Nerve Center d-2

by Dale Brown

  “Yeah, Mo,” said Dog. “Go for it, sister.”

  Whether she heard them or not, the EB-52 stepped down daintily on the desert runway, her tires barely chirping.

  She poked her nose up slightly, perhaps indignant to find a full escort of emergency vehicles roaring alongside her. But Bastian had no trouble controlling her, bringing her to a rest near the secondary access ramp at the middle of the field.

  “Good work, Colonel,” said Cheshire. “You handled that like a pro. Maybe we will use you as a pilot when Pistol and Billy leave.”

  Chapter 22

  ANTARES Bunker

  27 January, 0755

  Kevin nodded at the guard as the gate swung back from the road, the panel of chain links groaning and clicking as the metal wheels whirled. While the path was wide enough for a tractor-trailer, no vehicles were allowed past the checkpoint, not even the black SUVs used by Dreamland security.

  Madrone proceeded past the gate and the three cement-reinforced metal pipes that stuck up from the roadway, walking toward the pillbox that served as the entrance to the ANTARES lab. Made of concrete, the building bore the scars from its use long ago as a target area for live-fire exercises, though it had been at least two decades since the last piece of lead had ricocheted off the thick gray exterior. The interior somehow managed to smell not only damp, but like fried chicken, perhaps because the main vents from the underground complex ran through an access shaft next to the stairway.

  Madrone nearly lost his balance as he stepped down the tight spiral stairway. All of the qualifying tests for ANTARES had taken place over at Taj; coming to the lab yesterday had been a revelation — truthfully, he didn’t even know it existed. The bunker facility had actually not been used during the program’s first phase, except for some minor tests; it was only after ANTARES was officially shut down that the computers and other gear were consolidated here. Geraldo had been using it as an office and lab for a few months, but the scent of fresh paint managed to mingle with the heavier odors as Ma-drone stepped off the stairway and across the wide ramp. No human guards were posted beyond the gate, and like the rest of Dreamland, there were no signs to direct anyone; it was assumed that if you had business here, you knew where you were going.

  The metal ramp led to a subterranean catacomb area with three large metal doors, none of which looked as if they had been opened in years. Madrone went to the door on the right, which was the only one that worked. It was also the only one with a magnetic card reader. He pushed his ID into the slot and the door slowly creaked upward. He took a breath, then ducked beneath it, passing into a long hallway whose raked cement walls and dull red overhead lights continued the early-bomb-shelter motif. At the end of the hallway he turned right, and was immediately blinded by light; before his eyes could adjust the door in front of him slid open, activated by a computer security system similar to the one that governed Taj’s elevator.

  Now the ambiance changed dramatically. He stepped onto a plush green carpet and walked down the hallway, barely glancing at the Impressionist paintings — elaborate canvas transfer prints complete with forged brush strokes like the real thing. As he neared Lab Room 1, the adagio of a Mozart Concerto — K.313, for flute and orchestra — filtered into the hallway, and he smelled the light perfume of Earl Grey tea.

  “Good morning, Kevin, come in, come in,” said Dr. Geraldo.

  She was wearing a lab coat and her customary severe suit, but otherwise seemed more like a matron welcoming visitors to the family estate than a staid scientist. She ushered Kevin to a thick leather chair and went to get him some tea; somewhere along the way he’d mentioned that he preferred it to coffee.

  “And a pineapple Danish,” she said, appearing with a plate and cloth napkin. “Did you sleep well?” the psychiatrist asked him.

  “As a matter of fact I did,” he told her. “Best I’ve slept in weeks. Didn’t have any dreams.”

  “We always have dreams,” she said gently. “You mean that you don’t remember them.”

  “True.”

  “How many cigarettes have you had this morning?”

  Kevin laughed — not at her stern-grandmother scowl, but at the realization that he hadn’t had any. He hadn’t even thought of it.

  “I think your pills are a cure for nicotine fits,” he suggested.

