Tuesday, October 8, 2013:
Rose had obviously seen her, so Carol gave a wave with her hand. What now? She could go back inside, but that was so impolite it wasn’t even worth considering. Or she could walk somewhere else to read her book, or join the alien on the bench….
Rose waved back.
“Hey. Are you okay?” Carol asked. She walked towards the bench across the Grove.
Rose nodded, closing a notebook she was holding. She patted the spot next to her.
Carol timidly sat herself down, placing her book beside her. She pointed to the notebook. “Can you—” Rose shook her head. How would they communicate? “Want me to get my laptop?”
Rose pulled a large cell phone out from somewhere in her clothes and angled the screen so they could both see it.
Carol shifted to get a better view, trying to fight the impulse to keep her distance from the giant predatory lizard. They were close, but not touching, Rose’s left wing stretched behind where Carol sat on the bench. Why did she use a whiteboard earlier if she has a phone? And why is she using the notepad instead of text to speech?
Carol tried to remember the name of a dictation app she could recommend, but Rose typed faster with her knobby reptile thumbs than anyone she had met. [I’ve been out here sketching this tree. Couldn’t sleep?] The sky was beginning to turn purple, but as far as Carol could see, the large oak that dominated the Grove was but a black smudge.
Carol didn’t want to bring up her nightmare, but she was talking to a dragon.
“Yeah, I had a bad dream,” she said. Might as well go all the way, if she's one step ahead. “There were insect things attaching to my brain. That’s not real, is it?”
[Several have had similar dreams, but none of my family. I think it’s just nerves.]
“Good,” said Carol. She paused, desperate to talk about something else. “So what are you doing out here?”
[I feel cooped up when I stay indoors too long. When everyone is asleep, I enjoy time to myself outside.]
“I can't imagine a species with wings would like it indoors,” Carol tried to empathize with Rose. Her wings were always slightly splayed when outside, as though they automatically stretched to fill any available space.
[Maybe. Humans were designed to run, but do they?] Rose shifted her wings around before continuing. [It's true. The midnight breeze calls to me. I've never been able to spend much time in the great outdoors.]
“Why are you at Lincoln College then? This place is tiny. Magdalen is huge. They have all these deer…” that would probably be terrified of you.
[Daylight hurts my eyes anyway. Really makes you question the priorities of my makers.]
Carol’s heart twisted. Did Rose hate the dragons for dropping her into place she didn’t belong? “Couldn’t you wear sunglasses? Or do they not work for, um—” That wasn’t right. Rose saw infrared with the pits between the scales on her face, not with her eyes.
[The people who designed my shoes also gave me these silly goggles I have in my room. If you think I look alien now, you need to see what those look like.]
Carol stared at Rose’s face and tried envisioning a solution to her problem. Was it possible to make polarized contact lenses? She couldn’t imagine a hat working either, unless Rose was comfortable with flattening all her ear-flaps that she presumably needed for hearing.
She tried changing the subject back to colleges. “Worcester might have the best garden, if you're into that. I’m sure you could go at night.”
[I was just wondering if Emily would let me help tend to the plants. She's the main reason William and I are here. I'm a pretty good judge of character, and I could tell she isn't just trying to take advantage of me like most people we talk to.]
Yeah, I’m not trying to take advantage of you either. Carol remembered that her internal asides weren't necessarily private anymore. Shit. Sorry.
Carol pressed on. “What does she want then?” What are you getting at?
[To help William and me pursue our goals, and grow as individuals.] Rose answered. [You don't need to feel bad, by the way. You're a kind soul. I can tell.]
You know flattery is suspect for manipulation. Aagh! I'm sorry. I'm taking your words at face value. Why did you write it if you knew it was such a red flag?
Carol sighed. “Ugh!” When is this loop going to stop happening?
[You’ll learn to trust me when you become a telepath.]
“God damn,” she said aloud.
[I know, right?]
“Can you tell how much longer it'll take?”
[I'm not sure. The new connections are all much weaker than I thought. Seeding this many people at once wasn't optimal.]
“Is it taking twenty times longer than normal?”
[No, only slightly slower. You will all be telepaths soon. Come to think of it, your connection to me is stronger than anyone else's. I can't speak for your connection with Will right now.]
Carol’s first thought was of getting singled out in class again. “Cool… Does that mean I'll do well later on?”
