Scopolamine, muscimol, bufotenin, modafinil, and baeocystin. 2C-T-2, N-Methyl-3-piperidyl benzilate, TOMSO, 2,5-dimethoxy-3,4-dimethylamphetamine, and 4-Desoxymescaline. Psychedelics that would never hit the streets. Stimulants invented by regimes they never named.
Dean McClean lay on a comfortable medical bed under hundreds of feet of Wasatch Front granite, enjoying his chemical cocktail. Around him, white-coated doctors fiddled with electrical equipment and spoke into phones. They were all clean cut, never swore, didn’t even drink coffee, but they sure knew a lot about the hallucinogens that they themselves had never tried.
He was having a thoroughly good time riding waves of pleasurable epiphanies. Today was a big day. They had been training him for a long time, and now they would get to see what all that military funding amounted to. Some part of his fractured mind knew he should be nervous, but there were no communication links between that part and the rest of his psyche. He could look at it, but not speak to it.
Dr. Hyrum Johansson, lead investigator for the project, hung up his red telephone and walked over to the bed. “They’re ready for you, Mr. McClean. How are you feeling?”
He gave a thumbs up and then pondered the fact that so much of human communication was mediated through the use of fingers. The doctor smiled and returned to the wall with its banks of blinking bulbs. A lot of computer power was being used to analyze his vital signs.
Dr. Johansson picked up the phone again. Spools of magnetic tape started spinning.
“First sequence,” the doctor intoned.
McClean had been holding back a wave in his mind, spending mental energy to keep the full rush from permeating his headspace. Now he let it go. Chemical bliss surged, and in a flash he extended through the mountain. Contact.
“Direct yourself,” Dr. Johansson soothingly commanded.
Target acquisition commencing. McClean’s perception narrowed and focused, traveling over the surrounding megasuburbs and into Wyoming nowhere-land. Slicing over the sparsely populated towns, he focused on the Black Hills and made a turn before he could see the presidents’ faces. He weaved through the stone sentries of the Badlands; he soared over the two-toned flatness of the South Dakota fields, always searching for his target. There: a metal lid among the grass. He dove down through it, penetrating the silo, feeling the smooth hull of the missile. He reached the doctor in the launch control room with his two flashcards, holding them up to empty air.
McClean read them off. The whitecoats jotted notes. Dr. Johansson ordered the next sequence. The man in the silo held up two more cards. McClean read them. They repeated this for dozens of iterations.
At an order from Dr. Johansson, McClean pulled back and lazily let himself count the paint defects on the ceiling above him.
“Seventy-two percent correct,” one of the whitecoats said, “within tolerance, but on the low end.”
“Let’s not use him up, tell Houston we’re good to go.”
Dr. Johansson walked over with his box of administration techniques and started manually tinkering with McClean’s brain chemistry, pushing it to its maximum psychoefficiency. McClean didn’t like when they talked about him as if he were a piece of equipment, but he was used to it by now.
***
It had all started years ago. How many was getting increasingly unclear. Having lifted off from Nellis into the pre-dawn blue, he and his trusty radar intercept officer spent that fateful morning pushing their Phantom fighter to the limit. As they blasted around the central Nevada test range, McClean held the throttles full forward, letting the plane’s big engines make up for what its aerodynamics lacked.
Thus they practiced their Wild Weasel mission, pretending the sagebrush expanse was a European forest. When the dastardly Soviets finally went for world domination—the big Cold War prize—the Wild Weasels would be on the front lines. They’d fly low and fast, knocking out air defense radars so the ground pounders could roll on in and blow the hell out of the Fulda Gap.
Somewhere west of Wendover it happened. His voice spoke before his brain thought.
“Eject!”
His RIO, well-trained, didn’t ask questions. The rocket seats ignited, blasting the aviators up into the air. While he drifted back down on his colorful parachute he watched the Phantom explode below his feet.
Precognition, the men in suits had called it when they visited him in the hospital. He was lying semi-delirious, waiting for his spinal column to decompress. He remembered little from the conversation other than the strong impression that the men belonged to three letter agencies so clandestine that they used the CIA as a front.
When the doctors gave him the hospital release papers there was a signed document; his own handwriting, shakily scrawled. McClean’s time in the public-facing military was over. They gave him a discharge and then immediately hired him as a private contractor. Still owned by the government, but with plausible deniability.
At least he got to wear what he wanted and grow his hair out long. He found himself still in Nevada, occupying facilities hidden deep in the ranges, protected from prying eyes by signs warning of radiation. That’s where he learned what they needed him to do, through a scratchy VHS tape in an undecorated room.
It started by congratulating him on his gifts, and then launched into a lecture on the fringes of human mentality. Precognition, he learned, was only the tip of the iceberg. The ability was one of many; it often indicated deeper talents, one of which was remote viewing.
