Breaching The Guardian Dimension

By Cory Richardson

In the 2090’s, mind manipulating “4M” devices are used extensively for “rehabilitation” and have advanced to the point of a bold new usage – breaching the guardian dimension or, as some call it, supernatural exposures.

Coming of age in the 2090’s, friends Marcus, Randi, Vamir and Meagan soon find themselves working at a prestigious government-funded supernatural research facility. Something goes wrong after Marcus’ very first “exposure.” His friends watch in disbelief as other employees mysteriously die right after their 4M experiences. It is not clear whether they’re victims of machine malfunctions, the guardians, or something else.

During the mayhem, Randi and Meagan find the "something more" in their relationship that Randi has been longing for all along. Like their favorite song, it’s para, para, paradise. But something connected to the research program dooms the girls’ alliance.

The four friends’ relationships are tested as they attempt to work together to figure out why people in the program have been dying for eight years and what can be done to right some of the damages. The answers lie in where the 4M machines can go.

The action, adventure, suspense, love-triangles and sci-fi twists will thrill you from the first page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cory Richardson
• Release date: Jan 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311844859

Cory Richardson

Cory Richardson lives in beautiful Walla Walla, Washington, U.S.A. Mechanical engineer by day and hard core rock musician by night, Cory finds time for the love of writing in between the office, a few paltry pubs, and the occasionally frequented wine tasting rooms scattering the area.

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Breaching The Guardian Dimension

Published by Cory Richardson at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 by Cory Richardson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Tatiana Vila, Vila Design

Chapter 1

MISS Project

Jacob Derringer lay on his back, on the insulating ceramic table, looking upward to the dull gray roof of the polyethylene cylinder which engulfed his entire body. If he could reach his hands towards the ceiling, his fingertips would barely touch it. The ends of the tube were closed off by thick black walls.

He was covered head to toe in a thick, snugly fitting white cotton bag-like garment. Only an oval shaped hole with elasticized edges for his face revealed that the form was really human and not some large mutant maggot. His hands rested comfortably at his sides inside the bag. The temperature was perfect, since all he had to do was say heat or cool to adjust the comfort level in the tube.

He was relaxed but not drowsy. Only a faint whirling sound, like soothing white noise, accompanied his thoughts; thoughts of well-being. Almost as good as a massage, he was thinking when, wham!

A sharp pain behind the right eye came on as if by a switch. Suddenly his hands firmly gripped the edges of the table from inside the cotton bag, while his face flinched in distress as the throbbing started. The throbbing steadily increased in intensity, like a barely audible tone growing louder and louder, until it became an unbearable searing migraine headache. His mind screamed, What the hell am I doing here?

A loud, long Ahhhhhhhhh could be heard in the control room audio by the two technicians sitting behind a wide, clear membrane touchscreen monitor where various parameters were displayed in color in the air in front of them.

These headaches were still a side effect of the 4M devices, and researchers hadn’t yet perfected how to control them. Intense migraines were always induced (not on purpose) at the beginning of each session, disappearing during the next phase of the session. Quite often, newbies to this part of the program would become too nervous about the headache and, often with teary eyed panic, beg the clinicians to stop the process and yank them out of the tube.

Panicked subjects risked having to leave the entire program, even after extensive training and preparation, and knowing full well about the headaches and other side effects in advance. They would leave not because they’d be thrown out, but out of fear. Statistically, only seventeen percent of the terrified beginners, who freaked out from the headache in their first session and left the tube, ever returned for a second session.

They would miss out on the process that may eventually, after months of training and perfecting sessions, allow them to arrive at the sought after edge. They would miss out too, on years of preparation if they left the program.

The electromagnetic coursing through Jacob’s body and increased blood flood through his upper torso and head, all monitored and regulated by the algorithms of the 4M, were causing increased brain activity. This was a crucial point in the session, as depending on Jacob’s emotional state, he may start feeling either more at peace or more anxious. If anxious, then further adjustments needed to be made to the 4M routine. If he had a negative emotional state or a side effect was not reversed, then the session could not continue. But his migraine was beginning to dull. The technicians in the control room observed Jacob’s vitals and made some tweaks.

This technology was a far cry from the primitive mind manipulating devices of the 2040’s, which had initially been developed to address the high costs of physically storing a human in prison.

Changing their emotions was far safer and cheaper than housing prisoners. In 2052, the first man-made machine of its kind could finally be used to mellow the spirit. Instant rehabilitation, it was called. The technology then was in its infancy and was somewhat crude. It wasn’t really mind control, but more like mind alteration through gross side effects, much like how the pharmaceutical industry operated half a century before.

