Chapter 1: What Is Remarkable?

An image of the "Swami", sketched from memory in the cab.

A while back I was traveling on business. I was on a trek in search of exotic clothing material (a topic I shall elaborate on later).

As fate would have it, I found myself in Istanbul; tired, famished and slightly intoxicated. Intoxicated not from alcohol, but from the experiences I had just underwent.

An agent of some prodigy- some self described swami of passion and creativity- had spirited me away to an underground bar. It was a tiny place built like a cave two stories beneath an entrance that was a storefront, leading me to believe that unless you were invited you could never know that a bar existed there at all.

Upon seating me at a small booth in a corner this agent asked me what I’d like to drink. Trying to maintain a heightened sense of awareness given my surroundings I decided against anything alcoholic and blithely ordered a coke. As he turned away I noticed for the first time the black band on his finger. On it I could make out the word ‘edgi’ in white with a red sash design floating above it.

By the time my coke came the agent was gone; replaced by 3 women whose physical beauty I can only describe as sublime. I had become transfixed by the smell of their hair and the piercing yet transcendent gaze of their eyes. As if drugged I suddenly found myself surrounded by them, watching each circle around me and gently touch my face while my stare fell from one lovely face to the next as they passed. The bar I was in now completely gone, replaced by a beauty so unimaginable I found it hard to stand. Thin veils made of a fine silken material were falling around me and everything began to spin as the women seemed to fly about me faster and faster. They were talking but I could not make out what they were saying at first. As things began to go dark I started to recognize the word “…remarkable…”

I stopped and consciously made an effort to find my footing. The girls were gone now and everything was black and I found my self chilled as if from an arctic wind.

“Remarkable”.

I looked around and realized I was not even in the bar anymore. It was a dark night and I was in some kind of alley. Looking down the thin road I could make out a street sign below a lamp. It read Fethi Bey and was right under an all encompassing tree at the edge of the alley.

“Remarkable”.

I began to take hold of my senses and then realized I was not alone. The voice came from the dark end of the alley and I heard the footsteps approach me.

“Remarkable, isn’t it? Beauty in all it’s wondrous and luscious splendor?”

I staggered back and mumbled out the words “I guess?” with trepidation.

The figure now stopped. He was completely in shadow save for one small drop of light from the street lamp that barely nicked his right eye. As far as I could tell he was dressed completely in black, and his head loomed large from a hat carefully perched atop his brow.

With a baritone voice, not dissimilar to the music of a sousaphone, he asked “Do you know what it’s like?”

“Who are you?” I was now beginning to get irritated as I slowly regained my senses.

“I believe you referred to me as a ‘swami’…I rather like that” he chucked with a low rumble. How he could have known I used the term swami is beyond me, since I did not utter it once to anyone. The effect on me was immediate, which is exactly why he used that term.

“Do you know what it’s like?” he repeated, a little more forcefully this time.

“What?” I responded. I was still shaky from my experience with the girls and I still saw their specter’s dancing in front of me as I spoke.

“Never to feel passion…never to have experienced an original thought or idea. Do you know what it’s like?”

“Look buddy, I don’t know where you’re going with this, but there’s worse things in life then not feeling passionate.”

“Yes there is. Never to have felt passion at all. Never to have had the blood rush through your veins or feel the very life course through your bones. To suffer through the days and years with a heart that beats but does not live. Do you know what it’s like?”

As he said these things it was as if he was drawn closer to me, or I to him. I suddenly found myself face to face with this stranger, his one lone eye peeking through the darkness to scrutinize me.

“I…I guess I don’t…”

“Of course you don’t. It is passion that those three dazzling ladies drew from you as easy as drawing water from a shallow well. You know passion. You know it so well that you have forgotten that the experience of passion is remarkable. That is what you’re searching for, isn’t it? The remarkable?”

I thought about this question for a moment. I wanted to give him a relevant answer.

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Indeed. But you’ll never find what IS remarkable if you are only ever able to identify what is NOT.”

His lone eye then vanished again into the darkness. I did not hear footsteps, a fact I did not account for until hours later. From a distance, from the darkest end of the alley I heard his voice once again.

“What is remarkable?”

I’ve heard his voice in my head asking me that question ever since. I hunger to find the answer.

After he had vanished a cab pulled up to the corner of the alley. In the cab on the way back to my room I drew a sketch of that one lone eye. I tried to sketch it out before I forgot the image in my own minds eye. As I exited the cab and paid the driver, I noticed on her hand the same black ring as the man who had brought me to the bar. The sole word ‘edgi’ engraved on it’s face.

Chapter 1.5: The Tachyon Interlude

A visualization of a tachyon particle. Because the particle moves faster than light the viewer would see 2 images of it moving in opposite directions as it passed nearby.

A few months earlier my journey (which led to that first meeting between me and the swami I refer to as “edgi”) began at an independent laboratory in Berkeley, California.

Before I proceed I want to let the reader know that there is much about the brain I neither understood nor was aware of at that time. Over the course of the last few months I have been exposed to a wealth of knowledge that has changed my views on the human (and indeed non-human) mind and what it is capable of. Although the experience I described earlier may seem, to the reader, fantastic, I can assure you it did happen and was quite real (or as real as the life experience gets). Furthermore, the tales I have yet to tell you are equally as fantastic, and they are quite real as well.

Most people do not know what they want from life until they get it; or at least a taste of it. I definitely fall into this category. You might say that, as far as life and behavior goes, I’m still in the “Beta Testing” stage. The things I always believed I wanted from life have crumbled away before my eyes, revealing tantalizing hints as to what my purpose here is really about. This story is about my experiences and this journey I am on and the strange things I’ve experienced and equally strange people I’ve met. There are those who often say about their real life experiences: “you couldn’t make this crap up”. That is how I feel about much of what has happened to me in this last year.

