Chapter 8
Transcript of conversation between XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. September, XX, XXXX.
> We’ve run into another snag, XXXX.
>
> I’ve got a meeting in eight minutes. Get to the point.
>
> Yes, XXXX. We’re having problems with the execution script. We know what needs to happen, but we haven’t figured out how to make it happen.
>
> I thought all of that was worked out months ago.
>
> Conceptually it was, XXXX. We’ve had a plan in place since before he was chosen. But that was all based on a theoretical model of a typical candidate. We know a lot more about him now, about how he thinks and how he’ll notice certain things and how he will react to them. All of the simulations show only a 64% probability that he will accept the script as it currently stands.
>
> That’s not good enough.
>
> Exactly, XXXX.
- Aiden -
NOVEMBER
Three new developments and I don’t know which one to talk about first.
Let’s start with pens. If you’re observant, you probably noticed that I’m no longer writing with a pencil. I can use pens again. It turns out that my silver disks have connected themselves to my-- but that’s the second thing.
I’m going to start over.
Dr. Jacobs came to see me this morning to give me the bad news. Somehow, and no one seems to understand how or why it happened, my little silver disks have connected themselves with my nervous system. This means it will be very difficult to remove them without the probable loss of functionality in both of my hands. Not good news, of course, and I can’t say that I took it very well. But for some reason, Jacobs seemed to take it even worse than me and seemed to be quite distraught on my behalf.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
And then something happened, something unexpected. Which is to say something happened an hour or so later.
I was meeting with Dr. Garcia just before lunch, which is when we’ve been meeting every day since I woke up, and naturally I shared with her what Jacobs had told me and she asked me how I was feeling and for some reason everything she said to console me just got me more and more upset and before long I was shouting and swearing and then I noticed that she was staring at my hands. So I looked down and noticed that I was holding a glass of water and that the water in the glass was boiling.
In my hand. Actively boiling.
And I didn’t even feel it, not at first, anyway. But as I looked at the water, I could feel the heat that was there, but not with my hands. I could sense the heat in the water itself, which doesn’t make sense written like that….
It’s kind of like the color red. If you put red food color in water you can see it, even from a distance. You know the water is red, even if you aren't touching it. That’s what it was like. Yes, I was holding the glass, but I could sense the heat in the glass using something more than touch itself.
And then I wondered what would happen if I wanted the water to get colder and as I thought about it, it did. It took about four seconds for the water to go from boiling hot to frozen solid, which caused the glass to shatter and it cut up my hand pretty bad, but that didn’t bother me. For some reason, I can now boil and freeze water just by wanting it to happen.
Which brings me back to pens. I can still cause the pens to freeze up if I want, but I can thaw them again. At will.
And then in the afternoon, I was visited by two FBI agents who asked me a whole series of questions about who I knew and how long I knew them and if I had seen anything suspicious in the days leading up to the “incident.” I can’t help but think that they think that the explosion was not an accident, but some kind of device detonated by some terrorist or rival company or some other evil person in an effort to sabotage our process and kill three of my people.
Which brings me back to my feelings. Dr. Garcia wanted me to write in this journal to capture how all of it is making me feel, but after everything that’s happened today, I don’t know what I feel. Thinking about someone deliberately setting off the explosion makes me angry, of course, but at the same time a burden seems to have lifted. I think, maybe, that I’m starting to realize that maybe it really wasn’t my fault. Maybe there wasn't anything I could have done and maybe it’s okay to feel lucky to have survived, even with these silver disks that are turning out to be pretty cool.
Despite everything, today feels like it’s been a good day, which confuses me.