In Spirit Read online

  “Volunteers like her call it ‘ghosting',” someone behind him said. “You'll see why if you decide to follow our program, and volunteer to try it for yourself."

  The “volunteers” in the cages beyond the Plexiglas pane were not other prisoners, according to the researchers. The volunteers were mostly historians and cultural anthropologists, a handful of students, and others who routinely “ghosted back to the past” from this facility round-the-clock. Raed's researcher-guides claimed the yellow projection cages allowed people to experience the physical reality of the past without fully being part of it.

  But Raed knew that it was all a trick of some kind. If those volunteers were experiencing any sort of “projection,” it was the sort of computer-fabricated reality the outside world used to call—what was the word? Oh yes: a simulation.

  That was the only thing “projection” could be, the only thing Raed could bring himself to believe....

  His rehab programmers seemed prepared for Raed's disbelief.

  For the rest of the night, they cloistered Raed and his two Lew guards in the otherwise-empty conference room, so that Raed could browse through “holeos"—interactive 3-D training videos. The holeos began with a list of weird implications of “classical quantum theory": how subatomic particles appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared, how such particles could exist in many places at once, the development of a mathematics that suggested particles were boring between dimensions.

  Apparently Raed's rehab programmers knew he'd been exposed to such strange concepts before, while studying for his certificate in electronics.

  Of course they knew. Raed's electronics training came out at the trial because his certificate got him a position with the airline, a low-level job that allowed him to scrutinize airport security.... Anyway, one of Raed's electronics courses had touched on quantum theory—mainly for the students continuing on into cell-phone or computer technology. Raed hadn't understood the half-day “quantum overview” his college course included.

  According to the holeos, Raed wasn't the only one who hadn't understood. Most physicists chose to treat the theory simply as a convenient way to calculate and predict the positions of particles, rather than believe the world could really be riddled by multiple dimensions. The holeo invited Raed to imagine Copernicus and Galileo choosing to ignore the overall implication of their new way of calculating and predicting the positions of the planets—and refusing to believe the Sun could really be the center of the solar system.

  Raed didn't see why it was important for him to know or imagine any of this. But he didn't want anyone to think he was backing out of the program. He didn't want to be driven back to Lew, not just yet. And he was an expert at biding his time. Patience and playing the game were the essential survival skills of a long-term prisoner.

  So Raed patiently sat through a tedious holeo-guided history of quantum-in-the-large, which elevated the theory from the subatomic realm up to far larger scales. He listened patiently to young scientists attacking the notion that “multiple dimensions collapsed into a single dimension” whenever a human observer happened along—how could a theory of matter seriously include human consciousness in a central role? He patiently examined 3-D renderings of the first machines built to scan “N-space,” a theoretical realm that surrounded and suffused the visible Universe with all manner of strange dimensions.

  But when the holeos moved on to the topic of “forces experienced during projection into N-space,” Raed must have groaned aloud, because his researcher-hosts came in and turned off the holeos. They didn't seem disappointed; perhaps they'd thought he'd give up on their theoretical material much sooner.

  Next they let Raed watch an old pre-millennium black-and-white movie that was supposed to give him an idea of what it would be like to be “projected” to a city he could do little but wander through.

  The setting was Berlin, and the city was revealed through the eyes of two angels wandering among the living—angels who resembled two somber German men in stylish dark greatcoats. The citizens of Berlin couldn't see them, but the two forlorn-looking angels could see and hear people talking in the world around them. They could even hear the thoughts of people, although in those parts of the film the soundtrack reverted to German, so he didn't get to hear what the citizens were thinking. All he could tell from the tone of their untranslated thoughts was whether they were sad or happy, angry or afraid....

  After it was over, one researcher sat down with him, described the projection experience as a lot like being a ghost lurking in an otherwise real world. Projection volunteers could see the physical environment of the past perfectly, but could not be seen by people in that past.

  “Because,” the researcher laboriously explained, “light is so low in mass that it merely has one-way transdimensionality. Volunteers can see light from the past, but past-states can never receive light from farther along Time's dimension."

  Raed nodded dutifully, wondering what all the researchers here were really up to, and why they would try so hard to make him believe in an impossibility....

  An hour before dawn, he was hustled back to the armored van waiting in the loading dock, handed printed materials to review if he wanted to, then whisked out through the unseen but audible protestors and returned to Lew to spend the day resting in his cell. Which was fine by him. Stepping back through the door of Cell #1 felt like waking from a dream. He didn't feel so out of sorts here, so confused and vulnerable.

  But he couldn't sleep. The thought that he'd just been beyond the penitentiary's walls had opened up a crack inside his thinking. He still didn't know what to make of his night out. So much scientific argument just to convince him of something untrue?

  Eventually he gave up on sleep altogether, and began looking over the strange explanations in the support material they'd given him, looking for loopholes, looking for the truth behind their lies. Raed used to be an imaginative man. But imagination was not a good thing to have in prison and he felt very rusty. Long-forgotten thoughts stirred up faded memories of his teenage struggle to master challenging Western concepts—an education paid for by the organization, the money funneled to Raed through his cousins Nazir and Sayf, both of whom died back on 9/11.

