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What we are, what we have, didn’t all come from Jess and I. We did a lot of work, a hell of a lot, but we had a lot of help along the way. You, mom, James and Maggie were more of that help than you probably know. There’s also another friend who’s been instrumental in helping us get here too. It’s that guy, Terence Debney, who called me up that Friday. You’ve met Debney. I know you think you haven’t but you have.
We took advantage of Debney’s interest and he flew us back to New York late that same Friday night. Jess was scared by how much the events in New York had affected me. She didn’t fully understand because she hadn’t been there but her career in medicine tuned her in to the way loneliness amplifies pain and suffering. Jess could imagine feeling responsible to an extent; she was trying to have faith in how I felt and some sense of doing the rightest thing we could in helping Mike. He’d survived the surgery to reconstruct his face but he was still intubated and unconscious. The hospital told me that they’d yet to find or hear from next of kin.
We had brunch with Debney at Interlekt on the stylish and pretty roof garden. A wonderful selection of flowers, veg and fruit trees screened the garden and turned it into an oasis. Debney was the one who had spoken about reality. He was over retirement age, maybe even 70. He was immaculate in his presentation, soft and measured in his speech. His manner was professional and direct. He wore a perfectly fitted charcoal suit, black Oxfords polished to a sparkle, a white pin line shirt and dark blue tie. His slim, gold wedding ring was his only jewellery. His hair was thinning but generous for his age, swept back. It was a warm, still day and we enjoyed the delicious food and a delightful Pouilly Fumé together as we exchanged pleasantries and some backstory.
Debney had been in the VC world for years, having started out in the Treasury then the investment banking sector with a few of the big names. Interlekt was one of several VC operations that each pursued different strategies and were separated from each other for resilience. After we’d finished eating, he switched in manner and told me that he “valued candour”. To demonstrate, he came straight to the point.
“If you believe your system has value,” he said, “and delivers competitive advantage then one must question your willingness to sell it to anyone else. You seek a quid pro quo to get insight, training, investment from those in finance. An obvious risk is that you become like them, or your view changes and you lose whatever seems to be working for you. If you got this far on your own, why do you need others? There are other instruments and products that you could use and access, if you knew about them. That could expand the way you express your ideas and test your hypotheses. What I propose is not what you have told yourself you want. Where it can lead to may be much more than you imagined or it may prove that your system doesn’t have what it takes, and by inference, maybe you yourself. Whatever ‘it’ actually is. Or rather, whatever you tell yourself ‘it’ is. There may not be an ‘it’.” Jess and I sat quietly, having agreed to let him do the talking. “Interlekt isn’t looking to take on a trainee. But I am interested in exploring what you are and how you think. That’s the shortest way of putting it. I’ve looked through your proposal and what you were prepared to share of your system. I suggest that, for the next year, you do everything you’ve been doing in Santa Barbara just as you have been, but we help you become more efficient through automation, information and mentoring. That will give you time to focus on scenarios and ideas. The ‘how’ doesn’t matter. It’s the sense and expression of ‘what’ that matters most. Vision and ideas are the underlying capital. There is no money from me; you invest at your own risk as you have been.”
“And what happens at the end of the year?” asked Jess.
“We’ll be having brunch again somewhere and we’ll share our thoughts and feelings. I have no idea beyond that. Maybe we will come to an agreement or maybe we will part company. Who knows? Remember, it’s vision and ideas that are the true capital. That includes the vision you both have for your future.”
When we saw Mike in the hospital that night, Jess’s support became unshakeable and fear turned into shared commitment to help him. She went over his records and attached herself as a reviewing physician, then started making enquiries at home for a specialist or two. Mike would need a place to stay when he was eventually discharged and as far as we knew, he had no ties. He was in for another week after he came around and Jess convinced him to come and spend some time with us to recover. We knew we were taking a strange gamble with him, given that we knew next to nothing about him, but we had faith that something good would come out of it somehow. But the night before his planned discharge, Mike simply walked out of the hospital and we never saw him again. His attacker went free and we were left with a medical bill for $25,000. We were both shocked by his rejection of us, and then I began to feel like a fool to my own emotions. That became shame in front of Jess for having railroaded her into supporting my costly decision. I kept apologising as though that would change anything but Jess just said, “We made a choice to help someone unconditionally and without their input. We can’t worry about how or why Mike reacted like that, especially given his already fragile emotional state. We helped someone and that’s good enough. Let’s just keep moving forwards.” It was all that needed to be said.
