Hill's 4th Harmony - Chapter 6

Hill's Fourth Harmony

Read Chapter 5

Chapter 6

I made my way towards the lobby through the corridors from my second floor office. The walls and floors had navigation assist with red green and blue arrows following your pace leading to the closest emergency exit, lobby, and restrooms. I walked toward the lobby and descended one of the twin staircases curling in towards each other like a pair of enormous pincers. The lobby was cavernous, with a clear view to the ceiling about three stories high. The whole of the exterior wall was glass and through it you could see the flashing lights of police cars against the rapidly fading twilight.

Dawn joined me a few minutes later dressed in a well fitted ivory cocktail dress with threads of green and gold streaking through it making it shimmer as if with microscopic sequins. The effect was stunning.

“You look fantastic” I moved closer to give her a hug. “Does that dress come with an off button?” I whispered as we briefly embraced. Her elbow jab to my ribs as we separated confirmed she heard and registered the joke.

“Shut up before you force me to wound you physically and emotionally” she chided, her lips curled in a wry grin.

We walked, her hand on my arm, towards the security checkpoint at the front of the lobby. Dawn clung closer and held her breath as we approached.

“I hate this part” she whispered.

“Colonel Hill…. Captain Savipando…. Right this way” A security guard dressed in a black double breasted suit gestured towards the door and a waiting group of 4 more guards. The guards each wore the same suit. Each wore a pair of glasses containing a blue lens over the left eye, and red lens over the right. Three dimensional projections of threat assessment and other situational logistics allowed them to “see” through and behind objects using mesh networks and geo-synch satellite data. They wore copper colored bracelets, that I knew at any time could be instantly transformed to one of a dozen close and medium ranged combat weapons. The suits themselves rendered the wearer bulletproof, and I instantly regretted not setting my clothes as armored before I left.

We walked out the door to the waiting group of guards. I heard the wail of sirens and the jeers of angry protesters as we emerged into the pleasant Georgia evening.

“Stay close please” the first of the four guards mentioned in an out of town accent as they formed a perimeter around us.

The 100 yard walk to the transit station seemed foolish upon reflection. They should have sealed up a tunnel for us to walk from point to point instead of subjecting us to the public like this. Various slurs and ephitets reached us through the sea of picket signs. I began to breathe deeply as we slowly walked down the fence line.

To this day, I couldn’t tell you why I did it. It seemed a good idea at the time, I guess. I think I was tired of all the hatred. I began radiating energy. I summoned it from its infinite source and began to feel its effects, like a sensation of television static deep in the muscles of my body. I pulled more and more, and radiated it out in wave after wave of love. Each step I took felt more and more purposeful, as if I was walking the path to some ultimate and significant destiny. Time seemed to slow. Dawn began radiating as well, each of us walking hand in hand with the four guards walking a perimeter.

The crowd hushed. Reporters at the scene would talk over the following week about how divinely childlike we looked, comparing us to divine figures throughout history. Reporters not on the scene would speculate about government mind control aerosols. People who were once screaming and threatening us in ways too horrific to consider were now stunned in silence. Some began to silently weep, with a starry eyed wonder in their eyes.

Giving away energy of this kind is a type of transmission that puts the recipient in a very close state with the divine energy of the universe. Hate can not exist in its presence. I normally just let the protestors go their merry way and continue fighting themselves or whatever perceived evils they could conjure. Today was different, and in retrospect, this event pulled one of the strings that pulled me to where I am now.

As we reached the entrance to the underground transit station I was exhausted. Dawn seemed weary as well. The guards looked at us perplexed as we sat down to rest on one of the stainless steel benches in the transit terminal.

“Everything all right sir?” The lead guard asked, visibly concerned.

“It’s perfect” I said and let the words echo down the tiled halls of the terminal.

The guard looked unconvinced as Dawn and I held hands in the terminal and closed our eyes. We stopped radiating and turned some of the energy towards our weary hearts. The human heart is what allows us to radiate love to others, and also is what tires as energy flows out through it. We rested for about ten minutes before returning to our pre-walk state.

We rose and walked down the corridor pausing briefly to pay for the transit ticket. A transit car arrived and opened it doors. We entered and were off.

“Destination Planck’s Plate” I said aloud.

