Chapter 19.5 Drug Cocktails, Puzzles, and Plans

Trint’s love for puzzles went back to his earliest memories. He loved connecting the dots, pictures, actual 2-D puzzles, mazes, and tricky puzzles. Most puzzles, when unsolved, were like an itch to him.An itch that he had to scratch. With most puzzles, he was able to find a solution.

One of his earliest memories was when his grandpa Gerald showed him how to solve a puzzle and then handed it back to him to solve himself. Then he progressed to Rubik’s cubes and other similar challenges. There was something fun and satisfying in learning to solve them. He also grew to love coded messages and ones called ciphers.

He loved coded messages that used ciphers. A cipher was a series of characters that would be systematically used to replace others in a message. It allowed a hidden message to be read from a text. For example, a public newspaper article talking about garage sales in the neighborhood could have a cipher that told foreign spies not to attack their planned target on Tuesday. You needed to have the cipher and the message to use the cipher on to have any chance at reading the message. But there was a process to unraveling a code and not knowing the cipher. That is what Trint began to play around with.

His interest in cipher leads him to take up other hobbies like computer coding. Computer studies and study of the uses ciphers played during Earth’s wars occupied a chunk of his free time in middle and high school. His hobbies sometimes became an obsession, but he found discipline in the challenge of writing code and making his programable worlds. His family always encouraged computer studies, thinking he wanted to pursue a job as a programmer. His interests also helped him be a good student.

His plan had been to double major in math and computer science. He was planning a career in programming. Unfortunately, in his sophomore year in college, he suffered an accident that left his left hand mangled, and he lost most use of that hand. At the time, there were only a few ways for someone to type or code without using ten digits effectively. His love for math was lost to other necessities and his new limitations.

He was happy to be done when he was given a chance to stop taking math classes and change majors. Voice to text was still unavailable until he was much older, so for years he learned to type and function with only his right hand for delicate motor tasks. The mental burden led to psychological struggles and mental health issues. His family helped him get counseling, and a psychiatrist found a cocktail of drugs to help him get through college.

Trint was thankful for the support of his family and doctors. But it took years to adjust and feel like himself again. With the help of the school, he changed his major to psychology and used his credits already taken to minor in math. He planned to give back to others struggling with their mental health. There was a stigma with mental health, and he wanted to help those in need.

After the accident, he lost his scholarship when his grades dipped too low. Many people understood, but there were guidelines for his scholarships that required a minimum GPA, no matter the circumstances. Now carrying a mountain of student debt, he had the choice. Graduate school for psychology or get a job, pay off the loans and go from there.

He had always enjoyed numbers, and the Stockmarket and investing had become an interest to him throughout college. A close friend encouraged him to pursue finance based on their conversations about the stock market and investments. They both went to work for big banks. That let Trint prove to his family that he was healthy and independent enough to move away. He took a transfer from his local bank to a bigger city and an offer to work in investments. Trint got his securities license which allowed him to make stock trades. He still needed to use computers, but he could navigate with a mouse most of the time, and his people skills were improved as his doctor dialed in the drug cocktail over the last several years. He ended up being good as an investment client advisor. He built a good reputation, and his list of clients was small, but their assets were significant.

Managing multi-million-dollar accounts is a lot of responsibility for someone in their early thirties. However, he knew the current wisdom and philosophy of diversifying investments and the security it provided. But for his personal investments, he never could put down the puzzle of finding reasonable speculation in the stock market. He knew, in some ways, it was akin to gambling. But if it was a small portion of his overall portfolio of investments, then he still felt secure.

He usually allowed himself ten percent of his total to invest in the long-shot stocks he researched. More often than not, he found that he made more money in the speculations than in the other 90 percent. So he started pulling more and more of his total assets into the speculations. His mind and the research he did allow him to find some connections that gave him a better probability of success, and his instincts for deciding on them grew the more time he spent. A few times, when he felt the pull of his instincts like never before, he took a gamble and sunk 50 percent of his total investable assets into a single stock. That happened right before the whole stock market took a severe downturn. He watched as that investment rocketed down. But he chose not to sell on the downward fall. He decided to only look at it once a week. After six weeks of nothing positive happening, he finally saw green. The stock had gained value and not just a tiny bump. While the rest of the market was still red, it was a rare green gem. The speculations had gone from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in just a day. An announcement one company made resulted in a considerable gain. He immediately placed a trade and sold a portion of the holdings. He locked in half the profits, ensuring he had a couple hundred thousand. The other half he left invested and watched it like an OCD monkey.

As Trint made the connection from his body to his external Spirit cage of the 110 hexagons and 12 pentagons, the whole thing lit up and pulsed like it was electrically charged. And it gave Trint a feeling of rightness. There was no shock. Only peace in his inner being. It was like he took a lot of muscle relaxers but didn’t lose his concentration.