Professor Hephaestus (of whom you will learn more later) once told me that there are those born of this world who display such advanced and enlightened human characteristics that they are the human equivalence to “tachyons”. In physics the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) is considered a speed barrier. No particle created at sub-light speeds can travel at or faster than light (as it approaches this speed limit, it’s energy is converted to mass, requiring more energy to accelerate, causing a loop that prevents the particle from reaching 100% of the speed of light). There are, however, theoretical particles known as tachyons, which are created and exist at a state faster than the speed of light. Tachyons are not able to travel at speeds slower than the speed of light; a “slow barrier” if you will.

While the actual existence of tachyons is debatable in the scientific community, the metaphor Professor Hephaestus uses here is clear. Some human beings are created at, or manage to achieve, a higher level of consciousness and ability than the rest of humanity. Historically these individuals are put into the classification of “genius”. He defines this as follows: if the average of all human achievement (what anyone can achieve with a fair amount of hard work and discipline) were regarded as the “achievement barrier” (in the same way the speed of light is considered a “speed barrier” in physics) then a human being regarded as a “genius” would be one that is in a constant state of achievement above this barrier, and incapable of achievement below this barrier. This means that a genius is always creating and achieving at levels that far exceed the human average.

A good example of this metaphor is exemplified in Benjamin Franklin. In 1786, at the age of 80, while en route back to America from Europe, and as a way to occupy his time aboard ship, Franklin became the first to accurately map and define the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean by measuring wind speeds and taking the temperature of the sea at various depths. He did this only to assuage boredom and because he was curious as to why it took 2 weeks longer to return to the Americas from Europe than it did to make the voyage in the opposite direction.

As a trifle, a means to occupy his time while traveling to the Americas, Franklin mapped the Gulf Stream in detail, a route that has been used by trade ships ever since, and is used to this day. This sole achievement of Franklin at the age of 80 (enough to satisfy any average man for a lifetime) came as only one of many extraordinary achievements, some of which includes the inventing of the lightning rod, bifocal lens glasses and the urinary catheter (inventions all still commonly used today, almost 300 years later). Furthermore, Franklin never patented any of his inventions because he had already made his fortune as a printer decades earlier and wanted these inventions to belong to the people.

Once you factor in his revolutionary writing skills (his autobiography has inspired those from Daniel Boone to Dale Carnegie, is read to this day and has never been out of print), his work with and “discovery” of electricity, and his extraordinary contributions to the founding of the United States (for which he is most known), this concept of the tachyon human becomes all the more clear.

In essence, the most trifling and inferior achievements of a tachyon human (those who are beyond the achievement barrier) are leaps and bounds above the greatest achievements of ordinary individuals (those who are at or below the achievement barrier). It is as unlikely for tachyon humans to create below average work as it is for tachyon particles to travel slower than the speed of light.

So why this elaborate explanation of an abstract concept? Mainly as a way to describe the swami I call edgi. This individual is a tachyon. I have tried to learn from him and I shall attempt to describe as much about him as I was able to find in the text that follows. Mind you, he is not the only tachyon I’ve come across in my journeys, but he is of paramount significance to me.

It is through him, and the riddles he gives me as instruction, that I am trying to answer the question: can an ordinary guy like me become a tachyon like Franklin, or like the theoretical particles, must one be created at that level? In other words, is the achievement barrier impenetrable?

Chapter 2: The Medical Dungeon

I was not allowed to take pictures, so I did my best to sketch this poor miserable rhesus monkey from memory.

The air was thick with the sterile and antiseptic bouquet common to any laboratory. I could just distinguish the top down odors layered one upon the next, all used to cover up the foundation scents of urine, sweat and death; traits common to environments where the most ingenious of all animals on this planet perform experiments on its’ distant cousins.

Startling us, with a jump every few moments, were the sounds of the rhesus monkeys, rabbits, birds and other animals caged and stationed all throughout this wing of the research facility. Walking down the old dark halls gave me the creeps a little. We passed one locked room after another, from one blackened shadow to another and my self-manufactured distress began to mount. I suddenly found myself torn from my agitation by a pitiful anguished cry that rang throughout the hall, drowning out the other noises which had been prickling at us. A shiver ran through me and I felt Rachel grab my right hand and butt the left side of her body up against mine.

“What the hell was that”, I stammered, probably with a wobbling prepubescent tone.

“Sounded like a Macaque”, Dr. Nyx belched. She spoke with the emotional caress of one describing a car backfiring. I saw only her silhouette as she walked, her antique skeleton bouncing up and down with the cadence of a woman trying to move in a much more youthful and alluring fashion than her bitter disposition and advancing years would allow.

Again the pitiful wail of the macaque engulfed the research facility. My God, what are they doing to these creatures? I felt Rachel’s grip grow tighter and her body pressed up against me further, yielding to me both comfort and courage. I felt the last twinge of my previous anxiety extinguish.

“Dr. Nyx, do you continue to perform experiments all through the night? It’s midnight; shouldn’t all the researchers be done for the day?”

“Indeed they are Mr.Blakeney.”

“Really?” I stammered. “Then why are the animals making so much noise?”

Dr. Nyx looked at me over her right shoulder with a countenance I remembered getting in grade school when I’d asked the teacher a stupid or obvious question. She stopped walking and turned her back to me as she unlocked a lab door.