“ETA 3 minutes 41 seconds” The car’s soothingly feminine voice responded.

The car was shaped like a medicine capsule from the early twenty first century. It was windowed at either end and had a skylite along the top. The windows were one way tinted. Inside there was a white microfiber couch along the non door side of the capsule and two microfiber chairs bordering the door side. We sat on the couch looking at one of the two display terminals fixed in the middle of the room.

We watched the screen as we progressed on our path to the restaurant. The other screen showed footage of Dawn and I leaving the facility. Breaking news my ass. The newscaster was smugly reporting our mission a complete failure and our “meditative” practice as chicanery. Both were cited as a pitiful waste of government resources. The thin line between church and state was starting to crumble indeed, as reported by the network.

“The shame of it is that people believe this crap” Dawn’s voice grimly intoned.

“At least they believe something” I added.

“You always do that.” She softened.

“I hate to see you put out a vision of some future perfection where everyone thinks as you do. Every time you do; you get upset. Everyone does.”

“Hrmph. There you go making sense and not letting me have my little bit of cynicism. You are such a party pooper sometimes”

“There you go again.”

Our jousting was interrupted the chime from the capsule. We slowed and stopped, the door opened and we stepped out onto the platform. The station was aging poorly. The stale smell of old urine, only slightly less pungent than fresh stuff lightly kicked us in the nose.

“Charming” Dawn quipped.

We navigated the socially endorsed bland yellow tile corridor to the stairs leading out of the station. We walked the flight to the street to emerge like a new beginning into the smell of a hotdog cart and the playful banter of children playing in the deserted streets. We were in old city, hence the exit to the street. Newer areas had address entrances built into the transit system so that you could go directly to an address. It changed the landscape significantly in that most new buildings didn’t have an above ground public entrance. It freed architects to use footprints previously inconceivable, and made the main entry on most new homes to be at the basement level. As technology mitigated the need for physically navigating the social system, our houses went from neighborhoods to archipelago.

The streets, an artifact of antiquated transportation systems, were now mostly a place to congregate, and for children to play. Most streets had been socially repurposed had at least one cordoned off area for a tennis court, volleyball, basketball and the like. The government didn’t endorse this behavior, claiming that emergency vehicles needed right of way, but it did nothing to stop it either. Most modern emergencies were handled with air based technolgies like helicopters. Building evacuation systems were built into each floor and amounted to inflatable spheres ejected out of the sides. As the marketing jingle went – Grey’s building evac systems let you bounce your way to safety.

We walked a few blocks to Planck’s. I had chosen it due to their policy of no screens of any kind. They had booths and bars for eating and billiards and darts for playing and that’s it. The place was deceptively large but maintained a feeling of intimacy. Tables varied in size from small tops for two to long galley tables for 30. Planck’s had a policy. You never knew who you were going to sit with. You paid a premium for a private table for two. All other tables were considered fair game, and you were almost always seated at one of the long tables right next to complete strangers.

Billiards tables were in the center of the room which covered about the area of half a football field with high ceilings. The room was supported in the middle with four posts which served as a secondary lighting fixture. The clacking of billiard balls, and the din of conversation made it difficult to hear anything below a low yell. There was no music, which was also odd for a bar in this day and age.

Dawn and I were seated somewhere in the middle of one of the large tables. We sat side by side and began our conversation.

“Let us talk about things in the context of gardening” I proposed. Dawn nodded in agreement. Talking in near complete abstractions was easy, particularly because of the subjective nature of the experience of space travel. You could express any object in the conversation as any other object, only rarely did it fail to sound like rational conversation. We ordered wine, red for me, white for her and a plate of cheese.

“The white roses we worked with today were very interesting. I’m glad we had an expert gardener there to help us tend them.” I pitched. She caught on. We had both wanted to talk more about work but given the nature of what we do it is difficult to have a conversation about it in public. Having the conversation inside the office meant that we would have to include everyone, and privacy was not assumed. Here, out of context, and out of the ordinary setting wise, we were safe to discuss what we were thinking.

“I agree, I believe that we could not have picked a better gardener, though I wish she had told us more about the flowers before we had to leave.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“How much do you know about timesync roses?”

