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Excerpt From
Resonance: A Novel
by Steve Anderson
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This excerpt, including all characters, situations, technology, etc., etc., etc., are all strictly
copyrighted, (c) 2000-2005, Steve Anderson, SGAcreative.com, Writer@SGAcreative.com. You may not reproduce
this excerpt, in part or in full, without our express permission.
Resonance is a novel in progress.
If you like this bit, please let me know--I could use a little encouragement to hammer out the rest.
CONTEXT: Liz, a computer programmer on her friend Will's research project, has been having nightmares
lately about a motorcycle accident almost twenty years before--an accident which she escaped unscathed,
but which took the life of Will's mentor, Ian. At Will's urging, Liz has allowed their friend Sarah,
a licensed psychotherapist, to put her under hypnosis in hopes that she'll remember more details about
that horrible day.
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When Liz opened her eyes again, she found herself looking up into Sarah’s worried face.
"How do you feel?" Sarah asked.
"I’m all right," Liz answered. It was true. Dazed, perhaps,
and with a touch of a headache. But that was only natural after a nightmare like that. Did people have
nightmares under hypnosis? She hadn’t ever read about such a thing, but it certainly hadn’t been a memory,
and what else could it be? It was over, whatever it was, and she was perfectly all right. Or at least,
she was willing to try to convince herself she was.
Liz started to sit up, and Sarah placed a
hand on her shoulder. "Not so fast," she warned. "You had a rough bit in the middle of the session;
you might want to rest a few minutes."
A cold chill ran down Liz’s spine, but she tried to retain
her composure. "A rough bit?" she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
"I tried to bring you out,
and you panicked. I don’t know why, but it triggered a full-blown claustrophic episode. I had to put
you back under again to calm you down." Sarah reached over to her desk and picked up a bright, shiny
steel sphere a few inches in diameter, and instinctively began rolling it back and forth across her palm
and the back of her hand. "Fortunately," she added, "no matter how panicked they may be, almost everyone
finds this absolutely fascinating."
Liz nodded distractedly, fascinated now less by the ball than
by the memories she suddenly realized she had of the accident. "Can you call Will in here?" she asked.
"He’d better be able to explain what I remember, ‘cuz I sure can’t."
Sarah picked up her phone
and spoke a few words to her assistant, and a few moments later, Will was rushing in, positively exuding
curiosity. Liz looked up at him, and something in her gaze made him slow down, his curiosity giving
way to a silent apology for what he had forced his friend to relive. Sarah saw the change in his mood,
and rose to her feet. "I’ll give the two of you a little privacy."
"Can you stay?" Will asked.
They both looked at him in surprise and a little confusion, and he squirmed, still apologetic but determined,
as well. "We need to be sure," he said plaintively. Looking away from both of them, he noticed the
steel sphere Sarah had placed on her desk, and a hint of nostalgia showed on his face, as well. "And,
if I’m right," he added with a quiet sigh, "I think we may need your help."
So they took their
seats around Sarah’s desk again, and Will asked the all-important question: "What do you remember?"
Liz hemmed, and then cut right to the chase. "There wasn’t any pothole, and I had both hands on the
handlebars. And, even though it was my first day on a motorcycle, reliving the experience now, I know
what it would have felt like if I’d just lost control, and it didn’t feel like that, either. The bike
just suddenly lurched, and I fell."
As Liz spoke, the color drained from Will’s face, and when
she was done, he closed his eyes. "I was right," he whispered, his voice full of dread. A moment passed
before he realized they were waiting for an explanation, and then he nodded silently, gathering himself
for a long story. "You both know the general principles behind the Resonance Project. Electro-magnetic
fields—"
Liz scowled impatiently. "Yeah, yeah, echoes from all over the planet, Bear Mountain’s
a focal point, Washington under the Capitol dome. We know."
"It was Jefferson," Will said, then
blanched at a sudden flash from her eyes and moved on. "What if I told you we can listen to more than
just what’s going on around the world today? What if I said we could look back in time?"