[I'm not sure. Have you been doing anything different from your classmates that might have helped?]
“I meditated for about ten minutes yesterday, but I'm sure some of them did too.”
[I would have hoped for better. They] Rose erased what she had typed. [I'm sorry, I've actually been half asleep. I should have mentioned earlier.]
“Seriously? I couldn't tell.” Dragons shared an ability with many species of birds: unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. It was one of many things that Carol had read about, but wasn’t high enough on the to-do list to ask about. Unlike birds, Rose appeared outwardly unchanged as she slept, keeping both eyes open and retaining most of her mental abilities. Perhaps she was more irritable than usual? More impulsive, surely.
[If it had been my other half you would have noticed right away. In this state, my inhibitions tend to be lower. I'm feeling rather talkative. You should take advantage of that. I won’t mind.]
For a moment, Carol felt overwhelmed at the possibility of asking about anything. There were so many questions she wanted answered, like whatever was up with the shark whales (and what was the real story of Rose’s alleged abduction), or how telepathy actually felt, or how Rose’s unique mind worked. It was difficult to come up with introspective questions that weren’t rude to ask.
Does your alien psychology prevent you from holding human values, even if you were raised on Earth? she wondered, praying Rose didn’t know.
She glanced at the half-sleeping alien, who did seem more sedated than usual, now that Carol knew what she was looking at. Rose’s breathing was slow, and she kept staring at the oak tree. Your talkative half was the one drawing a picture? In humans, those functions were primarily located in opposing hemispheres. What was the other half of dragons’ brains in charge of? Or was there symmetric functionality on both sides? But if that were the case, why have two hemispheres in the first place?
“Do you feel like you're two different people?”
[Not at all. Just feel a bit different when I'm asleep. It's been a few hours anyway, so I'm in the process of waking up. Awakening isn’t sudden like it is for you.]
Once again, Carol felt like maybe she was in the presence of something much more alien than than it let on. Rose was able to hold a seemingly normal conversation using only half a mind. Perhaps speaking to her like this was preferable, but Rose had already demonstrated empathetic abilities this morning.
[I'm scaring you again?]
“Maybe a little. Don't you think humans are… inferior?”
[A dangerous thing to ask a mighty dragon, puny human.]
Carol tried again. “It must be lonely stranded on a planet of idiots.”
[Don't put words in my mouth. I love humans more than most humans. They'll never best me at poker, but I couldn't do half the things they do.]
“Like what? As far as I've seen, you're good at everything.”
[You'll understand more once you get to know me, but I'm awful at so many things. My mind is just different, so it seems better. If I weren't good at conversation, I wouldn't be able to hide it. My long term memory is horrible, and despite legends about dragons, I'm terrible at logical puzzles and math. I'd also go insane if I had to be alone as long as many humans do.]
There were a few threads of that conversation that Carol could have enumerated (“But you’re only seven years old!”, “Plenty of humans have different minds and they don’t seem smarter.”, “Really? You were alone just now.”) but she let it slide. It was probably best not to make Rose feel more alien than she was. She tried to think of something else to talk about, but couldn’t come up with a good segue into a conversation about whales.
“Were you alone when I came out here?” Carol asked. Perhaps Rose was speaking to more than one person at the moment. With telepathy, you could never tell.
[Yes. It's late in America right now. This is the worst time of night. I’m glad you had that nightmare, no offense.]
“I’m glad you’re out here. Much more interesting than this dumb book.”
[Lol. I try.]
Carol was caught off guard by Rose's use of slang, but then the same thing had happened when she heard one of her young English professors say the same acronym aloud during her first semester at Oxford.
Rose sat and stared at the big tree as though meditating. Carol thought of all the questions her group had asked that remained unanswered in the first lesson. Why are you lying to everyone? Was Amber even real? She didn’t want to treat Rose like a walking encyclopedia, but there didn’t seem to be much small talk to make with a sleeping alien.
“What are the limits of telepathy? Could there be a hivemind?”
[Not sure about hiveminds. It's seemingly boundless. William and I can merge completely, and we tend to do so by accident whenever he gets drunk.]
“I don't think I want to do that.”
[It's always temporary. I'd be gentle.]
Rose's response threw Carol off. . She hadn't been thinking about Rose, she'd been thinking about Nic, or someone else from the class. And the connotation was a bit odd, if not outright foreboding. Would a human say something like that to a near-stranger?
