SNEAK PEEK INSIDE!
Watching From Within by Daniel LaMonte
Chapter 2
Yesterday’s Unconsciousness
Although the attending physician recorded only a few minor abrasions about the face and arms, Jesse Baine remained unconscious in bed 12-B of the Space Bay Medical Center emergency room. First order protocol upon taking a sufferer into care, was a complete surveillance examination of the events leading to the injury. That order satisfied, the medical probes subsequently used to determine a diagnosis, returned negative for all potential maladies indicated by the replay of the patient’s episode with the police. Nonetheless, ephemeral minutes turned to lost hours and the mystery of the coma continued woefully unsolved.
Mitchel Page was first to ensure Jesse’s safe arrival to the hospital. Page required treatment as well sustaining a mild hematoma on the back of his head and a laceration demanding several bulging stitches above his right eye. Still unable to determine a cause for the invisible blast of energy that turned their initial encounter unpleasant, Page stayed informed of Jesse’s condition throughout the day hoping for a chance to ask even one of a glut of lingering questions. That opportunity, however, never presented itself.
Admissions found no personal or family contact for Baine and the staff readied to give up the search when finally, a young woman approached the administration desk. Waiting her turn in line, she drilled through a large white purse to find her identification. She wore an emerald green sundress of simple freeform design, a fresh coat of glistening sun oil and a visibly worried brow. Leaning a bit too far to one side, her tall, shining heals angled dangerously away from the desk and began to wobble. Page quickly reached out to stabilize her gait to assure that she did not fall. She grasped his arm to regain her composure. Peering, almost shyly, from behind her yellow bangs, she saw him smile.
“Tori, right?”
“Yes, detective. Thanks. I thought I was going to end up a patient there for a second.”
“New heals?”
“No. Slippery feet!”
Curious look.
“Well, I was at the beach when a friend of mine messaged telling me that my boyfriend was in an accident and rushed to the emergency room. I’m trying to find out what happened and where he is now.”
She turned toward the attendant.
“Next in line, please. Have your ID out and ready for inspection, please! Miss, you’re next. Identification please.”
“Well, then. Good luck to you. And my best to your boyfriend,” Page said with all the workings of his usual charm.
Tori entered the emergency room just in time to witness the procedure. The nurse placed a headband scanner over Jesse’s forehead and commanded the computer to probe for anomalies when a high-frequency sonic pulse pierced the stillness. All at once, Jesse’s arms left his side and stretched outward from the hospital bed. In one fluid, almost balanced motion, his listless body lofted into the air. Still and unresponsive, he lay on nothing save a refractive cloud. The distorted air between him and the bed-sheet danced like a wave of heat scattering the light reflecting off a sun beaten roadway. He floated a few inches above the tufts. Small trickles of blood coursed from his nose and ears. The nurse gasped. Then, without a thought, she wrapped her arms around Tori in a protective stance both to hide her view and to marshal her outside the room.
“System disengage!” wailed the nurse.
The staff physician, made aware of the situation by the ensuing commotion, instructed the nurse to tend to Tori while he investigated the unconscious patient. By the time the doctor entered the examination room, Jesse was no longer in flight. He was lying quietly, supine on the bed, the head-scanner down about his eyes and the blood streams dry.
Adjusting the apparatus, the doctor’s attention focused on the kaleidoscopic moving pictures produced by the head-scanner. The churning nano-circuitry, magnified in sufficient detail to identify the maker’s marks, combined in a force and structure previously undocumented by mainstream medical science. The nanoscale structures embedded deep within Jesse’s visual, auditory and cerebral cortices appeared to have their own living ecosystem. The solution to the complex network meshed upon the young man’s brain required the expertise of a nanotechnologist and demanded far more technical analysis than the attending physician was qualified to perform.
Better able to compose herself than was the nurse, Tori re-entered the examination room. She sat in a chair on the opposite side of Jesse’s hospital bed from the panels and from the over-focused doctor who spoke aloud, yet to no one, “Interesting, an erratic brain-print. Look at these severely elevated beta oscillations while at rest. How unusual. Implant excision is clearly indicated but is likely impossible. Poor soul. No doubt another victim of a Gensitech trial gone terribly wrong!” he postulated. “He may still be breathing, but whether this man lives or dies is more dependent upon the growing nano-mass in his head than upon anything we might do for him. I’ll take this matter before the board.”