  “If so, you and I will share a fortune,” she said kindly. Geraldo glanced toward his thumbs, which Kevin belatedly pulled into his fists; that was one habit he hadn’t yet broken. “You’ve gained weight. Very good. You did your exercises?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Full hour.”

  “Let me look at your spider,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to examine the side of his skull above his ear. It was a bit of a joke — the integrated circuit placed there to facilitate the ANTARES connection looked like a flattened spider. “Itchy?”

  “Not today,” said Kevin.

  “Yes, I think it’s fine. I think it was only the irritation from the shaving bothering you.”

  He sipped his tea. Inside the next room, Geraldo’s two assistants were making last-minute adjustments to the equipment. One of them made a joke that somehow involved the word “monkey,” and the other laughed.

  Monkey. That’s what he was.

  Madrone concentrated on the Danish as Geraldo reviewed the results of yesterday’s session. She gave brain wave and serotonin levels, which he knew wouldn’t be encouraging — they had failed to make a link.

  The thing was, he didn’t quite know what making a link really meant. Geraldo said it would be like shaking hands with the computer, except that it would seem imaginary. He’d feel it more than think it.

  Neither description cleared up his confusion. Zen, who had gone through ANTARES before his crash, described it as a smack on the head with an anvil, followed by the warm buzz of a beer when you’d spent the day working outside in the sun.

  That didn’t help either. Not only had he never been hit by an anvil, Madrone rarely drank, and frankly didn’t like the loss of control that came with being buzzed, let alone drunk.

  Geraldo bent down in front of him, so close he could smell the tea on her breath. “You’re worried this morning.”

  “A little nervous.” He felt his thumb twitch.

  “You’ll be fine,” she told him. “The link will come. It takes time. Everyone is different. There are different pathways. Trust me.”

  Shorn of its classified and complicated science, descriptions of the ANTARES system tended to sound either like Eastern religion or sci-fi fantasies. The bottom line was an age-old dream — ANTARES allowed a subject’s brain to control mechanical devices. It was hardly magic, however. The subject could not simply think an item into existence, nor could he — for some reason not totally understood, no woman had ever been an effective ANTARES subject — move items by simply thinking of them. Thought impulses, which corresponded to minute chemical changes in synapses in different sections of the brain, controlled a series of sensitive ultralow-voltage electrical switches in the ANTARES interface unit, which in turn controlled the external object — in this case a gateway to a special version of C3, the Flighthawk control computer.

  But before Madrone could interface with C3, he had to reach Theta-alpha, the scientists’ shorthand for a mental state where he could produce and control the impulses of the hippocampus in his brain. The production of the waves were measured on an electroencephalograph. All humans, in fact all carnivorous animals, produced such waves. But few people could actually control them, let alone use them to project thoughts as instructions. Successful ANTARES subjects could do just that, using the brain waves as extensions of their thoughts, in effect talking to a computer without bothering to use their mouths.

  In Theta-alpha, the brain began utilizing resources that it normally didn’t tap. Or as an ANTARES researcher explained it on the introductory video: “Areas of the brain that normally go unused are suddenly put into service to control autonomous functions. The average person uses only thirt
y percent of his available brain capacity, but under Theta-alpha, the other seventy percent is suddenly put on line.”

  That seventy percent would be augmented by the computers it was interfaced with. When he mastered Theta and ANTARES, Kevin would tap into their memories and, to some extent, computational abilities.

  ANTARES had physical components. A special diet, drugs, and feedback manipulated serotonin and other chemical levels in the subject’s brain. A chip implant in the skull supplied and regulated the vital connection to the ANTARES input and output system: this was physically taped to a receptor or, alternatively, overlain by a copper connection band in the ANTARES control helmet. ANTARES subjects had to either sit in a special chair or wear a flight suit that contained a sensor that ran parallel to their spine, allowing the ANTARES monitoring units to record peripheral nervous-system impulses. But the most important component was the subject’s mind, and his will to extend beyond himself. Kevin had to think himself beyond the interface into the object itself. As Geraldo was fond of saying, he had to discover a way to think in harmony with the machine. He needed to invent a new language with its own feelings, metaphors, and even thoughts.

