Conscientia Prime

"Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Unfortunately, someone heard Mr. Finnegan. That is why you must pack your things and come with me."

As the word ‘unfortunately’ resonated in her mind, Alessia felt a dark chasm form in the pit of her stomach that began to suck her heart in to its frozen depths. Minutes before, she had been in the deepest of sleeps, having drifted off to the sound of the rain melodically hammering on her window hours before, when the shrill clatter of her apartment buzzer had jolted her awake. She slowly lost focus on this anonymous man's face as she sat opposite him. Her eyes dropped to his indistinct black suit and tie. The sharp contrast between light and dark blurred. How ironic, she thought. Alessia's eyes fell to the ground. And just like a moonlight swimmer feeling something big brush against their legs, she quickly resigned herself to the most desperate of situations. Mr. Finnegan was still alive, but she knew that her old colleague, and dear friend, was on borrowed time. Just how much time was up to her.

This man sitting opposite Alessia skilfully stopped to let the implications of what he said sink in, but it didn't take long. He self-indulgently punctured the almost reverent silence; "Mr. Finnegan's funeral was supposed to be today. The poor man was fated to die in a tragic accident. A mad man taking his mad invention into low earth orbit in a very public gimmick. An endearing but cautionary tale for anyone thinking about setting their own schedule for historical moments. The thing about it is this: something came for him."

This time, he denied her the courtesy of a moment to think. He threw his hands up flippantly and glared at her. "But you're going to find him for us."

Alessia knew the capabilities of these people. Asking her to conspire to murder so blatantly was a testament to the control they had over the lives of ordinary people. Who would believe her if she told anyone anyway? She knew what they wanted her to do.

In 2028, Cal Finnegan was forced to resign from a classified government-funded feasibility study into faster-than-light communication. Cal had become mired in a dead end that he refused to give up on. He believed that he had developed a method of detecting the connection between entangled particles, but the results were sporadic. Despite the team's best efforts, the device couldn't be refined. Was something fundamental missing or were they fundamentally flawed? The study demanded results, and unfortunately for Cal, the latter was the conclusion the Department of Defence took. Cal resigned, and Alessia took the project in a radically different direction. After two years, her efforts were rewarded with a fully funded permanent research and development department. However, her achievement was tainted with the mark of Cain. As impatience grew towards Cal in his final months, she quickly stopped supporting him. She had worked too hard to isolate herself out of loyalty. As dissatisfaction quickly metastasised into contempt, Alessia saw an opportunity. On the day he was forced to resign, he was the last person to find out that his most trusted friend had sealed his fate days before. The look he gave her when he realised this permeated her thoughts with almost every aspect of her work.

In the years since, Cal's slow but private fall from the grace of the scientific community went supernova when he published a popular science book called Conscientia Prime. He posited that science is wrong to place consciousness at the peak of the evolution of the universe. Rather, consciousness leads to physics, which leads to chemistry, and so on. The book was popular with fringe culture and he became a B-list celebrity scientist. But to his former colleagues, he had sold his soul at the crossroads for some easy money and a morsel of recognition. Snake oil to the curiosity of the masses wrapped up in some fancy sounding words.

After his book, Alessia re-examined Cal's research, quietly. At first, she simply wanted to see how someone so gifted could go so far off course. But as time passed, she came to recognise a correlation no one else had seen. Cal's presence in every successful trial was the common factor that could not be replicated, and Cal would have known that for years. But it can’t be that. No one else knew, and his book was no secret; it had been out for years. By now, he was so thoroughly discredited that he could discover a unified theory of everything and no serious scientist would even consider it. Then again, it wouldn’t be unlike Cal to hide something under a veil of misdirection. But yet, here she is. Face to face with a man willing and capable of taking her life for an idea.

"Who took him? Where is he?" said Alessia.

"Now don't concern yourself with those details. They don't matter to you. All you need that pretty little head to worry about is making contact with him. Hell, you won't even have to think about what to say. You'll say what you're told to say." The man smiled in such a way that betrayed how satisfied he felt with patronising an astrophysicist.

