Eclipse - Book One: Darkness Falling
by M. Bumbarger
Chapter Four : Spark
"How was lunch with Daddy?" Red didn't even look up from the computer terminal as Adam entered the office.
"Great," Adam took off his coat and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. "We caught up on old times, realized how much we missed each other and decided to take that father-son camping trip that we just keep putting off."
"The usual?"
"The usual."
"You didn't break anything did you?"
Adam gave a soft chuckle. "No, I didn't break anything." Replacing his overcoat with his lab coat, Adam made his way to the computer terminal and dragged a chair over beside his lab partner. "Did you get anything out of those computer simulations?"
"Oh, yeah," Red sighed, using the same tone Adam had used with him when discussing his father only a few minutes earlier. "I cracked the equation and re-wrote the theory of relativity."
Not trying to mask his disappointment, Adam slumped back into his seat. "The usual?"
Red punched a few more numbers into the computer and sat back as random calculations began to scroll across the screen. "The usual."
"Did you have lunch?"
"Yeah," Red rubbed the back of his neck and leaned further back in his chair. He tilted it so that the two front legs raised off the floor and the seat was precariously balanced on the rear two legs – quite a feat to achieve with a computer stool, but somehow Red always managed it. "Sue dropped off a whole deli tray. She said that what we didn't eat, we could keep in the refrigerator. You weren't here, so I got to hear the whole living in the lab and not eating lecture all by myself. Remind me to thank you later."
Adam gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, feeling a genuine pang of sympathy for his friend. He knew what being on the receiving end of one of Sue's lectures was like a little too well. "Sorry about that."
"Anyway, she wanted you to give her a call when you got back from The Centre. She probably wants to hear all the details and highlights, right down to every non-intelligent word your father managed to utter."
"He was intelligent, Red. He's always intelligent," Adam watched the equations scroll up and across the screen, avoiding the other's eyes. "He just doesn't understand. He doesn't want to understand me.
"You know, I should be used to it by now, but I'm not. Every time I meet with him, I hope that maybe this is the one time that he will actually understand that I'm not him. I may have his name, but I am not Adam Marcus Neiman's clone. I'm his son . . . but to him a son, a drone, a clone . . . it's all the same."
"Hey, there are some of us in this world that are glad you're not him," Red said as he attempted to balance a pencil on his turned up forehead. "Just think about what someone with your father's drives and ambitions would do if he had half your IQ. Better yet, don't think about it. The thought's kinda scary."
Adam gave a soft chuckle and a half-smile. How Red managed to stay so detached from everything and still manage to care about the world and people around him, Adam would never figure out. But his friend wasn't given to long moments of sentimentality or anything else; when the situation got too intense, Red broke the tension with a joke or lighthearted remark that would have earned anyone else a few scathing glares. But not Red. With Red, everyone just seemed to accept it and move on.
"Did I get any messages while I was out?" Adam asked.
"Yeah, Professor Cage called with his apologies for his behavior. He wants to take you to dinner to make up for it." Red lowered the chair to the floor with a snap, slipping the pencil behind his ear. "In other words, he's so damn scared that he pissed you off so much that you'll leave his project, you can probably milk that old cow for whatever he's worth. What is his project anyway?"
"Quantum teleportation. They're taking atoms apart at the subatomic level to study photon teleportation and hoping to extrapolate upwards and outwards from there. And they're working with a biogeneticist as well. Basically, it's the same question that's been asked for years – if psi's can do it, why can't science?"
"You don't think they have a shot in hell of figuring it out, do you?"
"No," Adam answered honestly.
"Then why are you helping them?"
"It's something to do. Besides, I think that some basic understanding of teleportation is going to be necessary for us to solve our equation. The displacement of matter. Unfortunately, not a one of them is willing to consider the true road to understanding." Adam watched as the last equation scrolled across the screen . . . rejected as plausible by the program. "If they want to understand teleportation, they should ask the psi's, or at least the Alpha's who can teleport."
"Great theory but it falls in practice, mi amigo," Red said. "And you're supposed to be the smart one. You're assuming that they would leave an Alpha un-drugged and clear minded long enough to answer any questions . . . and if they ever did that, you and I both know the psi would be gone in a heartbeat. Hell, it's what I would do in their position if I could teleport.
"And there are so few Alpha's, Psi Control isn't going to risk allowing one to fall through their fingers."
"I know," Adam pushed the computer stool away from the desk and began winding a path towards the refrigerator. "But there is just so much we don't know about them. So much that we don't understand. And it's ignorance that causes fear. It's the reason that the segregation and the tagging began – because everyone was afraid of what they didn't understand."
He found the deli tray and began to make himself a sandwich. He didn't know how many credits that lunch cost his father, but he knew it hadn't been worth it. He was still hungry; he just hadn't realized it until he got back to the lab.
"And you're not? It didn't bother you at all to be in The Centre, knowing that hundreds, maybe even a thousand psi's were all around you? Hearing your thoughts? Your fantasies?"
