*reader warning: heavy use of jargon and medical style terminology. Please resist the urge to fall asleep, eyes glazed over in confusion and shock
As the man named Preacher sent his associate scurrying off on an impossible mission, the subject of their concern was checking in at the Alec Arms, a local hotel whose name he had snatched from the cab driver's mind. Somewhat refueled from his stop at the small cafe just across the street, he was now ready to get down to business.
"If you could sign your registry card, we'll get you settled in as quickly as possible!" the pretty, young desk clerk chirped, her eyes sparkling as she passed the small card over to the powerful stranger, along with a pen. Leaning against the polished marble front of the large reception desk, the big man took the card and pen, not even noticing the bright and hopeful smile the clerk directed at him. As he signed an alias name with a flourish, the clerk reached under the desk and retrieved a computer access card in a plastic envelope. When he was finished, she placed it into his outstretched hand.
"And here is your door key, Mr. O'Hara. Your room number is 5001 and if you need anything, anything at all, my name is Marcie and it would be my pleasure to get it for you!"
The big man paused at the sensual tone added to the last sentence and looked up at the clerk. Seeing that she had finally been noticed, Marcie almost unconsciously rearranged her dark, shoulder length hair and tugged her uniform straighter and tighter across her bust. At this distance, the man in black couldn't help but catch the hopeful, sexual thoughts that were spilling out of the woman's mind despite his tight psionic shielding. He smiled.
"Thank you, Marcie. I'll keep that in mind," he answered softly then turned smoothly from the desk to walk quickly to the elevators at the eastern end of the lobby area. When he turned around after stopping inside, he noticed her staring after him. As the big man's eyes met Marcie's, they dropped and he could see her blushing. Smiling in light amusement, the powerful stranger hit the key for the fifth floor.
By the time the elevator had reached the fifth floor, however, any trace of a smile was gone and the cold, almost emotionless mask he had worn at the airport before the assault on the telepath, had returned. Moving smoothly and with the grace of a hunting tiger, he strode down the hallway towards the door marked '5001'. The card key was quickly swiped through the electronic lock then the man in black carefully and cautiously opened the door, sweeping the room before him with telepathy to ensure he was alone. Satisfied after a quick search, he continued inside, quickly closing the heavy metal door behind him and making sure it was locked with a jerk on the handle. His bag then went onto the queen-sized bed, his heavy leather jacket swiftly following.
Unlike the trench coats he had run into at the airport, the man in black didn't need to generate an active telepathic pulse wave to scan a physical location. Senses highly tuned by his abilities, he could've merely closed his eyes, letting his senses passively stretch out of his body to fill the room. However, after tripping the ward in the corridor and triggering an attack from those self-same trench coats, he wasn't taking any chances. Focusing his mind, the stranger began an intensive search of the room and any connecting chambers with several psionic abilities, including telepathy.
The simple chamber that was the primary sleeping area, quickly resolved itself into a blank cube within the man's mind, a featureless set of six planed surfaces with nothing to distinguish them from each other except their differing orientations and geometries. Shifting shades of gray colored the surfaces, rippling with a life of their own as the man's senses washed over them again and again.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, the stranger then extended his senses into the two rooms attached to this one, a TV room and the washroom, quickly discovering they too held nothing of interest. It was only when he began bringing his senses back to his body that he caught sight of it: a glowing mote of light slowly making its way across the northern wall.
As the mote of light resolved itself in the man's inner eye, he swung his mental focus around and bore down on it, a frown on his face. In a blink of his inner eye, the mote was abruptly large and detailed in his internal perspective.
On spidery legs of gossamer light it moved, a tiny ball of compacted energy with feelers of luminescence that lightly caressed the hard surface of the wall itself, in which it was embedded several centimetres. Even from where he stood, he could feel the faint psionically active field the tiny creature was emanating, the field focusing around the tiny feelers, which were several times the length of the creature's body. It was a bug, and a rather complicated one. At least it didn't seem to be transmitting. Nor did it appear to have any specific identifiers, like a psionic resonance code that, upon being activated by a telepathic scan, would give the bug's identity and location on a predetermined grid map. Both of which made it much easier to dispose of.
Locking the bug's location into his mind, the stranger wove together a slender telepathic probe and aimed it in the bug's direction. Almost immediately the bug became active, its feelers perking up as it sensed a nearby psionic field. But, before it could locate and lock onto the field, the probe penetrated it like a pin through its energy carapace. It had time enough to 'meep' in surprise before the probe emitted a brief burst of null energy and ripped it apart. The bug's substance quickly dispersed as motes of light, to be absorbed into the ambient surroundings.