“We’ve arrived folks”, she said sarcastically.

We entered a laboratory containing a high tech electronic jungle. Wires and large pieces of equipment seemed to be everywhere. The scene was only missing a miniature Tarzan swinging through it.

Dr. Nyx led us through a narrow path using her clip board as a makeshift machete to bat away stray wires and plastic tubing. Rachel’s grip softened and I felt her lips close to my right ear. A different shiver ran though me this time; pleasurable and quite unexpected.

“Why are we doing this again?” she whispered.

“Money” I quipped.

“Oh yeah, that. So, remind me; why do I need money?”

“Shoes. Christian Louboutin”

I felt her head on my shoulder as she closed her eyes and began to imagine these ambrosia of the feet.

We arrived at another door on the far side of the lab. Dr. Nyx knocked gently and a young woman unlocked and opened the door. Looking over the doctor’s shoulder I could see red and green light emanating from this next room.

We entered a rather large chamber, half filled with an enormous enclosed plexiglass cage. At first I thought the strange lighting was playing tricks on me. The inside of the plexiglass cage, however, was aglow with an eerie bright white fluorescence. No light tricks here. I felt Rachel grab my hand and press up to me again as she let out a horrified gasp.

Sitting in the center of the cage, with its arms and legs completely restrained and encased in a thick white plastic, was a rhesus monkey, probably about 2 feet tall. It’s head was held almost completely still by a white metal bib fitted about it’s throat, just below the chin. Directly above the brow and the temples of the head the top half of the skull cap had been completely removed exposing, almost entirely, the creature’s brain. Perhaps a dozen or so small metal pins, each connected to wires, were inserted in different areas of the brain, and the whole mass seemed to ungulate in a purple and grey rhythmic pulse. Every few seconds a misting device would activate, directed at keeping this fully alive and functioning brain moist.

The scene was, at best, macabre. All the wires emanating from this pitiful creature’s brain gave the site a fantastical humorous quality, making the situation all the more disturbing.

Suddenly a loud “whirring” noise filled the entire chamber as Rachel and I witnessed a huge mechanical arm, mounted from the ceiling above the monkey; swing round to a bowl filled with dried banana chips. Gingerly this cumbersome mechanical arm picked one thin dried banana slice from a mound piled in the bowl, and with uncanny precision delivered it to the mouth of the monkey. It repeated this action several times before grabbing a plastic bottle from a shelf with a straw and delivering that to the monkey to drink from, all the while demonstrating an almost “living” precision.

While Rachel and I stood stunned in the green and red lit chamber outside of the cage, Dr. Nyx seemed to be arguing with the young woman who answered the door. It was hard to tell exactly if it was an argument solely from the cadence of Dr. Nyx’s voice however, as all discourse from her had the music of argument embedded into it.

“I don’t care what Professor Hephaestus told you, I need these readouts and I need them now! I must have this data in order to continue my studies, which both of you rely on. You seem to forget, Robyn, that I’m the one who actually does the work that you two take credit for”, Dr. Nyx sounded disdainful, all part of her charm.

“Look Hazel…”

“Dr. Nyx, if you please!”

“Really? I thought we had done away with formalities based on your tone. Whatever. Dr. Nyx, I’m not done with the analyses of my portion of these readouts. I need to verify the findings so that your studies don’t come back erroneous. That is MY job. Are you demanding that I do my job inadequately in order to hit some meaningless imaginary deadline you have set?”

“Robyn…”

“Dr. Athenia, since we’re being formal.” The young woman tried to throw it back in Dr. Nyx’s face, but the gesture was totally ignored.

“...I know you better than that”, Dr. Nyx continued. “I never have expected more than adequate from you, but if I need to make an extra effort to cover your shortcomings than I’ll make the sacrifice. Give me the data and I’ll cross reference it myself, since you don’t seem to be capable of doing it within reasonable parameters.”

“Reasonable parameters…?” The young woman began to stand from her stool and I could see the drama levels in the room beginning to spike. I was about to say something, polite and terse, when Rachel cut in.

“Hey…Ladies! As fascinating as it is to listen to you bicker, we’re not on a pleasure cruise her. It’s after midnight on a Wednesday and I have better places to be then this disgusting animal torture chamber. You both need to table this until we’re finished. Understood? I came here at the request of Professor Hephaestus and my employer who helps fund this madhouse and pays your salaries, and frankly I’m not happy with either of your performances so far!”

When Rachel wanted to she could really cut through the crap and get people back on track. Of course it always helps when one has leverage. I knew she wanted out of here as quickly as possible; this place was really creeping her out. I also knew she’d ask me to make the drive across the bridge to San Francisco after this for a drink to soothe her nerves.

Dr. Nyx hissed and turned her attention to her clip board. The young woman she had called Robyn composed herself quickly, smoothed her lab coat and approached us gingerly.

“Forgive me” she said in a polite tone. “My name is Robyn Athenia. I’m the personal assistant to Professor Hephaestus.”

Rachel sheathed her claws and reached to shake hands. “It’s a pleasure Ms., er..., Dr. Athenia. I’m Rachel Barrows, the anthropological advisor for the Rockwell Foundation.”

I put out my hand for a shake as well. “Nice to meet you. I’m Terrance Blakeney, but my friends call me Joey. I’m the chief officer in charge of research and history for Rockwell”.

“That’s quite a title”, Robyn said. “What the hell does it mean?”

“Well”, I said a little standoffishly, “it means I read a lot”.

She nodded. “And how do you get ‘Joey’ from ‘Terrance’?”

