The Alien Manifesto

  * * *

  The operation must have been successful because I survived it, and felt wonderful when it was over. I remembered nothing of the procedure. I felt a little woozy for a few minutes, then my head cleared, and everything was different. At first it felt like I had two sets of eyes, like double vision, and I had to concentrate to bring the two images together. There was a low babble in my head, like a crowd of people murmuring. I looked at the doctor and brought him into focus.

  Thank God it worked, he was thinking. You never know with this crazy shit. This man looks wonderful. What have I done, what have I done? His thoughts came in bursts, like raspy whispers, with little clouds surrounding each word. I felt his feelings, and shuddered. He was worried.

  “You have done a wonderful thing, doc,” I said, and he looked at me with alarm. I hope he can’t read what I’m thinking, or I’ll be ruined. Ruined! He’ll know all about me and Lance, and that horrible boy from the French embassy….

  “Don’t worry about anything,” I said softly, as I reached out and embraced his bulky body in a big bear hug. I looked deeply into his dark eyes and kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you for what you have done. You have done all of humanity a favor.”

  I turned on my heel, draped my arm around Jill’s waist, and we marched together out of the American Embassy, onto the street, and into our waiting stretch limo. My first exposure to the thoughts of people we passed was startling at first, like walking through the babble of a madhouse, or being in the middle of a mob, everyone mumbling to themselves. This would take some getting used to.

  In minutes we were back at the Hilton, in Jill’s room, studying the details of our mission, munching on raw vegetables and humus. I was able to read, absorb, and memorize the contents of the folder, all fifty-six pages of it, in an hour.

  At one point I looked up at Jill—she was sitting on the bed, me at the desk—and she was looking up at me, her eyes filled with love and compassion. I felt joined with her like never before. Her mind seemed empty of random thought, but loaded with feelings that seemed to generate a kind of heat in the room, or perhaps only in my mind. My new nano-chip was working beautifully. It might take a little time to adjust to the expansion of consciousness. All of life seemed larger.

  Everything was illuminated, now.

  17 Hanging Out with the Monkey Mind

  We streaked through the night sky over Europe at forty thousand feet, Jill and I and our pilot, Captain Jake Fisher. A sky bright with stars, nearly devoid of clouds. And devoid of other aircraft. It seemed as if we were the only airplane aloft that night; most European airports had closed down because of widespread computer “irregularities.”

  Our little Gulfstream G600, although a civilian craft, could zip along at more than seven hundred miles an hour (Mach 0.94), which meant we could cover the distance from Nicosia to somewhere in Switzerland, about fifteen hundred miles, in little more than two hours. Any aircraft hitting Mach 1 (or 761 mph, the speed of sound) would probably create a noisy sonic boom; we didn’t want to wake up anyone on the ground or call attention to ourselves.

  The G600 is equipped to carry eight passengers in American-style capitalist comfort: leather seats, giant screen 3-D TV, broadband, you name it. We had flown a military-owned Gulfstream from Phoenix to Cyprus, but this craft was sleeker and faster. For our journey, half of the eight seats had been ripped out so that a special cargo bay could be installed. The cargo bay held a piece of equipment vital to the success of our mission: the Bell Spyder helicopter—a tiny aluminum chopper that runs on batteries, barely seats two humans, and is designed to be dropped out of an airplane and immediately become airborne.

  Jill had assured me back at the Hilton that she could pilot the Spyder, although she had never flown anything in her life and never had a lesson. She told me she had read the manual for the Spyder and was confident that together we could figure the thing out. I believed her. Our destination: somewhere in the Swiss Alps.

  You are probably wondering what happened between Jill and I back at the Hilton. After the nano-chip was implanted in my skull, I found telepathic communication with Jill to be easy and natural, an extension of our already deep connection, with a new layer of intimacy. I didn’t go too deep at first, as I was still exploring the possibilities and the boundaries of my new abilities. There was no doubt that my mind’s processing power had been greatly expanded.

  Jill and I found that we had a few hours left to rest after digesting our Top Secret file, and before we had to report to the military airport at Nicosia. She crawled under the covers of her king size bed and invited me to take a nap with her. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Hold me, she whispered, and pressed her warm body to mine. We kissed, deeply. Clothes came off.

