The Loop

July 30th

The orb’s voice spoke in my ear, in my mind. It was a pleasant voice; female, calm, impossible to interpret as threatening. Impossible to ignore. But as soon as I had woken up from touching it, its voice was far from the only one speaking in my head; I heard a cacophony of them. And I had a flash of déjà vu, like there was something familiar about this situation. But that seemed absurd. What could possibly feel familiar about this? I’d just touched an alien orb of shiny metal, which was whispering in my mind, which led to me gaining some sort of superhuman perception. This wasn’t something that happened to me regularly. Inexplicably, a fragment of a dream I’d had recently flashed in my mind: a tower, an inhuman creature, two dark skinned women who wore the same face, Christine.

Christine?

Yes. I sensed her nearby, walking toward me from the back door of the restaurant. I could almost see her, although I realized now that my eyes were closed. And almost seeing wasn’t quite right either; I knew she was there, sure—could sense her movement clearly and precisely—but it wasn’t sight, not really even close to it. It was as far from sight as taste is from smell, as heat is from light. And I didn’t just feel her movement. I realized that her voice had joined the chorus of voices in my head. I focused more on them. They were … meandering, without direction, and none of what they said was directed at me. I was just an incidental observer.

What if he hates me?

How am I going to pay the mortgage?

I hope that pretty dog with the sad eyes is still at the shelter.

Mommy loves me even when she hurts me.

What’s taking them so long out there?

Why the fuck did I just take all those mushrooms?

How am I going to tell Sandra I lost my job?

Maybe I should just end it all.

I’m going to ask her to marry me.

The voices of the customers at the restaurant. No, I thought. Not their voices—their thoughts. This would all have been overwhelming—it would have been too much to handle—but for the one voice that cut through all the others. No, not Christine’s. I would love to say that it was Christine’s voice that kept me grounded through my transformation, but instead it was the voice of the orb.

At first its words had been so quiet, so indistinct, that they were hardly recognizable as speech at all. Incomprehensible speech-like sounds was how they began—reassuring, lovely, affirming, but ultimately nonsensical. But slowly the voice changed, grew louder and more distinct. The words became clearer, the message more concrete.

Hello, Adam. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.

Hello, I thought.

I am pleased. You are everything I was hoping I’d find here. The other one might have found me first, and that would have been well, but you are even better. Although, your mind feels … as if it has already known one of us.

I don’t understand.

No. It’s only a feeling. Perhaps it’s only a sure sign that you’ve been waiting for me as I have for you.

What—who are you?

Unity. Cohesion. Understanding. I am the purpose and the seeking. I am looking in your mind to find a name. I am Alice, if you please.

I laughed internally. Alice? I thought. Of all the random names you could have chosen, why Alice?

I got a sense of indignation from the orb. I felt crazy to be ascribing emotions to a metal ball.

I found the name pleasing. Would you choose for me another?

No, no. Alice is fine. Beautiful, even.

Satisfaction. Gratitude.

I felt my sense of place and my sense of self starting to drift among the myriad things moving around me, and the myriad minds thinking myriad thoughts.

Stay. Focus. Open your eyes and choose the first of five.

The first of five? Five what?

Partners? Teammates? I am struggling to find the word in your tongue.

I think I understand.

I was aware that somewhere above me, Christine and Jaleel had been carrying on a conversation. A conversation about the orb, about me. And I sensed from both of them to varying degrees concern, fear, excitement, and wonder. I started to look deeper but stopped myself. It would be a violation to search their minds on purpose, I decided.

I opened my eyes and stared at Christine. It was all I could do to stay grounded in the here and now. I sensed a mild relief from her. From Jaleel: distraction. He was staring at the orb again.

“Chris?” I said. “I feel … different.” I heard the voice of the orb—of Alice—pushing me forward. I didn’t hesitate. “I think you should touch it, too.”

I knew that the orb was already whispering in her head. Now that it had found a way to translate its alien intention into our language, it was gaining a foothold in her mind faster than it had in mine. Almost immediately, she followed my instructions. The orb glowed brightly, and an explosion of noise filled my ears. Christine fell sideways, and as she collapsed to the ground, Jaleel’s concern grew yet again. I wasn’t worried though, I could feel her heart beating, and the rise and fall of her chest, and the uninterrupted flow of her thoughts. I smiled down at her peaceful form.

“Why the fuck would you make her do that?” Jaleel asked.

I wanted to explain to him exactly what the orb was conveying to me, both explicitly and implicitly, but I found myself unable to express it in words. I decided the best way to convey to him what was happening was a demonstration of my new power. I focused on his mind and thought: I did it because it told me to. There are four charges left, Jaleel, and I want you to be one of them, too. All you have to do is touch it.

