Free Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 by Penny Publications

breakfast, cross-legged, he sat facing away from Jimmy. Now relatively adept with the technology, Jimmy placed his palm on the screen, waited till a green image of his palm glowed beneath his hand, then dragged his hand to spin the image, stopping when he reached the view from the opposite side of the room. Shuteyed, the prisoner's head dipped lower with each moment. Now was the time to work with him. Unhurried, Jimmy pulled the wheeled chair before the screen.
    The passageway pulsed with his heartbeat. Each beat moved him closer to the man at the other end. He saw him at rest, chin on chest.
I know you,
he told that still figure.
Your secrets require your silence. Your silence is your integrity. I understand.
    You want to do what's right.
    The head came up. Small lights appeared in the face: the wetness of the man's eyes. They returned Jimmy's gaze, and it made him halt. He felt the words slip from his mouth and hands and clatter along the passageway like dropped tools.
    Jimmy blinked. There sat the prisoner, head down, unchanged.
    Jimmy struggled to move his tongue. Desperately thirsty, he drank all of one water bottle, wishing he had ice, feeling the start of a headache.
    Seeing himself as if from behind, he thought,
You are patient and open. You listen before you judge. You want only to help.
    He had, it seemed, failed to control his imagination and, again, slipped. He would note this failure, reflect on it, rest, and, in the afternoon, try again

.
12. Spooky
    Lt. Col. Oblonski oversaw the program for "sensitives." Though a military man, he seemed to Jimmy like the sort who, when he left the service, would never look back. Built of sudden gestures, quick pivots on his heel, and abrupt shifts in volume, Oblonski gave the impression of an ill-contained elemental force. Not the type of soldier to be in charge of a unit—but it was understood that these were desperate times, that the lines had been redrawn, that the enemy was less visible than ever.
    They assembled each day in a large shed beyond the base's airfield. All that long winter, this meant humping through thick snow beyond all cleared walkways. Space heaters, their power cords snaking every which way, cluttered the classroom and training rooms like puzzled witnesses. The desks might have been a practical joke, relics from forty years back, each with the wooden top that swung up from beside the nubbly, colorful plastic chair. Discards from decent schools. Most of the team said the symbolism was intentional, that all of them, despite what they'd been told, were castoffs, removed to a marginal space, ignored by the rest of the base.
    Oblonski passed around an article on "spooky action at a distance." The piece was written for a general audience, making even the wilder speculations of physicists appear within everyone's mental grasp. Jimmy took away from it that paired particles could influence each other no matter their separation across time or space. It made him think of twins. And since time was only another dimension, it made him think, too, of whether your future self might tug you in its direction, ensuring your destiny.
    "You see?" said Oblonski. "The universe is wired this way. Quantum entanglement. Everything's connected."
    Lt. Connors, at around forty the oldest woman in the group, said, "Are you suggesting that our 'special abilities,' " she threw up lazy air quotes, "are operating at the
quantum
level?"
    "Isn't everything we do operating at the quantum level? Aren't we all just quantum events, circumstances, and accidents at the most minute level all operating together to make a unified being?" When Oblonski got worked up, as he often did, he walked among them and got in their faces. "How do so many disparate cells and chemicals and pathways operate together? Our consciousness creates probabilities out of nothingness. Across numerous unseen dimensions that fold regular space! This," he shouted, slapping his palms to his chest, "is all on the surface.