Natalia’s Game. Крейг Т. Бушар
I relax, connect with nature, and absorb energy. My eyes remain closed as my body becomes translucent, and a few seconds later my atoms reconstitute on a grassy knoll a few miles from my final destination.
Now I must hurry. There are no clear paths, and getting through brush isn’t easy. On the positive side, the view is nice. Scots Pine trees draped in green lichen grow near the top of the hills, with majestic, light-colored European Beech sprinkling the ground with golden leaves below. Gorgeous. I cover several miles as quickly as I can.
Most visitors to the school arrive by air via Bucharest, which is 207 kilometers to the west. The school is remote – nearly unreachable except by helicopter – near the coast of the Black Sea. I arrive at the guard gate at precisely eight hundred hours. Above the tall fence looms a metal tower housing guards eating breakfast. The guards are not watching their screens and do not notice me approaching. No one ever just shows up at the school.
Back to my girl. Na. Ta. Lia. Net… I need to find her. That won’t be easy because we have no photos of her; remarkably, there is no record of her growing up. So I must figure out how to find her and then win her. What does that mean? That’s the tricky part. Natalia doesn’t know it yet, but once we get past the basics, she must sleep with me so I can access the future through a portal in her dreams.
As I said, this is going to take a lot of work.
The Real People
Romania is not a strange place for me. I’ve been here quite a few times and like the people. Romanians are Latins descended from ancient Romans, now surrounded by Slavs. The cultures are very difef rent. I prefer Latins because they are more like us.
The country has always been poor. For this reason, when the Slavic people migrated to Europe, they passed through Romania on the way to wealthier places. Because they didn’t stay, Romania remained true to its unique culture and religion. Its people are Orthodox and very parochial. The everyday person is welcoming, honest, and highly educated. Just poor. My kind of people.
I can’t help but envy the Romanian men because their women are scorchingly beautiful and much more. If a Romanian woman says she loves you, she means it. She will bathe her man in her hot blood – if she trusts him. If unfairly crossed, he better beware. She will serve him a cold dish of revenge. Oh, those Romanian women. Na. Ta. Lia. Net.
My name is Natalia. I’m visiting the school this week, but not as a student. They asked me to translate for a visiting American named Thomas. I’ve patiently waited for him. You are about to learn why. The school is a highly selective, unique place. Our government brings “employees” here to study. For most, it’s a charm school preparing us to disappear into the world of spying. Emphasis is on the study of linguistics, geography, psychiatry, transcendental meditation, chemistry, and quantum physics.
Staff in white coats perform diagnostic testing and try to figure out if any of us are special. The last time I was here, our parapsychologists discovered something about me that interested them. We all knew I was a lucid dreamer. Not such a big deal. But on that last trip, I exhibited an off-the-chart potential in the extrasensory perception tests, prompting a decision at high levels of the SRI to include me in an experiment that introduces lucid dreamers to a psychedelic drug called anteril that enhances ESP capability.
Anteril was a black-market psychedelic that quickly became a favorite of the American hippies in the 1980s. It was deemed safer than LSD and with fewer side effects. Scientists wrote articles and even books about it. Some claim that it can take users to a different dimension. For example, the CIA and the KGB investigated anteril. Schools like Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Boston University researched potential commercial and military applications.
In Moscow, the Landau Institute, the elite producer of physicists in what is now the former Soviet Union, jumped in. The Russians weren’t about to lose the quantum physics race.
My life changed during that last trip. I sat back on a couch in the medical clinic and got comfortable. I took off my jacket, placed a pillow under my neck, and put my feet up. I swallowed a blue tablet containing 30 mg’s of anteril. A nurse told me I should feel tired and disoriented but encouraged me to stay awake. Drowsiness set in roughly one minute later.
A parapsychologist sitting in the next room, separated from me by a glass window, spoke into a microphone and asked if I was ready. The unexplainable happened next. I felt myself rise from my body, leaving it behind on the couch, and I walked through the wall to join the parapsychologist in the next room. The doctor was unaware of my presence. She was laying down cards, preparing to ask me to identify their shapes without being able to see them. I looked back through the window at the chaise, where my body remained, and thought, What’s happening to me?
I still had control of the voice in my inert body.
“Fire away.” My body on the couch mimicked what came from my mouth. The female doctor started turning cards. “Natalia, please relax, keep your eyes closed and tell me what you see.”
“Circle, Wavy Line, Square, Cross, Circle, Star…” I watched the cards as she turned them, calling them out with my body in the next room. Of course, I got 100 %. In disbelief, the parapsychologist shuflfed the deck and asked me to try again. I re-ran the table. The tester excitedly summoned her supervisors, and the SRI Ops Manager, Florin Oltean, hurried into the room.
With the eyes on my inert body still closed, I called out the third deck – 100 %. Oltean was flabbergasted. Oltean checked the barriers on both sides of the window and questioned the card flipper to see if she somehow cooperated. Finding no such evidence, he deemed the experiment “well-controlled.”
I walked through the same wall to rejoin my body and fell asleep on the pillow. But my first out-of-body experience was NOT over.
O.B.E
The parapsychologist and her team hovered over me, locked in animated debate. They had never seen a patient pass out after taking anteril. Now deep in a dream, I walked barefoot past Oltean with my body still comfortably asleep back on the couch. I walked through the wall into a dark hallway, where light from a small crystal down the hallway caught my eye. My chest felt tight; my heart was hammering, and I started to panic. Then I took a deep breath and allowed myself to float and experience. The panic faded, and curiosity gripped me as I tiptoed toward the light, finding a large square of black onyx inlaid in the ground. The light originated from a small crystal embedded in its middle.
I stepped onto the onyx with one foot and found it cold and refined to the touch. I did the same with my other foot, and a hole opened, causing me to fall through. The hole swallowed itself and was no more. The walls around me spun, glowing green and orange, then blue and red. Feet first, down a narrow tunnel, I plummeted. The colors melted into bright light as I landed on the floor. What floor? I had no idea.
I was still on the onyx square, straddling the glowing crystal I now recognized as a diamond. Stepping off the square, I walked through a wall into a bright hallway bustling with people in white coats. Some carried charts, some pushed equipment, and one guided a bed on wheels with a person on it lying under a blanket. I was standing in a very modern hospital, invisible and without substance. No one could see me. People were conversing, but not in Romanian. I was listening to English. Why am I in a hospital? What year is this? Nothing made sense.
Pulled by some unknown force, I passed through a closed door to find a beautiful dark-haired woman in bed. A fluid pouch hung above the woman, dripping through a tube into her wrist. Her bed was inclined, and she was breastfeeding a newborn wearing a pink gown! The baby girl had a spark in her eyes and a full mop of black hair. As I crept closer, my stomach tightened. The calm, statuesque mom could have been me, though maybe five to seven years older, perhaps mid-30s. She held her baby with fulfillment and love as if God had favored her. Hearing her mom’s cooing sounds, the adorable baby stopped suckling. At this point, I realized the woman I was staring at was me. A future me. But why? How? And with a baby! Whose baby? Her mother kissed the baby’s cheek, taking off her diamond-encrusted platinum cross; she gifted it to her daughter.
In a peaceful frame of mind, the woman