Xenoman

16 Premonition

Xeno walked out of Holly's front door, glancing back with the creeping sense he was being followed, but there was no one in the hall, just branch shadows swaying over his face in the moonlight. He crossed through the portico columns and came down the entrance steps, spotting a curvy figure lying in the front lawn, just beyond the station wagon in the driveway. He walked across the grass, until he arrived at the young girl in the reverse polarity suit, conked out under the stars. He bent down and checked her wrist for a pulse.

"She still alive?" Garry said over the transceiver.

"Her wrist is, so I guess all the other parts are." Xeno let her wrist drop in the grass.

"Hold on, Xeno. I want to check something." In the Intellegella studio, Garry studied the pineograph of Trianne lying dead in the grass on the Pineal Archive Monitor, extracted from Xeno's first premonition. He pressed a button on the main console and the semi-transparent image of the girl in the reverse polarity suit appeared, superimposed over the image of Trianne's corpse lying in the grass, then froze, followed by the prompt:

PINEAL SLICE OVERLAY COMPLETE

The two women were sprawled on the lawn in the exact same position. "Interesting. Your premonition of Trianne lying dead on the grass was the right pose, but the wrong person . . . Xeno? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you." Xeno slid his fingers beneath his black box. "My chest feels warm."

"Do you think you're having a heart attack?"

"No, it's more like oven heat." Xeno backed away from the girl, to an open clearing on the front lawn, and removed the Polaroids from his breast pocket. "It's the Polaroids. They're hot." He held out one in each hand. "But one's hotter than the other."

"Which one, Xeno?"

"The one with Trianne, standing in front of Klownburger." He put the Polaroid of Holly and Lew back in his breast pocket, still holding out the Polaroid of Trianne.

"It could be a premonition."

"Now what?"

"Stay with it. I want you to concentrate on the Polaroid of Trianne."

"Concentrating now."

"Now, turn the knob on the black box to two. I'll be capturing the pineal footage on the Pineal Feed Monitor."

"Roger that." Xeno slowly turned the main dial of the black box to "2."

Garry observed the Pineal Feed Monitor in the studio, adjusting the screen resolution from the main console. A swirl of neon strands appeared onscreen, like the tentacles of a glowing octopus, as the transmission from the SSP satellite made the psychic handshake with Xeno's pineal gland, handshaking with the Noumenol released into his bloodstream, preserving his bio-chemical equilibrium, in the event there were too many handshakes handshaking at the same time, resulting in a cardiac arrest, preventing Xeno from shaking hands ever again. A brief prompt appeared onscreen:

PINEAL CAPTURE DATA

SAVING TO DISK . . .

"What do you see Garry? Anything?" Xeno asked over the transceiver.

"Yes. A great light show. Hold your position, Xeno. The Polaroid is coming into view through your retinal link." The Polaroid image of Trianne appeared on the Pineal Feed Monitor, filling the entire telepane for Garry to see. "Now, don't move. I'm going to try something." From the console, Garry toggled the Pineal Joystick to the left. In turn, the image panned left on the psychic x-axis of the Pineal Feed Monitor, beyond the left border of the Polaroid, revealing the occult landscape outside the boundaries of the photograph.