Honing The Talent
B Pascal
Chapter 17
I woke from a strange dream to see the morning light peeking around the window shades. In my dream someone was poking me with a cattle prod.
I opened my eyes and found Gail lying close, facing me, and poking her finger into my chest once every few seconds.
“Ah-ha!” she said, “proof of life.”
“Why are you poking me? What did I do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s morning, time to get up, I need to shower, and you probably do, too.”
“What time is it?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
She told me, and I said, “Do you have some genetic abnormality that allows you to function on two hours sleep? After last night I thought you’d sleep till Sunday.”
“It was way more than two hours, and I’ve had enough sleep. What’s wrong with your genes that you need so much? C’mon, let’s hit the showers.”
I argued a bit more, but she was adamant, and still poking me. I eventually got up, and into pants and shirt, and she led me to the bathroom.
She got the shower running to warm it up, and put on a shower cap. “My hair takes so long to dry that I have to plan ahead to wash it. I’ll do it tomorrow. You ready?”
I washed her back and played with her butt with soapy hands, but as much as I might have liked to take it further, I didn’t think I could get a boner yet, as she had drained me so expertly last night.
Though I had some second thoughts when she washed my dick and balls, making sure that they were extra clean. She knew I couldn’t do anything about it, but she still teased me. Evil woman.
Cleaned and dried, she made me some tea, and found some cereal and milk for breakfast.
“I’m going to need a nap when I get back, Gail. You wore me out. Again.”
“I’ll find you some multivitamins and iron pills, Carter, since you’re obviously seriously anemic and run down. Get you fixed up in no time.”
“Thank you, doctor. Where’s Carol this weekend? I didn’t hear her come in last night.”
“Probably stayed at her boyfriend’s. She didn’t tell me, so I’m guessing.”
“Just as well. I’d have been a little embarrassed to have her hear me shouting last night.”
“She’d probably have been too drunk to know where it was coming from. What’s on your agenda for the rest of the day?”
I told her about upcoming midterms, and she commiserated, saying she had her own to worry about. We talked a few minutes more, then I found my shoes and my jacket and she walked me to the door.
She put her arms around me and hugged me for almost a minute, quiet.
“I’ve got some more thinking to do, Tom, to figure out how to process all the things that happened last night. I just want to say that I’m so relieved that that’s over. I’ve been terrified of those things for so long, and now I find that they’re manageable, controllable, not as frightening as I’d worried about. In fact, they even made me feel good. So I’m feeling pretty good about myself today, and thanks for that, for being so understanding. I appreciate it.”
“Gail, you’re a strong woman, you would have gotten a handle on it in your own time, but I’m glad I could help in some small way.”
“I do appreciate it, Carter. Now, go take your nap. Wuss.” She shooed me out the door and blew me a kiss as I left.
It had turned chilly, and the jacket was a little too light for the weather, so I walked quickly, trying to warm up. It didn’t work.
I was shivering when I opened the door, and the bed looked so tempting. I had just laid back and closed my eyes when Larry raised his head. ”Another unexplained absence, Carter? That’s two demerits. So was this the same one, or somebody new?“
“Larry, I’m tired. Are you writing a gossip column? Let me sleep.”
“No, I want to talk. No, I want to brag. I finally got lucky last night. Some girl took me back to her dorm and we spent a couple of entertaining hours.“
“I’m happy for you, Larry, but why are you telling me now?”
“Because I think it’s partially your doing, Carter.”
I raised my head from the pillow and looked at him. “Huh?”
“I mean, I went to this party with the guys, and we were all hitting on the women there, like we usually do, with no luck, rejections across the board, some of them more than a bit unfriendly, too.
So I was feeling sorry for myself, and I must’ve looked sad because this girl came up and asked why I was looking so down at a party.
“And instead of starting with my usual pickup lines, I said it’d been a tough week and I was feeling a little low. She looked maybe a little sympathetic, so I decided to just talk with her instead, get to know her since I obviously wasn’t going to get laid tonight.