Debney’s offer came through although there was not that much to it: instructions for setting up a financial firm that was solely mine, a schedule of services available from Debney and a timetable for mentoring with various parties. Although I didn’t know it, that’s how my recruitment into the program began.
Morton’s pain had dissipated and with it the crushing fear. The sense of fire had withdrawn and left them free in the void of a blank mindspace Frame. Scott squeezed his father’s hand, feeling the dry, smooth, almost plasticky skin. Within mindspace the tincture’s effects began to open a view of the fractal hints of pattern and endless order in soft, multicolour patterns. Morton’s sense was placid and quiet.
“Where are we now? Is this death?”
“This isn’t death, we’re alive. Death is more than this. We’re lying on the bed and our minds are sharing something called mindspace. Think of it as a shared meditation. Do you feel pain?”
“No. I feel nothing. I feel calm.”
“This is a place for you to rest and for us to talk without pain. I have more stories to tell you, if you want to hear them?”
“Yes, I’m listening. It was like you were singing a song. Go on.”
The first month I learned how to map out my system so it could be turned into computer code via Debney. That gave me a tool that tracked each investment scenario’s constituent part - bonds, stocks, funds, commodities, whatever - and a tool to build a new scenario that was like a simulator. This got me into coding in an easy way and on my terms and in my context, although the principles weren’t too far removed from my engineering mindset anyway. This was back in ‘92 and computing was clunkier then. I spent Thursday afternoons and nights on the portfolio, ideas and research. I wasn’t chasing stocks much, I was working on a longer timeframe. I had sessions with different mentors who took me through mixed topics, tools and financial products to widen my view of ways I could express myself in the markets. What they didn’t do was hammer economic doctrine down my throat. Harold told me that “economics isn’t right”. He pointed out that economists have almost zero meaningful predictive power on a consistent basis and what they’re trying to do is by definition almost impossible. How can someone build a model that encapsulates the sum total of all human activity, taking into account what the economist doesn’t know? It can’t be done. If an economist can’t model the degree of corruption, irrationality, insider behaviour, market rigging and so on, then how is he accounting for the power of those forces? And where do market black swans come from? Appreciating different ideas and views is one thing. Being wedded to an economic doctrine is something else.
I decided to do something different and instead of putting more money into markets I backed us directly. Or rather, backed Jess. That’s how our second practise in Oxnard started. I just turned all my analysis onto that problem and we started working together on it. Oxnard was densely populated, with farming and oil industry. Jess knew that a lot of medical cost could be brought down depending on how it was done. Testing prices were a hell of a lot lower than were charged to the insurance firms and the patient. There was huge room for price competition there. We figured that there was a market for responsible, affordable general practise and health monitoring of workers. That was local investment that we controlled directly, so we expanded her business. You remember how much she thrived on that challenge and it’s a testament to her that the team she built up stayed together and are friends after all this time.
Looking back, Debney was right. If he’d given me $50,000 to invest, we probably wouldn’t have done what we did. I would’ve been biased towards the markets for rates of return and also the abstraction that frees you emotionally. But this was our money and our adventure, and I didn’t owe Debney anything, so I was free to do what I wanted. It brought Jess and I closer and made us a better team. She started taking more interest in the portfolio work and began to see things more holistically.
She spent two days a week in Santa Barbara and three in Oxnard building the new practise. We levered the Santa Barbara client base hard for a word-of-mouth boost and did direct marketing to community centres and groups. It was simple, honest stuff: comparing our fixed price list of services to an average figure based on the ten nearest competitors, with a promise of quality care and an intro to Jess and her previous work. Four months in and her appointments were pretty busy every day, so we took on Ellen. who was looking for somewhere more open-minded and our honesty on cost was interesting to her. Ellen turned out to be pretty cool, with a streak of Californian hippy in her, which meant she was into the whole “food and natural medicine” vibe. That stuff was one of the reasons why we ultimately went down the holistic and preventative healthcare route, and you know that turned out to make a lot of sense in the end.
