Mind's Eye Read online

  Once again, out of the endless swirl of thoughts flooding his mind, one rose up and pierced through the rest. One of the customers had finished pumping gas and would be driving away in less than a minute. And Hall would then be in full view, wearing filthy jeans, no shirt, and training a gun on Baldino.

  His time was up.

  “March into the bathroom,” ordered Hall, continuing to monitor Baldino’s every thought. Frank Baldino did as he was told, at least outwardly. But Hall read that he had reached a decision. Once he entered the bathroom, he would launch a counterattack, regardless of the risk. Hall looked clumsy and unsure of himself.

  Baldino never got the chance. Just as he crossed the threshold of the door, Hall slammed the hard butt of the gun into the back of Baldino’s skull with all the adrenaline-boosted strength he could muster.

  Baldino fell forward into the small bathroom like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and Hall had no doubt he was no longer conscious. He bent Baldino’s legs at the knee, joined him inside the bathroom, and then closed and locked the door.

  He reached down and pressed his fingers into Baldino’s neck, feeling for his carotid artery and a pulse. Nothing. He tried Baldino’s wrist and put his ear to his mouth. No pulse. No breathing.

  Shit! he thought, almost hysterically. He was dead!

  Hall clutched at the small sink for support, reeling. He had killed a man. Hall didn’t remember who he was, but he was certain he had never killed before. Bile rose in his throat as he pondered taking a life. Even though the man had been intent on taking his, Hall suspected he would have puked if his stomach wasn’t totally empty.

  How many movies and TV shows had he seen where a man was knocked out by getting hit by the butt of a gun? Dozens? Hundreds?

  But never in any of them that he could remember—he was long past considering the frustrating irony that he could remember everything about the world except when it pertained to himself—had such a blow been fatal. But then again, he knew that a single hard, bare-fisted strike to the face would knock out just about anyone—cold—but Hollywood often showed fights in which the combatants barely slowed down after trading dozens of insanely forceful blows.

  Hall blew out a long breath. He knew what he had to do next. As distasteful as it was, he had to become a grave robber. Baldino was slightly taller and thicker than he was, but any clothing that hadn’t spent the night in a dumpster was a godsend. Hall stripped him with great difficulty, given the confines of the bathroom, but was soon wearing tan khaki slacks and a light-green polo shirt, both of them a size too large, leaving the gray windbreaker behind.

  Baldino’s wallet contained no identification or credit cards, but Hall confiscated the thick sheaf of twenties he found inside. He pocketed Baldino’s gun and silencer and took the smaller gun from the man’s ankle holster as well. Not that he had any idea how to use either one of them.

  He removed the keys to Baldino’s silver Acura parked outside, and took an extra minute to apply a soapy paper towel to his sneakers, since he had worn them in the dumpster.

  Finally, sensing no one was within eyeshot, he locked the door from the inside and stepped out of the bathroom, hoping the locked door would prevent Baldino’s body from being discovered for at least an hour or two.

  Nick Hall took a deep breath and walked calmly toward Baldino’s Acura. Nearby was a wire rack with several stacks of free publications, one selling used cars and one entitled, “Homes for sale in Bakersfield, California. Your free guide.”

  So he was in Bakersfield, California. Good to know. But this knowledge didn’t evoke an avalanche of memories, just as his own name had failed to do. A long list of California cities came to mind: LA, San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Oakland, and others, but as far as he could tell, he had never even known Bakersfield existed.

  Hall started the car, and despite his blood being so alive with adrenaline he felt as if a marauding colony of ants were marching under his skin, he forced himself to pull calmly out onto the street and away from the station.

  3

  Nick Hall drove for several miles as voices continued to ricochet around his head. Knowing that he had somehow acquired ESP didn’t make the voices any less grating or less capable of eroding his sanity. He was shocked to read the time on the car’s digital clock. For some reason he had assumed it was morning, but he had regained consciousness in mid-afternoon.

  The air was still cool, probably in the high sixties, so it must be fall or winter in Bakersfield. Good thing. Had it been summer, he would have been roasted alive in a steel barbecue pit of garbage—not exactly the way he hoped to die, which he decided should involve the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and his heart giving out from exhaustion.

  Hall had no choice but to assume he wasn’t stark raving mad. His senses told him he could now read minds and that the world around him was behaving consistently with this new world order. But this was the age-old conundrum of the philosophers. What was reality? Was anything real? Didn’t every schizophrenic convince themselves that their reality was self-consistent and rational?

  So what did he know? He knew that a large group of dangerous men had been after him, and no doubt still were. Apparently, he had eluded them by taking a dive into a dumpster. One would have to be awfully desperate to take that kind of action, but given Baldino’s orders to kill him in cold blood, this level of desperation wasn’t at all surprising.

