Shift: Chapter Four

    Nick tossed his car key onto the dining room table and switched on the HV. It was all he could think about on the drive over. Go home, call up every John Bruce holocast you can find and see if there’s a change.

    One that nobody had noticed.

    It would have to be something subtle. Maybe a slight loss of motor skills - was that why he’d left NASA? Or gaps in his memory, or…

    The HV prompt light came on. All he needed now was the remote which, as usual, was hiding - probably buried beneath last night’s Indian take-away. Or was that the night before’s?

    Someday he really had to find the trigger to his tidy gene.

    He found the remote, wiped off the red sauce and switched to voice input.

    "John Bruce," he said and selected ‘news.’

    A news anchor materialised in the corner of the room - the image, half life-size and floating two feet off the ground. She smiled at Nick and spoke in a soft southern drawl.

    "John Bruce will be leaving the campaign trail today to attend a SHIFT reunion in Florida. The thirty-one year-old former spaceman is currently trailing third in the polls in New Hampshire but…"

    Nick froze the image and asked for a list of every John Bruce appearance, with titles and dates. The news anchor disappeared to be replaced by columns of text scrolling through the air. Nick selected a handful either side of the launch date and flipped between them. Did Bruce show a discernible change?

    He walked around each image, flipping between the slightly nervous but always smiling spaceman and the relieved hero. All the interviews looked staged and undoubtedly were. NASA was fixated on image, paying as much attention to public perception as they did to their programs. John Bruce would have been coached from day one. 

    Nick extended the search into entertainment, documentaries and beyond. There had to be some candid shots surely, some unguarded moment away from his NASA minders?

    Text scrolled and faded. Images flashed. There were a few extended interviews, some passing appearances on live documentaries. But Bruce always appeared guarded. Impeccably polite, quick to smile, friendly … but he never really opened up.

    Even when he talked about his religious experience…

    Nick felt like slapping himself. How could he have forgotten! John Bruce had one of those religious born-again experiences during the SHIFT flight.

    He froze the image. "New search. John Bruce. Born again."

    He tapped at the remote, extended the search into the God channels. A new list appeared. Shorter. He selected the first. No good. The second … the third.

    John Bruce materialised in front of him. He was sitting in a chair, on a stage somewhere, being interviewed. He looked dumbstruck - eyes wide open, mouth slightly parted. 

    "It was incredible," began Bruce, his voice slow and wavering slightly. "I saw this white light, brighter than anything you can ever imagine."

    The holocameras zoomed in on his face, ballooning John Bruce’s head to twice normal size. Nick could see the spaceman’s eyes tearing up; the slow bemused shake of his giant head, the faraway look.

    "And suddenly I felt this rush. So much joy, so much peace. It was like I was bathed in light. All my sins, all my worries being washed away. It was then that I knew I wasn’t alone in the Pegasus. God was with me."

    "Hallelujah," shouted a disembodied voice from the studio audience.

    Nick agreed. Hallelujah, indeed, and froze the image. White lights, feelings of euphoria. Everything you’d expect to see if the brain came under stress during the flight. Distortions of the visual cortex, a massive release of endorphins. Was this the proof he’d been looking for?

    He bounced to his feet and paced around the frozen image. He so wanted it to be true. Just thinking about the possibility made his brain salivate. There were so many ramifications. Not just for John Bruce, but for science. If a fragment of Bruce’s memory could become detached and find its way into another person eighteen months later, then where had it been in the meantime? Had it been preserved in the higher dimensions? Had it drifted on hitherto undreamed of upper dimensional currents? Had it snapped back to Earth immediately and spent eighteen months trapped inside Pendennis’s head?

      And was it more than just memory? How much of John Bruce’s personality had gone with it? A vestigial remnant? Louise said he talked like John. Could a complete sub-personality have ripped away?

    Or was the great Nick Stubbs deluding himself?

    Every week thousands of people saw bright white lights. Near death experience, anaesthetics, drugs. Why should this one be any different? John’s brain had come under stress. So what? He was being shot through new space. Everyone expected his brain to come under stress. He saw a white light as he started to pass out then came to. End of story. Pendennis was a con-man who'd tapped Louise’s mind and John Bruce was as whole as the day he'd joined NASA.

    Nick slumped back onto the sofa. Why did rational explanations always have to be so boring? Why couldn’t he live in a universe where the simple answer was invariably wrong, a Heath Robinson universe of elegant complication, magic and imagination?

    He grabbed the remote and pressed ‘play.’ Maybe the interviewer would ask about Bruce’s childhood and the spaceman wouldn't be able to answer.

    John Bruce stuttered back to life.

