The Last World (14 page)

“Is that it?” Something didn’t make sense to him.

Fulton raised his eyes to his son’s. “You’d best be grateful it is; any other agency’s prices would’ve shot through the roof.”

Steve shook his head. “No, I mean is that all we’re paying? What about his doctor bills?”

Fulton tried to look as patient as possible, but it was difficult to do so with his son when it came to finances. “Son, I understand your concern and your heart’s in the right place, but his injuries weren’t caused by the accident. You said so yourself and, for that matter, so did he. Anything outside of what you may have caused is irrelevant. Fixing his car is all we’re required to do legally, financially, and ethically. He should be grateful I’m as generous as I am, otherwise he’d be paying us.”

“Yeah, you’re so generous.” The sarcasm dripped from Steve’s words like venom from a cobra.

“That’s right, I am, and if you don’t like it I can arrange for your policy and car payments to be canceled
before
I throw you out on the street. You understand me?”

Steve bit back the retort fighting to get loose and swallowed his budding pride. Such was the birthright of Fulton Drake’s son.

At seeing his son properly cowed, Fulton nodded and motioned for him to leave. “Better get to bed so you can get to work on time. Somebody’s going to pay me for cleaning up your mess.”

Shaking in anger and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Steve climbed the stairs and went into his room. What could he do? He was forced to play a game
—his father’s game—by his father’s rules. In time, he calmed down enough to take a shower and get ready for bed. He didn’t think he’d fall asleep, but he did as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Chapter 17

How is it one is supposed to handle pride in others
, where none had been present before? That was the question Franklin found himself asking after his father stood up to Doctor Forbes. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes earlier, but he could hear Winfield’s snoring echoing in the darkened room already. Now it was his turn to watch over his father and Franklin didn’t want to shirk the responsibility, but it was becoming harder for him to keep his eyes open with each passing second. He found, as odd as it may sound, that he was enjoying having his father around. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Franklin liked having his dad with him.

It was an odd occurrence in a day full of them, but unlike the others, this one he could live with. After everything he’d seen recently, Franklin refused to let go of the memory of that hospital room. The thought brought a gentle laugh from him. Who would’ve thought he would turn into a whiney, sniveling pussy? Maybe he wasn’t the tough guy he always thought he was, or maybe he was seeing things properly for the first time. Franklin liked the sound of the latter, it made him feel better.

So many things seemed to straighten themselves out in his mind as if a veil was lifted. As things were, Franklin no longer struggled with the possibility of being out of his mind because he wasn’t. That was simple enough; even simpler was the methodology of how he came to his decision. Simply put, if he was insane, then he wouldn‘t be worried about being insane. It made sense to him, but the reasoning would fall apart in the light of day. That was something he could live with, so long as it helped him feel better.

One final question still haunted him
, and that was why everything became so clear after his blinding headache passed. He’d been ready to accept Tanok was a part of him, as he obviously was since Tanok showed him other worlds in ways that defied reason. The funny thing was, Franklin knew Tanok was still with him, he just didn’t have anything to say at the moment. Franklin felt normal, as normal as anyone else, and was excited to see what life held in store for him from that moment on. Being happy and content was something he could get used to. Deciding then was as perfect a time as any to rest, he settled back in his bed and pulled the sheets up to cover his chest. Before he closed his eyes, he noticed a figure standing off to the side in the shadows.

With a weary smile
, he pointed at Tanok. “Don’t even start. I’ve earned this time.”

Tanok stood motionless for the longest time before bowing his head. “
As you wish. Rest my friend, may your dreams protect and guide you.
”

As quick as that, Tanok disappeared from Franklin’s vision into the shadows surrounding him as Franklin nodded his thanks. Things were beginning to look up for him at last. First thing in the morning he would call his mom. He wanted to talk to her again
, for no other reason than to hear her voice. After a yawn, he closed his eyes and allowed himself to fall asleep to the rhythmic snoring coming from his dad. Life was good again.

