THE BRIDGE

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Jennifer made the drive to Wilbur alone.

David had offered to come—Margaret too. She'd turned them both down. This wasn't scientists arriving with credentials and equipment. This was years of sitting in hot water together, years of listening without judgment, and the bill coming due.

The road wound through the Coast Range in late afternoon light. She'd driven this route dozens of times—the ritual pilgrimage from silicon and schedules to mineral water and silence. Usually she felt the unwinding begin somewhere around Clear Lake. Today the tension stayed.

She thought about what she was asking. Starseed had built an identity on interpretation. The resonance circles, the products, the vocabulary of ascended masters and sacred geometry. All of it resting on a framework that might not fit what was actually happening.

But the experience was real. The visions, the geometry, the sense of being documented—Starseed wasn't performing. He was genuinely terrified by what he perceived and genuinely desperate for a framework that could hold it.

She was about to tell him his framework was wrong. She couldn't tell him what the right one was—nobody knew yet.

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She found him at the 105° flume, alone in the late afternoon heat. He sat with his eyes closed, water to his shoulders, face turned toward the skylights where the last sun angled through.

Jennifer slipped into the water at the far end. The heat wrapped around her immediately, the mineral silkiness she'd missed. She let herself settle, watching Starseed's stillness.

He knew she was there. She could tell by the slight shift in his posture. But he didn't open his eyes.

"David," she said softly.

His eyes opened. Not Starseed's eyes—the performative presence, the guru's steady gaze. David Coyote's eyes. Frightened. Exhausted.

"Jennifer." His voice was rough. "I wondered when you'd come back."

"I told you I would."

"You told me a lot of things." He shifted in the water. "You told me Susan's plants were growing in the same patterns I see. You told me there might be an explanation. Then you disappeared for two weeks."

"There's been a lot happening. David—my husband—his detector confirmed iridium in Susan's field site. The same element that's in the water here. And when he ran samples through his equipment, he found molecular organization that shouldn't exist in natural deposits."

"Organization?"

"Coherence. Structure. Something his instruments can measure but he can't explain." She paused. "And Margaret—the geologist from London—she's been finding the same thing at extinction boundary sites from all over the world. Same organization, different continents, deposits separated by hundreds of millions of years."

Starseed was quiet, processing.

"There's more," Jennifer said. "David's been studying Pictish symbol stones for twenty years. The crescents and V-rods, the double discs, the beasts with spiral joints. When he compared the geometry in his detector output to those symbols—"

"They matched."

"Close enough to correlate. And Margaret mapped where the Picts placed their stones. They're at sites where this geology comes close to the surface. Outcrops. Places where the rock is accessible."

"They were marking something."

"Or responding to something at those locations. We don't know which."

"Yes." Jennifer held his gaze. "The morning we were here together, when David's spectrometer showed your visions tracking with the iridium concentration—that correlation is real. Your drawings match Pictish iconography you've never seen. Whatever's happening at those sites, whatever the Picts were responding to, you're responding to something similar."

He was quiet for a long moment. The water flowed around them.

"So my visions are… geological? Some kind of mineral hallucination?"

"Your visions correlate with something measurable. That's all we know. Not what it means. Not why human nervous systems respond to it. Just that the correlation exists—across fifteen hundred years, across continents, across completely different people."

"But the ascended masters—"

"You needed a way to understand what was happening," she said gently. "Sacred geometry, ascended masters, spiritual transmission—it gave you vocabulary. A way to hold experiences that didn't fit anywhere else."

"It was wrong."

"The interpretation might be wrong. The experience is real." She paused. "David, you've spent six years perceiving something. Drawing it. Trying to make sense of it. And the vocabulary you had didn't fit. That's not your fault. Nobody had better vocabulary."

"And now?"

"Now we're trying to find out what's actually there. David has samples from multiple sources. Margaret brought an artifact from Scotland—a crystal the Picts preserved, hid when the Vikings came. The coherence values are extraordinary." Jennifer leaned forward. "They want to understand what's happening. And they need your help."

"My help how?"

"They want to map your neural response. Put you in an fMRI, expose you to samples from different sites—Bear Valley, the extinction boundaries, the Scottish material—see which brain regions activate. Compare your response to what the detector measures."

"A laboratory instrument."

"A collaborator. Your neurology responds to something their equipment also measures. If they can map both responses together, they might start to understand what they're looking at." She touched his arm. "You've been carrying this alone for six years. Now there's a team. Now there's instruments. Now there's a chance to actually investigate what you've been experiencing instead of just… living with it."

He closed his eyes. The guru persona was entirely gone now. Just a man from Fresno who'd spent six years being chased by visions he couldn't explain.

"The resonance circles," he said. "The products. Everything I've built here."

"Will have to wait. Or end. I won't lie to you."

"I've been teaching people to trust their experiences. Giving them vocabulary for things they couldn't explain."

"And now you'll be helping build a better vocabulary. One based on what's actually there."

He was quiet for a long time. The light shifted as the sun dropped lower.

"What if it's—" He stopped. Started again. "The things I see. The sense of being watched. What if whatever's in there is…"

"Then we find out together. With equipment. With scientists who can interpret the data. With you experiencing and them recording." Jennifer squeezed his arm. "You don't have to carry it alone anymore."

David opened his eyes and nodded.

"I need to close things down here. Cancel the circle scheduled for this weekend. Talk to the staff." He took a breath. "Tell people I'll be away for a while."

"You don't have to explain."

"No. I want to." He looked around the Fluminarium—the flumes, the wooden walls, the steam rising. "I've been teaching people to trust their experiences even when the explanations don't fit. Time I practiced what I preached."

Jennifer felt something release in her chest. "I'll pick you up tomorrow morning. Eight o'clock."

"Make it seven. I want to watch the sunrise from the 109 one more time." He almost smiled. "As Starseed. Before I find out what I actually am."

She rose from the water, wrapped herself in her robe, and walked out into the California evening.

Tomorrow, the investigation would begin.

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