The Elders (18 page)

“Pretty much.”

“Why do I have a feeling that the devil’s in the
details?” I consider pulling out of this whole exercise.

He must’ve noticed my hesitation, because he says, “How about this?” He gets up, walks up to the wall, and opens what appears to be a safe. Out of the safe, he pulls out a small revolver and turns to face me. “You can shoot me if something goes awry. You know I wouldn’t take being Inert lightly, as it would cost me many millenniums of exile
from the other Elders.”

“Right, but if you made
me
Inert in Nirvana, I’d end up back in my real-world body next to George’s plane. Not to mention I’ll still have those people in the real world who would shoot me for making you Inert.”

“We already established that if making you Inert were the goal, I could have done it a million times over. As for the people outside, well, I wouldn’t want you
to decide to use this gun lightly. Still, I have so much to lose that giving you this gun is not an empty gesture.”

“Fine,” I say and walk over to take the gun. “Let’s get on with it.”

As soon as I aim the gun at Frederick, my senses go away.

Chapter 14

B
efore I fully register anything, a thought intrudes—a thought I recognize as Mimir’s.

“Darren, don’t trust the Elders with the secret of my existence.” As soon as the words reach me, I sense Mimir’s presence disappearing.

“Wait,” I think back frantically. “Is this what you tried to tell me before? You realize you got cut off at an important point, don’t you? You ended up making
me think I wasn’t supposed to trust someone, and it drove me crazy. In any case, why don’t you want them to know about you?”

No reply comes, so after what feels like a few minutes of angry waiting, I turn my attention to Level 2 itself.

You’d think experiencing this sensory deprivation would be easier the third time, but it’s just as frightening now as it was on my two prior visits.

The difference
lies in how quickly I become aware of that special sense that lets me ‘see’ neural networks. It’s almost instant this time. I see three networks: two frozen networks that are me and Frederick outside Nirvana, and a dynamic one that’s the Level 2 version of Frederick.

Though I don’t have much experience with these patterns, especially activated ones like his, I can’t help but think that Frederick’s
form is unique. His ‘neurons,’ if that’s what they are, don’t remind me of stars—the mistake I made during my first time in this realm. No, the spots of ‘color’ are more ‘orange’ than the whiteness of starlight. The synapses remind me of the sun’s rays trapped in a piece of crystal.

Suddenly, all that colorful stuff surrounds me.

A wave of anxiety hits me, or at least that’s the best way to
describe the emotion. It’s not fear so much as a sense of being invaded and having my privacy violated. There’s a hint of shame too. I felt this way during a dream where I was in the middle of Times Square naked, only this is much stronger.

A weird sensation overtakes me. On one hand, I’m definitely incorporeal, but on the other, I feel as though I’m being erased from existence. How can something
that’s not physical be erased? I don’t know, but I fight the force that’s trying to erase me with all my will.

And then the strange feeling subsides, and a new one appears that’s just as unpleasant. I feel as if I’m destroying something. As I endure this feeling, I realize that the pattern that is me has the pattern that is Frederick at a standstill.

It’s a little bit like when I encompassed
Thomas, Kyle, and my own pattern on my first visit to Level 2; my pattern surrounded the others in order to Read, Guide, and phase out. This time differs in that I’m only halfway surrounding Frederick. It’s also a more dynamic process. I think these two results are related. Frederick is ‘alive’ and clearly fighting my pattern as it’s trying to absorb his, and vice versa. It’s a strange mental tug
of war that reminds me of the day I tried to meditate before a tooth extraction, with my adrenaline making it impossible for me to calm my mind.

Then I feel fear, and what makes this fear odd is that I know, without a shadow of doubt, that it’s not mine. Well, it’s mine now, but it didn’t originate within me. A flood of other foreign emotions hits me like a wave. Surfing on this wave is a single
thought: “Darren, it’s me, Frederick.”

The thought is different from Mimir’s telepathic voice. I can almost ‘hear’ it.

“Try your best to speak,” another thought says. “You should be able to project your thoughts to me.”

A slew of emotions accompanies this advice, and somehow I know he’s telling the truth.

