Flightsuit (16 page)

Taylor didn't respond to the boy's call.  He sat for a moment longer, quietly thinking.  Then he stood and slowly made his way to the boy.  Several times he nearly fell, twisting his footing.  The clearing was covered with sharp-edged rocks, shattered by winter ice and summer heat.  He felt a fury toward the boy rising within him.  Whatever coerced him up the mountain bristled at the sight of the boy in the white suit.  Having felt the punishment the presence could inflict, Taylor felt a moment's empathy toward the boy.  He wasn't accustomed to concern for anyone else, but it only lasted a moment.

It wants the suit back
, he thought. 
All of this was to get back here to this suit
.  As he thought this, an image flashed to his mind along with a feeling of frustrated impatience.  In his mind he saw the long-armed suit flying through blackness. 
Not a suit, a flightsuit.  It is a flightsuit
.  And the frustrated feeling subsided.

He stepped close to the flightsuit, edging carefully toward it while keeping a close eye on the cliff's edge.  The flightsuit's boot tip was just inches from the edge of the cliff.  Taylor wondered why the suit would step so close to the edge. Some of the small rocks dislodged as Taylor's foot scooted close to the suit actually fell
from the edge causing the last drips of Taylor's exhausted adrenalin to seep into his bloodstream. 

The boy's eyes were wide and frightened.  His face was covered with dust and grit with clear streaks underneath his eyes.  His wide eyes looked hopefully at Taylor over the edge of the flightsuit's deep collar. 

Taylor looked down at the flightsuit.  He reached his own dirt-covered fingers to the touch the white shoulder.  The boy gasped, "No!  Don't touch it!  It will shock you."

Taylor hesitated, listening and tens
e, for a warning from the presence. 
I don't think so
, he thought.  In fact, it felt like the presence wanted to feel it.  He slid his fingers along the smooth shoulder. 
Same
, thought Taylor
.  It's the same as the artifact
.  It felt so smooth, like glass.  As his grimy fingers traced the surface, the dirt fell away leaving no smudge, no mark at all.  He looked at the flightsuit standing amidst the dust of the clearing and saw its surface shone as if polished.  He tapped on the sleeve to hear the heavy metallic ring and smiled.

Stepping back from the cliff edge, Taylor slid a small pack from his shoulder.  He reached inside and withdrew the artifact Sowyer had stolen.  He looked at the flightsuit trying to see where it fit.  There didn't seem to be any holes in the surface, nothing missing.  He felt the artifact pull from his fingers.  He craned his neck watching the artifact float to the opposite shoulder and settle into place.  The artifact formed a ridge on the shoulder that Taylor now saw matched one on the right.  It wasn't obvious before.  He reached up and touched the artifact's twin on the near shoulder.  Seamlessly back together. 
Amazing
.

"Who are you?" Leo asked.

Taylor looked back at him unsure of what would happen next.  He had no checklists, no plans for this.  He felt the familiar neural network expanding between himself and the boy.  He realized, without noticing exactly when the knowledge came to him, that the flightsuit was quite capable of movement.  It had run up the cliff edge.  It had leaped from ridge to ridge.  It was powerful and drew energy from some invisible source.  He looked blankly into Leo's eyes, giving no response, while he dug through his memories and experiences.  Leo stood locked in place with his mind open to Taylor's exploration.

This experience felt different to Taylor. 
Not just timesharing
.  He imagined himself standing in a maze hallway
.  Little things
, he imagined them as figureless small living things, darted past him through the maze, fleeing past in both directions.  Ahead, he saw the hall divided in two directions.  Some of the little things flashing past his legs went down one passage and a few vanished into the other.   He watched the shapeless things for a while before he realized what they were. 
Thoughts.  These are his thoughts
.  He'd never seen his own, or anyone else's speeding thoughts in this way. 
It might not even be possible
, he realized. 
Might create some kind of inescapable looping process to start trying to see your own thoughts.  Searching thoughts could blend into the stream of searched thoughts and…what?
  He had no idea, but it might not be a good idea to go too far with that particular experiment. 