"Even if I can communicate with him, I'll warn him that you're trying to kill him."

The man took a sharp intake of breath and exhaled. "Dr Maxwell, in that case, you'll live out the rest of your days regretting that you gave a dead man a few more hours. He's as good as dead and anyway, it hasn't stopped you betraying him before, has it? You’ll be doing him a mercy".

Alessia closed her eyes and tried to contain the cataclysm inside. Her colourful palate of emotions blended to create something dark and hideous. She felt scared and alone. She opened her eyes to the unnerving glare of piercing blue eyes back at her. This man was uncanny. His pale skin and perfect black hair made him so generic yet so striking. His demeanour was out of place. She couldn't tell if he was confident or simply revelling in the infliction of mental torture he clearly had a natural aptitude for.

"You see, Alessia, throughout history, countless individuals have convinced themselves that they will never compromise their most deeply held beliefs. Most die peacefully with that delusion, never having their mettle tested. But people are especially vulnerable at night. People succumb to malleability when they're outmanoeuvred at every step. Sooner or later, you've got them doing exactly what you want. You'd be surprised at how little you have to threaten people's lives to ensure cooperation. Some of my colleagues find that the whole rigmarole eventually becomes exhausting. They’re easily frustrated."

He slapped his hands off his knees and stood up. He walked over to the window and took in the cityscape for a few seconds. Alessia looked at the twinkle of the city lights and envied every other person at that moment. For the first time since she answered the door, she felt a momentary relief from his penetrating gaze. She glanced at her painting of the Cattle Raid of Cooley, a gift from Cal that she hung opposite the front door so anyone entering her apartment would be met with it. Is it crooked? thought Alessia. She glanced back at the floor. These men seemed to inexplicably know everything, but how could they know about this? The painting concealed a secret. Not the obvious safe behind it, but a memory strip on the back disguised as a label from the framer. She’d experienced the helplessness that accompanies these interactions before and worked on something that might balance the odds. The arrogance of total power is often its greatest weakness.

"But it's a craft," he said. "A beautiful art form. A gallery of the human condition. It’s exhilarating."  As he turned away and walked toward the door, without breaking stride, he said, "I'll be waiting in my car, it's at the front door. Bring a coat. It's wet out."

He let himself out. The gavel-like crack the door made snapped Alessia out of the last comfort she had. She was still in her apartment, and while they were talking, what came next hadn’t started. Until he left, her task was theoretical, but now she had been sentenced to total compliance. In five minutes, she would walk out of her front door and get into that car, and who knows what then? Strangely, she felt as if she deserved to feel like this. Having the person who killed his career then kill the man seemed cruelly preordained. As if her own fate had been wrested from her when she took his job and replaced with one where she was bound to live a life consumed by guilt, all the while destroying the lives of those close to her. Consideration of such mythical ideas was a guilty pleasure for a scientist, but she took her permission to think like this when Einstein voiced his opposition to evidence for the randomness of the quantum world as a simple feeling that something wasn’t right.

"The stars incline us, but they do not bind us," said Alessia. A mantra for all those who feel tied to an unwanted destiny.

She looked down to the street below and saw this unknown man getting into his car. The road glistened with street lights in a poor imitation of the now clear sky above. The smell of cold petrichor filled her nostrils. She remembered a time when her dad explained the smell to her as a child. His description of how "ichor" was ancient Greek for the golden fluid that flows through the veins of the immortals created something foundational in her. Although she never learned the language, Alessia was never disappointed with unremarkable words harbouring so much meaning in plain sight. She ran over to the painting. It had been moved. Of course it had. But he missed it. The memory strip was still there. The probability of Cal’s death just dropped from certain to likely, but now there was a chance.

She felt herself strengthen as she came to be fully awake. The warm embrace of adrenaline consumed the cool dread. She didn’t know why they wanted Cal dead, but among the brewing sea of confusion in her mind, one guiding light broke through the squall. They couldn’t do this without her. Alessia got dressed. Rarely are people afforded the chance to redeem themselves so completely. She left her light on to buy time and took the stairs to the ground floor. She walked out the back door to the apartment block and ran.