Tessa (Tessa Extra-Sensory Agent Book 1) Read online

  “If you’ve made contact, and you think that you have succeeded in reading Lieutenant Ellman’s thoughts, lift your finger … good, I’ll end it now.”

  My contact with Liv was instantly severed and I sat up, rather dazzled.

  “Wow! That was something!”

  “Did you take a good look? What was Lieutenant Ellman thinking?”

  “What I saw was a couple of kittens playing on a bed.”

  “Great! That was what she suggested using for this experiment. How was the quality of the imagery?”

  “Very good, very life-like,” I said, gazing at Liv from the corner of my eyes. She smiled and blushed a little.

  “Do you understand the potential now?” said the director, speaking for the first time since the beginning of the experiment.

  “I don’t know yet how controllable this is. It’s easy to concentrate on someone you know, who’s sitting next to you in the same room, but what about someone you’ve never met, who is a thousand miles away. That’s a whole new ball game.”

  “That will take training, I’m sure. Don’t be too ambitious. Let’s start by having Lieutenant Ellman sit in a distant room. You won’t know exactly where she is, and we need you to connect to her and read her thoughts without seeing her.”

  “All right, I’m ready.”

  I climbed again into the slipper—I had become used to calling it that by now—and waited for Liv to call to say that she had reached her position. A few minutes later the phone rang and the director spoke briefly into it and then said, “Proceed!” The doctor again switched on the system and in under thirty seconds my brain was overloaded with background noise—a jumbled mass of thoughts coming from God knew where. I had to focus quickly or go mad from the noise. I imagined Liv’s face, and right away the background noise faded and then disappeared. All I could hear was Can you hear me, Tessa? We hadn’t discussed two-way communication, and I didn’t know whether it would work, but I tried hard to project my thoughts to her. I hear you, I’m with you. Do you hear me? I thought, but apparently she wasn’t hearing me. If you can hear me, she thought, I want you to know how much last night meant to me … and if you can read my thoughts, you’ll know that I’m sincere. I’m opening my mind to you, and you can search it any way you want.

  “Have you made contact, Miss Tessa?” came the doctor’s nagging question, just when I was starting to dig into Liv’s mind.

  “Yes, yes!” I answered impatiently.

  “Well, let me know when you’re through,” he said, sounding a little hurt.

  His question had distracted me and it took me a while to get back to Liv. When I did, I picked up her thought somewhere in the middle. … so now you know, and I hope you understand, she was saying. And, oh, tell them that I was thinking about water skiing.

  Right then I realized that something amazing was happening: I not only heard Liv’s thoughts, but I saw the room in which she was. I was actually seeing through her eyes and not only the images that her thoughts projected to her mind. The sensation was extraordinary, a kind of out-of-body experience, and I didn’t want it to end.

  “Tessa, are you okay?” The director’s voice hit my ears; he sounded worried.

  The contact with Liv had been broken, and I jumped again to a seating position.

  “Of course I’m okay. Why shouldn’t I be?

  “You’ve been out for some time, Miss Tessa,” said the doctor, “and you didn’t respond to my questions.”

  “I’m sorry. I got a bit disoriented.” The intensity of the experience, which was completely new to me, was so great that I had become totally immersed in it.

  “That’s understandable.”

  “She was thinking about water skiing. Was that it?” I asked.

  “Yes, that was the thought that she had to pass on to you,” the director confirmed. “But are you feeling well? You look flustered.”

  “It’s all new to me, and it is confusing. I need to rest.”

  I was in fact tired and could have gone to sleep there and then, on the slipper.

  “It’s a natural reaction to your first exposure; it will pass. We have seen that happening with the rats as well. After a day or two, they got used to it.”

  “Doctor,” I said, “if you tell me again about your rats, I am not responsible for the consequences. Understood?”

  “Yes, sorry. I didn’t mean to, but we have data …”

  “Just don’t, please,” I said, raising a hand to check him.

  It was lucky that right then Liv returned, or I might have socked him.

  “Lieutenant Ellman,” said the director, “please escort Miss Tessa to her quarters and see if she needs anything. You are in charge of her until tomorrow morning. I want you to make sure that she feels well, and if she complains of any side effects, you are to call in the medical staff immediately. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll stay with her tonight, to make sure that she feels okay.”

  I was standing next to her, and she was holding my arm, as if to make sure that I would keep my balance. I didn’t mind.

  “That was satisfactory, Tessa,” the director said, adding an uncharacteristic hint of a smile. “Now go and rest. Tomorrow we have hard work to do.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “That was intense,” I commented.

  Liv raised her head and gave me an inquisitive gaze. We had had a decent dinner in the mess hall and had been sitting in silence for a while, drinking coffee in my room. I felt the need to explain.

  “I didn’t tell them, but I not only read your thoughts … or should I say, that I heard them? Liv, I saw through your eyes. I saw the room in which you were. It was uncanny!”

  “Wow! Why didn’t you tell the director that? It’s an amazing result!” Liv sounded really excited.