*****

Emerson Forbes finished his rounds and paused outside the door to room 136. It was his job to check on the patients under his and the other doctor’s care. It wasn’t difficult given the size of the town and the lack of serious injuries, but he took such things very seriously. After practicing medicine for a quarter of a century, the last thing he wanted was to have his career ended because of another scandal in the media or some frivolous lawsuit by an overprotective father that didn’t know when it was best to step aside.
He
was the professional, not the elder Bowen. By all rights and the law of mankind, Emerson had the justification in such manners.

His blood began to boil at the thought of throwing the man out. As it is in all of our dreams, reality often takes a backseat while we become superheroes in our mind’s eye. Even an illustrious doctor such as Emerson Forbes wasn’t immune to such an action. In his mind
, he stood to the side as the boy’s father was dragged from the room and down the long corridor toward the main entrance. Of course, all of the nurses would be at the nurse’s station watching him in wonderstruck awe at what he did. Once outside the double doors, Bowen would be thrown by the two guards and land on the sidewalk, without an injury, of course. It wouldn’t do for him to get hurt so he could reenter the hospital, now would it? Nope. Emerson would then stand over his conquered foe, his arms crossed across his chest and smiling down at the defeated man.

Such visions have inspired some of the greatest names in history to wonderful feats. To his credit, Emerson understood the consequences of such attempted actions. He knew what dreams and thoughts were realistic and which ones were folly. Still, he would’ve loved the feeling of accomplishment and power those actions would’ve given him. Practicality was the backbone of being a doctor, so he opened the door only after careful consideration. He paused with the door open to listen for any sounds and was rewarded with the snoring of the elder Bowen. Had the man been awake
, Emerson wouldn’t have entered, but now he could do his job without fear of being interrupted.

He stepped into the room as quietly as he could
and, for once, his rubber-soled loafers didn’t betray him with their standard squeaking. So much the better. If the young man was sleeping, he’d make the proper notes on the paperwork and continue on. Never one to enjoy people in general, he really didn’t like being around sick or injured ones. They whined and complained incessantly about everything from the temperature to what was on the television. Maybe that was why he never gave Franklin Bowen a second thought. To his knowledge, the young man never once complained or asked for anything, which made him the perfect patient in Doctor Forbes’ eyes.

Despite all of that, Emerson was still irritated by the young man for the simple reason that he brought his father there. Oh well, Emerson would endure, just as he’d always done since his first patient. Of course, the Bowen boy managed to capture the doctor’s interest. He was the talk of the hospital for somehow put
ting Doctor Doug on edge.
That’s what happens when your feelings for your patients get in the way
.

With four strides he reached the edge of the bed and could easily see both men were asleep. With a nod
, he made the notation on the chart so the nurse would check the readings during her rounds. It was something he enjoyed doing for it helped cover his ass in case the nurse screwed up. When he was finished, Emerson looked down at the sleeping form on the bed.
How in the world did you learn to cause so much trouble?
Shaking his head, Emerson turned and headed for the door. When he was halfway out of the room, he heard the young man answer his unspoken question.

“The same way you avoided that scandal in school, Emery. By knowing the right person.”

He turned back to face the pair, but no one was awake. The father was still snoring and his son hadn’t moved a muscle, aside from breathing. He thought about responding in a loud enough voice to wake them but he hesitated. All it’d do was wake and anger the kid’s father, and that was something he wanted to avoid. After taking a moment to balance his options, he turned and left the room as he’d found it.

While he was happy to be out of the room, Emerson couldn’t help but wonder how the young Bowen knew about what happened to him when he was a teacher. It was something the university buried so deep no one would ever be able to find it. Shaking his head, he pressed the small button on the end of his pen to retract the ballpoint
and put it in his breast pocket. Dropping the clipboard and paperwork into the plastic bin signaled the end to his ordeal with those in room 136 until they woke, his next set of rounds, or an emergency. Personally, he would be very happy not to have to deal with either of those scenarios, but he knew he wouldn’t be that lucky. On some level, he assumed his aversion to luck went to his great-grandfather, who was hung for cheating in a poker game. Not a major offense in modern times, but in the early twentieth century and given the company he kept, it was an inevitable end to an otherwise uneventful life.

