Mindspace: When Your Mind Has No Limits, Your Biggest Danger Is Yourself

By Robert Fobian

The mind is a powerful tool, capable of wonders which until quite recently, were considered supernatural. In the late 2040s, the world has given rise to a new generation of people with a range of extrasensory abilities. In an effort to study and understand these a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Fobian
• Release date: May 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869251794

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A person standing in a forest with a glowing circle in the middle Description automatically generated

Copyright © 2024 by

Robert Fobian

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-962905-47-3

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Book Marketeers.com

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 OCTOBER 19TH, 2049

CHAPTER 2 THE PSYCHIC WORLD

CHAPTER 3 DISCOVERY

CHAPTER 4 THE REVEAL

CHAPTER 5 ALL EYES ON JAY

CHAPTER 6 THE ONE AND ONLY

CHAPTER 7 THE NEW LIFE. SEPT 24TH, 2061

CHAPTER 8 FAMILY ABOVE ALL

CHAPTER 9 DANGEROUS MINDS

CHAPTER 10 THE VOICE WITHIN

CHAPTER 11 THE CODE

CHAPTER 12 PHOBOS AND DEIMOS

CHAPTER 13 A LIFE RENEWED

EPILOGUE – DECEMBER 17TH, 2066.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

INTRODUCTION

The power of the mind is an incredible force that shapes our thoughts, actions, and ultimately, our reality. In our effort to understand how the human brain works, we have delved into science and discovered that people have innate senses that we never understood until now. This exploration of science has brought about many new fields of study around psychic intuition and a variety of abilities of a new realm, known as Psionics. Psychic phenomena can now be identified and evaluated, and we have discovered many among us who have a variety of abilities which until quite recently, were considered supernatural.

In the latter part of the 2040s, the world has gone through many changes. Government regimes in the world have fallen, and others have risen, all to try to control the resources of the planet. The population has grown to over 10 billion people, and supply chain and logistics around the acquisition of food, tools, and daily needs and amenities have impacted larger cities. The crime rates in most of the large cities, above 5 million people, have steadily increased over the last decade. In an effort to relieve the overcrowded cities, more people have moved toward smaller towns and their population, subsequently, has begun to grow. Many new cities have risen and given way to new challenges involving the provision of needs necessary to support divested communities. Crime has been much more difficult to control, and the armed forces have been engaged to assist in large-scale surveillance and operations, supporting all offices of law enforcement. Technological advancements have assisted the criminal empires to thrive, by providing the means necessary to disrupt and control communities, all the while providing the clandestine leadership core the ability to stay hiding and prosper, divided among the population.

The government of the United States has been able to mandate that every citizen is tracked, at least by location, in every aspect of their lives while they are among the populous. Computer systems exist in every home, and each citizen is required to be on the internet in some way, with a limit to the time between being connected by any of the multitudes of systems in use.

In the 2030s, a series of cyberattacks on multiple government-controlled systems caused a colossal failure in the security infrastructure and the information stores in a vast number of protected systems. Hacking of shared data and systems brought the internet at large to the point of being dangerously corrupted, and integrated systems failed on a global scale. In an effort to develop new ways to protect data, the government had to revamp how security was controlled, and the rise of new highly advanced systems gave the government back control of the information vital to daily operation, but crime was at an all-time high, and the general public had very little means by which to protect themselves and their important information from those who would wish to corrupt.

Along with these challenges, over the last couple of decades, humanity has seen the rise of people who are psychically gifted and have elevated extrasensory awareness. Those people provide the means by which to present the greatest risk to those who commit crimes, as it becomes much more difficult to hide. Conversely, by their individual choice, these people can also provide protection to those criminal elements and are able to use their extrasensory abilities in ways that disrupt the endeavor to maintain security and safety. In every million people in the world, on average, there emerges one who possesses these types of extrasensory abilities and can utilize them to a degree that no one else can even detect, let alone control. Then, among many billions of people, one will emerge who raises the bar completely and who possesses a mind so powerful to find oneself in a position to either help society profoundly or profusely damage it, depending upon the force of will. A new force of good or evil can be born from such a being. The duality of man has never seen the striking juxtaposition it sees today. Necessitated by these profound complexities, the O.S.I., or Office of Special Investigations was formed, whose sole charge is to bring about the connection between systemic automation and human intuition to provide security and safety to all people. These special agents of this remarkable group bring order to the chaos. Out of this sequence of events, emerges a mind so powerful that it becomes its own adversary in the struggle to control itself…

CHAPTER 1

OCTOBER 19TH, 2049

Hey

Hey, Jay, you with me? Allie said as she waved her hand in front of Jay’s face. They were both sitting on a park bench at Dougherty Park, about 3 blocks from Jay’s house. It was starting to get dark.