    "And when I returned to Earth, I was amazed at how beautiful everything was. It was like I’d been wearing dark glasses all my life. Suddenly everything was brighter, the colours deeper, the sounds sweeter. Life was beautiful. It still is. If only people would take time out and look around."

    Nick froze the image and leaned forward. How long had it taken Pegasus to return to Earth? Two days? The white light effect doesn’t last that long. If Bruce was still experiencing a disturbance in his visual cortex two days later…

    He jumped to his feet.  

    Not the primary visual cortex - that was at the back of the brain, too far away. But the temporal cortex. Right place, right function. It handled some of the visual processing and it was close to long-term memory and hearing. A single localised rupture there and…

    He was off again, spiralling into the wonderful world of conjecture. He could see it all. A section of higher dimensional matter ripped away. Not enough to kill or critically impair, just enough to mildly distort some of Bruce’s sensory functions.

    He paced as he thought, kindling his brain, greasing his synapses. Think, think, think. If only he had a scan of Bruce’s brain, he could prove it. He could generate a map, work out exactly what would have been lost and…

    He needed that scan. He grabbed the remote, zapped John Bruce, called up a list of his SHIFT contacts and then tried to calm down, taking deep breaths. He had to sound relaxed. A casual voice mail enquiry to a fellow scientist across the pond. Do you still have the full spectrum brain scans from before and after John Bruce’s flight? Did that sound innocent enough? What if there really had been a cover up? What if they knew he’d been damaged?

    He tapped his fingers nervously on the remote. What choice did he have? He needed those scans. If SHIFT knew there were problems with the neural shielding then no concocted cover story would convince them to give up the data.

    He voiced in his request and played it back. Then recorded it again, bringing the timbre of his voice down from slightly manic to somewhere around borderline normal. Happy, he appended his contact details and pressed ‘send.’

    Then another thought hit him. What if Pendennis didn’t need to be telepathic? What if John Bruce had talked about Louise in an interview and everything Pendennis had told Louise was in the public domain?

    "New search," he asked. "All areas. John Bruce and Louise Callander."

    He waited, feeling stupid. Shouldn’t this have been his first search? Had he lost the ability to see the obvious?

    The search took in the whole net: the holocasts, the web, the groups, the boards, homespace. Several hundred hits; but nothing linking the astronaut John Bruce to his Oxfordshire sweetheart.

    Which was a relief.

    He tried Pendennis next. There was something familiar about that name.

    "New search. Peter Pendennis. Upper Heywood."

    A list of titles filled the viewing area. Angel-faced killer gets life. The Butcher sent down. Butcher guilty.

    Nick stared at the list. Now he remembered. He’d been out of the country at the time but had caught some of the Spanish-language holocasts. It had been big news world-wide. For a month or two.

    He selected the first entry to refresh his memory. Back came the friendly news anchor.

    "The angel-faced killer, Peter Pendennis, was sentenced to life imprisonment today for the murder of eleven people."

    Eleven people in two months. Nick listened to the litany, watched the images of each victim flash and fade. Wedding pictures, holiday snaps, smiling moments from happier times.

    Then the horror. Cold words delivered off camera while pictures of grim-faced policemen stood guard outside people’s homes. Five houses around Oxford broken into, the owners drugged, killed and dissected.

    Tearful neighbours came into shot, friends, family members - ashen-faced accounts of how the bodies had been discovered. Not bodies, corrected one of the witnesses, pieces. Then he broke down.

    Nick swallowed hard. Pieces. Strewn over carpeted floors. No attempt to hide or conceal, just left where they fell like cuts of meat. Except for their noses, which were always missing - bitten off, presumed eaten.

    Nick looked away. This was the man he was going to see?

    Did Louise know? Should he tell her?

    He looked at his phone.

    What if she pulled out?

    Anders Ziegler was standing by the window staring out at the car park. They’d be arriving soon.

    Big mistake.

    But what else could he have done?

    Twice he’d rung to cancel and twice he’d changed his mind in mid-call. What if there was a higher dimensional component to Peter’s condition? Could he risk not finding out? Could he risk discovering later - maybe many years later - that he’d had the answer within his grasp but had turned the opportunity down because of theoretical differences?

    Straw grabbing. The day was going to be a disaster and everyone knew it. Bazley had washed his hands of the whole affair and Security were obsessed with the equipment Stubbs was bringing with him. Not only had they insisted on a detailed specification of each item coming in but they were going to scan the lot for drugs and explosives.

    "Why’s he need all those tripods?" the Chief Warder had asked. "Bet they’re hollow. You know how much contraband you can fit in one of those extendable legs?"

    He did now.

    The day couldn’t end soon enough.