Omegasphere (5 page)

CHAPTER 8

Kurt shut the notebook. So far he had filled five of them. His hand ached. Usually he wrote on a laptop, but he had left his at home and now it was probably being stripped and searched by Homeland Security. This wellspring of creativity he suddenly found himself enjoying was much different than other prolific times in his writing career. This felt like he had a clear line straight to the creative source itself. There were a million ideas available to him; he could pluck them like low-hanging fruit. But the most interesting part for him was not the myriad of ideas or story plots he was getting, not the groundbreaking inventions he was coming up with—it was a truth at the core of it all, and he was on the verge of grasping it. At the center of this creative force, there was a truth about the universe . . . about life itself . . . something incredible. It was only a matter of time before he discovered it.

“I’m on a roll,” Kurt said, beaming.

Ursula forced a smile, never taking her attention away from the road before her. Kurt’s furious scribbling on those notepads was making her nervous. What the hell was he writing?

“Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my days. But today, in just four hours, I’ve filled five notebooks. We’re going to have to pull over so I can buy some more,” he said with a chuckle.

He opened one of the notepads and began to peruse it. “It’s not all prose, you know? I’ve jotted down all types of ideas. I even had an idea for a new type of cellular phone. It can—”

“Don’t tell me!” she said.

“What?” he asked. “Why not?”

“Listen, Kurt. I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, but you may want to be careful.”

“Careful. This is gold! Every writer dreams of this. You know how much it sucks to sit at the computer and get nothing? This is literally like walking into a gold mine. I’ve hit the mother lode!”

“People may not be ready for what’s in those notepads.”

“They don’t have to read them if they don’t want to. But I’ll bet somebody will want to. Lots of people.”

“Yeah, and have you considered what might happen if they do? Imagine you come up with an idea for an antimatter bomb? Are we ready for that? I mean really?”

“What if the science behind this ‘antimatter bomb’ leads to an engine that can propel a ship faster than light? Not all of us want to be locked up in our apartments. Some of us want to expand. See what’s out there.”

“I just want you to consider the impact of introducing ideas into a noosphere that may not be ready for them. It’d be like introducing a complex modern virus in to a primitive environment. For now, I think you should keep your ideas to yourself.”

“I’m getting ideas that could improve mankind and you want me to run and hide?”

“What about the men who want to lock you up? Maybe they have a good reason to keep you from the public. We didn’t exactly stick around to find out why they’re after you.”

“Now you’re on their side?” he asked.

“I am not on their side, Kurt. Come on. That’s unfair.”

Ignoring her, he took a new notepad from a plastic grocery bag and started writing. He knew trying to argue his position to her would only compound her disbelief. He saw it clearly; the tragedy that had broadsided her, that had sent her into a bubble of doubt. Her parents had been good people, but they had used their money to shelter Ursula, to protect her from the violent realities of life. Their protection had made her unprepared for life without them and when they died suddenly, she had retreated from life, gone into a shell of intellectualizing and rational thinking. She stayed away from the Internet, the television, the radio—the only thing she could trust was what she could see with her own eyes or glean using a proven scientific system. He knew at some point he would need her help, but the truths he was coming to weren’t rational, didn’t respect any known scientific model, wouldn’t even seem normal to most people. And if she was incapable of trusting him, the people looking to harm them would succeed. He needed time to convince her of the truth—time he didn’t think he had.

“Kurt. Where did you get the idea for the book? The one they said you plagiarized.”

“I had been working on another idea for about a year, but it wasn’t going very well. Suddenly a new idea hit me. I wrote the whole thing in about two months. Usually it takes about a year to write a book, but not this one. Like my mom used to say about my birth: came out like a bar of soap.”

“Where do you think you got the idea? I mean, did you see something on TV or read something in the newspaper?”

“I don’t have a TV and I don’t read the paper. It’s hard to explain this to a non-writer, but historically writers haven’t understood where they get their ideas. Some ideas just seem to pop up out of nowhere. Others seem to be more of a mixture of personal experience and observation. But for the first time, I’m beginning to understand the truth.”

“Understand?”

“Where ideas come from.”

