Harbinger (The Janus Harbinger Book 1)

by Olan Thorensen

  “Now, I realize this is quite a grandiose statement, but I sincerely believe this. It is outside the military’s normal chain of command and will later appear on your record as a highly classified deployment you will never discuss. This will, of course, raise some questions in the future in your career, but I think the interruption in your military career progression will be more than compensated. While you may not be able to describe to future superiors or even review panels what this deployment involved, your participation in such an operation will be a significant plus.

  “This remote site falls under the purview of General Justin Hardesty, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. I will also say both I and General Hardesty will greatly appreciate your ‘volunteering’ for this assignment. As of this moment, you can decline. In that case, you will move back into the routine career path, and you will probably never again hear of me, the virtual reality project, or the assignment I just referred to. Naturally, your complete silence about your tour in Santa Clara is assumed without authorization from General Hardesty or his subsequent replacements.

  “Sorry I can’t tell you any more at this point, except to reiterate that I honestly believe it may be the most important ongoing project in the U.S. military. For someone who professes to want to make a difference, this may be a chance that will never come again.”

  Andrew was taken aback. If other officers had made this statement, he would have suspected them of blowing smoke—but not Sinclair.

  “If you agree to take the assignment,” continued Sinclair, “then I will go into more detail on the project.”

  Andrew thought for a moment, then said, “So why me? How was it I was assigned to the virtual reality project? And how important is it that I take this new assignment? Couldn’t someone else do it?”

  “Reasonable questions, Major. I will say that the assignment involves working with a mixture of military and civilian personnel. It requires someone who works well with both and engenders significant levels of respect from a diverse population.”

  Sinclair paused, picked up another folder, and opened it.

  “Major, you were the commanding officer of an infantry company of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York. It’s the only division considered to be trained specifically for mountainous or Arctic conditions. Your company consistently scored high on just about every training category. I see special commendations to you and your company in the Fort Hood war game last year. The same holds for your month-long deployment in joint exercises with Australian forces and our Marine contingent in northern Australia. However, the record of your company also shows a relatively high level of disciplinary actions for the enlisted men. It seems like they have a penchant for fights and general disruptive behavior. This includes one in the noncommissioned officers club at Fort Drum and a couple during field exercises.

  “Your battalion commander . . . uh . . . ,” Sinclair paused as he perused the file, “a Lieutenant Colonel Pillard, admonished you to deal with this tendency.” Sinclair looked up at Andrew. “I spoke with Colonel Pillard. He said that what the record neglected to show was that most of these instances were instigated by comments related to the company commander’s race.” Sinclair paused, then said, “The other half of the division is stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and inter-unit transfers mean a fairly high percentage of Southerners in the Fort Drum units. It seems quite a number of Southerners in your company take umbrage at disparaging remarks about their commander.

  “Bullshit language aside, it seems your white enlisted men took no shit from others being disrespectful to their black commander.”

  Sinclair closed this folder and placed it on top of the previous one. “Major, your duty tour at Virtual-Reality turned into an extended interview for the assignment we’re now discussing. The mission is in the process of being expanded in both personnel and scope. You would be second in command. The job requires someone who, as I mentioned previously, can work well in a command position with a diverse team, is intelligent, has ‘common sense,’ which is not necessarily the same as intelligence, and with minimal family ties because this assignment entails remote deployment, limited outside contact, and absolute security.

  “At West Point, you majored in computer science.” Sinclair put his fingers and palms together, supporting his chin, as he gazed upward as if thinking. “A smart field of study for an ambitious cadet, given the military’s increasing reliance on computers, including in just about every aspect of the battlefield. I’m puzzled about the minor in anthropology, especially since it added a heavier than average academic load.”

  Sinclair paused. “Explain.”

  “It interested me,” said Andrew. “Besides the obvious issues in dealing with different cultures around the world, the evolution of human societies has always been an interest of mine. The closest field at the Point was anthropology.”

  “That was my thought,” said Sinclair, “and it fits with this assignment. Okay, Major, no more blowing smoke up your ass. I want you for this assignment. Your record indicates you’re capable of making quick decisions, so what is it? In or out?”

  Andrew would have preferred time to think about Sinclair’s proposal, but to what purpose? Even if he were given more time, the issues would not change—it would only delay the choice, if choice was the appropriate word. Being puffed up by a major general and then declining an offer to effectively be his aide in what the system believed to be a priority project was not the optimal choice for career advancement.

  “Yes, sir, I’m in,” Andrew asserted, with what he at least hoped was a positive tone of voice, instead of resignation. Truthfully, he was fascinated.

  Just what IS this project? He wanted to press Sinclair on the question, but captains or majors don’t press major generals.

  Sinclair smiled, stood, and held out his hand. “Good choice, Major. We’ll be moving along quickly now. Paperwork on your duty transfer will follow soon and will simply show you as detached temporary duty to General Hardesty’s staff—meaning working for me.” Sinclair picked up yet another folder, this one sealed, and handed it to Andrew. “Use the outer office. In here are more security forms than you knew existed. Read ’em, sign, and reseal the forms in the envelope inside this one, give it back to me, and be back here at fifteen hundred hours.”