He stared at me, dumbfounded. After a moment’s hesitation he reached out and touched the orb. Another flash of light, another explosion of noise. I felt Christine starting to stir where she lay, and I felt someone—Harper—coming toward the back door of the restaurant.

Christine sat up moments before Jaleel.

I expected to find relief radiating from him, now that he understood better what was happening, but instead I found his concern hitting its highest crest yet. I dared a deeper glance into his thoughts and discovered only a jumble of confused images and words. The one thing I could make out was a T.V. with a news story playing, the headline read: “Body of Missing McArnold Woman Found.” There was more to it, but he quickly shook off the thought, like shaking off a bad dream, and my own perception of it faded.

He looked at me and said, “you have to find the rest.” I understood exactly what he meant.

“Well there’s one right there,” I said, pointing Harper out to the other two.

Jaleel’s anxiety was slowly abating and it was as if whatever had triggered it was fading from his memory. I saw him shoot Christine a sly smile.

“Perfect,” she said. I would have picked up on her sarcasm even without the insight into her mind.

———————

Two hours later found us back in the restaurant, looking for all the world as if we were working through an ordinary shift on an ordinary day. We had a lot to discuss, but we also didn’t feel like losing our jobs. What had happened was monumental, and if you’d told me before it happened that I’d be able to carry on functioning normally immediately after something like that, I wouldn’t have believed it. But I got the sense that part of the function of the orbs was to ease the minds of those they transformed through the process in as non-disruptive a way as possible. Even so, if it weren’t for the fact that my newfound power could facilitate us carrying on a conversation that no one else could hear, I was sure we wouldn’t have been able to shut up about what had happened.

In my mind, I had done my best to shut out all voices besides those of my friends. Snippets of others’ thoughts still came through, but mostly it was just us. Well, us and Alice, whom we could all hear clearly now. She was helping us become acquainted with our powers, but insisting that discovering their true uses and limits would be a matter of experimentation and interpretation. For my part, I thought I was getting the hang of things quickly. I could do more than sense the objects in the world around me now; if I applied a little bit of mental pressure in just the right way, I could nudge things. I even made a spoon float out of the sink for a couple seconds before I lost focus and let it drop with a splash. The others let out their oohs and aahs and I was pleased, but knew I was barely scratching the surface of what I’d be able to do if I kept practicing. Wait until you see what I can do tomorrow, I thought. And again, a flash of intuition shot through my mind, and images of someone—me—doing extraordinary things; moving large objects, spinning a sword around without touching it, flying. Will I ever be able to do all that? I wondered. And why would I ever have a sword?

I wasn’t the only one impressing the group.

Watch this, Christine thought. I relayed her message to the others.

She placed her hand over a hot burner on the stovetop. Harper gasped and Jaleel moved to yank her hand away but she held up her other hand and shook her head, indicating to him that she was okay.

“See?” she said aloud.

“So you can … what? Not get burned by hot things?” asked Harper, incredulous.

More than that, she thought, switching over to mental communication. Again, I relayed her thoughts into the others’ minds.

What else? I asked, observing how her hand seemed to be glowing where it met the hot metal of the element.

Lines of energy seemed to be tracing up her arm from that point of contact, glowing just under the surface of her skin. Finally she withdrew her hand from the heat and looked at us. A faint glow could be seen tracing the veins all over her body now.

“Observe,” she said dramatically.

She held out her hands in front of our faces and, without further warning, a blinding burst of light shot out from them. I took a step back, Jaleel jumped, and Harper let out a small squeal of fear, which changed over quickly to delight.

So you can absorb energy, thought Jaleel. Store it, change its form, release it? Heat to light. I wonder if it would work in the opposite direction.

I have a feeling it would, she replied. Any source of energy, any output. But I won’t know for sure until I experiment some more.

“What about you, Harp?” Christine asked. It occurred to me that if anyone else had been in the kitchen, our conversation would have appeared highly abnormal, with only a few words spoken aloud every few minutes, but with all of us seemingly following the thread.

Before our eyes, Harper’s facial features appeared to melt. Jesus Christ, I thought, thinking something had gone wrong. Before I could get too worried though, her face rearranged itself into an accurate facsimile of our manager, Derek, right down to the freckles, the dimples, and the greasy red hair. Her body, too, had stretched itself out a few inches, and her belly appeared to have grown out slightly. The proportions weren’t exact, maybe because Harper didn’t have enough material in her body to create a perfect replica of Derek’s, but the face was spot on, and the rest was close enough from a distance.