From the 1990’s through the 2030’s, medicines were habitually created by drug companies and tested on willing participates who were paid only pocket change (or sometimes just free medicine for a few years) to be part of a clinical study. With plenty of unemployed, unhealthy, desperate people living in near poverty conditions, it was easy to get participants for cheap.

The wide range of side effects from each drug was cataloged and reviewed. Formulas were tweaked and testing repeated, to hone the drug and achieve the most desired and marketable side effect.

These drugs were then mass produced as mainstream medicines and sold as cures by the medical professions to treat the symptoms of the widely unhealthy public from their poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and exposure to a variety of environmental contaminations.

By the 2050’s, the first mind altering devices were coming of age. They were really just cleverly designed noninvasive brain reorganization techniques using energy generating machines that were developed with the sole purpose of producing a known effect on the brain, such as the ever sought after lethargic effect desired for, tested on, and applied to prison inmates and other convicted criminals.

These machines included technologies mostly associated with controlled nuclear material acquaintances and laser introductions (both of which would actually burn or scar parts of the brain). Despite the long list of side effects (just like the pharmaceuticals), the initial machines that produced desired effects were considered a success and the idea caught on, with hopes of replacing drug therapy to the greatest extent possible.

With the mind reorganization technology somewhat proven, and the desire by the government and medical industry to replace most all drugs with it, the thinking was to finally get medical therapy back under the control of doctors and hospitals. Machine-administered dosages could not be misused by patients like drugs had come to be. Corporate profits were greater. It was seen as a win-win. By the mid 2070’s, this new industry was well under way to becoming mainstream in all developed nations.

By the year 2103, the technology of the mind machines had advanced to the point of largely successful behavior control. The new generation of machines uses more sophisticated electromagnetic pulse technology. Depending on the desired effect, such treatments range from in-facility sessions, to portable devices, and implants. Devices using this latest technology have been heralded worldwide on the Internet as the Miraculous Mind Manipulating Machines, commonly referred to as 4M technology.

A new group of elite patients clamors to participate in the latest clinical studies using the 4M technology. And something much greater is going on today. This technology is on the verge of a huge advance catapulting mankind to a much higher level. The general public refers to this effort as the edge studies, though most people know little about it.

A recent Internet news article proclaimed, "These edge studies are the most promising of government-endorsed offensive measures to make the majority of military defensive measures obsolete by 2128." A pretty wild claim. Though governments were initially skeptical at the medical industry’s confidence, they too bought into the possibilities, provided huge funding initiatives, and commissioned their own studies.

One of the oldest and largest edge studies funded by the European Union Federal Government is known as the Mirrored Initiation Suspension Sequence (MISS) Project, which is run out of a beautiful campus in Park Hill, Washington, North America. MISS uses a wide variety of patented 4M devices and processes to induce controlled progressive stages of prompted mental enhancement leading to the edge platform. The most developed MISS edge platform processes is known as Sustained Augmented Brain Energy Retransmitting (SABER).

SABER is the most tested and results-supported theory in the MISS Project. Using a combination of their proprietary 4M techniques to get a human mind to safely reach the edge platform, it is statistically highly probable to induce some form of supernatural exposure. Yes, you heard that right. They can breach the damn guardian dimension!

First news of this was a global sensation in the fall of 2092. It rang an unusually loud chord of approval among religious organizations, which had nearly faded into obscurity in the decades that followed the mostly peaceful takeover of the economically failed United States in 2066 by a revitalized and newly wealthy European Union.

High odds of supernatural exposure are based on a tuning of the 4M devices’ energy sources in a modus mirroring tri-magnetic fields, produced at the surface of our own sun during solar storms. This sounds almost too bizarre to be for real, but it did not come about purely by chance. An inexplicable discovery in 2088 charted the consistency between the signature of these solar fields and our brain waves during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep cycle. This odd connection bewildered the scientists who discovered it.

The match was so overwhelming and statistically significant, like two fingerprints out of a trillion matching up almost perfectly, that it blew the scientific community away. This find prompted leading physicist Ulrey Olgstein, to remark to the governor of the United States, it is the coincident signature of the Almighty. The edge research was born and continues to be explored.

What may be revealed to a person during supernatural exposure is of ultimate military, economic, and mortal significance. This is why MISS is considered to be of utmost EU national interest and security.