Since the 50s, the spookier federal departments had been gathering evidence. Some people could see things far removed from them, up to the other side of the world. The intelligence applications were immediately apparent, and the gifted were scooped up into secret research projects. At first, the scope had been narrow: train them to see inside Politburo meetings or Kazakh missile test sites.
Over time the goals expanded. Remote viewers were trained to find religious artifacts, locate lost cities buried in the sands of time. In the same way the zeitgeist turned from 50s conservatism to 60s experimentation, so did the program evolve.
Pioneer 10 and 11 changed everything. When the space probes beamed back their images of Jupiter and Saturn the world was mesmerized, but the spooks knew they could do better. After all, those images weren’t what the planets actually were like. They were data streams; captured, compressed, and recorded. Wouldn’t it be great to see directly?
It was an easy sell when merged with paranoia about Soviet space weapons. If The War broke out, having teams that could navigate and see in space with the same ease as a soldier on the ground would provide an incalculable advantage.
Or, forget The War. What about First Contact?
The next day McClean met Dr. Johansson. The doctor plunked a metal cube on the table between them. It had a circular hole on one side.
“This is a trigger object.” he explained, “The truth is, we can’t be sure that you won’t just describe the planets or space environment as you imagine them from science fiction movies. Additionally, it’s an open question as to how one’s consciousness can handle being stretched over light-minutes. Thus, this box. Focus on it, put yourself into the box, and see through this hole.” He squirted a bit of McClean’s first dosage out of a syringe, getting rid of the air bubbles.
“This is the space probe. We call it P2,” Dr. Johansson told McClean at the Kennedy Space Center. The ship was sitting in a brilliant white bay, the harsh lights making the kapton insulation sparkle. Its main hull was a decagon. Arms stuck out the sides of it, a big white bowl of a dish adorned the top. It was not meant for this world, that much was apparent. “It will only have one sensing instrument: your trigger object.” McClean wondered why it needed a high-gain antenna, then. “Everything else is for telemetry. The plan is still the same. You will see Jupiter with your own eyes. This is only a test run. We just want to see if it works.”
McClean nodded, only half listening. The bizarre looking probe had started his mind tilting more than usual. In its presence he was unsure as to where he actually was.
***
STS-11 stood on its launch pad and McClean had a front row seat, only a few miles away from the Space Shuttle and its big International Orange fuel tank. Somebody had scrounged up a chair for him. He sat enjoying the Florida coastal breeze, listening to technical chatter piped through the radio Dr. Johansson was holding. A pair of gannets wheeled overhead, unperturbed by the titanic chemical energies about to be lit off in their habitat.
Everything at the space center was directed at the Shuttle and its crew. McClean imagined all that telemetry flowing through the underground wires, the computers moving their massive blocks of numbers at the speed of light.
STS-11 was the first of its kind: a secret Department of Defense launch. There was no cargo manifest listed. The crew had been sworn to secrecy and were instructed not to take pictures while circling the Earth. The Shuttle would lift off the planet then come back down a few days later and very few people would know what it had done in the meantime. McClean knew though; P2 and his trigger cube were strapped onto a miniature rocket that itself was strapped into the cargo bay.
“Have you seen one of these before?” Dr. Johansson asked.
McClean shook his head.
“Me neither. Do you think it will be loud?”
“You scared?”
The doctor didn’t answer. He raised his binoculars to survey the launch pad.
Ten… nine… eight… seven…
Six…
Five…
A flash erupted under the tail of the Shuttle. The main engines started, rapidly pumping fuel through their rocket bells. The nose of the ship twanged back.
Four…
A billowing white cloud erupted from the pad, internally illuminated by the developing inferno.
Three…
The sound arrived. McClean was expecting something like the screech of a jet taking off under full afterburner. This was a deep base roar though. It was comfortable, the feeling of the air and ground vibrating him.
Two…
The nose of the shuttle twanged forward.
One…
The solid rockets ignited and off the shuttle went. Slowly at first, but always gaining speed. It accelerated smoothly as it pierced the top of the exhaust cloud. Now the bright rocket flames showed clear, forming a cone of light that reminded McClean of the sun: pure and undifferentiated.
The Shuttle rolled onto its back, tilted, and started flying down range, bending itself to a circular orbital path. McClean’s head lolled back in time, lazily keeping the Shuttle in the center of his visual field. Up it climbed into the thinner and thinner atmosphere, looking more and more like a comet with each passing second. The low-pressure sky let the exhaust expand into a tenuous cloud. The solid rockets cut out, but the main engines kept pushing. It morphed one more time, becoming a vibrant red scar in the sky. Then it vanished.
A breeze ruffled McClean’s hair. His skin prickled. A secondary image arrived and startled him.
A photographer standing next to McClean with his eyes still glued to his viewfinder muttered, “Good launch. Very nice.”
“There wasn’t anything wrong with the solids?” McClean asked before he could understand why he had.
“No,” the photographer lowered his long telephoto lens and looked at him with concern. “Why?”
