Pulling it back to my chest I grabbed itgently. The pain receded quickly, and I guessed that I had justpulled a muscle wrong by moving it so fast. After rubbing it for aminute, I figured I had better go ahead and start the cleanup. Iglanced down to pick the path of least soakage to my slippers andfroze.
After several seconds to allow my brain toprocess what my eyes were seeing, I took a few steps around mycoffee mug. I checked it from all angles, even getting down on myknees for a closer look, but I finally had to accept the fact thatmy coffee mug was hovering about four inches off the ground.
A chill seemed to run through me as I reachedout a finger to touch it. I moved it about an inch and jerked myhand back quickly and continued to stare at it. It sat there,hovering in the adjusted position. Reaching out again, I turned thecup to level and pulled my hand back again to watch, but it justsat there in the new orientation, as steady as if it were still onthe table top.
Standing up, I paced back and forth for a fewminutes, never taking my eyes off of it. Puzzled, I walked back toit, and putting my hand underneath, I slowly raised it back to theheight of the table top. Removing my hand, it stayed at the newheight and about six inches away from the edge of the table.Confused and a little scared, I sat down in the chair by the windowand continued to stare at it.
“This is not possible,” I thought to myself.“What the hell is happening? Am I still asleep?” I got up andresumed my pacing. I couldn't think straight at the moment andpacing always helped; I could always think a bit better whilemoving.
“Ok ... what are the options here? One, I'masleep and having one stupidly weird dream. Two, I silently wentbatshit crazy. Three, someone stored a few dozen hits of acid inthe coffee can, and I brewed up a big steaming pot ofhallucinogenic crap. Four ...” I thought back to the pain that shotup my arm when it happened. “Four, I somehow caused the cup to stopin midair.” Stopping in mid stride, I slowly reached out my handtoward the cup from across the room.
“Come! Get the heck over here!” I ordered thehovering mug. Nothing happened. I resumed my pacing and thinking.“If I’m dreaming, then I can get a good chuckle from Linda when Itell her all of this. If I’m crazy, then none of this reallymatters since I’ll need real help. I doubt that there were drugs inthe coffee, so that leaves only me as the cause of thisevent. That’s the only theory worth working on right now, buthow?”
Sitting again, I thought back to the exactmoment that this happened, and what I was doing and feeling. Beinga hardcore coffee fiend, I wanted my coffee, and knocking it overwould piss off both Linda and myself, although for differentreasons. She was always calling me the absentminded professor forthings like that. Maybe I needed to want it more for thisthing to work.
Reaching out my arm again, I concentrated onthe cup. How much I wanted it, how good it would taste, how I wouldhate for it to fall to the ground. Suddenly, the cup shotstraight toward me, landing in my open hand with a slight slosh ofthe remaining liquid. Relaxing, I felt the weight of the cup in myhand and knew that if I let it go now, it would fall. Staring at itwith both amazement and distrust, I took a sip. Feeling somewhatstunned, the only thing my brain could process is that the coffeehad gone cold.
“Ok,” I said out loud. “Any of myexplanations of this could still apply, so how would I proceed ifthis was a research project?”
My mind still a little incoherent, I tried toapply the steps of the scientific method to the problem. The firststep is always to ask a coherent question. Ok, so my coherentquestion is: what the hell is going on and how is this happening?The next step would be to perform background research, but I hadtoo many opposing ideas to pick out any one line of inquiry.
Next would be to form a hypothesis. Well, Ishould probably still discard the crazy or dreaming lines, as thosewould be self-cancelling, which left the super power option.Pausing for a moment, I realized that the super power option wouldnot necessarily preclude the crazy or dreaming lines, and I couldwork with that. Ok, I was a batshit crazy, dreaming, superman.Feeling better now that I had a course to follow that incorporatedall my lines of reasoning, I went and got a fresh cup of coffeebefore sitting down in front of my computer.
The first thing that I thought to search onwas telekinesis. I spent the better part of an hour clickingthrough the links that came up. Telekinesis, psychokinesis,psionics, parapsychology… a guy could go on for days on thisstuff.
Ok, enough research, time to move on and forma hypothesis. Somehow, I was experiencing the ability to control apsionic power. The short definition of a psionic power was theability to perform an action with a mental rather than physicaleffort. It seemed to fit.
Unable to comprehend the why of theequation, I decided to concentrate on the how for now. Thatmeant that I needed to test the hypothesis by doing an experimentunder a bit more control than my half-assed attempt while still inshock.
Staring down at the coffee cup, I tried tocalm my thoughts and concentrate only on the cup itself.“Rise,” I thought at the mug. “Rise.” Closing myeyes, I pictured the cup lifting off the table and thought sharplyat it, “RISE!” My eyes flew open as a sudden crash fromabove startled me, and shards of the now shattered cup rained downaround me. It felt like
