Free Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles by Ted Dekker

data . . . I don’t know what to call it. I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for everything I experienced, even if none of it fits the existing models. Neither did quantum mechanics until a few decades ago.”
    “So what are you trying to do, build a new model?” I asked.
    “No, I’m trying to find Outlaw again. He, whatever he represents, is the key to understanding all of this. I’m convinced of that. Both times I encountered him were in that altered state, and both times my mental experiences had physical ramifications. Don’t you see? What happens in that substrate of reality directly affects everything else, including the physical realm that seems bound by Newtonian laws. What if we can get outside of the natural laws that we think constrain us?”
    I crossed my arms over my chest. “Austin, it sounds—”
    “Crazy, right? But think of it this way: what if the brain is nothing more than a biological computer, the physical tissue inside your skull, along with the hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses that connect them—it’s all hardware. Without data inputs, the hardware has nothing to process so it doesn’t generate any output. For us, data is received through various phenomena: sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Without an operating system to translate the data and make sense of it, there would be no output—no perception, no self-awareness, no sensation. Our observation of the phenomena creates it.
    “It’s fundamental quantum physics. Werner Heisenberg’s theories in 1925 laid the groundwork for the observer principle. The universe is comprised of energy that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, existing only as pure and infinite potential until it’s observed. It’s the act of observation that instantly organizes the potentiality into a specific, measurable actuality. Into matter.”
    “Mind over matter?”
    “Not mind over matter, mind as matter. Science has proven that matter is nothing more than organized energy. The solidity of matter is an illusion, a universal sleight of hand. The universe is mostly empty space and dark matter. We simply perceive it a certain way. And, if we know how, we can go beyond the firewall that nature gave us. What if you could strip reality down to its source code?”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    “People used to say the same about Einstein’s ideas and Galileo’s and Friedrich Miescher’s—the scientist who figured out DNA. We don’t know why the universe works in unsuspected ways, but it does, all the way down to the quantum level, to the level of thought and observation. All I’m doing is hacking the software that keeps me from seeing it. And it’s working.”
    I stood silent.
    “I’m just scratching the surface,” he said. “I’m convinced my theory explains the case studies I’ve read. The neurologist, the Indian woman with cancer, and the others I’ve researched—they all accessed a layer of human consciousness that’s just beyond our awareness. Likely the same one I caught a glimpse of during my stroke. That’s what my subconscious was telling me.”
    “Outlaw.”
    “Yes.”
    I spoke slowly, trying to get a grip on this. “You’re hacking into consciousness, and you think this Outlaw guy—whoever or whatever he is—is like a muse in your subconscious that can help you. And by hacking your brain, you can see past this reality”—I swept my hands wide, indicating everything around us—“to an underlying, more real layer of reality.”
    “Not just see past it, but change it.”
    “Change reality?”
    “At the cellular—at the atomic —level. I think so, yes.” He paused for a moment and I could practically hear his thoughts buzzing in his skull like a hive of bees. Then he looked at me and a smile formed.
    “It’s hard to swallow,” I said, but he acted as if he didn’t hear me.
    “You should help me,” he said, voicing what was obviously a new thought, a revelation. “If you saw