“She turned out to be pretty interesting, and funny, too, and nice looking, and we really got along. So, one thing led to another, and, you know.”
“Larry, I’m really glad to hear it. Women are people, with brains and ideas and opinions, and they generally like guys to recognize that before they’ll think about anything further. I’m happy it worked out for you. Now, I do need to get a little sleep. Go have breakfast.”
He shrugged, having crowed about his success, got dressed and went off to eat. I managed to get a couple more hours of sleep before the noise in the halls got to be too much, so I got up and went to lunch.
I won’t bore you with school details. Midterms were challenging, but I found that the extra prep I’d done had paid off and I felt confident about my answers. I was relieved, and that was reinforced as I left the exam area afterwards and saw more than a few worried looks on people’s faces. Of course, it might turn out that my confidence had been misplaced and I should have put on a worried look myself, but I still felt pretty good about it.
With that weight off my shoulders, I went back to the library and continued my personal research, trying to understand more about ESP and mind-reading. The general term is parapsychology, so I’ll use that, but that word is a big umbrella for all the weird stuff people claim they can do with their minds, including talking to the dead. “Uncle Howard, are you there? Can you hear us?
Knock once if you can hear us. Young Tom is here and wants to know how he did on his midterm exams.”
But thinking about my particular talents brought me back to my earlier ruminations about whether strongly tethered habits and beliefs can be overridden. I had previously leaned toward a definite ’no’, that doing so might cause some internal trauma from competing and dissimilar beliefs struggling with each other, but now I was reconsidering my decision. I’d thought that Gail’s long-held convictions that she couldn’t deepthroat because she’d choke, and couldn’t do anal because it would be too painful, were too strong to be removed or at least suppressed.
That turned out not to be the case because, apparently, a more positive feeling to supplant and overpower the negative one could be effective. I wasn’t sure if this were true across the board, whether it might be possible to use it to modify public rather than private behavior, for example, or to replace some personal moral or ethical belief. I wasn’t even sure how I would test that case, but something to think about.
So I concentrated on school, and found myself getting involved in my classes. I found that a little odd, but I was comparing it to middle school and high school classes, where almost everything was taught by rote, the teachers couldn’t wait for the three o’clock bell, and you weren’t forced to think for yourself,
The teachers I had here were making an effort to push us into deeper water so that we’d have to swim. It was a challenge, and it took a lot of work, but I was surprised to find that I liked it.
A week or so after my last encounter with Gail I suddenly remembered that I had promised myself to find a name for the metaphor that caused a rush of pleasure when a dick entered her mouth, increasing as it went deeper. I couldn’t keep calling it ’that thing that happens when she feels a dick in her mouth’.
I tried on and discarded a number of names, but eventually settled on “Boner Bliss”. Not perfect, but it described what it was supposed to do pretty well. I had decided that I wanted to keep separate the small orgasm that began when the dick pushed into her throat. So Boner Bliss and Spitshine together could be quite the pleasing cocktail. Well, I’d already proved that, several times over, but having names for them now made it easier to apply them.
I had also promised to give some thought to how to apply some of these baseline states to myself. I could send myself a named metaphor for an orgasm, like Aftershock or Roller Coaster, and they worked impressively well. I was really proud of myself for figuring out how to do that.
But I’d never tried giving myself Foundation or Rowboat, since they were baselines and were meant to maintain an enhanced state of relaxation and contentment between orgasms.
That was the key, they were designed to keep women in an aroused, pleasurable state as they went from one orgasm to the next. I had to think about what it meant to give a guy—me—that sense when we only get the one orgasm before collapsing. Damn, more questions, always more questions.
I had gotten in the habit of calling home every week or ten days, mostly because I seldom had much new to report, nor they to me. Still, it made my mother happy to know how I was doing, that I was getting along with people and doing well in classes, so I called.