Oh, sorry, I was daydreaming. I’ve got so much going on; it’s hard to remember everything all at once. Jay answers.

Oh-kay, well, some of us are heading down to the holoplex to watch the games. You wanna come? she says.

No thanks. I’ve got a big test coming up this week and I have to make sure and study for it, which is a bit ironic because it’s about thinking and memory, Jay says. Ah, Psionics. I had Leary last year for that. Allie told him. Yeah, that’s who I’ve got, Professor Leary. This test is kickin’ my ass. I mean, I don’t get it. We’re all supposed to have these abilities, but I’m not sure they work the way people think they do. Jay said. Well, I heard that Professor Leary is pretty good with it and can even move things around with his mind, so you might want to pay attention. I mean, you never know; you might need it someday. Which test you got? Allie asked. Defense. It’s my second time through, too. He paused and drooped his head. The first time, I had so much going on in my head that I wasn’t able to concentrate. In fact, I think my mother thinks I have ADD or something. How can they know what people are thinking? I think it’s guesswork. He said, Oh, it works. There’s no doubt about it. Allie came back sharply. The subject seems to excite her. Yeah, how many fingers am I holding behind my back? Jay asked her. Well, it… She started to answer, I know, I know, you’re going to say, ‘That’s not how it works’, right? That’s what they always say. I think they talk about this so much that it makes people imagine things. Jay tells her. Well, that’s not exactly what I was going to say. What I was going to say before you so rudely interrupted me was that all your fingers are behind your back, just not all open, she said with a laugh. Oh, that’s funny, smartass, Jay replied to her. Seriously though, I’ve had many times in my life when I think somebody is about to say something, and they do. I mean, these are, like, really specific things. She confided in him. Yeah, ok. He’s not a believer yet. Well, I gotta run…are you sure you don’t wanna come? She hopped up from the bench. No, I can’t fail this again. I need to figure out what’s the trick to passing. Jay was testing out of senior, meaning he was going through evaluation tests, a requirement for graduation.

Allison Riley has been Jay’s best friend since he was 5. She’s nerdy and a bit awkward herself, so it naturally seemed to feed into his difficulty communicating with others. Through the years, they have matured together and learned to communicate even their most difficult experiences to each other. Many times, Jay found that Allie was the only one who understood him, and that thought brought him comfort. At least he had somebody he could talk to. Allie lived with her mother as well. Her father had been out of the picture since she was very little, but she had a very close relationship with her mother. Her mother, Irene, was a nurse at the local hospital and worked most days, so Allie spent most evenings either with her or with Jay at the park. Allie is a spitting image of her mother. Irene is tall and slender. She always tried to keep up with the hip crowd and wore clothes that belied her age. She loved Jay and always prodded Allie to get a real relationship going with him, but Allie seemed to always be satisfied, as Jay was, with how they related to each other. Close, yet distant, just like they both liked.

Allie lived about a block away, and sometimes she and Jay met after school and walked home together. Many people seem to think they are in a relationship, but at least so far, it’s just been a friendship based on a common understanding of each other’s personalities. Who’s playing? Jay asked. It’s the finals of the ZCombat tournament. Texas Nova vs. New York Rails. E-games became the biggest attraction when holographic VR hit full stride back in the 2030s, and many of the holoplex theaters host their tournaments. ZCombat is the most popular of these games and tournaments. It’s a hyper-realistic first-person combat simulation in a holographic environment, which plays like an immersive virtual reality war. Physical sports have taken a back seat to the virtual world. Each person in a holoplex theater has their own set of glasses, which look very similar to sunglasses with a slightly purple hue. When the glasses are put on, each person can see their own perspective of the hologram in front of them from the player’s point of view, as if they are seeing through their eyes. The entire environment is very immersive and makes the participants feel like they are really getting shot at. Sports like football, basketball and soccer are still around, but they are just not as popular with the younger crowd as they used to be. Overwhelmingly, the games are watched mostly by that ever-important 21-30 age group. Both Allie and Jay have an application on their watches called UMLO->, which allows the user to have a social group based on levels and, of course, Allie is the highest level. He could even look up what she had for breakfast if he wanted to. She’s never far away.

