We knew we had something incredible the first time we got a clear image.
With each click of a switch the equipment whirred and whined its way to life. This little closet, out of the way from the main lab, was jammed full of racks and secrecy. It was the brains of the Direct Encephalo Ionizer, or DEI, the instrument to which we had dedicated our lives. It fired up without a hitch as each of the components blinked their way on.
In the moment before the main computer booted up I caught a glimpse of myself in the dark screen, a reflection of a graying dark beard that hid all the wrinkles of worry underneath. I was glad to see my image disappear into the blue screen that showed it was all progressing. This had to work, and soon, if we were going to keep our funding.
I slipped through the door to greet LaShonda who was prepping our subject in the big dentists chair we had grabbed at a garage sale. Right now, she was Dr. Clark, straight business, cool and professional, until the moment demanded more. That was until her smile lit up the room, stretching across her broad chin with a warmth they don’t teach you with your doctorate in Cog Psych.
She stood in front of the large quartz disk that was clamped onto an improvised pole on her left that held the beam emitter. To her side was the other pole where the impossibly heavy detector drooped slightly. LaShonda did her best to fuddle with the clamp and level it, but it was always a shade off balance.
“You comfortable now, honey?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so.”
“Just relax, this won’t feel like anything special.”
Our subject that day was Jayda S, one of our students. They all had to take their turn under the beam, but none of them ever seemed to like it. Jayda, like most, had the excitement of discovery brighten up her young green eyes, but the way she fumbled with her long blonde hair betrayed her worry. She was the crew that made this exploration possible, just as surely as LaShonda and I shared the role of Columbus. Jayda’s confidence was as important to us as it was to any ship in uncharted waters – and moreso.
“We’re ready to go when you are,” I called to them both.
“You’re all set, honey?” LaShonda checked in.
“Uh—huh. What do I have to do?” Jayda nervously responded.
“Just look over here at the board. We’d like you to think about the problems up there. Concentrate on solving the integral in your head.”
As one of my Physics majors, we knew that Jayda had her calculus down cold. I settled in to watch on the screen and sync the signal behind the viewing computer as LaShonda aligned the beam to focus right on Jayda’s head.
“We have a signal, It’s strength 90. Up a bit, yes, 93 … 95, that’s as strong as we can expect,” I relayed.
“Just relax, honey. This is no big deal. Focus on the integral.” There was that smile.
I switched it over to the video signal and adjusted the sync frequency. Once again we had a blurry image that was vague and out of focus. The static and deep purple color was dispatched when I clicked on the filters we’d programmed in for this run, but there still wasn’t much there. A row of something repeated and a few outlines of round figures. Another result too subtle to impress the unimaginative.
“Are we getting the same patterns?” LaShonda asked me. Her cool demeanor quivered a bit as her brow tightened under her cornrowed hair.
“Same, sort of. Same but different. It’s just not much of a signal.”
“The new filters working?”
“I think so. Actually, we have signal, it’s not decoding into anything striking.”
Jayda was silent as she stared at the board. The process of solving this simple integral was probably over in her head already, but she did her best to concentrate on the process like we told her.
“Just relax, honey. Bill, you have anything different?”
“Same as before. The beam is on full.”
There was a pause after I said that, a pause filled with the warm hum of machines and the whistle of air conditioning. The machinery was unrelenting, but LaShonda stole a moment from it and made the single greatest leap we could have made.
“You mind if we try something different, Bill?”
“Go ahead. It’s working properly, we’re just not getting anything new.”
Her brow unwrinkled as that smile turned to pull our subject off in a new direction.
“Jayda, honey, just relax. Think about something peaceful and happy for a moment.”
“Like a memory?”
“Yes, from childhood. Something that always relaxes you.”
The screen in front of me flickered and flashed as the video went way out of sync. I clicked on the control panel to lock it in once again. This was a new signal to us.
“Whoa, that did something.”
“Did what, Bill?”