The thought brought a smile to his face
; it wasn’t everyday Emerson thought about his family and their bloodline. The only reason the thought even came to him was because his… dubious exploits in college were mentioned. But by whom? Neither of the men in the room even stirred, and how could the young man have said anything without waking his dad? Of course, the question of how either of them could’ve read his thoughts didn’t yet register with him. Each time Emerson thought he was closer to an answer, another question rose to take its place. After a few rounds of trying to learn the truth, his mind began to feel similar to when he completed a course in anatomy forty years earlier. Emerson also began to wonder who, or what, had said that to him. The voice sounded like the young man’s but he wasn’t so sure. Also, did he actually hear it or imagine it?

Emerson rubbed his forehead as he made his way
toward his and Doug’s shared office space.
It now appears we have more in common than I originally thought
. Until minutes earlier, he would’ve wagered anything that Doug had imagined the younger Bowen knowing about his cerebrum being swollen, but now he wasn’t so sure. If anything, he felt as disturbed as his colleague and he didn’t know why. The budding headache he owed to the young man was beginning to cause his vision to blur with each beat of his heart.

He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out an Aspirin b
ottle. He shook four tablets into his hand then gulped them down in a single bite. The bitter, powdery taste stung his jaw muscles like a tart fruit. It was a taste he welcomed, for it meant his headache would be gone and he’d be pain-free in a few minutes. While sitting there, he decided it’d help put his mind at ease if he had a look at Doug’s files for Franklin Bowen. It was an ethical dilemma, as files such as those were meant to be done in the strictest confidence. Of course, that agreement didn’t hold water considering they were both doctors and Emerson was responsible for the young man’s care as well. The fact he was Doug’s patient was more of an afterthought than a form of substantial evidence in his mind.

With a deftness belying his skill and experience in such manners, Emerson opened the locked drawer
where his fellow doctor kept the personal files of his patients. In the movies, one would expect to see the words CONFIDENTIAL in bold red letters printed across the front of each manila folder. Perhaps some doctors did such a thing, but Emerson believed they were a product of an over-active imagination on the part of filmmakers.
Nothing make-believe here
. Confident in his footing in reality, Doctor Forbes opened the file on Franklin Bowen and began reading.

Chapter 18

The doctor’s visit and gradual exit went unnoticed by those in room 136. The only one that seemed to give any notice didn’t move. In fact, he was sleeping as sound as a baby in its mother’s arms. True to his word, Tanok let Franklin sleep without any fear of being disturbed. He watched over the young man he had tagged as the savior of humanity with a fond expression on his face.

Tanok’s arrival hadn’t been as smooth as he had hoped, but with his
self-appointed mission to accomplish, he couldn’t allow physical boundaries to impede his way. In fact, nothing truly stood between him and Godhood if he so wanted it, but he refused to taste from that succulent and poisonous fruit as others had done throughout history, both on this world and on others. As a World Watcher, it was his duty to watch as the descendants of his species took root and grew into a colony that would one day be welcomed into the Interstellar Empire.

Their current process
, called The Interjectionary Method, was far more peaceful, enduring, and more balanced than the former method of colonization, The Interjunctionary Method. While the latter took no more than a handful of years to implement, it also stretched their own population to very thin levels and proved dangerous to the sentient life already there. Through their explorations, intelligent life was never found aside from beasts of various sizes and descriptions similar to dogs, horses, and whales, there were records of a previous species of intelligent life preceding the humans. Since the search for those that came first never ceased, it was deemed less important than finding new homes for the citizens of the expanding Empire.

Because of the strain caused by the Interjunctionary Method, their scientists began to look for better, more rewarding ways of colonization. Those efforts led to what was later called the Interjectionary Method. Instead of arriving at a planet and throwing its ecosystem into chaos that often times couldn’t be undone, it was proposed a select number of volunteers would be sent to outlying worlds to begin the colonization process. While their numbers would be kept low, they would be more than adequate to ensure a solid base to begin a new race without severe repercussions such as birth defects, mental retardation, and other less pleasant oddities.