It was pretty much the same conversation this time, though I did find out—and I had been waiting for this to happen for a long time!—that Mindy, my sister, now had a boyfriend. All through high school, when I had expressed even a passing interest in a girl, my mother was on me like a circling hawk spying a fleeing rodent.
It wasn’t what you think. I had decided that she was trying to relive some part of her adoles-cence by vicariously feeding off mine, wanting to know everything about my female friends. It could have become obsessive, but Karen had suggested that I should invite her to dinner so they could meet, and Karen, within a couple of hours, had twisted my mother around her finger.
My mother had miraculously stopped her snooping and only occasionally asked about Karen.
But I knew that the vicarious thrill she got from it was still there and I had predicted that when my sister got a boyfriend, my mother would be in her romantic life like flypaper.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. As she talked about it, it seemed to me that she knew entirely too much about how the two of them got along, how they felt about each other, and where the relationship was headed. I wasn’t sure how my sister felt about my mother’s involvement, and would have to ask her the next time I spoke to her.
It’s entirely possible that Mindy was a willing participant, as she was a major league gossip and loved talking about boys and who she liked with anyone who’d listen. And my mother was a good listener. I’d hear more about it the next time I went home.
And in the meantime I returned to my usual schedule of classes, homework, reading, frequent quizzes, and, when I had time, my own research into parapsychology. I still had Willing’s brief talk to the Psych Club bouncing around my head. He’d made some oblique references to research in ESP and other parapsychological phenomena, but also had suggested that the research was out of the mainstream and frowned upon by the academic establishment.
So I wasn’t sure that there would be much accessible research in the field, if scientists in academia were hiding their interest. On the other hand, there could be other, more conventional ways of framing that kind of research. For example, a statistician might look at cases of people who guess lottery numbers or win at roulette more often than probability would suggest. That could be indicative that there were other processes at work. That might include either precognition or cheating.
On a whim, I booted my PC, now connected to the school LAN, and looked at the school’s website. This, in itself, was very forward-looking of the school and intended, I am sure, to show everyone on the outside that we were very technologically advanced. The construction of websites was still so arcane that they had brought in outside consultants to build it for them.
Very few people had an internet connection, but still used dial-up modems to phone into bulletin board systems or, for the tech-savvy, America On-Line. So when I got my LAN hookup, which linked me to the interconnected world, I had had to download a copy of the Netscape web browser and install it on my PC. I hadn’t used it much, because there weren’t that many websites yet. There were a few commercial ones, mostly large companies, and a good portion of academia had one.
On the school’s website, there were links to the various departments—the usual stuff about how cutting-edge the department’s research was, how committed the students, and so on. The Psychology Department had, in addition, links to a home page for each full-time faculty member, and adjunct faculty, too. I found Willing’s entry and clicked on it.
His gave his academic background, where he’d taught before, his research interests—it cleverly evaded calling his parapsychological research by its name—and a list of his published papers. I made notes of the ones that might have a bearing on my interests.
I called up a search engine, AltaVista,—Google wouldn’t even exist for a couple more years—and ran a query for ’ESP research’ and got relatively little back, and most of that seemed to be from websites belonging to the tin-foil hat crowd.
I tried again with ’parapsychology research’ and got a few academic hits and looked at those.
Again, they were mostly summaries of published papers, and those seemed to be confined to a few esoteric specialist journals that I doubted would be in our library, but I’d look. I logged off and shut down the PC.
I lay back on my bed and put my hands behind my head while I thought. I had no idea how the mechanism of this thing I’d developed actually functioned. There were some obscure clues that might rule out a few things. For example, it was a one-to-one connection, and the target had to be visible, in my line of sight. That allowed me to do certain things.
For other things, I had to have their focus—and I’d need to define that more precisely—before I could look into the epicenter, for example, or piggyback on how they formed a foreign (to me) language.
That seemed to be true, also, for that extraordinary binding of minds that happened between me and Karen, and with a few others, as well. I had no idea why that worked sometimes and not others in what I assumed were the same circumstances, like when we both came simultaneously.
