"Hold that thought!"(Kevin Hughes) “There! I got it! “

Maria turned the dial a bit more. The light blue line grew darker. The smile on her face got wider.

“Blue! I have a blue thread!”

All the other Techs crowded around her terminal. Leaning in with almost the same intensity as Maria herself.

“Don’t let it slip away!”

“Shut up, Brad. Let her concentrate.” Whispered about half the Techies.

Maria just kept tugging gently on the blue thread. Easing it out from the almost infinite sea of “thought soup” surrounding the globe.

A moment later and they all cheered. The dark blue filament was glowing inside the crystal Maria had placed it in. Maria collapsed back into her chair. A huge smile on her face.

They had done it. They had captured a random thought, kept it intact, and placed it in a crystal. Now the hard part. Finding out what the thought was thinking.

Maria let out a big sigh:

“That’s tomorrow’s worry.”

With the word “worry”, the blue filament vibrated - just a bit- it went unnoticed by all the Techies, including Maria. But the Monitors and AI both caught it. They would have to trace this thought back to its birth. Someone…was hurting.

*****

Author’s Note: Physicists claim that matter and energy are two sides of the same coin, and both are “conserved.” Which simply means in a closed system they must always equal out. None lost. None gained.

Neuroscientists way back in the early 2000’s already figured out that “thoughts” were simply an emergent property of electro chemical energy produced by a form of matter called Neurons.

Then a genius figured out that the frequencies that the brain functioned at- the so called: “Big Four” (Alpha, Beta, Delta and Theta) were emitted depending on both the physical and mental state a person was in when they were “thinking.”

But what happens when a thought is formed? The energy that gave rise to that thought is gone. The thought isn’t reabsorbed by any physical means. If you voice a thought out loud, it interacts with the air, vibrating as it propagates through the air, hitting the organs of the ear…and absorbed. And you hear what they were thinking, because they told you.

But what happens to the thoughts left unvoiced…where do they go? And that is what Maria and her Team were working on. Back to the story.

*****

Suzie stared once again at the bottle of pills. All she had to do was take them, wash them down with alcohol…drift into sleep. A sleep that would never end. She was so tired of keeping up a facade. She was empty. She almost always was. Joy was an emotion she could never capture.

She tried all the antidepressants. Sure they made her seem normal. But she felt like the real her just got locked in a room, as her body acted like a robot to fit in to Society.

Nothing mattered. Nothing. She reached for the pills.

“Hey! Open up! We need to talk. Now!”

Suzie stopped her hand from reaching for the pills. Even though she felt little, if at all. A strange woman’s voice yelling with obvious concern and a tinge of fear through her door - was enough to penetrate her own wall of despair.

It took a few seconds to fight through the stupor of meaninglessness that came with the depression. And an emotion she hadn’t felt in decades fought its way to the surface. Curiosity.

That made Suzie smile. She thought to herself: “Well that’s a surprise. I care about something. I care enough to be curious, interested. And I don’t even know what it is. Maybe …maybe…I do care.”

Out in the hallway, Maria held the crystal. The blue which had grown so dark it was almost purple, was now slowly changing. The two other techs, which only moments before had grim features locked in place, let out a breath they hadn’t even noticed they were holding in.

They relaxed…a little. But there was hope.

“Suzie, open the door. Please. My name is Maria. I work at the University. We can help. I know we can. You do not have to feel sad all the time any more. I can show you!”

Suzie's lethargy was falling off her shoulders like an old shawl. Trying to cling to her, but failing. Hope. Yes, Hope was struggling mightily to get out of the web of despair, giving up, and not caring that had held it in its web the last few weeks.

She opened the door. In front of her were three people. One of them, the voice she heard through the wall, was a breathless and worried woman. The other two were ruffled young men dressed in what had to be thrift store rejects. It made her smile.

A part of her brain lit up. She was smiling. And it wasn’t fake.

Maria looked down at the Crystal. The filament was a very pale blue now. Like a Robin’s egg, or the sky without the glare of the sun. Maria had her own thoughts:
“It was working!”

“Yes?” Was all Suzie said as she continued to stare at the flustered trio outside her apartment door.

Maria couldn’t help it. She held the crystal up to Suzie.

“Here, put this next to your head, and close your eyes.”

Suzie almost laughed. But the sincerity in that woman’s voice, and the eager looks of “go on, please, do what she says” plainly written on the faces of the two young men made her do it.

She took the crystal from Maria, placed it against her temple. Her eyes widened in surprise, then slowly closed as her body relaxed.

Her mind was being emptied of all the horrid thoughts. The isolation. The defeat. The “nothing matters not even me” feelings. She could feel the crystal tugging at the root of her darkest thoughts. Pulling them out of her mind like stubborn weeds in a garden.

She started to feel lighter. A strange feeling grew more powerful. She laughed out loud when she recognized what it was. She felt good. Nothing extraordinary, no hyper accelerated sense of joy, or happiness. She simply felt…good. As she laughed, tears started to fall. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt….good.

That triggered another wave of dark thoughts, of regret, sadness, despair. The Crystal absorbed them before they could fully form.

It was too much. Maria and the two other Technicians caught her before she fell.

She woke up on her own couch, what seemed like hours later- refreshed. Maria patted her hand and explained she had been “out” for only a few minutes.

“But…but…bu…I feel good. Refreshed. I…I…am hungry.”

And again, Suzie laughed with tears that didn’t match the laugh.

Maria asked what she was thinking, since the Crystal did not change color this time.

“I was thinking I am hungry. But I usually just ignore hunger. I don’t care if I eat. This time, I am hungry and I am looking forward to eating. I want to taste the food. (Tears now fell like a summer cloud burst)
I haven’t cared about what I ate, or how it tasted in weeks. What is happening?”

Maria held the crystal up. It was a clear bright yellow. All the blue was gone. She decided to tell the truth.

“We traced your thoughts back to you. Thoughts leave a unique trail. Mark here (pointing her thumb over her shoulder) is a genius at separating the noise of all the thoughts floating around down to just one.”

Mark smiled a shy smile, shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s true.”

The other Tech smacked Mark in the shoulder with a light fist. Mark squeaked out: “Hey, it’s true though.”

They all laughed.

Maria continued on.

“So what we did was follow your thought back to you.”

“You can do that?”

Maria beamed.

“We can now. Until you …it was all theory. But even better, your thoughts connect to the one caught in the crystal. And then it is tuned to absorb the negative thoughts. And it did.”

Suzie held the crystal. It was a bright yellow filament inside. Not the dark forbidding blue when they knocked on her door.

“So, is the yellow what I am thinking now?”

“Yes, the Blue thoughts have all been broken down in the crystal. They are…well, gone. “

Suzie started to shake. She felt…good. It was overwhelming. But she always wished she could help everyone that felt like her. Nobody should have to live with such dark thoughts while trying to function normally.

She looked right at Maria with determination.

“You have to get these to everyone!”

Maria smiled.

"We intend to.”

The crystal in Suzie’s hand turned a very powerful pink. And it pulsed.

Maria pointed to the crystal.

“Hold that thought!”

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