by Tom DeLonge
And it was black as the night itself. Indeed, the light from the floods above the hangar seemed to fall into it.
With a low hiss of air, a panel near the center of the ship folded down, revealing three steps into the body of the craft. Morat pulled his helmet on and checked his coms as he led the way, stooping beneath what Alan still wanted to call the wing, though the whole ship was a kind of wing. The struts of the landing gear were tall and slender, not designed for conventional takeoff or landing, but sturdy enough to roll the ship out into the open. Alan tried not to stare, to give away his fascination with each new aspect of the craft that he discovered, and took refuge in pulling his helmet over his head as he climbed the stairs into the belly of the Locust.
There were two seats, side by side. The inside of the cockpit was exactly as the simulator had promised, which came as something of a surprise given how skeptical he had been of the machine he had just left. Alan wore a flight helmet unlike any he’d ever worn before, though he’d heard similar devices had been developed for the F-35. It was snug and new smelling, and it gave him the option of seeing beyond the aircraft itself, via a complex set of digital projections effectively making the ship around him transparent. In any other circumstances, he would have found the possibilities thrilling, but tonight he wanted to stay focused on the Locust itself. Absurd though the simulator had been, he was sure the Locust was capable of maneuvers his Harrier was not. He took his seat, buckled himself in with a five-point harness, then tapped the silvery rectangle.
Once buckled in, Morat turned his seat to face Alan and began touching control buttons, talking as he did so.
“This is the stand-by mode, which brings online your communication and navigation systems. See this here? This is the home preset. If you get into difficulties, hit this button here; wherever you are in the world, at whatever altitude, the craft will return to this point by the fastest, safest available route. It’s designed to tap into any available satellite system to track air traffic and adjust its flight path accordingly. Best autopilot function ever devised.”
“And if the system is compromised?”
“You’d be amazed how much it takes to stop that function from working. Multiple built-in redundancies. But if it really can’t get you home, it will let you know. If that happens, and I’ve never known it to, you’ll have other things to worry about.” He paused, then spoke. “Preflights check out?” Morat asked into his headset.
“You’re green,” flight control responded.
“Night Bird One primed for departure.”
“Roger that, Night Bird One,” said the flight controller. “When you’re ready.”
“Much appreciated,” said Morat.
“Kick the tires and light the fires,” Alan said. “Old pilot saying.”
After all, for all its mystery, the Locust was still just a plane.
Morat was talking again. “This light indicates when you are in free space—where there’s room to lift off. You have proximity detectors here, which will alert you to any interference—birds, power lines—you name it, though bird strikes aren’t usually an issue. There’s no air intake, like on a conventional jet, so you don’t suck geese through your fans. Not that they come near anyway.”
“Why not?”
“They just sense us. Not sure why. Of course, if you’re moving very fast, bird strikes are still possible, but they don’t endanger the ship’s performance.”
He reached for one of the wall consoles and popped it out of its housing like a tablet computer. “This is your main power readout,” he said. “It won’t activate if surrounding conditions are unfavorable, but we’re clear of the hanger now so … Watch this sequence.”
He tapped a series of buttons, replaced the tablet in the console and reached for a silvery rectangle glowing beside it.
“Night Bird One to flight control,” he said into his headset mike. “Permission to activate flight systems.”
“Granted, Night Bird One,” said the voice in Alan’s earphones. “Happy flying.”
Morat gave Alan a nod and, with the thrill of understanding, Alan reached for the console and touched the blinking amber square of light till it turned green. With a faint hum that resonated through his body, the ship became something subtly different from what it had been.
That made no sense, he knew, but that was how it felt.
The Locust was still sitting on its spindly landing gear, but—Alan thought—not really. They were touching the ground, but that, it seemed, was a choice, and not the result of basic gravitational physics. For all intents and purposes, Alan thought, they were already flying. Retract the gear, and the ship would just hang there, he was sure of it, dangling in empty space, not so much hovering—since that took thrust—as floating. He could feel it, a curious and inexplicable weightlessness about the ship, unlike anything he had ever felt in a plane before.