  So why did they want him dead? This had to be about his mind reading. What else could it be? Memory loss or not, he knew this was something recent; a mental ability he had never had before. Even in its untamed form—in a form that could drive one to madness because, while there seemed to be a dimmer switch, there didn’t seem to be an off switch—this ability conferred incredible advantages on him. Without it he would be lying dead on the floor of the Shell bathroom instead of Baldino.

  And if the ability was this useful when untamed, even wielded by a man without memory who had only begun to learn to use it, how useful could it be when tamed and wielded by someone with knowledge and experience? It would be the ultimate advantage. Anyone who was power mad in any walk of life: criminal, business, politics, government, military—what would they give to have such a power? And what would they do to get it?

  But then why kill him? It would make far more sense to capture him and use him as a guinea pig. Try to find out why he had this power and duplicate it. Or force him to use it for their ends.

  He considered. The only reason they would be so desperate to kill him would be if . . .

  What if he had read something in someone’s mind? Something big. In this case, he would need to be terminated at all costs.

  He pulled up to a red light. As more and more cars came up on all sides, the intensity of the voices in his head increased. “Stop it!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs, covering his ears with his hands, which of course did nothing to lessen the clamor.

  He forced himself to take several deep breaths. Getting worked up about his predicament wasn’t going to help him. If he couldn’t find a way to turn it off, he would have to find a way to get used to it. To ignore it; tune it out. But easier said than done.

  If it wasn’t bad enough to have to live with incessant chatter in his brain, or have a hit squad intent on snuffing him out, he also didn’t have any idea of who he was or what it was he knew. This knowledge could at least give him a chance. But as it was, he was the ultimate deer in headlights; without his memories, helpless and disoriented. His newfound ability had kept him alive so far, but he was under no illusion that this power alone could hold off the posse that was now on his tail. If the men’s room door of the Shell station had swung inward instead of outward, he would be dead now; ESP or no ESP.

  He had to find his bearings. Somehow.

  His memory was perfect when it came to some things. He knew lyrics to songs. And he realized he could recall countless movies as well. He might not be able to remember anything about the circumstances of the viewing, but an
intimate knowledge of a movie at least indicated he had seen it many times—like the first Terminator movie. He could quote Kyle Reese’s lines as though he had played the role himself: You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her! That's what he does! That's ALL he does! You can't stop him! He'll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out!

  Hall couldn’t help but shake his head that the one movie that had sprung to mind involved a relentless assassin pursuing a helpless victim who had no idea why she was being hunted. Just perfect.

  He supposed locations would work the same as movies and song lyrics. If he thought about nearby locales and one of them evoked a high level of familiarity, this might at least tell him something about himself.

  Hall scrolled through his memory of California localities. When he came to La Jolla, he realized it had more of a familiarity to him than the others he had recited. He could visualize a high cement walkway cut into the ocean, overlooking a small beach on which seals liked to come ashore and lounge in the sun. He recalled restaurants and a hang glider park above cliffs. He knew that La Jolla was an upscale beachfront community in San Diego with a strong scientific presence, particularly in biotechnology.

  When he thought of science his mind instantly held a picture of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He felt certain he must have been there on many occasions. He didn’t seem to know it well enough to believe he had worked there, but perhaps he was friends with someone who did.

  There was only one way to find out. He needed to make a visit in person. If he was very lucky someone there would recognize him. Someone who could tell him who he was. Give him a past.

  He switched on the car’s built-in mapping program. “Give me directions to The Scripps Institute of Oceanography,” he said.

  The street in front of him disappeared!

  He gasped in terror. His entire field of view had been totally eclipsed by a 3-D image of California from space, which had materialized in front of his face from out of nowhere, with a route drawn in red from his current location to La Jolla. The image had become his entire world. The road, traffic, and pedestrians were gone.

  He was now driving totally blind.

  4

  Hall slammed on the brakes, surprising the car trailing behind him, which had to swerve blindly into the next lane to avoid a collision, narrowly missing an oncoming car in that lane. In both lanes tires screeched and horns honked, and it was only by blind luck that his action hadn’t resulted in a multi-car pileup.

  “What the fuck is your problem, asshole!”

  “What happened over there?”

  “Damn,” thought a teenage boy pulling out of a McDonald’s on the corner with a bag full of food. “Just missed. A crash would have been so cool.”

  Hall picked up dozens of other thoughts related to his reckless maneuver, but he paid them no attention. He was too busy panicking. And struggling to see something other than a massive three-dimensional map that hovered directly in front of his face.