He wondered, ‘Could you simultaneously take something like Adderall and muscle relaxers? Probably not a good idea.’ He concluded.

He began making more and more connections and saw that although they were jumbled and the new connections were seemingly tying him up, he was not hindered from moving around. Soon the crisscrossing and weaving of the connections from the body to the cage had formed a cocoon of circuits wrapping around him. He felt good and somehow knew he was making progress with every link. There was probably a more efficient way to do this, but the euphoria had only allowed him so much patience.

Pneuma was pondering what was happening with Trint. When Trint made the first connection from his core to the circuitry, Pneuma’s attention snapped to what was happening. He also felt the same thing Trint did and agreed with Trint’s assessment. It felt correct, and the system acknowledged him somehow manipulating his Spirit this way. Something was happening outside Pneuma’s extensive knowledge and experiences in the iterations. Pneuma decided not to interrupt but waited and watched. Pneuma watched as he made the final connection from his core to the circuits in his spiritual body. He felt the shock, and after a while, he released his metaphorical breath and his anxiety about what was happening relaxed. He realized his attention had become completely internal to what Trint was doing. He gave his full attention to the physical world and saw Trint sitting in the cave. Nothing but bugs and rock and dirt around him. After reaching as far and wide as he could and determining no threats were around, Pneuma attempted to return his focus to Trint’s work. It had only been a few moments, but Pneuma knew he could have missed a lot with the time dilation. As he attempted to focus, he suddenly found he couldn’t enter Trint’s personal spirit space. Somehow he was locked out and couldn’t view what was going on. He could only watch from the outside of a now flaming sphere.

“What are you doing now?” Pneuma tried to ask Trint. But received no reply. He was left to watch the lightning storm of power arcing in and around the sphere. The lighting was gold and sometimes a dark blue.

As Trint felt he was progressing, the connections toward something meaningful. His steady but hurried pace slowed, and as the last of the character-covered shapes on his body and the cage were connected, he knew there was a final connection from the core to the densest cluster of connections in the cage. One pentagon was opposite his Spirit Core but immediately behind him. Trint made that final connection to the center character in the pentagon surrounded by hexagons, and nothing more happened. He felt that he had done everything correctly. What was missing?

He waited and tried to relax. Just like a quiet meditation, he took a moment to rest. He considered his desires. His family needed him. He had so much to overcome to get to them. But they were worth it. ‘Come what may!’ His heart screamed.

He didn’t know how but after that thought, he instinctively felt there was another step. He looked around at the grid of honeycombs and pentagons. They were just out of order. The connections were scrambled. He wasn’t meant to be tied up in a cocoon by these connections. He was to be freed by them and from them.

He reached out with his spirit. He didn’t use only his spiritual hands like before but straining; he realized he could pull out one shape and swap it with another. He started using his pair of Spirit hands but wanted to be faster and more efficient. He divided his attention and first manipulated a couple of pairs of additional spirit hands to do the work of shifting shapes and connections. His Mind and will allowed him to use more than just two hands.

Moving the pieces in the grid around helped unravel the knot. The difficulty of this would be incredible, but he felt he could solve it. All of his attention and determination went toward the puzzle. A wide smile on his face appeared both spiritually and physically. Pneuma was encouraged when he saw the smile appear and remain for a long time. Trint was beginning to understand the solution and began to see the pattern in the mix unfold in his mind.

It took a while for Trint, but he was lost to time during the process. He was trying to align the outside cage with internal circuits and shapes. While simultaneously unraveling the cocoon around his spirit body.

Trint paused to reflect before placing the final pieces he had left to move. He realized he had no idea how much time had passed. It had taken a lot of focus and, indeed, time. But Pneuma was quiet and watching. Surely he would say something if he was headed in the wrong direction or about to do something detrimental. He felt something would happen if he completed the final pieces, a hexagon swap and one with a pair of pentagons, and had everything untangled.

The final piece slid into place, and the whole place lit up like an explosion of white light. The glow had radiated to the point of pain in his spiritual eyes. But the feeling was like he’d just leveled to unbelievable heights. Pleasure and reassurance, like a parent acknowledging an adoring child’s achievement after years of wanting just a hint of approval. He felt like he had also been starving for power and now knew a little of what it meant to brush against a force far above what he had ever known. He was experiencing so many forms of satisfaction and bliss. This had to be the right way to solve the puzzle. There couldn’t have been a better way.

All the connections between his internal circuitry and the cage pulsed in brightness. Trint felt his spiritual senses were starting to be overwhelmed by the stimulus of the pulses of power and brilliance. Very quickly, it became too much, and he had to close his spiritual eyes and open his physical ones.