Deja Blue by Robert W Walker Read Free Book Online

and displeased with this image? Aurelia asked herself these questions again, as she’d done before, alone in her bedroom at home. Now here it had invaded her workspace, this strange scenario, and while she knew it was a repeating dream image of sorts, one of those real naggers that wouldn’t leave her alone, it insisted she think of it as a kind of looping, recurrent thing—as in a déjà vu moment. No matter how often the vision came to her, it felt like a rerun…a replay…a blip stuck in the coiled inner ear and third eye inside her head.
     
    Is there more to a memory that hasn’t yet happened than symbolic language, she wondered. Has it more to do with the seer herself than the symbol? Has it to do with the seer at all? Or is it from without, a signal. A sign. A warning. A plea. A cry for help?
     
    Reaching out once again to touch the floating angelic woman, Rae’s more objective side studied the features, focusing on what appeared a pure, androgynous, and quite unrecognizable blank slate. She was reminded of the creepy old black and white film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which blank-slate clones of human beings were hatching from pods to take over their counterparts in order to repopulate the Earth with unfeeling aliens. But this blank slate, Rae believed, once had great feeling and emotion; she was once all too human.
     
    The image remained just beyond the reach of her mental fingertips.
     
    From the observation booth, others watched her unusual behavior inside her familiar cocoon. They too saw the recurrent image. Ashley Phillips, Dr. Waldron, what think-tank experts she could get to return, they’d all tired of this lady of peace, this sky floater. No one thought it relevant to the case at hand.
     
    And perhaps it wasn’t. It’d first come to Aurelia before she ever heard of the case, long before it’d been brought to the PSI Unit.
     
    She wondered what her Buddhist father might have said about déjà vu occurrences, and this recurrent dream in particular. Conversely, she wondered what her Irish Wiccan mother would say of this strange image and it’s déjà effect.
     
    Then she heard her mother’s soothing voice in her head. “All life is connected in so many myriad ways, Rae. Thought itself is part of the geophysical world and the substrings of particle matter spoken of in astrophysics.”
     
    “Listen to your mother,” came her father’s voice. “Sub-strata strings carry thought, and if so, can the déjà vu be someone else’s memory returning for a second bombardment on the individual mind? Or a reflection, a mirroring—you being the psychic mirror.”
     
     
     
    Up till now, Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa had sat in the lotus position, contemplating a series of murders, her concentration facing a kind of ‘pong’ game with the image of the floating, featureless girl in the bustling Times Square-like setting.
     
    It meant nothing to her. She could seize it not. Yet the image had made an indelible impression, and it had intruded on an earlier case she’d been working, a missing persons case and a cold one at that. One which simply defied heating up.
     
    She finally gave up the ghost, calling it quits. “Sorry…sorry,” she called out, which had become her signal for ‘enough is enough’ and that she must shut down. “Hate to disappoint everyone, but…”
     
    Rae snatched away the CRAVL electrodes, another nicety that Gene had always seen to, but not anymore. Gene Kiley would shut things down on her behalf whenever he felt she’d been pushed too far. Now with Gene gone, she’d pretty much been left to make this move on her own. While Ashley Phillips was empathic, she most certainly was not in touch with Rae’s deepest emotions. Being out of touch meant just that; Phillips could not know when to shut her down, because she was not in harmony with Rae. Perhaps she never would be.
     
    “Hopefully, Miranda,” Rae’s full, rich voice came over the intercom to the next room