James

It’s hard to know how to begin to tell a 17-year-old kid government secrets about the nature of reality, especially when you’re pacing around the room from stress before you’ve even had your morning coffee and you’re worried about what actually having the coffee would do to you.

(Everyone in the Sphere drinks a lot of coffee, which is probably a reaction to the fact that no matter how many bright lights get shined in your face in the “morning” and no matter how many Vitamin D3 pills you are required to take, your brain can never quite adapt to never seeing natural sunlight. “The Sphere” is what it’s officially called, incidentally. Like the Pentagon.)

James is pacing and he doesn’t know where to begin so he begins with the simplest thing he can say, which is:

“The soul is real.”

Kyle, sitting on the bed in that slightly-too-nonchalant posture typical of lanky teenage boys who don’t seem to have quite decided what their limbs are for, nods.

“A DARPA scientist named Mohammed Salim discovered it thirty years ago when studying so-called parapsychology. Psychic powers. ESP. That kind of thing.” James paces jaggedly. “It turns out that there’s a sort of energy field pervading our bodies that underlies our thoughts and emotions. Obeying its own unique laws of physics, totally distinct from anything science had seen before. Salim called it ‘pneuma’—the breath of life.

“Our brains don’t really do anything important—the pneuma just uses them as a kind of computer for simple calculations. The way pneuma itself works is far more complicated. Salim thought it was impossible to explain. He ended up concluding that science had come to an end, that the world was telling us we could go no further, that the mind was mystical and incomprehensible.

“Except that just months after Salim discovered the pneuma, another scientist, Hermes Cept, came out with a theory that explained every experiment Salim had done. Cept’s theory was a set of hopeful, daring approximations. It made no claim to truly explain the soul, only to give us a simplification of it that could prove useful. It proved very, very useful. Using Cept’s equations, we learned how to precisely detect pneuma, predict its motions, generate it, convert it into physical energy.”

Kyle blinks. “So why doesn’t anyone know about this? Why is it a government secret?”

James sighs. “It’s complicated. Part of the problem is that half of the people who know about pneuma think that that very knowledge is unethical, that we’ve opened Pandora’s Box. People whisper about plans to assassinate every pneuma scientist, destroy everything they’ve written, re-close the box. We’re playing with the very stuff of the soul, here.

“Let me give you just one example. When we do things with electrical energy, it tends to produce electromagnetic radiation. Light, radio waves, and so forth. Pneuma processes do the same thing—and the radiation, like all pneuma, is conscious. The pneuma equivalent of ‘light,’ according to Cept’s theory, is a simple, stable, and pleasant consciousness, like a relaxed person on the edge of sleep.

“But pneuma processes also generate random fluctuations in the pneuma fields. Cept called these ‘Boltzmen.’ They’re entirely formed conscious minds, appearing randomly out of the sea of physical fluctuation. Every time we turn on a pneuma-powered light”—James points to the ceiling, where an ordinary bulb glowed—“we generate thousands of Boltzmen. Most of them last for only tiny fractions of a second before disappearing. They’re random minds, in random states of being. When I turned on that light this morning, I created people in states of bliss beyond anything you’ll ever feel, and people in states of agony beyond anything you can imagine. Fleeting people, existing for only a moment and then dying without warning. Should I feel good about that? Bad? Neither?”

Kyle shrugs. “You’ve got me there. But come on. The government’s done worse things.”

“Right. It’s not the Boltzmen that force us to keep this stuff secret. It’s not even the destructive potential of pneuma, the fact that by manipulating souls we could make something far more powerful than any atom bomb. It’s what we discovered down here, at the ocean floor.”

Kyle throws up his hands in an “oh, now we’re getting to the point” gesture.

“Physically, this is a place starved for energy. It’s cold, there’s no light. The only life that can survive down here is life that feeds on dead things from above—it’s dependent on another ecosystem. That’s what we used to think, anyway. But it turns out that there’s tons of energy down here—pneuma energy. Radiating from the ocean floor, for reasons we don’t understand. There are lifeforms down here, invisible to physical light and touch, whose souls glow with a power that dwarfs ours. In terms of soul—pneuma—this is where the action is. Life on land is just a blip on the radar. Compared to the kinds of things that live down here, there isn’t much difference between our souls and the souls of dogs, or mice, or cockroaches.

“Some of these lifeforms seem to be aware of us. Some of them seem to have . . . ambitions of conquest. We’re already in a tight spot, trying to research them however we can, trying not to let them know anything more about us than we already knew. If the whole world knew about this, instead of just one little government agency in this dismal little base? Someone would fuck things up. Someone would give these things—the heteropneums, the alien aggressors—whatever it is they need to come to the surface and wipe us out. We don’t know why they haven’t done it yet. All we can do is try to make sure it never happens.”

James has just started some coffee brewing. It’s going to be a long floorday.