“So, what, you’re manipulating people’s lives?”
“I was just asking a question, K.”
“These people who work for you, who are they?”
“I’ve found that people drawn to complex games and game theory often have a highly developed sense of pattern recognition and an innate ability to see connections—or, more importantly, possible future connections.”
He waved again and the giant screen went dark.
“This is just a small sample of what we do here. There’s so much more going on beneath the surface—so many systems and events to monitor and influence.”
“What’s happening on the other floors of The Tower?”
“Eighty percent of the building is nothing more than an enormous server farm, I’m afraid.”
“Computers?”
“A whole bunch of them.” He smiled again.
I tried to imagine exactly how much computational power that might be, then gave up. I had no way to comprehend those types of numbers, and I had something else on my mind in that moment.
“How did you know my mother?”
“I met your parents in San Francisco. We worked together for a long time. This”—he motioned around the room—“is the end result of some of that work.”
“I’m not sure I understand. What kind of work are you talking about?”
Crow took a moment, as if he was considering whether or not I was ready to hear the answer. “Are you familiar with Kellan Meechum?” he asked, finally.
“A little,” I said. “Wasn’t his thing other dimensions and ley lines?”
“That was part of it, yes, but there was so much more.”
Crow leaned back against a table and continued. “While working with a group of scientists that would eventually make up a large part of the MKUltra team, Kellan Meechum discovered something incredible—and quite by accident. He’d spent his early life focused on proving the existence of ley lines—a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense focused on the importance of perceived alignments of landmarks, religious sites, and manmade structures. But in 1945, Meechum stumbled upon something else. While trying to connect ley lines to patterns and anomalies in Fibonacci numbers and Benford’s Law, he uncovered something he referred to as Radiants—theoretical lines running through the world, lines of energy Meechum believed would morph and change as the world changed around them. It’s difficult to explain, this morphing or migration of energy—and Meechum himself admitted he wasn’t completely up to the task. But investigating the cause wasn’t what Meechum was interested in. He was interested in investigating the effect. You see, near the end of his life, Meechum had converted to Christianity. At that point, he believed God had long abandoned this world, and that as a result, humanity was denied access to the afterlife. Meechum was looking for…the other side. He’d become convinced that the Radiants were leading him somewhere. He believed he’d discovered a map to heaven and hell.”
Like his precise numbers theory from earlier, I got the sense Crow believed everything he was saying, but that didn’t make it sound any more believable.
“What if I told you that Kellan Meechum was right?” he continued. “And, although the heaven-and-hell aspect of his theory was nothing more than the religious ramblings of a man approaching the end of his life, his Radiants actually exist?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s pretty out there.”
Crow smiled. “I understand your skepticism. I think you’ll find it much easier to grasp if you compare the Meechum Radiants to Earth’s magnetic field.”
“Okay…”
“Pigeons, foxes, and turtles use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate the world. Cattle align themselves in accordance with it, and dogs as well, when they defecate.”
“I’m sorry, but what do defecating dogs have to do with magical pathways to heaven and hell?”
He forced a smile and continued. “Many scientists believe humankind hasn’t fully lost the power of magnetoreception that we had millions of years ago. As part of Earth’s magnetic biosphere, humans—like those other animals—have always had the ability to detect the magnetic field subconsciously. Before he became obsessed with the religious nonsense, Meechum described his Radiants as a similar, unseeable source of energy—no more magical or strange than Earth’s magnetic field. He believed that if we were somehow able to understand the movements and uncover the language of these Radiants, we might be able to use them to shift or slip between dimensions.”