  “I was too tired, and I knew that if I told them they would keep me there for who knows how long. I’ll tell them tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s incredible. You really saw through my eyes?”

  “Completely. I have never had such a vivid experience before.”

  “I don’t really know what you did in the past. They only said that you were in the remote viewing program.”

  “Well, the first time I had an extra-sensorial experience, I was thirteen. We were visiting friends, and I told my father that, gazing out the window, I had just seen someone break into our car. And I had really seen it. The problem was that we had parked two blocks away, and the car was nowhere close enough to see.”

  “So they didn’t believe you.”

  “No, and when we went back to the car and found that someone had smashed the driver’s window and had stolen the phone that my father had left there, they were in shock.”

  “I bet they were.”

  “I started having visions often after that. Some of them made sense and others didn’t. I had them at home, at school, and everywhere else. I had to share those experiences with my friends—I simply couldn’t keep them to myself—so the story about the girl who saw things she shouldn’t have been able to see got around. On my fourteenth birthday a ‘professor’ knocked on our door, with a government-sponsored scholarship offer that my parents simply couldn’t refuse. After almost a full year of training, I got into the Remote Viewing Program, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two years.”

  “Was that professor …?”

  “Yes, the director. He took me to the remote viewers training center and turned me into an operative. He robbed me of my life, essentially.”

  “That’s why I sensed hostility when you spoke with him.”

  “Yes. To be fair, it’s not his fault that I am a freak, but he could have left me alone, to grow up like every other normal teenager. I was happy when he left the remote viewer unit. I thought that I had seen the last of him, but here I am with him again.”

  I guess that I sounded a bit emotional, because Liv put down her coffee mug and came to sit close, putting her hand on my arm.

  “Poor baby,�
�� she said.

  “Hey, don’t mother me! You’re almost my age.”

  “I’m not, I’m twenty-five.”

  “And I’m tougher than you,” I said, but for some reason my voice trembled. I felt that my shield—the façade that always keeps me one step ahead of everybody else—was dissolving, leaving me vulnerable. I turned my head away to hide my emotion, but Liv took my chin and turned it back to her.

  “It’s all right,” she said, and I suddenly needed her to make me feel protected. I let her hug me, and I buried my face into her shoulder. When I moved away, I had to wipe tears from my eyes.

  “If you ever tell anybody that you saw me like this, I’ll kill you!” I said.

  Liv smiled and wiped a tear from my cheek with her hand.

  “I’ll sit here with you for a while, if you want me to, but then it’s lights off. You’ve had a tough day, and we both need some rest.”

  I nodded—that’s all I could manage—and then I closed my eyes and let her hold me again.

  When I opened my eyes in the morning, Liv was not there. I hated the way she disappeared on me, but I brightened up when I heard someone banging on my door, assuming that she was back. Instead, it was again the young attendant who had met me on arrival.

  “Yes?” I asked, not too friendly.

  “You are expected at the laboratory in twenty minutes. Please get ready.” He seemed unfazed by my cold attitude and that for some reason annoyed me.

  “I’ll be ready in ten,” I said, closing the door in his face.

  I washed my face, brushed my teeth, made coffee on my room coffeemaker, and took it with me in a Styrofoam cup. When I opened the door, the young attendant was still standing there, his face expressionless. I started walking in the direction of the laboratory, ignoring him, and he kept pace with me until we reached the laboratory, and then he left. Inside the lab only Doctor Alexander was waiting.

  “Where is Lieutenant Ellman?” I asked.

  “She’s quite far away. I’ll show you.” He clicked a remote control, and a wall turned into a screen that displayed a map. “This map shows a hilly area 200 miles away from here, and this is a 3D image of the exact location where Lieutenant Ellman is right now.”

  “What is she doing there? How did she get there?”

  “We flew her there, early this morning, by chopper. This will take your training to the next level. We need to see that the distance, and disturbances around your target, do not diminish your ability to make contact. Now please climb onto the bed … the slipper, as you call it.”

  Doctor Alexander gave a little smile when saying “slipper,” and I thought that maybe I was starting to dislike him a little less. But now was the time to come clean about my experience.

  “There is something that I didn’t tell you, yesterday.”

  Doctor Alexander stopped fumbling with his controls and gazed at me, waiting for me to go on.

  “When I made contact with Liv, I saw the room she was in through her eyes—not only the image of the room that she had in her mind but the actual images that she saw in real time.”

  “Amazing! Amazing!” Doctor Alexander jumped up from his seat with excitement. “It makes sense. The images are transmitted from the optic nerve to the brain, which processes it. This means that your level of connection with the subject’s mind is profound. I didn’t expect this. I must report it as soon as we are through with this morning’s training.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  I lay down and closed my eyes.

  “Ready?” asked Doctor Alexander, who seemed to have calmed down.

  “Ready.”

  “Here you go,” he said, and the usual jumble of thoughts and mixed background noises invaded my head. I thought hard about the map and then about Liv’s face, and the noise subsided and then disappeared.