Liz
rolled her eyes. Will’s sense of humor had always run near the edge of good taste, but dragging her
into the city, putting her through hypnotic regression, and all for a practical joke? And if it wasn’t
a joke, she didn’t even want to think about the alternatives. But before she could decide whether to
be angry with Will or concerned for his sanity, Sarah was nodding and positively beaming. "Echoes,"
she was saying. "Voices of the dead, lingering details of times long past… everything people have always
sensed at places like your mountain, all over the world."
"Exactly," Will said. "I’ve never said
so in public, because we need the funding, even if I don’t like the applications the government has in
mind. But Resonance is about mechanical telepathy. That’s the secret, and also the problem: no matter
how good your image-enhancement software gets, Liz, I just don’t understand what I can do well enough.
Not like Ian does."
Liz and Sarah shared a look, and then slowly turned back to Will. "Does?"
Sarah asked.
Liz expected a quick apology, probably something about being too distracted to be
bothered with tenses. Instead, Will nodded seriously. "Does," he said. "Or at least, did until a few
hours ago. Ian didn’t die. He developed the project with me, and it was incredible. Our resonator
could see hundreds of years back, and I’d developed my talents, as well. Telepathy ten times more powerful
than anything you’ve ever seen from me. Telekinesis, even. And if I focused hard enough, I could reach
back along the lines the project uses and actually change the history we could see."
Liz had seen
Will’s telepathy in action. He knew who was calling before the phone rang, and sometimes he knew what
she was thinking; it was real enough to her, the way her own intuition was. But this? And telekinesis,
to boot? Will needed a few weeks’ vacation, she decided, or maybe just a good swift kick.
Even
Sarah, the perpetual optimist, was clearly dubious. "You’re asking us to believe—"
"The truth,"
he insisted, ignoring the psychologist for the moment and turning in his seat to give Liz his full attention.
"Ian and I developed the project, and tested it, and tried to stop your accident. We tried to warn
you—" He laughed; Liz didn’t see what was so funny about it until he explained, and then she smiled
too. "You couldn’t hear us over your Walkman. So, I gave you a nudge. I figured falling off your bike
was a lot less painful than the alternative."
Liz just stared. "You mean to tell me—" she started,
and couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.
Will finished it for her, but turned it into
a statement: "I mean to tell you that it wasn’t an accident. You didn’t just fall off your bike. I
pushed you."
Liz had heard strange things come out of Will’s mouth before. Everybody had. It
was just his way: come up with a halfbaked morsel of pure insanity, talk somebody into believing in it,
and then make it a reality. She did her best to accommodate him, to give him more patience than anyone
else could ever hope to earn from her. But to interrupt her work, string her along, drag her all the
way in to the city, and put her through the agony of remembering every detail of the accident as clearly
as when it had first happened, and then make a pronouncement like this! She dug her nails into the arm
of her chair and looked at him with impatience burning in her eyes. "You’re full of it," she said.
"You can’t honestly expect me to believe something this outrageous without some sort of—"
She
broke off, her mouth still slightly open and her hand still suspended in midair, and followed Will’s
sudden intense stare to find herself looking at the steel sphere still resting on Sarah’s desk. It was
wobbling. A trick of the light, she tried to tell herself, but a moment later, the ball was rising from
the desk, uncertainly at first, then gliding smoothly through the air to drop gently into her raised
hand. She weighed it on her palm, then slowly raised her eyes to Will’s and finished her sentence in
astonishment: "Evidence."
Throughout Will’s little demonstration, Sarah had been growing paler
by the second, and now she whispered, "It’s all true, isn’t it? And now Ian’s dead, because he stepped
out to get Liz’s bike. And if Ian isn’t here, your project can’t change history, so the accident happens
the way it did the first time. So Ian lives and you change history, so he dies and you can’t."
Liz
put the steel sphere back on the desk, feeling a headache starting to form behind her temples, and then
suddenly smiled. "But if you remember that much," she started to say, only to trail off into silence,
not daring to finish her thought.
"Yes," Will said with a brilliant, trumphant smile. "Yes, I
do remember enough to change history again and save Ian. But my memories are starting to fade, and my
talents are going with them. We’re going to have to hurry."
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