But Jess’ pregnancy that winter was the most exciting and scary thing of all that year. Remember when I rang you up scared out of my wits? You just said, “keep being you, don’t change a thing. We’re here to help and teach you how to do the dirty work.” We loved you all the more for that. I told you the miscarriage was tougher than I realised at the time. Everyone says it’s sort of normal, or likely, but that didn’t change how I felt. There was sadness that seemed tied to an alternate reality of what we might have done wrong and what would’ve been. Jess was strong and pragmatic on the outside but I could feel and see the pain but time and love got us past it, like it did for so much in life. We had a few months of heavy coping where we just worked really hard on everything else we had going on and then we tried again, and all that love and work became Ethan in the end. So it was worth it.
Debney was right. A year after our rooftop brunch, we were having brunch again, but this time he came to us and we entertained him at our place. The portfolio was still performing well and the main work had been on the practise and overall we were in good shape; just past breakeven with reasonable growth. Plus, we were actually happy. I was grateful to Debney for what he’d given us, which was more confidence in ourselves and a means to learn in our context. That was a kind of wisdom that a job offer from a corporate wouldn’t have provided. When I asked him what he’d gotten out of that last year he said, “I’ve gotten to know you two a little better and that’s what I aimed for.” He encouraged us to set up the practise in Beverly Grove. That was the agreement we came to: we would stabilise what we had and come up with a more sophisticated plan to eventually launch a practise in Hollywood that would appeal to the upper end of the market where the cost-to-quality ratio wasn’t the important factor. You all got it as well and so we felt it was a worthy goal. In other areas of the portfolio, I was free to keep following my own ideas and building what we had. I told him there and then that I thought a careful property investment was on the cards, which chimed with Harold’s advice about a loft in New York. At the end of our brunch we had pretty much filled up our next year around Ethan’s birth.
Your advice and perspective on constant renewal got us the loft in the meatpacking district, when that place was in a slump. But ‘93 was still a fun time to get in because it was sleazy and cool. If you and the family hadn’t supported us and invested, we might not have done it. Debney helped by connecting us to decent financing after we all put something in, and it went from there. Harold helped us find Dylan to manage it. He was someone I wanted to work with: razor sharp, quick and broad in his thinking, funny and open. It didn’t matter what the loft was going to be, Dylan could always work out how to get it done smartly. It was his idea to lease the roof space and set that up as a roof garden and so the LoftGarden was born. Being on the other side of the country was a big leap of faith.
Anyway, you know that stuff, more or less. What I didn’t know was what Debney was doing or how he’d decided to do it. It wasn’t until Ethan was 6 months old in ‘94 that Debney changed tack a little and branched out from just business. We were in a mentoring session and we were talking about the stress of babies and balancing work with home life and extra responsibilities. That’s when he asked me about meditation and that sort of stuff, which I knew nothing about. He sent me a copy of the Hemi-Sync tapes as a gift and told me to approach them with an open mind. Debney suggested them as a means to help with stress, sleep and work. He was right. It helped Jess too. Kinda new age, but we were open-minded enough for them and it was uninvasive. That was a key test, it turned out.
By the end of that year, Jess was taking advantage of being the boss by bringing up Ethan at work and I was doing everything I could to make the LoftGarden and the portfolio work efficiently while still at Vargas. I had my job there down pat and if it wasn’t for the way you brought me up I’d have been coasting. I took that diagonal move leading Engineering Projects because I knew there’d be a lot of slack time between the company getting projects together. The real workload wasn’t that high as long as the team was kept busy and well supervised. That gave me decent chunks of time to spend on our business while I was at work and then more time with family when I came home.
Debney came to us again that year because of Ethan and we agreed to stick to our plan of what we had. The LoftGarden’s internal fit out was nearing completion but the roof was empty. We needed to get the club working to afford to fit out and use the roof. With two health practises and Ethan, we were up to our eyeballs and there was a lot of trust in Dylan. I went out to New York once a month to see how things were progressing and we had weekly management calls. We needed to fill the club every night of the week to maximise revenue and Jess came up with the idea of booking out Sunday, Monday and Tuesday as a performance space for boutique and edgy arts and theatre stuff, which kinda led into that well-off avant garde crowd. Debney was supportive of our progress and still did his business mentor thing . I’d learned a hell of a lot from the support he offered. He’d augmented my portfolio management software by giving me a Bloomberg terminal, so I was using professional level information in my own way but I wasn’t making good on the terminal cost. Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about that. Debney didn’t have any strong recommendations or demands. He was happy to see us “busy but thriving”, as he put it, and by this point he’d come to feel like a friend. A lot of our contact time with him was emotional first and business second. You always knew what we were up to anyway, so it felt like we were one big team to me.
