by Bob Mayer
The chopper turned and Dalton looked out. He spotted the distinctive white cross of snow on the Mount of the Holy Cross to the north. From that he knew they were somewhere in the White River National Forest, south of Vail, north of Aspen, and west of Leadville, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.
"Check it out." Barnes nudged him, pointing forward.
Straight ahead, a large door, camouflaged to look like part of the mountainside, was sliding up, a level metal grating coming out at the bottom. A dark hole appeared on the side of the mountain.
"Some high-speed stuff, Sergeant Major," Barnes said. "Who the hell are these people?"
Dalton knew that Anderson and Trilly had not had a chance to fully brief the team, but Special Forces men were used to missions with vague parameters.
The blades flared and the chopper settled onto the metal grating. Dalton grabbed the door handle and slid it to the rear. He felt the chill blast of air as he stepped out.
"Gentlemen, welcome to Bright Gate." Raisor waved the team off the helicopter. Dr. Hammond was next to him, holding her coat against the chopper blast.
It had taken them two hours to reach this location deep in the spine of the Rocky Mountains. The helipad was extended out of the side of a massive, thirteen-thousand-foot peak The entire platform shuddered, then began retracting into the hangar cut into the side of the mountain, taking the helicopter and its passengers with it. As they cleared the side of the mountain, the door slid down, cutting them off from the outside world.
"This way." Raisor gestured toward a large door on the side of the hangar furthest into the mountain. He and Hammond led the way, the team following, carrying their gear in large green rucksacks. Raisor paused before the door, a large circular steel structure, over eighteen feet in diameter. It was strangely formed, with rings of concentric strips of black metal spaced evenly out from the center on the polished steel. Dalton noticed that strips of the same black metal were attached to the rock wall that extended left and right the length of the hangar, disappearing into holes drilled into the rock where the hangar ended.
Dalton looked closely. There was something strange about the door, in fact the whole wall the door was set in; a shimmering effect that was barely noticeable.
Raisor punched a code into the panel on the right side. Dalton blinked. The shimmering stopped. The door rolled sideways into a recessed port. A corridor lit with dim red lights beckoned. Raisor made a sweeping gesture with his hand and the team trooped through. The door rolled shut behind them and Raisor again punched a code into the inside panel. Dalton swore that the shimmering came back, this time on the inside of the door. And the inside was also covered with the black metal circles, branching off into holes drilled on this side into the rock.
Dalton followed the rest of the team down the corridor. They walked through a door, then down a hallway cut out of the stone. Hammond opened a door and showed them a large room with gray painted walls and several bunk beds.
"I'm sorry the arrangements aren't the greatest," Hammond said, sounding not sorry at all as the team members threw their rucks down. "I'd like to get started right away," she added.
They followed Raisor and the doctor down another corridor deeper into the mountain. The corridor opened into a large chamber. They all stopped, taking in the view. There were two rows of ten of the large cylinders that had been on the slide. Two had people in them, floating in the green liquid, a man and a woman, like full-grown fetuses in suspended animation. Each wore a slick black one-piece suit over their torso.
The team silently walked up and stared at the two bodies.
"Don't touch the glass," Hammond warned. "The fluid inside is supercooled and your hand would freeze to the glass."
Dalton looked closely and now he saw a thin haze in the air surrounding the glass as the ambient room temperature met the much lower temperature.
"Supercooled?" Anderson asked.
"It's necessary to slow the body's processes down to allow the brain to function at a higher level."
"How do they breathe?" Master Sergeant Trilly asked.
"Actually, they're not breathing as you know it," Hammond said, a statement that caused a ripple of concern among the team.
Hammond pointed. "You see the center tube going into the helmet?" Next she pointed to a bulky machine on the outside. Clear lines coiled around the outside of a pump moving so slowly, the action was almost imperceptible. The liquid in the lines was a dark blue.
"A mouthpiece is attached to that lung machine. It doesn't send oxygen in the gaseous form as you are used to, but rather a cooled, special liquid-oxygen mixture directly to their lungs. The machine actually does the work for the lungs, because we can't count on the autonomic nervous system to function properly."
"They're breathing that blue stuff?" Trilly asked in astonishment.
Hammond nodded. "It's similar to what some extreme deep-sea divers use to get the exact right mixture of gases to handle the depth. It's difficult to take at first, but you get used to it."
"Breathing a liquid?" Trilly asked.
"You don't even notice after you go over," Hammond said.
