Cross My Mind

A NEW POWER

….

Garba wakes up to a non stopping noise that has been generating around him, when he opens his eyes, he was on the cold floor of a cell at the nearby police station, je is worried by the fact that he is being treated as a suspect in a crime committed against him, but at the moment he is more concerned about the growing volume of voices he is hearing. From all directions, as if it is actually happening inside his head.

Garba could not see anyone near him talking but he can hear over nine different voices of people apparently Talking on their phones he deduced, he voices were clear and distinct, and he can tell with precision what each of them are saying.

To make the matters worse, as a police officer walks nearby the cell that Garba is locked in, he started to see flashes of light floating around the man’s breast pocket and when he focused on the light, he saw a holographic projection of a mobile phone with an icon over it that said “Connect”

This puzzles and intrigue Garba to a great extent. He has never seen a real hologram before let alone one that floats around near people who are walking. He starts to suspect that he was dreaming but realized that was not the case when he pinched himself so hard and felt a sharp pain on his skin. He has developed the pinching method to differentiate between the active Lucid dreams he gets all the time from reality.

Having realized this is not a dream, he sat down and settled his thoughts.

“There’s only one thing left to do since I cannot leave this cell to follow him and see what the hell was the hologram, so I’ll wait for him to come back. If he is walking into the inner parts of the station,, he would definitely have to walk out right past me in this cell at some point. During which I will make out whether I seeing things not or they really are there”. He thought.

Two more people came walking past the cells, walking straight into the police station. The station has been built in such a way that the locking Cells are located near the entrance and exit of the station so as to maximize ventilation when the station is packed with criminals. It also allow for the consistent monitoring of the arrested and detained criminals by all the passing by police officers.

One of the two people was a civilian who has the same hologram projection Next to his breast pocket, he is a man of about fifty-five years old. while the other one is a police officer dressed in his uniform, ,with his phone in his hands and the holographic projection floating right next to the cell phone in his hands.

“I am sure my son didn’t hit the other car intentionally, the other driver was the one who was reckless on the road. I don’t mind how much I have to pay, just set bail for him and I will pay it no matter how much it is”. The elderly man said to the police officer walking with him.

At first, Garba kept thinking that the holographic projection of the icons he is see must be his imagination but when the police officer walking the man inside the station came to the cell next to Garba’s to remove a detainee, Garba was shocked even more by what he saw.

The man was unlocking the next cell and Garba was focusing his attention more and more on the projection and all of a sudden, the projected icon expanded and zoomed closer to Garba’s face, forming a large window near enough for him to touch. He was shocked by the sudden movement of the holographic projection that he recoiled back in a bit of shock, making the police officer look in his direction.

“You alright young man? Just now you moved backwards as if someone or something just tried to attack you” the police man said to Garba while opening the next cell and waving his hand at a young man of about Garba’s age. The young man walked out of the cell and the police man still looking at Garba.

“I am alright, but can you tell me why I am in here? I was robbed of hundreds of thousands of Naira yesterday in the hotel at night and I was almost beaten to death by the robbers so what am I doing locked in a cell?”. Garba responded.

The police man shook his head and begin to walk back into the police station with the young man who Garba is already deducing to be the son of the earlier elderly man that was complaining to the police officer.

Before the two disappeared from his sight, Garba reached out his index finder and touched the projected icon next carrying the word “connect” on it which is floating right next to the smart phone projection.

As soon as his finger touched the icon, it blinked and turned green, then transform into a progress bar with “connecting” blinking at the top of the bar. A minute later, the police man and the young man that he took out of the cell walked past Garba’s cell towards the exit of the building.

“So this is the power of money, I guess they wont believe I have money even if I told them” he thought to himself.

Right at this moment, the progress bar has reached a hundred percent and the “connecting” sign blinking at the top of the bar has changed to “connected, press to view”. Garba reached out his hand again and pressed the icon. Instantly, the cell phone projection blinked and turn into a gigantic smartphone projection with a screen as big as the monitor of a desktop computer.

The phone is in its home screen so Garba sat back down to the floor and started interacting with the phone.

At first, he didn’t realize what exactly he is accessing but when he checked the contacts on the phone, the text massages exchanged between the owner and others, it became clear to him that he is in fact going through the police officer’s smart phone unnoticed.

“If they were seeing these projections, they would have been talking about them so this means I am the only person that can see these projections. Could this be the effect of the experiment we volunteered for? If this is the case, then can Mila see them as well and why cant I find any information on the damn company! In either case, I need to get out of here first and although I don’t have an explanation as to how and why I have access to this incredible technology, I am most certainly going to take advantage of it and get myself the hell out of this place” he thought in his mind.

He continues to go through the police man’s massaged and found many evidence of corruption and bribe collection and demand in the phone but the question he could not answer for sure is .

