Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
A definite problem.
A roaming mind couldn’t survive separated from the main part of the mind, and vice versa. At a certain point in time, the two parts would both begin to fragment, with the roaming part absorbed into the PsyNet. Giving him, in effect, a psychic lobotomy. At which point, his physical body would die.
Great.
However, since he’d learned young that to rail against that which couldn’t be altered was a waste of time, he didn’t try to throw himself against that infinite wall of black. Rather, he focused on the psychic structure of the barrier. The ones behind this island had been clever. Instead of trying to control each individual mind on the island, they’d simply isolated the entire island.
That had to be burning massive amounts of power.
Power such as that generated by Scarabs before they imploded.
Because Scarabs were inherently unstable. That was the problem, had always been the problem. Silence had been designed as a solution partially to deal with this exact scenario: to assist Psy who burned so hot, so out of control that they went insane or died in childhood, their brains unable to cope with the psychic overload.
That amount of power required very specific neural machinery. Machinery such as that in a dual cardinal’s brain. And dual cardinals were the rarest of the rare, genetic anomalies so unusual that there was no statistical model for their occurrence in the PsyNet.
Had the Scarabs not been unstable—both psychically and mentally—no one would’ve worried about them. Rather, they’d have been studied for the potential for untrammeled psychic power. Because while not every Psy wanted to be a brutal power, it was a safe bet that most at the lower end of the Gradient wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to safely supercharge their psychic abilities.
But, as with Ivan’s own ability, it turned out that becoming a Scarab wasn’t a choice—and it wasn’t safe. Thanks to Grandmother’s standing in the PsyNet, a standing that meant she’d been briefed fully on the entire situation, Ivan knew that Scarabs had been studied once—a generation into Silence.
Project Scarab had initially been lauded a great success. Removing the psychic rules mandated by Silence had removed the “dimmer switch” on the abilities of affected Psy.
It had also destroyed them.
“They all died,” Grandmother had told him, her tone solemn as she stared out at the roiling waves of the ocean. “Either by their own hand, or at the hands of Council executioners. They were too unstable, fractured at the very core—and that instability, that psychic chaos, threatened to destabilize the Net.”
Yet the separation of this island from the Net hadn’t been chaotic.
No, it had been very well planned, and it had succeeded in its goal. Which meant that the Scarab power was being somehow stabilized. A task so difficult that, per information supplied by Grandmother’s byzantine maze of personal contacts, only a rare few empaths had succeeded in doing it, and even then, the stability of their subjects was precarious at best.
He added it to the list of questions for which he needed to unearth answers. The priority was to find out the reason for the comas, catatonia, and disordered states. Especially as it appeared that, as of now, he was the only person outside the island who could access it.
With that in mind, he began to move away from the edge of the broken-off segment. It might be that the solution to his problem of being stuck here, cut off from his mind, might also lie deeper within the island.
If it didn’t …
Death had never worried Ivan. He’d been up close and personal with it at too young an age. He’d always figured that when it was his time, it was his time. But to die because he hadn’t set up a fail-safe—a stupid basic error?
He’d have to haunt his own dead body.
That this was an unknown situation that had thrown everyone wasn’t an excuse. He was a security specialist, his job to consider how things could go pear-shaped. Yet he’d assumed he could get himself out of this—because he’d been getting himself out of various situations all his life.
“You, Ivan, take independence a touch too far at times,” Grandmother had once said to him. “You don’t always have to rely only on yourself. Such violent independence can become a weakness.”
He’d been sixteen then, had politely listened to her words—then ignored them. Canto, Silver, Arwen, they’d worn off some of his edges with their unrelenting support, so that these days he did, at times, reach out to them for an assist.
At the core of it, however, he hadn’t changed. And he’d proved Grandmother right. “You can say ‘I told you so’ if I make it out of here,” he muttered in the strange psychic space he now inhabited.
Since he couldn’t extricate himself, he’d have to hope that one of his family would give in to their nosy instincts and come looking for him before it was too late. Even then, they were unlikely to be able to wake him since he’d separated his mind into two parts. What they could do was ensure that his body stayed alive, while he fought to find a way out before it was too late and his mind simply stopped.