John Hawks - The Traveler

He nodded slightly, like an athlete acknowledging the crowd, and sauntered across the courtyard to the Tomb. All these buildings had been constructed and all these people had been assembled for this moment. Bet it cost a lot of money, he thought. Bet it cost millions. Michael had always felt that he was special, destined for greatness, and now he was being treated like a movie star in a high-budget film that had only one role, a single face on the screen. If he really could travel to another realm, then they should give him their respect. It wasn’t luck that he was here. It was his birthright.

A STEEL DOOR slid open and they entered a vast, shadowy room. A glass-enclosed gallery, about twenty feet above the smooth concrete floor, ran around all four walls. Light from control panels and computer monitors glowed inside the gallery and Michael saw that several technicians were looking down at him. The air was cold and dry and he could hear a faint humming sound.

A steel surgical table with a small pillow for his head was in the middle of the room. Dr. Richardson stood near the table. The nurse and Dr. Lau were checking the monitoring equipment and the contents of a steel rack that held test tubes filled with different colored liquids. Eight wires connected to silver-colored electrode plates lay beside the little white pillow. The separate wires were spliced together into a thick black cable that slithered off the table and disappeared into the floor.

“You okay?” Lawrence asked.

“So far.”

Lawrence lightly touched Michael’s arm and remained near the door with the two security men. They were acting like he was going to run out of the building, jump over the wall, and hide in the forest. Michael walked to the center of the Tomb, pulled off his knit cap, and handed it to the nurse. Wearing only a T-shirt and the drawstring pants, he lay faceup on the table. The room was cold, but he felt ready for anything, like an athlete about to play an important game.

Richardson leaned over him and taped the eight sensor wires to the eight electrode plates on his skull. Now his brain was directly connected to the quantum computer, and the technicians up in the gallery could monitor his neurological activity. Richardson looked nervous, and Michael wished that the doctor’s face was concealed with a surgical mask. To hell with him. It wasn’t his brain that was skewered with little copper wires. It’s my life, thought Michael. My risk.

“Good luck,” Richardson said.

“Forget luck. Let’s just do it and see what happens.”

Richardson nodded and slipped on a radio headset so he could talk to the technicians in the gallery. He was responsible for Michael’s brain while Dr. Lau and the nurse were in charge of the rest of the body. They taped sensors to his chest and neck so they could track his vital signs. The nurse swabbed topical anesthetic on his arm, then slipped an intravenous needle through his skin. The needle was attached to a plastic tube and a saline solution began to drip into his veins.

“Are you getting a wave range?” Richardson whispered into the microphone. “Good. Yes. That’s very good.”

“We need a baseline to start out,” he told Michael. “So we’re going to give the brain different kinds of stimuli. Nothing to think about here. You’ll just react.”

The nurse went to the steel cabinet and came back with several test tubes. The first batch contained tastes: salty, sour, bitter, sweet. Then different smells: rose, vanilla, and something that reminded Michael of burned rubber. Richardson kept murmuring into the headset as he took a special flashlight and aimed colored lights at Michael’s eyes. They played sounds at various volumes and touched his face with a feather, a block of wood, and a rough piece of steel.

Satisfied with the sensory data, Richardson asked Michael to count backward, add numbers, and describe the dinner served to him last night. Then they went into deep memory and Michael had to tell them about the first time he saw the ocean and the first time he saw a naked woman. Did you have your own room when you were a teenager? What did it look like? Describe the furniture and the posters on the wall.

Finally Richardson stopped asking him questions and the nurse squirted some water into his mouth. “Okay,” Richardson told the technicians. “I think we’re ready.”

The nurse reached into the cabinet and took out an IV bag filled with a diluted mixture of the drug they called 3B3. Kennard Nash had called Michael to talk about the drug. He explained that 3B3 was a special bacterium developed in Switzerland by a top scientific team. The drug was very expensive and difficult to manufacture, but the toxins created from the bacterium seemed to increase neural energy. As the nurse raised the bag higher, the viscous turquoise-blue liquid sloshed around in the IV bag.

She took away the neutral saline solution, attached the IV bag, and a thread of 3B3 raced down the plastic tube to the needle in his arm. Richardson and Dr. Lau stared at him as if he were going to float off into another dimension.

“How do you feel?” Richardson asked.

“Normal. How long does it take for this stuff to kick in?”

“We don’t know.”

“Heart rate slightly elevated,” Dr. Lau informed them. “Respiration unchanged.”

Trying not to show his disappointment, Michael gazed at the ceiling for a few minutes, then closed his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t really a Traveler, or perhaps the new drug didn’t work. All this effort and money had led to failure.

“Michael?”

He opened his eyes. Richardson was staring at him. The room was still cool, but there were beads of sweat on the doctor’s forehead.

“Start counting backward from one hundred.”

“We already did that.”

“They want to return to a neurological baseline.”

“Forget it. This isn’t going to…”

Michael moved his left arm and saw something extraordinary. A hand and wrist composed of little points of light emerged from his flesh hand like a ghost pushing through a locked cabinet. Lifeless, his flesh hand flopped back down onto the table while the ghost hand remained.

He knew instantly that this thing-this apparition-had always been part of him, inside his body. The ghost hand reminded him of the simple drawings made of constellations like the Twins or the Archer. His hand was composed of tiny stars that were connected by thin, almost imperceptible lines of light. He couldn’t move this ghost hand like the rest of the body. If he thought-move thumb, clench fingers-nothing happened. He had to think of what he wanted the hand to do in the future and, after a brief interval, it responded to his vision. It was tricky. Everything operated with a slight delay, like moving your body underwater.

“What do you think?” he asked Richardson.

“Start counting backward please.”

“What do you think of my hand? Can’t you see what’s going on?”

Richardson shook his head. “Both of your hands are lying on the examination table. Can you describe what you see?”

Michael was finding it difficult to talk. It wasn’t just moving his lips and tongue; it was the awkward, laborious effort to conceptualize ideas and come up with words for them. The mind was faster than words. Much faster.

“I-think-that…” He paused for what felt like a long time. “This is not a hallucination.”

“Describe, please.”

“This was always inside me.”

“Describe what you are seeing, Michael.”

“You-are-blind.”

Michael’s annoyance grew stronger, twisting into anger, and he pushed with his forearms to sit up on the table. He felt as if he were cracking his way out of something old and brittle, a capsule of yellowed glass. Then he realized that the upper part of his ghost body was vertical while his flesh body remained behind. Why couldn’t they see this? It was all very clear. But Richardson continued to stare at the body on the table as if it was an equation that would suddenly produce its own answer.