“Not enough that’s for sure. Even what I do know is likely a bust, as the blossom we saw seemed extraordinarily large and complex. Not even our gardener had the words to describe such a thing. What I do know is that even in roses that have a lesser evolved genome, the sheer volume of information available is staggering. It’s like looking into half a million years of history and being able to track the right and left turns and the context at the time.”

“What is it about them that makes them so special?”

“Energies never really stop, even in matter. When a organisism dies, the lion’s share of its raw energy is thrown off and dissipates into the base energies in the surrounding areas. The matter that remains, the dead matter does retain some of the energy inherent in the organisim when it was alive. Ghost is a less precise word for it, but a gestalt of what a thing was can be looked at by looking at whats left. This is true at a material and an energetic level. Timesynchs are particularly crazy because they are the collected ghosts from hundreds of millions of organisims.” Her voice stumbled awkwardly. She was having trouble trying to keep her phasing in the context of our gardening façade.

“Who knew roses could be so complex.” I tried to bail her out.

“Certianly not me. I didn’t know we were viewing such an exquisite specimen until after the fact. I was experiencing the euphoria of being in such a delightful garden. I’m concerned though, that whatever the beauty of such a flower, we will never be invited back to the garden, and we couldn’t make it there without an invitation, as I don’t know where it is.”

“That’s our standard lament when we see such wonderous things. This is different based on our gardeners response this isn’t just wonderous, it is significant.”

Her words hung in the air the waiter came to deliver the cheese plate and the wine. Dinner orders were given. Steak for me, Shrimp for her. The wine was excellent and I took a moment to savor it. It rolled and flowed gently over my tongue as flavors opened and deepened.

“What did you feel about it?” I started back in dropping all attempts at masking our conversation.

“I was a little girl on a playground, sliding down slides and swingng on swings. It was great…. But you know what it’s like.”

“Yes. Except for the girl part” I teased.

“You big strong alpha male you” She shot back.

“Can you share?”

“Sure… It’s a little sketchy already, but I’ll try” she clasped my hand and leaned her head on my chest. I put my arm around her. Our hands warmed and our pulses began to normalize and beat in synchronous rhythm. I felt her energy begin to pulse in waves around us as I did my best to let go of my own. I attempted to keep my energy from uniting with hers by dropping mine to as low a level as I could. It was slow going, but after a few moments I could begin to take on her energy as if it were my own, and feel what she experienced in the diamond. Using her energetic perspective felt like the sense of intuition, but in a flavor that you enjoy but can’t reproduce. As I felt through her into her recollection of the diamond I became aware of only one thing. I could clearly feel the etchings and markings our energy was leaving in the energy pattern of the diamond. It was as if through the combination of my feelings and hers, a three dimensional view was now possible. It was stunning, and the diamond became more wondrous and more terrifying at the same time. I began to bring my energy level up in combination with Dawn’s. Our bodies were waving slightly like we were being moved by a wind, or dancing to an unknown song. I was optimistic that viewers in the restaurant would just think us stoned on the latest love drug.

The connection was broken by the arrival of dinner. Dawn jumped both at the breaking of the connection and at the suddenness of some realization that had just occurred. After sending the waiter off with a grateful look I asked immediately.

“What’s the matter?” I whispered with urgency.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“Gimme a second, I’ll be back, promise.” Her eyes began to move rapidly as she rose and walked shakily towards the bank of personal facilities.

I folded my hands and relived the experience the best I could searching for any clues about the meaning of Dawn’s response, or it’s cause. Nothing.

She returned a good while later and my steak had gone from warm to room temperature.

“Everything alright?” I asked as she sat down.

“Yes.” She spoke slowly, measuring and remeasuring the words as they heavily left her mouth. “As a female, my sensitivity is higher to certain types of energetic patterns, and males have a similar skill opposite in polarity...” She started.

“Yes, and ”

“I felt the subtle shifts in the pattern once you and I were mingling, that I couldn’t feel without having both contexts to look through. I don’t know how to say this but there are some things we must do and act quickly on. First, you need to mingle energies with Winter.”

I winced as she said her name out loud. We had blown out the gardening ruse, moved through dicey, and went straight into conversation we should not be having in a public place. She sensed my discomfort. “Then we need to get whatever record the twins had of this and purge it.”

“What?! Why?”