“Yeah,” she said, trying to mask her thoughts with a non-committal response. “I don't know.”
Rose suddenly turned to regard Carol’s eyes, typing at the same time. [Isn't it lovely that you can't tell whether or not I'm intentionally being manipulative? You abhor it, don't you?]
“It's not your fault. Er, I assume it isn't. How do you make mistakes if you can basically see the future?”
[I always explain it by saying that for me conversations are a bit like chess. Do you play?]
Carol shrugged. “I know how to play, but I'm not any good.”
[If you're good at chess, you can easily look ahead into the future and see how different moves will pan out.]
“Isn't a lot of chess just memorizing positions?”
[Yes, but the true professionals are good at winning once they go out of the book, when they play new moves. That's what I'm talking about.]
“How does this conversation go? If you already know the outcome, what’s the point continuing?”
[I don’t know for certain, I can only guess. There are many potential futures. And besides, it's not about the destination. It's about the little things that I don't foresee. You’ve seen me make mistakes before. Do I look like a god to you?]
“You look like an alien.”
Rose shrugged. [I try.]
“So how do you pick what to say?”
[Well, for this conversation my strategy would have been to steer it towards more personal questions, like your other classes, and then I could relate with my own anecdotes, and eventually you work up the courage to ask about the damn shark whales, and I would explain enough to satisfy you. You'd probably rather we do that in the opposite order, now that I’ve mentioned it.]
Carol was surprised at how direct Rose’s answer was. “That sounds about right. But you didn’t expect for me to ask that question?”
[It was always a possibility, until it wasn't. You’d expect a question like that to make the future more difficult to predict, but it does the opposite. It gives me freedom, and then my response makes you more complicit in the future. There was a wide set of routes we could have taken, but now it's starting to feel more narrow.]
“I could decide not to be complicit.”
[But you won’t, because if you make it into a game you’ll lose. And yes, I can tell you’re not a competitive person. But know this: I abhor manipulation too. I’m trying to give you real outs whenever I get the chance. And part of you is pleading to fast forward to the part where I answer your real question, so I apologize for not doing that earlier.]
What does ‘losing’ a conversation mean? “What's the point in all this if we can fast forward?”
Rose took a deep breath and exhaled, an unsettlingly perfect imitation of a human sigh. Am I being too annoying? Carol wondered how many of Rose's mannerisms had human origins. If only there were other dragons to compare with, Rose would have been an excellent case study in the whole nature versus nurture question.
[Maybe I'm stalling. There was a chance we could have avoided this, but it would be manipulative of me to force that. I am somewhat apprehensive about talking to someone who wants to be a psychologist.]
“I'm sorry. We can avoid personal issues. I won't—”
[No. Shark whales are a personal issue.]
“Did you meet one? We don't have to talk about it if you don't want.”
Rose shook her head.
[You're not the type to let me slowly doll out hints. You won't be satisfied unless you have the full exposition dump. It’ll probably make you more comfortable around me anyway.]
Carol wasn't sure how to respond to that. “If you don't want to talk about it, I don't want to make you. Especially if you're still half asleep. What was it you could have said to make me stop asking?”
Rose glanced at Carol, seemingly surprised. [I could have mentioned that Nic would probably want to hear this from the horse's mouth, and I'm considering lecturing on this instead of poker tomorrow. But don't pay attention to that. Or do, if you would like. Since you're thinking we should wait now, remember I'll be busy all day and Nic would rather find out as soon as possible.]
Carol probably didn’t consider it as much as Rose hoped. “Okay, tell me.”
At lunch that day, Carol became a telepath.
Once, as a child, she had been on a picnic with her parents when her dad asked if she could hear the bees.
“What bees?” she had asked.
“Listen,” her dad had told her.
She had been about to tell her dad that he was crazy when she finally heard them, their buzzing making a low tone. It wasn't too quiet, either. How had she not noticed it earlier?
Once you knew the tone, you couldn't ignore it. Now that your mind knew where to look, you would be more surprised by the tone's absence than its presence.
She had been in the middle of a conversation with Sam and Gina when she noticed an unfamiliar feeling.
It was a static, radio noise, on the edge of her perception, not attached to any particular sense. When she focused on it, it made a sound, filled her vision, and made her skin buzz. The strength of the feeling reminded her of the bees. How did I not notice this earlier? she wondered.