  “The important thing is not to push too hard,” she told him now. “Let it come to you. It will. Are you ready?”

  Madrone took a last bite of his pastry, then got up and followed her into the lab. He stripped off his shirt, holding his arms up while the techies carefully taped wire leads that would monitor his heartbeat and breathing. Shirt back on, he slipped into the subject chair, which looked like a slightly wider version of the one found in most dentist offices.

  “Going to prick you, Captain,” said Carrie, one of the assistants, as she picked up his hand. He nodded, trying not to stare at her breasts as she poked á small needle into his right thumb. She held the needle against his finger as she retrieved a roll of white adhesive tape from her lab coat pocket. A small tube ran from the needle to a device that measured gases in Madrone’s bloodstream, analyzing his respiration rate during the experiment.

  It was all but impossible not to imagine the outlines of her nipples rising as she attached the device.

  In the meantime, the other assistant — Roger, whose long nose, wide stomach, and long legs made him look like a pregnant stork — got ready to put the ANTARES helmet on Kevin’s head. The helmet was actually more a liner made of a flexible plastic with bumps and veins; a full flight helmet would go over it when they got to the point where he was actually working in a plane. Besides the thick metal band that connected with the chip, there were two classes of sensors strung in a thick net within the plastic. The first and most important picked up brain waves and fed them to the translating unit, backing up those that were fed through the chip and band interface. The other sensors helped the scientists track Madrone’s physical state.

  With the helmet on, Roger lowered a shieldlike set of visual sensors to track rapid eye movements over his eyes. These backed up the translating sensors, and gave the scientists another way of monitoring their progress. In the next stage of the experiments, the sensors would be part of the flight helmet and would be used by ANTARES to help it interpret his thought commands.

  The physical feedback input from electrodes, which would be connected to the spider and grafted onto the nerves of the skin behind the eyes and ears, wouldn’t be used until Madrone demonstrated he was capable of achieving and controlling Theta. The electrodes would allow the computer to send data to him, first by affecting his equilibrium, and then by interacting with his brain’s Theta-alpha wave production.

  A ponytail of wires connected the ANTARES helmet with a bank of workstations and two servers. These fed data to a set of supercomputers the next level down via a set of optical cables. The interface modules for the Flighthawk’s C units were still being worked on, but eventually would be hooked into a smaller, portable (and air-cooled) version of the ANTARES computer array.

  Madrone sat stoically in the chair as the technicians prepared him. Geraldo had given him breathing exercises to do as a form of relaxation; he tried them now, imagining his lungs slowly squeezing the air from his chest. He pictured his upper body as a large balloon, gradually being emptied. He relaxed his arms and hands on the seat rests, easing himself into the chair. When the visor was placed on his face he accepted the darkness.

  His lips and cheeks vibrated slightly, as if set off by some internal pitchfork tuned to their frequency. Someone placed headphones over his ears. The Mozart concerto played softly in the background.

  The music called up memories of the past, times in junior and senior high school, learning the cello. Orchestra was his favorite class, though not his best — B’s and B+’s compared to the A’s and A+’s in math and science. The thickness of the notes matched the feel of the bow in his hand, the vibration shifting in his senses. Sounds morphed into movement through space, and space itself transformed, the high school halls a jungle of jagged shadows and sharp corners.

  “Kevin, are you ready?”

  Geraldo’s voice intruded like a bully bursting from the shadows. Junior and senior high school were in the same building, seventh-graders mixing with towering twelfth-graders, always cowering in fear of being pummeled.

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes,” said Madrone.

  “Your hippocampus has grown two percent since our measurement twenty-four hours ago,” said the scientist. “That is extremely good. Surprising even. Incredible.”

  “Off the chart,” said Roger approvingly.