What else could these little things be?
  Nothing occurred to him. 
Wonder if I can actually catch one?
   His perspective of them seemed as real in this maze place as his own imagined form.  He bent slightly and when the next one came around the corner, he grabbed it.   It recoiled under his fingers, trying to escape, but Taylor only squeezed it harder.  It burst in a spray of Cerenkov-blue jelly.  The flowing jelly seeped into his hands and forearms.  He licked some from his lips where it had splashed his face.  He heard a boy's voice in his mind.  It was clear, isolated sound with no background noise at all – like a voice in a dampened broadcast booth.  The boy's voice asked, "Maybe he owns it?"

Taylor looked down and saw the crushed little thing pull itself back together at his feet.   After a moment, it started to move again.  There was a sensation of it moving slowly at first, then
abruptly achieving the same speed as the other little ones flashing past him.  He looked at his fingers.  The jelly's glow rapidly faded into grey.  The electric warmth as it splashed onto his skin now felt like a brush with frog's skin.  Wet and dead. 

He crouched and waited for another of the little things.

As seconds passed in the world outside, Taylor ran through Leo's mind chasing his thoughts, catching them and tearing them apart.  His mental personae was covered in gray slime of dozens of intercepted thoughts.  The darting thoughts had no hiding place safe from him.  Their path through the maze made them vulnerable to Taylor's capture
, and he tore apart one after another.  As with the first, they reformed at his feet in a diminished state before continuing their original journey.

He wondered if he could create one of the little things himself and send it into the maze
.  Would it be processed by the boy's mind?  He decided to try. 
What message would he send for such an unprecedented experiment?  What would be fitting?  Something more suitable than Graham Bell's "Watson! Come here I need you."
  He watched the helpless little thoughts flying past his knees and felt his complete mastery of the boy's mind.  He thought of just the right announcement.  As he stood in the maze, covered in the slime and essence of a dozen stolen thoughts, he smiled.

He echoed his announcement in his own mind, trying to figure out how it might be packaged from a stream that he knew was present but invisible.  He concentrated and imagined himself to be a magnet, drawing, pulling at the invisible stream.  Finally he felt a current between his fingers, as if he'd plunged them into a river and felt invisible forces slipping past them.  The invisible forces collect
ed into a fog between his two outstretched palms.  It became less transparent and resembled a floating, spinning jellyfish.  As it grew to the size of the boy's thoughts, he let his announcement echo into it.  The blue glow swirled in until it looked just like the ones flashing past.  He squeezed it experimentally and was surprised to feel a sudden terror.  He looked about him in the maze, feeling threatened and afraid.  There was nothing but the little thoughts.  He squeezed his little thought package again and the sudden fear returned as if he were a trapped animal hearing a hunter's step.  

This must be what it feels like for him
, he thought grimly.  He smiled and pulled his hands away from the little package.  It dropped to the floor, hesitated a moment and then flashed around the corner.

Taylor turned, waiting to snare another thought and find out if his experiment worked.

Leo watched Taylor.  There was nothing else he could do.  His arms stretched out at his sides and legs held firmly by the suit.  The guy was either his last hope or…

He asked, "Who are you?"  He wondered if the man owned the suit.  He seemed to be familiar with it and wasn't paralyzed by touching it.

Then a voice cracked like thunder. "I AM," it said.   The sound came from all around as if the air itself spoke.  He looked around trying to locate the sound, listening for it to repeat.  When he looked back to the man, he was smiling.

Taylor
signaled Leo to "be quiet" by putting his finger against lips.  Then the air voice said loudly,
I think we can do better than that now.  I know that you hear me
.  Taylor was quickly adapting to his new ability, beginning to package thoughts he wanted to send to the boy with less concentration.  He was impatient for the boy to figure out what was happening.  The intercepted thoughts suggested he was beginning to catch on.

Those are my thoughts you're hearing boy. 

Leo's eyes locked on Taylor's lips as the air voice spoke.  They never moved.