“Yeah, right," someone muttered from the back of the team.
"The autonomic nervous system?" Captain Anderson asked.
"All right," Hammond said. "Listen up. Now is when we move you from what you learned in Trojan Warrior to Psychic Warrior. Where you learn what you need in order to be able to go in there." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the tanks. "We call these isolation tanks. The embryonic fluid not only cools your body, but suspends you so that you have no sense of physical contact with the outside world, not even gravity."
Dalton could read the mood of the team. Hammond had not led into this well at all. He stepped up next to her.
"Remember how you all felt in airborne school at Fort Benning," Dalton said, "the night before your first jump?"
Hammond turned in surprise at his interruption.
"I don't know about you guys, but I was scared," Dalton continued. "Not so much of jumping, but because I’d never done it before. It was a new experience and everyone gets a little nervous before trying something new." Dalton turned sideways so that he was half facing the team and half facing the tanks. "But as you can see, it works. Just like you knew at Benning that all those people before had jumped and been all right. That doesn't mean it's perfectly safe," Dalton added. "But the more you learn about it, the safer it will be for you." Dalton turned back to Hammond. "Sorry, Doctor. Go ahead."
"Let me explain why these isolation tanks are important," Hammond said, walking between the team and the tubes. "Your brain works on several levels. What we want to do with the machines is allow you to remove all other inputs and distractions to your brain and allow you to concentrate on the virtual plane."
"I don't call breathing a distraction," Staff Sergeant Stith remarked.
Hammond ignored the comment. "There will be two major aspects to your training here. In the mornings, we’ll work on adapting you to the equipment. In the afternoons, we’ll work on adapting you to your own bodies and minds.
"Come with me." Hammond guided the team out of the main chamber into a classroom. She waited until they had all found seats. There was a large table in the front of the room, crowded with various machines.
She picked up a helmet, the twin of the one on the bodies in the isolation tanks. It was solid black and large, about twice the size of a football helmet on the outside.
"This is the key." Hammond turned it so that they could see inside. She shone a light into it. There was a thick lining that she ran her finger across. "This is the thermocouple and cryoprobe projection assistance device, or TACPAD for short. This is the breakthrough that has changed everything and makes the Psychic Warrior concept possible.
"We’ll be fitting each of you shortly for your own TACPAD. What the TACPAD and the isolation tank allow us to do is-" Hammond paused, looking at the eight men in camouflage fatigues. She sat on the edge of
the desk. "All right let me try to explain this as best I can.
"What we tried to do in Trojan Warrior was focus your brain. To bring out capabilities that each of you has but that have remained dormant. But it goes beyond the training you received there. I know you may not believe it but trust me when I tell you there is a residual telepathic capability in every person.
"Many, many thousands of years ago the first human beings didn’t have a verbal language. We were just a step, a slight step, up from being monkeys. But there was a big difference: our brain. It was larger and more complex than that of any other species on the face of the planet. At some point the human brain made a fantastic leap. We became telepathic."
Dalton raised his eyebrows. "I've never heard of this."
"Most people haven't," Hammond said. "But if you went to a university and talked to a physiology professor, he or she would tell you that this was indeed likely but it’s still only an unproven theory. But we aren't in a university here, and I'm telling you the breakthroughs we have made prove to me that this theory is valid.
"This telepathy was not as big of a deal as you might think. It wasn't like these early people could 'talk' to each other with their minds. The reason they couldn't was they couldn't talk verbally-they had no language-so the telepathic communication was emotional. If someone saw a large tiger approaching the group, that person could use their mind to warn the others by sending their fear into the others' minds. There are even some examples of this 'pack mentality' in the animal world today."
"What happened to this ability?" Captain Anderson asked.
"It's still there in some people but regressed," Hammond said. "Once we developed a verbal language, it wasn't as important. The person who saw the tiger could yell ‘Tiger!' which was just as quick and more effective in that it specifically identified the threat. Since this was a better mode of communication, evolution took over and the verbal mode of communication became dominant.
"So as humans used the verbal language more and more, the telepathic capability waned and became residual. It's not entirely gone. All of you have had moments when you sensed things despite the fact that there were no specific normal sensory inputs that gave you that information. A sixth sense."
Hammond stood up. "Especially you men. Each of you has an even stronger residual mental capability than the norm. Significantly stronger. That's why you were chosen for Trojan Warrior three years ago.