  A view of a rocky hill jumped before my eyes almost in a flash, and I realized that I was seeing through Liv’s eyes. They should’ve started by now was the thought that reached me. I need to wait for the signal. Liv was gazing at the communicator that she held in her hand, while she walked toward the edge of the hill on which they had left her. On the right side, the hill ended in a cliff, and it took me a second to realize that, while looking at the communicator, she wasn’t paying attention to her steps and was in danger of stumbling upon a loose stone and falling off the cliff. There wasn’t time to do or say anything. Although I knew that it wouldn’t work, I concentrated all my thought energy into transmitting a warning to her. I thought that if she sensed something coming from me—anything—that might save her from falling.

  It didn’t work, but something else happened. I found myself in Liv’s body. In fact, I was Liv, but with my own thoughts. I could smell the cold air and feel the wind on my face. For a moment, I was blinded by the sun as I gazed up, and I realized that Liv’s body was responding to my commands. Her being had been pushed into the background. In panic, I did the only thing that came to my mind—I threw myself to the left and to the ground, away from the cliff. My left knee—or rather, Liv’s left knee—hit a pointed stone on the ground, and I felt a sharp pain. I let out a cry and, suddenly, I found myself back in the room, away from the hill.

  “What happened?” Doctor Alexander asked with alarm.

  “Check Liv … Lieutenant Ellman. How is she?”

  To his credit, the doctor didn’t ask questions. He moved aside, grabbed a communicator from the nearest desk and spoke into it, returning to my side after a few moments.

  “She’s okay. She took a fall and hurt her knee, but other than that she’s all right. But you knew that already, didn’t you? You read her mind as she was falling, and that’s why you cried out, right?”

  “I … I didn’t read her. I was her,” I said, and as I said it the enormity of the thing dawned on me. My face must have showed it, because Doctor Alexander gazed at me as if I was crazy.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, incredulously.

  I pulled the left trouser leg up, revealing a red and swollen knee.

  “This is what I mean,” I said.

  CHAPTER 5

  I remained lying on the slipper while, as you can imagine, frenzy ensued. The director was summoned, as was a military surgeon who looked too young to me to be out of medical school. He examined my knee and pronounced it swollen, which I knew already, and ruled that the swelling would go away with cold compresses in a few hours. The pain might still be felt for a day or two, but no permanent damage had been done. The director and Doctor Alexander conversed at a safe distance until the surgeon left. Then they grabbed chairs and came to sit next to the one in which I had been examined.

  “Tell us exactly what happened,” ordered the director.

  I went through the explanation again, but that didn’t satisfy them.

  “But that’s not possible!” said Doctor Alexander.

  “Then let’s say that it never happened and forget about it,” I said. I was starting to get badly pissed off by then.

  “The story checks out,” said the director, speaking severely and eyeing Doctor Alexander with what I thought was admonition. “The bruises on Tessa’s knee are a fact, so we need to understand what happened. What did you do to make that happen, Tessa?”

  “Do? I didn’t do anything. I tried to send a warning sign to Liv, because I saw that she was about to stumble on a stone, and she was dangerously close to the cliff. Suddenly, I found myself in her body, so I threw myself to the ground. When I cried out because I was hurt, the doctor here stopped the stupid machine, and I was back. That’s all there is to tell.”

  Doctor Alexander’s face turned white. He started to breathe heavily, and then he mumbled something.

  “Speak up, Doctor!” the director barked.

  “I never thought that this could happen. My calculations show that it would take a monstrous amount of mental power to take possession of a body by telepathy. No normal individual should be able to do it.”

  “Tessa is not normal. Never b
een,” the director said.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said, not a little annoyed, “and some of it is thanks to you.”

  “Don’t get fresh, Tessa. You still owe me an explanation why you didn’t report in full, yesterday. You know that—”

  “Yes, reporting is the first duty of a viewer, I know that by heart. When is Liv coming back?”

  “Why?”

  “I think that we should compare notes, don’t you? I’d like to know what happened to her while I was in control.”

  “She should be here soon. We’ll debrief her, and then we’ll decide what to do next,” said the director.

  “What we do know,” said Doctor Alexander, “is that Miss Tessa can connect with a subject at a significant distance. In that sense, the experiment today was a success.”

  “Beyond expectation,” said the director.

  He looked satisfied with things, and I didn’t like it. In my experience, when the director is happy, that means trouble for the rest of us.

  I didn’t get to see Liv until late afternoon, when she came limping into my room. I hadn’t been able to sleep, although I was exhausted, because I kept thinking about the day’s events and what they meant. Seeing her safe and well made my heart race, and I jumped up and ran to hug her.

  “Woof!” she said. “Slowly, girl. You took the wind out of me.”

  “I was so worried … what happened out there? What do you remember?”

  “I was walking on that hill, looking at my communicator, and all of a sudden my body started doing things on its own. I tried to control it, but it was like my mind had been disconnected from the controls. I saw everything and felt everything that was happening to me, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was scary, I can tell you that.”

  “I’m so sorry. I was trying to save you from falling …”