And if I had these quite specific skills, why didn’t I also have the ability to read minds in general? Or predict the future? Or move things with my mind? Aren’t those things linked in some way?
Hell, I don’t know. What I know about this you could write on the back of an envelope. One side only.
And that led me to contemplate why it was I had developed this in the first place. Was it just the bump on the head? Unlikely, since people got hit on the head all the time, sometimes even going into comas, but they mostly didn’t wake up with the ability to implant suggestions or other things.
So maybe there was something special about me, some brain abnormality or genetic oddity which switched on these abilities. I doubted that it was genetic, as I’d never heard any family stories about weird old Aunt Agnes and her ’visions’, so perhaps a genetic mutation, a one-off, that affected only me. I had no way to rule it out yet.
However, the most likely scenario, I thought, was a combination of causes: The collision with the stump that sent me into the coma, and whatever it was that had been in those discarded cans next to the stump, which had gotten into the open head wound.
And those cans had been cleaned up as part of a ’green-up’ effort around Parker’s Pond some time after my accident. I didn’t know where they had come from and who had dumped them, so couldn’t know what had been in them.
Parapsychology had a pretty standard list of things that fell under its umbrella—telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and psychometry—collectively referred to as psi abilities.
The various abilities were either cognitive, like telepathy and precognition, or manipulative, like telekinesis.
What I had seemed to be cognitive, a kind of subset of telepathy and clairvoyance. I made a mental note to try to define the known variants of parapsychology, determine which I possessed, and perhaps to experiment with the others to see if there were any nascent abilities in those areas.
Telekinesis could be fun. But precognition might be really useful. Knowing who was going to win the World Series or the Superbowl next year, a few quiet, well-placed bets, well... Or the stock market! What are the hot stocks going to be in two years?
I was getting carried away. I’d had no hints, none, that I had any of those other abilities, so there was no reason to believe that they were buried somewhere deep inside, dormant, waiting to be awakened. Still, it couldn’t hurt to be thorough, so I’d look.
But later. I’d gotten tired from too much cerebration. So I took a nap, and when I woke I realized that it was past time for dinner, so I went and did that. When I got back I found that Larry still hadn’t returned. He’d been gone quite a long time today. I wondered where he was.
I picked up a textbook and read for a while, lying on the bed. I was ahead in my assigned reading, but it couldn’t hurt to be a bit in front of the pack. My mind started wandering, unable to give Edmund Spenser the proper respect. I thought back to the Psych Club talk by Thornton on memory, when he mentioned the idea of the memory palace or Method of Loci, the technique bards used to commit epics and oral history to memory, recalling it at will.
He had mentioned that he also studied the chemical and biological mechanisms underlying memory. I wondered if that might have a connection to what had been happening to me, whether my normal cognitive biological processes had somehow been modified by some chemical contam-inant. I suppose it might be possible.
Come right down to it, nearly everything in the human body is based around chemistry and biology. But it would take a pretty detailed chemical analysis to determine if my brain chemistry was a little off. I couldn’t do it, and I’m not sure the tools to do it on a living subject even existed yet. It might require an autopsy for a thorough analysis. I decided I’d wait.
But now my mind was bouncing the ideas about memory storage and retrieval off the proverbial wall to see where they went. I hadn’t really thought much about memory from the perspective of my new abilities, other than the times when I’d picked up foreign language vocabulary from a native speaker.
In those cases, a word that he used ’appeared’ in his language center, along with its English equivalent. When I ’saw’ them on his or her mental blackboard, I assimilated it immediately, as if I’d always known it. The foreign word was then as familiar to me as if I had learned it as a child, even though I hadn’t been aware of it a few seconds before.
But I had to observe the native speaker use it, place it in a sentence, as she prepared to speak.