  The truth about “deep-projection” finally dawned on Raed. Now he saw through the rehab programmers’ game, and saw how to get what he wanted: a chance to see his daughter Basma, whom Raed hadn't seen since she was three years old.

  With that reward firmly in mind, Raed finally fell asleep.

  The next night, he was again driven out of the Appalachians to the deep-projection complex. And again he heard protesters out in force as the van went through the complex's gates, although the van's walls muffled whatever was being shouted at him....

  Waiting for him in the same conference room as before were the three psychologists and the two so-called senior researchers—his “projection parole board,” for all intents and purposes. These five men could approve his participation in the program or send him packing for the rest of his life.

  “Questions, Raed?"

  He held up the printed materials he'd brought back with him. “Is it really necessary for me to know any of this before I can project?” Raed already knew the answer, but was curious to see how they'd try to rationalize it to him.

  A compact researcher with close-cropped gray bristles instead of hair took the printouts back from Raed. “You reviewed all this?"

  “Yes."

  “Well then, let's see where last night's holeo-lessons broke off....” He flipped to the final pages. “Ah, yes: N-space forces and the role mass plays in them. Complex stuff—but crucial to understanding what you'll encounter during projection, how you can move around, and so on."

  An evasive answer that simply pressed ahead with the logic crafted to convince him. Indeed, that was the ultimate purpose of all this preparatory theory:

  To make Raed believe “projection” would show him the real past, so that the psychological benefits of the
rehab program could take effect.

  The science was all part of the rehab, part of the game these psychologists were playing with him. He recognized their bag of tricks well enough.

  But Raed could play the game better than anyone. After all, he'd lived in America for seven years and played the game of being one of the ordinary people on his Brooklyn street without anyone suspecting his deep-seated separateness. So he would play along with tonight's game, stay on the move inside his head, hop from room to room through the labyrinth until he came out as the winner....

  This time, the compact senior researcher with the bristle-hair remained behind when the others left. The man introduced himself as Francis Drummond, a volunteer himself during the earliest test-projections. He seemed committed to helping Raed understand the hard stuff.

  “Get through an hour with me, and you'll get to project for the rest of the night,” Francis promised as he began summoning images onto the conference table's display-surface: the Moon; a mountain; a building; a metal barricade. According to Francis, each of the displayed objects was massive enough to exert force “into many N-space dimensions.” But people who projected through N-space into the past could apparently thrust their ghostly hands right through a foam mattress—or even through a pane of glass, if they were patient enough.

  Raed nodded, knowing all this information was being trotted out to explain away the defects of the simulation he'd be projecting into. “Will I be able to walk through walls, like the two German angels in that black-and-white movie?” he asked, getting into the spirit of the game.

  “If it's the wall of a tent, sure. There's a kind of ‘tingly give’ when you step through thin structures. But you can't step through ordinary walls of concrete or steel, no. It all comes back to mass and massive structure...."

  Over the course of two hours with Francis, Raed struggled to keep on top of the complex concepts paraded before him. Francis even told him about the big surprise from the earliest test-projections: “We discovered that life-forms of sufficient mass exert some kind of energy into a few dimensions; we call these ‘biomass signatures.’ Volunteers pick up these signatures when animals of a certain size wander close to them."

  How did they simulate that, Raed wondered. “That include people?"

  Francis nodded. “Conscious animals exert the strongest signatures. Please don't interpret this as something ‘psychic'; individual thoughts are far too fleeting to be sensed. They essentially have no weight. But strong emotions can last a long time in the forebrain, fill the hindbrain, contort the face, change the way we walk, permeate our muscle-tissues. Massive, you might say."

  Francis seemed to be trying to reawaken Raed's mind as much as teach him about projection. And that was all right with Raed. Because if he was going to go through their rehab program, and notice all the things they'd want him to notice, and win the reward they'd promised him, he'd need to be on the ball....

  “Well, that about covers it,” Francis finally announced, shutting off the conference table. “Any last questions?"

  Raed sensed this was a test he must pass. “You said gravity has ‘two-way transdimensionality'?"

  “Yes.” Francis seemed pleased. “It's a strong-weak interaction. Gravity from the past is exerted strongly onto the N-space fold you'll be in, and your own mass exerts itself weakly onto the past—"

  “Doesn't adding my mass to the past change the past? I thought paradoxes were outlawed by quantum-in-the-large.” Raed's rusty brain was beginning to work again. He wanted to show this clever man he'd been listening and he would catch flaws in his logic, if Francis wasn't careful.

  “Paradoxes are ruled out. Our technology wouldn't work at all if it were possible to project into the future, for instance. And according to quantum-in-the-large, people who project through N-Space to the past already visited that past the first time around, so to speak. So their mass was accounted for, and their presence won't change anything. They can only go back and weakly interact because they were there all along."

  “I understand you perfectly."

  “Excellent.” Francis stood up. “I'll send in a medic who'll take you downstairs, get you hooked up to the cage."

  The man strode out of the room.

