Star Force: Psionics (SF29) Read online

  1

  May 28, 2406

  Solar System

  Earth

  Jason sat cross-legged inside a white spherical pod, patiently waiting while the Star Force medical staff scanned him using their most advanced sensors. He neither heard nor saw anything other than the calm interior of the pod, but the equipment was bombarding him with numerous types of energy, probing straight through his clothes and flesh and detailing his body in intricate design as the machine worked to compile a composite digital clone for the medtechs to research.

  While the pod was calm and tranquil, with his body reflecting the same, the trailblazer’s mind was not. It was a low level storm, constantly raging that he had to maintain control over constantly. The pressure exerted on him, and by him in return, kept his mind in a semi-numb state that left him partially vulnerable to his surrounding environment, given that his situational awareness wasn’t at its normally high level.

  That said, his ‘spherical vision’ helped to compensate for the disadvantage, allowing him to see in all directions around him even with his eyes closed. At the moment they were, but he hadn’t turned on the ability, which he’d subsequently learned how to control and the more times he used it the easier it became to switch it on and off. Despite the pain, he’d been diligently working to improve the ability, learning to focus it where he wanted for greater range and detail, almost as if it were a radar beam.

  “That’s good, Jason,” a medtech’s voice echoed through the small pod from a hidden speaker. “Begin phase 2 please.”

  Without answering Jason sucked in a deep breath and slowly released it. As he did he flipped on his spherical vision and the interior curve of the chamber manifested itself beyond his closed eyelids. It stretched all around him, down to the flat floor beneath, while ignoring his clothes by means of a minimum distance function of his mind. If an object had reached out to poke him in the arm, it would have disappeared in mind’s eye a couple of inches away from contact while he was in this ‘viewing’ mode.

  No such objects were present though. He was alone in the chamber with only himself and his clothes. Even all sounds from the exterior were being blocked, so as not to affect the subject undergoing the scans. Jason ‘looked’ at the inside of the pod, seeing nothing but the tactile-like sensation of its inner surface for several minutes, then the medtech’s voice came on again.

  “Begin phase 3 please.”

  With a bit of increased pain, Jason forced his spherical vision to switch from ‘viewing’ mode to ‘proximity’ mode. The walls of the pod disappeared and the perimeter of his body seemed to glow, with his clothes being registered in his mind as foreign objects, especially his shoes that appeared like heavy boulders around his feet. He could feel his eyelashes, the small hairs on his body, and the thicker ones on his head bristling like a blonde porcupine, though he could see no color. Everything felt black and white and grainy, though in proximity mode the grains decreased in size, offering enhanced accuracy.

  Jason had been on Earth for nearly a week, and one of the first tests the medtechs had run after thoroughly debriefing him was to test his level of sensory sensitivity. While in proximity mode they’d touched various parts of his body with tiny objects, similar in size and pressure to ants and flies. With a signal button he was supposed to register exactly when contact was made, and for control purposes they’d run the test with his spherical vision turned off, though they had to take his word for it at first.

  The control tests had been in three stages. The first stage was neutral, just having him come in and be politely prodded with his eyes closed. Second stage was for him to go through a sensory cleansing meditation and dial his senses up as much as he could. It was something Jason was familiar with, much akin to noises sounding louder when they broke into a quiet setting, while noises sounded fainter after, say, coming out of a very loud concert. The body adjusted its ‘normal’ based on what was going on around it, so as to keep as accurate as possible without overloading.

  Stage three had been going the opposite way. He’d gone through a short but intense workout in the pyramid with some of the other Archons then come straight to the testing area, where they repeated the same level of touch tests. As expected, there was a variance…and from the data gathered they’d constructed a baseline for his tactile sensitivity, which differed depending on which part of his body they touched, with the areas that saw the most contact, such as the pads of his feet, being the most unresponsive, given the amount of stimuli they processed on a daily basis…not to mention the thin callouses he’d developed from so much kicking and running.

  With that biological map in place they’d repeated the tests with him using his spherical sense in proximity mode…and found an insanely sharp increase to his tactile sense. Even the post-workout mode was sharper than the meditative calm had been. How he’d been enhancing his tactile sense had been a mystery for the other Archons who’d arrived at the training summit before him, but eventually one of the medtechs had stumbled onto an erroneous data packet that led one of the engineers on station to deduce the presence of an energy field.

  With that avenue of thought now before them, Star Force had hastily brought in energy sensors and confirmed small amounts from the four Archons showing tidbits of the spherical vision…enough to convince them to design and build a much more complicated and powerful sensor, which Jason was now sitting in.

  The trailblazer was unlike any of the others, given that his abilities were so much more advanced, so this test would hopefully give the medtechs plenty of data to chew on while the Archons went about the discovery process in their own training-inspired way.

  “Excellent. Phase 4 please.”

  Jason shut down his proximity mode and instead pushed out his spherical vision around him, going beyond the boundaries of the pod and ‘seeing’ through the walls a few feet…which was all the further his range would go at the moment. As prompted, he compressed his spherical vision down to a narrow come and pressed it out forward, allowing him to see two of the medtechs outside near a terminal.