“Let’s give her a little altitude, shall we?” said Morat.
Alan swallowed, then did what Beaker had told him, pushing slightly on the vertical thrust lever. He watched all around—instruments, scanners, windows—as he set the craft into its vertical ascent, but still he couldn’t believe his eyes.
The Locust rose steadily into the desert sky, but there was no sense of the force doing the lifting, no pressure, no registering, in his body that they were moving at all beyond a slight oscillation of the craft as it climbed, as if it were floating on a rippling cushion of air. Strangest of all for a pilot used to the bellow and shriek of jet engines, there was no sound, other than a low, cycling hum that was less a noise than a vague awareness, something felt in the pit of the stomach and the bones of the skull.
This can’t be.
It had to be an illusion, another bad simulation. The Locust continued to rise, but Alan’s body felt nothing. The ship just drifted up to—according to the readout—56 meters, then stopped. There had been a fractional shudder as they left the ground and then only that minute undulation, like they were a cork on a still sea, rising and falling so slightly that you could barely sense it at all.
“Landing gear away,” said Morat, pulling a little lever. The dull whir and snuck of the wheels being stowed sounded loud in the stillness. He paused and looked at Alan. The visors on their helmets were still up and Morat met his eyes. “You okay?”
“Sure,” said Alan. More fake casualness. “No sweat.”
“Don’t want to know what’s holding us up?”
Alan’s hesitation was so small he doubted Morat saw it.
“Will we crash if I don’t know?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then let’s go. I want to see what this thing can do.”
If it had been a test, Morat’s grin said he had passed.
“We’ll stay over the base tonight,” said Morat, all business again. “But you can practice some maneuvering.”
“How long can we stay airborne like this?”
“Without moving? Indefinitely. Turn off the directional acceleration systems and we go dark. No external lights would be visible from the ground. We’re just here. Going dark also turns off detection counter measures, however, so though we’re invisible to the naked eye, we’ll show up on radar. But yeah: power everything down and we can hang here in the air forever.”
Alan wanted to ask how that was possible, but buried the thought.
“Take her up to two thousand feet,” said Morat, “and you can see how she handles.”
They did, and Alan moved the craft out around Papoose Mountain, first manually, then using preset coordinates entered automatically as the ship moved. They moved at a steady 300 knots but there was, as before, no sense of drag, thrust or turbulence as they moved. Alan was reminded of a hot air balloon, drifting, its weight somehow canceled out so they moved like dandelion seeds.
Alan realized he was holding his breath, and deliberately let it out again.
“Hold it here,” said Morat.
Alan cut the thrust, mouth dry, speechless. The c
raft hung in the sky in a controlled drift, level but rippling fractionally. Years ago, when Alan had still been with Lacey, he had taken her up in a hot air balloon in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, his last great romantic gesture, complete with champagne and strawberries. It hadn’t worked, and a month later she was gone for good, but he remembered what it had been like in the balloon, moving soundlessly (when the burner wasn’t roaring) through the sky, unobserved by the deer and rabbits who went about their business below, oblivious. That’s what this felt like, an entirely different experience from being in any kind of plane.
“Looking good from here Night Bird One,” said the voice of flight control. “Sending coordinates to your nav system now.”
“Roger that flight control,” said Morat. “Coordinates received. Engaging directional control and locking on.”
Alan watched the console as the navigational computer processed the input.
“Take her over there on your mark, Phoenix,” said Morat. “Nice and easy.”
Alan adjusted the controls, and the Locust suddenly slipped sideways, speeding east at something close to five hundred knots, so that the world below was a nauseating blur.
Or should have been. In fact, there was no nausea at all, and though he was moving too fast for his eyes to make sense of anything, Alan’s body remained cool, unfazed, as if he was sitting in a bar, watching the world go by, but at supersonic speeds.
