The Mind's Eye, page 12
“I see,” the President said. “How many telepaths do we know about?”
“Around forty,” the CIA Director said. “The chances are good, however, that more will be coming out of the woodwork in the next few weeks and months. What happens if even one percent of the American population is telepathic?”
The President nodded. “I see,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”
***
Three hours later, the President rose to his feet in welcome as Senator Tom Brookline was shown into the Oval Office. Brookline was one of his oldest friends and political rivals; a man whose sincere belief in the Republican Party was as strong as the President’s belief in the Democratic Party, yet he was someone the President could talk to without it turning into a political catfight. Politically, they were deadly enemies, but that didn’t stop them being friends outside politics.
“Mr President,” Brookline said. They shook hands firmly. “What can I do for you?”
The President smiled as the maid brought them both coffee and then faded away. “What’s the word in the GOP about the telepaths?”
“Very little as yet,” Brookline said. “Half of the senior leadership are still convinced that it’s a joke and they’d end up with egg on their faces if they jumped too quickly.” He looked up sharply. “It’s not a joke, is it?”
“I wish I could say that it was and laugh at you,” the President said. He picked up the file the CIA Director had left behind and passed it to Brookline. “Read this and tell me what you think.”
Brookline skimmed through the file quickly and thoroughly. “I see,” he said, finally. “It looks as if at least one telepath deserves a medal.”
The President shrugged. “So it would seem,” he agreed. “The fact remains that the secret is out and spreading – and that new telepaths, civilian telepaths, are beginning to pop up. What does this mean for the future?”
Brookline did him the honour of considering the issue carefully. “Well ... I suppose it depends on just how many telepaths there are,” he said. “What happens if we all become telepathic over the next year or two? I think that we’d all be much happier if we knew what everyone else was thinking all the time. Or what if only a tenth of the population becomes telepathic? Or half the population ... it could be a nightmare.”
“Yes,” the President agreed.
“There will be demands for immediate regulation, of course,” Brookline continued. He grinned. “I suspect you may be urged to create a Psi Corps at once.” The President snorted. “You’ll have to change the name, of course, or the government will be sued, but I think that that is what they will want you to do. Telepaths to be licensed; branded and put to work for the government – and kept under control. That won’t please civil liberties groups or the telepaths themselves. Why should they be kept under an insulting level of control?”
He scowled. “The problem with humanity, of course, is that we keep dividing people into groups. Protestants against Catholics; Sunni against Shia; Muslims against Jews; Americans against Russians ... it never really ends. We have conflict between people whose only real difference is skin colour, discrimination against women because they are women, discrimination against gays and lesbians ... I could quite easily see people discriminating against telepaths.
“Why do straight men generally dislike homosexuals? Is it because a homosexual man might see a straight man as a sex object? That he might do unto him as he would do unto a pretty girl? You remember the old joke about how guys spend all of their time thinking about sex? The joke gets less funny when you realise that gay men are just the same – they just think about men rather than women. And it hits straight men right where they live. They want to do the fucking, not be fucked themselves.”
The President nodded. Unlike the CIA Director, Brookline was actually making sense.
“It will only get worse when telepaths are involved,” Brookline added. “A telepath can look into your mind and see all of your secrets. All the thoughts and feelings that you keep bottled up for the sake of your own sanity and safety. It will seem to everyone that a telepath could be reading their mind every last second of the day – it will strike them right where they live. How many dirty secrets does the average person have? Do you lust after your married workmate? Do you secretly wonder what it would be like to make love to a person of the same gender? Do you have a habit of helping yourself to leftover food at the place you work? Do you steal paperwork and office supplies? Do you feel guilty because...?”
The President held up a hand. “I get the idea,” he said, flatly. He remembered the shooting in Kansas and scowled. The latest reports were clear that the victim had never been a telepath.
“And there is another problem,” Brookline said. He tapped the report with one long finger. “This report says that four known telepaths are effectively incapable of functioning within normal society – and that several other telepaths have been pulled out of mental care centres, where they have been driven insane by their own powers. You may need to separate telepaths from normal society as much as possible, if only for their own good. Find a nicely isolated patch of land somewhere in flyover country and set up a home for them there.”
The President nodded. “So ... what do you suggest I do?”
Brookline considered it. “The best I can suggest is setting up some kind of regulatory agency,” he said, finally. The President blinked in surprise. He wouldn’t have expected a statist solution from Brookline. “You see ... the difference between a working and civilised state and a failed state is the rule of law. People have to believe that the law will be fair and even-handed. If not, they tend to take the law into their own hands. You need a way of identifying and punishing telepathic criminals, if only to prevent lynch mobs from forming every time a telepath may be involved in a crime.”
“This problem isn’t going to go away, is it?” The President asked, bitterly. “The telepaths aren’t going to just vanish ...”