  We made love, yes: sex in hyperspace. Cosmic lovemaking. Actually, it was more of an out-of-body experience than anything else. I knew her great body, visually, at least, having seen it back on the flight to Cyprus. But to touch her womanly flesh, to melt, flow, taste, penetrate, become one with, turned into a hallucinogenic experience. I saw her DNA signature; I saluted her ancestors; I lived and shared her past lives in a split second of holographic awareness. It was an awakening, an opening of the thousand-petaled lotus.

  Marty.

  Yes, Jill. Back on the Gulfstream. We were holding hands. I woke up from the daydream of our shared journey to the farthest star. Had it really happened?

  It happened, darling, and it was glorious. It was worth waiting for. I am still tingling! Jill had just “flashed” me, which meant she had sent me a telepathic communication. That’s what psi people called it.

  Soon Jill dropped the flashtalk and reverted to voice mode. It was easier to communicate that way on matters that were less intimate or private. “Now, Marty, please listen. The Secretary back in Nicosia gave me a vid chip to plug into our player. It has all the details of our mission. And it’s got some great clips of the Black Swan headquarters which our mole managed to send out of there to a transceiver in Switzerland. Put on these headphones and let’s start gathering some data.”

  “Yes, sir, er, ma’m,” I said, and resisted the impulse to plant a big wet kiss on her juicy lips. Grow up, Marty, I mumbled inside my head. My annoying horndog character, the alter ego that had haunted me for years, seemed to have dissolved with the chip implant. Still, ancient echoes remained. Jill glanced at me and looked away. I tried to tune in to what she was thinking, but there was nothing on her mind’s thought-screen except an empty space and a few random notes from Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica.

  Reading someone’s thoughts is not like reading text. Thoughts rise endlessly like bubbles from the conscious and subconscious mind, pop into life as waveforms and become neurons, or brain nerve cells, dancing across trillions of synaptic junctions propelled by chemicals called neurotransmitters, looking for receptive cells in order to form coherent thoughts. No wonder humans are crazy.

  I have heard that the average human brain produces at least 50,000 thoughts a day. Most of these thoughts are just nonsense—endless loops of worry, regret, fear; revenge fantasies; memories, nightmarish or otherwise; pictorial sexual fantasies; re-creations of scenes from the past, with embellishments; projections of what will happen in the future; rehearsals of what to say to a wife or husband, to a boss, to a cop, to a bully. To add to this neurotic cesspool, endless repetition rules the human mindscape.

  In other words, the average human mind is a mess. Buddhists talk about the “monkey mind,” an out-of-control thought generator. What to do? The average mind lives everywhere but in the present moment.

  My work now is to “watch” the thoughts that enter my head, according to Jill, my teacher. She said this is the basis of meditation. Watch the ongoing parade of thoughts from a distance, she said, and the thoughts will simply dissolve. Okay, that’s meditation. So far, so good.

  Using my newly-acquired
supermind, my job was to focus on the thought forms of others that related to our mission. This wouldn’t be easy. Which thoughts are coming from the outside into my head, and which thoughts are mine? Thoughts have no voice; they are more like a whisper. Also, Jill said that if someone is running a pictorial fantasy about something or other, a common activity of the monkey mind, I could actually tune in and see the pictures, which appear like a fuzzy movie or You Tube video.

  The trick I had to learn was how to screen out unwanted thought forms. Otherwise, the cacophony could drive a novice telepath insane in seconds.

  Jill is very clear; her thought forms have little or no baggage attached. There is no inner censor standing over her mind’s shoulder, no residue of guilt and regret and ancient trauma lurking in her unconscious mind waiting to contaminate her thoughts. The woman seems to have no ego.

  Unfortunately, I do. Whenever my thought forms come up tainted or tricky or “unclean,” she will bust my balls immediately. Telepathically, that is.

  “Marty, please pay attention to the video, hey?” Jill impolitely interrupted my daydream state. “We need to know the layout of this place before we barge in there.” The video was intriguing and revealing. Black Swan Beta designed custom software programs for big corporations worldwide. Its client list was impressive. The firm had branch offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Big time.