So I try to talk, ignoring the fact that I don’t have a mouth and that there’s no air
in this place to carry sound waves. The message I try to get across is: “So, this is Assimilation?”

“That’s it,” Frederick’s projection responds. “You did it. And indeed it is.”

Again I know his words are truthful, and this time, I attempt to figure out why I’m so certain of that. Then it hits me: it’s the emotions. Our emotions seep through with every word. In this strange state, we’ve become
empaths. When you can feel someone’s true emotions, figuring out whether they’re telling the truth is easy. It follows the same principles as a lie detector. If Frederick lies, his emotions will betray it. Unlike real lie-detecting machines, which can be duped, this doesn’t have any loopholes that I can think of.

“So you’re going to ask me stuff?” I project. “And based on my emotions, you’ll
know if I’m telling the truth?”

“You’re a quick study,” he projects, his emotions validating his sincerity. “Indeed, that’s the plan.”

“Okay then, but I also want to ask you a few things.”

“I would expect nothing less,” he responds.

“Did you make my friends attack me?”

“What?” His response is associated with genuine befuddlement.

“Mira, my girlfriend, and Thomas, my adoptive brother,” I
clarify. “Did you Guide them to attack me at Kyle Grant’s funeral?”

“I did not,” he projects, and I know he’s telling the truth, but there’s also deep confusion in his reply, as I would expect from someone who knows nothing about the attack. “Can I ask my follow-up question now?”

“Go.”

“Did you ever intend to harm us, the Elders?” This is accompanied by hope.

“No.”

“You’re lying.” Fear and
anger permeate the thought. The weird sensation of being gobbled up begins anew, giving me a very bad feeling.

“Let me explain,” I quickly project. “I didn’t intend to harm the Elders per se. As a group, I like you guys. I simply expected to discover that one of you tried to hurt me by using those close to me. I would harm that person if I could.”

“That is the truth,” he replies, and the pressure
of the mental violence subsides. “I accept this.”

What the hell did he just do to me? I could ask him, but I’d be wasting a question, and I have something more important I need to ask, something that, if he confirms it, will remove a huge number of people from my list of suspects. Besides, I instinctively know what he did. He tried to ‘envelop’ me—what I’d do if I wanted to Read someone.

“Do
the Elders really never leave the Island?” I ask.

“Never.”

“But—”

“It’s my turn,” his projection intrudes.

“You’re right. Go.”

“Will you unite our people once you’re done with your short-term trivia? Do you want Guides and Readers to have peace?”

Ignoring the insult of calling the kidnapping of my friends and family ‘short-term trivia,’ I think about his question. This is the first time
I’ve genuinely considered it. Hillary once said that as a hybrid, I embody a shift in the age-long hostilities and could make a difference. She thinks someone like me could change the usual tribal thinking that’s so prevalent in the Pusher versus Leacher strife, since within me, the tribes are united. I never gave her words much thought because I didn’t have to, but I consider them now, and I don’t
see anything but good things coming from such a peace.

“In theory, I would like to see the problems between Guides and Readers go away,” I project. “I want peace, but I don’t want to be killed in the process.”

“Thank you for telling me the truth,” he says. “Now we can—”

“How do I get back into Nirvana?” I project. “That’s my next question.”

“Just because I have to tell the truth doesn’t mean
I will answer every question you ask.” His projected thought is mixed with feelings of amusement and slight annoyance.

“I will pick and choose which of your questions to answer then,” I reply.

“It’s not necessary. I was saying that we don’t need to continue with this Assimilation. Let’s slowly disengage.”

As his words register, so does a shift in the arrangement of our patterns. The foreign
tension of the Assimilation eases slightly, but doesn’t go away.

He seems to be waiting for me to do something. I try to let go of his pattern, to get away.

The tension eases further.

After repeating the same process a few times, we disengage and I can once again ‘see’ his pattern ‘in the distance.’ He’s absorbing his static pattern, and soon after, I’m back in the Quiet, in my physical body.

* * *

For a few moments, all the sensory input disorients me.

“That was something else,” I say to Frederick, and it feels great to be saying things out loud, with my voice echoing off the room’s walls.

