Project Ultra

By James White

In 1947, just after the end of the second World War, the Central Intelligence Agency began a search for, and counter to, the then-perceived Soviet menace of psychic warfare. The belief was that the Soviets had gained strategic advantage over the U.S. intelligence services by employing psychics in what was known as “remote viewing,” the ability of the psychic to accurately describe events distantly removed from him.

My name is Victor Williams. In 1947 I was read into the National Secret Services Act and enrolled in the project to recruit, test, and train our own psychic warriors.

What happened next changed everything...

• Language: English
• Publisher: James White
• Release date: Mar 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458051127

James White

Dr. James White is Professor of Plant Biology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Dr. White obtained the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Botany and Plant Pathology/Mycology from Auburn University, Alabama, and the Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Texas, Austin in 1987. Dr. White specializes in symbiosis research, particularly endophytic microbes. He is the author of more than 400 articles, and author and editor of reference books on the biology, taxonomy, and phylogeny of microbial endophytes, including Biotechnology of Acremonium Endophytes of Grasses (1994), Microbial Endophytes (2000), The Clavicipitalean Fungi (2004), The Fungal Community: Its Organization and Role in the Ecosystem (2005; 2016), Defensive Mutualism in Microbial Symbiosis (2009) and Seed Endophytes: Biology and Biotechnology (2019). He and students in his lab are exploring diversity of endophytic and biostimulant microbes and the various impacts that they have on host plants.

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by

James Michael White

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2005

James Michael White

Cover art lines hold the memories

Copyright © 2011

by Silvia Pelissero

a.k.a. agnes-cecile

www.agnes-cecile.deviantart.com

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NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

:: 1 ::

Through the pain I have these moments of lucidity. They come and go like roiling sediment disturbed from the bottom of a bottle of fine wine. Sometimes I think I'm dreaming. Sometimes I don't know which of my moments are dreams, which are real, and which are memory.

Eyes open, I see a white room, and beyond its one window, snow falling on trees. There are doctors and nurses and medical machines plugged into me all over, and a sense of urgency among them, these machines pumping life into my failing body, in even all these people working so hard that they may hear me speak, may catch what flows from the bottle broken in ways they find so hard to fix.

Within me resides the secret.

When I go, it goes.

They will not allow it.

Eyes closed, I see my past stretching before me in its vast and sweeping ruin, all the momentary ambitions and self-destructions composing who I think I was. I even see the markers of what these people hovering over me want, like beacons of significance and meaning amid the vaster uncertainties of a chronically misdirected life.

Among them I see Oscar … poor Oscar … they tell me he's gone. They tell me these things in what they say are my lucid moments. They think saying these things will make me speak.

But I know what they did to him.

I know how I helped them along.

So I also know what they say is wrong.

If he were gone I would feel it.

I know what they mean when they say he's gone.

It isn't what he wanted.

It isn't even what I wanted.

What I wanted is underway. What he wanted will come to pass. Until then they have him just the way they've always had him. So in my lucid moments in this place I remember … I know I remember and that what I remember is precisely that, a memory and not a dream. I remember because I think there's a way out for Oscar. Even as I remain in this enormous and empty place, its only patient tended by doctors who ply me with questions while working to keep the life in, I want to believe that by remembering him I can help him.

You see, there are moments when he does not exist.

:: 2 ::

In 1947, just after the end of the second World War, a newly-formed agency of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, known as the Central Intelligence Agency, began a search for, and counter to, the then-perceived Soviet menace of psychic warfare, something they called Project Stargazer. The belief was that the Soviets had gained strategic advantage over U.S. intelligence services by employing psychics in what was known as remote viewing, which is where the psychic viewer accurately describes actions, events, scenery, even conversations from places distantly removed, often doing so over, say, a multitude of kilometers though the viewer sits in a locked room in a controlled environment and the scene described may be those multitude of kilometers away. Often the scene is not merely distant, but a place the viewer has never been. Whether the Soviets were actually successful or not was never determined, but we believed, at the time, that they had been.

My name is Victor Williams. In 1947 I was read into the National Secret Services Act and enrolled in the project to recruit, test, and train our own top secret cadre of psychic spies.

They chose me because psychic research was, quite apart from my academic and professional work in psychology, my genuine area of expertise.

Until I met Oscar Stingel, I had never encountered any reason to believe in psychic phenomena.

:: 3 ::

How's he doing that?

He's tricky.

I was watching these guys play Xo, even though I wasn't really familiar with the game (except I knew it was Greek, and that the Pythagoreans enjoyed it as a means of mental discipline), and one of them was a tall, thin fellow, weather-haggard, a sheep herder visiting from up north, the Frissians, someone said, and the other guy, the expert here and the big draw, was much younger, maybe in his early twenties, a bit round around the middle, scalp already showing through thinning brown hair. Both of them sat bent over the little gameboard on this street corner where the sunshine beamed warm and bright, the shade cold and dim, and there was this little group of us gathered round to see, all elbows and fingers holding cups of steaming coffee while the remnants of war groaned around us, U.S. olive drab Army jeeps and the few allied uniforms. But most days were like this. A shattered country and a defeated people reaching up from the darkness and ruin for such moments. For games.

The game goes like this:

One guy puts his pieces down, they're little gleaming beads of glass with shapes on one side, blank faces on the other, on a gameboard — here a piece of blue and white checked cloth spread over their little table where they'd already spilt dashes of coffee and tea and pretzel crumbs, those big doughy ones they seemed to like so much over here — and he can arrange them however he wants along the vertices of those blue and white intersections so long as he makes the required three by eight array. The other guy does that, too. Now the tricky part: see, those beads, on the underside, are either Xs or Os. Players take turns guessing what's what on their opponent's front rank till they get one right. Whoever guesses right then gets to advance one of his own front-rank beads toward his opponent's array while meanwhile his opponent has to expose the rightly-guessed bead, and the right-guesser gets to take another guess, but this time he's informed by the newly exposed bead: there must be a like one, and only one, adjacent to it either horizontally or vertically. This is known as the adjacency rule. So if the guesser keeps guessing correctly all the way through the ranks of his opponent, he wins. Ah, but if he guesses wrong, not only does he lose his turn, he loses his advanced bead. The object here is to advance one of your beads to your opponent's final rank or finally expose his entire pattern of arrangement. Theoretically, what begins as a guessing game becomes one of pattern discernment once more and more of the array is revealed.

But this guy, this brown-haired guy with the big half-eaten pretzel at one elbow, the steaming cup of tea at the other, the blue eyes gazing at the game, he hadn't moved