The Strangeness Within Pt 07

...*** Chapter 41 ***...

"This is a beautiful place," Raj said, then expertly flipped another omelet. "But your spice selection is atrocious."

Javier smiled. Despite all the events of yesterday, the professor was remarkably relaxed. Or maybe it was because of all that. In any case, Raj was winning points from everyone for his breakfast.

It was noon, and everyone aside from Mark looked like a zombie. It had been near dawn when they finally got in to the mountain camp.

"You're welcome to stay as long as you like, Raj," said Javier. "And it's not just because of your killer eggs."

Raj nodded, but his expression faded slightly. He put the last omelet on his plate and joined the others.

"How long do you think I have to hide out here?" he asked. "By sheer luck I'm not teaching this semester, but I have other obligations when the term begins. I still wonder if it would be better to get the local police involved in investigating my abduction. Or the FBI. Or even the media. The Unit is not all-powerful, and too much exposure would be dangerous for them."

The three of them had argued about this during the last part of the drive, and for a while now they continued their discussion. In the end, though, Raj reluctantly agreed with Javier and Esther. The Unit had been desperate to kidnap him in the first place. Desperation was dangerous, and Raj was probably high on their target list because of his link to Lukas. Their hope was that the Unit believed the rescue to be entirely Lukas's effort. But if so, the dramatic rescue would only cement the Unit's belief that in addition to what he knew, Raj would be a useful hostage to use against Lukas.

"They'd be wrong about that, though," said Raj. "Lukas is a changed man. I think he would sacrifice me now, if he had to."

Esther and Javier spent the rest of the afternoon answering Raj's questions about the events of the last months, and the extent of Esther's abilities. Finally, he sighed.

"I knew you were special," he told Esther. "I had no idea how right I was. You are more important than any of us. I don't want you to do anything that would expose you to danger, even if it's on my behalf."

"I have these abilities for a reason," Esther said stubbornly. "And I can already protect myself."

"Well then," Raj said. "As it happens I have some suggestions for you. Am I right that there's only a single access road up here?"

Esther nodded. "Well, technically there's a logging road you could take all the way over the ridge. But it hasn't been maintained for years. Even with the truck we'd have to stop to clear downed trees or boulders."

"Then I suggest we start doing that maintenance," said Raj. "Better to have the option."

"You're right," Javier said. "We should have thought of that."

Raj waved that aside. "Actually, it's useful that there's mostly just the one access. Esther, I assume you're constantly watching for visitors?"

"Yes," she said. "It's a little exhausting, but it already saved Mark and me once."

"But that isn't the only way to do it," Raj said. "There are technological solutions as well. We could put infrared sensors way down on the road and link them up here with microwave transmitters, all running off solar and battery power. And that's not all. You could use the same transmitters to transmit other data packets. There's no reason you couldn't have a slow connection to the Internet up here, with encryption even. Think about how helpful it would be to have secure communications to the outside!"

Javier's mouth dropped open, and he could see Esther was equally stunned. They took for granted the camp's isolation, for good or bad. But what would it be like if he could keep in touch with Kat from up here? And maybe even Mamá? No more driving all the way to Reno to mail anonymous letters.

"I think that's brilliant," said Esther. "Could you and Javier work on that together? The intruder sensors first. It would give me such peace of mind to have a backup for my abilities. Right now, though, I'm overdue for some meditation."

She kissed Javier quickly on the cheek and then off she went to Abuela's cabin. It was now their cabin, he supposed, for however long he was going to be living here.

It was three weeks until the term began at San Jose. He should be out buying school supplies and dorm furniture. Excited to meet whoever his new roommates were.

Sometimes he imagined there were multiple Javiers out there. One little decision here, one there, adding up to a different life. In another universe Javier was doing all of the normal preparation for college. That Javier would be eagerly registering for computer courses, pestering Kat for help so he could be top of the class right from the start.

Yet another Javier might never have met Kat. Or Esther. He'd be going to a different state school, wondering what he was going to do with his life. Wondering if he were missing something about the world.