The comment terrified her and she was unable to pursue the topic any further.

“Hopefully Ray Jacobson will agree with me.”

“Ray Jacobson? Another one of your colleagues?”

“That’s right. He lives in Chapel Hill. Lots of writers live in Chapel Hill. Very literate community.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“Nope. But we’re about to find out.”

They arrived at the Jacobsons’ house and were greeted by Ray Jacobson’s wife, Sarah. She said Ray had been gone for four days. “Three men, claiming to be from Homeland Security, came to the door and insisted he go with them.” She hadn’t yet heard back from either her husband or from Homeland Security, despite her repeated attempts.

Sarah took Kurt into an extra bedroom that Ray had turned into an office. The room was clean now, but Sarah said the agents had ransacked the room. They had taken his computer and all of his files. They had gone through everything, but never said what they were looking for.

“What about the books? Did they go through them?” Kurt asked, walking over to the bookshelves. Three of the four walls of the room were dedicated to books.

“No, they just went through his file cabinets. They took everything he had ever written. They took his computer and all his CDs,” Sarah said.

Kurt scanned a few of the shelves, then stepped back to get a wider view.

“Most of these books he bought in the last couple of weeks, if you can believe that,” Sarah said. “He ordered them online. They were only a few dollars each, but he spent thousands of dollars on books. There’s more in the garage. He said he wanted to spend the next couple of years reading.”

“He left us a message,” Kurt said.

“Where?” Sarah asked, crossing over to the bookcase.

“All the other shelves are alphabetized by author, except for this one,” Kurt said.

“I never noticed that,” she said, baffled.

Kurt read the authors aloud, “Hemingway, Ellison, Lewis, Proust, Mann, Emerson. It says: Help me.”

“You don’t think that’s just a coincidence?” Ursula asked.

“I don’t believe in coincidence. And most authors with an extensive library such as this one are usually very particular about how they arrange their books. The next row: Ibsen, Nabokov, Turtledove, Heinlein, Euripides, Frost, Updike, Steinbeck, Elliot, Bradbury, O’Henry, Xenophon. There’s no correlation in genre or even in century between most of those writers.”

Kurt wrote down the first letters of the author’s names on a piece of paper.

I-N-T-H-E-F-U-S-E-B-O-X

“Where’s your fuse box?” Kurt asked her.

The fuse box was in the garage. When they opened it, they found a 36 gigabyte USB memory stick inside.

Sarah brought in her laptop.

Ray had kept a video journal. In it, he looked about forty years old, was slender, and had a beard. Sarah said the beard was a new edition to his face, one she didn’t like. She had also said that, until recently, he had never been that trim, even when they had first met back in high school.

“I think it’s important to point out that I’ve been undergoing a few changes,” Ray said. “Over the last few months, my mental abilities have improved. I can fathom more, retain more information—I’ve even become more creative. I wrote a novel in just a few months, but I’ve never really considered myself much more than a short story hack. Physically, I’ve been able to control my faculties better than ever. It’s been three days since I last ate, but I have no hunger pains at all. Yesterday, I was thinking about how a beard might be apropos given my recent intellectual transformation, and the next day it appeared. I can sleep at will, or not sleep at all. Bathroom trips are much less frequent. In fact, human waste seems almost unnecessary for me. I can adjust my body temperature; I got it up to 105 last night then brought it back down to normal. From what I understand, Buddhist monks are capable of a lot of these types of things after years of training, but I’ve had no training.

“I’ve made this video because I suspect other people have been going through the same thing. I’m only one piece of a larger puzzle. I don’t know who’s responsible for this or what they want—maybe the government stumbled onto something . . . who knows? Should this all take shape the way I think it’s going to, pretty soon the world is going to be a different place.”

When the video ended, Sarah turned away from the monitor in tears. “Please help me get him back.”

CHAPTER 9

Cynthia Lopez came to the door wearing a gray sweater and jeans. She was a slightly plump woman about fifty years old with dark hair that went down to her lower back and luminous eyes the color of yellow quartz. After answering the door, she walked away without a word. Kurt took it as a somewhat cavalier way of inviting them inside. On their way into the living room, a bay window with a view of downtown Pittsburg was flooding the room with daylight.