  And Raed waited, feeling out of his element, out of his cell, completely out of sorts. He glanced at the guards watching him from their shadowy corner of the room. He glanced at a bookshelf against the conference room wall, took down a text, looked at the cover: Creating Transient N-space Intersections with Past Time.

  A book about a false bunch of theories? The book's spine was cracked worse than Raed's copy of Shaherazade, as though it had been thumbed through many times.

  The crack deep inside his thinking hadn't gone away; it was still down there, wedged wider by all the information they'd fed him. And now a hint of fear was seeping up through that crack.... Because Raed knew what his rehab programmers were up to, he could guess their “precisely targeted-destination,” oh yes.

  They intended to project him back to 9/11.

  A burly male medic arrived, and led Raed and his two guards down to the same curtained chamber off the main projection arena, where the guards removed his restraint-collar. The medic explained that the chamber's projection cage was the only one isolated in the facility, set up just for Raed. Then he helped Raed don the harness, which was worn under his clothes, against his body so the ‘trodes could record biofeedback. After strapping it on, Raed got into a magnetic jumpsuit. The medic told him he could put his clothes on over the top of the jumpsuit.

  So he did, fingers trembling as he re-buttoned his shirt....

  The pair of lawyers who'd first appeared at his review back in Lew suddenly reappeared with a slate for him to sign. They informed Raed about the protests being held outside the facility. The protests were not about him, they said; no one outside knew he was in here.

  “What are they protesting?"

  Apparently the people outside felt projection technology was too dangerous to be used. The lawyers assured Raed no volunteer who'd undergone projection had been physically harmed by the process itself; it was emotional damage, that was the real risk. The potent “biomass signatures” people gave off in the past could be quite corrosive.

  “That's the only danger?"

  One of the lawyers told him, “There's a movement called ‘New Spiritualism’ that contends the transdimensional interaction can be positive. Some New Spiritualists are sponsoring your rehab program, by the way...."

  But Raed was hardly listening, seeing more of the truth peeking out from behind their lies. The protestors outside were opposed to the simulations this technology produced. And now Raed had been brought here—because if they could convince him the simulations were real and use them to help him rehabilitate, wouldn't that be a big coup for a beleaguered technology?

  Raed signed the slate held out to him. Then the lawyers asked the medic to strap a special “ripcord” over Raed's clothing, reiterated that he could back out at any time, and as they left the chamber, his personal projection team came in. An Asian senior researcher, a boyish-looking controls operator, and finally a woman psychologist—a Muslim psychologist, no less, wearing a black cotton burqa that kept her hidden and proper. Didn't they realize Raed was no longer a devout?

  As Raed was introduced by his guards, the woman's wide-set black eyes looked coldly over the burqa-veil at him. No doubt she'd been sent by the Arab-American Rights group who'd petitioned to get him into this crazy rehab program.

  The team quickly took their positions, the medic helping Raed through the yellow bars into the cage, then pulling down the blue coil-cables and magnetically latching them to anchor spots on the jumpsuit beneath Raed's clothes. The moment the medic stepped out of the cage, the operators powered up the blue cables, which recoiled, hoisting Raed comfortably into midair. He tried to calm his breathing, and listened to the chatter around him.

  “Got five hours."

  “Time for, say, ten projection
s?"

  “Aim for ten, minimum."

  “Curtains open or closed?"

  Raed realized this was addressed to him. “Open.” He didn't care if anyone looked in; he wanted to look out. So the curtains were drawn aside, and Raed peered at the hundred-odd cages across the main floor, which were again all occupied by volunteers, some in jumpsuits, some in tracksuits, some in regular clothes. Presumably this facility was packed day and night. He heard something below him, and realized the Muslim psychologist had stepped into the cage.

  “Your program for tonight involves a number of projections, all of them focused on a primary time-locus—"

  “I know where you're sending me,” he told her. “Back to the day I was convicted of being a party to. As punishment,” he added.

  The psychologist shook her veiled head. “It's up to you what you get out of the projection experience. If you want the offer made to you upheld, you'll have to stick the program out. On the other hand, if you decide you no longer want to continue—” She indicated the ripcord round his waist. “Pull this, you'll instantly shut down the cage-frame and return to the present."

  Raed had been advised by the lawyers that any ripcord shutdowns would be treated as a withdrawal from the program. “I'm not afraid,” he said to her.

  He was curious, though. Raed hadn't thought much about 9/11 in nearly two decades. All by itself the mind sprouted rooms within rooms to tuck away what was destructive. And tucked a hundred rooms away from the Raed of today was the twenty-four-year-old Raed who'd aided and abetted his cousins Nazir and Sayf. He no longer had any connection to that Raed, but he was curious to know how history now looked on the events of that day.... The medic was now strapping a lightweight breather-mask round Raed's neck. Would it secrete some kind of hallucinatory gas?

  “In case we project you to the wrong coordinates,” the woman psychologist explained, still standing below him. “You'd pass out in certain environments, but there's little chance of real physical harm. Anyway, you can use the microphone on the breather to call out to us during projection. We'll hear you. The people of the past won't hear you, remember. Sound can only travel one way across the dimensional fold, just like light. Now brace yourself,” she warned him. “The world of the past's going to feel both startlingly real and surreal."