The man frowned as he watched the motes disappear. Then, focusing his mind, he made one last scan to satisfy himself that the room didn't have any more unexpected guests. As the room resonated to the final scan before fading back into reality, he unzipped the bag sitting on the bed and reached inside. It didn't take long for him to find what he was looking for.
At first glance, it looked like a flat metal cigarette case, made from silver, or perhaps platinum, gleaming with a warm luster in the light cast by the single overhead light. The man in black turned it lightly over in his hands, the rounded edges whispering softly as they glided over the skin of his palms and fingertips. The whole was a smooth fusion of form that could easily fit into a shirt breast pocket.
It was as the man's finger caressed a corner of the metal form that a soft blue light appeared, a tiny sliver of illumination bisecting a short edge of the rectangular shape that winked with intelligence as it flashed across the man's palm.
"Paladin, are you online?" the man asked in a soft voice as he looked down at the silvery shape in his hand.
"Fully operational within normal parameters, Mordecai," a soft, woman's voice replied from the silvery form, just barely louder than a whisper.
Mordecai nodded in satisfaction, the stranger finally named. It was a short label, more a title than anything, his birth name long forgotten. He chose it for himself after he had made his final ascension into the powers and abilities he now wore, what seemed like forever ago. Much had happened to him since then, much had changed his life. And now he faced the greatest change of all.
"Stand by, Paladin, to uplink to global information net."
"Standing by, Mordecai," the soft voice replied. Nodding with satisfaction, Mordecai slipped the silvery rectangle into his pocket before reaching back into the bag to pull a second rectangle from its depths. A soft red light flared into existence as he touched a spot on its edge. Raising it to his mouth he began to speak in a low, intense voice as he strode to the room's only window to pull the curtain back just enough to peer outside.
"Event log, August 2nd, 2018: I've followed the urgency trail and it has led me to a Canadian city in the western province of Alberta. At first I was skeptical that it was enough to pull me from my business in Nassau. But after witnessing a probability vision on the plane as I approached the city, and an apparent assassination aimed at, and performed by, softwires in the airport immediately following my arrival, I was convinced otherwise. I was forced to intervene, as per personal directive one. However, though the assassins survived my intervention, their quarry did not. A subsequent search of the contents of their minds yielded the presence of heavy neural encryption and I was unable to gain any information from them."
The big man grimaced at the memory and let the curtain fall back into place after briefly surveying the street below for a moment.
"As far as I know, no Normals were injured in the attack, though several of them were witness to the softwire assassins using shockwaves to immobilize their quarry." He walked slowly around the bed, his eyes losing their focus as he concentrated on his report.
"This could constitute a breach of the Shield, necessitating further investigation and possible suppression. Additionally the probability node energies are now very strong here. I will need to determine what future event will be powerful enough to generate such a node, capable of inducing a probability vision. The assassins' quarry, a telepath of indeterminate ability, managed a data download into my cortex before he was terminated. The data, however, is also heavily encrypted. I'm initiating a decryption algorithm as soon as I complete this report with the hopes the information revealed will tell me something about what's going on here."
He glanced at his watch, a late model chronograph in shimmering titanium before continuing.
"The algorithm should take approximately ten hours to run to completion. I will initiate the first level of my investigation at nightfall, as per standard insertion procedures. End of Entry, Mordecai, August 2018."
Tossing the recorder back into his bag, Mordecai returned to the window, once again drawing the curtain back to peer down at the street, his eyes searching for any sign the bug's owners were closing in on him after learning of it's abrupt death.
"Paladin, uplink to the information network and initiate search."
"Uplink established, Mordecai. Database to be searched and search parameters, please," the soft voice replied after a brief pause from his shirt pocket.
"All encounter and Shield maintenance and protection databases." Mordecai's frown deepened slightly. "Search parameters: any reference to the proper name: Preacher."
Abruptly he paused as the knot of data he had received from the dying telepath swirled and a word oozed from the morass into his mind. It was a singular one, a name.
"And any reference to an organization called the Brotherhood," he quickly added.
"Confirmed, Mordecai. Search has been initiated. Shall I sound an alert when the search has been completed?"
"Yes. Make it a standard audible alert, if you would, Paladin. And download all information into a storage file for later examination."