“I’m Kurt Robbins from Lor publishing,” he said to her back.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“Are you Cynthia Lopez?” Ursula asked.

Cynthia went to a teapot set up on the coffee table and began to fill three cups. It was as if she had been expecting them. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

“This is about the book you submitted,” Ursula said, crossing over to accept the cup being offered to her.

“No it’s not,” Cynthia said. She sat down, took a sip of tea, and then looked up at them and smiled. “Please, have a seat.”

Kurt and Ursula sat down.

“There are two paths to knowledge: direct knowing and intuitive knowing,” Cynthia said mysteriously.

“Do you know why we’re here?” Kurt asked.

“Ursula is wondering how I knew you were coming,” Cynthia said.

Kurt let out a chuckle and asked, “Ok. What am I wondering?”

“You’re wondering if you’re going to find the truth, the one truth about the universe.” A smile creased her face just as she was about to take another sip. “You’ll find it.”

“Are you some sort of psychic or something?” Ursula asked.

“Not until lately,” Cynthia said.

“Lately?” Ursula asked.

“You know what I mean,” Cynthia said.

“Has anyone come here looking for you?” Ursula asked.

“Yes. They came and took my typewriter and all of my manuscripts. They were a little surprised I still used a standard typewriter, but the truth is that I write freehand. Always have. My friend types my manuscripts for me when I’m done. I know how to type; I just like having my friend here. Writing can be lonely. They found her and took her away.”

“Why didn’t they take you?” Ursula asked.

“I wasn’t here when they came to get me,” Cynthia said. “I phoned my friend and told her to stay away, but she didn’t get the message in time.”

“Do you know where they took your friend?” Kurt asked.

“No. But I know who does. It’s someone on that list you’re carrying around.”

“How come you know all this, but you don’t know where we can find the others?” Ursula asked, frustrated.

“Because someone is blocking that knowledge. Someone as powerful as we are, maybe more so. He’s put a sort of wall around the knowledge—a psychic padlock, if you will. Sometimes I can figure things out by what he’s hiding. I can frame the truth around the lie to get an image of what he’s trying to conceal, but it doesn’t always work.”

“He?” Ursula said.

“He is a man with great power. A great intellectual mind, but not much heart.”

“How have you avoided them?” Kurt asked.

“Same way you have. By not staying in one place too long.”

“But this is your house . . . and you’re here,” Ursula said.

“You found me because I wanted to be found,” Cynthia said. “After you leave, I won’t be found again for some time.”

“How will you do that?” Ursula asked.

Cynthia smiled and said, “I’m going to move on.”

Ursula was stunned for a moment, and then she said, “You mean you’re going to die?”

Cynthia chortled and said, “It will be the opposite of death . . . think of it as a dimensional graduation.”

“Why have we all written the same book? Why is this happening to us?” Kurt asked urgently.

“You already know why, Kurt. And you know where it came from originally. It’s the place where all ideas come from,” Cynthia said.

Ursula picked up a book on astrology. She turned it to show Kurt, and then made a face.

“I used to be a housekeeper by day and sometimes on my free time I did astrology charts for people,” Cynthia said. “I was pretty good at it. I always had a sort of natural intuitive sense and a gift for storytelling. And I liked the extra income, too. After my parents died when I was a child, I had this nearly obsessive desire to know what was going to happen next. Something I think you can relate to, Ursula. No more surprises, right? As I got older, I did my best to arm myself with as much predictive information as I could get. Now I know more than I want to know. Now I know the future isn’t set in stone. All outcomes are possible and have already happened. Given the sheer scope of the universe, it’s more probable than not that this moment in time—us being here together—would eventually occur.”

Ursula’s brows furrowed. “People are being taken away against their will. Something is happening to them and I want to know what it is.”

“The simple answer is that the authors are part of an evolutionary quantum leap. But it’s not of our own making. We had help. Someone pushed our evolutionary fast-forward button.”

“Who?” Ursula asked.

“Ask Kurt,” Cynthia said.

Ursula scoffed. “Do you have any practical information for us?”

“The man behind the lies will find you, eventually.”