my laptop screen. Ted is right; we’re like Pavlov’s dogs with these little sounds. This one just told me to expect an email, and there it is. It’s from Ted.

The subject is misspelled. It says, “Hello from dreanlamd.” The email says, “Mary Dempter has sex with a homeless guy because he needs it so bad.” He got the name and almost everything else wrong, but there’s no doubt that this is the fact I asked him to send me from a dream.

I push to my feet and cross the room. I don’t want to waste any time so I don’t knock, I just pull open the thick door and flip on the lights. Ted thrashes in the cot and swings his feet to the floor. He’s hunched over, rubbing his eyes against the flickering light.

“What were you dreaming?” I ask.

“What was I...” he says. His voice trails off.

“Dreaming? Were you having a lucid dream?”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, I was having a weird dream. Did my thing go off? It did, right?” He rests his forehead on one palm and uses his other hand to scratch his side. I get the feeling that he’s not used to sleeping with a shirt on. He keeps pulling at it and twisting inside his shirt. “That’s right. I was dreaming that I wrecked my car on the guardrail of the overpass. It was right near the house I grew up in. I mean, it was like that overpass, but it wasn’t.”

“And then?” I ask.

“Then... I knew I should call the police because it looked like it was more than fifteen-hundred dollars of damage, but I wanted to call my grandmother first. I couldn’t call her though because the phone was going off. Yes, the phone was going off with the dream signal. I thought it was weird because I had just been thinking that it would be strange if I was having a dream because we were just talking about it.”

I watch his eyes.
 

“What color was your first car?” I ask him.

I’m trying to keep him off-balance and get a read for what his eyes do when he’s accessing a visual memory. When I wake up from a dream, I have the whole thing in my brain. Ted looks like he’s trying to reconstruct a drunken evening; either that, or he’s making the whole thing up.

“My car?” he asks.

“Yes, what color?”

“Yellow. Yellow and gray. It had a couple of spots of primer.” His eyes dart up and to his left, the same as when he was describing his dream. It could be a match. “But that’s not the car I was driving in the dream. The car in the dream was black. It was a hatchback. I’ve never owned a hatchback. What was that car they used to make? The really terrible one?”

“Is that it? You wrecked a car?”

“No, wait. I heard the signal from my phone and at first I thought it was a bug in the app. But then I realized it was a dream and I called off the cops.”

“What do you mean? You called them off?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I took control of the dream. I didn’t need the police anymore. Then I got a laptop from the back seat because I remembered I needed to email you. I sent the email. Did you get it?”

“What did you send?” I ask.

“The thing from the book you made me memorize. I sent that in an email,” he says.

“What specifically did you write?” I ask.

“I wrote the thing,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut. “Paul’s stage name is Mungo Fetch.” His eyes pop open and he smiles at me. “Right? Did you get it?”

I wave for Ted to follow me out to my desk where my computer sits. I point to the open laptop and offer that he should look for himself.

Ted stares at the screen for a second and then looks over his shoulder at me.

I hear the sound play that indicates a new message.

“There!” Ted says, pointing to the screen.

When I look past Ted to the inbox, it’s my turn to believe that I’m in a dream. The latest message is from Ted and the preview says “Paul’s stage name is Mungo Fetch.”

“That wasn’t there a second ago,” I say.

“It can take a second for email to be delivered. It was probably just routing.”

“We were in there for ten minutes while you stammered through that recollection of your dream. How does it take ten minutes for an email to make it from that room to my machine?” I ask.

“We don’t know how the email was routed,” he says. “And what if your inbox is only updated every ten minutes?”

I roll my eyes. I’m stumped as to how he pulled off this email trick, but I know one thing: it’s definitely a trick.

“Go back in there and dream up emails about the other fact I told you to send,” I say, pointing to the room.

“It’s just going to happen again.” Ted shuffles off and closes the thick door behind him.

I sit down at my desk and read the emails—the one about Paul’s stage name, and the earlier one about Mary Dempster. Every email comes with a header, which is a digital fingerprint of where the email came from and how it got to its destination. I’m no expert, but I pull up the headers side by side just to compare. These two emails look like they came from the same place. Aside from that, I can’t tell much.

It’s weird that Ted mentioned the second email—the one I hadn’t gotten yet—but he didn’t say a word about the Mary Dempster email. In fact, he didn’t even mention it when it was up on the screen in front of him.
 

On the monitor, Ted is flipping and turning. It looks like he’s having trouble getting settled again. I hardly take my eyes off Ted as I pour a cup of coffee and load it up with creamer. I like a good French vanilla with enough creamer to make you wonder if you can really still taste the coffee at all. The fake creamer is about ten calories per teaspoon, so I throw a blast of sugar in there as well. I figure that the sugar will boost my metabolism high enough to burn off the creamer. The combination tastes like a rush of chemicals.
 

When I’m puzzled by a case like this, I usually retreat to the subject’s motivation. You’d think that the motivation would always be the same—people trying to claim the cash prize—but it’s not.

My boss set up this reward over ten years ago, and it’s not the first one ever created, but it’s by far the biggest. If you hunt around, you can find dozens of other prizes for proof of ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, and any other paranormal or supernatural phenomenon. The prize for proof ranges from about a thousand dollars up to a million for the biggest.
 

If someone can pass our test, the reward is ten million U.S. dollars. The other prizes get a dozen applicants per year; we get hundreds. But, like I said, it’s not the money that brings them in. People come in because they want to prove they’re not crazy. People come in because they want their life’s work validated. People come in because they crave attention. Some people are just trying to sell a product or a book and they think they can get publicity out of applying for the prize. Whatever their motivation, I’m usually the first person they talk to.

So, what is Ted’s motivation? I immediately think of that app he wrote. It’s pretty cool. You could sell it for a premium to people who want to control their dreams. Now that he has it implemented, he just needs some good publicity to get the name out there. There are millions of apps out there, so it takes a lot of luck or some good publicity to get noticed. Maybe Ted thinks this dream email thing is his ticket to getting on the morning talk shows. He doesn’t need me to believe him, he just needs me to investigate. Then, on the next slow news day, someone might pick up the story.