The canvas-and-wood folding cot creaked as I sat up, rubbed at the fatigue on my face. As I stood, my muscles and joints painfully reminded me that, even though I was in damn good shape for a guy on the upside of fifty, the unaccustomed gymnastics of staying alive had carved a load of new aches into my body. I stretched everything to the pain limit and found nothing indicating serious injury.
Only then did I shuffle over to the coffeemaker near the shower. Bless Sonia, I thought as I flipped on the switch. She had filled it up ready to go. While the coffee brewed, I shaved, then stumbled into the shower to see if the stinging-hot water could jump-start my brain. By the time I got out and toweled off, my cell phone went off again. I picked it up, recognized the same number, and answered it.
'Stone.'
'Brad! Sorry to be so persistent, but I thought you would want to know you received a wire transfer a few minutes ago for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.' The voice belonged to Juan Hernandez, president of Simi First Bank, a small, solid, and profitable institution run by top-quality executives who treated customers as people rather than cattle.
'Jeez.' I reached over to pour coffee into a John Deere mug.
'You weren't expecting it?'
I sipped at the coffee for a moment. Vince's comments about the officious colonel came to mind, the part about no report, better off without the insurance. The Jambalaya had cost me only about $100,000. I'd bought it in bad shape out of a bankruptcy, put in another $50,000, and saved a bundle by doing most of the refurbishing myself. It might have been worth $200,000 the day I finished the work, but given the depreciation since then, I doubted she would have fetched more than about $130,000 yesterday morning.
'Uh-huh, it's the… insurance on my boat. I wasn't expecting it so quickly.'
'I caught the news. It said you were okay,' Martinez said. 'Did they get that right?'
'Just bruises.'
'Good. Well, I wanted you to know the payment arrived.' He paused. 'Take care of yourself.'
'Doing my best.' I started to say good-bye, then a thought came to me.
'Juan, can you print out a copy of the transaction record and fax it to me? It'll remind me to deal with it when I get time.'
'Done.'
'Thanks.'
After I hung up, I turned on my laptop and worried about where the funds had actually come from. I slipped into a softly worn pair of khaki cargo pants and pulled the laundry plastic off a blue, oxford-cloth, button-down shirt. I refilled my coffee mug as I slipped on socks and my spare pair of walking shoes before settling down in front of my laptop. I felt a memory rising from unremembered dreams. These came from time to time; some might call it inspiration and others a message from the divine.
As the ideas coalesced, I double-clicked OpenOffice and slipped a Mozart piano concerto into the laptop's CD drive. Finally I slipped on headphones and sat still, eyes closed. The music cleared my head and I began to write. Soon, everything else vanished.
Eventually the music ended and left me looking at new words for the first time. I often felt like a conduit rather than a creator. This would make for a provocative presentation to the postdocs from Toronto.
Sonia walked in with a grilled-cheese sandwich and a large mug of chicken soup.
'Not to disturb you, but your postdocs will want you in about half an hour.' She set lunch on the table.
The writing spell faded and the rest of my life raced toward me: the J2 icon on my laptop screen told me Juan's fax had arrived with my e-mail; my iPhone whined its lowbattery plea; the time startled me. I looked my watch.
'Wow!' The writing had consumed my morning and the beginning of the afternoon. An urgent rush rippled through me.
Sonia waited until I had sampled the chicken soup before retreating from the room. I printed a hard copy of what I had written, then pulled up the fax image on-screen and tried to decipher the banking gibberish as I wolfed down lunch.
The money came from an insurance company in the Isle of Man, asset playground for spooks, terrorists, tax evaders, and others with enough money and motivation to play international three-card monte with their cash. I had received wire transfers in my other life that had originated from places like this. I did not want that part of my past creeping up on me again.
With time running out, I grabbed the pages from the printer and retrieved my stilldamp wallet from my shorts along with a Space pen, a small blue Leatherman tool attached to one of my old military service dog tags, and a tiny, thin LED light that shone bright blue when you squeezed the sides. I grabbed my phone and headed out with Sonia's good wishes echoing behind.
As I rushed along the corridor, I pulled up Chris Nellis on my speed-dial list and got his answering machine.
'Chris, I had an interesting conversation about what you found in and around the Jambalaya. Call me on my cell when you can.' I left the number, hung up, and set the phone's ringer to vibrate. When I reached the enclosed bridge to the next building, I began a jog toward the conference room inside, the half dozen postdoctoral students from Toronto were sitting around a long, elliptical plastic-laminate table, drinking coffee from a variety of disposable cups. The rest of the seats around the table along with the standing room around the windowless walls were jammed with a collection of my current students I vaguely recognized but whose names I could not recall.
The conversation lulled when I entered the room and made my way to the big white board at the front.
'Good afternoon,' I greeted them. 'Before we get started, I want you to know that if today's lecture is interesting and you want more, you can find my notes and other data at my Web site: ConsciousnessStudies. org.' I turned and wrote the address on the white board.
'Okay.' I turned to face them. 'Let's begin with a question: Did you really decide to attend this seminar today, or are you here because of some unremembered incident last year or maybe during your infancy?'
The attendees unanimously gave me the confused stares I wanted.
'Or maybe you're here because of some artifact lurking in your DNA?' Their befuddlement deepened.
'Some among us today believe everything you do is predestined. These reductionists and determinists whose dogma dominate brain science today think free will is an illusion and consciousness an accidental by-product of synaptic electricity.'
A couple of the faculty members present, acolytes of the orthodox, frowned deeply at this.
I tapped an index finger against my temple.''One hundred percent in the meatware,' they say. ‘Inspiration, meditation, right and wrong, eloquence, philosophy, do not exist; transcendence is a fantasy and everything's just the meat talking.''
Most heads shook their disagreement.
'This issue transcends science because free will underpins our relationships with others and forms the philosophical foundations of law and society. Genuine accidents carry a different reaction than intentional injury or insult. Courts treat two people convicted of identical crimes very differently if one's insane or visibly, provably braindamaged.
'Sadly, the scientific mainstream has mishandled free will. They have a vested intellectual interest in promoting politically correct science over reality, just as the Renaissance Vatican favored the religiously correct over provably factual heresy.
'They conveniently forget Albert Einstein when he said that ‘science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.''
I ignored an assassinating frown from a slight man sitting toward the back of the room. The man, Jean- Claude Bouvet, had a lot to lose if I was right. A widely published author and leader of the 'consciousness as meatware' movement, Bouvet was a pompous, brilliant man who received lavish research funding from large pharmaceutical companies.
'We will speak heresy today,' I continued. 'Because like Copernicus, our search for truth requires that we see things as they are, rather than as we would like for them to be. This means setting aside politics, social engineering, and corporate profits to accept the unwelcome pain of unexpected discoveries. Unlike our reductionist colleagues' — I singled out Bouvet with a glance- 'we will deal with science rather than fantasy.'
Bouvet mumbled something derogatory, and I continued without acknowledging him.
