Chapter 44
Heather sat up, the wondrously supple tentacles melting away from her body as she moved. She felt something. What was it? Somehow different.
For one thing, for the first time in days she felt not even a hint of the headache, which had been coming and going but always leaving just a fragment of itself in her head. It was as if a loose connection in an electrical circuit, one that had been spitting sparks, had been correctly spliced and wrapped with electrical tape.
Looking around the medical lab, Heather suddenly noticed that the door had remained closed. Mark and Jennifer must be frantic on the opposite side. As she visualized the door opening, it complied. Mark and Jennifer both raced into the room before it could close again.
Mark looked as if he were ready to kill something. “Heather, are you all right?”
Jennifer raced over and threw her arms around Heather’s shoulders, a flood of tears streaming down her face. Heather hugged her back.
“It’s okay. I’m fine now.”
“What the hell happened?” Mark yelled. “We were just about ready to go get help.”
Heather paused, looking at Jennifer’s accusing face as she pulled away. “I’m not sure. I think the ship detected something wrong with me and decided to fix it. I hadn’t told you, but I have been having the headaches again. This morning was especially bad. Anyway, when I put on the headset, I felt compelled to come directly here, so I guess that’s what I did.”
“You didn’t just come up here,” Jennifer said. “You jumped up the six feet to the second deck like you were Batgirl or something. Mark followed, but the doors had already closed and wouldn’t open for us. It’s been half an hour since you disappeared.”
“We banged on the door, yelled, tried visualizing the thing opening, but nothing worked,” said Mark. “You really scared the shit out of us.”
Heather touched him on the arm softly. “I’m sorry. I must have been in some sort of trance. Anyway, I think the table fixed whatever was wrong with me.” Heather paused. “You say I jumped up instead of climbed up?”
Mark nodded. “You just leapt straight up in the air and landed on your feet on the next deck. I had to concentrate to manage the same thing myself.”
“Well, there is a big difference in weight.”
“Don’t give me that. It’s a matter of weight ratio to muscle mass. Your muscles were performing like mine or there’s no way you could’ve done it.”
Heather shrugged. “There’s something else I didn’t tell you guys. This morning at breakfast, I think I heard Jen’s thoughts in my head.”
Jennifer turned pale. “All of them? You were in my head?”
Heather shook her head. “No. It wasn’t like that. You were thinking about telling me something, and I picked up on that. It was just the one time, but I thought it might be a good idea for all of us to keep each other in the loop on what is happening to us during the change.”
Mark tilted his head. “Did you just say, ‘during the change’? What change?”
Heather paused. “Did I? A Freudian slip. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Aren’t Freudian slips supposed to be based upon a real thought?” Jennifer asked.
“Forget I said anything about Freud. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You got away from explaining the world record girls’ high jump,” said Mark.
“I was getting to that. It just confirms an idea that’s been growing in my mind for a few days now. Do you remember when we first got onto the medical table? It showed our brains with about the same level of activity. There weren't any real differences between us.”
Mark’s lips tightened. “Yes. What of it?”
“I think we all have almost exactly the same abilities.”
Jennifer shook her head. “But that’s just not true. I’m not coordinated and strong like Mark, and I don’t see numbers in my head like you do. But I’m better at data manipulation than either of you.”
“Yes, but I think the reason behind it is different,” Heather continued. “We all have a picture of ourselves in our heads. You know, a self-image. I think I’m good at certain things, Mark thinks he’s good at other things, and you think you’re good at others. I think our brain enhancements interpret our visual images of ourselves as goals. Our brains are taking those goals and implementing them, including our self-imposed limitations.”
Jennifer crossed her arms. “So you think if I imagine I’m strong, I can jump up here like you did?”
“I doubt it. Our self images are probably difficult to retrain. I’m only saying that we may have considerably more untapped potential than we realize. But even if we change our self-imagery, I’m still going to have things I prefer. And I’ll still practice those things more than either of you would.”
Jennifer finally smiled. “Makes sense.”
“That reminds me, I want to get up to the command deck and search for more data on subspace. If I’m right about what I saw last time, subspace vibrations should leak back into our space and vice versa.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “And other than boring me out of my mind, this is important, why?”
Jennifer frowned. “Mark, listen for a change. I think I see where Heather is going with this.”
“Think of the different spaces like tuning forks a little distance apart. If I hit one with a small hammer, the others pick up the same vibration, the same tone, only more weakly. I think we may be able to make a subspace receiver.”
“Two questions,” Mark said. “Number one: Why bother? We already have the QT circuit. Number two: Wouldn’t we also need to build a subspace transmitter?”
Heather laughed. “Look. We’ve been scrambling to do anything that can get someone like the NSA to help us. And every time we do, we come closer to getting ourselves caught than to bringing heat on the Rho Project. It’s time to step up our game. With the quantum twins, we have to physically plant one of them somewhere to be able to send and receive from that other location. But with this, we should be able to tune our subspace receiver to focus on a mapped location in real space. It’s completely hands-off. With this technology, we can effectively hack the planet.”
“So we could aim it to listen to anything, so long as we know the location?” Jennifer asked.
“I think so. The problem is that everything rings the subspace tuning fork. So we would be listening to white noise or static. But that brings us to the next answer. We don’t need a subspace transmitter because everything transmits into subspace.”
“So how do we get around the white noise problem?”
“That’s why I want to spend more time on the command deck. I think we can introduce a carrier signal that we can detect in the noise.”
Jennifer started moving toward the door. “We can embed a data signal on it.”
“Right. With that, we could remotely tap any line, so long as we knew its exact subspace coordinates.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Jennifer said as she led the way out of the medical lab. “Like you said, time to hack the planet.”