  The head of the computer operation was a gentleman named Klaus Lieberman. His bio came as a read-out on our airplane’s giant TV screen:

  Klaus Lieberman, born in Cologne, Germany, age 52. Parents moved to USA, settled in Bay Area, No. California. College: UCal Berkeley, Master’s degree computer science. Subject worked for various Silicon Valley firms as programmer, software designer, systems analyst. Wrote first security detection program in UNIX for military, banks, Wall Street brokerage houses and oil companies. Dropped out of corporate computer business in 2001 and began taking powerful psychedelic drugs. Had brief notoriety as hacker-prankster. Became disciple of so-called Indian guru/shaman Shree Rama Shivanandadas, a native of Newark, New Jersey. At the guru’s ashram in New York City, met and became friends with Wolfgang von Neumann aka Wolfgang Maximus. At von Neumann’s urging, joined cult org Eternal Flame, became involved in immortality movement. Subsequently had business association with von Neumann. (More intel on von Neumann forthcoming.) Resurfaced in Davos, Switzerland, in 2007, formed Black Swan Beta, software firm which grossed over $500 million worldwide last year. Subject never married, no children, linked with half dozen gay male European celebrities.

  “Jill, this dude is heavy duty. Plus this is great footage of the Black Swan layout. But I got one question: Where’s Leela?” I spoke out loud, because there was no need for secrecy. And it felt better. We had scanned the plane for bugs; it was clean.

  “Leela is definitely in that building,” said Jill reassuringly. “Mr. Anderson verified her location by code matching. Our mole knows exactly where she is being held because of Leela’s GPS signal. Leela is still being restrained with a powerful electromagnetic field. I hope we can break through it when we get in there.”

  “Yeah, me too. So let me get this straight. We have been invited to Black Swan Beta h.q. because of our reputations in the computing field? Better explain, sweetheart. I built a website once, but I can barely talk zeroes and ones, much less write code or discuss Internet protocols and stuff like that. And Black Swan has pulled off some of the major hacks of our time. What do they need us for?”

  “Marty, do a recall on that Top Secret folder. Our friends at the State Department have paved the way for us. Supposedly I am a mathematical genius from MIT who wrote an algorithm that will solve all of Black Swan Beta’s problems. You know they are having trouble maintaining their attacks on the Internet worldwide, right? They can do short-term attacks, and cause a lot of trouble for infrastructures and power grids and so forth. But they can’t sustain the attacks because their victims do short-time patches and fixes. There could also be a problem with Black Swan’s attack software shutting down and crashing. So I am supposed to have the answer to those problems.”

  “Wow.”

  “My cover story says I am the author of several books, I have a website, I have won numerous awards in the scientific and computer fields, I have tenure at MIT. My name is all over the Web. The State Department has taken care of all that. I have solid credentials. Black Swan needs me.”

  “Great. But if the Internet is disrupted all over the planet, how can Black Swan access all your online info?”

  “Somehow Black Swan Beta’s Internet access is still up and running!” said Jill with a grin. “All of my fake info will be available to them.”

  “Great,” I said. “But what about me?”

  As the word “me” left my mouth, our fierce little Gulfstream hit some turbulence and seemed to drop about a thousand feet in a millisecond. My stomach did a flip-flop. Jill looked a little pale.

  “Sorry, folks,” said our pilot over the P.A., “just some weather up here for a few minutes. We’ll drop to thirty thousand feet for now and begin our d and d, descent and deceleration. The drop-off point is about a half hour away. Better get your flight suits ready.”

  The drop-off point. That meant Jill and I would be getting into our tiny Bell Spyder helicopter for the final descent to our designated helipad in St. Moritz, a tiny resort town in the Swiss Alps for wealthy skiers and snow bums. St. Moritz is about seventy kliks from Davos, a journey to be negotiated in a rental car. In St. Moritz we would meet our contacts from the State Department, and be given last-minute instructions—plus luggage, clothes, paperwork, fake passports, and whatever else we needed to carry out our very dangerous mission.

  The video continued, revealing that the Black Swan people were running their software enterprise with a business-as-usual attitude. Very few people outside of the firm knew of their worldwide computer sabotage campaign, whose victims included private corporate and government networks as well as the very core of the Internet. It seemed that our whole computer culture was under attack by Black Swan Beta’s twisted geniuses.

  We learned that the software business was headquartered in a historic, chalet-style office building in downtown Davos. Most of their legitimate business was conducted on the two surface floors of the building. Their dirtiest business was conducted in the two basement floors beneath.

  The vid chip footage was amazing. On the first basement level were hundreds of servers in high-ceilinged, frigid rooms; skilled hackers were hunched over keyboards and monitors in myriad cubicles, triggering worldwide chaos, blackouts, dam breaks, bank failures, system breakdowns, airport closures, train collisions, everything imaginable where computers were vital parts of the human endeavor in the Twenty-first Century.

