Thirty Four Minutes DEAD (24 page)

The couple drifted into a contented sleep after their energetic love making, lying sprawled out on the thick-pile burgundy carpet. Levene awoke Vain the following morning, and the first thing the couple did involved a continuation of the previous night’s sexual activity. When the MC project pair climbed into Vain’s car later that day, their collective fatigue couldn’t stop them sharing a celebration French kiss outside Levene’s London hideaway.

Levene had asked to drive Vain’s car for the return journey to Designation B, and Greg had made no objection concerning her request. A short distance before the project base, the car’s progress was halted by a long tail back. Neither of the project pair suspected anything problematic at this stage, but suddenly a group of individuals started flitting between the halted vehicles and then the couple did start to become suspicious.

Most of the people who snaked through the traffic peered into vehicles, to be met with indignant curses from the infuriated drivers. When Vain noticed that some of the individuals wore press identity badges, he informed Levene and she encoded an emergency call signal on her ‘
Comm-Lynx
’. As two of the figures approached Vain’s car, a cold sweat started to form on his brow. Both individuals had tabloid newspaper titles emblazoned on the camera cases that they carried. One of the two seemed to recognise the project pair, and he broke into a run as his rival reporter let out a triumphal shout when he too recognised who the pair were. After this dual recognition, a mad scramble ensued until thirty reporters laid siege to Greg’s vehicle.

The pressure of the jostling reporters started to rock the car, and Vain opened his window halfway, to be met by a barrage of questions. He realised that the media avalanche that Denison had expected after the global MC revelation had started. The crowd swelled to over fifty, and scuffles started to break out between angry drivers and loud-mouthed reporters. When Gregory Vain had opened his passenger window he had initially shouted that the reporters had made a mistake and he had been quite adamant in his denial of MC project involvement. It didn’t take long however for the project pair to realise the futility of any further denials and Vain closed his window as howls of protest emanated from the journalistic ranks. When the car started to tilt dangerously, the project pair decided to implement the ‘power authorisation’ that MC project affiliation enabled them to call upon in situations like the one they were experiencing and both project members thus reached for their concealed firearms.

After brandishing an Uzi through the car window, Vain intimated that he was going to get out of the vehicle. Upon seeing the weapon, the crowd withdrew a few metres and then Vain got out to read a brief statement that all front-line MC project personnel carried.

As cameras clicked repeatedly, Vain started to read, whilst his left hand directed the gun toward the crowd.

“As a member of the Memory-Camera exploration project, I am empowered with the highest authority from both the defence forces of Britain and the United States of America. This authority empowers me to contravene conventional forces of law and order. As a member of the said organisation, I can use a firearm if I have ‘reasonable cause’ for alarm, with regard to my safety and MC project security. As a collective force that bars MC project safe passage, I must warn you that if this form of obstruction remains, I will be forced to use the weapon that I am permitted to carry. You must disperse to enable my access”.

After he had read the statement, Vain turned to get back to his car. Questions seemed to come from every direction but one cut through the homogenised verbal chaos, being heard quite easily by Gregory Vain.

“People claim to see a lot, Mr Vain. Christ; the devil; aliens! Are you going to visually determine truth here?”

As Jess Wheeler’s security unit arrived to break the crowd up, Vain couldn’t resist one sarcastic reply line to the journalist who had been heard above the rest.

“Write me an X-file. Fuck you”.

The reason Vain had singled out the one journalist for satirical attack was because she had actually got quite close to areas that Vain wished to explore in future MC project directions. He didn’t want any sensationalist reporter stealing any credit for future exploration areas.

Wheeler’s unit created a convoy to guide the project pair back to Designation B and as they entered the building, Denison met them. He was quite jovial in his tone and apparently not angry that the media had again detected the same two MC project personnel. His words were carefully selected to dispel any fears that Greg and Marcia may have had after this second detection.

“Hey folks, hang those long faces! It was just a matter of time until those bloodhounds sniffed you out. You may have had shit for brains in Washington but things have changed. After the global MC revelation, we knew that media relations would be kinda different. I mean we were fucking lucky before global exposure, you know. Four years back we had to wipe a pack of reporters in Cincinnati, then New York, and of course you know about Lassiter’s Washington press unit. Christ, Wheeler’s boys must have ‘retired’ over fifty reporters by now! You handled press detection perfectly - real pros and so long as you keep that up, you’ve got nothing to fear from me. Go and settle back in. Check out the other front-liners. They’ve been working solid on both main vault and mindsight extension explorations”.

Vain and Levene parted to go back to their respective rooms. Both Ko-Chai and Tavini were out, and thus Vain was free to envisage the headlines of tomorrow’s press on his own. He had settled back into his room when a knock on his door broke his train of thought. He was pleased to see that it was Diana Fearston who had sought his presence. He had tremendous admiration for this woman and was glad that she was his closest understudy. Fearston had been working solidly during the past week on both individual work and front-line team explorations with Hannah Nichol and Marco Sant. After a courteous greeting she proceeded to tell Vain of a significant finding that she had discovered in the membrane that separated the main visually-determined MC vault and the ‘mindsight’ extension.

“I’ve been working with my team to an intensive level of late Greg, and I have also had the opportunity to further my own neurological research. Our team have undertaken twenty-five mindsight explorations after you guys unlocked Braddock’s vault-extension visuals, and one exploration presented me with an enigma that could well upset Leif a bit! I carried out the explorations with Hannah and Marco but I was left to assess the screened results on my own. Braddock heard Levene read a passage from Revelation, but we opted for a fictional piece written by Hannah about a bad LSD trip. It was quite short, describing a series of powerful recurring visuals that envisaged hallucinations in their magnitude. The three key descriptive images concerned the allegorical figure of death in stilettos, a taxidermist devouring entrails from dead animals and blood from an angel’s veins lapping around the fires of hell. Each subject had the passage read to them three times as with Braddock, but they didn’t view their mindsight visuals afterwards. I was the sole reviewer”.