The Javier in this universe smiled at Raj. "So, explain to me how this is going to all work. And when we're done with that, we'll figure out what I need to buy in Reno. Remember, despite all appearances, Esther is fantastically rich. We have an unlimited budget, so better to buy more than we need so I don't have to drive out there again."

Raj nodded eagerly and began to describe a project he'd done with similar infrared sensors for a prank during grad school. It was a whole new side of Raj, and soon Javier was wiping away tears of laughter.

You never truly knew anyone. That was the joy and sorrow among friends or lovers: the promise of future changes in your relationship. Nothing was guaranteed except the change. Javier was going to be someone different tomorrow, and Esther might one day be as strange as Abuela, or stranger. She would likely be alive for decades after Javier was nothing but a memory.

But Esther never forgot anything.

* * *

Esther made that tiny little gasp, the one he could never get tired of, and Javier crushed her naked chest against his. He kept stroking her favorite sensitive patch on her back, and she rocked back and forth across his dick. They'd tried this in a couple positions, but having her sit on his lap was probably the most satisfying yet. The curve of his dick didn't make it the easiest, but he could touch her the way she wanted. As much as he loved her nipples and tiny breasts, it was her back that gave her the best orgasms.

She weighed so little that it hardly mattered if she sometimes caught his dick awkwardly. Though her odd physiology did produce some lubrication, she never got very wet, and the friction was almost too much for him. She loved it, though, and that was what mattered.

One of his hands slid lower, until he was holding almost her entire ass in his palm. His dick looked gargantuan every time it pistoned back between her lightly furry thighs.

Esther made encouraging noises when he massaged her butt, and he slowly moved his finger nearer her asshole. She leaned to give him better access, and he swallowed. Maybe she really did want to be touched there. He thought he'd imagined it.

When his finger finally reached her puckering hole, she sighed and pressed right against it. Javier had sudden visions of her sliding forward and sitting right on his cock, her asshole so tight that at first he could only get the head in, and then ...

His vision dimmed and his cock spurted heavily, thick ropes of semen covering both of their abdomens, as if the earlier orgasm had been only foreplay. Esther kissed him and told him he was beautiful and held him through it all, her own pleasure forgotten.

When it was finally finished, he started to stroke her ass again, the way he had been, but Esther squeezed his hand and pulled it away. He'd missed his chance. But maybe at least he could raise that possibility he'd been too nervous to mention before. Kat was right: this wasn't a first-date situation. She liked being touched on her ass, and maybe more. She'd never be offended or find it disgusting. The worst that could happen is she wouldn't be interested.

He tried to imagine how Kat would suggest it to a lover. Totally upfront. She and Andrea wouldn't beat around the bush, so to speak.

But in the end he couldn't bring it up. Their sex had been so perfect, but then he'd come too fast and ruined it. And now he was already started fantasizing about Kat and Andrea. There would be a better time.

* * *

Esther lay next to Javier, sweaty from their lovemaking, working to reestablish her meditative discipline. The wild flights of exploration she could manage during orgasms were a guilty pleasure, though she knew they were a necessary one. It was so hard to keep a balance between exploration of her abilities and the constant vision she needed for everyone's safety.

In the other cabin, Raj was starting to take off his clothes, and Esther flushed, pulling her senses a different direction. A squirrel dug furiously, sensing the slow turning of the weather. A mother deer and two juveniles nestled together for warmth in a bed of soft reeds. Farther away, a small truck moved steadily along the highway towards Sierra City. Everything safe.

Esther stroked Javier's naked chest, eventually moving down to encircle his flaccid penis. He sighed and shifted, and she felt him slowly begin to harden again. He'd had two orgasms already, and the next would take time. It would be highly satisfying for him if she could get him there. But she was distracted as always, and she couldn't shake something he'd murmured during his fitful sleep that morning.

"Javier," she said slowly. "Do you miss Kat?"

He looked at her with nervous confusion.

"Why? What do you mean, Esther?"

"Uh, physically, I guess. I mean, I know you miss her as a friend."

Javier didn't say anything for a long time. Finally he sighed.