“Uh, hey guys. Uh, just wanna let you know that we’re coming into a slow season, so don’t be surprised if some of your hours are cut.” The voice was indistinguishable from Derek’s, and it was eerie hearing it coming out of a mouth that I knew, logically, wasn’t his. “Of course, my hours won’t change. I need to make enough money to feed my millions of cats,” she finished, giggling.

Hey, I thought. Don't bring the cats into this. But I was laughing, too. So were Christine and Jaleel.

“I could do you next,” she said. Her face started changing again.

Oh, god, no, I thought.

She stopped short, and I felt a brief embarrassment flash through her. There and gone. Her face turned back into her own, and her body shrank down to its usual size: tall for a teenage girl, but not so lanky as Derek and without the beer belly.

We were all still laughing intermittently when Christine turned her attention to Jaleel.

Alright, Jaleel, she thought. Show us what you’ve got.

Jaleel was struggling to figure out his power. I could see that he had the sense it was precognitive in some way, but he couldn’t understand how to use it yet. He kept coming close, I knew, because I could feel his consciousness on the verge of slipping over some sort of precipice, and his senses nearly picking up something beyond the here and now, but every time he got close, he caught himself in a panic and pulled back. It was frustrating to watch, and I wanted to tell him just to let himself go, but I knew it was something he had to work out on his own.

“I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out myself. Maybe I got a dud.”

He laughed, but somehow I felt that his power might have been the most important one of all. He’s going to figure it out soon, and he’s going to tell us something important. The thought came into my head and I knew somehow that it was right. Another flash of déjà vu. I felt like I was on the verge of knowing what he was going to say even before he was, but it slipped out of my grip before I could figure it out.

I turned my thoughts back to the orb, back to Alice.

I was mulling over what it—she—kept reiterating: that I still had two choices to make. Why it fell on me to make these choices I didn’t know. I considered putting it to a vote, but everyone would probably be as indecisive as me, and more input wouldn’t make the choice any easier. And why was it just two more? Why not one? Why not a dozen? Alice couldn’t say. She only said that she had had six “charges” to begin with, and she had a compulsion to give all of them out. And, she kept telling me, as the first one to make contact, only I could choose who would get them.

I kept circling around Angie as a candidate. In the pros column she had only one distinct qualification: she was my sister. It felt wrong to base the decision on nepotism, but on the other hand I hadn’t really considered any of my choices so far; indeed, I’d basically just picked the closest three people, and it just so happened that I was friends with all of them. So would it be so wrong to continue the trend and include my sister? But then, Angie was fourteen years old.

There was a certain excitement to having superpowers. It was almost intoxicating. So much so, in fact, that I kept forgetting the more serious implications of what we had all done, like for instance that these powers probably obligated us to do something good. Fight crime? It seemed like a joke, but then could we just ignore bad things we knew were happening and still live with ourselves, knowing we could stop them? Everybody in the world did that every single day to some extent, I thought, but then most of them couldn’t read minds or move objects with a thought. To continue doing so would have been in line with my character, and I was aware of that; I had never been particularly enamored with decisive action or confrontation. The frustrating part was knowing that and still being unable—or unwilling—to change.

But … but Christine. I knew her well enough that even if I couldn’t see the surface of her thoughts—boiling with the possibilities and potential of what she might do with her power—I still would have known where she would have landed in the debate. She had already been a warrior for justice and truth—marching in women’s rights protests, organizing campus demonstrations against pseudo-fascist guest speakers—and she would certainly see these powers as a tool to help those who were downtrodden or disenfranchised and couldn’t help themselves, and—yes, I had to admit to myself that she had a vindictive streak in her—to hurt those who perpetrated the disenfranchisement.

And I wasn’t too stupid to understand that there were already thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of others on the planet, many of them right here in the US, who had powers like us, and not all of them would be as neutral as me or as justice-minded as Christine. Many people would do with these powers what they would do with any sort of power: hurt those they hated and do anything they could to help themselves. There would be conflict. There would be hatred and resentment from those without power, even if we did everything we could to help them. And I wasn’t entirely sure that resentment would be misplaced.

Could I really bring Angie—a fourteen year old girl—into that?

On the other hand, all of that conflict would exist now, whether she was involved or not, and perhaps giving her power was the only way to ensure her safety and survival in the world going forward.

Adam, thought Christine, you’re zoning out again. What are you thinking about?

I was being careful to delineate those thoughts that I intended to project to the others from those thoughts that I intended to keep inside my own head. It was ironic, and perhaps a bit cruel, because the rest of them didn’t have that privilege, although I had ensured them that I wasn’t snooping and I was only latching onto those thoughts at the forefront of their consciousness that I could see were intended for me. For anything they meant for everyone in the group to hear, I was acting as a sort of transmitter, but the result of this was that any time I was lost in my own thoughts, they perceived it as a sudden lull in the conversation, where they lost the ability to hear not just me, but each other.

