The Aether

The story begins with an 18-year-old girl, Laney Louis, hiding in a bathroom stall at the restaurant she works at. She is taking pills for the crippling migraines she suffers from regularly. A coworker comes and finds her and gets her back to work, but she ends up vomiting on some customers and getting fired. Laney is picked up from work by her mother, Peggy, who tries to comfort console her, but Laney is despairing that all possible medicines have been tried and nothing has worked. The headaches only get more frequent and more severe. Laney crashes for the night when she gets home, completely exhausted physically and emotionally. The next morning a woman named Elizabeth Decker makes a visit to Laney’s home. She is an employee of Aether Industries, a trillion-dollar corporation. Laney had submitted a DNA sample to Aether Ancestry in hopes of finding her biological parents, who gave her up for adoption when she was a baby. Decker explains that Laney has a special set of genetic markers and Aether Industries would like to run some testing on her in their biological sciences department. Promising to help Laney overcome her headache problems and to compensate her handsomely, Decker signs a million-dollar check for Laney to leave with her immediately for testing. Laney accepts the offer, and they depart via private jet. Laney is run through extensive medical testing to determine the cause of her headaches, but she is in excellent health and given clearance to begin testing. Decker explains to her that her genetic markers indicate she should have psychic abilities such as pre-cognition, telekinesis, and remote viewing. She begins putting Laney through simple tests to measure these abilities. Each time Laney begins to focus she suffers another headache. Eventually after the constant migraines and vomiting and failure to perform on any of her tests, Laney decides to quit. Decker consults with her boss, the owner of Aether Industries, Matthew Braun, about what to do with Laney. He suggests they use Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in Magic mushrooms to helps Laney open up her mind and reveal the cause of her headaches. He believes Laney’s headaches to be psycho somatic and rooted in a traumatic memory. Laney refuses to try it. In a last-ditch effort to keep Laney in the program, Decker takes Laney to a secret mountain facility where Matthew Braun greets them. Apprehension, Laney follows him down into the facility as he explains that she could be part of something great and that she could change her entire life if she just doesn’t quit. He reveals to her that they have built a flying saucer in secret and that it requires a psychic to pilot it. Laney bursts into laughter at the thought she could fly such a ship when she is a nervous wreck and constantly suffering debilitating headaches. At this point Laney also meets Elizabeth Decker’s two sons. Kristian (16) and Hannes (18) who are both identical to Nikola Tesla. While Laney is resting from the day, the others have dinner. Decker voices her concern to Matthew Braun that she is not properly trained to guide Laney through a trip and there is no way to know how it will affect her. Matthew knows which strings to pull to get her to comply and he tells her she is a brilliant woman, and she can figure it out as she goes. He puts her on the spot in front of their two brilliant Tesla clone children. Reluctantly she agrees to proceed. Laney begins her trip, and the experience is soul wrenching. With supernatural clarity she reviews her life from her earliest memories up to the present. The suppressed trauma of her life is revealed to her, and she can see and feel her worst traumas happening once again. The isolation and depression, the sexual abuse by her adoptive father, and the crippling headaches and hopelessness. Laney then steps into a vision of her younger self restrained in a torture device that drives spikes into her head to cause her headaches. A monster is running the torture device. In a rage, Laney kills the monster and sets herself free from the machine. Her mother then appears to her and apologizes to her for placing that psychic block there and explains it was needed to keep her from manifesting her abilities and being found by “Them”. Matthew and the boys testing a particle cannon in the test bay. It was designed by Kristian, who also designed the propulsion system for the disc. When Kristian begins the test fire the cannon suffers a catastrophic malfunction and explodes. Matthew is very disappointed, and Kristian can feel it, and is hurt. His older brother Hannes sarcastically reassures him that he solved the propulsion problem so figuring out what went wrong on the particle cannon should be an easy task. Decker walks in just after the explosion and calls Matthew aside to explain what happened during the trip. Matthew believes that Laney’s mother was a psychic spy from the CIA project Looking Glass, which used psychic spies for espionage. Matthew and Decker visit Laney and bring her dinner and try to give her anti-depressant medicine which she refuses. She is non-compliant and accuses them of being more interested in having her fly the disc than they are about her suffering. She demands that they find her mother before she will partake in anymore of their requests for treatment or training. Kristian is in his room that evening listening to classical music and visualizing the entire test sequence in his head. His mental abilities are so advanced that he is able to replay a simulation of the event in his mind. He finds out what caused the explosion – his brother Hannes has sabotaged it. Kristian goes to Hannes’ room and confronts him about it and asks why he would do such a thing. Hannes explains to him that he did it to show him their father is only concerned with what they can build for him, not who they are as people, or as his children. He loves what they can build, not who they are. Kristian is saddened when he realizes this is true. It is 3 am and Laney is having difficulty sleeping so she decides to wander through the facility. She sees that the main hangar is open, and Kristian is there near the disc craft that he designed. Kristian is startled by Laney. He explains to her that his mind is like a generator that constantly creates and endless and dizzying stream of insights and ideas. His greatest idea that he ever gave life to was the disc, but without a pilot it will never be able to do what it was built for. He encourages her that if she can fly the ship she can fly among the clouds and dance with the stars. Laney is moved by his passion and decides she wants to help his dream fly. The next morning Matthew and Elizabeth Decker are discussing ways to possibly find Laney’s mother, when Laney let’s herself into the room. She proposes a deal – that she will begin training to fly the ship on the promise that they will do whatever is in their power to find her mother. Matthew and Elizabeth agree. Matthew laments that he may have a trillion-dollar company, but he is at the mercy of a teenage girl.