Diana Fearston paused for breath and Vain felt that his understudy shook a little as she continued.

“The first twenty-one screenings showed a great deal of commonality Greg, with every subject mentally rendering the three key images in their minds. Personal translations meant that slight variations in depiction occurred, but most imagery was created and stored along very similar visual lines. Subject 22 radically altered my concept of visual storage though, Greg! The mindsight visuals of Subject 22 initially tied in with the previous explorations, with the female volunteer rendering both death and the taxidermist along similar lines to the rest.

“After these two depictions though, there was nothing! You and I both know that ‘recent’ mindsight visuals mirror storage in the main MC vault, remaining at the front of the extension close to the dividing membrane for several hours, usually. With this in mind I got my team to undertake a second mindsight probe, deeper toward the core of the extension. As they hadn’t witnessed the screening they didn’t know what I was looking for, but my team leader prerogative meant that I didn’t have to enlarge upon my motivation. When I reviewed this secondary exploration, I just encountered images of non-prompted self created thought - there was no angel! I decided to interview Subject 22 in private on my own. I had a theory that the absent imagery may somehow have been transferred to the main visually-determined vault by dropping through a weak section in the dividing membrane. In effect my hypothesis pertained that thoughts could permeate the membrane, arriving into the main vault and thus deceiving the recipient in the process - making them believe the ‘dropped’ thoughts had a concrete reality and were a physical experience like the other images in the main section!”

Vain realised that Diana Fearston could well have uncovered an ‘Achilles heel’ in their project, if thoughts could actually fall through to an area of the brain which housed ‘real’ sight-determined imagery. After a brief pause for breath, Fearston continued.

“I began my questioning of Subject 22 by asking her what she recalled about her mindsight exploration. Her recollections backed up the absence of any angel imagery, as she only remembered hearing about death and the entrail devouring. That proved that her mindsight vault didn’t house the angel anywhere within its parameter. I then decided to test whether my theory pertaining to ‘fall-through’ had foundation, and asked her questions about imagery she had physically seen. I started by keeping the two themes of previous discussion. I subsequently asked her if she had witnessed any deaths in her lifetime and proceeded to link in horror, asking her about any horrific imagery she had witnessed. After she recalled imagery from a road crash she was involved in, I turned the line of inquiry to religious experiences, and after ten minutes I was able to ask if she had ever seen God or an angel. At first she was quite bemused, saying she wished that she had, and so I prompted further by asking her how she derived her concept of angels. She described books she had read as a child and paintings which she had witnessed in art galleries. Then almost as an afterthought, she added that she thought she had seen some in films. I knew that this was probably my cue and I concentrated on getting her to reveal more about instances where she had seen angels in films. She initially mentioned some light films like ‘Heaven Can Wait’ and ‘Carousel’ but eventually she said that she had some vague recollection of remembering a horror film that involved an angel. I decided to ask her if she would be explored one last time and after some initial reluctance, she eventually agreed.

“I told my team to perform a main vault exploration on Subject 22, and although it was the third exploration, they didn’t seem to have any suspicions with regard to my repeated testing of this woman, as occasionally our work had explored both vault sections with regard to the same individual on other occasions.

“Before Subject 22 ‘went under’, I had primed her in private to keep remembering the aforementioned images of angels in film.

“When I reviewed the subsequent visuals in private, I had to initially sit through ‘light’ viewing but then I got my reward! The bleeding angel and the blood circling the fires of hell were both there, and although the image had a poor visual quality, it made direct links to the read passage. The brain of Subject 22 had encoded the image as film seemingly as a kind of safety device, because if it had been rendered as a product of ‘actual experience’, you can imagine the psychological damage it could have done to the woman; converting it to a cinema experience was a form of subconscious protection! The image was probably damaged during the journey through the membrane and this would explain the poor visual quality”.

Fearston was sweating due to the complexities surrounding what she had revealed to Vain, but he didn’t interrupt her because he sensed that she still had more information to divulge. After extending a grateful smile to her front-line mentor, the woman continued.

“This exploration was my
déjà-vu
research realised and yet extended, Greg! For some years I have believed that thoughts could been conceived as actuality in a person, and the membrane penetration proved this to be correct, but I never anticipated that the main MC vault section could convert images like I discovered here! The fact that Subject 22 was protected by the dominant vault activating the imagery as a ‘distant’ eleven-second cinema experience shows just how complex the relationship between the two vault sections is! We now know that the two sections have the capacity to act independently of each other, like a mental duality within one person! There’s another issue though Greg, and it’s the factor Leif would hate. I have shown that mindsight imagery can break through the membrane into the ‘heightened visual’ vault of ‘experiences’, and therefore one could argue that the validity of some of our exploration results could be questioned. I know that we had enough DNA evidence to back up Sandford-Everett’s conviction and thus society was certain of his guilt, but not all murderers leave as much genetic information behind. After my Subject 22 findings, people could argue that an individual could envisage their own murder, and yet the guilty party in their mindsight might not perpetrate the killing if it was carried out in actuality. We all envisage people attacking us if our suspicions are aroused, and if some of our mindsight imagery fell through the membrane like in the Subject 22 instance, couldn’t our main vaults wrongly implicate a person if the worst befell us?