“We’re looking into that, sir,” his chief of staff responded.
“Well, look faster,” he replied brusquely. “We can’t let that hold us up. We need to know what he has, and we need it yesterday.”
A pregnant silence filled the room. Then the DNI asked, “What about the Invention Secrecy Act?”
“Do you mean 82-256?” asked one of the female staff lawyers at the side of the room.
“Yes, the act from 1951. Can’t we use that?”
“He’s never filed for any patents,” she replied.
“And that makes him exempt from the statute?” the DNI asked skeptically.
The lawyer replied hesitantly. “Its provisions pertain to withholding patents that are detrimental to national security, sir.”
“Well, it’s certainly a national security issue,” he shot back.
She stammered for a moment before responding. “Yes, sir. But there aren’t any patents to withhold,” she replied awkwardly. “The act pertains to the sequestration and government use of what he’s chosen to disclose to the USPTO when it’s in the national interest. It doesn’t pertain to search and seizure.”
There was a brief silence as the DNI pondered the options for resolving what he viewed as an untenable situation. “Are you sure there aren’t any related filings that would give us some clue about what he has?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem reasonable that he’d try to go it alone without any type of patent protection.”
“Apparently, that’s what he’s done,” the lawyer’s superior interjected from the side of the room. “There isn’t anything on file with the US Patent and Trademark Office, either from him or from any entity where he has an interest.”
The DNI frowned. “Then either he’s very brave, or he thinks he has something so unique that nobody can duplicate it,” he replied gruffly, slapping his hand on the table for emphasis.
“Or even worse, it’s all in his head,” the director of the Central Intelligence Agency added pensively. “That would be the nightmare scenario.”
“Keep working on it,” the DNI said tersely. “If we’re not fast enough, you can be sure that someone else will get hold of it first. We can’t let that happen.” He glanced around the table to see each of the sullen faces nod slowly.
The meeting was over.
AFTER MR. GREGORY STARTED TO MAKE HIS NETWORK interventions, he knew that people viewed him as anything but ordinary. Everyone he met recognized that he was more than just clever, but no one understood why. They were puzzled and wondered how he had come by his insights to discover the existence of the Network.
Mr. Gregory seemed to have an intrinsic feel for how the universe was designed that extended far beyond what other luminaries had even begun to appreciate. That went for the full panoply of philosophers, clergymen, naturalists, scientists, and mystics who had ever staked a claim about their understanding of the universe and humanity’s role in it. So the question was, who was Mr. Gregory, this person who seemed to have insights that allowed him to surpass the ideas of everyone else?
It all went back to an experience he had as a child. One day, when he was alone in his room, he’d seen something so odd that he couldn’t help but wonder what it was. In the midafternoon, in broad daylight, he saw a region near the corner of his room begin to waver and shimmer, almost like water waves colliding to form ripples rather than any type of air movement. When he got closer to have a better look, he felt a burst of cold air that stopped him from advancing any farther. He was bewildered, and as he watched, the region began to slowly expand and contract in a way that appeared to pulsate. Within it, he could see what he perceived as twinkling “slices,” each containing images that unfolded as separate scenes, much as they would appear in four dimensions. Together they seemed to be like a stack of multidimensional celluloid images that advanced through an expository sequence at varying speeds—some slowly but others more quickly. Within each was a wide splay of colors that blended at their margins into what appeared like a continuum. But before he could do anything more to evaluate them, the shimmering region disappeared. The episode lasted for only a few moments, but the experience was enough to shape the rest of his life.
He told his parents about what he’d seen, but they were convinced he’d simply fallen asleep and had a dream. He knew that what he’d seen was real, but there was no point in his pressing the issue. As an only child, he was dependent on his friends and acquaintances for his social companionship, and he wanted to fit in with them at all costs. It would only make him seem peculiar if he confided his experience in them, and that was exactly what he didn’t want. Accordingly, he decided there would be no good way for him to communicate what he’d seen until he could prove it. And he recognized that the only way for him to do so would be to find incontrovertible evidence to support his account of what had happened.
Even though he was still early in his schooling, he had already begun to learn about science and the scientific method. Based on that, he realized that assembling the proof he needed would be a long process that would require many years of study and investigation. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it; he realized he’d been given a glimpse into the underlying basis of reality that few people had ever been fortunate enough to see. That made him feel that he’d somehow been chosen to do the hard work of proving that there was more to existence than everyone seemed to assume.
For the time being, he went about his ordinary life, making friends, growing up, and learning life’s lessons, until he was finally able to revisit his ideas about what he’d experienced. Although he didn’t mention it to anyone, he went about assembling the compendium of information he needed to prove the existence of what he’d seen, step by step. His goal was to make his understanding of what he’d experienced have a significant practical value so that he could demonstrate to others that it wasn’t a mere illusion or a mirage. What he had seen existed, and it sat in the background of the reality that people thought they knew. Despite that, it had occurred under special conditions that were just right for him to have witnessed it; under more ordinary circumstances, it would remain cloaked from the rest of humanity. Because of that, he recognized that he was one of the privileged few who had been in the right place at just the right time to have the opportunity to view it.
Although he understood the importance of what he’d seen, it would take many years for him to find out exactly what it represented and what it meant. He decided to dedicate his life to the pursuit of that goal, and for that he was willing to forego the many other niceties of life—comfort, marriage, children, and social status. His work became his life, and it continued that way until he was finally able to build his machine, the device that allowed him to both read and influence the Network. As far as he was concerned, its power needed to be in full display for others to develop enough of an interest to believe in what he’d witnessed as well as the insights it had given him. To do that, he needed to show them what it could do in order not to be written off as just another theorist or a quack. And that was what his invention allowed him to do.
It took more than a decade of work for him to develop his machine, and once it was operational, he knew that it was time. He started to use it in ways that would give him visibility to people in the proper strata of society who could be of help to him in disseminating his message, including key financiers, industrialists, and politicians. His strategy for gaining acceptance of his insights and capabilities depended on his being able to garner progressively greater degrees of influence over them, and his plan was beginning to work. One by one, they started to pay attention to what he could do by using the power of the Network, and they were even trying to understand the nature of the underlying reality that stood behind it. Slowly at first and then more quickly, they were beginning to open their minds to the possibilities of what the universe actually was and how it was designed.