*Wow, that’s a nasty piece of work.* he said.
Being first thing in the morning, Taylor hadn’t realised the obvious.
*I wonder how bad it looks inside...*
On that, Taylor attempted to create a probe. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing. What the heck was going on? It certainly wasn’t a hard thing to create a probe! In fact it was very, very easy. He could create as many as he wanted at the same time. But now... for some unbeknown reason, he couldn’t even make one!
Why?
That’s when it clicked.
That’s when Taylor realised that he was floating. That he could see in every direction around him. That he didn’t have a body.
*Oh my gosh!*
He panicked, for naturally his first thought was that he was dead. It all seemed to point to that. After all, he knew no one would leave him behind.
He was dead. There was no other explanation.
For a long time Taylor did nothing, except maybe wonder why he wasn’t in Heaven, or in Hell. Or maybe that unfinished business thing was true after all – although Taylor never believed in ghosts.
He watched as the work men arrived to clear the wreck. He floated around watching. Something he noticed though, was that he couldn’t put up a block from hearing their thoughts, and he didn’t appear to be empathic anymore. Not one emotion did he feel. Not even an empathic signature. Just thoughts.
Some hours later, the wreck was cleared, and Taylor came to the conclusion that he couldn’t hang around there for the rest of his life – or the rest of his death, one or the other. And who knows how long that would be.
So he started flying down the road. Maybe he should try and find his family. Yeah, that’s what he should do. Besides, if he was dead, he didn’t want to be hanging around this joint indefinitely. Well, unless he was meant to go to Hell for the rest of eternity. He shuddered and sincerely hoped that would never be the case.
Taylor didn’t know how fast he was travelling, but he did know how far. He got to almost five kilometres away from the wreck – his telepathic radius – when he felt something tugging at him. Pulling him. He got to his exact telepathic radius and as he tried to go beyond that...
It was like a rubber band effect – you can only stretch it so far. Taylor found himself being snapped back, past the site of the wreck, to the other end of his range. Then forward again to about four kilometres away from the site. Then back four kilometres and so on and so forth faster than Taylor could really comprehend and the sensation made him think of the rides at an amusement park. Only this didn’t manage to pump any adrenaline into his system. Well, he didn’t exactly have a system. Just his mind.
Finally, it stopped and Taylor was, uhh, floating next to a pile of rocks on the side of the road. Something, for some strange reason or another drew him to a particular rock. It was a funny shape. It was round, and the bottom part was fat while the top half was more flat and actually had a hole in it. And there were a few scratches and such.
Taylor touched it – in a manner of speaking – and the strange rock actually began to glow. And somehow, somehow Taylor knew that he would never be able to go beyond his telepathic radius from this rock.