"We didn't really have anything physical together," he said. "Well, that's not true. We slept in the same bed, and that's pretty intimate. We were closer than just friends. But I don't know what she looks like naked. It's complicated. For a long time I didn't even know she liked men, but it turns out she's bisexual."

"Oh," said Esther. "You mean, like me."

She realized she'd shocked him. But she'd told him about Nicola — she remembered exactly the words. Maybe he thought that was a sort of aberration?

Or maybe it was because she'd described it as though Nicola was doing a favor for her, the same way she'd described it with Mark.

She started moving her hand faster, and Javier sighed as his penis hardened. He didn't seem forthcoming about Kat, which told her enough. She didn't mind if he thought about Kat. Esther missed Nicola a lot, and she even missed what she'd had with Mark, though to her relief Mark seemed complacent enough about it all.

She wished everything were simple, that it was just her and Javier, and all the time they needed. Even now she couldn't devote her full attention to him. Maybe one day her vigilance would be so unconscious that she wouldn't resent it. Maybe Raj's electronic surveillance would let her relax a bit. A lot of maybes. Until then, she'd have to do the best she could.

Javier moaned her name when she put her wet lips over the head of his penis. Right now, she could at least try to be the lover he seemed to think she already was.

...*** Chapter 42 ***...

Esther fixed her mind on Javier as he drove the sedan. He was finally approaching, a little too fast on the last paved section of road below them.

"He's almost there," she told Raj.

A minute later, a red light blinked under the cabinet, and Esther and Raj broke into smiles.

"I guess it works, then," said Raj. "Great. You still want to start on the harder part? Connecting up to the Internet? If we get that done, it'll never be the same up here."

"It never is," Esther said, and Raj smiled.

Javier was delighted when he heard the good news. For a while the three of them sat and enjoyed the feeling of security. It wasn't foolproof, of course. Andrew might not have come up the road when he'd ambushed them that horrible night. But it was a big improvement nonetheless, particularly for anyone else if Esther had to leave the camp.

Soon enough their conversation turned to Esther's abilities. With Raj here, it was like another puzzle to solve.

"I was thinking about our discussion yesterday," said Esther. "There are too many things I don't understand about my abilities, but one of them keeps nagging at me. Do you remember how I described Nicola's talents?"

"She could feel the structure of matter even down to small scales," said Raj. "Like a human electron microscope. Remarkable."

"Right," said Esther. "But she could sense even smaller things than that. The problem was, everything got fuzzy."

"Wait," Raj said. "Are you suggesting she could actually feel quantum uncertainties?"

"Yes!" Esther said. "That's what we thought. I can feel it too, when I enter the abstract space of connections. Most of the connections are extremely short-lived, and everything is in flux when I look closely."

"Almost as though you're seeing the quantum correlations themselves," Raj mused. "You said everything was connected to everything. Well, that's exactly what quantum correlations describe."

Esther nodded. "Perhaps, at least some simplified picture of it. I'm far out of my depth here. But I do know there's something terribly off about the chaotic butterfly description that Abuela gave me. You see, what she did shouldn't be possible at all, once you worry about quantum mechanical disruptions. Even my passive abilities seem hard to reconcile."

Raj started to nod. At Javier's confused look, he tried to explain.

"Quantum mechanics is the seed of uncertainty that underlies most everything we think of as unpredictable. Any chaotic system will seize quantum mechanical uncertainties and amplify them into uncertainties on the human scale. Imagine you were trying to balance a sharp pencil perfectly on its point. Even if you were a machine, there would be a problem: at the smallest scales, the pencil is wobbling slightly due to quantum uncertainties. But every wobble gets amplified by gravity, and then the pencil begins to fall that random direction. Almost everything we think of as random behaves like this."

"Butterflies are everywhere," said Esther. "Little changes turning into big ones. But quantum butterflies aren't useful, because they're fundamentally unpredictable. And they should be destroying the subtle effects of the butterflies Abuela so carefully searched out. They should be fuzzing out the kind of listening I'm doing, far closer than the distances I can manage. The only way around that is to find places where quantum butterflies can't disrupt a signal. It's not chaos I'm looking for, but rather the rare islands of order."