  The second basement level was a mystery, and what went on there was a closely-guarded secret. This level was off limits to most employees, including the State Department mole, one Greta Eisen. She was a Swiss-born American citizen who was a hotshot programmer and superbrain, supposedly a member in good standing of Eternal Flame, eating the immortality drug EMC-2 every day. Except she wasn’t; she faked it.

  Black Swan Beta’s malicious mischief was reported to the State Department by Ms. Eisen. She shot the incredibly revealing video using her mobile phone. For about a month Ms. Eisen worked in the special basement unit, first level. Every evening when she got home from work, she sent a deeply encrypted message to the State Department in Cyprus—audio, video, photos, and text—on the current state of affairs at Black Swan Beta.

  Greta eventually was sent back upstairs because her supervisor didn’t trust her. She never managed to get to the second basement level; that required a special elevator key and a nine-digit code. But by staying alert and keeping her ears open, she did manage to gather two critical pieces of information. One, that Leela was being held in a locked room in the second basement unit, u
nable to use her psychic powers or communicate with the outside world because of the electromagnetic field that had been in place for weeks and basically neutralized her.

  And two: Greta learned that the real secret weapon of the Black Swan Beta organization also was located in the second sub-basement. The people at the U.S. State Department called it the Secret Internet, which was just a fancy term for cluelessness. They really had no idea what it was that powered Black Swan’s attacks. “It” had awesome, unheard-of processing power; “it” could override and defeat any patch or fix that ordinary humans could effect to counteract the damage done by Black Swan’s programmers and hackers.

  Temporarily. It had one shortcoming: It kept crashing. The program might run successfully for hours, then crash for no good reason. It was a bitch to reboot. That was why Jill’s algorithm, a supposed patch for the problem, was so important to Black Swan Beta.

  There were some in the CIA’s inner circle, and even some analysts at State, who thought the “Secret Internet” device was sentient, was possibly AI, Artificial Intelligence. Reasonable, intelligent people in the government believed that the big breakthrough—a machine that could outthink people—had finally been accomplished. And that the breakthrough was being used by madmen to get what they wanted and totally fuck over the rest of the human race.

  “Time to go!” came the cheery voice of Captain Fisher over the intercom. The video was over. Jill and I had already slipped on our thermal, full body flight suits. We squeezed into the tiny helicopter. It looked like a bubble with a single propeller on top. Was this a toy or a flight-worthy craft that would deliver us to our destination?

  “It’ll be fine, Marty,” said Jill. “Remember, I read the manual. I know I can run this thing.”

  “Great,” I said tentatively. The Bell Spyder weighs less than two thousand pounds, has a top air speed of one hundred thirty knots, can stay airborne for at least three hours, and runs on the new super-batteries. I closed the Plexiglas bubble and fastened it securely. Seat belts, Jill, I flashed. I could feel the Gulfstream descending and decelerating.

  “Opening the cargo bay in ten seconds,” said our pilot. “You two only have to descend about eight thousand feet. Don’t forget to press and hold down the starter button for at least five seconds. Be sure to wait until you have left this aircraft before you do that, okay?” Good luck!”

  Whooooosh. The bottom seemed to fall out of the Gulfstream and our Spyder was falling fast through the night sky. It was very, very dark. “Hey, Jill, how about that starter thingy?”

  “Where is it?” she said, a bit panicky.

  “I thought you said you read the manual!”

  “I did, I did, but I can’t—Marty, turn on the lights, huh?”

  We were falling, faster and faster. There were no interior lights, only exterior. I was very calm about it all. Earlier, back on the plane, I had had a vision of the near future: Our Spyder would have a crisis coming in, would appear to be falling out of the sky, but we would have a smooth landing on a surface very slick and cold. I trusted my intuition to find the starter button. It was just under the control panel. I held it down for five seconds. The rotor began to turn and whir and we were on our way.

  “Thanks, Marty,” said Jill with a big grin. “Sure glad they drilled that hole in your head back in Nicosia!”

  “No problem, Jill. Hey, where do they keep the heater switch? It’s freezing in here.”

  “Heater? There is no heater. This is supposed to be a short trip. And we’re running on power cells anyway. Hey, watch this!”