“There now, Phoenix,” said Morat. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? You’re in safe mode now and practically invisible to any technology we know of. Try moving the ship around to get the feel of the controls. Your nav screen will show you the safe zone. Your operational shelf tonight is between five thousand and twenty five thousand feet. Let’s try some manual control.”
“Roger that,” said Alan, still trying to wrap his mind around the way the Locust had moved.
He engaged the manual system and cupped his hand over the red track ball on his armrest. He rolled it gently and the Locust pivoted in place. He did it again, this time applying a little thrust with his other hand, and the ship changed direction again, leaping hard to the west and then climbing in a dizzying spiral before screaming back to the southeast. Of course, there was no screaming, except perhaps inside Alan’s head as the laws of physics seemed to implode with each movement the craft made. No sound, no torque, no G-force, no inertia.
It was, if anything, smoother than the simulator had been. Which was impossible.
As the ship moved at Alan’s bidding, he gaped and stared, mouth parched, eyes dry because he didn’t blink for fear of missing something. And even though he was the one piloting the craft, he felt strangely irrelevant, all his knowledge and experience of flying rendered null and void by the way the Locust handled. The word that had slid unsummoned into his head already ricocheted around like cannon fire: “impossible.” All of it. It couldn’t be true, but it was, and it changed everything.
Alan gazed at the land beneath him and the sky above, his mind chasing the vectors, acceleration and related calculations the ship seemed to make with an ease so complete that it did not even register on the inside.
It was, in every possible sense of the word, awesome.
When Morat’s voice came in over the headset Alan realized that he had almost forgotten the other man sitting beside him entirely.
“You okay, Major?”
“Yeah,” said Alan. “Or at least, I will be.”
“Understood,” said Morat. “I think that’s enough for your first night. I think you get the idea.”
Except of course, that Alan didn’t. Not really.
Back on the ground, Alan was silent as they left in the blacked-out bus. There was something about the way Hatcher patted him understandingly on the shoulder which said that his mood was not unexpected. They were used to it, this stunned sense that reality was not what it seemed.
“Let’s take the rest of the night off,” said Hatcher. “Mr. Morat, take the Major for a beer.”
ALAN WAS RELIEVED THAT THE PLANNED BEER WOULD NOT be on the base, but there were things to say first, things that could not be said anywhere but Dreamland. He requested a debriefing room, a place, he said, where they could talk openly and without fear of being overheard. Hatcher did not hesitate, but neither did he ask what was on Alan’s mind, or if he could sit in. This was pilot talk.
He led them down a series of hallways, swiped his badge through three separate doors, and showed their clearance IDs to the guard with the submachine gun on duty outside the designated meeting room.
“And remember, gentlemen,” he said, showing them into the comfortably appointed—but predictably deserted—lounge. “Careless talk …”
Costs lives, Alan thought, recalling the old wartime motto. “Say what you like in here,” Hatcher concluded. “But only here. Then get your beer, like a regular person. Just remember that you aren’t one. Not anymore.”
And with that, he left them.
Morat took bottled water from a fridge, tossed one to Alan and waited. The room hummed with the textured hiss of the white noise speakers on the walls.
“How can you live with it?” Alan asked.
Morat gave him a level stare. “With what?”
“The …” Alan fought for the word. “The sheer physics of it?”
Morat glanced fractionally around before answering, making sure no one had come in. “I don’t need to understand digital recording, or sound compression and reproduction to enjoy a bit of Taylor Swift on my iPod,” he said with a shrug. “I’m a pilot, not an engineer.”
Alan scowled. “You listen to Taylor Swift?”
Morat shrugged and grinned, but Alan didn’t let him derail his train of thought.
“No one ever told you Taylor Swift on an iPod was a theoretical impossibility,” he said. “You haven’t lived your life according to—premised on—that assumption.”
