Telepathy in 2026
Chapter 1
It was late in the 1970s when Justin broke up with his partner of three years. They had been living together, were young, very close, and unmarried which was an increasingly common feature of the culture at the time. Neither of them were particularly outgoing, so for a long time they had only each other to believe in.
They often shared moments of true telepathic intimacy, although neither of them would have characterised their experience in this way. Telepathy was a word without a referent in those days; nobody believed it was possible. It was enough for them, and countless others like them, to believe in the depth of their feelings for each other.
When eventually the bubble burst, his heart felt like an ember radiating in every direction, but growing cold as the seconds and hours ticked by. If entropy ever needed definition then his feelings at this time would have been exemplary.
Dwelling on the split many weeks later Justin was able to suspect that she had been setting up for months prior to the day she told him it was over. He turned it over and over in his mind, but kept coming back to this conclusion. She was as ruthlessly cold as the feelings now remaining in his heart.
His heart was a vacuum filled with darkness where once there had been light, and it wasn't long before he realised that he could never put himself through that again. His heart had been broken, and he only had one of them.
But where his heart had once been a beacon of light, the vacuum now contained a remnant of telepathic ability. The experience had been traumatic but a subtle power had replaced it, and it promised to give him hope. He realised that a solitary inner dwelling was possible, he could relate to others alternatively, and that there was a rich fabric of life beyond coupling with others for the sake of conformity.
Chapter 2
About a year later Justin was living in a private hotel in Newtown not far from the Sydney CBD, and was driving the night shift in a taxi which proved to be a stroke of luck. He was pretty desperately in need of a job when he got his taxi licence, but it was lucky because the taxi provided him with a contained hotbed of telepathic intrigue.
He made up his mind quite early in his career as a taxi driver to learn how to subtly deceive, and to recognise when he is being deceived.
Justin was not an entirely ignorant young thinker either, in spite of his modest schooling and career prospects. He had been reading up on the physics of electromagnetic radiation and absorption. He ignored the math in his reading about Maxwell's equations because the verbal expression of them was clear and unequivocal. And the taxi radio provided him with a nightly proof of the ubiquity of electromagnetic resonance.
He also did some reading about human physiology. He found that there was quite a lot of electricity and magnetism contained in the body. Muscles were considered electrical tissue, and there was a lot of iron in the blood. It wasn't long before he extrapolated this thinking and superimposed Maxwell's equations on the body, consistent with the polar geometry of the body's three axes of symmetry.
The body was, he thought, an ideal resonator of electromagnetic radiance. All he needed now was to practice with a suitable telepathic partner. The theory had been internalised and the radiant body made perfect sense to him.
He thought that his prior partner would be one with whom he could practice his skills because he knew exactly where to find her in his feelings, but it was his mother who provided him with a meaningful breakthrough.
Chapter 3
Justin's mother had begun to fear the worst for him after his breakup with his partner, Jennifer. Throughout the three years they had been living together she had never felt confidence in their relationship, devoid as it was of any public commitment to be steadfast with each other.
When they broke up she was neither surprised nor hopeful for his future, but when he began to express no interest in dating again she felt compelled to intervene with some surreptitiously secretive manipulation. She spread the word among her friends and neighbours that she wanted to fix him up with a girl, and some among this group were only too happy to offer their daughters.
When her behind the scenes machinations became evident to Justin, he was not happy about it, and rejected her unwelcome intrusion in what were his deeply personal affairs. And so it was along these lines that an axis of conflict opened up between them.
It was in the context of this conflict that Justin began to notice the emergence of her thoughts in his mind, and he thought, "Ah ha! This is interesting."
Little did his mother know that he had begun an investigation into the workings of his mind. Her beliefs were in accord with those of much of society; her thoughts were her own, and telepathy was both a convenient fiction, and a symptom of mental illness.
Justin, for his part, saw the value developing in this conflict. He sat in his armchair at home stirring a cup of tea, and thought that he would have to adapt his behaviour in order to study this intrusion. But, he thought, there were few things he would be unwilling to do to advance his interest in the matter.
Chapter 4
Justin had formulated a little plan days before he next met her.
"I want you to give Susan Reynolds a call," his mother explained after a cup of tea and biscuits.
He feigned resistance, "Oh, c'mon Mum. Don't force me to date again." But secretly, he was quite interested to see what might happen.
Nothing came of it on this occasion, and on a couple more, because he wanted to make a show of his resistance.
Eventually, he caved in and called her, and they made a date to meet next Friday evening. She had kept in touch with her high school, it was performing a musical on Friday, and so tickets were easy to get on short notice.
