Not that German shepherds and mercenaries with automatic weapons could keep them out.
No.
Nothing could keep them out.
Not unless he wore one of those ridiculous skullcaps. Jesus, he hated the thought. A grown man, a multibillionaire who owned more companies than he could count, a scientist and defense contractor, wearing a fucking aluminum foil hat. Well, technically a dome-shaped glass and crystal-lined metal alloy hat.
It blocked out most of the intrusions.
It stopped the dreamwalkers from stealing into his head and stealing his knowledge. It kept his slumbering mind from being complicit in the theft of his own technologies.
Shutting the barn door after the cows had run off, though. He was sure of it.
Not that Bell knew who exactly had been sneaking around in his head. Someone from Gateway, for sure. Some of Erskine’s remote viewer spies, those fuckers.
And someone else.
Was it Prospero? Was the boy still alive? If so, what on Earth was he up to? The rumors Bell was hearing terrified and sickened him. ISIL, for Christ’s sake. Selling the null field to a gang of insane murderers. How was that any kind of justice, even from Prospero’s perspective?
How?
If it was true, and Oscar Bell did not have real proof.
Then there was Corrine.
She’d been in his dreams, and maybe inside his head twice now. Both times on nights when he forgot to wear the damn helmet.
Bell hated it. He was no romantic and even if he was, having someone inside his head like that was not romance. It was rape. It was a violation on a level that ran so deep that he wanted to saw open his head and scrub his brain with Lysol.
Damn the woman.
After the first time, he tried to call her, but her assistant said she was unavailable. After the tenth call Bell decided that Corrine was down at Gateway.
Last night’s dream… well, that sealed it.
He’d become aware that he was sleeping. It was like that. You are asleep but then you realize that you’re asleep. You are still inside your body but you are aware the body is sleeping.
That’s how it began. And then she was there.
It was not like meeting her in the flesh. There was no flesh. It was her but it was like he could see her with some sense other than eyes. There is no word for it in the English language. “Sensed” her did not fit because there was no precise sensory input. No sight or smell, no sound or touch. But she was there and he knew it was her.
Corrine Sails. Stripped of everything. No uniform, no face. No skin or bones. No blood or breath.
Just her, whatever “she” was.
Bell knew why so many people had committed suicide. It was a nightmare encounter. Her thoughts were right there, shooting through him like electrical shocks, as if the nerve signals fired by neurons were stun guns. He had no defense against them and the power was raw and immediate. Bell wasn’t sure how exactly his body was registering them. Again, there were no words for this kind of contact. It wasn’t even a purely electrical connection, either. There had to be some of that, of course, or the helmets wouldn’t work, but on the plane of communication there were other rules, other forces yet to be cataloged. Someone at Gateway had tried to coin the term “soulspeak” but it was too silly for the scientific and military minds to grasp.
Bell, despite his cynicism, thought it might be right.
What were souls, after all? If they existed at all, then they were some kind of energy that had no label in science. Yet. Quantum scientists would have to label them at some point, give them a properly sober Latin name, place them in a category, force them into a range, measure them and meter them.
That would come. Science wasn’t there yet.
When Corrine stepped into his mind Bell was sure that the contact dragged them both into another place entirely. The soul level? Maybe.
Or another dimension.
Another world?
Another universe?
After all, the God Machine was Prospero’s attempt to open a doorway that would take him to what he believed was his home. To another world, but not another planet.
To a different universe than this.
Or to a different plane of existence where words like “world” and “universe” and even “dimension” had no practical relevance.
They did not really talk to each other. Conversation is a product of organic machinery. Breath vibrating the larynx, tongue and lips forming words, the jaw hinge moving, and electrical impulses accessing memories and forming thoughts, using syntax and vocabulary. All physical things.
They had no bodies in that place.
But he heard her. Felt her. Whatever it needed to be called.
Corrine was trying to tell him something. He was sure of it.
Warn him?
Maybe. Probably.
But warn him about what? About who?
He couldn’t remember what frightened her, only that something did. It terrified her. It was the only clear thing Bell could remember when he woke up.
However, he woke up naked, on the balcony where they often stood after making love. Except he stood on the stone rail, his toes over the edge, his body swaying as if trying to leap.
It took a lot of scotch to stop the shakes.
He did not know why he crawled under his desk with a gun.
All he knew is that after that night, he never went to sleep without that goddamn helmet.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“The Gateway matter has presented us with a number of complications,” said Mr. Church. “Particularly in the matter of reliable information. Most of the records are unavailable to us through our usual channels, and that includes MindReader. We know that the project was initiated fifteen years ago and the focus of the research being conducted at Gateway has changed many times. We know that Dr. Marcus Erskine was the head of the research and development team down there, and that they were working on several projects that, on the surface, appear to be unrelated.”
“That’s all we have?”
Church removed a folder from his briefcase and slid it across the table to me. “This is something Bug dug up for us from very deep in the records of the black operations file attached to Gateway. It’s a fragment of a project proposal paper written thirteen years ago by Dr. Erskine.”
I read it hungrily, needing answers. Unfortunately most of it was scientific mumbo jumbo that shot way over my head. However, there were footnotes and annotations in the distinctive scrawl of Hu’s handwriting and Bug’s juvenile scribble. The story this all told was bizarre. Erskine hadn’t gone down there with one purpose in mind. Gateway was one of those cluster projects where several ultra-top-secret research programs were being conducted under one roof, with Erskine as overall director. Unfortunately each project had a code name. Kill Switch was the easiest to understand — a weapon that interrupted power. But also referenced — without useful explanations — were projects labeled “Dreamwalking,” “Dreamshield,” “God Machine,” “Freefall,” and “Unlearnable Truths.”
Church was petting his cat and looked way too much like a James Bond villain. Even the gloves creeped me out.
“This is all we have?” I demanded.
“It’s a piece of what was clearly a larger document. Bug said that most of it was scrubbed from the Net and this is part of an editing memo that he was able to salvage. The text is suggestive of certain kinds of projects that surface every once in a while. Psychic phenomena, esoteric espionage, thought projection.”