So there was a process there that allowed me, in some way, to ’borrow’ parts of her memory, to make a copy for myself. A similar thing happened when they prepared the sentence in the foreign language, and I could see how the parts of speech were put together, like Lego blocks, to construct the proper grammatical form of the sentence for that particular language.
And when I listened to a lecture in class and had the teacher’s focus, I could see the topic being discussed in detail, and how it fit into its logical framework, and that specific small portion of the speaker’s memory was now mine, too. I wasn’t reading their minds so much as seeing the totality of that small part of the subject and sharing the speaker’s understanding of it.
I wondered whether I might find a way to rummage around in the hidden parts of the speaker’s memory of a subject, find the things that he knew which might be superfluous or perhaps too advanced for the level he was trying to teach at. It might be fun to learn those things, too.
When I first discovered this specific ability, I did find that I could dimly see the things that were related to what was being taught, for example where the facts that he was teaching today might appear again in the next lecture as part of a different perspective of the subject. So there was at least the possibility that I could do that.
I was a bit leery of experimenting with this, because I didn’t know whether a—I didn’t have a proper term for the people whose minds I browsed through, so I’ll use ’target’—target could sense my presence, or whether I might upset something delicate in there. I’d have to tread carefully if I did this.
Then I wondered about my own memory. I’d never had any problems with it, but neither was I one of those lucky people with eidetic memories. When I memorized stuff, I had to go through that agonizing rote memorization process like everyone else. At least, once memorized, it stayed around for awhile.
But memories, when not used or recalled periodically, faded. So how, I wondered, did that memory palace trick allow the old bards to hold that stuff in their heads for decades? I thought it might be worth trying to poke around inside my own head. I didn’t even know it it were possible, but I’d found that I could establish a link with my own mind in the same way that I was able to channel and linkcast physical sensations and emotions to women, so perhaps I could poke around my own epicenter and see what I’d left in the back of the closet.
No time like the present, I suppose. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, letting my mind grow calm, trying to put the dull noise of the dorm aside. I thought back to English class in high school with Mr. Martinez, and how I had desperately rummaged through his epicenter when he had called on me in class to answer one of those furiously ambiguous questions that teachers like to ask students so they can then demonstrate how much more they know by answering the question the “right” way.
I had jumped back into his epicenter and found what I’d remembered seeing there earlier, the difference between the author’s voice and the character’s voice, as I recall, and I recited what I’d found. He was a little disappointed, I think, that I had answered the question that he wanted to expostulate about, but also a bit pleased that I had understood so much about voice in writing.
But what was interesting to me was that I saw something I’d never noticed before. I describe the epicenter as a ’room’, except it doesn’t have fixed walls, just a kind of nebulous holographic barrier separating different compartments, like the one devoted to processing sensation. However, I’d seen something that looked like a door, and when I went through it I found other things related to writing. This was, however, another kind of writing, his own. It turned out he was trying to write a novel in his spare time.
So writing was the topic of conversation in class, but it seemed to bring up his memories of other kinds of writing, because they were related. He didn’t need to have his own writing close to hand, but writing seemed to be a general category or classification and so brought forth everything he knew about writing.
Something similar had happened in an American History class in high school. Mr. O’Donnell, a boring teacher who just recited facts and expected us to memorize them, was talking about, I think, the Louisiana Purchase. He had discussed only the fight between President Jefferson and the legislature about purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France.
As I wandered around his epicenter trying to assimilate his understanding of the topic, however, I also found another ’door’. When I stepped through I found unrelated information about the topic, perhaps something to be discussed in a later class, dealing with how the Purchase affected the economic balance of power between the North and the South, and how it contributed to the Civil War.
And the interesting thing was that, when I examined this extraneous information, I understood it, remembered it, knew it, as if I had committed it to memory, just as Mr. O’Donnell had done in his student days.
So, again, other information about the current focus of the speaker’s thought was waiting just offstage, perhaps to be ready for access should it be needed. And if I examined it, I retained it.