However noteworthy the images, the clinician found no correlation between the existent nano-particles and the apparent glitch in the laws of physics. The doctor turned away from Tori as if he never saw her enter. He left the room as he continued to mumble quietly yet deliberately into the ether, “Floating above the bed, indeed! Substantially overworked staff, I presume. High flying imagination, perhaps?”
Then in an acute change of voice he added, “What shall we call the disorder, doctor?” and with a change of pitch in response to no one he answered, “Implant induced hoveritis, of course! Insanity!”
Tori sat alone drifting in thought. Jesse remained still as the images within his cranium played upon the panels.
As extraordinary as they were frightful, Jesse Baine’s inimitable abilities emerged on occasion as did funnel clouds over the bay. The episodes developed without warning in uncontrollable and persistently unpredictable ways. Over the years of their special friendship, Tori witnessed Jesse inadvertently spawn many such kinetic feats. So, seeing him drift a few inches above his hospital bed elicited far less fear in her than did his unexplained unconsciousness.
The caregivers of his childhood were the first to discover Jesse’s exceptional nature. Although typical in so many boyish ways, his demeanor proved infinitely more composed in the wake of tragedy than a three-year-old is customarily able to master. On one unforgettable evening, a sudden coastal thunderstorm brewed from the east. The orphanage nurse tucked all the children into bed for the evening when a menacing squall stole over the bay unleashing a warmonger waterspout.
Interested more in learning the whistling tune of the elements than in sleeping, young Jesse hopped out of bed to press his ear to the window. Then, from the tall, arched pane centered in the wall between the parallel of bunk beds, a sudden blast of fury lit the room and with the flare came the wrath of an enemy worse than the first mother’s evil serpent. Final sparks of life flew from every wall-mounted lamp as all electrical capacity of the building expired. The deafening crash of a force through the glass alerted the nurse to rush to the boy’s dormitory.
When she arrived, she found all the children huddled together in the far, dark corner of the room. Without a second inspection of the small, frightened faces, she knew immediately who was missing from her head count. She ran to the smashed window kicking up the jagged shards with her slippers as she went.
“Jesse! Jesse Cedric Baine!” she called frantically. However, both the darkness and the fog consumed the courtyard to blind her view. The slowly encroaching howl, like that of an approaching freight train, conjured up the worst in her thoughts. Yet, none of her imaginings trumped reality. The twister fell upon them. As she ran down the hallway with the open double-doors of the great-room entrance in sight, she saw in her night terror a three-year-old boy with straight jet-black hair carried by a twirling demon. She saw the little body tossed and tattered about the garden as if shaken by a lion after the hunt. When the boy finally landed face down in the swampy island centering the circular drive, the nurse mustered her senses, took a deep breath for strength and stepped over the threshold and into the storm.
Jesse, unfazed by the tumultuous ride, jumped to his bare feet and scampered to within ten feet of the grand entrance of the Southern Georgian style mansion used to house the many parentless children in the city. The wave patterned rain and mountain sized hail stones hammered every living and nonliving thing unfortunate enough not to have sought refuge in the arms of Atlas himself. Even the mighty carrier of earth prostrated himself low in deference to the wind and buckling thunder as the angry javelins of lightning sliced at His soul.
“Come here, Jesse, come inside!” cried the nurse. However, Jesse remained too inquisitive to be obedient. He ran from the doorway into the wind perhaps expecting his nanny to give playful chase, yet she did not. As he approached the center of the circular drive, Jesse hopped the small stone curb and began to spin around the flagpole as he had done so many times. Then, the unthinkable happened.
The lightning bolt struck the rod and rocked the mansion. Jesse held the flagpole firmly with both hands and faced the full fury of the firmaments. The event illuminated the expanse like a strobe and slowed all motion. In the paralysis of her astonishment, the nurse dropped to a knee. The little boy with the straight, jet-black hair took the force of the crackling jolt and flew halfway across the driveway. He landed face down with a thud loud enough to echo throughout the orphanage despite the clamor of thunder and the slashing patter of the deluge.