A face floated before his eyes and Adam felt the corners of his mouth turn up in a smile. Fear had been the one emotion that he hadn't felt staring into the dark orbs. "No, I wasn't," he shook his head, pushing the face out of his mind. She was beautiful, but she was about as far removed from him as the sun was from the earth. He'd have better luck helping Cage and Emmerling re-write the Quantum teleportation theory they were working on.
And that, in essence was why he allowed himself to talk to her, to admire her. The knowledge that he would never see her again, and that even if he could see her again, it would never be anything. There were mores built into the society that prevented that; norms and psi's simply did not associate on social levels. As further protection to those mores, Psi Control kept a careful and watchful eye on their psi's. There were rules and laws regulating their departures from The Centre and their interaction in the "mainstream." They were not even allowed to consider a marriage partner without the permission of Psi Control, and those marriages never took place between a psi and a norm. That was illegal.
Tainting the gene pool, was the reason that Psi Control gave for that law. They wanted their psi's strong and not watered down; anything less than an Epsilon was simply not acceptable. That was the excuse they gave. And most people seemed to buy into it . . . of course for most people, it was easier to accept what you were told than to think for yourself.
Adam had his own beliefs. And his was that Psi Control needed to control the number of psi's to make certain they remained in control. He'd studied the numbers and developments of psi's a few years back, and he didn't believe that Psi Control had been entirely truthful in the biological information they gave to the public. Psi Control insisted that the genes for psionic ability was recessive; Adam had a hunch that the genes were actually dominant, but as yet hadn't really worked out all of the computational material.
If that was true, then all of Psi Control's rules and laws made sense. It would be dangerous to allow a proliferation of psi's that couldn't be counted and numbered. But it would also explain why rogue psi's were found everyday. And if rogue psi's were found every day, why were so few Alpha's found? And why did that one ability that marked them as Alpha – the ability to teleport – burn itself out so easily?
Unless it didn't and the psi's were far more aware and manipulative than Psi Control would ever concede to give them credit for. Wasn't it possible that they hid that ability to avoid spending their time drugged and incoherent, to avoid the mind control techniques that Psi Control subjected its Alpha's to? And wouldn't that explain why there seemed to be an increase in the number of Beta's and Gamma's, who knew well enough to hide their teleportative abilities, but couldn't hide the overall strength of their psionic power?
It was certainly food for thought, for some other day. If only he could actually talk to a psi, preferably a Beta or a Gamma outside of The Centre. If they trusted him long enough to talk to him, if he could make them believe and understand that this was truly his own private little world where he liked to build and disprove theories because . . . well …because he could. But he would never find a psi willing to talk to a norm, and he would certainly never be able to get one off The Centre grounds.
Inadvertently, his mind turned back to Amelie. He had a thought; it was positively insane, but he wasn't going to be able to think clearly until he put his curiosity at ease. "Red, you can get into Psi Control's computers right?"
"Yeah, I can. But why would I want to?"
Adam turned to look at him, giving him a smile. "I want you to look something up for me."
"You do realize how much encryption I'll have to go through to do that? And you're not set up to hide your footprint. They'll trace it right back to the lab."
"No, you misunderstand me," Adam shook his head and carried his sandwich over to the terminal. "I don't want you bothering any of their secured files. Just the public data files, the information that is out there for anyone to retrieve if they want to retrieve it."
"And have the clearance to."
"I have clearance," Adam told him quietly. "I've just never used it."
"Oh, well aren't you just full of surprises?" Red turned his attention the computer and began to login. "It'll only take a few minutes to get in if you have clearance. When did you get clearance anyway?"
"It was a gift from Dad. He thought that it would sway me."
Red gave him a quick glance, then with a shrug returned his attention to the computer screen. The Psi Corporation logo twirled on the screen while it accessed the computer and then granted permission.
"Where to pal?" Red asked once they were inside.
"Data files. Beta two zero one seven."
Typing the information in, Red quirked an eyebrow at him. "Can I ask what we're doing?"
"Just looking at a data file, Red."
"A data file of a psi. Why are we –" The other stopped as the information came up on the screen.
Adam smiled, reaching over to scroll through the information. "Beautiful, isn't she?"
"How—"
"I saw her today at The Centre. In the public gardens. I talked to her. Sort of. I couldn't stop staring at her."
"You talked to her?" He heard the disbelief and horror in Red's voice.
"No law against that. Yet." Adam continued to skim the information in Amelie's file. Basic biographical data filled the screen. Her height, weight, blood type, test results, observer's comments, everything that Psi Control considered important, but nothing about *her*. No birth date, no family information, no other origin information aside from the farm she was 'harvested' from. He had known that Psi Control didn't consider that information important; it had never occurred to him that they would obliterate it completely. "Damn."
She was a person, damn it all. At least she had been before Psi Control got their claws on her. Now, she was simply Beta 2017, a designation. Adam wondered why he would have expected anything else?
"Adam, what are you looking for?"
"Nothing," Adam turned sadly away from the computer, marking yet another reason to hate and disapprove of everything Psi Control was and did. "Nothing important. Let's get back to work on that equation."
***