“Um,” she said, interrupting Sam. “I think it's happening.”
According to the first Telepathy lesson, she should have been able to shut it out by willing something closed. That part had been unclear. She experimented for a moment, and found she could strengthen the feeling to an extent by focusing on it, but it wouldn't close.
Pulse. Pulse, pulse.
The connection strengthened and weakened a few times, seemingly on its own. Communication? Other than that, the feeling was purely white noise, devoid of information. As far as she could tell, there was only one connection. Maybe it was both of them, or maybe she just couldn't feel Will's yet.
Gina and Sam were asking questions like “What, telepathy?” that Carol only half paid attention to.
“Yeah. I think it's Rose,” she said.
Why did I assume that? Carol wondered. Is it because I already knew our connection was strong, or because I can magically recognize her?
“How do you make it stop, again?” she asked, trying to sort out her jumbled thoughts. How did you close something that just felt like buzzing?
“They said it's intuitive,” said Sam. “Can you not?”
“I don't know.” She took a few deep breaths and experimented some more. It was possible to ignore the feeling to some degree, but it wouldn't go away.
“Fuck, I can’t make it stop. Maybe. I don’t know.”
The others watched her, eating on pause. Another thing Rose had suggested her students do was to imitate the new feelings in their heads, only louder. Carol closed her eyes and tried imitating the noise with her own mind, copying the intensity of the pulses before.
Pulse, the static replied.
Just one. And then, miraculously, Carol felt relief as that part of her brain was treated to silence, blackness, icy calm purity.
For a moment. And then the buzzing was back.
Pulse. Pulse.
“She should have told us to study Morse code instead of poker,” Carol remarked, her heart racing.
“You can communicate?” asked Sam.
“What’s it like?” asked Gina.
Carol struggled to divide her attention between the table and the buzzing. “I think so. I'm still trying to figure out how to throttle it. It’s like, uh, white noise. Not much else.”
“Want me to look it up?” Sam offered.
“What?” Carol asked, distracted. “Oh. Okay, but I'm not sure they know it.”
Instead of trying to ignore the noise, Carol imitated the silence that had replaced the static before, only louder. Finally, the noise diminished. A small amount of testing determined that the presence of black silence was within her control.
“I got it!” she exclaimed. “It doesn’t feel like closing anything, more like replacing it.”
The static feeling was easily ignored, too. Carol got the sense that the constant noise wasn't telepathic communication like Carol had imagined, but rather the feeling of the connection itself.
“I can't feel anything. Do you think it's because you're friends with Rose?” said Gina.
Carol almost corrected her, but stopped herself. “I don't know.”
Sam held up his phone, which had a Morse code infographic on the screen. “‘Hi’ is all dots, so maybe try ‘hey’?”
“Sure,” said Carol. “Can you read it to me?”
“Dot dot dot dot. Dot. Dash dot dash dash,” he read.
Carol focused on creating the noises in her head as he spoke. She wished he would slow down. Her own pulses tended to waver randomly and echo unless she was able to devote her full attention to each one. Who knew what they sounded like on the other end? Meditation was certainly a wise choice for the first class.
“Anything?” asked Sam, as Carol finished the last dash.
She waited a moment, observing the static crackling in her head. She could have sworn that it wasn't just white noise, that she could somehow sense the gears turning on the other end, but it was probably a placebo. Listening to the random sparks and such that must have somehow represented Rose or William’s mind was like listening for a weak signal on the radio.
DitDitDit, said the connection suddenly, much faster than Carol’s signal. DitDitBuzzzz. DitBuzzzBuzzzDit.
It had happened so fast, she almost forgot the order while she relayed it to Sam.
“S-U-P,” he translated. “Wow!”
‘Hey. Sup.’ Carol was certain Rose was on the other end of the line. Then—
“Oh my God,” she couldn't help saying. “I just talked with freaking telepathy.” It was different than she had hoped, but the skill would take time to develop.
“Shouldn't you try seeding us now?” asked Sam.
“Oh, I guess. I don’t know how.” Not that I really want any of you to read my mind. “Should we go somewhere — wait.” She paused as a new message began in her mind.
‘W-H-E-R-E’, it said. Carol waited for more, but the transmission ended with the usual quiet buzzing.