My next trip to NY after our end of year meeting with Debney went a little differently. Debney was in LA and offered to give me a ride to NY. Remember I told you about the ride in the jet? It was kinda awesome and I’ll never forget how nice it was. He came with me to the LoftGarden and took a backseat as Dylan and I went through everything. I figured he was watching me in action. There wasn’t that much to see; Dylan and I got along great and usually had a relaxed time and a laugh managing the project. We had clear goals and we took a lot of his suggestions on board around the details, plus we wanted him to be able to get stuff done so we didn’t try to make his life difficult. The loft needed licenses and permits, a good design for a club and performance space, plus there was staffing, stocking, promotions, all that stuff. Things were going well and we were ahead of our conservative schedule.
Debney invited me to stay with him that trip and it turned out that Interlekt’s brownstone wasn’t just offices after all. On the fourth floor there was a beautiful three bed apartment, classically fitted out with a certain Englishness. There were a few pictures from the war on one of the walls: Debney and friends in uniform. One of them he showed me was taken at Bletchley Park in England, where they cracked the German Enigma code machine. There was Debney with Alan Turing and a beautiful woman in front of an outbuilding. One of the doors was ajar and you could just make out a bunch of round cogs of the replica they’d built in there.
“That photo was a courts martial offence, but sometimes posterity justifies bending the rules,” Debney said. “It’s the only one I have of us with Alan, and he’s smiling there. Such a wonderful man so terribly betrayed by his country.”
The woman was Debney’s wife, as I would realise when I saw a wedding photo on the sideboard. Turned out they’d met in England and had worked together in the war. She was very beautiful. Pale skin, dark hair - he said she was a red head - a delicate nose and intense eyes that kinda drew you in. Now you know who I’m really talking about, don’t you. See, I told you you knew them. Just not everything.
“Where is she at the moment?” I asked.
“Washington most of the time. This is a pied-à-terre. Hazel is here on occasion but, like me, she has business that keeps her busy. The kids live in Sydney and Boston, so we don’t see Paul much at all and Evelyn not as much as we’d like.”
He settled me in and excused himself, leaving an open invite for a “late supper” if I felt like it. I headed out for another jog and took the instinctive opportunity to retrace my steps of the first day I visited Interlekt. I ran down to the 7-11, sat outside drinking a juice and reliving that weird encounter wondering if Mike would turn up, then I headed up to the courts in the hope that I’d find those same six guys arguing so I could interrupt them with another challenge, but it wasn’t to be. My last stop was Marco’s and my heart and appetite were lifted to find it still there and open. Of course, Markus remembered me and pointed me to the booths at the back. Being late afternoon, it was quiet and he joined me and we munched our way through pastrami, pastries, pie and coffee. I told him about what had happened that night and what I had done with the food. He told me he was grateful that I’d shared the food and used it to make some connections with people - even fleeting - because that’s what food is about: an expression of love that can be shared and enjoyed with anyone. He was saddened to hear Mike’s story and pried to get many details out of me, including the size of the bill. Something about him was disarmingly genuine and although his questions were invasive, somehow with him it was OK.
“You know, I think you got me a few more customers, come to think about it,” he said with a smile. “I bet the guys you played ball with started comin’ in here not long after that. That must be them. They been pretty regular ever since, Wednesday or Thursdays, at least two weeks a month. Four or six of ‘em. I’ll check next time. I bet it’s them.” Hearing that made me smile and gave me an idea.
“Give them my number if it’s them. We’re looking for staff at a club in the meatpacking district soon, maybe they might be interested or know people who are.” It just seemed like the natural thing to do, even though I didn’t know much about any of them. It just felt like a nice gesture. “How are you with canapés and the kinds of things people eat at pretentious theatre performances?” I asked.