It was odd that I’d never thought more about this until now. I think that I might have been a little ashamed of being a kind of voyeur, poking around in a person’s memories. It still didn’t feel quite right, but I was certainly tempted by the ease of assimilating that much knowledge so quickly. I just didn’t know when I might stumble across some memory that might be too personal, too embarrassing, too disquieting, so I avoided it.
I didn’t know how a person’s memory was organized, so I couldn’t be sure if Mr. O’Donnell’s memories about the Louisiana Purchase weren’t also mixed in with his addiction to sex fantasies about whips, Martha Washington, and powdered wigs. Assuming he had those kinds of fantasies.
That would be enough to send me running in the other direction.
You can’t be a voyeur if you’re spying on yourself, can you? I didn’t think so. Anyway, I already knew my own fantasies and embarrassing secrets so I wouldn’t be surprised by them. I spent a few minutes thinking about how I might run this little experiment.
Let’s see what happens if I think about a specific topic, and look into my own epicenter. I wasn’t even sure I could do this, since I needed a certain amount of focus to make the connection and that might interrupt the thing I was trying to concentrate on.
Okay, trial and error, at worst I’ll fail. I chose a topic. I’d just been reading my text on Real Analysis trying to understand the Heine-Borel Theorem, so let that be my point of focus. I reviewed the main points of the theorem as I remembered it and tried to make a connection to my epicenter as I did with others. It was always a little trickier to find my own link as it didn’t seem to be as clear as other’s links.
But it was there eventually, and I followed it back to my epicenter while trying to concentrate on math. It turns out to be really hard. I kept losing one or the other. I tried a half dozen times, failing before I got in.
Frustrating. I was ready to give up, but I remembered that when I picked up the thread of the link that sprang into existence with a person had their focus on me, even partially, it was also tenuous, and I had to traverse it quickly before it was lost. But once I was in, I didn’t have to feel for the link any more.
So maybe if I get into my own epicenter, I can try to think about math then and still retain the link. I found my link again and was soon in my epicenter. This felt very weird, like looking at infinite reflections of yourself in two mirrors. Easy to get lost in the infinite.
I was watching myself think about getting into my epicenter and how it would feel, while I was in my epicenter watching it happen. I forced myself to avoid thinking about this philosophical vortex and tried to again summon the details of the Heine-Borel Theorem. There it was. This was a truly strange feeling, watching my own thought processes, using the same mind that was also thinking about Real Analysis.
I made a real effort to understand the theorem and could observe myself concentrating on it. I experimented with letting a part of my attention wander, while the bulk of it remained focused on math. The peripatetic part of my consciousness stepped back to observe, to look.
If I were to describe what I was seeing, it was as if there were several piles of papers on the table being shuffled back and forth, while an invisible hand scratched symbols on a whiteboard.
Was this how I thought about math, moving papers/concepts around from one stack to another? Seems odd.
I looked around the place, as I had with O’Donnell and Martinez. It looked familiar. Of course it did, I spent a lot of time in this room, even if I wasn’t conscious of it. I looked more closely, everywhere. The center was brightly lit, or seemed so, but there were more shadowy areas as well.
I focused on those.
I looked away from the center of the ’room’, into the shadows. I don’t know why I should be surprised, since I’d seen something similar with O’Donnell and Martinez. Doors. A couple of them. I opened one—well, it was more of a hologram, so I just walked through it—and stepped in. This was... what? It had math things in it, but there seemed to be no structure. I focused on a specific point and found... fractions and decimals, cardinal numbers, positive and negative.
I looked elsewhere and saw, well, it seemed to be algebra in its various forms, and matrices and ordinary differential equations.
I stepped back and thought about this. This seemed to be my memories of mathematical concepts and techniques. It didn’t have an understandable structure, but the unconscious mind might use a different organizational scheme than the conscious mind. The first area could be called number representation, maybe. The second area seemed to be things that were used to solve equations, especially sets of linked equations.