‘H-A-L-L’, she replied. Transmitting was annoyingly slow. She hoped Rose knew that ‘Hall’ meant the dining hall.
“How do I make the jump from Morse to English?” she asked. Would the static magically arrange itself into words, feelings, and images, given time?
“I don't know,” said Sam.
“She didn't explain anything to us,” said Carol. “Shit professor.”
Gina gasped.
“I'm joking! And Rose will know it's a joke, when she inevitably finds out.”
‘C-O-M-I-N-G’, said Rose.
At least Morse code with pulses of static didn't infringe upon her privacy, assuming Rose couldn't already fully interpret the static. Just in case, Carol fully obscured the connection with blackness.
“Can we meet her outside?” Carol didn't want to be the center of attention in the Hall again.
Rose emerged into the quad accompanied by Will.
“Carol!” she said in her peculiar English accent. “And Gina and Sam! How are you all doing?
Gina and Sam both made some generic polite responses.
“Was that you?” Carol asked. She unthrottled the connection and let static fill her mind.
Pulse, Pulse.
“Yep!”
William had a goofy smile on his face. What’s up with you? she wondered.
“I don't think I can feel you.” Carol told him.
“I know, they're mostly going slower than we had hoped,” said William. “I think all it took was for you to spend time near Rose.”
“Because of proximity, or just that we were talking this morning?”
“Who knows?” Will said with suspicious enthusiasm. “I hope everyone will have it by the class tomorrow.”
There was a moment's pause before Gina spoke up. “Should we get her to seed us?”
“That would be great!” the Stattons said. “We have to meet with some professors now. I’m sorry. You know what to do.”
“Wait,” said Carol. “I have questions.”
Rose made her it's okay face and sent an accompanying wave of static.
“Was that supposed to be—”
“Yes.”
“It's all white noise. I can't read it. I didn't feel that.”
“You've had this for five minutes. Give it time.”
“Can you read my mind now?”
“No. It's the same for me. Everyone starts similarly. Just relax. You're the first new telepath, so I'll be free to practice with for now.”
“How do I practice? More Morse?”
“I had to use the internet for that, so no. Just observe my thoughts for a while. It'll clear up. As for you two,” she indicated Gina and Sam. “Don't bother feeling left out. You'll both get it soon. Maybe tonight!”
The two groups parted ways and Carol headed up the stairs with her friends behind her.
“You talked to Rose this morning?” asked Sam.
When Nic arrived in her dorm, he embraced Carol and kissed her on the lips.
“How are you? Are you okay?” he asked. She had half expected him to complain that she had gotten it first.
Carol had made Gina and Sam wait in her room so she could explain everything. She had tried seeding them as instructed, but couldn’t tell if it had worked. Hannah never responded to the group message, and nobody knew where she was. Until Nic had arrived, Carol had mostly been paying attention to the white noise in her head.
She had tried several metaphors for visualizing the connection, and the best candidates so far seemed to be things involving swirling, turbulent fluids, like storms or waterfalls. The white noise was the effect of a complex motion of billions of parts. If she allowed her mind to wander, it was able to sense a kind of wriggling, churning, boiling cause responsible for the static. That might have also been a placebo, but it made sense, since the thing she was listening to behind the noise was presumably Rose’s brain. She had tried imitating different feelings of swirling on her own, and as best she could tell, Rose had responded in kind.
She finally acknowledged Nic's question. “I'm good,” she said. “There are just so many things happening at once, I don't know what I’m doing.”
“It'll be okay. If you want to be alone to process it, we can—”
“It's not just that,” she said, looking at Gina and Sam. “There's other stuff too. I talked to Rose last night, er, this morning.”
“Oh. When?” asked Nic.
“At like 4:30. I had a nightmare and went outside, and she was there. But she told me about shark whales. That's why I texted you—”
“Carol!” Nic looked at Gina and Sam.
“No, it's okay. She said I could talk about it. They're going to explain in class tomorrow anyway.”
“What?” asked Gina. Gina and Sam stood next to each other, confused. Carol worried they might have been feeling left out, considering she was getting special treatment for living next to Rose. . The day she met the alien, she was made privy to top-secret information. Now she had a head start on all her friends in telepathy.
“Shark whales are this species from Earth,” Carol explained. “They're intelligent, so they got moved somewhere else to be separate from humans.”