  The hippocampus was one of the key areas of the brain involved in ANTARES, since it produced nearly all the Theta waves. Also responsible for memory control and other functions, it was actually a ridge at the bottom of each of the brain’s lateral ventricles. Geraldo had explained that she wasn’t sure the size of the ridge or the number of cells there mattered. Nonetheless, the ANTARES diet and drug regime included several hormones that were supposed to help stimulate the grown of brain cells.

  “Our baseline frequencies this morning are 125 percent,” continued Geraldo. “Kevin, I must say, we’re doing very well. Very, very well. Can you feel the computer? If I try a simple tone, do you feel it? The feedback?”

  He shook his head. Her praise was misplaced. He had no control over his. thoughts, let alone the growth of his brain cells. He was worthless, a failure, useless. Karen had seen that and left.

  His brain began to shift, ideas floating back and forth like pieces of paper caught in a breeze.

  Something hot burned a hole on the side of his head.

  Red grew there. His skull bones folded inward, became a flute.

  Maria Mahon, the flute player in ninth-grade orchestra.

  He had a crush on her. Thomas Lang, a senior, was her boyfriend.

  Stuck-up rich kid bully slimebag.

  Go out for the football team, his dad urged.

  He broke his forearm and couldn’t play the cello anymore.

  Very red and hot.

  The light notes moved down the scale. He was a horrible trumpet player. Try the bass, pound-pound-pounding.

  Red knives poked him from the sides of the hall. Someone took a machine gun from the locker.

  Respond with the York Gatling gun. He had one in his hands. His head was the radar he’d worked on.

  Pounding red lava from the cortex of his brain.

  Madrone heard words, hard words that shot across the pain, spun him in the displaced hallway of his distorted memories.

  “Kevin, try to relax. Let your body sway with the music.

  You’re fighting too hard.”

  Relax, relax, relax. Don’t think about the bullies.

  The tanks. He was in Iraq, alone with his men.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Go left. I’m right. Just go!”

  He screamed, running faster. He drew the Iraqis’ fire and his men did their jobs, it was all so easy in his memory now, without the pain and the nervousness, knowing exactly how it would come out, the elation, t
he adrenaline at the end, the smell of the burning metal, the extra grenade still in his hand.

  He could do it. He wanted to do it.

  And then Karen. Christina being born in the hospital. Taking blood in the doctor’s office when she was a week old because the TSH had been so elevated.

  Normal, said the nurse, for a traumatic birth.

  Except the birth hadn’t been traumatic. Labor was only two hours and the kid nailed the Apgar charts.

  Christina wailed as they pricked her heel. They couldn’t get the blood to flow.

  The second test, then the third. X-rays. Colonel Glavin, Theo P. Glavin, wouldn’t give him the day off so he could be there.

  “P” for Prick.

  Oh, God, you bastards, why did you poison her?

  Karen, don’t you see — they killed her. They poisoned her and then me.

  His wife looked at him from across the room, the empty white room at the back of the small church where they’d had the service for Christina, their poor, dead little girl. Karen’s eyes stabbed at his chest, wounding him again, the memory so vivid it wasn’t a memory but reality; he was in the church again, his daughter dead, his marriage crumbling, his life over. He’d been uncontrollable at the service, blurting out the truth, what he knew was the truth — they had poisoned her through him, killed her.

  He’d get them, the bastards who’d exposed him to the radiation, exposed her —

  “Kevin?”

  “I can’t do it, I’m sorry.” Madrone snapped upright in the chair. He yanked off the helmet.

  “Easy, easy,” said Geraldo. Her fingers folded over his gently but firmly. “Let’s break for lunch.”

  Her words or perhaps her touch pushed him back, somehow both surprising and calming him at the same time.

  “Lunch?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s lunchtime,” she said. “Why don’t you go over to the Red Room? Take a real break. We’ll start from scratch at two o’clock.”

  “What time is it?” asked Madrone. He’d only just sat in the chair, perhaps five minutes ago.