  Jill was in full control of the tiny chopper now, pulling and pushing on handles and levers and gears, making the craft rear up and down, like a bucking bronco, laying it on its side, having one hell of a time.

  “I didn’t know you were such a hot-rodder, baby!” I teased. “What else can you do? Let’s see if you can really haul ass in this hopped-up taco wagon. Floor it, you cool kitten!”

  “Dig this, Daddy-O,” she shouted, jamming some lever down to the floor. Our Spyder hovered briefly, then went into a sudden sharp nosedive.

  “Wheeeee!” said Jill, laughing hysterically. I had never seen her like this, so I sat back and enjoyed it for a few seconds. Then:

  “Hey, Marty, I can’t get this thing back up in normal position,” she said, pulling frantically at the stick. “Got any good ideas?”

  We were heading nose down at a pretty good clip when the rotor suddenly died and all I could hear was the sound of wind whipping around our little bubble. Jill looked over at me with fear in her eyes, another first. We were about a thousand feet from the ground, which appeared to be a huge, jagged iceberg.

  I put my hand over hers on the stick. “Relax, sweetheart,” I said, totally confident that I knew what to do. With closed eyes, I put two fingers over my third eye and focused on leveling the chopper. It worked. Then with pure mind energy I started up the rotor. The Spyder slowly glided downward. Jill missed the descent because her eyes were tightly closed.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. She turned to look at me, a helpless female look. I had never seen that before either. So many firsts. “Marty, how did you pull that one off? That nano-chip must be a lot more powerful than we thought.”

  “Jill, could you manage to land our chopper now? We’re almost touching down. Look, we were supposed to trigger some radio signal to alert our contacts that we’re coming in to the helipad at our hotel. Do you know where that button is? No?” She was shaking her head, embarrassed, slack-jawed.

  My earlier vision of a safe landing came back to me. “Hey, there’s a nice frozen lake just below us,” I said. “Let’s land here. The hotel isn’t too far away. Oh, and I’ve found the radio signal button, see?”

  Silently, Jill pulled gears and levers and made a perfect landing on a frozen lake. She turned off the engine and the rotor slowly came to a halt. She sat back in her seat, trembling and breathing heavily. I put my arm around her shoulders, brought her closer to me. My lips felt numb from the cold. It was definitely below zero outside.

  “Kiss me,” I commanded. Jill melted into me, her warm lips exploring mine. We had a few minutes to kill before our friends showed up. It was late, and it was cold. Making out with this beautiful psychic in a helicopter on a frozen lake in the Swiss Alps seemed like a perfect way to pass the time.

  18 The Internet’s Invisible Underbelly

  The Palace Hotel is the top of the line at the top of the world, the grande dame of hotels in the ritzy resort village of St. Moritz.

  Our contacts had rescued us from our tiny chopper on the frozen lake, whisked us to the elegant Palace, helped us check in, supplied us with luggage, clothes, an iPad, everything we needed. Joe and Kate Jeffers, our angels, a young married couple from Durango, Colorado: their cover, ski instructors for the Palace; their real employer, the U.S. State Department.

  They ushered us to our suite and smiled a lot and wished us luck and handed us a sealed Top Secret folder with updates on our assignments. They didn’t know that both Jill and I were telepaths. I scanned them, just for laughs. Joe was running a wild fantasy about he and Jill naked together in an outdoor hot tub, surrounded by snow; his wife was visualizing me in jockey shorts, all muscles and washboard abs and ripped, sculpted pecs. Quite a fantasy, that.

  They left with hugs and continental-style air kisses. Jill and I immediately thawed out in front of one of our two wood-burning fireplaces. Our suite had a separate bedroom, a huge tub with Jacuzzi, and a view of the lake and snow-covered mountains. The tab, to be picked up by the State Dept., was two grand U.S. a day. We had our own butler, Wilhelm, a sweet little Swiss gentleman from Zurich; he wasn’t in on the game.

  Jill scanned the rooms for bugs: no recording devices, aud or vid. We had a little supper sent up by room service. Jill wasn’t interested. She warmed her innards in the Jacuzzi, took a quick hot shower, and jumped into our
king-size bed. Exhausted, she fell asleep as soon as I kissed her eyes, nose, and lips and tucked her in with the big down comforter.