“True,” said Morat, taking a sip of his water. “You lived your life on the premise that there could be no more advanced form of flight than what you’ve been trained to do in a Harrier. What if you grew up flying a Spitfire or a Sopwith Camel, and then someone showed you the Harrier? Would that change your view of the world?”
“No,” said Alan. “Yes. Kind of. But this is a different order of magnitude.” He leaned in, lowering his voice. “This isn’t just going faster or higher than we thought we could. This is a fundamentally different notion of travel. According to everything I’ve ever heard, it’s not possible. Those aerial maneuvers I just did, the changes of direction, the acceleration, that’s …”
“What?”
“That’s not flying.”
“It’s just a different kind of flying.”
Alan shook his head. “I don’t know what that means,” he said.
“No, and if I’m really honest,” said Morat, “neither do I, but you know what? It works. You’ve seen it.”
“I just don’t understand how it’s possible that …”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Morat, and his smile was brittle now. “So you keep saying. Let me see your phone.”
“What?”
“Your phone, let me see it.”
Alan fished in his pocket and pushed the iPhone across the table.
“State of the art,” said Morat, impressed.
“For now,” Alan replied.
“Right,” said the other man with a meaningful stare. “But even if it wasn’t, what do you have here? A communication device that allows you to talk to people all over the world. This phone is a computer that can process more data in less time than anything involved in the Apollo space program that put men on the moon. You’ve got digital pictures and video, music …”
“I know. So?”
“So imagine taking this back in time a thousand years, or less, say a couple of hundred. Imagine you could walk into the house of George Washington, with all your networks and servers functioning, and show him what that little device could do. What do you think the people of the
time would say?”
Alan frowned. “I guess they’d be pretty impressed,” he said, grudgingly, guessing where Morat was going.
“No,” Morat replied. “Not impressed. They’d freak the fuck out. They’d be terrified. They’d say it was witchcraft. They’d say it wasn’t possible, that such a thing could not exist in the world as they knew it.”
Alan said nothing.
“What you saw today is a leap forward—a quantum leap, if you like—but a leap forward in technology and theoretical understanding way beyond our pay grade. But it ain’t witchcraft.”
“I get that,” said Alan, “but I’m a pilot. I know about flying.”
“Sure you do,” said Morat. “Thrust against drag; lift and angle of attack to generate turn Gs, right? You are dead-on: a Sopwith Camel pilot could get his head around a Harrier. Action and reaction, objects in motion stay in motion unless acted on by a force—that’s what Newton figured out right? And invented calculus to analyze? A fighter pilot has Newtonian physics baked into our muscle memory. But think on this: Didn’t Einstein already grasp that Newtonian physics are just a useful approximation for the world and speeds we live in? Or that space and time are a continuum, and both bend and curve? Astrophysicists can see the evidence—around neutron stars and black holes; Einstein lenses bending space. But the useful engineering of non-Newtonian physics into applied technology—why that’s as far out as telling old Ben Franklin that your iPhone is just the engineering of the electricity he is experimenting with in his kites and Leyden jars. Bend space and time under commanded control, non-Newtonian, and there’s no action/reaction; no force needed to equal acceleration you’d feel in the cockpit. The engineering of such technology? Well, that’s more than you need to know. But it ain’t magic, and the sooner you get used to the idea that it’s real, the longer you’ll last up there, capisce?”
Alan blinked, looked at him and nodded. It hadn’t been a threat. Not really. A caution, perhaps, and a useful one.
AFTER THE BUS RIDE BACK TO GROOM LAKE, THE TWO OF them sitting silently in the cool interior, looking at nothing, the driver took them to their respective quarters to change out of their flight gear, asking them politely to return in civilian attire. For Morat, this meant jeans and a worn open necked shirt that made him look like someone Alan had never seen before. Alan ruffled his hair a bit and pushed the sleeves up on his wrinkle-free no-iron Oxford shirt, but he knew that anyone with half a brain would spot him for military.