"What…," Leo started, his own voice startlingly weak and small compared to the booming air voice.  He stopped when Taylor shook his head in fru
stration.  The air voice said,
no
.

Talking in my mind
, Leo thought.

Taylor nodded, relieved to move on. 
Yes, it works.  No need for words between us at this point
, Taylor thought,
or ever
.  He was careful not to package the "or ever" part and monitored Leo's thoughts to make certain he didn't receive it. 
Good.  I alone control communication
.

A shattering scream of images and sound blasted Taylor.  The maze of the boy's mind turned translucent and became only an overlay, replaced by a virtual duplicate of the clearing.  Both the maze and the clearing were visible, with the clearing feeling dominant and tangible.  In his mind he saw the boy and himself crumpled to the ground prostrate with a giant orange-red figure, like a menacing ape before them.  It towered over them, halfway as tall as the ruler-straight trees behind it.  Its face was angry and frustrated.  Its all-black eyes peered at him under cavern brows.  The alien air it breathed
was a bellows of furious frustration.  It was covered in short fur, with longer growth on forearms and lower legs.  Muscle and tendons stretched the skin taut.  The creature raised its gaze from Taylor and looked skyward.  Its fingers stretched into the sky, then tightened into fists.  It pulled the closed fists down into its chest and held still for a moment.  Then with horrifying violence it slammed both fists into the ground on both sides of Taylor.  The vision was incredibly detailed.  As its giant fists smashed into stony ground, bits of rock exploded from the ground around Taylor, the impact shaking this vision earth.  The giant creature lowered its face down to Taylor.  Each exhalation from the gigantic thing made him stagger.  Its eye was close enough that Taylor's imagined self could reach out to touch it, if he could ever force himself to move under its monstrous, barely contained fury.  He wondered what would happen to his mind if the creature closed him in its immense grip and crushed.  Would he die?  Would his body live with a mind that was crushed?  He wanted desperately to keep the creature calm.

Outside Taylor's mind, a second passed for Leo with the man's eyes wide open and far away.

This has been inside me
, Taylor thought, looking at the great black eye. 
This monstrous inhuman thing hid inside my mind.  While I worked to build the company, while I met with people, even when I…Taylor stopped mid-thought realizing all the women he'd been with while a furious angry, alien, thing hunched behind his eyes, watching
.  Taylor shuddered and tried to swallow.

The timesharing
, his thoughts staggered slowly into daylight,
that wasn't me at all, was it?
  The thing pulled back, staring at his face. 
It wasn't
, Taylor thought, feeling certainty behind the thought. 
It was you
.  The creature's huge head pulled back inches more. 
You can be here
, Taylor spread his arms to indicate the imagined version of the cliff face,
in my mind, because your (people?), (kind?), because you communicate with each other through something like the timesharing network you created between me and the people around me.
  Taylor sensed some subtle, almost imperceptible relaxing by the creature as if a door was slowly cracking in the frustrating prison it had made for itself in his mind.

The creature settled back on its haunches further, giving Taylor a hard stare.  Taylor thought the stare meant,
stay there
.  Then he followed the creature's gaze to the boy, or where he'd last seen the boy.  The boy's image had faded while Taylor and the creature interacted.  Taylor looked around the cliff clearing.  The scene from his mind felt identical to the physical world version at first, but as his eyes scanned for the boy, he noticed that detail seemed to fill in only after he focused on it.  As his eyes first moved toward something, like the large rock near the edge, it felt the same as its physical counterpart at first even though his mind, or the creature's, painted the details in after he was looking at it for a moment.  The mental image seemed to only have minimum necessary detail at any moment.  Looking out over the cliff at the surrounding mountains was especially disconcerting.  The mountains almost seemed to have more detail in periphery than when he stared directly at them. 
Probably never a change in distant detail here
, he thought. 
There's no point to it.  The feeling that my peripheral vision is chasing after more detail might be because my mind is used to seeing vague representations in the peripheral and not accustomed to a lack of detail straight ahead
.  He kept his view close in as much as possible to avoid the unsettling, magnetic draw of his eyes trying to bring the mountains into focus.