  Late that afternoon, Sinclair watched Jefferson and Marjek leave his office, then he glanced at his watch: 4:21 p.m. They’d met for an hour and twenty-one minutes. Both men had arrived within seconds of each other at 3:59 p.m., Marjek marginally first, to what Sinclair sensed was Jefferson’s annoyance. Their different physiques matched in projecting solidness and fluid motion, with Jefferson taller and leaner, Marjek a couple of inches shorter and a form many people would have called stubby from a distance.

  Sinclair had been perversely curious about their reactions if there had been only one chair for them to sit on. He suspected Jefferson would have gone searching for a chair, with Marjek shrugging and sitting on the floor. The situation never arose because Sinclair had called maintenance for another chair.

  When the meeting ended and Jefferson closed the outer door, Sinclair gathered up his files and stuffed them back into his bulging briefcase. He was pleased. He thought both Jefferson and Marjek would work out. Neither of them had pushed too hard for more information. Not that he thought either of them lacked curiosity or were reticent in asserting themselves, but both recognized what they weren’t going to get, yet. He was reasonably assured that once they were underway to the site and particularly immediately after arrival, there would be more than enough information to slake their curiosity. And they would certainly both have more than enough to occupy themselves in the next week or so.

  Jefferson was dispatched back to California with three interlocking objectives. The easiest one was to tell the company the project was over, and all further development would be assumed by the military. Sinclair expected they would squawk that it wasn’t finished. A lieu
tenant colonel from the Pentagon’s Resource and Development Office would arrive to help assuage the company and smooth Jefferson’s other tasks. The millions that had gushed from the Pentagon to VR even now made Sinclair wince when he remembered past postings where they had to scramble for every penny to train people for combat. Oh, well, he thought, that’s the way of it.

  Jefferson’s two harder objectives were preparing the system for shipment and instant deployment at the site, plus convincing the three key personnel to sign on and agree to move on short notice. The former was only a matter of doing it, while the latter was one of those tasks whose outcome was not assured but had to be done.

  I think Jefferson is up to it, Sinclair thought. Plus, we’ve always got the last resort of simply shanghaiing people. Once there, I doubt we’ll have any trouble with them.

  More complex tasks waited for Marjek. Sinclair had told him to consider what security resources might be needed, within the sketchy outline of Site 23 given by the general. Marjek now had Sinclair’s logistical codes to change the next supply flight’s manifest with instructions to make reasonable additions. Marjek would give him the modified request report in two days, but Sinclair intended to give him free rein within the restriction that everything requested had to fit on one pallet for a C-17 Globemaster cargo plane.

  Sinclair had acceded to Marjek’s strong assertion that he needed the help of an ex-colleague whom he trusted—for added security. Sinclair had responded that they already had two men undercover on site, but Marjek pushed for his man—someone he had worked with before. Sinclair wasn’t sure of the need but saw no reason to resist the request.

  Marjek had someone in mind. He said the man was somewhere in Virginia, but that was his problem. He had a week to accomplish the other tasks, find his colleague, and convince the man to join up.

  The less pleasant task for Marjek was to assess whether the Hardesty woman had read a file whose contents Sinclair hadn’t shared. If she had, she needed to be scooped up and delivered to Andrews Air Force base for the initial flight. Sinclair left getting her there up to Marjek. He had the added interest in seeing how the agent handled this delicate situation—getting the woman there without physically kidnapping her, if possible, and without raising outside notice.

  CHAPTER 6

  CALIFORNIA LAST DAYS

  Jason Cain

  On the last day of his former life, Jason Cain woke at 4:00 a.m., as usual, and worked on a VR system subroutine that needed tweaking. More correctly, it was a subroutine of a subroutine of a subroutine of one of his interactive algorithms. At times, he’d lost track of exactly how many layers the subroutine lay in a module.

  His girlfriend would not awaken for another three or four hours. Their relationship had never been romantic, more a situation of convenience. She and her friends moved in more politically active circles than he, and the difference became a friction point. Not that he disagreed with many of their political and social agendas—just with their naïveté and self-absorption. Lily finally gave up on enmeshing him in their activities, and they became more withdrawn from each other—both for that reason and as Jason became more obsessed with the ongoing project at Virtual-Reality Inc.

  Continually nagging at him were ruminations on the odd specifications given by the military for the VR development. He appreciated the military’s desire to use as sophisticated of simulators as possible, such as for pilots, armored vehicle crews, and infantry. After all, while there was no substitution for real-world experience, simulators allowed far more exercises to be conducted than otherwise practical. Pilots’ simulations were the most straightforward case to understand. A pilot could run through dozens of emergency scenarios in a couple of hours—scenarios impossible to implement in real life, such as crashing a plane full of passengers! Even for infantry, Jason could see the value of simulators as warfare got more complex—integrating boots on the ground with satellite communications, drones, GPS, automatic artillery support, and on and on.

