Love Story: In The Web of Life (18 page)

"I was mad. I got out of the car and walked
back to the cafe. I pushed the deputy aside and went over to the
map and drew an X on the map where Lucy was. When I turned around,
the Sheriff and deputy had guns drawn, pointing at me. I said, 'I
know where she is, here where the X is, about a hundred yards up
Bear Creek from that old logging trestle. She is in some kind of
shelter but is very cold. She may not have much more
time.

"The Sheriff shouted in a tirade, 'we have her
tracks in the snow going in another direction. Get Houdini out of
here! If you come around here again I'll have you arrested. Don't
go hunting for her yourself, you will be destroying her trail for
the trackers.' Two deputies grabbed me by the arms and walked me
out of the cafe, past the parked emergency vehicles, to the edge of
the parking lot. One shouted at me, 'If we see you around here
again or conducting your own search you will go to jail for
obstructing officers in an investigation.' They pushed me into the
street.

"I barely made it home because I was so
occupied feeling Lucy's distress."

Steve was almost in tears and having trouble
finishing the story.

"I couldn't sleep because of my concern. About
midnight, she died and I could go asleep, feeling her
peace."

I was quiet while Steve sat deep in
thought.

Georgia came out onto the decks, using her rear
to push the screen door open, carrying a large tray loaded with
sandwiches and fruit.

She looked at Steve and said, "You told him the
story." She went over and kissed him on the forehead. He grabbed
her and pulled her onto his lap as she screamed, and kissed
her.

Georgia, appearing a little embarrassed, as she
got off his lap and smoothed out her dress and said, "It is really
hard for him to tell that story."

I replied, "I think the Colson Foundation wants
to make sure nobody else has to tell similar stories."

Steve got up and got a glass of iced tea from
the table and raised it in a toast, "I'll drink to
that."

Over lunch we chatted about living in the
mountains and desert, the wildlife we saw, the aesthetics of such a
life. I told them about being raised in the woods in the small
northern California logging town, and how the gossip grapevine
worked, as it did in Rocky Butte. We got talking about college, and
I told him about the Garabedian brothers.

"When I was in upper division, my third and
fourth years of engineering school, I took some classes with a pair
of identical twins, Erin and Eric Garabedian. They were really
smart and could have been straight-A students by themselves. In
that school, it was really hard to get A's. You had to study really
hard and do seemingly endless assignments of problem sets to get
good grades. Erin and Eric had a great advantage, they could study
together, divide the problems sets of solving equations or doing
engineering calculations requiring a lot of time. It seemed that if
each of them studied half of the material they both knew all of it.
When they took exams, they purposely sat far apart, and asked for
the instructor to take note, because they would usually get the
same score and miss the same problems: they didn't want to be
accused of cheating.

"Somehow they psychically communicated. They
could synchronize their thinking."

Steve smiled and said, "It doesn't seem unusual
to me–that's what I would expect from twins. It is a very high
bandwidth case, though."

"Bandwidth?" I asked.

"The electrical signals of the nerves in the
parts of our brains where we process sensory data are of a very low
frequency, a few cycles per second, a tenth or twentieth of the
frequency on our power lines, sixty cycles. When I remote sense, I
listen to recorded sounds through earphones to help me slow my
brainwaves down to bellow five cycles. Information comes very
slowly at those frequencies. Follow me and I will show
you.'

I followed Steve into an office off his living
room. He changed some connections on his PC and then
said,

"Ten or fifteen years ago all our PCs
communicated over dial-up phone lines. I have my PC connected to
the low bandwidth telephone line that comes all the way out here
from Rocky Butte. I am going to load the web page from The Rocky
Butte News."

We watched as for about two minutes as the
image of the newspaper web page loaded. First, with vague images
and then text, then with the images gradually filling in and
eventually becoming sharp and clear.

"This is how my usual remote sensing works. At
first, there are only vague outlines and sparse sensory
information. As time goes on, the pictures and sensory data fill in
with more detail. I might spend a half hour 'loading a page,' so to
speak. Remote sensors have to be trained and disciplined to not
jump to conclusions about what is coming in. There is a lot of room
for error if you do.

"I can't talk about my Government work, but I
can give you a made-up example that shows the process. For a task
they might give me a photo of somebody of interest, call him Mr. X.
And I would go into meditation and report what I sensed. It might
go like this, working with a guide to help steer me:

Me: 'an open place, no trees around.
Northwestern part of US.'

Guide: 'A little closer on the
place.'

Me: 'somewhere people visit for natural
wonders. A feeling of great devastation from fire. Many people
standing around, waiting for something, sense of excitement,
standing on a path of boards.'

Guide: 'Is the excitement about the
fire?'

Me: 'No the fire was before, nature is
repairing itself.'

Guide: 'Go back to the people. What are they
looking at?'

Me: 'some kind of white dome. White stuff
coming out of the dome.'

Guide: 'What can they smell?'

Me: 'Not a pleasant smell, some kind of
chemical.'

Guide: 'What can they hear?'

Me: 'Hissing and chugging sound. People talking
excitedly.'

Guide: 'What kind of movement do they
see?'

Me: 'Something white squirting from the dome,
erratic.'

Guide: 'What kind of structures or buildings
can people see?'

Me: 'There is something big and old behind the
people.'

"If we continued on, I would gather
increasingly detailed information. If we stopped right here, what I
sensed may be of use to an intelligence analyst. If he had
information from other sources that Mr. X had rented a car in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming the day before, and entered Yellowstone
National Park that morning, he might conclude that Mr. X was at the
viewing area for the geyser 'Old Faithful.' With time, I might have
been able to tell that it was 'Old Faithful' and the intelligence
analyst could have used that information to verify the car rental
and park entrance information.

