The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

You develop for yourselves etiquettes and ethics. The closest I can think of would be it’s like asking someone flat out if they’re gay or pregnant. It’s just not done.”

“The benefit of being ignorant is you get to ask rude questions,” says Avi.

“But not necessarily get them answered,” Bishop says. “For you, I’ll make an exception.” He plucks an olive from his glass and slices it in half with his front teeth. Without any warning, all movement in the bar stops. Men making important points sustain hand gestures while their dates keep gazing off past their ears. The bartender pours a glass of wine until the glass overflows, the bottle emptying onto the back bar. The piped-in electrojazz in the background is the only sound that continues except for the whir of ceiling fans.

Avi swivels on his stool. The woman next to him has her drink halfway to her lips. The glass is tilted. The liquid sloshes gently, short of the rim. He reaches out to touch her, wondering if she’ll be cold or hard. He puts his hand on her bare arm. It’s warm flesh, nothing unusual. He grips it and can feel her brachial pulse, steady. He lets go and turns back to Bishop.

“I’m in their minds,” Bishop says. “All of them at once. At the academy, we split telepaths into readers and writers, although most can do a little of both. Some writers can only suggest. Others can command. I am, strictly speaking, not a telepath. I’m an omnipath.”

Bishop chomps on the remainder of his first olive. Motion returns to the bar with a lurch. Only the bartender notices the pause, cursing the inexplicable puddle of wine dribbling onto his shoes.

A drop of blood falls from Bishop’s nose into his drink. It expands into a pink nebula and hangs suspended. Bishop’s hand goes to his nostril. He wipes away the trickle that runs down to the edge of his lip. He turns his hand outward, two fingers up like a Boy Scout pledging. The fingertips are smeared with a pale pink liquid. “Too light to be blood, right?”

“What is it?” Avi asks, leaning in to look.

“The closest correct answer would be to say it’s my thoughts, running down my nose like snot,” Bishop says. “Another answer would be to say it’s my Resonance. My ability.” He takes the spear that impales his olives and stirs the drop of blood into his drink until it’s no longer discernible. “Or you could say it’s Resonance. Not mine specifically but ours in general. The shared source of our abilities.”

“Running down your nose like snot,” says Avi.

“With some old-fashioned blood mixed in for color. When you find out how the magic happens, it’s never as magical as you hope.”

“How does the magic happen?” Avi asks.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Bishop says. “It’s a frustrating thing for a scientist not to be sure.”

“You’re a scientist?”

“I was,” he says. “I was a mechanical engineer.”

“There’re no records of you anywhere,” says Avi. “It’s like you don’t exist.”

“Yet here I am, existing,” Bishop says, holding out his hands as proof. “I worked for the government during the war. When we were done, some of us became public figures. Oppenheimer. Fermi. Bethe. Some of us disappeared. It’s likely I would have disappeared afterward anyway. Taken an academic job somewhere. Pined for the bomb like an ex-lover. Many of those men and women went on to lead very sad, very dull lives.”

“You worked on the Manhattan Project?”

Bishop nods, and Avi’s heart leaps. This is the mother of all bombs, the God bomb. He’s read book after book on the Manhattan Project, biographies of all the major scientists, memoirs of women who did computation at Los Alamos, transcriptions of the security lecture Robert Serber gave to new arrivals. He has a hundred new questions for Bishop, but none of them relate to the story at hand.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Too old,” says Bishop. “We should die when our ideas become obsolete. A red jewel in your hand should blink, and someone takes you off the board. It’d be a mercy.”

“Did the bomb give you your abilities?”

“I assumed it was radiation for a long time,” Bishop says. “It was the fifties. We had no idea what radiation could do. We thought it would mutate ants and scantily clad women until they were monstrously large. We thought it would make us glow in the dark. Why couldn’t it give me abilities? I taught myself genetics so I could comb my genes looking for the glitch. I expected to find something entirely new. A fifth nucleotide. Gene X. I spent years looking before a friend of mine pointed me in another direction.”

“Who was this friend?” Avi asks.

“A colleague. A close friend,” he says. “Another scientist on the project. He was a physicist. Theoretical stuff. Beautiful man, like a film star. And brilliant. Maybe not as brilliant as Feynman or Szilard. But beautiful. It happened to him, too. His abilities were similar to mine. Moving things around in people’s heads. But his thinking on it was different. He thought the bomb was like a tuning fork struck against a glass. That it set certain people in tune with something elsewhere. There was a vibration that served as a connection. A conduit. Once there were more of us, this made more sense. There was no genetic link between, say, me and a kid in the Ozarks who could produce perfect duplicates of himself, like an amoeba dividing. If the genetics were insufficient, the biology was even more so. Where did the matter come from to produce those duplicates? Where did the energy come from that shot out of Sam Guthridge’s eyes?” The name startles Avi: the dead boy in Wyoming Patrick told him about. He sees pain pass over Bishop’s face mentioning it, and he wonders if Bishop remembers the names of all of their dead. “The human body can’t produce that on its own. It would burn itself up. We had to