Memory Soup...Part 1

As soon as I saw that Ravyn had things under control with Dr. Geek-- and that she wasn’t gonna toss his befuddled ass out into the street-- I slipped into a dark closet and back through the Shadow to my home. I would have to deal with how much trouble I was in with Ravyn later.

I didn’t give much thought to asking for any more help from Ravyn at the moment. This was something I had to do alone.

I knew my daughter’s name was Alexa, and that she had been born in May in New Orleans. I also knew that her mother was a former exotic dancer in Vegas who was originally from New Orleans. Her first name (Naomi) and her face (very exotic and rather beautiful) appeared in his thoughts prominently, but her last name didn’t. For being a scientist, Daniel Bernstein’s thoughts were pretty fractured and chaotic. (The more I worked with his memories, the harder time I had referring to him by my nickname for him. I had never known his first name before.)

So, if I was going to actually locate my daughter and her mother, I was going to have to mine through this chaotic jumble of another man’s memories to come up with as many clues as possible.

That is one significant problem with discovering that I had new powers and abilities on the fly. I had no idea on how to sort through and make sense of all of those fragmented thoughts and memories, and I wasn’t sure how time I might actually have to figure it out. What I wouldn’t give for a Google function for my own mind!

When I got home, though, I went straight to the small TV I keep in the place and turned it on to see how damned close that storm was and to see how big it was. The news reports were not very encouraging. They were looping constant images of that monster of swirling clouds making a bee-line for New Orleans. At that time, she was a Category Three hurricane and was looking to get worse. The predicted landfall was expected to be in the next two days...not much time indeed.

Next I moved over to my new computer, a shiny, new, top-of-the-line Apple iMac, and did some quick research on New Orleans and how prepared the place miught be for the Hell that was descending upon it...not very damned encouraging either.

I sat back for a moment and tried to skim through the morass of memory fragments to see if anything would surface easily...but no luck. I was going to have to do this shit the hard way, as usual.

I got up from the computer, leaving it running and still connected to the web. I left the TV on as well and walked back into the recesses of my new home, to the place I had set up to my new place for meditation and contemplation, the Dark Room.

I closed the specially modified door behind me, cutting off all noise and light from the rest of the house. This place was as close as I could make it to be like the Shadow World, dark and silent.

I laid down on the mat in the middle of the floor, and drew my Will deep inside. It was time to sift through this Memory Soup and find out everything I could before I left for the Big Easy.