“I dunno, it just … Got it again, up like two kilohertz. 2230, actually.”
There, on the screen, was the new world we were looking for. A sharp picture of people, running and laughing. It buzzed in and out a bit, but in brief moments the images were clear. I was vaguely aware of how my eyes grew large as I silently tried to pull this image into my own head.
“Bill, you got something?”
“Come … get over here. Mother of God, this is amazing.”
“What is it, what do we have?”
We were paying no attention to the outward manifestation of Jayda now that we had the inside of her head up on the screen. That was our mistake. The noise and commotion pulled her attention away from the peaceful hum of her own thoughts and into our excitement. The image flicked off into static before LaShonda could come over and see it.
“What did we have, Bill?”
“It looked like … like guys in uniforms laughing and doing something exciting. Let me show you.”
I replayed the scene and there they were. A glimpse of men in what were clearly … Civil War uniforms? They were in a large hall of some kind that had a cross at the end of it. Was this a church? It had to be, I reasoned, but the men were full of the glee that could only have come from some kind of defiling. Two of them grabbed something shiny off the alter just as the image fluttered off to static.
LaShonda ran her fingers over her cornrows. She knew this would take time to absorb.
“Jayda, honey, what were you thinking of just now?”
“My grandfather. When I was little he used to take care of me all the time.”
“Your grandfather?”
“Yes, he … he died just a few weeks ago. I miss him terribly.”
“Is there, ah, any chance that your grandfather was in some, I don’t know, Civil War re-enactment group?”
“Noooo, not that I know of.”
There was another long silence that filled what she said next with a terrific air of importance.
“What exactly were you thinking of, honey?” The cool, professional Dr. Clark was back in the room now that the moment was over.
“My grandfather. The last time I saw him.”
“What did you do, I mean, what was he like?”
“Just relax and tell us more, Jayda,” I interrupted. She was like my own daughter now and not just a grad student guinea pig.
“We used to just walk to places and talk about stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Another silence defined the moment. I clicked on the replay one more time to try to make sense of it even as we grilled her.
“I was thinking about some stories he told about his grandfather. No, wait, great-grandfather. Family lore. It was real important to him, he told me about it over and over.”
“Civil War?” I gulped knowing the answer.
Jayda blushed a dark red that came from a well deep inside of her. “Yeah.” The color drained as quickly as it came. “Yeah, how did you know?”
I ran the moment we captured into a loop and turned the monitor to Jayda. “Is this what he told you about?” I knew the answer was yes, it simply had to be. We had the image straight from inside her head in front of us.
“Um, no, not at all. Grandpa told me about his great-grandpa Samuel S. and the 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry, how they served with distinction and valor.”
“They never … you never heard a story about them looting a church?”
“Bill!” LaShonda lost her cool a moment, “Just, just don’t put things into her head, we have to know what this is.”
“I’ve already turned the monitor around. It’s too late.”
“The subject is, in fact, contaminated, but it’s her own images. We don’t want to add our own prejudice.”
Jayda had been focused on the screen as intently as she possibly could. When the argument was hitting its own pace, she suddenly put a stop to it.
“This isn’t what Grandpa told me at all. I don’t know where this came from.”
The hum and whistle of machines filled the moment again. It defined what we had in our own heads as well as any image the DEI could possibly have created.
I broke the silence carefully. “It’s been over 10 minutes already, she’s done for today.”
“Yes, Bill, you’re right. Jayda, can we pick this up tomorrow?”
“Ah, sure. What is it?”
“We have no idea, honey. If you can’t tell us, we have no idea.”
As Jayda got up to leave, I went into the closet off the lab to switch off the equipment. While the lights on the panels slowly extinguished, one by one, I could feel how much my heart was pounding in my chest. Were these the results we were expecting? Not at all. Would they be enough to get us what we wanted? They almost looked faked, they were too good.
If only we knew what we had then.
To Chapter 2 –>