“Ah”, I said, “my middle name is Joseph. Joey just stuck when I was growing up”.

All this light hearted banter was suddenly and ferociously broken when the rhesus monkey let out a shriek that shook the whole chamber. Robyn looked over at Dr. Nyx.

“Hazel, quick, start recording this!”

Dr. Nyx looked confused. “How! This isn’t my station! Just exactly what the hell do you think I am; I’m supposed to…”

As Dr. Nyx prattled on uselessly, Robyn ran behind the bench she had been sitting at and threw a switch, then started typing furiously into a laptop computer.

The monkey continued to screech and Rachel was back up on my right side; as stiff as a board. The whole scene was surreal. The red and green light we were standing in made the white florescent light from the cage stand out strong and piercingly. Inside the monkey distorted its face and screamed, twisting its visage into bizarre shapes. It’s mouth contorted and its tongue and teeth seemed to work together. Once Rachel and I began to get over the horror of it all we suddenly realized that the screeching was not random; this monkey was saying things that sounded like words!

The words were hard to grasp at first. It was like trying to decipher English words from a foreign tourist who has a tremendously thick accent. Once we picked up the cadence however, we could definitely recognize that this monkey was not making random sounds. It was shouting out letters, and select words, in a staccato with metronome like precision.

eeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
mmmmmaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhggggg
sssssssssuhuhuhuuuubbb
eheheheheheeellllllllllllll
eheheheeeemmmmmmmm
sssssssssuhuhuhuuuubbb
eheheheheheeellllllllllllll
heheheheheeesssssssssssssssssssssss
heheheheeeemmmmmmmm
sssssssssuhuhuhuuuubbb
heheheheheeesssssssssssssssssssssss
eeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkwwwwaaaaaaaaalllllllssssssssssss
kkkkkkhkhkhaaaaaoohohohohnnnnnnssssstttttttahahahannnnnnttttt
bbbeeheehehheheeeeeee

As the beast continued to painfully distort its face in order to make these sounds I reached in my pocket and activated a miniature recorder I carry with me to record my ideas in the field. I listened intently to understand each word.

E
Mag
Sub
L
M
Sub
L
S
M

These were some of the sounds I could decipher. I also heard what sounded like the words CONSTANT and EQUALS, as well as the number TWO. it all sounded quite random, but the fact that this animal was making noises I could recognize at all was astonishing, since the rhesus monkey has neither the cognitive brain power nor the vocal capability to do what this animal seemed to be doing.

The monkey kept speaking. The scene was an unnatural horror. Rachel pressed up to me even tighter, but not from fear this time. I could feel her fear and shock being replaced by a ubiquitous curiosity; a curiosity that had already engulfed me. In us both all sense of horror and shock had given way to an overwhelming sensation of wonder and astonishment. Without thinking I took her hand in mine.

I looked over at Dr. Nyx and Robyn and could see they were furiously working at the bench. I did not want to disturb them. I turned to look at Rachel’s face. Although we had been working together for the better part of a month I had never given the features of her face a second thought. She had always been a working colleague, that’s all. Looking at her now, her eyes illuminated by the same awe of discovery that has driven all great minds, from Thales to Einstein, on arduous quests to uncover the deep hidden truths of the cosmos; I felt a chill run through me and I finally realized how magnificently beautiful she is.

Her hand stirred in mine. Suddenly she was aware of my stare and her eyes met mine. Normally I would have turned away. She is a professional colleague, what I was doing was inappropriate. But I could not stop looking at her. All sense of decorum and modesty were lost to me. I could feel the burning curiosity in her and it filled me with intrigue and longing. My breath escaped me.

All of a sudden there was a deafening silence. A silence replaced in a moment by the scratching chalk board that is Dr. Nyx’s voice.

“You didn’t get the oscilloscope readings!”

“That’s ok, it’s no different then…” Dr. Athenia was not given the courtesy to finish.

“It’s not OK! You need to do your job or get replaced!”

Dr. Nyx then looked over at Rachel and I, holding hands and facing each other.

“Boy, if this kind of show turns you two on then you both must have screws loose somewhere”, she chuckled angrily.

Rachel and I let go of each other and each took a step back.

“I was startled, that’s all”, Rachel announced, turning away from me. "Why didn’t you warn us of what this animal is capable of?”

“You guys still use oscilloscopes?” I threw in. “What type of experiments are you performing here anyway?” I turned away from Rachel in a conscious effort to demonstrate a lack of concern for her welfare. Inside, my heart was pounding and I was breaking into a cold sweat. Both hands were trembling. The minutest features of her face remained burned into my mind; a face I had been looking at regularly for almost a month without as much as a second thought. What was it that suddenly made me see her in this light? What happened to me? It’s not as if the ambiance was romantically charged.

Dr. Nyx walked over to us with a grimace. “It’s complicated, and I’m certain you would not understand if I were to tell you in detail what we do here, so I’ll try to keep it simple. We are mapping the brain in a more detailed fashion than has ever been achieved in the past. In the process we delicately inject certain neurotransmitters in certain areas of the brain to stimulate those centers that would be analogous to speech centers in a human brain. The mere fact that we have kept this macaque alive for over a month, in this condition, would amaze any other research scientist. In the process this particular macaque has developed a sort of parroting ability. It can shout out simple words, letters, numbers and such in a random fashion.”

“So the monkey is not cognitive of what it is doing then?” I asked.

“Certainly not”, Dr. Nyx laughed demeaningly. “This ‘talking’ is simply a reflex response. Trust me, this is just another dumb animal. It’s probably not even aware of it’s surroundings or of the amount of time we have had it in this cage.”