Jacob’s vitals showed that he was experiencing an increasing calmness, not anxiety. The clinicians advanced him to the next routine with a few flicks to the membrane screen. The whirling sound increased in frequency and slight pulse could be felt throughout Jacob’s body. A growing sense of euphoria was intensifying by the minute. The surging in his temples and the feeling that blood flow was increasing through his eyes was a welcome release from the migraine headache he’d had just moments before.

With his eyes closed, he began to see a wild, rapid succession of random patterns and colors, like a kaleidoscope on steroids. Jacob was blown away by the imagery and thought, This has to be from the other realm.

There are great risks to people in the MISS Project and to national security as well. Seeking supernatural exposure via the edge platform is inherently dangerous in itself. The old Jewish Bible warned of people dying if they even cast an eye upon their God (New World Translation). They were also warned against contacting the supernatural realm at all.

What if a supernatural power didn’t want direct contact or gave intentionally misleading information? Or killed those making contact? This was the biggest unknown and the gravest concern of the MISS Project.

It has been known since the days of the primitive mind machines of the 2050’s that there is a point of no return which can be reached somewhere on the edge platform. Many test subjects died during the earlier experiments, and there are deaths even to this day. Were they killed by the supernatural? That has been the generally accepted belief.

The common theme was that while the test subjects showed perfectly functional and healthy vital signs, complete coherence, and even an elated disposition during the ramp up, there was a point reached in which they could not be brought back. Stopping the machine did nothing once past a certain point and the subjects drifted away while their vital signs hopelessly faded.

During the instant rehabilitation campaigns with prison inmates, death rates were of little concern to the government, even though nothing was known about using this technology for supernatural exposure at that time. But because the present day MISS recruits are highly valued and viewed as performing a national service almost as vital as the military, continuing deaths in the program have brought much controversy. Yet there is no shortage of recruits.

The recruits are hardly recruits, though. The government does not require anyone to participate in MISS. They’re selected. And they line up to be selected. One project clinician was recently quoted as stating, Hell, they’re clamoring to date little MISS, like she’s some kind of whore. And they pay us better than any pimp, I can assure you. But direct participates in the MISS edge studies have to meet strict criteria.

MISS candidates have to cough up some dead presidents. A lot of them. The program is outrageously expensive, costing as much as a medium sized family dwelling, a small fortune today. Unlike a hundred years ago when everyone bought their own house and borrowed money to do so, the price of homes today is unobtainable by the average worker or family and lending is rarely an option. If you own a home today, you are considered wealthy.

Participants in the MISS Project cannot have a criminal record of any kind. The fact is though, many of the existing program participants didn’t meet this requirement and it was waved. This requirement is strictly in place to allow MISS to weed out someone they can’t reject for some other reason.

MISS applicants cannot be affiliated with or active in any religious organization. Prior associations are not necessarily viewed as negative, provided the applicant has left any such organization and ceased seeking anything supernatural at least two years prior to MISS. Applicants must sign a statement attesting to those facts. Truth testing is performed by MISS.

The reasoning for this restriction is that MISS proponents want to minimize any preconceived and resilient notions of the supernatural in the minds of its subjects and therefore minimize the risk of death or other negative effects from supernatural exposure should their beliefs somehow offend.

This may sound a little paranoid but something associated with supernatural exposure was seen as the cause of many deaths in the program and there was growing data to suggest the deaths had been reduced since this requirement was implemented.

More controversial than the death of the subjects however, was the risk of biased MISS results, skewed by religious beliefs. A death, not to down play it, only meant that no further data could be obtained using that person. But if the supernatural purposely provided misinformation because of the subject’s religious or other offensive beliefs, then the consequences could be disastrous on a larger scale, because important national plans may be based on this data.

Adherents of the MISS Project must also have a minimum of ten years of experience in the military, politics, business management, or financial sector, and presently work in one of these fields.

Did you notice no education requirements? That’s right. It’s all about desire and work ethic. The MISS Project was a pioneer in ridding modern society of employee education requirements that had been grandfathered in place for a century.

The proponents of MISS saw a college degree as just a piece of paper that could be bought, used by a corrupt system as a prejudice tool to weed out the unwanted from corporate ranks. All that has been changed, thanks to MISS. Even so, college was never discouraged. Of course, neither was reading.

If lucky enough to be accepted by MISS, there are strict diet requirements as well. MISS subjects can only eat organically grown meat, grains, vegetables and fruits as prescribed and administered by MISS nutritionists. No milk, cheese or other dairy products, no eggs, no