Still in frenzy, the nurse gathered herself in sufficient quantity then flew to the sufferer’s side. She raised him up in her arms and cradled him close to her bosom praying with the fervor of the holy ancients. As the rain began to subside, her trembling slowly retreated to a tearful sway and her thoughts to a sorrowful elegy. She saw the strike. She witnessed his last inquisitive moment. She wished that she had given chase, that she had done something more than turn to stone in fright.
‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘if I had stayed with him throughout the night, or if I had never left him alone to walk the mansion halls, in the dark, through the storm– I could have prevented this ungodly tragedy!’
As she held him, the thought occurred that his body was still quite warm, rather than cold and growing rigid, as she first feared. Instantly she realized that Jesse was still breathing. She rushed back into the clinic where she laid him on the white sterile sheets of the infirmary bed. Tossing his clothes to the floor, she began to examine his small, naked body. She started at his head. She noticed a small bruise on his left cheek, but otherwise his face showed no sign of distress. She lifted and rubbed each limb looking for marks, but she found none. When she reached his feet, she stroked the soles looking for a reflex and she got one. With a start, Jesse sat up giggling. “Tickles,” he said.
“Oh, Jesse! You little diavolo!” More tears! “Tickles, does it? Well, then prendi quello, take that, and that, and that,” she cried. Two delighted, she tickled his tiny feet and Jesse wiggled his toes and giggled until what seemed the end of time.
From that epic day forward, everyone knew that he was something special. Thankfully for Jesse, the secret stayed safely hidden in younger minds who eventually let the memory go as childhood dreamers often do. Nevertheless, defeating a whirling tumult, taking the blow of a barrage of boulder-sized hail and conquering lightning at an earlier age than did mighty Thor proved to be a hard dream for some of his friends to un-see. Still, these feats were only the beginning of his journey.
At the age of fourteen, Jesse was becoming a hometown hero on the diamond. His physique was that of a much older boy. He played for the Bobcats on the Central High School baseball team. One afternoon, with his new friend Tori Richard and her pining heart seated in the second row, young Baine stood determined to make more than a significant impression. The score was six-all with just a final out remaining in regulation. Stepping into the batter’s box, Jesse took a long, glare into the pitcher’s eyes. He thumped his bat down on home plate a couple of times before raising it to the ready position. The wind-up and high-kick led to a fastball from sixty feet six inches away, which even if honed by infrared-telemetry, would not have set the orb on any better path to its target. With the reaction of a hovercopter and the power of an airbus, Jesse let the lumber fly. Using an intense concentration, he watched the ball reflect off the sweet spot of the baseball bat and into the gap in deep right-center field. Effortlessly, he rounded second and walked into third base with a textbook stand-up triple in the enduring fashion of famed Wahoo Sam Crawford, the best triple-maker of all time. Tori and the crowd jumped to their feet and cheered their man.
Next at bat, Jesse’s orphan-brother, Jeffrey Deeker, came to the plate. A full head taller than Jesse and sporting the highest homerun record in the division, everybody expected Deeker to end the game with one stunning swing of the stick. He decoded the sign from the third base coach and on the next pitch, his flawless execution brought the crowd back to their feet. To the infielder’s surprise, Deeker dragged a near-perfect bunt down the first base line. Coach called for the squeeze! The pitcher screamed toward the ball as Jesse launched like a rocket toward home plate. The play would be close. Facing the hometown dugout, the pitcher scooped the bounding ball, spun 270 degrees to his left and fired the bullet home. For many, Jesse’s slide was in slow motion and quite possibly etched in their minds forever. The ball slapped into the waiting mitt with only milliseconds to spare. The catcher grasped the ball and glove with both hands curled and smothered home plate in preparation of the impact. The crowd gasped as Jesse lifted both legs to the sky and threw his body to the ground. Yet, instead of kicking up the dirt and crashing into the catcher, miraculously Jesse hovered several inches above the ground, held by nothing save the visible, springy air and dust as he remained in a perfectly horizontal sliding position barreling ever closer to home. As the catcher lunged forward to apply the tag, Jesse raised his legs and floated over the waiting glove like a boat rides a wave to its apogee, then freely falls in its parabolic descent. Touching the plate once safely past the impediment in the baseline, he scored the winning run and won a young girl’s heart.
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