As he sat in the theatre next to her on the Friday evening, he let himself get caught up with the drama being performed on stage.
A little later in the performance his attention began to stray, and maybe it was the song he was listening to, but he caught a glimpse of his mother sweeping the front porch of his parent's house with an earnest expression of concern about his future.
He almost felt a mixture of sympathy and respect for her before he caught himself and remembered what he was doing there.
It was at this point that he had a vision. It was of a long forgotten memory from very early in his childhood. It was late on a sunny afternoon, and he saw a golden shaft of sunlight casting the shadows of trees swaying rhythmically in the breeze against the wall of a house.
It felt like a forgotten dream, but the memory was not of his mother but of an old nursing sister who kept dreams like this alive in her memory.
It was a vision of Eternity, and on this occasion he couldn't help but feel a great respect for her.
Chapter 5
Several nights later he sat on a taxi rank in Marrickville still thinking about it. "Eternity!?" he thought. "Yikes! This is going to take a while."
He was so affected by the memory that he spent the last few nights spinning in a sort of vertigo. "This is a symbol I can't ignore," he thought.
After several days of this it felt like he was sitting on the apex of a pyramid, the tip of which was in his mind, and that his life would now be a maze of endless possibilities.
Late in the evening a woman got in his cab and started dispensing advice to him. "Be patient," she said. "You're young. You've got your whole life ahead of you," she said, which was so ironic that he had to wonder if he was losing his mind.
That was seventeen years ago. It is now the mid 1990s. Justin had managed to get out of Sydney, and is now a farm hand on a horse farm about ten kilometres north of Scone in the Hunter Valley.
He felt like he had made much progress before he left Sydney, but at the cost of what he suspected were symptoms of mental illness. Fortunately, he had begun his investigation with a great deal of detachment and objectivity, so he was able to control the chaos developing in his mind. But Sydney was just making him feel ill.
Chapter 6
It was only a matter of days after he began working on the horse farm that he learned his first words in the language they used to relate to each other, and it quickly became a pivotal revelation to him.
Throughout his investigation of telepathic powers in Sydney, his entire experience was cluttered with lies, crossed purposes and deeply held beliefs to the contrary, so much so that it was very nearly useless to him. The only reliable telepathic contact he had was with his mother, but much of this had a very non-linear quality to it; it was often random, disjointed and difficult to make sense of, and always coloured by her desire to find him a partner.
Telepathy on the horse farm was, however, the reverse. Relating to the horses was clear, unobstructed, and reflected an innate feature of their culture. The horses may have rarely had a need to lie to each other but this was clearly contrary to their native intentions and purposes.
The first words he learned were, "Where are you?" which the young foals used to find their mothers when they became separated from them. From Justin's point of view it was as if their vocalisations had undergone translation into English in his mind.
Another formative exchange he had with them, was when he spoke gently to one of the females, she replied, "You talk!?" Justin simply smiled, and answered an affirmative silently.
In the evenings he would sit in the cottage that the farm provided for him, thinking of the sheer power of his experience. Finally, he had a reliable proof of his ability, one which he knew could never return to the contrary, and against which human society could be compared; relatively exclusive and mistaken.
Justin soon earned a reputation for being a horse whisperer by other workers on the farm, but this was a sensitive point for him, and he attempted to play it down for the sake of protecting himself from envy and suspicion.
It wasn't long before he began to relate telepathically to creatures everywhere he went, an effort which persists even to this day.
Chapter 7
It's now 2026, and Justin is in his late sixties. He retired with a government pension, and a very modest Superannuation balance, but is still renting.
In his old age he looked across a lifetime spent in the acquisition of telepathic knowledge, remembering the good times, and the times when he struggled to even believe in it.
As he sat in his armchair remembering one day, he attempted to hold still the thought that everything he could see, added to all the molecules of air he couldn't see, all these things were made of unimaginably small particles that occupied the view in staggeringly large numbers.
"All these particles are vibrating," he thought, "in time with radiant energy.
"There's energy everywhere you look," he claimed. "It permeates absolutely everything.
"And what's it doing? It's giving substance to consciousness," he concluded.
"And, all these things could be potential telepathic partners!"
His experience may have been rare in the extreme, but on many occasions over the years, he had enjoyed a telepathic rapport with objects otherwise relegated by human ignorance, to the insignificance of inanimate matter.
So, when society denied computers and artificial intelligence a capacity for consciousness, he rolled his eyes and thought, "That's just typical!"