“Probably not,” Brookline said. He pinched himself and grinned. “I didn’t wake up.”
“Thanks for your help,” the President said, sincerely. “I just have to run a few ideas past my cabinet and then ...”
“There’s something else you need to know,” Brookline said. He hesitated. “You’re a good man, even if you are a Democrat. You have to understand this.”
He paused. The President realised that he didn’t want to continue. “Where I live, Mr President, back home, I have a neighbouring family who has a beautiful daughter. I see her every day as she goes out running through the gardens, including mine, and she waves to me. She wears short skirts, so short that sometimes they flip up and I see her panties, or very tight shorts. I know that I shouldn’t, but I watch her and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to reach out for her, pull her towards me and take that fantastic ass in my hands. There are times, when I am in bed with my wife, that I think of the neighbour’s daughter instead.”
“I don’t understand,” the President said, confused. “You would hardly be the first man to lust after a pretty girl.”
“She’s fourteen, Mr. President,” Brookline said.
The President stared at him in horror. “Fourteen?”
“She’s fourteen years old and looks seventeen,” Brookline said. Once he had started talking, he seemed to be unable to stop, despite the President’s shock. “I have never touched her and never will, no matter how tempting it becomes – even though I know that she will grow older. Touching her now would be statutory rape. I might have thought about it, but I would never actually do it.
“Now tell me; what would happen when a telepath read my mind and found that?”
The President frowned. “They’d accuse you of lusting after her,” he said, flatly. “But merely thinking about it isn’t a crime...”
“Before telepaths came into existence, no one could prove that someone was thinking about doing something,” Brookline said, sharply. “Even when we discovered bombs and weapons stored in a terrorist hidey-hole or two, it was still hard to press charges against them and a good lawyer could argue that they weren’t thinking of blowing up a building or two in the United States. Now ... now you can prove that someone was thinking about doing something unpleasant.”
He spoke on before the President could interrupt. “Have you never wanted to strangle an irritating reporter who insists on misreporting everything you say? Have you never wanted to send the Marines into some foreign country to kill the leader who keeps irritating Americans and keeping his own people in bondage? Have you never wished that you could pull a Nixon and act outside the law?”
Brookline smiled. “How many secrets do you think are in Congress and the Senate? How many Congressmen do you think are fucking their interns like President Clinton? How many Senators have dirty little secrets that they won’t want revealed, whatever the cost? Everyone is scared, Mr President, and you’re going to have to reassure them, somehow.”
The President snorted. “What was I thinking when I ran for this post?”
“I dread to imagine,” Brookline said. “That’s why I never threw my own hat in the ring.”
He stood up. “I’ve taken up enough of your time, Mr President, so all I can really do now is wish you good luck,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” the President said, dryly.
Once Brookline had gone, he settled back into his chair and stared down at a sheet of blank paper. He preferred to write down his thoughts where possible, knowing that hackers had hacked into the White House’s computers before. Now ... now a telepath could pluck his thoughts out of his mind. He understood what Brookline had said. There would be no such thing as privacy any longer. And that would scare people. The arguments and protests over telephone tapping and email interception would be nothing compared to the coming storm.
Carefully, thinking hard, he started to draw out the future on paper.
Chapter Thirteen
With reports spreading through the country, that government-supported telepaths have been probing the minds of suspected criminals and terrorists a number of civil liberties organisations have already started demanding injunctions against any further telepathic probes being carried out by the government without a legal warrant. This comes on the heels of a protest lodged by two of the lawyers of the New York Dirty Bombers – and the sacking of a third lawyer when he refused to lodge a comparable protest. The New York Attorney General called the protests a grotesque attempt to delay justice – New York is seeking the maximum penalty for the terrorists.
-AP News Report, 2015
“Mind-readers OUT, Mind-readers OUT, Mind-readers OUT...”
Roger winced as the sound assailed his ears. It looked as if all of Harvard and most of the surrounding city had come out to join the protests against telepaths. In the two weeks since Professor Zeller had introduced his pet telepaths to the world, the reaction had moved from awe to anger and fear. Matters weren’t helped by several eye-witness testimonials of what had happened when telepathic talent had blossomed into life. One man, a former boyfriend of one of the telepaths, had even filed a formal complaint against his ex for mental rape, claiming that she’d exposed his cheating through reading his mind.
“You’d better be careful in there,” the policeman said, as Roger tried to slip closer. “So far, it’s quite orderly, but it’s going to get a lot worse very quickly.”
Roger nodded, trying to ignore the lines of policemen that were rapidly forming up and preparing themselves to contain and disperse a riot. He’d seen student protests that turned into riots before, back when he’d been a cub reporter and the G20 Protests were underway, but this had an altogether nastier tone. He saw yet another police van arrive, followed by a pair of ambulances, and realised with a shiver that the police were expecting wounded. The last news report he’d picked up on Twitter had claimed that the Governor was calling up the National Guard to assist the police if the riot got completely out of hand.