“I trained at the Plaza Hotel and worked at the Algonquin, so I know a thing or two about canapés,” Marcus said, and that was that.
Late supper with Debney was negronis, steak, an incredible Bordeaux and soufflé to finish. Debney was a dab hand in the kitchen and he made me his sous-chef as well as trusting me to mix the drinks. While we cooked he told me about his time with the French Resistance in the war and how France had cursed him with a taste for good food and French wine. His time in England blessed him with his wife and she blessed him with their family. The war taught him the true value of deep and lasting love and friendships, even if they were short-lived. Honesty, loyalty, tolerance and forgiveness were the things that built true trust, and trust was what had kept him and his close compadrés alive.
“In the darkest moments I always clung to the idea that I was fighting for people I loved, or getting home to them. The objectives, the plans, the mission, they all come a distant second to your buddies in the field and the memories and imaginings of family and lovers. That’s what you fight for; every soldier will tell you that.”
“Did you always believe in what you were doing?”
“Personally, yes, but you don’t always get to choose. I say that because that kind of war is full of people forced to fight in tribes, and they are just like you. It’s the politicians and the generals and the top tiers who decide fate in pursuit of some ideology and they tell the stories that lull the tribes into brutality. So people fight for their buddies and their little lives, and in doing so they chase their masters plans, even if they’re dark and terrible. There was massive brutality on all sides of the war. That is what war is. And there was brutality in the way the spoils of war were divided up. That is fundamental to the business of war. To the victor the spoils and it was the USA who was most victorious. We wrote history and we wrote the future.”
As we ate, conversation turned to our arrangement. Debney’s continuing positivity and warmth made me curious.
“You and Jess have both done good things for each other, Scott. You’ve grown together, grown closer and you’ve made a family all while growing your businesses. That’s no mean feat. You should feel proud.”
“Well, we feel happy, fairly satisfied and pretty beat, I’ll tell you that! I’m looking forward to the club getting on an even keel. I’m a little worried about Jess being overloaded with Ethan at work, but she says she’s fine and likes it. I was thinking that we could combine that into a kind of creche at one or both of the practises. It kinda makes sense.”
“Perfect sense. A little bolt-on service. You wouldn’t even need to make it big, just enough to give you what you want and turn over. Who wouldn’t trust a creche in their GP’s office surrounded by their doctors? Now, remember what I asked you the first time I called you on the phone? Whether you would be interested in manifesting a reality beyond your portfolio? Seems like that’s what you’ve managed to achieve.”
“Yes, but we had kind help from you and love and support from family too. I don’t think we could have done it all without that. Thank you, Terence. A question, if I may?”
“Of course. It must be serious for you to be so polite,” he said.
“You said you wanted to get to know us, and over these two years you probably know me as well as my boss at Vargas - probably better in some ways - and you know Jess as well as you know me. How is any of this giving you a return? Are you really getting what you want, and what is that really?”
Debney gave me a beaming smile. There was a glint in his eye.
“I was deadly serious and completely truthful; getting to know you both is exactly my return and I have been delighted by that chance. Though it might sound odd, it was a strange kind of good fortune that your trip to New York was so testing, otherwise we might never have come to really know each other. A toast: to good things from mixed blessings.” I didn’t need a cryptic toast to enjoy the wine, it was truly fantastic. “Venture Capital isn’t the be all and end all of my interests, Scott. Diversity and varying degrees of complexity permeate my portfolio. That makes recruitment very difficult, especially when you know you need to find talent from a variety of places. That’s where getting to know people comes in but it takes time to find the right people for the demanding positions.”
“What kind of positions are they and in what fields?”
“The demanding positions are multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary. Practitioner, manager, analyst all-in-one and more besides. Field-wise, hmmm. In some ways it concerns ‘forward-looking anthropology’ because I concern myself with where humanity is going; in other ways it’s about technological, scientific and… holistic… discovery, learning and development.”
“This sounds high falutin’ and vague,” I interjected. He could have been talking about anything.
“Yes, it’s both of those things, literally. These are not just figures of speech. Finance, venture capital, markets and so on are only a necessary part of the work. There’s much more. Take medicine, for example. Mankind continues to make advances in drugs and treatments for all sorts of conditions and lifespan in rich countries continues to climb. The story we are told to believe is that medicine is the key driver of health and longevity. That story isn’t really true, but you and Jess already know that. What about war? Since the war, has the world become more peaceful? We won but we keep starting wars? The USSR has collapsed. Again, we’ve won. Do you think the world will be even more peaceful, Scott? What do you think?”