Those volunteers would have their memories wiped clean except for their basic nature and survival skills needed for the worlds they would inhabit. Once there, they would begin the arduous process of building a civilization from the ground up until they reached a level of human advancement on par with the Empire before being welcomed as a new allied world. While this process often took hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, it would offer the benefit of having an already populated world that wouldn’t put any strain on those in the Empire. The scientific benefits were also considered quite rewarding in that those in the Empire could learn how their ancestors began to build their own civilization billions of years earlier.

Earth became the first in such a test, but it wouldn’t be without its share of difficulties. The animals were often ravenous to the point of insanity
, but there was also another group there. An earlier experiment, conducted by a scientist whose name was forgotten in the pages of history, was on the verge of extinction. The Neanderthals, as they would become known on Earth, were genetically altered humans that were changed for the purpose of surviving easier in such a rich world. More animal than man, the Neanderthals started to fail so the introduction of Homo Sapiens, as they were meant to be, would do one of two things: Either one of the groups would find a way to prosper and survive or they would both die, leading to the end of the Interjectionary Method.

The truest challenge for the volunteers wasn’t building a new home
. It was giving up something they were taught to do from the day they were born. Able to use ninety-five percent of their brain, humans used their mental abilities for everything from communication to controlling their machines and computers. While many still preferred the old ways of speaking, the Empire had become one of telepaths. Early on in their lives, they were taught how to use their mind to better themselves and those around them. Vicious attacks against others weren’t tolerated and the need to spy or gossip ended soon afterward. Each person expected some form of privacy and was given such. No one attempted to probe another’s mind, instead they waited for the individual to release what they wanted to communicate via telepathy or speech. The act of taking that ability away nearly ended the program before it got started.

Feeling their minds shouldn’t be hampered in any way, many citizens voiced their concerns, but the program directors pointed out the value of watching Homo Sapiens develop from a seed into a beautiful plant. In time, it was agreed that those volunteering would do so knowing they’d cease to exist as they were for all time. After much worrying and pondering, people volunteered in the thousands, more than was needed. The procedure they underwent wiped their minds and “deactivated” their mental capacity to one percent.

To say the Interjectionary Method was a success would be putting it mildly. After two million years, the humans on Earth developed their own sciences, religions, and hierarchy in governments, even going so far as to begin to break through the mental barriers imposed on their ancestors. They developed new forms of construction, aided by an interfering World Watcher in ancient Egypt and Central America which would never be copied or attempted again. Their progress was astounding to the eyes of the Empire and conservative estimates claimed they’d become part of the Empire within a thousand years. The biggest surge came before Tanok took his assignment on Mars as a World Watcher.

During what was the 1940s on Earth, Tanok’s predecessor crashed his ship after a routine planetary study.
Their ships were seen and reported many times since then. Sometimes, if the World Watchers were discovered, they’d implant memories of abduction in an effort to “scare” the people of Earth away from watching the skies. Those attempts had the opposite effect and when the ship crashed, the ultimate fear of Earth advancing too rapidly began to grow. From what was salvaged from the crash, the people of Earth took their technology to places they hadn’t thought possible before. From microchips to microwaves, the atomic bomb to laser eye surgery, and from primitive medical practices to cutting edge X-rays and MRIs.

Tanok was pleased with his assignment
; it was sought after by millions of people, and he proved himself worthy of taking the role of World Watcher. From his sheltered alcove beneath Mars, he received reports of a new disease that was destroying world after world within the Empire. He watched in horror as those worlds not sick turned their weapons and mental energies on those that were, and then on each other out of fear. Such devastation was unprecedented in their history and nothing seemed able to stop the spread.

Toward
the end, he received a message from his mother, the same woman he implanted in Franklin’s mind hours earlier. She shared the images of the ravages of the disease and the Empire’s final days with him. When she died, so did the remaining world of the Empire; humanity’s mother world was nothing more than a dead husk floating in space. It was then he realized the fate of the civilization that preceded humans. They had tried to leave the galaxy billions of years before just as humans had and met much the same fate. That which meant the disease eventually died out, but what would happen the next time humanity tried to leave the galaxy? Both he and Earth were spared because of their distance and subsequent lack of contact from the rest of the Empire. He knew that, in time, humanity would reach Mars with a manned vessel and move beyond.

