by Stephen Moss
“Indeed,” said Neal. “I understand from Madeline that you have been having quite the time test piloting the new toys coming off their line,” said Neal with a fatherly smile. But his smile became more like a laugh when she beamed at him, a hint of embarrassment following her initial flow of happiness at the thought.
She was about to elaborate on the spectacular experiences she had had over the last two months, but something about the man sitting next to her made her stop. Any doubts about the importance of the mission that had claimed her partner Captain Kellar’s life had long since been dissuaded. But Jack had described this Neal Danielson as the mastermind behind the ever-larger conspiracy, and as she looked at him she realized that she was looking at the man that had caused all this to happen. It was … unsettling.
As these thoughts worked through her, she found that she had lost the amusing anecdote that had been waiting to come from her original train of thought, and was forced to merely smile and nod a little, turning to look out the window as they slowed for the next security gate.
They sat in silence, both pretending to listen to the more technical conversation happening in the front of the car.
Eventually, Neal attempted to break the tension, “So did the major let you fly the StratoJet, or did he hog the controls the whole way?”
She chuckled, “No, he lets the rest of us play every now and then.”
“Good, good,” said Neal. “Have you seen the schematics for the Skalms? I hear they are something to behold.”
Jennifer brightened at this, “I have, they’ve even begun testing the wing designs. The entire Skalm is too large to produce in the existing resonance chambers, so we’ll have to wait till they complete the next generation chambers, but even the wings are a thing to see.”
“I thought they were all wing?” said Neal, wishing he’d had time to study the forms more closely. He had an image in his mind of a giant X made by two crossed delta wings.
“No, well, yes, I suppose they’re actually four wings, rotated around a central drive core, but I am told the whole has to be made as one, as the structural pressures would be too much for any after-chamber join to withstand.”
Jesus, thought Neal.
“I know,” went on Jennifer, seeing the look of surprise on Neal’s face, “given the strength of the materials being used, makes you wonder what the Skalms will be capable of doing.”
Neal nodded appreciatively.
It did beggar belief that the capabilities of the new ships would even test materials capable of withstanding tens of thousands of miles of weight, like the cable they could see slicing upward from Rolas Island a few miles away.
But Neal would have to wait a while longer until he had such weaponry as the Skalms at his disposal. Wait until his first massive, apartment block sized Resonance Dome was finished.
“Three months,” Neal said offhandedly, thinking of his schedule, and the inexorable slowness at which they were being forced to proceed by politics, the persistent ineptitude of their spinal interfaces, their projects’ massive hunger for resources, and the continuing unrest in Russia, the Middle East, and now the US.
Jennifer’s smile faded a little as the conversation puttered to a halt once more.
Neal sensed her reticence, and with it, some of the awkwardness of a moment ago, and Neal was brought back to the present as the thought of how he had sent her to die whispered in his ear again. He stepped on another surge of remorse for having put this woman in danger. No, Neal, even if she had died on that mission, it would have been worth it.
As Jennifer went quiet and looked out the window, he staunched a new desire to reprimand her for, even inadvertently, making him feel guilty for his choices. He looked at her and felt a surge of anger, followed by a wave of regret, followed by a sense of confusion. He knew he had been right to order the mission, and he knew he would do it again. He knew he would actually have to, and on a far larger scale, when the real fighting began.
He wanted to say something more, but decided against it. He wallowed in the anticipation of regret.
Jennifer sensed the turmoil of the man sitting next to her, and studied him. As he turned back to her, they smiled at each other, almost bashfully, and in that moment he suddenly became aware of a certain grace in the way her clearly feminine figure suggested a strength and athleticism beneath her androgynous uniform. He balked at the thought. Stopping it almost before it had started, pushing images of her body to the back of his mind, and focusing instead on the anger he had felt a moment ago.
With determination, he parceled away any carnal thoughts of her, and focused on some meaningless small talk to fill the time until they reached the bridge to the island fortress if Ilhéu de Rolas.
But over the twenty years since Jennifer had stumbled through puberty, she had learned to spot how a man looked at her when he was picturing her naked, like all women learned to, eventually. Surprisingly she felt a rush of pleasure at his eyes’ momentary straying to her breasts and neck. It was not so much objectifying as flattering, at least for the brief moment the look lasted.
She saw him muster his emotions, and then stifled a smile at his sudden adjunct to small talk. She was not immune to the fact that this was one of most influential figures behind all the revolutionary things happening in the world today. As she looked at him, she found herself seeing the brilliance in his eyes, the weight of the power on his shoulders, and being drawn to it.
Chapter 22: Dangerous Liaisons
Amadeu had worked on the spike for weeks. Using the small resonance manipulator they had brought to SpacePort One for various teams’ usage, he had crafted the device based on a modification of the original Mobiliei design. It was a shiny silver spike about two inches long that was no more than a centimeter across at its base. The small underside of the device was the size of a penny, and was almost gelatinous; a dome of semi-transparent spongy material that covered a pattern of golden streaks and copper dots on the small base of the spike.