“I’m no expert on war and I’m not much of a historian, Terence, but Smedley Butler told everyone war is a racket. The defence sector pays healthy dividends but a long lasting peace would probably see those dividends drop. It’s no coincidence that their customers are all governments and ours is the biggest customer of all.”
“Precisely. If war is politics by other means, what’s so problematic about politics that we keep reverting to other means so frequently? If we have advanced as a species over the millennia since we first stood up, why are we still fighting with each other so much of the time?”
“From what I can tell, most of the world isn’t fighting most of the time. Only us, the people we have a problem with and some others. It’s not everyone.”
“I agree, Scott. That’s my source of hope that human nature is better than the whims of those who make war. That hope is some of what drives my interest in the future of humankind, what I called ‘forward-looking anthropology’. I hope that mankind is more than what we have and are at the present time. In fact, I know it is. How much more is what I’m curious about. What do you think, Scott? Is there more to us?”
“Probably. If you believe in the soul, in God and anything involving an afterlife, that inclines you to believing there’s more to everything, whichever flavour of God you believe in. And you’ve deliberately shown us there’s something more that I didn’t know about with the tapes.”
Debney smiled again. “Have they been worth your while?”
“They’ve been useful but there’s more than meets the eye. The curriculum’s broader than just relaxation and that kinda stuff. There’s quite a hippy contingent attached to this stuff, and further down that road is transcendental meditation. All of that suggests there’s more to something, even if I don’t know what.”
“Correct. Monroe’s work on the tapes is one facet of what they represent and there are many people who have interests in them and what they mean. Some of it’s pretty weird and ‘far out, maaan!‘.” He laughed playfully while mimicking a hippy. “They seem to offer something of a shortcut towards meditative states that can otherwise take years, maybe decades, to achieve by other means. It is from meditative states that it is suspected man can realise more of his true potential.”
“So am I right in thinking that you need a lot of money to either end war and help people expand their spiritual awareness, or hope to expand awareness to end war?”
“Ha! If only things were that straightforward. Nonetheless, they are admirable goals, are they not?”
“Yep, but that’s a big bite and a lot to chew on.”
“It certainly is. There’s five-and-a-half billion people on Earth, Scott, and hoping to manage them all and bring them to some fundamental agreement and understanding at the grass roots level in anyone’s lifetime is unlikely. We haven’t done it in millennia. People aren’t going to down weapons before I die. That’s why my goal isn’t either of the things you mentioned. Not now. In life, I think it’s important to accept that one’s control and influence is limited. There are many ways one expands control and influence but time, skills, patience and resources are required. People respond to many things, including guidance, education, leadership, and love, as well as the opposites to or lack of those things. I’m interested in what lies beyond the human nature and capabilities that we know of now, in the hope that greater understanding helps us to advance as a species. That’s the simplest, but highest falutin’ and most vague way I can think of saying it.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t really grasp what he was telling me. It still could have meant anything.
“So, dare I ask, Terence, whether you’ve made any discoveries yet?”
“I’ve come to learn a lot. I can show you something, if you like. But not until we’re done with our soufflé. You’re in charge of making them rise, my friend.”
“Is that a formal test?”
“You bet your ass it is!” he said, laughing hard.
After a successful dessert, we sat in the lounge in a pair of green leather wingbacks. Terence fished out some impressive looking cigars, but I declined.
“Well, Scott, you were right when you said that there’s more to the Hemi-Sync tapes. I can tell you a little of what I know about that, but on two conditions. First, that you trust me and listen to my story with your eyes closed and mind open; save questions until I’ve told my story. Second, use your discretion and keep what I tell you between us - not all of it. The private bit will be obvious.”
“Honestly, Terence, that makes me a little anxious.”
“I know. Take a moment and follow your instincts.”
“I can’t promise to stay silent if you tell me something that puts my family at risk. Is that reasonable?”
“Fair enough. That’s reasonable.”