Rachel and I looked over at the poor beast behind the plexiglass. It looked exhausted. It’s head drooped to one side and it was breathing heavy. Somehow I got the impression that it knew exactly how much time had passed. It glanced up at us, it’s brows drooped in a pathetic plea for sanctuary. I felt sick. The antiseptic smells and overwhelming emotions were getting to me and suddenly I felt the floor drop away and the room seemed to spin end over end. I could feel the blood rush from my face and I staggered back.

Dr. Nyx looked at me and laughed. “Can’t take it huh? Well, don’t feel bad. Not everyone has the proper nerve for this type of work. What is it they call you type of men…metrosexual or some such thing?” She laughed and looked at Rachel. “Is this the best you can do honey? You should spend more time at the gym.”

As she laughed demonically Rachel raised her right index finger and I could see the rage about to spew forth when I, grabbing Dr. Nyx’s shoulder to maintain my balance, expelled the remainder of my dinner from my sour stomach all over her chest and neck. It had been a fine meal from an excellent Cuban restaurant; however it had drastically lost its appeal by this hour of the morning.

Dr. Nyx reeled back and began a steady stream of obscenity that was as clever as it was vulgar. By some miracle, not one drop of my expulsion had touched me, the floor, or anything in the chamber save Dr. Nyx. Fuming she shoved me back and ran from the room. Her concerto of obscenity could be heard all the way down the outer hall until she climbed the stairs.

I stood leaning on a bench composing myself and feeling humiliated. When I finally looked up I saw Rachel and Dr. Athenia laughing to each other. Dr. Athenia approached me with a towel and a cup of water.

“You alright there tiger?” she said.

“I’m really sorry. I feel like such an ass. I think maybe the food may have made me a little ill.” I was rapidly regaining my composure now. I felt a lot better.

Rachel gave me a pitiful look with the shake of her head. “Ya think? Wow, some date you are. I take you out for what was probably the first meal you’ve had with a woman in a month and this is how you repay me?”

“I don’t know what to say….I….”

Rachel and Dr. Athenia both laughed. “Don’t sweat it kid” Rachel said. “I won’t let it affect my high opinion of you as a professional colleague, ok?”

“Fine”, I relented. Just great. I suddenly feel some attraction to this person I’ve been working with and I toss my cookies right in front of her. Real smooth.

I looked at Dr. Athenia. “What about Dr. Nyx? Can you apologize for me please? I feel just awful, it was and accident and I…”

“Don’t worry about Dr. Nyx”, Dr. Athenia proclaimed. “She has a thick hide. I’m sure she’ll live. Now are you feeling better?”

“Yes, I’m fine now, and I promise it won’t happen again.” Rachel chuckled when I said this and gave me another pathetic look, shaking her head.

“Well, then, I guess we should go down to Professor Hephaestus' laboratory. Are you ready?”

Rachel and I looked at each other, then back at Dr. Athenia. “Sweetheart”, Rachel said, “I’ve been ready since the moment I set foot in this creepy place. I hate the smell of antiseptic.”

“Ok then”, Dr. Athenia laughed. She turned and walked to a spot just behind the large plexiglass cage. Sticking a rounded key into the wall, she opened a panel containing an electronic numerical pad. After she typed in a code the entire plexiglass cage began to move. It shifted forward about 3 feet toward the door of the chamber. As it did this, the green and red lights, illuminating the chamber, went dark and were replaced by a lemon colored hue from the ground revealed by the moving cage. There was some sort of thick glowing plastic under the cage floor and after Dr. Athenia locked the panel with the numerical pad back up, she beckoned us to stand with her on the plastic strip where the cage had been. Dr. Athenia then produced a small remote control and at the touch of a button the whole plastic strip began to sink into the floor. As our heads got below the floor line, the cage with the monkey moved back into place. Music, Debussy I believe, was playing in this small space as we sank deeper and deeper into the ground, the walls around us slowly rising before us and the only illumination coming from the floor piece we were standing on.

“Have you met Professor Hephaestus before?” Dr. Athenia looked at us.

“No” Rachel said. “Although I’ve read some of his work.”

“So have I”, I interjected. “He is quite a brilliant theoretician.”

“Yes, well, I must ask you both to brace yourselves and please do not act shocked when you see him”, Dr. Athenia looked concerned now. “As you know, since the Professor's accident he does not allow pictures taken of him, as his appearance is, well, unconventional. The initial reaction upon meeting him for the first time is a gasp of shock, so I want to let you both know right now so you can consciously control it, ok?”

Rachel and I looked at each other. “Sure”, we said simultaneously. “How bad can it be”, Rachel added.

“Not bad, so much as…well…not common. You’ll see for yourselves soon enough”.

Just then the plastic flooring came to a jittery halt and with a loud mechanical hiss two steel doors were parted before us.

Chapter 2.5: Passion in Wonder

At the close of the seventh century B.C., hailing from a city called Miletus in the land of Ionia, a young man arrived in the land of Babylon fresh from his journeys in Egypt. He was bright, curious and conversant with the knowledge of Babylon.

He strode through the magnificent city and came upon the construction of a series of great and beautiful gardens, which had been commissioned by King Nebuchadnezzar II in an effort to appease his wife who pined for the sights and scents of the forests in her far off homeland of Persia. The gardens had the makings of the most elaborate and extraordinary of its’ kind, and the trees and exotic plants, brought from far away lands and put forth, hung from the many marbled terraces and sculptures as if a man made mountain had sprung from earth.

