In the Now by Kelly Sinclair

Author:Kelly Sinclair
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Blue Feather Books
Published: 2012-07-12T18:07:46+00:00

Chapter 13

A bone-tired Mike sagged into my living room sofa with the air of a man who cared little what happened to him. Thankfully, Rashida was out with friends, as she would have been shocked to see him looking so bedraggled.

Stubble missed by his razor, an unwashed polo shirt, he hadn’t looked this bad since—not even his divorce hit him this hard. Borlauch indeed fired him and hired him back the next day. Dr. Nyanga wanted to make a point. Point made, Dr. Nyanga asked him to devise a study of beta-anodynol’s effectiveness in inducing states much like what occurred with Amy. An appalling thought.

“Mike, there’s no way you can control the outcome.”

“Yeah, the language problem. We’ve developed a master list of translators we can contact at a moment’s notice, but we shouldn’t have to go to them because IBM has an excellent language recognition program via a mainframe at Stanford. We establish a link with it and use voice-activated software already on the market so that we can understand the first words out of the past persona’s mouth almost instantly. We identify the primary tongue, if necessary link to the human translator, and we have it covered both ways. If we set it up properly, the current life will be able to translate for the past. We just need the support system in place for purpose of documentation.”

“There are and have been thousands of languages, not all of them well studied or possessing living translators,” I reminded him.

“No offense, Carla, but we didn’t know beans about what we were doing that night. We sent that poor woman off to meet her past life without bothering to prepare her for the shock. No wonder she went into a catatonic state. We’re damned lucky she’s so stable we were able to bring her back. One of your little parlor neurotics would still be spinning in the psych unit right now. Damned lucky.”

His eyes drifted off to some other reference point.

“That’s why you shouldn’t be trying this with someone else. The odds against it working are phenomenal,” I said.

Amy sounded so guarded over the phone the last time—when was it, Tuesday?—unwilling to come in for a session or even to talk about what she was going through. Nor were Gordon and Randall helpful, as they both believed Amy found a way to handle Isao’s presence.

Gordon hadn’t wanted to spend time on the phone discussing his sister’s mental state.

“Look, Doctor,” he’d said. “Last weekend, she trimmed hedges and edged her lawn before dragging me off to the synagogue with her. She seems kind of freaked about the situation, but she’s handling it about as well as anyone could.”

That was more than could be said about Mike, who lit up a Winston without asking my permission. Old habits died hard.

“Carla, there’s no way I’d put someone through such an experience, however controlled, without knowing with absolute certainty what the procedure entails. That’s why I’m the first guinea pig—second, if you count Amy.”

By the time

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