With no other serious misgivings and growing curiosity about Debney and what he could tell me, I closed my eyes, leaned back and enjoyed the smell of cigar smoke as Debney began to speak.
“Monroe’s Hemi-Sync tapes are a part of something bigger. There’s more potential for their application, more people interested in them for all the advertised reasons, and people interested in them for unadvertised applications. I’m in that latter camp. It’s public knowledge that Monroe claims to have had what he calls out of body experiences and the ability to do that is linked to the tapes, or rather the states that the tapes can help to induce. Monroe has already published two books on it, one in ‘71 and another in ‘84, and he’s about to publish another this year. This stuff might be niche, but it’s by no means secret. You’re right that there’s a lot of hippies out there into this stuff, and others. Some of those others are in government, specifically the CIA. You may or may not know about some of the whacky things the CIA is into, again it’s a matter of public record. The Church Committee in ‘75 was a moment when some light was shone into the CIA’s dark corners, but it was largely superficial. Nothing really changed after that; we were all just shocked at the craziness of our spies and the lengths they were going to, and then people got on with their lives. But I happen to know that the CIA has validated Monroe’s work and thinks there’s deeper value in it. Independently, they’ve got reasons to see it as a piece in a bigger puzzle that it has begun to use in its work, whatever that comprises exactly, and that includes all aspects of Monroe’s claims, not just the superficial stuff like stress and sleep and concentration. Now… open your eyes.”
Contrary to what I expected to see, the chair opposite me was empty. I looked around. Thomas was behind me, by a window he’d cracked open. The whole time he’d been speaking I’d heard his voice from ahead of me and never heard him stand or move position. It was subtly strange and very disturbing in its way.
“But… how did you get over there? I mean, I didn’t hear you.”
He returned to his chair, still as placid in his manner as before.
“I simply stood up, Scott. As for what you heard, that’s partly because of you and partly because of us. You’ve heard of Uri Geller, of course…” Debney continued. “You may or may not know that Geller was involved with two scientists, Puthoff and Targ, investigating aspects of psychic powers. Geller was the weak link because he’s just a trickster, but what Puthoff and Targ were doing was actually spun out of the CIA. Something to note about the CIA is that when it says the stuff it was doing has ended, the very good odds are that it hasn’t ended. The Church Committee proves that amongst other things. Everything the Committee exposed that the CIA said it would or had shut down just kept going in other guises. Its investigation into psychic powers happened to overlap with Monroe’s Hemi-Sync tapes and some other things that are in the public sphere.” Debney paused and took a deep draw on his cigar. He breathed out slowly, filling the space between us with a dense, pungent cloud that hid his face. “One of those other things are the ideas of a man called Itzhak Bentov, who was an interesting fella, to say the least. Long story short, he came up with some interesting ideas about the universe and everything in it, including us and our minds and our consciousness and…” The smoke slowly dissipated, thinning to reveal Debney’s face. His mouth was closed, he sat still, and yet I continued to hear him speak. “…how we might connect into the universe in ways that underpin, or at least do not exclude conventional religions, both eastern and western. What, you are wondering, has that got to do with the CIA?” I was silent. I was wondering what the trick was. His mention of the trickster Uri Geller was a clue of some kind. “Bentov’s ideas were a key reference point for the CIA to begin to understand and contextualise its own work into psychic powers. This was largely coincidence. Bentov’s ideas were independent of the CIA and Monroe, but strangely they tied the two together.” Debney took another draw on his cigar, but his voice continued uninterrupted. “So, between Monroe, the CIA and Bentov, evidence of sorts that we are more has been in the public sphere for years, on top of the myriad mysteries and stories that mankind has passed down over the ages.”
“How are you doing that? I can’t work it out. A recording played on a directional sound beam?”
“You can prove your own theory if you move around. The sound beam would have to track you well and quickly if that was the method employed.” I followed his advice. “So what I’m sharing with you is the knowledge that the CIA itself has researched what it calls ‘psychic powers’, came across Monroe’s work and also Bentov’s, and took it onboard. When the CIA takes things on board, it’s worth paying attention.”
My movements hadn’t changed a thing. Debney’s voice hadn’t audibly changed. It sounded like he was addressing me directly as I looked at him, but he was not visibly speaking.
“Where am I standing and what have I picked up?” I tested. There was no way he could have pre-recorded that combination of answers for instant playback.