“Because we can never go back there. We can not let anyone know that that thing was anything more than a chunk of class b diamond.”

“I’m not following.”

“The crystal is more than a mere timesynch. Let’s call it a training course.”

“A course in what” I wondered aloud

“A course in godhood. I think anyway. You know as well as I do that diamond created from the carbon from dead organisms contains the energetic signature of the organisms that make it up. Remember in phase two of training when you started cultivating your sensitivity to the energy of living things.”

“Yeah.”

“Could you feel the old fashioned cars when they were coming and going? Did you feel the primal energies being released as they combusted petrol?”

“Yes, it was like being bombarded by a wave of humid air.”

“As you progressed through the training, your senses increased, as did your ability to discern finer and finer energies. “

“Mmm hmm” I was already tiring of the remedial.

“Well, the diamond, makes our training, and the levels of subtlety we are capable of look about as subtle as a wrecking ball.”

“Ok…” I was still waiting for the point. Context takes too long sometimes.

“This diamond gets you down to levels of subtlety that push you through the c-barrier. At least so far as I can tell.”

Clarity at last. The c-barrier was the lowest level of wave function that the scientists could even surmise. It was presumed that the c-level was the level of creation itself, hence the name. The c-level became the presumption upon which the foundations of modern nanotech had been built. Science could not harness it directly but by making key assumptions about it, outcomes were reliably produced.

“So this stone is a training course that realizes the ambitions of godhood?”

“Like I said, I can’t be sure. We need more data, but either way, we have to do something about it.”

“Why?”

“Because if it teaches you anything about how to manipulate the c-level, you could do anything you wanted… It’s the ultimate… ultimate.”

“I see your point, but, it existed for how many billions of years before we stumbled on it?”

“I didn’t say anything about destroying it. Besides, I don’t think we could even if we wanted to. I do think that we should not tamper with it. I am quite sure that those in the various seats of power should not know about this.”

We were both starting to be afraid. Wisps of behavioral paranoia could be seen. The occasional sidelong glance, the lowering of the eyes, and refusal to make eye contact for more than a second or two – this was deep inside our heads.

More than a few tense minutes passed as we ate the rest of our meal in silence. I couldn’t think clearly about the impact such a thing might have. On one hand, it seemed and felt like a terrible responsibility to know of such a thing and not be able to explore its meaning and depth. On the other, it seemed as if this was the intended purpose of such a thing, and if it were ever used, then who ever did use it had no interest in fucking with us, at least so far as I could tell.

I rose and tapped my fingers on the console on the way out the door, paying the check. The doors opened, something they wouldn’t have done had I not paid the tab. Dawn and I entered into an evening that had began to carry a slight chill with it. We walked quiety, both of us wrapped in thought, back to the terminal we arrived in.

“ We shouldn’t talk more about this. Not tonight anyway, and for now, let’s keep this between us.” I advised.

“ The twins will know, and I want to talk to the rest of the crew about it.” Dawn protested. “Not tonight. If you must, check on me tonight while we sleep, but let me form a plan before we start adding variables, Please.”

“Ok.”

“Where are you sleeping?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful.

“Bank 4, You?”

“The same. Let’s go”

The capsule ride to bank 4 was quiet. I meditated on the “days” events. I could feel the amount of information I had gleaned sloshing around in my head. I couldn’t get a handle on any of it. I was overwhelmed and needed rest. We arrived at bank 4, checked in, and proceeded to the nearest empty sleeping chamber. I was a big place and looked like a maze of doors, each separated by about eight feet of walls spewing advertisements.

I bid good evening to Dawn as she walked down the hall to the nearest vacant chamber. I walked down the corridor of light and found an empty room. I tapped my fingers on the entryway and was let into the small room the size of a walk in closet. It had the standard sleepchamber amenities, a PF station and a bed. I stepped into the corridor, punched in the keycodes for the bathroom and my sleeping clothes. The bed itself had begun configuring to my preferences upon my initial entry, and by the time I had finished my work in the bathroom, it was arranged to my liking. A beam shot down on two white pieces of fabric which made a shoomping sound as they seemed to inflate and become pillows. I laid down and tapped on the wall requesting from my library a slowly rotating spacescape. The walls complied, and I drifted into a dreamless sleep staring at the stars.

Read Chapter 7