The boy had vanished.  He was gone.  Taylor looked back to the creature.  It hadn't moved.  While Taylor had scanned around the virtual clearing, it had not moved.  It stared at the ground to his right.  Taylor looked at the ground and saw nothing.  He looked back at the creature to be sure
it was looking at the same spot.  It was, but there was nothing there.  Gradually, he became aware of a shimmer in the space beside him, like heat haze rising from sunbaked rocks.  The haze thickened into a form. 
Hiding
, he thought. 
The boy was trying to hide from it.  He was able to hide from me, but not the creature.  It knew right where he was, like a cat allowing a mouse to run between its paws as it pretends to be bored and disinterested.
  He tried to swallow something caught in his thought. 
He's not disinterested at all.  He's keenly interested.  In both of us
, Taylor thought.

Taylor thought some unheard communication was occurring between the creature and the boy.  He drew the maze back into focus by pulling into himself and making his virtual self heavier.  As he pulled the maze view toward him, he realized how natural this control of focus felt.  It came to him as naturally as using hands to bring something closer even though it had no comparison in the physical world.  He released his pull on the maze and watched it fade back again, replaced by the imagined view of the mountain clearing.  He relaxed still more and saw the physical clearing again, felt the sun's warmth on his face and heard birds calling in the woods. 
Not a second has passed
, he decided. 
I could pull myself down into our minds and experience the equivalent of weeks or even years in the span of a second here
.  Taylor considered his situation.  He'd stolen a unique piece of what turned out to be an alien armor, a flightsuit apparently capable of independent space travel, from the NSA.  They would eventually identify him as a suspect given his sudden, unannounced departure.  He'd sacrificed his ability to generate revenue from his company ever again.  Topping it off, he had a hateful, frustrated alien in his mind that could easily control him through incapacitating painful attacks.  Drawing back into himself and away from his uncertain future was irresistible.  He was relieved for a 'time-out' that stopped or slowed the ticking bomb the creature had made of his life.  He tightened his view again and watched the physical detail fade into the imagined clearing.  Then he reeled in the maze of the boy's mind.  He was knee-deep in a river of swimming thoughts.  He snatched one from its path and tore it open.

He heard the boy's voice plead for understanding,
what is happening to me?
 

Good question
, Taylor thought to himself.  He relaxed his pull on the maze, coming back into the imaginary clearing.  The creature was still staring intently into the boy crouched at its feet, trying ineffectively to hide.  Taylor considered how one went about clearing his throat in an imaginary world and decided against it. 
Probably best to just look at it for bit and let it see that I have a question
.  Which did work.  The creature turned its black bowling ball eyes to Taylor and waited.

Taylor asked,
what are you going to do with me?
  He braced himself expecting a barrage of images and screams.  Instead, he saw endless black space through a clear helmet as if he were inside the armor.  The face reflected back on the inside of the helmet was the orange-red ape.  There was a sensation of movement without any visual point of reference.  After a while, he noticed several of the stars directly in front of him growing brighter.  Then they grew larger and he recognized them as planets.  He saw Jupiter swell to eclipse the other stars and felt a sensation of falling into it.  He expected to crash into it.  His depth perception and sense of distance were frighteningly off.  The sphere might be smaller and closer or larger and further away.  He half expected the giant ball to brush his equally giant shoulder.  He tumbled toward it, closer and closer.  He closed his eyes, expecting impact.  Feeling nothing, he opened his eyes and turned his head to see Jupiter falling away.  Relief washed over him and he turned to look ahead.  He saw a small blue shape growing larger.   The revelation continued for some time.  Occasionally, there was a pause and he'd be aware of the creature watching him to make sure he understood.  Its patience surprised him.  It's important to his plans that I understand, Taylor realized.   When he saw something he didn't understand, he thought a question to the creature.  Somehow, it understood his questions and provided memories of its own or pieces of his memories in response. 

And Taylor came to understand its plan.