"Confirmed, Mordecai," Paladin's soft voice replied and silently went to work.
The database search initiated, Mordecai turned his attention back to the encrypted mass of data clogging up his synapses. The algorithm needed to unravel the tightly wound ball of data strings would be complex and would require an insertion point to begin its work. A thoughtful expression appeared on the powerful man's face as he brought the data mass into his mind's eye. Slowly it rotated on all three axis, showing an iconic representation of each side. Did the mass even allow for an insertion point? He might need to create something that gnawed its way in, able to store partially decoded data lines sequentially for reconstruction later. Mind working, he eased into the couch, the algorithm growing beside the data mass in his mind's eye.
Fortunately the algorithm's creation took only half the time Mordecai anticipated it would, the pieces fitting smoothly together once he built its foundation. A complex mental program much like a piece of computer software, it would work independently until its allotted task was completed. A quick test run to confirm it would do what he wanted then Mordecai set it to work. His initial task done, the powerful man in black sat back and turned his mind back to the airport encounter and the probability vision.
The ability to create such complex mental programming was, in actuality one that few psionics possessed. In fact, many of the talents Mordecai possessed weren't cataloged in any psionic database. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Despite their status as secret and hidden, one of many underground subcultures that sought to keep themselves out of Normal humanity's notice, psionics made no pretenses or reservations about science. To them, science and technology both were tools to be used and understood. Slaves to advancement, psionics pushed the envelope of development as fast and as hard as they physically could, as evidenced by the technologically advanced tools Mordecai himself employed, and were often far in advance of what technology Normal mainstream society was using.
Ironically enough, the one field that they struggled hardest to understand, the medical study of the powers of the mind, called Metapsionicology, was initially pioneered by a Normal. Both the finest and the basest minds of Humanity throughout history had disputed the actual existence of powers of the mind, and just as many claimed their possession, though a good number of those were proven frauds.
It wasn't until a relatively unknown neurologist, a man by the name of Dr. Draz Stojanic, managed to isolate the first factor in what would become a steady stream of scientific evidence proving that the powers of the mind indeed existed in the mid 1980's. It was a previously unknown neurotransmitter in the brain, found only in a very small minority of people, where ethnicity, gender and location played little, if no part in determining who belonged to the select slice of humanity. That selfsame minority also seemed in possession of strange, yet provable and definable talents that included the ability to move physical objects with thought, sensing the presence of people in a room after they had left and knowing another's thoughts.
Adopting terminology from the world of science fiction, Stojanic named the abilities 'psi talents', and the neurotransmitter that fueled them 'psilobilin'. Now such talents could be proven by testing for the presence of psilobilin in a person's cerebrospinal fluid. He then coined the term 'metapsionicology' to describe the scientific study of the newly discovered talents and physical differences in the psi brain.
Instead of receiving acclaim after long years of challenging work to make his discovery, however, Stojanic found himself ostracized, the world at large rejecting the idea people existed with powers of the mind. Especially after he, in a fit of pique, announced the psi talents made those possessing them better than normal people after the first wave of public critique and outrage. Such claims smacked of the mutation and genetic superiority claims made by the father of the Second World War and the Holocaust of the Jews, Adolf Hitler, a figure chiseled into the annals of infamy by his perverse genetic cleansing and terror campaigns against the people of Europe.
The brilliant scientist and his accumulated data were both unceremoniously bundled up by a scientific community seeking to avoid controversy and swept under the carpet of conformity and ignorance in an attempt to make his unsettling claims and undeniable proof vanish. Shortly afterward Stojanic himself vanished as if he'd been dropped into a deep hole, all trace of the man and his work disappearing virtually overnight. In the wake of his disappearance, his discoveries were mocked and ridiculed until eventually they too were dropped into a hole, buried and forgotten.
To the world at large, Draz Stojanic and his work were gone, no longer a threat to the complacency in Normal human dominance of the world. To the people who he nearly uncovered, however, he was both savior and enemy. In one hand he held hope the world would accept psionics for what they were, without fear or revulsion; products of a changing Nature, not some genetic manipulation. And in the other: fear that in uncovering the psionics' existence, he made them a target for Normal hate. A viewpoint supported by harsh and almost paranoid reactions to Stojanic's revelations that culminated in secret massacres of psionics in northern France, at Cremodie, Gull Valley in the northwestern United States and el Ajib in Saudi Arabia in the late 1980's, early 1990's.
