Week 06, 2019
Kathy knew it when it happened. She did not
require notice.
She felt a disturbance, it was subtle, but it
was Jim, and he was dead.
Kathy knew now that she would never see him
again, she was certain of it. Her own emotions twisted up in turbulent waves.
She was shaken, and she felt in her gut that
he had planned this.
Jim was orchestrating these events, even her
responses, he was engaged in a level of manipulation that she had never thought
was possible with him, it caused her to look into her heart and question
everything she thought she knew.
Kathy had believed that she was impervious to
the manipulations of others, because there was not a person she had ever met
that she was unable to read, except Jim.
Now she felt that their entire relationship
was a lie.
She was stunned.
When the initial shock had passed, when it
was over, she felt the hollow emptiness and peace of being in a vacuum.
She was not surprised when she received the
call informing her that his body had been discovered by the flight attendants,
and that by the time they got to him he was already dead.
They never noticed that he had been in
distress; they said, and they were not a witness to the moment of his passing.
It happened in flight, after he had eaten.
He had been still and quiet after take-off,
and they thought he was merely resting.
Once again Jim’s behavior was unexplainable.
He died as he lived, a mystery.
Jim did not carry identification.
He never did.
He was anonymous.
To society at large he barely existed, he
left only the smallest of paper trails to define him.
He was a citizen of the world, he spoke every
language. He had access to credentials that could open any door, in any
country, at any time.
He was both present and completely invisible.
Jim was off the grid.
There was nothing on his phone to tell anyone
who he was, only the record of the calls he had recently made to Kathy.
That is how he intended it to be.
Kathy’s safety
and security depended on it, and
Jim’s mission depended on that.
He had carefully protected this identity
above all others. There was not a single information gathering service in the
world, weather private or governmental, open sourced or covert that would be
able to discover anything about him, unless they devoted a great deal of
manpower to it.
Even then Jim had fail-safes in place to
protect his privacy.
He would be alerted; he would be able to
cover his tracks.
That never happened.
It was vital to his plan that when he was
discovered dead, those responsible for contacting his next of kin reach Kathy
and only Kathy. She had to be given the responsibility of dealing with his
property and effects. She must be directed to do so.
His plan required that she pursue those
duties with a sense of mystery, an openness to discovery that would place her
in the right cognitive mindset for the essential moment that was to come.
Everything concerning the hours after his
departure was a puzzle.
There were wheels within wheels, gears
turning and contingencies developing. The pieces came together like the engineering
of a fine watch.
Jim’s plans were a thing a craftsmanship.
It was working.
Kathy followed the path Jim laid out for her
like she was walking through a maze. There was light at the end of the tunnel,
when she arrived there, she would know what she wanted to know, and she would
be standing where Jim wanted her to be.
Kathy booked a flight immediately.
She arrived at the city morgue and identified
the body.
The pathologist informed her of the cause of
death. It was a catastrophic stroke. The autopsy
revealed that an embolism had burst in his brain, killing him instantly.
Otherwise Jim had been in perfect health.
The doctor said that the stroke was like a
small explosive that went off in his brain.
Kathy had no idea why she was the one to
receive him other than what the authorities were telling her.
She was the only person he had been known to
have contact with, the only person they could connect him to.
Jim’s relationship to Kathy was the only
relationship that mattered.
“Why am I here;” she wondered, but not about
the process.
She wondered about Jim’s intentions.
This whole thing had been orchestrated.
She knew that it was his plan she was
following.
She was angry, but her curiosity compelled
her.
There were aspects to the administrative procedures
she was engaged in that were not exactly normal, or even legal, but the
officials she was engaged with were acting under orders. The judge, the medical
examiner, other governmental functionaries she was forced to deal with, they
were operating under some kind of pressure, but they themselves were not quite
sure what the exigencies were.
There were plans within plans, and the person
pulling the levers was here on the slab with her, cold and unmoving.
It was inscrutable.
There was a level of caution at work that
reminded her of her own handlers. There were multiple levels of misdirection
and masking, which were intended to keep the objectives of their research
hidden from Kathy.
As far as the locals knew, Kathy was simply
the only person the authorities could connect Jim to, it was irregular, but it
was what it was and that, coupled with orders from a federal magistrate; that
was enough for them.
Kathy would not have believed it possible,
but Jim was more mysterious in death, than he was in life. She dug into his
background only to find nothing, absolutely nothing.
As angry as she was at coming to the
realization that he had been deceiving her throughout her relationship with
him, her esteem for him are by an order of magnitude.
She
appreciated the puzzle he had left her with, it was a gift, a final piece of
him for her to assemble.
There was no record of a family, and no record of work, he had a social security number, and
a passport, but no record of anything else, not at first blush.
There was no record of Jim ever having
attended a school.
No driving record, only one bank account, it
was in Switzerland, he was worth billions, at the least. The actual sum was
unknown.
He had no legal representation. He had no
heirs.