"Like seismic waves," Javier said. "You discovered you could hear much further using bedrock and listening like a seismometer. People did that before they even knew what quantum mechanics was."

"Exactly," said Esther, smiling at him. "Signals don't lose energy quickly as they travel through rock, and maybe that shields them against these quantum butterflies."

"Also, waves act with simple superposition," said Raj. "That means two waves can pass through each other without affecting one another. So you're looking for places in physics that are stable and predictable. But maybe not too stable, because you still want to find your own butterflies."

"Computers," Javier blurted. "This is something computers are designed for."

"Hmm?" Raj asked.

"It was in an article. They do error-correcting in computer chips, so that if a cosmic ray or something hits them, they can keep computing correctly. But it's kind of a race, because it's getting a lot harder as the wires on the chips get smaller."

Esther's heart began to hammer and her mind raced ahead. Javier was completely right. Abuela had explained the reason it was easier to affect sensitive humans at a distance was that humans were always balanced among decisions, and a small sensory input could push them one way or another. But computers were designed in the same fashion. And it was more than that: humans had connected computers at great distances, allowing the programming choices of a single computer to propagate more perfectly than even seismic waves.

"Javier, Raj," she said slowly. "You have to teach me about computers. The Internet. Everything."

* * *

"Are you sure you'll be all right?" Esther asked.

"Yes," said Raj. "Mark will be babysitting me the whole time. I have plenty to occupy me, trying to get all this technology working. It's the perfect time for you to visit Kat. Give her my best."

They took Javier's sedan, and a few hours later they were checking into a seedy San Jose motel. As he'd hoped, the person at the desk wasn't surprised when he paid with a wad of cash.

The room was worse than he'd expected, but at least they wouldn't be presuming on Kat's hospitality. Her bed might have been big enough for two, but all that was over anyway. Javier was still pretty nervous about this extended visit, but there was no substitute for Kat's computer knowledge and her custom-built computers. Esther needed to see if some of her recent theories made any sense, and this was the place for it.

Kat picked them up at the motel, and when they got back to her room, she was all business right off.

"I cracked a few passwords from a weakly-encrypted hash stored in that InforCorp data," she said. "Unfortunately, I failed at installing that backdoor. I was nervous and in too big a rush and I made a dumb configuration mistake. But it's not all bad. They don't seem to have noticed my incursion, and with the passwords I gleaned I've already gotten a lot of personal information on InfoCorp employees, plus a whole cache of internal E-mails. Nothing that gets me to any computers outside the Fresno location, though. A good return, but not a jackpot."

Esther found a spare chair to sit. "Javier's told me a lot about you, Kat, but I'm getting a sense of how very skilled you must be. Now, I have some ideas, and I want you to be very honest about whether they make any sense."

She tried to explain her theories, and Kat nodded from time to time.

"You're saying you might be a kind of mind-magic hacker," Kat eventually said. "But first things first. What can you sense from a computer, anyway?"

Esther shook her head. "I've never really tried. I'm hoping that with the crash course from Javier and Raj I might at least be able to sort through some things, but they were having trouble getting the equipment working up in camp, and I was impatient."

Kat smiled and went rummaging around in her closet, returning with an old Apple II. She plugged it in and sat down to type.

"This is probably the simplest thing I have that qualifies as a computer, unless you want to play with a graphing calculator. I'll write a quick program in BASIC, and maybe you can tell me what you sense."

A few minutes later Javier smiled when the monitor began to list the prime numbers in sequence. Esther looked dubiously at the machine, and then she put her hand on the monitor.

After a while she sighed and shook her head unhappily. "Nicola would probably be better at this," she said. "It's hard to explain, but I can't focus close enough. Everything's unfamiliar and the details keep slipping away."

Javier stroked her shoulder gently. She was incredibly tense. He looked at Kat, who also seemed uncomfortable.

"Hey, Kat," he said. "I think I should talk to Esther a little alone, if that's OK. Is there a good place —"

"Oh, no problem," Kat said. "Good excuse for a cup of coffee from the place on the corner. Twenty minutes or so?"

When Kat left, Esther sighed and hugged Javier.

"What's up?" he asked.