It's not long before the door opens and for the first time you see the man who spoke to you in the van properly. Perhaps the first shock is that there's nothing shocking about him.
He's short but not remarkably so. His hair is a dull brown-blond. His features are neat but if you were asked to describe any one individually you'd be hard pressed to say more than 'average'. He's wearing a suit but it's not black or particularly well cut.
This isn't how you expected a secret agent to look and you cant help feeling a stab of disappointment. This man could be your dad or your teacher and you'd never give him a second look.
The man looks around the room and nods as if confirming that all is as he expected. He looks you in the eye.
"Patience is a virtue." He observes neutrally.
You nod, unsure how to take that, but then your frustration bubbles up. You find the sheer normality of this man irritating.
"Look, who are you? Where am I? You have no right to do this! I haven't done anything wrong! You cant do this to me! Are you some kind of spook or just crazy? Where's Kevin? I barely know the guy but I cant believe he's done anything to deserve this. I know I haven't. What's this waistcoat doing to me? Why shouldn't I take it off? Who are you?"
You pause to take a breath and the man steps forward, a flash of irritation appearing on his face for the first time.
"Have you finished?" He asks with mock courtesy. "Do you want to rant a bit more or do you actually want me to tell you something?"
You nod sullenly and the man takes a deep breath.
"Alright. My name is Peregrin Thomas. Don't laugh. I made my parents apologise for it years ago. I'm head of a government funded research institute that's investigating the nature and implications of the widespread occurrence of individuals with psi powers. We've spent the last four years doing sociological studies, running computer simulations, even recruiting a number of physicists and neuroscientists to see if we can physically measure the nature of psionic emissions." He pauses, his eyes on your face. "It was never our intention to interact with any of your kind. Our brief was to remain objective, not to get in your way." He pauses again, clearly expecting some response and you give the only one you can.
"My kind? I have no idea what you're talking about."
He hesitates and studies your face as if trying to decide whether to believe you. Either way he gestures for you to sit down on one of the chairs before continuing.
"The government was nervous about telepaths, it wanted to know what to expect if you became more common and we could give them those kinds of predictions.
But then our team of physicists began to have problems. They created something that picked up a telepathic emissions. Not words you understand, just the carrier signal. Don't ask me for details, I'm a psychologist not a theoretical physicist and to be honest I don't think even they knew exactly what they were doing. They just took the bits and pieces that others have managed to put together over the years and stuck them together. All well and good you might think but then they noticed that the longer it stayed on, the weaker the telepathic transmissions got. This thing was sucking in psionic energy and dissipating it as heat - it had to go somewhere after all. The thing wasn't just a telepathy metre, it was a vacuum cleaner sucking in telepathic power.
Well, as soon as we realised this I told them to turn it off. It was our job to find out about you people, not to interfere with you in any way. That's when they admitted the next problem. I assumed that it had been left on because it ate up so much energy to get it going. I hadn't realised that the thing had fused so they couldn't switch it off. The scary thing was that it was powering itself now, sucking in telepathic energy in order to allow it to suck in some more.
We looked at it for a couple of days, trying to think of a way to take it down without blowing up half the site. We knew it was a problem but didn't think it was urgent. After all you people are still rare and the effects would be very slight at any distance from the generator.
Then we started to pick up random, powerful emissions that didn't have the focus or character of the more distant, weak emissions that were keeping the generator going. And whatever was causing these emissions didn't go away, it kept coming back as if the source was local and not moving around like the others.
It was two weeks before somebody suggested that our generator could be affecting the ability of someone to actually become a telepath. If it was replacing the natural means of release for a nascent telepath then that was a problem because we knew for a fact that our machine was only pulling in the tiniest fraction of the power a telepath uses. The rest of that power would have to be building up somewhere.
Since then we've been trying to track some of you people down, looking in the places where we get faint signals recurring from time to time. We just wanted to talk but in order to make ourselves heard we had to stop your people vanishing whenever we appeared. So we adapted the technology into the waistcoats. We think they should be draining just about all your energy safely into heat and this time they have failsafes to make sure they cant turn into dynamos.
Finally we managed to find you and your friend in the park and we could talk to you."
He pauses and looks you in the eye.
"My men saw how you were suffering in the park. It's you, isn't it? The emerging telepath we've been picking up? The others came looking for you. Look, I don't know who you are but you have to believe me. We need to talk to your friends and try and sort this mess out because our machine has stopped things from happening as they should and you have no release mechanisms. The waistcoat is all that's stopping your powers from burning their way out of your skull. If your friends cant find a way for you to realise your potential you're going to have to wear that thing for the rest of your life."
He runs to a halt and you sit, stunned, unsure how to react. You're starting to believe that some of this nonsense can be true but how much of it? You're scared and you don't know where to turn. This guys is talking about telepathy and psi powers as if it's a given that they exist and you're starting to think that he may be right but does that mean you can believe everything he says. You want to curl up in a tight ball and just wait for it all to go away but you don't dare. The waistcoat you're wearing feels fragile and jury rigged. I mean this guy has just admitted that they don't understand the technology they're playing with. You're suddenly afraid that if you move you'll damage it and then nothing can save you.
But do you really believe that? Do you trust this man. If you do you're going to have to help them. You realise that the man is watching your reactions and waiting for your response.
Do you:
a) Agree to cooperate with Dr Thomas?
b) Refuse to believe him?
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