Kathy was fascinated by the developments and
full of sadness. She was fine with the things she was discovering, and she
accepted her involvement in his final affairs, except that suddenly she was
responsible for his body, and she had no idea what he might want her to do with
it. They had never had any conversations about death, or burial customs.
Kathy knew that Jim was not religious, at
least not observant, he tended to believe that all religions were merely
variations on a theme, and that every religious institution was at its heart
corrupt, self-serving and short sighted, even those groups who did charitable
work.
He was a cynic.
She opted to have him cremated. She thought
she would make a tree out of him and plant him somewhere nice.
That is what Kathy wanted for herself.
Why not
do the same for Jim?
He liked tree; that much she knew.
And so it was decided, she made the
arrangements and waited for the return call.
In the meantime she busied herself with some
court appointments.
It took Kathy some time, and there was
detective work to do.
She went to the work with calm determination,
finding that she was enjoying
herself.
The fact that Jim’s identity appeared to be
completely fictitious concerned her.
There was a moment when she feared that he
was just another plant, one of the handlers sent to interact with her from the
National Security structure.
The thought gave her nightmares, feelings of
doubt, inadequacy, foolishness.
She was able to set them aside, because the
more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. She would have known, she
would have picked up on it, if not from Jim, she would have picked up on it
from one of the other agents who she had occasion to interact with, or from one
of the many who followed her every move.
She considered bringing them into the
conversation, asking them to help her understand who this ghost of a person
was.
She rejected that idea, because it might
complicate her ability to look into his affairs. They might just swoop in and
seize everything related to Jim, and never give her a chance to discover
anything for herself.
Given her abilities, Kathy was typically able
to glean any information she wanted from the people around her, but Jim was a
phantom.
He was as much of an enigma in death as he
had been in life.
Nobody knew anything about him.
It took days to even locate where he lived,
and then it took another appointment with another judge to grant her access,
and that was limited to a very narrow window of time.
Finally, when she was in that building, Kathy
began to encounter people who Jim had interacted with. Though even to them he
was a mystery; a quiet, impersonal, private man.
Very few of them had even spoke with Jim.
She thought that it was funny.
In all of the years that she had known him,
Kathy had never been to Jim’s home.
She thought she knew the reasons.
She thought it was because she was always
under observation. Jim was aware of that, she knew, and because of that he did
not want to draw attention to himself, or to their friendship.
That is what she believed.
Kathy did not want the people who watched her
asking questions about him. She wanted this relationship to be something
entirely under her control, and that is why Jim never came to see her where she
lived. If he had ever visited her apartment she believed that he would be taken
and interviewed by her handlers, and that it might be the last time she ever
saw him.
She had always felt that the two of them
could have come up with a plan to meet in different places. To travel together
if they had wanted, to slip the watchers and be somewhere that they were truly
alone.
Jim had eschewed such notions.
Kathy accepted his reservations without
argument.
She had wanted to see the place where he
lived, but unless he was willing, she had determined that she would not push
the issue.
He was an intensely private person; that much
was clear.
To her knowledge he had never moved, he had
never mentioned it at least.
His apartment was exactly as she had
visualized it, scant, bare, Spartan.
Walking into it was like de ja vu.
She had seen it before, through Jim’s eyes,
but she had not realized it at the time.
He was like an early twentieth century
minimalist piece of stage craft.
Even though it was what she was expecting,
she was nevertheless, shocked by it.
He was an aesthetic.
It was extreme.
It made her uncomfortable.
Everybody needs a little something of color
and comfort in their life.
This place where Jim lived was all white,
black and gray.
It was cold and metallic.
There was not a moment of her life that Kathy
could not recall, she remembered everything. She remembered the birth canal,
the darkness of the womb, her mother’s breast.
She remembered her first birthday, her first
steps.
She remembered struggling as an infant,
struggling to be understood, to speak, to master the muscles in her tongue and
lips so that she could form words against her palate and speak.
Her memory
and her contextualization of her memories were perfect, and it was as fast as
lightening.
She could pull together the most remote and
seemingly unconnected pieces of data to provide context for analysis. Her
proctors believed that the speed with which she could arrive at conclusions was
not measurable.
She could answer questions in no-time.
She was entirely actualized.
She defied understanding.
The field of her knowledge was not limited to
her own experience. It was tied into her genetic heritage, the memories of her
ancestors that was built into her DNA. But it was more than that, she was able
to tap into something else that was only understood through a mythic narrative,
a structure that no human being actually understood, and of which only a few
human beings even suspected the existence of; it was the nous sphere, of Tielhard de Chardin, the cynergenic field of Carl
Jung.
It was the collective unconscious of planet
Earth.
In that electromagnetic field, in that
quantum reality, the entire repository of human knowledge existed.
Kathy had access to it, she was not the first
human being of which this was true, but she was the first person that it did not
drive into madness.
Now that she was standing in Jim’s apartment,
she knew that he had lied to her about a great many things.
His life was not at all as he had presented
it to her.
This life was not his only life, and there
was more than one Jim, of that she was certain.
Kathy was not surprised.
Emergence 4.0
Part One, Jim
and Kathy
Chapter Five, Endings
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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