The device itself was almost an exact copy of the original Mobiliei spinal interface it was based on. Its function and technical specifications were identical, but due to biological diversity on a galactic scale, its application and operation were utterly different. The fundamentally different way Mobiliei and human brains worked had formed a vast chasm that had forced Amadeu to reinvent the basis of mind-machine interface from the ground up.
Sure, they’d had the basic theoretical foundation. And they had been given the technology they would need, but it was like being given a car built for a species that has hands for feet and feet for hands, not even mentioning where they kept their eyes and ears. The system’s capabilities were all in place, but no human could use them without completely redesigning the interface.
Progress had been slow at first, and then had taken on a new and promising path when Amadeu had discovered that there was a language that could reach the significantly more capable right side of the human brain. From that day onward, he had completely reprogrammed the way his machines built their bonds with the minds they were plugged into.
He had started with ‘dumb’ interfaces that merely listened to the signals coming through the spine without actually puncturing the cord itself. With his learning programs becoming ever more effective at interpreting the mind’s operation, he had then begun experimenting with his monkey subjects, and begun to physically tap their beings to link them to the machine.
But though this had proven successful, it was all, in the end, academic until they tried it on an animal that could understand what was happening to them and react accordingly. With disturbing candor, Madeline had offered to find a human candidate for trials, flatly refusing his offer of testing the process on himself on the basis that he was too valuable to the team.
He had fought this, at first on purely ethical grounds. But she had eventually convinced him to work with one of her ‘volunteers;’ a brave green beret from the ranks of Ayala’s shock troops who had been briefed on the risks of
the procedure. But not long into the tests, Amadeu had realized that his objections were not only ethical, they were practical. In the final days before he and Birgit left for Sao Tome, they had stumbled through a series of unimpressive tests with the brave volunteer. The implant had been successful, the connection clear and true, but there was something missing.
The experiments with the monkeys had been academic not only because of the differences between the ways our minds worked, but also because the monkeys couldn’t appreciate the scale of what was happening to them, and in the end neither could this volunteer. Amadeu did not need just any human subject, he needed someone that grasped the full depth of what was happening. It was like a caveman being given a bicycle. Even if he had some idea, some concept of how it is supposed to work, he would still never have seen it done, and would have no one to show him. How many times would this person graze his knees and wrists, crash into trees, and generally risk life and limb before he either gave up or killed himself trying to master the relatively simple but fundamentally counterintuitive process of riding a bike?
And yet, once upon a time, there was indeed a very first person to actually ride a bike, Amadeu told himself, as he sat alone in his laboratory. There was a person who first conquered the initial instability, and formed that bond between bike and rider, who built the muscle memory that turned the seeming impossibility that we all remember from our first days without stabilizers, into the smooth ride we all come to know and love after time.
That man was able to do this not because someone told him what needed to be done, but because he was the one who had conceived of and built that bicycle, and he understood, fundamentally, the logic behind what he was trying to accomplish. He was able to work through his initial shakiness because of his belief in what could be done, and how it should, in theory, work.
That was the theory, anyway, thought Amadeu, his heart starting to race. It would do him no good to push another test pilot down a hill on this bicycle of his.
He needed to ride it himself.
He knew that.
Deep down, he was sure of it.
But despite that certainty, he shuddered at the thought of what he was about to do, even more than a young MacMillan must have felt in 1830 when he first rode forth on his strange-looking wheeled device. For Amadeu had watched the way the silver spike wormed its way into the spines of his simian, and then human test subjects, and it made him shiver.
Steadying himself, he wrote a brief note highlighting what he planned to do, and what should be done by anyone discovering him, should he be … unresponsive. He carefully pinned the note to his shirt with a safety pin and then picked up the spike once more.
It was cool to the touch. He dipped the silver device in a whitish liquid preparation Madeline had helped him make. Since the global uptake of the antigen Madeline had created to protect us from biological attack, Amadeu was, like virtually every other member of the human race, effectively immune to any infectious disease that might lurk on the spike’s surface.
But this spike was going to snake its way into his very fiber, into his spinal cord. So he dipped it into this white soup that contained a vastly amped up version of the cellular construct that had multiplied across the planet. It was wired specifically to the job of bolstering the consistency and efficacy of the recipient’s spinal fluid and its delicate contents. He dipped the spike finger-deep into the solution and removed it, grasping it again by the other end and dipping it again to make sure the solution reached every part of it. He felt a slight tingle on his fingertips where the liquid touched them, as an army of nano-warriors scoured his skin of pollutants.
The spike was designed to remain in him once it was in place. The gelport on its tip would protect the interface while not in use and deter unwanted signals and contact with the complex connective systems it covered. Amadeu stared at it. Assuming this went well, this spike was about to become part of him.