His mission was clear to him
; he needed to preserve humanity from its destined destruction. Taking the World Watcher’s vessel, he approached Earth, but in his haste Tanok failed to account for the thick atmosphere. With the vessel’s refraction hull plating, it would appear all but invisible aside from the trail of burning ions behind it. Seconds before his body died from the heat, he reached out for the nearest human, creating a psychic anchor and aimed his vessel to land near him. By the time it impacted, the vessel was mostly gone and what remained largely disintegrated on impact.

With his consciousness teetering on the brink of ceasing to exist, Tanok tightened the psychic tether he attached to Franklin at the moment of impact and began sharing the young man’s body. The shockwave was greater than Tanok was prepared for
, and he watched as the young man he became a part of was thrown against his vehicle and killed. Refusing to allow his mission to end in failure, he combined his consciousness with Franklin’s. Through the combined strength of their minds, Tanok was able to restore Franklin’s body with great difficulty and pain to the young man. Tanok then focused their combined minds on repairing the damage caused by his craft. He couldn’t repeat the same mistake of his predecessor; there would be no proof of his arrival, but he needed a tool. Focusing his energies, Tanok fashioned the remaining portion of the ship’s computer core into a half sphere until it would need to be used. To ensure that, Tanok buried Franklin’s memory of the event and, before relinquishing control of his body, he placed it in the field where Franklin later found himself.

During all of that, Tanok had some
insight. One being while they were together their separate consciousness would begin to combine until there was only one remaining. It was survival of the fittest at its most primitive level. Despite it all and his own mental strength, Tanok knew he would lose the battle since his first attempt at hiding the memory of the crash showed signs of failing. With the boundaries between the pair slowly breaking down, Franklin was gaining more control over his visions and thoughts, the most recent of which was Franklin’s unconscious mind hearing Doctor Forbes and reading the recesses of the man’s mind. Answering the man’s unspoken question through Tanok’s advanced abilities in his own voice was nothing more than a dream to Franklin, but a demonstration to Tanok who the better human was. Franklin’s will and spirit were far stronger than Tanok’s; leaving his only wish was to still be around to see his mission fulfilled.

Those thoughts were what kept him from allowing himself
to be swept away after his vessel crashed, and Tanok believed he found the help he needed. There were others they would need for their cause, but he was sure they wouldn’t be a problem. So long as Franklin could control his growing abilities and not loose himself in them, their greatest danger was time. Tanok thought it amazing how everything seemed to center around the greatest enemy of any living creature.

*****

Interesting
. Doctor Emerson Forbes closed the folder and clasped his hands on top of it while his mind worked over what he finished reading. In all of his years as a professor and doctor, he never gave much thought to one’s sixth sense. Such a thing was beyond the principles of science as those abilities can, in no way, be measured or tested. Truth was, it was damn near impossible to prove whether it was plausible or not, simply because there was no way of telling if the test subject was lying or in cahoots with someone on the research team. Using a truth agent or lie detector would be refused by the subject, of that he was certain, because it would interfere with their aura or other hocus pocus.

What surprised him above all others was that his colleague, a man he held in relatively high regard despite the man’s simple nature, would entertain a notion like this. The very idea was filled with the worst claptrap of all
—a man of science didn’t believe in such things. He believed in things he could touch, taste, smell, hear, or see. One couldn’t put another’s brain under a microscope and see their so called psychic ability any more than one could another’s faith.

Sitting there with his h
ands clasped, Emerson Forbes felt safe and secure in his knowledge that those… other worldly things simply don’t exist. By the time he put the folder back in Doug’s desk, he added a third category to his growing list. He also felt superior over his fellow doctor. This transgression he committed on Doug’s privacy was something he could never admit to, but he’d keep the knowledge he gained for a later date. One couldn’t have enough tools to do a job and, should Doug ever oppose him, he’d make the younger man look the fool. Leverage was the key to victory, and he now had plenty of it.