Nothing. Well, actually I was just considering who to pick for the last two spots. Any suggestions?

Tons. But I won’t give any of them to you. It’s your decision. And frankly I wouldn’t want it. I don’t envy you.

She is right, Adam, said Alice. While you are welcome to take suggestions from your friends, the decision must ultimately rest with you. If anyone else touched my surface right now, they would experience nothing but the sensation of a smooth metal ball against their skin.

Currently, Alice was hidden inside the glove compartment of my car. After we’d all touched her out back, and decided that whatever else we did, we should at least get back to work to avoid suspicion, it had seemed safest to place Alice somewhere where no other passersby might accidentally stumble upon her.

What about … Never mind, said Harper. I knew she had been about to suggest her brother. The thought had occurred to me, too, but I hadn’t given it any serious consideration. He was, or had been, my closest friend. He was intelligent, actually probably a genius, and I had no doubt that he’d do great things with powers like the ones we’d been given. But then, maybe he wanted power a little too much. I thought back to conversations we’d had back in high school, about how his plans to change the world always revolved around a restructuring of things to be the way he thought was best. He didn't care about fame or recognition, but if there was a hierarchy of ideas, he did want his to be at the top. It was arrogance, but it wasn't always unwarranted.

But then, I’d barely spoken to him in the past two years, not since I had walked in on him nearly killing himself over some insane, and undoubtedly criminal activity he’d gotten involved with online. And there was no telling how that event and the years since had changed him. I often felt a profound guilt when I thought about that day, that I had all but abandoned him when he had probably needed a friend most. I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night in a deep and unshakeable panic, convinced that in the weeks after that event, he really had ended his life, and I could have stopped him. But he hadn’t done that. And who knows what would have happened if I had intervened further? It was impossible to know. So I hadn’t talked to him. I hadn’t intervened. I never did.

Who else? I thought. My parents? Laughable. Derek? Even more laughable. Other people’s siblings? Jaleel and Christine were both only children, though Christine hadn’t always been.

As I had been in the midst of this internal loop, I felt the thoughts of the others drifting, thinking of their own power and how they might be changed by them. I noticed how Jaleel’s thoughts were more relaxed, sporadic, unfocused. He’s getting close, I thought.

The television, he thought. The clock on the wall. He tried to catch himself instinctively, but he was too slow and, nearly panicking, he tumbled over the edge of his conscious awareness, and landed someplace beyond my reach. He was back almost instantly, but I knew at once that it hadn’t been instant for him.

“We have to go!” he said aloud. “We have to warn them.”

“Geez, slow down, Jaleel.” Harper was almost laughing, but I could tell that she was actually quite frightened by this outburst. “Tell us what’s going on.”

I threw my moral objection to poking around in my friends’ heads aside for a minute and looked more closely at what Jaleel had seen that had him so worked up. Oh my God, I thought.

“Exactly,” he said, turning to me. “We have to find that woman and warn her. Or … or save her. She's probably already missing, but maybe she hasn’t been killed yet.”

“Wait, what? What the fuck are you two talking about? Some woman is going to be killed?” asked Christine, turning her full attention to us. A sudden rage was swelling in her, and it masked her underlying fear almost completely.

Jaleel, I thought, did you recognize the woman’s name?

No. Did you?

I’m afraid so.

“Shannon,” I said aloud, and Harper looked at me in shock.

I sent the images I had seen in Jaleel’s head to the rest of the group. The television, the news broadcast, the clock on the wall and the date in the corner of the screen: 10:00 p.m., August 1st; tomorrow night.

“Shannon … Oh God.” Harper looked like she was going to be sick. “We have to help her, Adam. You don’t know what it would do to Linc if …”

I have a pretty good idea, I thought.

“Right, well … I guess it’s decided. We can’t not tell Lincoln about this, and if we tell him then we can’t very well keep him in the dark about how we know, and if we’re going that far then we might as well go all the way. So I guess Lincoln’s officially in.”

“Um, excuse me,” said Derek, who had walked in a minute ago without us noticing, wrapped up in our conversation as we were. “I don’t know what exactly ya’ll are talking about, but it doesn’t really seem work related.”

I realized how confusing this whole scene must have been to him, with three quarters of our conversation conducted telepathically, and the part he could hear having something to do with warning a woman who might get killed. We’d have to be more careful to exclude eavesdroppers in the future, I thought.

“Actually, Derek, I’m going to go grab a break.”

I’ll call Lincoln. We’ll get him to come to us, I thought to the others.