“Can i alter anything in the phone? In other words, does my interaction with the projected phone translate to interaction with the real phone?. I have to test this out” he thought to himself.

He opened the phone and copied the number saved with D.P.O and Garba immediately knows it to be an abbreviation for Divisional Police Officer. This is usually the highest ranking police officer that oversee and manage all police stations and officers in a district division.

With his expertise and experience in programming and computer program manipulations, it didn’t take Garba long to find out that he can send a text massages to the policeman’s phone disguised as the DPO of the district and this massage would even be documented on the DPO's phone as if they are the one that send the massage themselves.

Apart from being able to interact with People’s phones, Garba found out he can also copy files from the devices and store it in what at the moment he can only say is a form of Local storage device he can connect to at any time, even if there is no smart phone device around anymore. One by one, he connected to the phones of all the police officers in the station and collected evidence of massive instances of corruption and malpractice, some even power abuse and clear violations of the code of ethics of the police department.

A day later, all the police officers in the station will watch Garba being walked out of the station, they will watch their superior give him new clothes and all his possessions that have been confiscated when he was arrested, and the ones taken from the hotel room.

The next morning, Garba was ready to blackmail the highest ranking police officer with evidence he has found of him collecting millions of Naira in bribe, other acts of corruption and to Garba’s surprise, even a s*x tape. “ what could an elderly man of his age possibly benefit from by keeping his own s*x tape on his smartphone? I guess people have their kinks. Either way, I’ll send him the massage in his smartphone, I’ll start with thee corruption case and if that doesn’t motivate him to do as I do, I’m sure the s*x tape would”. Garba thought.

However, Garba’s thoughts were interrupted by the Arrival of two people dressed in black suits into the police station. From his cell, he saw them show their identity cards and present themselves as Officers from the Nigerian department of secret services. Out of curiosity, Garba begins to connect with both their phones out of curiosity but what he found after he access their phones put him right on the edge. He found corresponding massage exchanges between each of the two of them and an individual who’s contact they both saved as ‘HQ'

In their conversations through chat, the HQ person referred to one of them as Agent Delta and the other one as Agent Sigma and both of them were given specific directives to retrieve, sedate and transport subject 001 to a rendezvous point they will be provided with only when they have confirmed their capture of the target and arrived the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in western edge of the country.

What baffles Garba more than why he has suddenly gained the ability to access electronic devices is that the subject 001 that the two agents Delta and Sigma have been tasked with retrieving is none other than him. In each of their phones, a file containing information on subject 001 and when he opened the files, he saw a very clear picture of himself that he has no memory of ever being taken, the clothes he was wearing in the picture are clothes he has never seen in his life.

Below the picture the details talked about his Heterochromia, his sister’s Heterochromia and his family background. His last seen location was also mentioned to be ‘Hotel Fourteen' residence.

In that instance, Garba realized that this could be the doing of Neuratechnologies which has apparently vanished from existence since the end of the trials.

“I have made many attempts to contact or find anything more about them and it is all gone. There’s not a single thing about them on the internet. Neither the company nor their whereabouts. Why would they do that even though they paid us a lot of money” He thought and immediately, made up his mind to get out of the cell and put as much distance as he could between him and the two agents until he understands fully what is going on”. He thought.

He quickly prepared a file and sent it to the highest ranking police officer in the station. The file contains the officer’s s*x tape and list of all the bribes he had collected n the last two weeks to release criminal that have been arrested. He sent the file to him with only one massage.

“you don’t know me, but I know you, if you don’t want these contents to be simultaneously sent to everyone you work with and know, including your wife and the police headquarter, you need to excuse yourself and walk out of your office immediately, then do one good act in your life and release the innocent detainee named Garba Danladi in cell one of your station, you have three minutes to do so and tell me or I will automatically upload the massage”.

Without any delay, the police man walked to Garba’s cell and unlocked it with fresh sweat breaking on his forehead.

“Whoever that your friends are, please tell them that I am sorry for getting in their way, tell them that I owe you people any favor you want in the future as my assured cooperation so they should please get rid of those files. i dont want to offend a blue eyed demon like you, i knew my men have put me in trouble by bringing you to my station so please tell them that i complied with their directives” the officer said while handling Garba a plastic bag containing all his belongings and a pair of new clothes.Garba wanted to pretend he doesn't know what was going on initially, but the smirk on his face ended up scaring the police officer on the end.

"I guess my Heterochromia has some use once in a while" he murmured to himself.

As soon as Garba got out of the police station, he took a random cab and asked to be taken to the nearest car dealership in the city.

while in the Cab, Garba figured out a way to control the background phone conversation playing in his head by focusing on the thought of shutting the noise off and like a Miracle, the noise died down.

however, as the noise die down so does the radio playing inside the cab which the driver finds very weird and scary that he started reading traditional incantations to protect himself from the evil of dark spirits and witches, obviously scared by Garba's Blue and brown eyes.