As the young man observed the construction activities amongst a small group of onlookers a sudden and violent trembling rose up from the belly of the earth. The entire world seemed to rear up and roll like the deck of a sea bound ship. Tools fell and men staggered, but then, as sudden as it had begun, the earth was stable again and the ground grew solid.

People laughed nervously and collected themselves and talk began to arise of how the great God had stamped his foot upon the ground. Two older gentlemen began the discourse on how the world was once entirely covered in water until the great God, Marduk, had placed a mat on the face of the waters and covered the mat with the soil of the earth, creating the dry land. The rolling of the land must surely arise from Marduk rocking the mat, perhaps in a demonstration of power.

The young man from Miletus stepped forth to listen to this conversation, but he did not agree with the conclusions of the older men.

“Yes”, he said with alacrity, “indeed the earth was once mostly covered in water, with almost no dry land upon the seas. However it was not Marduk, nor any other God who created the dry land. The creation of the lands are a natural phenomena resulting from the interaction of the waters on the soil. I’ve just come from Egypt, where I have noticed that the earth silts up in the delta of the river Nile. I have spent time sampling the waters and measuring the amount of soil carried by them. My observations yielded to me the idea that the soil is carried from the source of the river by the waters and is deposited farther down, creating the build up of land. Over time, this silting up process must create more land over the seas. As this silting process continues over time the lands grow and expand over the top of the waters of the seas. When great waves of the sea churn beneath the earth, the land rocks like the deck of a sea faring ship. The entire process is a natural one. No Gods are involved.”

The older men stopped for a moment to solemnly regard the wonder and joy in the eyes of this energetic young man. He was almost trembling with excitement as he recounted this fantastic tale of “natural phenomenon”. They then broke into a fit of laughter, slapping themselves and the young man on the back.

“What is your name young one”, the taller of the two gentlemen asked with a smile.

“Thales”, the young man replied eagerly.

“Listen, young Thales, you’d do well to forget your own useless conjectures and put your faith in the Gods for understanding the world and its dangers. The answers to all the mysteries of the world have already been uncovered for all men to appreciate.”

“If that is so then the Gods have surely cursed me”, Thales exclaimed. “For I find no greater pleasure in life then to seek for truth in all I see. The world is a majestic puzzle, filled with riddles and illusions which hide the truth from us. I believe men can solve these riddles and lift the veils of illusion to forever uncover the gems of truth that lie beneath. I hunger and thirst for knowledge no less than I would for food or drink. I am not sated by the interventions of the great Marduk, or the mighty Zeus to explain all that is.”

“Then take our pity young Thales”, the shorter of the two gentlemen said gently and with pity in his eyes, “for surely yours is a life of torment and chaos.”

Thales simply grinned and bid farewell, continuing on his exploration of the city.

While the conclusions of Thales in regards to the creation of dry lands and the phenomena of earthquakes were not correct, his approach was revolutionary and remarkable.

Thales was the first human in recorded history to postulate that the world was not made by the Gods. Instead the world must be the result of material forces interacting in nature. These forces could be observed by man and a process could be put in place to measure the natural world and uncover it’s secrets. Through the virtues of passion, curiosity and wonder, humans could solve any enigma the cosmos has to offer.

When Thales returned to his Grecian city of Miletus, he brought with him the foundation of what we know today as the scientific method. In Ionia, he delicately sowed the seeds of astronomy and geometry; new sciences, bereft of any divine interventions, which would forever change the way human beings regard their world. He would also use his ideas of observation to embellish the art of philosophy, influencing the great minds of classical civilization. Over the ensuing few hundred years Ionia would explode in a cultivation of this new way of thinking. This explosion would have profound influence on the great minds of Athens hundreds of years later, and the great geniuses of the European Renaissance two thousand years later.

No secret of the cosmos can be kept from those who find passion in wonder.

Chapter 3: Cerebral Camelot

Professor Jules Hephaestus drawn from memory: one of the most brilliant minds of this generation. The helmet upon his head gave him an almost Kingly demeanor.

The parting steel doors revealed an atrium like chamber, perhaps twenty feet in diameter and lit from certain panels in the floor and the areas where the walls met the ceiling. There were, however, no hard corners in the chamber at all. Where wall met floor and ceiling there were gentle curves melding one to the next, and the chamber itself had the form of a perfect circle. The doors of the elevator we were standing in were located at one far end of the circle, and directly opposite us, across the chamber, were another set of the same style steel doors, shiny and clean. The sterile antiseptic smells from the lab above were replaced with the soft scent of flowers, and the music we heard in the elevator, Debussy, was now clear and I recognized the tune as his famous Clair de Lune.

As we stepped from the elevator I saw that, embedded in the walls on either side of us, were large fish tanks that looked quite deep. The bottoms of the tanks were about waist high going about three feet in height toward the ceiling. At the base of each was a small table built into the wall, jutting out perhaps a foot and running the length of the fish tanks. As I looked behind us I noticed, on either side of the elevator doors, two identical vases, each about three feet high and designed in an art nouveau style. It dawned on me that the entire chamber had an old world art nouveau style as well, so the vases fit in well. Each vase was filled generously with flowers.

“Wow”, Rachel regarded the chamber in awe as she spoke. “This is quite an office. Those are beautiful flowers. What a change from the torture chamber you’ve got going on up stairs. Are those Chrysanthemums?”

“Yes”, Dr. Athenia said with a half grin. “White Chrysanthemums, historically symbolizing truth. Then there are Delphiniums, representing boldness, Begonias symbolizing deep thoughts and then the pink Carnations...” She trailed off.

“What do those represent?” I chimed in.