“You’re not standing. You’re sat on the floor and you’re holding up the corner of the rug.”
“Stop! I need you to tell me how you’re doing this. It’s getting fucking disturbing.”
Debney gestured to retake my seat. He pulled a packet of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and offered them. I fumblingly opened the fresh packet, lit up and took a deep drag to counter the growing sense of weirdness. I wanted to call Jess.
“What you just experienced, Scott…” Debney’s trick had ended and he was speaking, or lipsyncing, normally. “…is natural. It’s just unusual. It’s not a trick in the sense you mean. It is a capability we can develop, and the Hemi-Sync tapes are a part of that. Also, why you didn’t hear my voice shift when I moved out of the chair is mainly because of your mental bias of where you thought my voice was coming from, but leave that aside - it’s small beer. What you just experienced is referred to as telepathy by many and non-verbal speech by a few. This is one of the aspects of the untapped human capability I’m interested in.”
“So it was Thomas all along? You knew him since you were at Vargas?” It was Morton’s question but in the Frame it sounded like it was spoken in their single, shared voice.
“Yes, but I didn’t know him as Thomas until quite a long time after that trip to New York. A lot happened. It’s kinda complicated, but it was Thomas who showed me the value of the tapes, and more beyond that. This place we are in now is something that we’ve worked on since then and even before. There’s more to know. Don’t be afraid.”
Scott’s memory of Thomas seeped into the Frame and flowed into their sense. The rainbow of ebbing fractals and flowing geometries gave way to fleeting glimpses of Thomas’ appearance and remembered and imagined moments. Amongst the swirling imagery of Thomas’s face were images of other people, but only a few that Morton also recognised: his own family, Harriett, Haley Clarke from Resurgenesis. Morton didn’t know if what he seemed to see was real or imagined, but he knew that what he felt emanating from his, from their sense of self was borne only of love.
“You weren’t like James and Maggie. You used to sneak into our room and cuddle between us when you were small.” The ebbing imagery melted into the form of a toddler who wandered through a door and along a corridor. “I have a sensation of your little head and fluffy hair, snuggling between us. It made me curl around you. Every kiss was all the love I had in that second. You were never there in the morning. When I came out of dreams I felt a silent guilt that all my love went into you and none to your mother. I couldn’t tell her about that feeling and those thoughts for fear of cheating her for you. That feeling was why I doted on her as a penance. Sometimes, often, I would lie there crippled by that guilt and the idea that we were the family in the jungle, whose baby stared up at me from the mud when soldiers fled from murder. I would be paralysed in that vision until we had flown away in my mind. I was obsessed in those mornings with the need to see you were alive - that you actually existed. There was a panic that the part of my life with you in it had been just a dream until I saw you each day. Whether you were asleep or awake, the sight of you was a shock of joy and relief that I’d not lied you into existence in my dreams; that I was not the dream of a father dying in that jungle.”
“Maybe that’s where our story began: in the jungle. Without your story and that place, we wouldn’t be this now. I remember sensations of monochrome dreams where sounds echoed and scenes were always shades of white. Only you and mom were black in there, but only senses of you that were never fully in my vision; always holding my hands. You were teaching me something or giving me things, filling me with some part of your lives, but I didn’t know what. It was like you were helping me move from sensations of worry and fear of the morphing, mysterious, scary whiteness into belief that I had some strength to be unafraid. When I woke up from those dreams I had strange ringing sensations through my ears and teeth and jaw that made me feel disembodied. You’d helped me pass through that strange space. That’s why I came to cuddle, I think. To thank you for helping me. Then those monochrome dreams stopped and all my dreams became colour.”
“It was your mother, then you who were my rebirth. You two were the forces that kept me away from horror or despair, or kept them away from me. I had to keep making everything real. I had to prove to myself that you two were real and lasting until I knew I wasn’t just going to wake up back in the mud and the heat and the noise in that jungle. When I came back from the war I was dead. Through you two I could live.”
Find all previous chapters here.
WOW! Read this with great pleasure, thank you!
It's nice to get a background on how Scott got discovered joined up. I'm thinking of the earliest chapters that focused on CERN, and so curious to know more about how that ties in with the back-stories we have been learning about now.