Jeshua Allen Morgan was adopted when he was 5 years old from a foster home. Ever since he was a young child, he never liked his name, so he went simply by Jay. He was never told much about his original family, except that they were killed in a car accident when he was much younger. He does remember having been in a hospital as a small child. The male side of his adopted family is a group of blue-collar workers with backgrounds in physical trades and who show little understanding or interest in the sciences. He never really has any meaningful conversations about his passions or dreams with most of his adopted family. His father is a welder and his brother, Jay’s adopted uncle, is a bricklayer. It’s surprising to Jay that bricklaying is still a thing, but in the last 10 years, there has been a boom of building houses in the traditional style of brick. Many of the most expensive homes are built, at least in part, with stone and brick. Industrial trades have been on the rise, with an increase in population, there is always demand for new buildings to provide housing. Bricklayers have been known to make quite a bit of money as well, so it’s highly sought after. Jay keeps a low profile and prefers to be on his own for the most part, often engaged in thought. He’s known to be highly intelligent. While Jay excels in most of his classes, he has a difficult time relating to people, although not really due to ability or intelligence, but more due to unwillingness to apply his attention and stay engaged. Lately, he’s been bothered by a distracting mess of random thoughts. He likens the experience to having Mental Tourette’s Syndrome. Jay has plans after high school for the U.S. Space Force and becoming an investigator. They have a program in which a candidate can get his college training paid for.

All his life, at least the part he can remember anyway, he has had desires to understand the world around him. He was always inquisitive. He works with complex systems in his room that most people don’t understand. He has a passion for information technology, which will serve as a backup career plan, but it’s not his primary focus. He lives in a modest house (brick, of course) right at the corner of Locust and 5th. It’s a two-story house built back in the 2020s. In the morning before his test day, he gets up, ready to go to school, which he hates to do. Hey, Mom! He says. Hi, honey. She turns around and stares at him as he walks by and grabs some chips. So? She asks. So, what? Jay says, shoving a chip in his mouth. Well, how are you feeling, of course? You told me you were having fits when you went to bed yesterday. I just want to know if you’re feeling alright? She asked. OK, well this was weird because while he remembers feeling very strange before he went to the room for the evening, he didn’t even remember the conversation or telling her about his issues at all. Oh, I’m OK; I think I’m just a bit stressed about this test in Psi. I want to go to college and to get in the Space Force, I’ll have to score 85 percent on the ASVAB. And, on top of that I must get as close to straight A’s as possible to get placed in Electronics. Jay explains. What’s an ASVAB? She asked, confused. Oh, that’s the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery. It’s the standard test to get in the military. Jay says.

Electronics, as it relates to the Psionic fields, is a must-have for anyone interested in being an investigator. Using the tools that make it possible for him to identify and evaluate people who are psionically gifted will be necessary to being effective. He always wanted to be an investigator. He always felt a pull to do it, as he felt that he had a great understanding of people and how the world works. He studied the law in his spare time, knowing one day he would need to know it like the back of his hand. He had a path in mind, and he knew he would one day achieve it. He just had to get past this damn test. The area in which he always seemed to have problems was defense. In any field related to psionics, you need to have the ability to control your own mind first. Being able to shape your thoughts and keep psychic-endowed people from detecting your thoughts was to discipline your mind to keep you from betraying yourself. The testing is rated based on the ability to read your thoughts and determine secret information you may have in your mind. Jay is 18 years old, and he is testing at senior level this week, and has a few written tests to get past, along with the psionics test, which consists of overall knowledge of mental energy and how it relates to quantum physics, and lastly, the test in which they measure abilities and provide a final rating.

CHAPTER 2

THE PSYCHIC WORLD

In the late 2030s, more and more cases of psychic phenomena were reported in the population. These phenomena have brought about many changes in intelligence, with the latest being the ability to sense things outside of the touch, feel, and sight of our existence, or simply put, Extra-sensory perception, or ESP for short. In 2033, a young boy in India was said to be able to move things with his mind, and they were able to measure the force being applied upon objects in his surroundings. Reports of psychic powers of all kinds grew over the years, and today, it’s a well-known fact of life that nearly everyone is supposed to possess some type of ability like this. This field of study is known as Psionics. Psionics first came into American science fiction in the 1950s and ‘60s. Psionics was a proposed discipline that applied principles of engineering (especially electronics) to the study (and employment) of paranormal or psychic phenomena, such as ESP and psychokinesis, or more popularly called telekinesis.

