Great HyperShort today dealing with Astral Projection… and bad people doing creepy things. Ethan’s specialty. As usual, check out more HyperShorts here…
THE MIND MACHINE by Ethan Lawrence
Shasta Wilson is fast in the hundred yard and the mile, the greatest hope for her college coach who believes she can beat the best runners from other countries in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But something devastating occurs to keep her out of the running. She is badly injured in an accident that leaves her paralyzed from the waist down.
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In a rehabilitation center, Shasta is suicidal, believing she will never run again, until David Arnold, a scientist from the university’s research facility, works his way into her life. He sees Shasta as the means of new hope, and tries to convince her to help him with a theory he has been working on.
“You could help prove my work is real and provide yourself with a new way of running despite your paralysis.”
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“That’s impossible. I can never walk again!”
But David goes on to explain his work in the “bicameral mind” or neurological command, in which a person is capable of activating neural activity in the dominant left hemisphere of the brain and separate consciousness.”
“Separate consciousness?”
“Some used to call it OOBE – an “out of body experience.”
Shasta has heard enough, tries to push her wheelchair away from the delusional man. The embittered girl wants nothing to do with David or this preposterous theory.
But David persists with his bright hopeful manner and his intelligence.
“It’s more than just achieving an altered state of consciousness. At a more rarefied level, it is a peak experience that brings some people beyond just an out-of-body-experience.”
“How do you do it,” asks a still disbelieving Shasta.
“I employ something I like to call ‘The Mind Machine’. It uses mostly illegal technology to allow subjects to obtain higher levels of existence by leaving their broken bodies behind.”
“Forever?”
“That’s entirely up to you, Shasta. But something tells me you won’t want to come back once you’ve tried it.
In David’s lab, he explains how he has been attempting to explore other realities, and finding the secrets hidden in our minds. With nothing to lose, Shasta agrees to a regime of training for her brain. It’s required to separate her contact with material reality that is in every way as difficult as her early physical training for the Summer Olympics.
But with David’s dogged persistence and vast knowledge of ‘The Mind Machine’, Shasta begins to achieve that “out-of-body experience” by reaching the right brain state so that her astral self can detach from her paralyzed physical body and run again. It is like nothing Shasta could have imagined – a passing from flesh to a resonance with the universe. Both she and David are ecstatic as they achieve the proof of his theory while, at the same time, falling in love.
But while Shasta is filled with a renewed feeling of having experienced a rare accomplishment, it has unexpectedly exposed her to dark shadowy figures lost to history – “astral demons.” These harbingers of death have always existed in the astral plane and Shasta and David have unwittingly opened a doorway for them to our world. It is clear that this powerful force threatens the survival of humanity and Shasta is all that stands between them and us.