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I am a telepath.
In fact, I am a member of the American Institute of Telepaths, and
I have been a member since I was eighteen years old. A student member,
of course - I didn't become a full member until I graduated from
College, and I was almost twenty-three, then. I'm pretty good, too
- my current rating is 13.6, and I think that's about as far as
I'll get. Telepaths improve until they're about thirty five, and
after that there's really little change. However, 13.6 puts me in
the top ten per cent: last year I was elected Fellow of the AIT.
I don't suppose
you know what a rating of 13.6 means - the AIT is a testing body,
as many of the professional Institutes are, and we have committees
that review the rating procedures, to allow for the differences
between environments and so forth. It ends up being fairly complicated,
but to put it in its simplest terms, my rating means that I can
communicate with a master telepath up to 13.6 kilometers away with
a 50% accuracy in an urban environment. A master telepath is someone
with a rating over 20, and at the moment we only have about sixteen
of those in the Institute. An urban environment means that there
is a relatively high population density, and for two telepaths communicating,
the normals in between make a sort of mumbling background noise,
which blurs the contact.
This probably
seems pretty good, and a few years ago it was; but of course a couple
of normals with cell phones can have a better than 90% accuracy
over thirty miles or more, these days.
It is always
really astounding how many professional Institutions there are,
and how many of them share the same initials. However, if you go
into Yahoo! and do a search for AIT, you won't find the American
Institute of Telepaths.
And why is
that? you may well ask. It's because the idea of a telepath has
been threatening - alien, even frightening - for many normals ever
since the recognition of the possibility appeared, and so we keep
ourselves somewhat apart to avoid being massacred.
Those of us
who have this ability have some difficulty in understanding why
normals think like this. If I read the ordinary science fiction
book that has a telepath as a character, I see that it is believed
that we can 'read minds' - whatever that means. However, everyone
thinks in a different way, and in fact simultaneously in several
different ways. I am sure you will understand that this is an oversimplification,
but there are perhaps three or four distinguishable levels.
The only one
a telepath stands a chance of getting at is a very near surface
process, which is almost like subsurface vocalization, where the
individual is thinking in words in a fairly continuous and structured
way. To give you an idea how little of what people think of is like
this, remember the research that has been done on how people read.
The eyes jump about the page - re-read sentences, omit sections,
sometimes go back to them if they can't remember who a new character
is, and so forth. Can you imagine how this appears to a telepath?
But even then, the printed page is a discipline, a fixed reference.
If an individual is thinking about a matter of interest to them,
there is no fixed reference, and furthermore the thought process
may involve only a minority of words - many of the concepts resemble
pictures, or ideograms, or whatever. These are intensely personal,
and a telepath can only access them after a long and close association
with the individual.
There is a
deeper, almost wholly unvocalized level of thinking, which is close
to inaccessible, apart from some general indications of themes.
And finally
there is the very deep processes which continue when one is asleep,
and enable one to wake up with the solution to a problem which had
seemed impossible the previous night.
So, is the
ability altogether worthless? Well, not exactly. Two telepaths can
communicate very clearly within a room, without any of the normals
being aware that this hyperconversation is going on, and we get
much entertainment - and a sense of community - from this. There
is the occasional pleasure of discovering a new telepath who has
not discovered their ability. I remarked above that the normals
generate a sort of background mumble, and while it is confusing
at large distances, in a room (even a large room) the effect is
easy to ignore. One can 'hypersee' your telepathic colleagues in
this low-level morass as crystalline peaks, and even recognize them
by their characteristic auras. Within this, the unawakened novice
is instantly recognizable, and very exciting. There isn't a one-to-one
relationship between physical space and telespace, so identifying
which of the assembly is this new one is often challenging.
But I have
to tell you, it doesn't happen very often.
We talk amongst
ourselves as to whether there is a Darwinian benefit in being a
telepath. Are we the next stage in the development of humanity?
A relic of an earlier stage which communicated this way before speech
had evolved? The debate has been going on a long time, without moving
towards any kind of conclusion.
Anyway, you
won't find the AIT listed anywhere, but it exists. So do we. If
you are a telepath, we will probably find you, particularly if you
regularly attend relatively large gatherings.
And for those
of you who are not telepaths, you do not need to worry. We can't
generally tell what you are thinking. We are not spying on your
sex lives. We differ only a very little from you, and so far as
we can tell, it doesn't really appear to make us better, or (come
to that) worse.
I am a telepath.
And, perhaps, so are you.
I look forward
to meeting you, and maybe even helping you to discover why you have
been feeling just a little bit different all these years.
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