In the late 2040s, advancements in research proved that actual measurements of this scientific realm could be made. Electronics is a whole new field from what it used to be. There are elements of electronics that cross the boundaries between what was earlier even thought to be possible. Reality and fiction are harder to separate now. This is Jay’s primary focus. He wants to become an investigator. Due to the rise in psychic abilities and the popular affinity to utilize these talents for a variety of daily applications in the general populous, there has become a need for people to be able to understand and control the process to a degree. As in any social environment, there are good people and bad people, but left to their own devices and having talents involving psychic abilities, the allowance for people to empower corruption has grown.

Investigators are the hunters that find people who have committed crimes of a variety of types and directly track them down for the government. It’s a new promising field and one for which Jay feels he is perfectly suited. He has always had the ability to know when someone has a strong presence as he calls it. Presence is described as having a psychic gift, understanding it, and applying it in some way. All these factors add up to their psionic score. People having psychic abilities can help or hurt society in general, depending upon whether there are checks and balances in place. The general populace is sorted out as approximately 70 percent of people who have no idea what their particular presence is or how they use their abilities at all. About 20 percent of people show a much larger presence but aren’t really in control of it. Most people describe it as a mild sense of intuition that keeps them out of trouble or some type of understanding of things they really have no explainable reason to know about. There are approximately 8 percent of all people that have a strong presence and use it properly. These are the dangerous ones. Statistically speaking, most crimes committed by people who have a strong presence are in this range. Then there’s the 2 percent. Strangely enough, people in the 2 percent are rarely heard from. They have a strong presence; they understand it and use it very effectively. The abilities to predict events based on some type of ultra-sensitivity to their surroundings or moving objects psychokinetically fall into these brackets, but the normal curve seems to indicate that these people avoid fame and tend to use their abilities for their own purposes, whatever those may be. Many people who are the most endowed with psychic powers never learn to use them properly at all. Now, it may be that the 8 percent are the most representative of the psychic criminal populace, because they just don’t have the mastery necessary to fully control what they can do, but they do it anyway. Understanding the top 2 percent of people in the world, who accordingly rate a psionic score of 98 or better, is a very difficult endeavor since the people that have this level are always seen to have genius-level intelligence and a well-developed wisdom to go along with it. They are not normally involved in any type of criminal activity, supposedly because they know better. Jeshua Morgan has never been measured yet, or at least successfully. Something seems to go wrong whenever they have tried in the past, causing some delays, particularly where Jay’s career aspirations are concerned.

See ya later, Mom. Jay says as he walks out the front door. What time will you be home? She asks. Well, I guess it depends if I actually pass this time! he says. She responded, OK good luck! Jay makes the trip to school, walking a mile and a half. The Winter weather is cold but not too bad. The sun is shining and it’s looking like a good day for more than one reason, Jay hopes.

When Jay was a young child, he was diagnosed with Acute dissociative disorder. Through the years, as more understanding of his condition developed, he became more sociable as people warmed up to him and treated him with care. He displayed a social awkwardness to nearly everyone, including his own adopted parents. The only exception to this behavior was when he spoke with his adopted mother, Kathleen Morgan, alone. To her friends and family, she went by Kathy. He seemed like a different person when he spoke to her. It seemed Kathy was the only one who could really relate to him, at least within his small family. She had come from a rough childhood herself, and she related to some of Jay’s difficulties. To everyone else, he seemed cold and distant, but there was always a strange observant nature to how he communicated with others. It was almost like a snide attitude toward them, accompanied by a sense that he knows what he’s going to say before you ask a question. It almost seemed like he guided the conversation, all the while staring into somebody’s eyes in a way that just seemed uncomfortable to watch. The reactions to Jay always made him wonder what the big deal was. To Jay, he seemed like any other kid, if not one that’s remarkably brilliant. He had been homeschooled since he was 8, so he had not had exposure to social environments like others did, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He liked to be alone, which he repeated enough for it to be his mantra. In fact, most of the family would frequently finish his sentences with And I prefer to be alone. In fact, Jay had very few friends at all, but it’s fair to say that among his friends, Allie knew Jay better than any person on the planet, parents included, because she really opened up to Jay, unlike any other person. It always felt like he was talking to himself in a sense.

There were times when Jay would seem darker than other times. There was a certain disdain for how he communicated with some people. There was something in his eyes that always betrayed that. You always knew how you stood with Jay because he wasn’t shy about silently conveying it. Each day, while others, including Allie went to school, Jay stayed home. In fact, Jay rarely went outside at all. Only when forced would he choose to do so, and when he was forced, particularly by his parents, he usually acted in a way that made it