He smiled at it. It was pretty cool-looking, after all, though only the doughy gelport would be visible to anyone else. Soon, he hoped, everyone on his team would have these little gelports on the back of their necks. Then the soldiers being trained by Quavoce. Then … everyone. This little spike was going to change everything.
Starting with him. Picking up the optic cable that would connect the spike to the computer, he brought the connection up to the gelport of the spike. The plug on the end of the white cable also had a gelatinous penny at its tip, identical to the one on the spike’s base, and as Amadeu brought them together, the two seemed to morph out toward each other. Sensing each other’s presence, they ballooned ever so slightly, and as Neal allowed them to touch, they melded, connecting the spike to the cable through a thousand molecular highways. The software Amadeu had designed sensed the spike’s purpose, and offered him up the option of initiating the interface device to prepare for insertion.
Amadeu selected OK, and the computer began preparing the spike for insertion. A beep from the PC indicated it was about to test the spike. Neal held it up in the air by its base, and waited.
The spike shimmered slightly in the luminescent light, and then, from along its length, a single fiber unpeeled itself. It was micro-thin, and it seemed to fall away from the spike’s point like a blade of grass slowly wilting. As it bent away, it then began undulating, waving and twisting as the machine tested its malleability. It was followed quickly by two more hair-thin spines, each beginning to twist and turn like Medusa’s reptilian hair, and slowly the spike revealed itself not as a metallic whole, but a thousand tendrils that each twisted and turned independently.
After a few seconds of this testing of probes’ flexibility, the hairs began to merge back together again. They followed a precise choreography, leaving no space between them as they slid into each other once more. It was like a building’s destruction seen in reverse. The thousand constituent fibers that had made up the spike sliding back into place, to return the whole to a single gleaming point once more.
Amadeu nodded. It was time. He only had one more thing to do before he took the leap. With his free hand, he pressed the speaker button on his desk phone and called Birgit in her quarters in another part of the complex. Her voice came out of the speaker.
“Hello?”
“Birgit, this is Amadeu. I am sorry to call you so early, but I need you to come to my office as soon as you have a chance.”
There was a pause while Birgit no doubt gathered her senses. It was five o’clock in the morning and she was exhausted. They were launching the first climber that morning. Her part in the effort was really over. Tests were complete, and they had run it up as far as twenty thousand feet yesterday without a glitch. The designs were good. The construction was good. The system was not new, it was only new to them, and they had every reason to believe it would work as planned. A luxury which Amadeu did not enjoy in his efforts.
But she wanted to be there in the morning when it departed for real, and she didn’t know why Amadeu was waking her at this ungodly hour.
“Is everything all right, Amadeu?” she asked, a hint of anger in her voice.
“Yes, everything is fine, but I need you here as soon as you can make it. I’ll explain when you get here.”
She did not like being ordered around, least of all by a young boy, albeit it a somewhat loveable one, and she snapped back, “Amadeu, what is this about?”
“I can’t tell you, but I need you here, please come. There has been a … breakthrough in my research.” It wasn’t really a lie. By the time she got here, there would have been. Either for better or worse. He knew she would not let him do this if she was here, but he needed someone here once it was done, in case something went wrong. Maybe even someone to bring him out of it if he passed out, as the first test subject had, though without any long-term aftereffects.
She persisted with her questions and he became impatient, “Listen, please, Birgit, listen. I rarely ask for favors, and when I do
I don’t do so lightly. I am not asking you to come here for some frivolous chat. I need you here. All will become clear when you get here, I promise. It is important. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t. But I can’t tell you anymore over the phone so … just come, will you?”
She was more than a little perturbed by his tone, but on some level she got it. Goodness knows she had made several calls just like this herself in her long career. Sometimes you just needed someone to get something done, not bother you with questions that you didn’t have time to answer. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” she said flatly and she hung up, leaving him to whatever had so possessed him to call her and demand her attendance.
She pulled on some shorts over the underwear she had been sleeping in, clipped on a bra, and threw on a T-shirt. In truth, she was more curious than annoyed, such was the boy’s infectious enthusiasm. And so, a moment later, she was walking briskly from her quarters toward the small block of offices where they had been given some rooms to continue their work onsite.
Back in the lab, Amadeu took a breath. The spike was live as he held it up to the back of his neck. This was not really something you should do yourself, but the machine would not allow him to miss the mark. At the meeting point of the line of his shoulders, he felt with his left hand for the bumps of his spine, and with his right hand he guided the point of the spike to the line between them.
The fibers at the end of the spike became mobile as they approached his neck. They could sense the pulse of his heart, the firing of his nerves, all the electrical signals that darted about his body, and at the center of that symphony, they could see the hot core of his spine, and they hungered for it. Amadeu’s spine was a superhighway pumping a billion signals back and forth from every corner of his body, and the top of his spine thrummed like a biological IT network, feeding the HQ of his brain with information from every part of the organization it ruled, and delivering the HQ’s orders to every element of the whole, both subconsciously and consciously.