Long hidden from most eyes, the psionic community at large made the simple decision: remain hidden and thus remain safe. Better to remain on the fringe and alive instead of accepted and dead. Since many had worked hard to see that the Normals not only couldn't find them, but would also completely forget they ever existed, a task Mordecai and others like him devoted their entire lives to.
Safely ensconced in hidden refuges, psionic scientists however embraced the hope Stojanic brought with his discoveries and continued his work, delving ever deeper into the mechanisms of psionic ability. The most complex of organs and the least understood since Medical Science had begun its investigation into its workings, the brain, and the psi brain in particular, slowly and reluctantly began to yield up its secrets to the determined scientists.
But yield them it did, the first to fall being the curious workings of the neurotransmitter Stojanic isolated and named. Similar to serotonin, a primary neurotransmitter with a broad range of responsibilities in the human brain, psilobilin was found in high concentrations in CSF samples taken from psionics of all abilities. When tagged with radioisotopes, psilobilin activity was traced to select neuron clusters in the frontal cortex and limbic system. Here, in these new neural clusters biochemical processes were triggered that resulted in the generation of massively powerful bio-electromagnetic fields.
While by their very nature neurons generated bio-electromagnetic fields, the fields created in these new neural clusters were several orders of magnitude higher than even the most active neurons in a normal person's frontal lobe, long considered the seat of higher thought. Intrigued by their discovery, the scientists named this cluster, apparently the site of psi activity, the Psionic Cortex, measuring its output in specialized electrical units called 'stojans', after the infamous Normal doctor.
Further investigation revealed two parallel nodes of highly specialized neurons buried deep within the dense, convoluted tissues of the psionic cortex, closely connected via interwoven neural channels and working in tandem with each other. A full fifty percent of the cortical mass, the two nodes generated over 90 percent of its bio-electromagnetic activity and with their vertical alignment, showed both right and left brain inter-compatibility. Tests yielded the dorsal, or topmost node consisted primarily of neurons possessing direct sensitivity to electromagnetic fields impacting the body, whether natural or artificial. Secondary feeds from peripheral nerves enhanced this sensitivity, granting the possessor unparalleled awareness of magnetic fields in the surrounding environment.
The ventral node was composed of highly polarized neurons that, when stimulated by psilobilin, generated a focused or directional electromagnetic field much like an electromagnet, each end possessing a distinctive 'pole'. Under psilobilin's influence, and with feedback from the sensory node, the ventral node could generate what the scientists called 'influential' EM fields; fields powerful enough to affect other nearby EM fields or objects within them. Directionality was achieved by manipulating electrical gradients at the cellular level, utilizing the node's polarity to 'aim' the influential EM field. Levels of psilobilin also determined if the influential field was generated as a pulse, wave, or steady stream, lending additional control.
The interaction between the two neuronal nodes and the levels of psilobilin in the brain, as the researchers went on to discover, was the force that created Stojanic's psi talents, which the researchers lumped into a general category called 'psionic abilities', which they then subdivided into 'senses' and 'talents'. They listed the senses thusly: clairvoyance: the ability to see along the streams of probability, both forward and backward in time; deepvision: the ability to see beyond and into physical surfaces; farvision: the ability to see across long distances with the use of a psionic lens; and microvision: the ability to see extremely small objects; and post-event reconstruction.
The talents they listed this way: telekinesis: the ability to move things with the mind, pyrokinesis: the ability to summon fire and great heat with the mind; compulsion: the ability to bend others to one's will; translocation: the ability to teleport instantly from one point to another in space and time; and telepathy: the ability to sense another's thoughts. Two additional talents were then discovered in only the most powerful psionics: levitation and time-dislocation, the ability to move back and forward along the time stream.
Psionics themselves were also divided into two groups, according to the number of talents each exhibited. Softwires were those that had two or three talents at most, generally only one. They made up the bulk of psionics across the globe.
The second group, the hardwires were psionics that possessed all or most of the abilities the researchers had categorized. They were also as rare as albinos were in the normal human population, if not more so. Many considered them the elite of the psionic world, the nobility.
And if the hardwires were the nobility of the psionic culture, Mordecai was their king. Possessing all the abilities ever discovered by metapsionicology, and more, the man in black was a psionic giant, the talents he possessed so powerful no five hardwires could match him, combined. It made him a dangerous man, more dangerous than any other, living or dead. And now he walked the streets of Calgary.