  Suddenly the road came back into view. His mind had made some kind of adjustment. The map was still present in his visual field, but now, so was the road. And he could choose which one to look at. Like having side by side televisions, each with a different football game. He could concentrate on either one to the total exclusion of the other if he wished. Or like bifocals. When one wanted to see something far away, one looked through the top half; close by, the bottom.

  He tilted his head back and blew out a long sigh of relief toward the ceiling, ignoring the horns that continued to honk at the idiot who had decided to take a sabbatical in the middle of a busy street, and a myriad of other choice words he was able to read that were far less charitable than idiot.

  Hall chose to ignore the map and it shrank from his view. He carefully resumed driving. A few minutes later he pulled into the parking lot of a mini-mart. The map was now gone. He guessed that by not focusing on it at all for a period of time, the software behind it had told it to vanish.

  He studied the car’s GPS. It was also displaying directions to La Jolla, but they were standard, not floating far larger than life in front of his face in ultra-high-definition 3-D clarity. He reached over and turned the device off, as well as the car.

  “Give me directions to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography?” he said aloud, and instantly a map sprang into sight once again, hanging in front of his face. He studied it for several long seconds in disbelief. It was a standard Google Map. It even had the Google logo on it, and the directions looked to be accurate. And it hadn’t been generated by the car’s GPS device either, since this device was still off.

  Hall thought about the map disappearing and it promptly complied.

  Coincidence? Or did it somehow respond to his thoughts? Companies had made great strides with game controllers and artificial limbs that could be operated by thoughts alone, so it wasn’t out of the question. He thought about the map reappearing, and there it was.

  So could he do this trick only with maps?

  Show me the Wikipedia entry for Bakersfield, California, he thought, and immediately, like the map, the Wikipedia entry was before his eyes, overlaid with his real vision. Again, he could focus on both views at once, although, like watching two different movies, he could only do so at a very superficial level. But as before, if he focused on one, the other would recede completely until he decided to focus on it again.

  He tried several other searches in rapid succession, each of them appearing instantly. There was no way around it, he was tapping into the Internet. He could surf the web using thoughts alone, and the text or graphics or video would magically be projected in front of his face in ultra-high definition.

  But projected by what? And how?

  He thought about how this might be working for several minutes, coming up blank, when it occurred to him to use the Internet itself to understand what was happening. Search ‘accessing the Internet using thoughts alone,’ he instructed to whatever it was that was responsible for this miracle of technology.

  A results page popped up. It wasn’t Google or any of the other search engines he recognized, so perhaps it was a proprietary one just for this purpose.

  He scanned down the page and chose the earliest article, calendar-year-wise. It was from ComputerworldUS, published on November 20, 2009. It began by quoting Intel researchers who predicted that someday, “you won’t need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer. Instead,” he continued reading from the page that was always centered, regardless of how he turned his head, “users will open documents and surf the web using nothing more than their brain waves.”

  Hall paused and let this sink in. He was sure he hadn’t heard about this technology before, even though it had clearly been discussed as far back as 2009. He continued reading:

  Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets, and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

  The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie. . . . Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.

  "I think human beings are remarkably adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people twenty years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop. There are a lot of things that have to be done first, but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

  Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau said that users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers.

  Instead, they'll simply manipulate their various de
vices with their brains.

  "We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed . . . to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the web with the power of your thoughts."

  Hall read several more articles, but it was clear that only five or six years later, all efforts toward this goal, by Intel and others, had been largely abandoned, leaving only a few scattered pockets of activity. The challenges had been greater than first appreciated, and the payoff much farther down the road. And animal models, while surprisingly useful, still couldn’t yield enough data to fully translate into the human experience.

  But, apparently, this technology hadn’t been as abandoned as everyone had been led to believe. He was living proof. He had no doubt he was the beneficiary of the implants spoken of in the article.

  Which meant that it wasn’t projecting the images in front of him. Instead, his further reading made it abundantly clear that his implants were somehow tied into his visual cortex, from the inside, or else were sending information directly to the region of his brain responsible for interpreting the steady stream of visual input from his eyes.

  The implants were converting the Internet images into a complex, multi-pronged binary code that was tied directly to his visual centers. His mind, only having experience receiving these signals through his eyes, from sources external to himself, insisted on interpreting the images as hovering in front of him, rather than coming from within.

  A woman named Sheila Nireberg had been a pioneer in this arena, in her effort to treat blindness. He watched a video of a presentation she had given to an organization called TED in October of 2011, in which she discussed the complex patterns of electrical pulses that were produced by the retina, processing the information delivered by over a hundred million photoreceptors. Hall was somehow able to “hear” Nireberg’s presentation, indicating the system was also capable of sending signals to the hearing centers of his brain.