Dr. Athenia looked up. “Gratitude.” She turned back to Rachel. “I understand your opinions regarding the work we do upstairs, but I want to remind you that without the type of research we do here, and at other facilities around the world, the quality of human life and scientific progress would hit a stand still. For some areas of study, such as the brain, there is simply no other way to advance forward and learn.”

“Well that’s a nice rationalization, but c’mon? There’s no other way to advance science than the prolonged torture of one of God’s creatures? I don’t buy it.” I could tell Rachel did not want to get into this, but she would not back down from her opinions either.

Dr. Athenia frowned. “You simply don’t understand it, even though you reap the benefits of it. Animal testing is what allowed scientists to develop vaccines against diseases like the mumps, measles, rubella, polio, TB…the list goes on. Tell me something, have you ever known anyone who has had heart bypass surgery?”

Sensing trouble I tried to change the subject. “Dr. Athenia I had a question about the monkey upstairs…”

Rachel interrupted. “Yes, my father had it when I was a teenager and he had another one about three years ago. I see where you’re going with this but it is no excuse…”

“Rachel, without animal testing your father would have died when you were a teenager.” Dr. Athenia was now quite stern, yet, defensive. “Open heart surgery techniques were developed on animals like the one you saw upstairs; animals who did not survive. Those techniques supplied you with the privilege to keep your father into adulthood.”

“You know”, Rachel shot back, “that can be contested. What you are doing to that poor creature up there is an abomination. I don’t believe there was no other way to develop that surgery. I’m not convinced.”

“Only because your ignorant to how the results of this testing affects your life. Every day!” Dr. Athenia looked pained as she continued. “Look, I’m not like Dr. Nyx. I don’t enjoy doing it. But I see the necessity and I know we need to…”

I finally cut in. “Ok ladies, I’m sorry but that’s quite enough. Dr. Athenia, I appreciate your feedback on this issue, it’s obviously something you feel passionately about but we are not here at this hour to debate the ethics of your job.” As I said the last few words of this sentence I looked back at Rachel. “If I’m not mistaken Professor Hephaestus is waiting for us. May we proceed with what we came her to do please?”

Dr. Athenia shook her head and turned away from us. “I haven’t slept in over twenty two hours. I’m a little punchy. Forgive me.”

Behind her back I motioned to Rachel. Take the olive branch!

“Ah, um, I’m sorry too Robyn. It was out of place for me to question your job.” Rachel made a fake plastic smile on her face.

Dr. Athenia looked back at the flowers for a moment and paused, as if in her own little world. Stirring from her trance she turned back to face Rachel and I.

“Ok, down to business. Each of you were given a security code word before coming her tonight and were instructed not to share that word with anyone or write it down. You remember your code words, right?”

Rachel and I each nodded.

“Good, step over here please.” Dr. Athenia took us over to one of the fish tanks. As we approached, I realized these were not fish tanks at all, but huge video monitors, curved to fit the shape of the room, showing video of fish swimming. Dr. Athenia touched a button on the table at the base of the monitor and the video suddenly switched to an image of a large grid with the alphabet embedded in it. She then opened a small drawer and pulled from it a cap, sort of like the thing you wear to keep your hair dry while swimming, with many wires attached to it. “Ok”, she continued, “you will both need to do this simultaneously so listen close. Place this cap over your head so that the front is on your forehead, the back is at the nape of the neck and the sides are as far down as they can be at the ears. Here, Rachel you take this one, Joey you go over to the other monitor and use the one in that drawer.” She motioned to the other side of the room where the fish tank had also been replaced by the grid of the alphabet. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

I walked to the other side of the room and fitted the cap on my head as I was told. The wires coming from the inside of the drawer were long enough for me to stand comfortably. When I looked back up at the video monitor I could see a highlight square now blinking quickly and randomly around the letters in the alphabet, one letter at a time. This blinking highlight moved at a very fast but constant rate from one letter to the next.

“Ok, now I want you to spell out the code word in your mind, one letter at a time. Focus on the one letter and as the highlight blinks on that letter on the screen tell your self ‘yes’.”

At first I thought this was ridiculous. Or I thought it would not work. However as I started to think of the first letter in my code word I could see the highlight begin to blink a little more frequently on the letter I was thinking of. Each time it would highlight I would think ‘yes’ until my letter highlighted brightly for an instant and then appeared in a window below the grid. The whole process took maybe ten seconds for that first letter. “Astonishing”, I mumbled, thoroughly intrigued by this device. I continued in this manner, thinking ‘yes’ each time my letter was highlighted and watching it get highlighted more frequently as I focused on it. By the fourth letter I had picked up the pace so it only took me about five seconds to ‘manifest’ it into the digital window below the grid.

Before I knew it I had the word “edgi” successfully spelled out in the digital window. I looked back at Rachel, who was equally impressed with this technology and smiling back at me shaking her head. I could see the word “tesla” written in her window. Just then a powerful ‘whirring’ noise filled the atrium all around the walls, and with a very subtle jerking sensation I felt the whole atrium rotate, probably clockwise. Although it was faint, I also had the impression that the entire atrium was sinking deeper into the ground. When this noise ceased I could just barely feel the atrium slowly stop and the steel doors at the opposite end from the elevator opened with a hiss.

Rachel and I took our caps off and proceeded to the door where Dr. Athenia motioned for us. As we approached her she reminded us, “Remember what I told you in the elevator.” Rachel and I both nodded. I began to ask a question when Dr. Athenia put a finger to her lips and motioned for me to move forward.