  He moved his ‘spotlight’ around, all the while sitting motionless inside the pod. Jason counted 9 people in the room in total, with another four in the one below and at least 8 in the room above, though it was so busy with feet walking in and out that he couldn’t be sure how many there actually were. His vision wouldn’t extend throughout the room, nor even far enough to touch the ceiling, but he could see several sets of legs up to the knees, but he couldn’t focus close enough to see through their clothes as he could with the medtechs nearby.

  It was strange, given that he could adjust what he was seeing. One moment the walls of the pod were opaque, then with a mental twist he could see the components inside, layer by layer if he wanted, so long as the material didn’t get too dense. Like Superman, the heavier elements blocked his vision, or rather some of them did and didn’t. Which ones were a continuing subject of interest for the medtechs and engineers who were continuing to try and examine the energy fields he was producing in order to ‘see’ in this fashion.

  Those energy fields were part of what they were measuring now in the pod, along with his body’s reactions, trying to determine how and where he was producing them. This wasn’t the first time they’d put him in the pod, and each time they did they gathered enough data to have the engineers reconfigure the device in a new way, as if they were tuning it to settings they were just now discovering, making this whole exercise a massive beta test.

  “Thank you. Rest a moment.”

  Jason did as prompted and released the vision, causing another blip of pain in the transition, though the power drain in his head diminished. It didn’t pull much, but there was definitely an energy e
xpenditure of some sort pulling from an inner reserve that seemed to refill gradually. In the past his head had been so chewed up that he’d had a hard time analyzing it, and though the pain wasn’t gone he’d been able to define several things about his abilities, first of which was that his ‘reserves’ were actually three different pools of energy, one of which fed the spherical vision.

  “Begin phase 5.”

  Jason opened his eyes and looked down at the small marble he held cradled in a fold of the material of his pants where his legs crossed. He’d placed it there half an hour ago rather than hold it in his hand or place it on the floor. It’d been invisible during all but his proximity mode, but now that he looked at it both his proximity mode and viewing mode activated, piggybacking onto his vision in an odd way that he hadn’t quite been able to pin down yet.

  The senses pulled from what he thought of as the secondary pool of energy, while he painfully released the floodgates on the primary and fed power down a line of connection and into the marble, gripping it in a different type of energy field and lifting it up into the air in front of him, where he held it aloft as the sensors scanned both him and the fields he was producing.

  Meanwhile the tertiary pool of energy lingered in his mind. At first he hadn’t been sure it was even there, for he never could seem to make it do anything, but given enough experience poking around his own head he’d confirmed that there was in fact another reserve there, smaller in size, but that was probably because he hadn’t used it for anything, and if/when he did it would probably grow larger like the others had with training.

  Holding the marble aloft took a good deal of concentration, but his primary pool of energy had grown to the point where the ‘physical’ aspect of lifting the lightweight object wasn’t an issue. At present he’d have trouble budging his shoe, even without his foot in it, but a marble was definitely within his ability to manipulate and given the size of this one, which he carried with him most of the time for practice sake, he could maintain the mid-air suspension for a little over 5 minutes.

  His record with the white orb was 5:39, but this test wouldn’t last more than a minute, for the medtechs didn’t want his energy depleted.

  True to their word, the voice came back again 32 seconds later.

  “Begin phase 6.”

  Jason closed his eyes and concentrated, feeling his ‘grip’ on the marble slip as his vision went away. Relying now only on his spherical sight for coordination, he kept the marble aloft then pulled it to the left and set it into a slow orbit around his body…which was very difficult to maneuver. Fortunately it was something that Jason practiced regularly, otherwise he’d only have been able to manage straight lines.

  “Thank you. Rest now,” the medtech said after five full rotations.

  Jason guided the marble back down to the niche where his legs crossed and set it into the fold of cloth where it had originally been, then bit his teeth against the pain as he released the object. His head constantly hurt, but it always hurt more when he was changing something.

  The side of the pod cracked open and the two halves of the dome split, peeling apart and turning the floor he was sitting on into a round table with the various medtechs standing around. Some of which had thoroughly startled expressions.

  “What?” Jason asked, sliding off the table and pocketing the marble.

  “Have a look,” the lead medtech said, motioning him towards a console.

  He walked over and glanced at a detailed image of his sitting form, only without visuals. Instead it was a mass of data signatures, including auras surrounding his body. “Energy fields?”

  The medtech nodded. “And we finally have data on them. Yours are far more advanced than the others, though that’s probably due to the crudity of our equipment. You’re putting out larger fields, hence there’s more for us to gleam an understanding from.”

  “Hey,” one of the engineers said, mock offended. “Ingrate.”

  The lead medtech smiled ironically, but let the comment pass. “This is phase 2. Note how the field fills the entire chamber, and probably beyond. Now compare with stage 6,” he said as another medtech adjusted the scans for them.