  My chip implant was working overtime. I had been warned by the docs back in Cyprus. Because the pineal gland regulates sleep as well as other bodily functions, they said, and because my pineal had been slightly “reprogrammed,” I might find it difficult to sleep. The docs were right.

  I meditated in front of the roaring fire that Wilhelm had fixed for us, looking inward at this mind that so recently had been expanded. I felt like I had attained warp speed in brain processing power and added several dozen points to my IQ. I kind of understood who I was and what this existence was all about. And the thoughts, the endless thoughts: It was easy to watch the thoughts passing by, like watching the river flow—silent, unattached, non-judgmental. As the Buddha said, just watch.

  Yeah, and this whole thing was crazy, absolutely friggin’ crazy. It seemed as if there were two Martys: the Marty of the past, the neurotic, sarcastic, always edgy Marty, a wiseass horndog who somehow had managed to live an incredible life. And the now Marty: calm, confident, mature, super-intelligent, telepathic, telekinetic. Who knew what other powers I had been granted, albeit temporarily? How could I ever go back to the old, pre-chip-implant Marty?

  I pulled out my Amigo, which had been turned off for a few days so I could focus on the business at hand. There were urgent messages from Benny Bravo, sent via the new, highly secret message delivery network called REBEL. This program had been written by Hacker and some of his cyber-pirate buddies when it became obvious that persons unknown were sabotaging the Internet and e-mail was no longer viable. Data was transmitted with absolute security via de-activated NASA satellites that the genius programmers had managed to hack.

  I brought up the REBEL app on my Amigo, spoke the access code and password, let the photo cell take a snapshot of my retina, and passed through the virtual security gates. There were Benny’s three messages, beautifully encrypted—a final, fail-safe security measure. In times of crisis, you can’t be too careful.

  I spoke another password and the decoding program kicked in. Benny’s videos were a little shaky, and a little out of focus. Which didn’t matter, really; my assistant was just learning to use the Amigo I had given him back in Sedona.

  First message: Goddess Kali had gone completely over the top since I left Sedona a few days ago. Now she was healing terminally ill people, just by touch. Word had gotten out and the ensuing traffic jam had clogged all the roads into Sedona. Her next project, she announced, would be to bring people back from the dead—carefully selected historical figures who would help solve our planet’s present problems. She would install their consciousness in bodies of living volunteers. Holy cadaver, Batman. Zombie time.

  Second message: Martial law had been declared in Sedona. There was a curfew after sunset. Police were having trouble controlling the crowds coming to be healed by Kali. Meanwhile, city water coming into homes and businesses was sporadic, and toilets were overflowing everywhere. A terrible stench pervaded the town.

  Many residents had started to move to a tent city growing up near the wastewater treatment facility, five miles south of town. Treated wastewater was there, potable water, millions of gallons of backlog, safe to drink. Somebody had brought a bunch of chickens to provide food, so they called the place Chickentown. Jesus H. Kee-rist.

  Benny had attached a video clip of Sedona’s empty streets, police checkpoints, a parade of cars, bicycles, and pedestrians heading out of town on the main drag for Chickentown.

  Third message: Benny got a call from Hacker, who asked for a meeting. My two buds managed to dodge the cops and the curfew and got together at our old secure meeting place, Mystic Vista. Hacker said he was involved in a project so important and so secret that it would affect the entire planet. He couldn’t discuss it, but he wanted to know my whereabouts and what I was doing. Benny asked if it was okay to give out my Amigo access info to Hacker.

  I wrote back to Benny that Hacker was a welcome guest in my Amigo anytime. Benny said Hacker had told him to send me a three-letter message: DNS. Suddenly I got it.

  For weeks, computer criminals had been messing with the Internet’s Domain Name System, or DNS, the unglamorous, invisible underbelly of the Internet. DNS has great power: It could be called directory assistance for the Internet. It also routes every piece of Internet traffic in the known Universe. Hacker had told me back in Sedona that he suspected attacks on the DNS system were behind the Internet sabotage. Now, my expanded mind and super-intelligence were able to put all the pieces together.

  DNS had been the subject of malicious attacks by hackers for years, but the keepers of the WWW gates always managed to patch it up. Without a fully functioning DNS, the Internet would be chaos. That was what had happened. Now, e-mail messages were being rerouted to the wrong addresses; websites and search engines were either inaccessible or fakes, full of ads or porno photos; bank accounts were raided, and huge amounts of money transferred to secret accounts.