I didn’t want to overthink this yet, I just wanted to find what was connected to my current focus of thought, which was math. I went back and looked at the second area again. I wasn’t seeing anything that related to calculus. Why wouldn’t that be here?
I was sure there were things I hadn’t seen yet, but there was another door, so I stepped out of that ’room’ and walked through the second door. It was also quite dark in here, but math did not require light. I was proud of myself for that profound observation. I looked around the room.
Geez, I wish there was a card catalog or something, so I’d know where stuff was.
I focused on a random section of the area and tried to discern what was there. It was hard to see, but it seemed to be statistics and probability. I turned and saw something that had more...
solidity, and I reached out with my mind to examine it. Aha! Here was calculus. I’d spent a lot of time with this in high school and it seemed more substantial to me, unlike the statistics.
I chose something arbitrarily, Green’s Theorem, which relates the integral along a curve lying in a plane to a double integral of the area bounded by the curve. It had been a while since I’d used it, so it was a bit fuzzy in my head, but I brought it to the forefront. I watched the solid area while I thought about Green’s Theorem, and I could see it shift somehow.
I realized that I was now looking at my understanding of Green’s Theorem, that which had been stored in my memory, and as I looked at it, I recalled it so it seemed almost fresh, as if I had just mastered it.
As I marveled at this sudden recollection of knowledge, the area shifted again, and I was no longer looking at my old memories, as I now had a more recent memory of it. So what I had been looking at, I would guess, was a representation of stored, long-term memory, I was suddenly very tired and didn’t think I could do much more of this. I stepped out of my epicenter, dropping the link, and heard myself let out my breath. I had a lot to think about. I was surprised at the level of detail I’d seen in my long-term memory, at least of this quite specific concept, Green’s Theorem. I wondered at this.
If I had been back here in the real world, and someone, Larry perhaps, had asked me to explain Green’s Theorem, I would likely have stumbled, trying to pull some memory of it from the recesses of my mind. I would probably have had to pull down one of my math books to refresh my memory for the details. So why did the conscious mind have such difficulty recalling things stored in long-term memory? I was able to find it while I was inside my own head, and once exposed I remembered it clearly
I would have to experiment with other, more arcane information in long-term memory to see if I retained the same level of detail.
However, it still didn’t show what I’d been hoping to prove. Namely, can I access information related to the focus of a target’s epicenter if he or she is not thinking about it specifically? I thought that similar information might be ’nearby’, as it had been in my head, but I didn’t know if I could do that in someone else’s mind.
I was so wrapped up in this experiment and what I’d found that I’d been unaware of a faraway sound demanding my attention. I pulled back from my rumination long enough to identify it.
“Hello? Are you dead, Carter? Raise your hand if you’re dead.”
It took me a moment. “Larry? I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I got back a few minutes ago. I’ve been trying to wake you. Whatever you were dreaming about must’ve been fantastic because you weren’t responding to signals from earth.”
“I don’t remember falling asleep. I must’ve been really tired.” I was hoping he’d buy the
’nodded off’ excuse. I’d forgotten about this particular side-effect of being in your own epicenter.
It makes you oblivious to what’s happening in the real world around you. I hadn’t heard him calling me.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Larry, just tired. Where’ve you been?”
“I ran into Marina, that’s the woman I hooked up with at that party. We went to get something to eat and got to talking.”
“That must have been a very long talk.”
“Well, you know...”
“I can speculate. Congratulations, I guess.”
“She’s really nice, I like her. I don’t get to see her as much as I’d like, we’re both hammered with class work. Well, it was nice to take a break for a few hours anyway. What’ve you been up to?”
“Same old. Studying, reading. Sleeping.”
“You should come up for air every so often, Carter. ’All work and no play makes Tom a dull boy.’ Was that Franklin who said that?”
“Beats me. Anyway, I have plenty of play time. Just not today.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I’ve had my play time for today. I’m gonna take a shower and then go to bed.”
“Good idea.”