  Jason squinted, trying to make out what he was seeing. There was a compressed line running from his head to the marble as it spun around, but the intersection between the line and the widespread energy field was…funky.

  “What am I seeing?”

  “I don’t know,” the medtech answered honestly. “But it’s significant.”

  “Well I do,” the engineer said, pointing a finger at the display. “At least I have a theory. The thin line is your lifting mechanism. Think of it like a tractor beam. Where the beam connects with the object there are secondary lines flowing back to source. Input and output.”

  “Flowing back through the other energy field?” Jason asked.

  “You’ve said that’s how you ‘see’ things. One field causes a change, the other senses the change. Look here,” the engineer continued, pointing at Jason’s feet in the image. “There are very faint lines of activity. My guess is because the field has something to ‘report’ back, whereas the rest of the area is open air up to the wall. Less stimuli there, so the field is less active? Just thinking out loud.”

  “I get what you’re saying,” Jason said, studying the display. “But tractor beam doesn’t fit. I can move an object on the other side of a blocking one. It’s like the field can penetrate matter, then condense at any point it wants to form a physical hold.”

  “Perhaps the line is your power conduit,” the medtech suggested, running a finger on the console from head to marble. “As you send energy down it fluctuates and gives the sensors something to ping off of.”

  “Perhaps, but the field is larger than is showing. It feels like a shadow I can throw over an object like a blanket, and once on top I can use precision control, but the blanket throwing is almost random. I can nudge it one way or another, but it’s pretty much all around me and that’s not showing here,” he said, tapping the screen.

  “Probably the sensitivity of the sensors,” the engineer grumbled. “We didn’t have much time to build them, so they’re still a bit on the crude side.”

  “Do you have enough data to work with for now…both of you?”

  “Yes,” the medtech said, while the engineer simply nodded.

  “See what you can make of it,” Jason said, placing a hand on the engineer’s shoulder as he walked by and out of the room. He continued down a few hallways before finding a short stairwell and heading down to ground floor…where he walked out of the building and onto the enormous command deck within the V’kit’no’sat pyramid.

  He grabbed one of two dozen tech-grade mongooses parked outside the Star Force-constructed building and tore off down the ‘road’ between the other out of place structures dotting what had once been dinosaur central. Their large lounging pads where now surrounded by a sea of buildings, none of which really even began to put a dent in the massive amount of floor space available.

  Jason followed the chaotic traffic patterns via painted lines on the deck that swerved in and out around buildings and pads, changing routes twice before he came to a newly constructed building, larger than all the others but still painfully short compared to the height of the chamber. The Archon locked up the brakes and skidded the low-powered mongoose to a halt in its parking place, turning off the whisper-quiet engine and heading inside the most recent addition to the training sanctum.

  What had originally been four buildings was now five, with this one larger than the other four combined, given that Davis anticipated many more Archons coming to the pyramid over time as they developed these peculiar mental abilities. The original sanctum had been built small, given that they only needed it for the handful of Archons on site, which was usually one or two doing some basic research through the database or helping the techs by working the hidden interfaces.

  On occasion there’d be a group of Archons that would come down to use
the holographic training programs, but in general there were few on site at any given time and the facilities could really only handle about 20. Thus Davis had ordered an upgrade.

  The building Jason entered was a tall spire with a wide base three stories thick. The highest peak reached only halfway up to the ceiling, but looked down on all the other buildings with ease. The trailblazer headed over to one of the multi-purpose rooms they’d designated as Cerebro 1 and tagged the door switch on the wall. When the halves parted he walked into a control booth, on the other side of which was a pitch black room, visible only through technological means on a wall-spanning artificial window.

  Jason sat down in one of the seats, watching the individual inside walk slowly through a maze of small objects.

  “Have fun?” Aaron-010 asked, his eyes not turning away from the screen as he was telepathically guiding the other Archon through the darkened obstacles.

  2

  “They confirmed the presence of energy fields,” Jason answered.

  “Well, at least now we know it’s not magic,” Aaron quipped, still focusing ahead…then cringing as Zack-887 walked face first into a soft pylon.

  “Nice one,” the Saber said, feeling the dark object with his right hand while he rubbed his smooshed nose with his left.

  Jason glanced at Aaron, seeing his forehead knit up as he concentrated. The conversation capability of the control room was one-way only, allowing Zack to talk to Aaron, but not the reverse…forcing the trailblazer to use his infantile telepathy.

  Zack received another mental message, then stepped left and smacked into a knee-high object that tripped him up and had him half fall on top of it, catching himself on his knee.

  “Let’s go back to binary, please,” Zack said as he stood up and oriented himself straight towards the object, then pointed to his right for a moment, receiving a ‘no’ command from Aaron, so he pointed a thumb back over his shoulder behind him, whereupon he received a ‘yes.’ Neither command was a word, for Aaron didn’t have the skill for that yet. Each thought was something unique, almost like a sound, with the ‘high pitched’ version being used as a ‘yes’ while the ‘low pitched’ version was being used as a ‘no.’