“And?” asked Nic.
Carol explained the rest of the information she had learned that morning, as best she could. The whole time, she passively observed the static in her brain, maintaining a playful, swirling back-and-forth with Rose. She allowed the feeling to rage in the back of her head. She had to remind herself to keep her voice down, speaking over a tempest only she could hear.
[I'm not really allowed to be cynical, but remember that most of the points I can make about humans apply to me as well. Tell me, if you turned on the news in 2011 to see an alien, and that alien claimed the entire city of Jacksonville had been secretly converted to a group of telepaths, how would it make you feel?]
The question might have been rhetorical, but Carol answered aloud. “I would feel like it's a disease. Like zombies. You would be much scarier.”
[Right. Would you believe we actually considered doing that?]
Carol felt like she understood Rose's perspective so far.
“It's important for you to look good if you want to spread it. Shark whales make you look bad?”
[Not necessarily bad, but they make my story more urgent. Imagine if I hadn't infected Jacksonville, but I claimed to plan to as soon as I could.]
“Same result.”
[Humans tend to do whatever feels normal, rather than what they think is rational. Our class isn't really a normal class at all, but it's important for us to set it up like that. Once people felt like they had to sign up, they felt like they had to follow through.]
Carol wasn’t sure how this part was related, but she complied. “Part of me still can't believe I went through.”
[People are also naturally partisan in their politics. You feel like you're more than fifty percent on my side, and that makes you the enemy of those who think I’m evil.]
“That sounds about right. Good thing you aren’t evil.”
[You're not a telepath yet. I still could be.] Rose paused for a moment before typing. [Imagine if I were some kind of insect, or mollusk, or a blob of goo. How would anyone join my side then? I know my appearance is demonic, but I’m thankful I’m a vertebrate.]
Carol was growing impatient. Whales were in space, therefore telepathy should be spread, subtly and quickly? Did they make Rose look evil somehow? Was the Amber character, the dragon that had abducted Rose several years prior, somehow responsible for the abduction of all the shark whales? “So what’s up with shark whales? They want us to have telepathy so they can thank us for all the fish?”
[Oh, not much. The whole thing isn't that big a cover up. Everyone knows we left information out. I never explained why Amber put an egg on Earth, or why it was such an issue to interfere with humanity. It's just more of an issue than I let on; I assume they killed her because of it.]
“I'm sorry.”
[I'm fine. It's been three years. The sadder truth is why she died. Humans and shark whales belong to the vast majority of intelligent species who aren't spacefaring, and probably never will be.]
Something clicked in Carol’s mind. Finally they were arriving at The Answer. It felt wrong though. She followed Rose’s gaze into the sky. It was turning blue, and most stars were gone.
“The vast majority? How vast?”
[Probably like 99%. Or more.]
Rose paused, watching Carol.
If most species weren't spacefaring, they were all stuck on their home planets, just like Earth. There would be no way to ever leave. Even Carol knew the first law of hyperphysics, the law that governed her growing telepathic connection, the law that everyone already knew kept humanity stuck on earth: connections are created and destroyed only through physical proximity. To travel to another star through hyperspace, you had to have already flown there the old fashioned way. Without a response from the aliens, humans would never be able to ride their network.
Ninety-nine percent of species were stuck like humans, waiting on a response.
“Why?”
[There's a race, or a couple of them, I'm not sure, of creatures that holds the power. It's all set up to avoid failure, or to evolve, or something. They're truly alien. I don't understand them.]
“You did lie, then. You said we might join them.”
[Might. I was careful to avoid giving odds.]
Something twisted in Carol's stomach. She didn't like where the conversation was headed. Her eyes fixated on a white point in the sky. It might have been Venus, or a bright star.
“What do we have to do? You want to spread telepathy… is it a requirement?”
[I don't know, and no. Amber didn't know either. There is a small number of niches that species are allowed to fill, and humanity isn't a good fit right now. There needs to be a drastic change of some kind. Humans might be too violent, or too dumb, or too smart.]
“So telepathy—”
[That's right. I'm hoping to change the species. If that doesn't work, at least we'll have telepathy.]
“What if the change is bad?” Have you considered that you’ve used telepathy your entire life, and maybe it isn’t universally good? What happens when a sociopath becomes a telepath? What if humans need more privacy than dragons?