As we walked through the doors we entered an enormous chamber, probably twenty five hundred square feet in size. In the center of the chamber was another perfect circle, maybe seven feet in diameter and with the same lemon glow as the elevator we originally come down on. Again, the first thing that stood out was the absence of corners as the walls, floor and ceiling seemed to grow into each other with that same art nouveau style to it as seen in the atrium. The chamber was filled with equipment, but was very dimly lit so it was hard to see what the devices actually were. Along the wall to the left was an exposed elevator shaft going from the floor we were on up one story to a platform that comprised approximately one quarter of the chamber, but on a level above the floor. Stark black shadows were everywhere yielding shafts of different colored light off in the distances. Looking up at the platform, in the distance, I could see light emanating from a panel parallel to the ground at about waist height. This cast a shaft of light up into the end of the chamber. Just in front of this light, yet still off in the distance on that upper platform, I could make out the silhouette of a man, stoic and unmoving.

A large video monitor mounted from the high ceiling then flashed on in front of us, and a mechanical voice, spitting words as regular as a metronome with an artificial inflection that seemed to rise and dip in all the wrong places began to speak from the darkness.

“Welcome. I was just finishing my review of your dossiers. If you please…”

On the monitor above I suddenly saw my own face, with a written report to the left of the photo.

“Terrance Blakeney. Age: thirty five. Height: five feet ten inches. Weight: one hundred sixty five pounds. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Graduate of Stanford University Physics Department (under scholarship program), Cum Laude. Area of interest: Cosmology. No sports, no extra curricular activity. Masters Degree, UCLA. Returned to Stanford for Doctorate Degree but left eight months into the program. Spent four years as a mountain bike tour guide with Worldwide Touring, Inc. Led tours in France, Italy, and Spain and various locations in the United States. Winters spent as ski instructor, Vail, Colorado, Chamonix, France, and Val d'Isere, France. Founded company manufacturing t-shirts; filed bankruptcy two years later. Hired by the Rockwell Foundation three months ago in the division of Fashion Design and Research. Artistic proficiency. Never married.”

The image on the monitor then switched to Rachel’s face.

“Rachel Barrows. Age: twenty eight. Height: five feet four inches. Weight: one hundred fifteen pounds.”

Rachel broke in loudly. “I weigh one hundred and FIVE pounds…hello?”

The mechanical voice continued on unflinchingly. “Hair: black. Eyes: green. Graduate of Cornell University Anthropology Department, Magna Cum Laude. Area of interest: Cultural Anthropology. Two years women’s soccer. Ph.D, School of Human Evolution, Arizona State University. Participated in major excavations in Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Ethiopia. Spent three years in management affiliated with LVHM (Moët Hennessy / Louis Vuitton); worked in divisions of Berluti, Donna Karan New York (DKNY), Givenchy, Emilio Pucci, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton. Acquired position initially through a friend in the parent company. Left affiliation with LVHM to form small company importing shoes. Company purchased by Rockwell Foundation. Moved to Fashion Design and Research two months ago. Artistic proficiency. Never Married.”

Now the image switched to that of our boss, Steven Rockwell.

“Rockwell Foundation. Steven Rockwell founder. Age: thirty eight. Height: six feet. Weight: classified. Hair: classified. Eyes: classified. Graduate: Harvard University Department of Economics, Magna Cum Laude. MBA, Wharton School of Business. Founder: Rockwell Technologies, details classified. Founder: Rockwell Institute, details classified. Founder: Rockwell Foundation, details: conglomerate company consisting of many distinct smaller companies. Companies include, but are not limited to, divisions in solar power, wind technology, medical technology, microcredit, fine art, video games, feature film animation, perfume and fashion design. Steven Rockwell is known as an eccentric adventurer who professes a love for starting companies. Married sixteen years with two children.”

The electronic tambour of the artificial voice had barely dissipated when the video monitor was shut off and another light appeared above us on the upper platform. The man who had cast the silhouette I’d seen earlier had made his way closer to us and now was directly overhead. An orange light from an illuminated table top now revealed him to us, shining directly at him and casting a medieval shadow far up the smooth wall behind him. He was horribly crippled; unable to move even the smallest muscle in his body. His hands were twisted and contorted and his legs were covered with a thick blanket. He wore a suite, without a tie, and his countenance seemed to be unmoving, with a thin smile forever entombed on his face. Just above his thick glasses was a helmet that completely covered the top half of his head. From this headpiece thousands of small wires came out and up, forming some kind of crazy electronic wig atop his head. The wires twisted and looped in a chaotic fashion before disappearing behind the high back rest of his wheelchair. Before we even realized it, the platform we were standing on began to rise into the air to meet him. It stopped right at the edge of the platform he was on so we were now at his level. In a slow mechanical gesture, his head moved to look at us. It was obvious from the quality of the motion that a mechanical device behind his neck was doing this. Seeing him up close was like seeing the great king of a crippled society. His wheelchair, outfitted with various electronic contraptions, consumed him, like a magnificent technological throne. His helmet glinted in the light, forming a makeshift crown atop his head, haloed by the electric wires. It was in this moment that I first saw the black band I would continue to see throughout my journeys. On the small finger of his left hand I could make out the shiny black ring, a lone band with the word “edgi” engraved on its face.

Then, from the speakers placed throughout the chamber, we heard the ubiquitous mechanical voice once again, all of us now staring directly at it’s source. His face was frozen in a serene expression while his words engulfed the chamber.

“No secret of the cosmos can be kept from those who find passion in wonder. You are here because you have such passion. I am here to extol this virtue in you to efflorescence. I am Professor Hephaestus.”