  All that was well and good, but why did the system have to be as close to reality as specified? he wondered again as he had for months.

  Usually, simulations did not have to be in “high definition,” but just defined enough to engage users. The system developed at VR, Inc. ran on a trio of the fastest computers yet constructed, and the total memory and storage far exceeded what Jason thought necessary for routine simulations. The total cost of a finished system must have run well beyond tens of millions of dollars. He wouldn’t have been shocked to learn the dollars were in the billions. Even the military couldn’t afford too many such systems.

  Similarly bizarre was the second specification. Why did the system need to allow multiple users to interact wirelessly with the system? It was as if the person experiencing the simulation would be physically distant and not hardwired. After testing the limits of the separation, and due to the extreme bandwidth and information load required, they found that separations of more than a hundred feet were not feasible.

  Existing simulations ran from a central processing station that integrated the person with the simulation program. By the Pentagon’s specifications, they devised a capability that allowed external parties to control the simulation.

  Jason’s crowning achievement was a set of novel algorithms that allowed multi-party control of the simulation without crashing the system. The basics were to establish fundamental rules of the simulations and let multiple parties modify the simulation, as long as basic rules were not violated. The breakthrough had come on a morning such as this one: Jason up early, the apartment quiet, and him focused on the problem. The breakthrough was a melding of what they were trying to accomplish and a mental connection to several branches of mathematics, including game theory, graphs, and combinatorics. Even with his math background, it was more of an intuitive feeling of aspects coming together than a firm understanding of how to make it work. At the time, he could not have explained it, but it just “felt” right. After several months of study and consultations with other mathematicians, the solutions suddenly coalesced.

  After that, he translated the theory into computer languages. That was where Ralph and Harold had been indispensable. Ralph might have been a twelve-year-old gamester in a twenty-seven-year-old body, but his video development skills were astounding. No one knew the enticements used by VR Inc. to lure him away from the video gaming industry, but Jason heard rumors that Ralph was as rich as Midas, he cared little for money, and boredom with game design contributed to his decision.

  Then there was Harold—perhaps not the most exciting personality but with a natural talent for audiovisual system integration and wireless communication. The three of them had become, if not true friends, at least a highly effective and interactive team.

  Well, maybe we’ll learn something new today, thought Jason as he shaved.

  For whatever reason, Jefferson had called and scheduled that morning’s meeting after being gone several days. Jason’s hunch was they might get a better idea of the system’s purpose. Of course, the same hunch recurred periodically, but he figured one of these days it would come true. With those thoughts, Jason left the bathroom for his workstation in the spare bedroom. There, he delved again into the esoterica of multidimensional, multi-party virtual reality and the connection to combinatorial and topographical mathematics.

  Harold Nieze

  On the last day of his former life, Harold Nieze woke just as he did every day at 5:30 a.m. However, Harold was not particularly fanatical about time. Rising at this hour simply fit his routine. An hour of violin practice came first. He broke the practice into two parts: first running through scales and flexibility drills and then practicing his current piece of interest. At this hour on weekday mornings, instead of practicing with his violin as on weekends, he used the digital violin he had designed and built. It looked like what it was, an electronic version of a real violin, only missing the sounding chamber.

  Signals from strings were transmitted wirelessly to a computer tha
t interpreted the accuracy of his playing and translated it to his earphones. Despite several people encouraging him to file a patent, he somehow never crossed the threshold of finding the time and interest to hassle with the paperwork.

  Harold had once fantasized about being a concert violinist. By the time he was seventeen, he realized he would never reach that level of virtuosity. However, no matter what was going on in his life, everything else disappeared when he became absorbed in playing music.

  Once Harold realized that professional musicianship was not in his future, his interest moved into acoustics and electronics. A succession of jobs involved TV, radio, and recording, at first as a low-level tech and later in audio system development.

  Today, Harold religiously carried out the exercise drills, then lost himself for the next thirty minutes in Telemann’s Fantasia in F minor. If asked, he couldn’t describe why he liked the piece so much. Maybe the change of pace in the four movements captivated him, from the sweet flow of the adagio first movement, then a short but lively presto, to the almost too serious grave third movement, and the life-affirming vivace finale. He almost had the entire piece memorized, but for some reason the presto movement still fought him.

  After practice, a quick breakfast followed. Today was scrambled egg substitute with an English muffin and fruit, followed by a shower and shave. In the bathroom, Howard didn’t need to peruse himself in the mirror. He knew his light hair, thin face, and somewhat sleepy expression would never rank him as a handsome man, but he had seen worse.

  Right now, his mind pondered the possible topics of the morning’s meeting. During the drive to work, he would return to thinking about where he would go after the Virtual-Reality project eventually ended—maybe somewhere without the worsening traffic and a quieter locale. He would later ruefully remember such trite concerns.