***
In space, the Shuttle crew opened their payload doors and plucked P2 out of the ship with a ghostly white manipulator arm. They placed the probe next to them, then fired off their reaction control system to move away from it. Once they did, a command was sent, the miniature rocket fired, and P2 was launched into a hyperbolic trajectory.
Had McClean been viewing out his cube, he would have perceived speed only for the first days as the Earth shrunk away. Soon it was little more than a very blue star among many. Besides a gradual dimming of the Sun, all sense of movement and perspective stopped. P2 was moving faster than most other human inventions, but against the distant inertial-reference-frame-producing stars it was frozen in the expanse. Only the most sensitive computers would be able to detect parallax as it sped through interplanetary space—simultaneously quickly and painfully slowly.
Years later one of the stars in the celestial sphere started to brighten, then expand. For the first time in half of a decade a passenger on board would have perceived motion. Four stars appeared around the central orange-white pinpoint. Then the pinpoint became a sphere, and the sphere became a world, and that world was Jupiter.
***
Dr. Johannson spoke the magic word. A timer started running. Dean McClean felt the doctor’s chemicals rewiring his brain in real-time. Reading numbers at a distance was a parlor trick, a warm-up before the big game. Now it was time for serious work.
Neurons disconnected and reconnected in new and interesting ways. Trains of thought rerouted. Parts of McClean’s brain that didn’t usually interface discovered what their neighboring structures were up to. Somewhere within the synaptic flurry, the correct configuration was achieved and his consciousness expanded beyond the Mountain West and the Great Plains, beyond the surface of the world, beyond the reaches of the upper atmosphere.
The medical bed became porous. McClean melted through the interstitial distances between the subatomic particles. The sound of logic gates opening and closing within the computer terminals became an overwhelming roar, then faded away to the deathly silence of the test site’s granite vault. For a brief second his body was encased within the rock, the stories of geologic time holding him within its grasp, and then even those stable structures disintegrated. Layer by layer the Earth melted away. McClean looked at his hands and saw nothing.
His internal communication networks started to expand, thought vectors undergoing scalar transformations. An out-of-focus disk of orange and white light appeared.
Dean McClean: the 43 light-minute consciousness. Strangely, improbably, relativity was still holding. The disk was in focus now. Dr. Johannson’s voice returned, unintelligible. McClean looked at his hands and saw a metal wall. He looked to his right and saw through the trigger object’s hole, out into the purity of space.
The vacuum shrouded his body, his physical form pushing up against endless nothing. The vacuum didn’t feel cold, it didn’t suffocate him. Between him and the planet there simply wasn’t.
But the planet was there. He started thinking and must have spoken. Forty three minutes away they were recording.
Jupiter spun below him, the fast rotational period of the planet matching the whirling maelstrom of its hydrogen storms. Massive cliffs of white, orange, and brown collided and sheared apart. In a telescope the world looked like a marble. Now its three-dimensionality was clear. He could see down through the ever-darkening depths to the cloudy core. The pressure of the gas above squeezed hydrogen through phase transitions he had never considered.
He pondered the cold hostility of the world. As he did, a new color appeared to the right. At first it was a mere glow. It expanded bit by bit, bowing out to fill everything he saw. The Eye. Red on red on deeper red. Cataclysmic, anticyclonic depths. The breadth of Earth, filled with sheer devastation. A world so close to becoming a star, taking its anger out on inanimate molecules.
As the clouds collided they sang, sending acoustic waves so powerful they imparted heat. As it sang, the Eye stopped. The world despun. McClean—view unfiltered by camera equipment—looked into the eye of the king of the gods of the planets. The timer was running down.
Every cloud front was the size of a country. Magnetic flux tubes intersected with orbiting moons. Avoided perturbations with bursts of reaction control jets. Dissolution controls all onto the moon’s overhead spiraling. False high-contrast images often casually mislead astronomy fans into the colors. Thinking of a planet; more pronounced than they actually are. Is Europa considered a habitable (potential) world? But they’ve not been paying enough attention: Callisto. Though ammonium hydrosulfide, state gaseous. Cosmic impacting rays hull the spacecraft… Is salt still a… Floating: space compared often reentering to womb the—is this a (bad) metaphor?
Forming monuments. Layers of atmosphere. Attitude adjustments. Flagship mission.
The age. The solar system.
In a flash, he returned home.
Forty-three minutes away Dean McClean took a deep, shuddering breath as the IVs were removed and Dr. Johannson turned the recorders off. The magnetic tape reels stopped spinning and the white coats looked pleased. One gave a thumbs up. McClean weakly mirrored it and returned his gaze to the flecked ceiling, unable to see the granite through it. Then he fell asleep.
— Zachery Brasier is a science fiction writer and visual artist residing in Salem, MA. His stories have been (or will be) published in Corner Bar Magazine, The Pink Hydra, The Pixelated Shroud, and the upcoming “This Exquisite Topology” anthology from Angry Gable Press.