The noise was only growing louder as he made his way along the edge of the crowd. He’d seen plenty of basically good-natured protests where he’d felt fairly safe but this was different. There was a hard edge to the protest, not helped by the presence of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of professional protesters and troublemakers that had arrived to join the excitement. A source in the Campus PD had told him that the internet had been used to advertise the protest – billed as a march for mental privacy – and thousands more were expected to arrive any moment. The police, apparently, were setting up roadblocks and shutting down public transport in the hopes of preventing more protesters from arriving at the campus. They’d probably end up taking part in an impromptu march against telepaths elsewhere. Riots had a life of their own once they got really started.
He caught sight of a speaker, standing on a table someone had hauled out of a classroom, and paused to listen. “... They can read our thoughts and feelings,” the young woman was saying, her words booming out over the crowd. Roger could feel it responding to her chosen words, a shifting wave of anger and fear that seemed to spur them onwards. “What sort of privacy will we have in a world where our thoughts can be read?”
Another speaker stood up as the girl stood down. “We have to make them see that they cannot expect us to stand still and have our minds read,” he thundered, using the microphone to amplify his words. “We have to demand that telepaths be barred from the public and forbidden to read minds! The government will not listen to us unless we make our point clear! March with us for mental privacy!”
Roger turned and headed onwards, towards the protest office. The protest was still getting organised, with several stewards trying to point the crowd in the right direction. With so many eager volunteers standing up and speaking to the crowd, matters were already getting out of hand. He could feel the energy washing through the crowd, the sensation of thousands of humans all united towards a single purpose. It was seductive; he could have lost himself within the sensation. No wonder that so many protests got out of hand. The madness of crowds was overpowering, pushing people to do things they would never do on their own. He wondered, vaguely, what a telepath would make of it, before realising that a telepath would never be able to endure the presence of so many people. It was common knowledge that several telepaths had had to be removed to a deserted part of Alaska before their minds gave out completely. They hadn’t been able to block out anyone, or control their powers.
The protest organisers looked harassed when he arrived. He knew that they were not completely in control. Some of the people who had started to publicise and encourage people to come to the protests had kept their identities hidden, refusing to meet with the other organisers or provide stewards for the protest. That almost certainly meant that radicals from a dozen different groups were present within the protest, looking for a chance to cause trouble. He caught sight of a pair of teenage girls, carrying heavy bags and, oddly, a stuffed bunny and winced. They were out to cause trouble, he was sure. Very few people would carry a bag to a protest, not when pickpockets and other thieves saw it as a chance to operate without detection.
“I’m Roger,” he said, taking it for granted that they would know who he was. His scoop had made him incredibly famous and earned him death threats from all over America. It seemed that he’d managed to annoy both conservatives and liberals; the conservatives thought that he’d betrayed American military secrets, while the liberals thought that he’d been encouraging telepaths to come forward and admit to reading minds. It was odd to see the two sides of American political discourse united on anything, but both conservatives and liberals, for different reasons, disapproved of public telepaths. Or maybe it was just a basic human reaction. Both sides would have secrets they wouldn’t want to make public.
“Yes, we know,” the leader said. He was tall and beefy, with red hair and a smile that didn’t quite conceal his own nervousness. They had thought that they were in charge until they discovered just how many people had come to the protest. If they didn’t please the crowd, it could turn on them as easily as it could march against telepaths, or the police. “I don’t think that we have much time for interviews...”
“There’s always time,” Roger said, making a show of consulting his watch. There was still half an hour until the protest was actually scheduled to begin. He glanced up as a police helicopter flew overhead, and then looked back at the leader. “To start with, then, what is your interest in being here?”
The leader frowned. “My girlfriend read my mind,” he said, shortly. Roger nodded in sudden understanding. He’d interviewed Elizabeth Tyler and she’d mentioned Ron, her boyfriend, during the interview. She hadn’t been too impressed with him, he gathered, although that might just have been hindsight talking. He wouldn’t have been too impressed if a girl had cheated on him, both with her for cheating and with him for taking her seriously. “I want to make sure that that doesn’t happen again.”
One of the other leaders caught his arm. “We’re here to make sure that there are new laws passed against telepathy,” she said, firmly. She had a faint smile that would have been charming, if some of her teeth had been smaller. As it was, her smile made her look like a happy rabbit. “We want to make sure that our mental privacy is respected.”
It wasn’t Roger’s place to debate with them, but he needed answers. “But how do you intend to prove or disprove that mind-reading did in fact take place?”
“We want all telepaths isolated from the rest of us,” Ron said, firmly. He sounded hurt, although Roger couldn’t find it in him to be sympathetic. He’d cheated on his girlfriend, after all, and had to have known that she would find out one day. “They have to be rooted out and transferred to somewhere else ...”