  The whole global Internet system, which most of the world’s population had come to depend on, was hopelessly scrambled and virtually impotent. The watchdogs of the Internet, scattered around the world and possessing incredibly powerful tools, were unable to keep up with the attacks. Every patch was met with a new style of hack. Also, malicious viruses had been distributed by the saboteurs to millions of computers around the world, further snarling the system.

  The primary suspect in this plot to take down the Internet was Black Swan Beta.

  I closed my eyes, put a finger over my third eye, and tried to look into the future. All I got was a blank screen, then a snowstorm on a blank screen, then a high-pitched, screeching noise which forced my eyes open and gave me a headache.

  I was restless, not even close to sleepy. I decided to visit Jill’s dreams, and allowed my consciousness to drift into the bedroom. Dreams are weird at best, and rarely make sense—fragments of mind dust, a synaptic free-for-all, the brain simply letting go and allowing data to dance like the notes in a Bach cantata. Jill was dreaming of Leela, alone in a cage, naked, like a trapped animal, desperately grasping the bars, a look of despair on her face.

  Suddenly I felt like a voyeur and ducked back into my own head. Visiting the dreams of a telepath is risky. She might be doing lucid dreaming. She might be dreaming of a future you don’t want to know about.

  I thought about Leela and my lust for Jill and the consummation of our hot flirtation just a couple of days ago. Did our tryst have Leela’s stamp of approval? It must have. Jill had said back in Sedona that she had “wanted” me for a long time, but the code of honor between women, especially powerful psi women, precluded any kind of a coital experience between Jill and I. At that time! That was then! Also, guilt didn’t seem to be in my repertoire of emotions anymore. Strange.

  Wide awake. I picked up the Top Secret envelope, broke the seal, pulled out the sheath of papers. Contained therein were further details of our mission.

  Jill and I were to pose as Simone and Roger Hightower, an American couple with special skills. Jill/Simone was a noted computer scientist who had never met a computer problem she couldn’t fix. Her whole history—college, post-grad, articles, books, websites, blogs— had already been created by the CIA. A Google search on her name would bring millions of hits—when the Internet was functioning normally. In reality, all she knew about computers was how to send e-mail.

  Her scam: She would connect telepathically with Greta Eisen, our mole at Black Swan; Greta would think or visualize the steps necessary to help Jill seek out and sabotage whatever was disrupting the Internet. This sounded like a ridiculously reckless plan to me, but Jill lived in an unwavering state of trust, so what the hell. In her bag Jill would be carrying several data storage units, in order to download incriminating information from the Black Swan Beta servers. She would also be carrying a dat
a chip loaded with the most malicious computer virus ever created, courtesy of the State Department’s computer scientists.

  My cover story: I am known as The Raven, a “psychedelic shaman” who has lived among Native Americans and whose skills in healing, ESP, and inter-dimensional travel are widely recognized. I am also an expert on psychoactive drugs, and have ingested most of them: LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, salvia divinorum, Ecstasy, DMT. The State Department knows well of Klaus Lieberman’s great interest in drugs. My life is very secret and no official documentation exists on Roger Hightower. My job is to keep Klaus distracted while Jill works on the Black Swan problems.

  The fire was starting to die. I shuddered. It was four a.m. There was a single sheet of paper left in the large Top Secret envelope. It was headed “Wolfgang von Neumann aka Wolfgang Maximus.” There was one short paragraph on the purported founder and head of Black Swan Galactic:

  Wolfgang von Neumann (Maximus), born in Budapest, Hungary 1960 of German and Hungarian parents. Naturalized US citizen. Education: Stanford University, MA, computer science. Worked for Silicon Valley firms as programmer, software designer. As freelance, created “Blujay,” sophisticated spyware which he sold to U.S. government for 250 mil. Blujay used by National Security Agency (NSA) for surveillance, wiretaps, database management, e-mail hacks after 9/11. Became wealthy investor, started Eternal Flame and immortality movement, founded Black Swan Galactic, set up Klaus Lieberman in software business called Black Swan Beta. Twice divorced, no children. Supposedly charismatic man who inspires confidence and even worship. Probably addicted to immortality drug EMC-2. Known to be ruthless in business and personal relationships, although ostensibly charming and likable. A mystery man never seen in public. Former therapist diagnosed him as psychotic with murderous tendencies.