He nods. “It’s something few people ever get to experience.”

“How did you manage to have us come back here?” I ask, realizing this is the second time his Nirvana-phasing worked differently
from mine. “How come we didn’t end up in the real world?”

“It’s part of those Nirvana arts you’ll learn if you come back and accept the offer we’ve made.” He gives me a smug wink.

I frown at him. “Why didn’t you try Assimilating the very first time you pulled me in? Wouldn’t it have been just as helpful as Guiding me in terms of uncovering my agenda?”

He shakes his head. “No, that would’ve
been a bad idea, as it would’ve put us at risk.”

“Why?”

“Because if I had ambushed you, you might have tried to fight me, or absorb me, so to speak.” His expression is now serious. “If you had succeeded, you would’ve made me Inert, and you know how I feel about that. Anyway, the more likely outcome would have been me making
you
Inert in self-defense—another outcome I didn’t desire.”

“It’s interesting
how you omitted that going Inert was a possibility when doing this Assimilation thing,” I say, narrowing my eyes.

“Because it wasn’t, not when I didn’t have any intention of doing such a thing to you. If anything, I was putting myself at risk, given that for me, going Inert carries greater consequences.”

“You know what I mean.” I hand him back his gun. “But no point in splitting hairs anymore.
I fulfilled my end of the bargain.”

“I am ready to do as I promised,” he says, taking the gun. “I shall take you to the library so you can wait while I speak with George, Kate, and the rest of the team. After that, I will end the Session early, as promised.”

* * *

I pace back and forth in the library as I wait for Frederick to terminate the Session.

To kill time, I look through the shelves
for something to read and settle on
How There Can Never Be a Theory of Everything
, written by Victoria. I leaf through it for a number of minutes, skimming its contents. To my huge surprise, this book doesn’t mention sex. It’s more of a scientific philosophy treatise about the futility of trying to reduce complex phenomena, such as life, to a simple, all-knowing formula. After what feels like
an hour of this, but before I can form a real opinion on the matter, I get bored and decide to find something else to read.

An older-looking volume catches my gaze, and I grab it.
The Atrocities,
the title states, and the author is none other than Mary, my newfound Reader-hating grammy. As I leaf through the book, I see why she feels so negatively toward Readers. This book catalogues what I learned
before—how Readers tried to exterminate Guides. According to Mary, their favorite tactic was piggybacking on an existing conflict. During World War I and World War II, they were able to get rid of thousands of Guides in Western Europe. And afterwards, during Stalin’s Purges, Readers managed to all but wipe out what was left of the Guides in Russia. So yeah, it’s no wonder Mary hates them, as
all of these things happened during her lifetime.

I put the book back on the shelf and look for something more cheerful to read, which is probably any other book.

Rows and rows of fascinating subjects line the shelves, but one really catches my attention. It has Eugene written all over it. If I don’t look inside, he’d never forgive me. The book is called
Making Machines Work in the Mind Dimension
, authored by Alfred. I pull it off the shelf and open the book at a random page. “Steam power is another viable, if primitive solution—”
 

I don’t get to finish the sentence because I’m no longer standing in the library, holding the book.

I’m back in my real body, next to the airplane, with guns pointed at me.

Except the people lower their guns, and after a few insincere-sounding apologies,
they turn around and head for the Castle.

“Frederick told me about his agreement with you,” George says. “I think his idea to utilize Kate’s team is genius.”

“And it will be good for their morale,” Kate says with uncharacteristic cheerfulness. “Despite it being a simple extraction, the team will be happy to get off the Island. They’ve been stuck here for months.”

“Now, Darren,” George says.
“Where do we set the course to?”

“Back to where we came from,” I say. “We’re going to pick up Hillary and—”

“We don’t need her,” George says. “In fact, I think we should go directly to where your family is and help—”

I hold up my hand, interrupting him. “First, I’m not forming any plans without Hillary,” I say firmly. “And second, it wouldn’t help us to get anywhere yet
.
The vans are probably
still en route. Even without rest stops, the drive from New York to Florida takes twenty hours.”