Compile:Quest

Chapter 17: Resonance

Lambent Laboratories, Cell 3,

Africa Dome

"These readings can't be accurate."

Onyx shifted his gaze from the girl to Jasper. His mouth tightened. The man had interrupted a complex chain of thoughts.

"Based on what?"

"According to these EEG readings, her brain waves are oscillating at three-point-five cycles per second."

"Which corresponds to a theta brain wave cycle," Onyx said. Not that he had to. Jasper knew this.

"But she's just entered alpha stage. It's taken her less than two minutes to reach theta!"

"I designed this procedure, Jasper. I would know if there were issues with the method in which readings were obtained. There are no discrepancies, no interferences. These readings are accurate."

"I never meant—"

"It's not impossible for a person to reach theta in less than ten minutes." Onyx looked back at the girl. Jasper's concerned expression annoyed him.

"But highly improbable."

"We've performed this procedure on all the recruits, Jasper. You didn't argue with their readings." Onyx did have reservations about the readings, but he wasn't about to admit them, not when Jasper seemed ready to scrap the entire procedure on a whim.

"There must be some interference—"

"None."

He sensed Jasper move closer and grimaced, stepping away. Jasper peered down at Peppermint as if observing the introduction of aluminium to bromine, both shocked and intrigued by the resulting chemical reaction.

Jasper's myopic gaze fixed on Onyx. "Do you feel an echo?"

Onyx hesitated before answering. He didn't have to turn his attention to the sensation to measure it — the resonance permeated his body, radiating through him in waves akin to a pulsing electrical charge.

"There is an echo," he said.

The echo emanated from the girl, rising like an aura from her flesh. It became exponentially weaker with distance. If he stepped closer the sensation would quickly transform into pain — closer still and he'd develop a migraine.

"Strong enough to account for—"

"It's erratic," Onyx interrupted him.

"Erratic how?"

"Pulsing. Irregular. Shifting." Synonyms exhausted, he waited for Jasper to digest this new information.

The man was anything but idiotic, but his languid thought processes quickly traversed the threshold from bearable to infuriating.

"Is that normal?" Jasper asked.

"No." The word emerged with an irritated exhalation. "But I've never done a reading on a recruit who's undergoing an MRI scan with EEG equipment attached, while said subject is listening to binaurals, with someone nattering away in my ears."

Jasper dipped his head. "Ah."

"Exactly."

They stared at each other.

"So there's something, but it's intangible," Jasper prompted.

"It is tangible, just not quantifiable."

"Ah," the old man repeated with another dip of his head.

Onyx looked back at the magenta-haired girl.

"We'll move to the Ganzfield in fifteen minutes."

"Already? But—"

"Do you expect me to repeat everything I just said? The readings are accurate. There is no reason to delay the next procedure."

Jasper nodded. "I understand." He took another step toward Onyx.

Onyx reared back, lifting his hand in warning. Jasper looked at his hand, a confused furrow appearing between his thick eyebrows.

Then the old man's eyes widened. "My goodness, I apologise. I got so caught up—"

"What were you going to say?" The urge to hurry Jasper along in any conversation was too strong to suppress. He was sure he aged exponentially while waiting for the man to complete a single thought.

"She's so..." Jasper's hands flailed in the air. "So young. We've never received a recruit—"

"What of it?" Onyx interrupted. "There is no correlation between age and abilities. Manifestation can happen at four years of age, or forty."

"I just meant that... she's only just started her life. If she is—"

"Her life? In the dome?" Onyx managed to suppress outright laughter, but his words trembled with mirth. "You're confusing survival with living, old man. Denizens merely exist. You of all people should realise that."

"I just meant, she hasn't had time to fully discover—"

"Then think of this as an accelerated learning curve. After today, she'll know if there's anything more to her futile existence than being caught up in a pathetic show and tell of material abstraction."

"I know it will be a step up for her—"

"A step up?" And now Onyx did laugh, unable to overcome his stupefaction at Jasper's self-imposed ignorance. "There are no steps out there. The only graduation in life is through knowledge and experience. Denizens have access to neither. This wouldn't be a step up, it would be an awakening, a rebirth. She would be transformed from just another gear in the machine to a being of singular abilities and astounding potential. Can you really be so obtuse?"

Jasper closed his mouth. Onyx nodded. He couldn't tolerate the man's compassion, which seemed to have crystallised into some new, even more infuriating compound with the arrival of this girl.

Onyx turned his attention back to the recruit. The fact that she was beautiful arrived as a vague, irrelevant observation. He had no interest in whether her features were perfectly proportionate or obscenely asymmetrical. The only aspect of her persona that interested him was the one he was in the process of establishing at this very moment. Her potential.

"I'll be in the observation room until she's ready for the Ganzfield."

Jasper didn't indicate that he'd heard him. His eyes were locked on the girl, mouth turned down as he no doubt decried her gloomy future. Onyx stalked across the room, catching sight of his reflection in the dark glass of the observation room. The combination of his white lab coat and pale face transformed his reflection into something ephemeral.

Seated in the padded chair inside, Onyx peered at the partial three-dimensional reconstruction of the girl's brain. Her neurons spun in an intricate dance as they assembled themselves. Phoenix was mapping her brain using the combined readings from the EEG and MRI. Despite the advances in technology after Black Sunday, procedures like this still took time and Onyx struggled to suppress his frustration at the delay.

If the girl's readings at this stage were any indication of her hidden depths then lying out there was a thing of beauty. A human mind evolved beyond the point of mere thought, memory formation and emotional manifestation — a mind capable of anything. Everything. A psyche that could be trained to rent through the very fabric of the universe.

And he would be the one honing it. 

. . .