[Then my life is a failure. And Amber's. I don’t think it’ll be bad.]
Carol sat in silence for a moment. “I need more time to think about this.”
Rose kept writing anyway. [The whole pro-Rose / anti-Rose thing is only going to escalate, I fear.]
Right, back to the original thread. The reason for the lie: the politics of spreading a disease.
“Having telepathy doesn't make you pro-Rose, does it? I'm sure once it spreads, lots of people won't even know you.”
[To the enemy it does. There are sensible people who assume all of Florida is compromised, and now all of Oxford. They must not realize how easily telepathy can spread, since this is such a tourist hotspot. I could have touched a lot of people by now.]
“And you intend for your side to conquer the planet.”
[Yes. As quickly as possible.]
A disturbing thought occurred to Carol. “Are other people compromised? How many telepaths are there, really?”
Rose addressed the accusation Carol hadn’t voiced: [No Carol, you were seeded yesterday, with your classmates. I would never impress telepathy upon someone without consent. There are 27 human telepaths outside of my class, and I think 7 animals from the tests. Most are known. One new addition as of last week was Rector Emily.]
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly.
[You had to ask. It’s not a coincidence you’re developing faster. Assuming you become a telepath in a few hours, how quickly do you think it can spread?]
Carol drew in her breath in shock. A few hours? Carol noted that she hadn't before realized how odd it was that telepathy had only been spread to animals in two entire years. If it looked like a disease, people would fight back.
“It'll be exponential now. Er, it would be, but you'll tell us to slow down, control the burn? It's a balancing act, isn't it?” Too fast and telepathy would be seen as an invasion. Too slow and the Earth would continue as before, without improved technology or space travel. Or maybe the telepaths could all be assassinated. Carol didn't voice that concern aloud, hoped Rose didn't read it. Carol was pretty sure twenty-seven was a bit larger than the public number, so maybe that issue was taken care of.
[Not really. Maybe I'm too impatient, but the last three years have been far too slow. I ended up with less time for PR than I had hoped.]
“So it's going to explode, then. Starting here. With… academics.” At least part of Rose's plan was starting to crystallize in Carol's head.
[Emily is in on it. Telepathy will be a respected science, viewed as a privilege around the world. Emily is planning to turn this place into a College of Telepathy. The main idea is to build an air of elitism.]
“So if you're anti-Rose,” Carol started.
[You're anti-science,] finished Rose.
Carol thought of the other Lincolnites who didn't make (or sign up for) the class. I didn't sign up for this. “Most of them didn't sign up for this.”
[I know. I feel horrible just thinking about it. I'm doing to you what I did to the Stattons, on purpose this time. There's no way around it, really.]
“So that's the reason you're at Lincoln?”
Rose shrugged. [It's why I'm at Oxford. Its tutor structure is a perfect fit for telepathy. Other universities and scientists will be desperate once they see how well we do.]
Carol and Rose sat in silence for a minute.
[What do you think?] asked Rose.
“I don't know. What are the odds it works?” She wasn't sure which part was more frightening: the promise of panic and war once exponential growth started, or the fact that her species was probably doomed to die on Earth, without convenient alien technology that could probably end disease, solve world hunger, and keep everyone happy. Rose was from America, so surely she was aware that being anti-science wasn’t necessarily radical.
[Low. But it's all I can do.]
Carol understood that.
“You want people to rally around you.”
[Only as much as I'm a symbol for telepathy.]
“And they'll rally around… us.”
[Hopefully only as much as you choose. By the time your identities are public, I hope there'll be a couple thousand of us.]
Carol sat in silence, imagining what might happen in the future. Was Rose doing the right thing by infecting them? It seemed like it all depended on how telepathy worked, and whether it actually benefited humanity
“Okay,” she said, unsure of how to continue. Rose wasn’t typing.
So that was it? She thought of Rose waiting for years before making her public appearance. Why wait two whole years if you thought Amber was dead? The question didn’t need to be raised aloud: Rose had only been five years old.
The sky was turning a lighter shade of dark blue. It would still be a few hours before sunrise. The air was chilly, but Carol had been pretending she wasn’t cold.
Rose held up the phone. [Can we talk about something else now?]
“What?” Carol started. But I have so many questions.
She met the dragon's gaze and suddenly understood why Rose must have hated talking about it, why it was so personal.
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