Undisclosed, Nevada
October 6th onwards
In a world of unusual people, Don was at
one end of the bell curve.
He made a living as a biology researcher with a specialization in octopuses and squids, although I had to admit that most of the time it was difficult for me to imagine that someone could make a living from that. Nonetheless his day job did not keep him involved, and he somehow moved in odder circles, in the gray area of the law. For some reason, had had contacts all over the place, and if you needed to arrange a fake license or had to have something stolen, Don would somehow know the right person to talk with.
Don and I had been fairly close (as close as you could be with Don, which wasn’t very much), but we had drifted apart when I had left the University. Nonetheless, I had always kept his number in the back of my mind.
While we were driving to his cabin in Nevada we fell easily into our old friendship. Friendships between males and females are so different. Female friendships seem to require constant contact over time, otherwise they will degrade, but males think nothing of contacting a person after ten years for no other purpose than to talk, and it isn’t thought odd by either party.
On the drive up, I explained to Don everything that was going on, and his eyebrows seemed to be locked permanently into the upright position as he listened to my story. He was extremely dubious, at first, but a few very minor demonstrations of the Overnet in his cabin later that night were able to drive his doubts away, which at one level made me feel very good that I wasn’t crazy – at least I was able to coax another person into my delusion.
More than anything, both he and I wanted to try and understand the Overnet, so we embarked on several weeks of experiments. He always approached things from a scientific point of view, and pulled out various arcane machinery from his basement, and we did some small, small experiments, trying to see how the ring was able to communicate with something located within the Earth’s core, but after a day or two Don gave up; he couldn’t figure out how the Overnet was using the ring, or vice versa, and couldn’t even detect any transmissions at any scannable frequency. He made some joke about “invisibleon” particles, and then we went to another round of experiments where we tried to arrive at quantification of my abilities, and after a while I began to get a better handle on how exactly everything worked and what it took to control the Overnet.
We never did anything more than boil water, and never until I had checked the location of the other Core members, and always very carefully; but even with boiling water there is an amazing amount of quantification that can be done, and we did it all: graphs that showed the average amount of energy poured into the water vs. distance from the water vs. variations based on geographical location of target, all cross-indexed vs. various physiological parameters that he was recording; I walked around for most of a week with some advanced wireless EKG and heartbeat monitors, and was constantly having my temperature taken by a small device stuck to my forehead.
I established contact with Monitor several times that week, and after conversations with Monitor I learned that things were getting worse, not better. Checking my life in the real world using a twice-anonymized browser revealed that the company was going under and I had a frantic yet vague note from my mother that I just couldn’t respond to. I tried to get a local California paper so that I could at least read Gwen’s obituary, but I wasn’t able to find one. I disengaged from the rest of the world, since I couldn’t do anything about it, not while I had the future of the human race in my hands. Don and I continued to try variations in Overnet usage to understand how it worked.
Finally, after talking with Monitor and going over the conversations laboriously with Don, we came up with a plan. It was a plan that was incredibly poor, but really, we couldn’t rig anything better; what I really wanted was a nuclear bomb or an aircraft carrier or something, but even Don wasn’t able to rig that, and he had serious doubts that we would be able to convince a sober government official about the veracity of our claims, Overnet demonstration or no. We also didn’t know how far the Core extended, and were afraid that every person that we brought into this made it much more likely that the Core would hear about our efforts.
So we made a plan, and a backup plan, and called shipping companies and trucking companies, and spent a very hairy evening at a Death Valley cliff, and very quickly managed to eat up all my savings; I had to deed over my house to Don, and he needed to sell a substantial portion of his stock, but we finally equipped it so that we had something that we thought would stop the Core, and then a very crazy blue sky idea that we would use in the event that that didn’t work. All in all, the best efforts of (individual) man and my shaky efforts with the Overnet were going to have to be enough.
It was time for a meeting at a gas station.