  So that was the man behind the whole operation: a charming, violent psycho who had the wherewithal and the smarts to create a worldwide organization bent on destruction of Planet Earth. And who planned to use his ill-gotten monetary gains to finance a mission to the stars!

  Jill and I, two vulnerable, small-town psychics, were assigned to take down one of this egomaniac’s prime business operations—the firm that seemed to have a stranglehold on the world’s most valuable resource, the Internet. And while we were in their headquarters building we were to rescue my beloved Leela, who was also, by the way, a very important State Department “asset.” How could we ever pull this off? It seemed like Mission Impossible. And yet, we had to make it work.

  I needed to sleep, needed darkness. I put a finger over my third eye, hoping to trigger a deluge of melatonin, the brain’s natural sleep chemical. In minutes I started yawning and my muscles seemed to relax all at the same time. I ripped off my clothes, hurried into bed, put my blindfold in place—melatonin needs darkness to really trigger its effects—and snuggled up next to Jill.

  She was naked. She moaned softly as I wrapped myself around her. I slept, a deep, dreamless sleep. Blackness.

  19 In the Belly of the Beast

  “So you have taken zuh trips on DMT, Herr Hightower? May I please call you Herr Raven? Thank you. So, what iss it like?”

  “I have indeed, sir. It is very profound, almost too intense for the human mind to accept without going mad. Fortunately, it is a very short trip.”

  I was sitting with Klaus Lieberman, CEO of Black Swan Beta, the computer arm of Black Swan Galactic. Klaus was the chief mastermind behind the malicious computer mischief that was helping to bring down the planet’s financial and communications systems. We were in the outdoor patio of Beta’s headquarters in Davos, enclosed by a transparent bubble of some unknown material, immune to the below zero temperature outside. The view of nearby snow-capped mountains was stunning.

  “Details, Herr Raven, details, please.”

  “Klaus, even veteran trippers such as Leary and Terence McKenna say the experience defies verbal or visual description. How about this: time travel, visits to paranormal realms, encounters with spiritual beings, meetings with trans-dimensional entities…. Whenever I took it, I felt like the Ruler of the Universe—”

  “Like God?”

  “Beyond God. The god behind the god. Like I knew everything and had experienced everything past present and future and could do anything, be anything I wanted.”

  His eyes were very wide. Klaus admitted he had never taken DMT. In truth, neither had I. Everything I told him came from Wikipedia.

  “Can you read my mind, Herr Raven? If so, you must tell me. We have done considerable research on you and your genius wife, Simone. Our research shows you have some extraordinary abilities. Please demonstrate, now.”

  His tone was demanding, with Germanic overtones. Although Lieberman spent most of his life in the USA, he was basically German; his first language was German. He had a very Arian profile, high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes, fit and pumped up, a little over six feet, just about eye level with me, and an intimidating kind of energy. I knew he was gay, but he was very butch, very aggressive, like a street punk from Berlin or a queer Moscow gangbanger who had learned his moves in the gulag.

  He had been taking large doses of the mysterious drug EMC-2, which not only kept cells alive forever, or so it was claimed, but it also flooded the body with massive doses of testosterone. That might explain the man’s macho energy. Allegedly, the drug also boosted brain processing power exponentially. The jury is still out on that one.

  “Herr Lieberman, Klaus, that ESP stuff is just bullshit. No human can read another human’s mind; that is a myth promoted by TV and tabloid writers. During psychedelic journeys I have undertaken after ingesting certain, uh, plants and chemical substances, I have demonstrated some amazing abilities which were recorded on video. Perhaps that is where you heard of my so-called ESP abilities. I cannot see into the future. I can, however, move objects with my mind. Watch.”

  I don’t know what possessed me in that moment, but I knew I could do something I had never done before if I just focused my mind. So, using my amped-up superbrain, I lifted the man’s half-full porcelain teacup into the air, slowly, hovering it a full meter from our table. I tilted the cup so its golden contents spilled out onto the tiled floor. Then I let the teacup fall onto the floor, shattering into hundreds of pieces.

  Lieberman simply gaped at me. His mouth moved, but no words came out. Finally, he stuttered, “How— how did you do that, Herr Raven?”

  I stared at him, then let my mind drift over to Jill’s world. I found that I could easily allow my consciousness to function on two levels: one, sitting with the German, carrying on a conversation; and two, experiencing the world through Jill’s eyes, mind, and body.