"With my communication with Lucy, I didn't
really have much detailed information. I knew where she was,
geographically, knew she was very cold and sad, and that she was
inside something made of logs. I didn't see any pictures. It was
more like part of a 140 character tweet than a web
picture."

Steve changed the connection to the PC and
immediately the Rocky Butte News web page appeared.

"I am glad I have this satellite link now. It
is thousands of times faster that the dial-up circuit."

"Steve," I said, "Let's go back outside. I'd
like to bounce some ideas off you."

We rejoined Georgia who was sitting on the
deck, reading a book,

"Are you familiar with the mathematician
Candice Montgomery's work on eight-dimensional spaces?"

Steve replied, "Yes, I have looked at her
papers and talked to her. Although I am not an expert on
mathematical subjects, her thesis sounds good to me. I have to say:
birds don't need ornithology or aerodynamics to fly; they simply do
it. People doing remote sensing don't need eight-dimensional space:
we believe in the phenomenon because of personal experience. We are
not the audience for Dr. Montgomery's papers."

I paused for a minute and then said, "I thought
I would present a little bit of it in the trial to refute any
experts they might produce saying that there is no scientific
evidence that remote sensing is real. The jury doesn't have to
understand the theory. They only have to believe Dr. Montgomery
knows what she is talking about. It is important to have the
scientific viewpoint in the record for reference in other
trials.

"I will make the jury believe what you do is
real and, parenthetically, has a scientific basis. I'd like to give
them an intuitive feel that physical reality allows psychic things
that common science hasn't caught up with yet.

"I have been toying with the idea that a friend
gave me: reality is kind of like YouTube. If someone sees something
of interest they record it and upload it to YouTube, along with
keywords for people to use to find the record.

"In YouTube time and locations (space) are only
keywords used in identifying the video. I can access information
across time and space in YouTube. The videos are physically stored
on a server somewhere in the world, so they have a physical
location. I don't have to know where the videos are stored to
download the information.

"Remote sensing is downloading information that
is physically distributed throughout regular four-dimensional
space-time. Eight-dimensional space-time, a concept validated by
modern physics, provides the 'Internet' for accessing the
information."

Steve thought for a minute and then replied,
"The only thing I might add is remote sensing is like searching
YouTube with a slow, 4.8 Kbit telephone circuit.

"For the trial, I suggest that you have me do a
live demonstration of remote sensing. You can design it after you
look at the videos. Don't prep me on what you decide as a
demonstration. I like to be able to say I was not coached on what I
will demonstrate."

Georgia interrupted and said, "It is now time
for our afternoon nap and meditation. Let's adjourn until five. You
can go up to the guest cottage and rest or simply enjoy the
view."

****

At five, I walked back from the guest cottage
and found Georgia busily setting the table on the deck.

"Did you have a nap?" she asked.

"Not exactly, I sat in that big, soft deck
chair and snoozed in the sun. It was really relaxing."

"After the trial is over, why don't you come
back and spend a day or two relaxing? It is especially beautiful in
September up here." She smiled a knowing smile and added, "And
bring that pretty dark-skinned lady with the pale–blue eyes. I'd
love to meet her."

"I'll do that."

"And, Steve is a legally ordained minister.
When you are in need of that kind of service," she added without
looking up from setting the table.

Steve came out onto the deck and dropped into a
chair looking a little blurry–eyed. Georgia handed him a cup of tea
she poured from a pot on the table.

"Excuse me," said Steve. "I am not quite back
yet."

He sipped his tea for a minute and then added,
"Earlier, I remembered some other scientific experiments on remote
sensing you should know about. Some academics have done highly
structured, formalized experiments in remote sensing where the data
is posted on-line for all to access at every stage of the process.
They are quite conclusive. However, skeptics don't believe the
results, because they don't believe there can be valid result to
begin with."

"Send me the references and I'll check them
out," I replied. "I need to know all the background I can before
the trial."

Georgia interrupted and said, "Dave said he
would come back and spend some time after the trial, and maybe
bring his friend with him."

Steve smiled and said, "Wonderful! We can have
some time to go on some hikes and I can show him how beautiful this
country is. In my business, spending a lot of time in meditation, I
need to ground myself in a beautiful place like this to keep
balanced. When I worked in the Palo Alto area, we lived in a little
cabin up in the mountains between Palo Alto and the ocean. I
couldn't have survived without my daily nature fix."

As we had dinner, Steve asked me about soaring,
and I told him my flying stories.

After dinner, Steve asked, "Do you want to
know, in advance how the trial will turn out?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "it might spoil the
fun."

I thought to myself, 'Why am I disbelieving
that he can do this?'

"I'll mail you the 'win/no win' verdict in a
sealed envelope in a few days. You can open it when you want–before
or after the trial."

"How would you do that?"

"Do you see that stump by the driveway? The
morning after the verdict, I will have Georgia stand on the stump
and show me one of either of two things: a long handled pick ax
that means the verdict was in your favor, or the rag cloth mop head
that means you lost the case. Tomorrow, I will go into meditation
and synchronize my mind with myself, standing there in the future,
and see what kind of sensory information I get. If the sensory
information I get from my future self is 'firm, sharp, metal,
dangerous, wood handle, rusty etc.,' I will know you won. If the
sensory information is 'soft, cloth, limp, cotton, wet, etc.,' I
will know you didn't win. I am quite good at this kind of
prediction."