"First, each of you is left-handed or ambidextrous. The brain consists of two hemispheres." Hammond pointed at her neck "At the base of our brain, our nervous system does a switch. So the right side of your brain is responsible for the left side of your body and vice versa. Thus a left-handed person is right hemisphere dominant.
"Both sides of your brain are pretty much the same. That makes for redundancy. There have been clinical examples of people who have suffered tremendous damage to one hemisphere, or had extensive surgery, who were still able to rehabilitate to almost a normal level of functioning."
Dalton thought about Marie, lying in her hospital bed. Whatever damage the aneurysm had done, perhaps there was hope that she would recover. Hope. Dalton knew what a two-edged sword that was from bitter personal experience. He forced himself to accept reality: Even if by some miracle she did regain consciousness, the ALS would be that much worse, the disease still progressing even as she lay in the coma. And he knew Dr. Kairns had leveled with him: Marie was never going to wake up.
Hammond walked to the front of the room and pulled a chart down. It was a top view of a brain. She pointed to the right side. "But there’s something very interesting that doctors have always wondered about here. The speech center on the right side appears to not work. All our speech comes from the left side. But the same parts are present on the right. Why?" She didn't wait for an answer and tapped the chart. "This is where the residual telepathic ability resides. This is where we focus our efforts to get you into the virtual plane."
Hammond went back to the desk and picked up the TACPAD. "This machine amplifies the parts of your brain that can allow you to get to and operate on the virtual plane. We've used the TACPAD successfully for two years.
"What the TACPAD does in conjunction with the isolation chamber is the following-" She grabbed a marker and began writing on the board.
1 — Isolation Chamber
Emphasize Parasympathetic
Hammond pointed with the marker. "When the parasympathetic nervous system is operating, your body relaxes. Your pupils constrict, your heart rate slows, your digestive system practically shuts down, your muscles relax. You did some of this consciously in Trojan Warrior. The isolation chamber does this by lowering your body temperature to the point where your body is almost totally inactive."
She pointed at the wall plug. "Your brain operates on such a low voltage that its power is almost negligible. We can't exactly increase the voltage into your brain, as that would fry the cells, so we focus the power that is already there by reducing the need for it to be expended on unnecessary outputs. As I told you earlier, the isolation tube even does your breathing for you. It will also control your heartbeat."
"How?" Barnes asked.
"We do direct electrical stimulation to control and maintain your heartbeat and also control the nervous system in the brain."
Dalton glanced at the other men in the room. No one looked particularly happy.
The pen squeaked against the board again.
2 —TACPAD
Cryprobe
She turned the helmet once more so that they could see the thick lining inside. "The cryoprobe is a device that surgeons have used for a while to target certain areas of the brain. It's a very fine probe that reduces the temperature in the target area to ninety-three degrees. This causes the neurons there to cease firing, effectively shutting that area down."
"What parts of the brain do you shut down?" Dalton asked.
"Those connected with the parasympathetic nervous system, since those bodily functions are taken care of by the isolation tank," Hammond said. "Every milliamp of power we can save is critical."
"What exactly is the microprobe?" Captain Anderson asked.
"A microscopic wire that’s inserted directly into the targeted areas of the brain." As there was an uneasy rustle in the room, Hammond quickly elaborated. "The wire is so small that you won't even feel it go in, and when it's removed there’s no bleeding. Less than point zero-zero-eight millimeters in diameter. The fact that there have been so many breakthroughs in microtechnology in the last several years has been one of the reasons we've been able to develop the TACPAD." She held up the helmet. "It's so thin, you can't even see the probe with the naked eye."
She wrote again.
3 — TACPAD
Thermocouple
"The thermocouple does the opposite of the cryoprobe. It targets those areas we want to activate and emphasize. It raises the temperature of the designated area, which facilitates its functioning."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Barnes asked. "Wouldn't that be like someone suffering heat exhaustion, where the body temperature goes too high? I've seen guys get their brains fried like that."
Hammond shook her head. "No. It's very controlled and specific. There is a low-grade electrical current running through the thermocouple that does slightly over half the emphasizing."
"Hold on," Dalton interrupted. "You just said that it's not a good idea to up the voltage or amperage in the brain."
"In an uncontrolled or nonspecific manner, yes. But here, we're talking about less power than you would get from a double-A battery. It's safe, I assure you," Hammond said. "Doctors have been using this technique in brain research for years."
"Do you use wires into the brain for that too?" Anderson asked.
"Yes. Again, so fine that you can't see it or feel it." She went back to the board.
4 —TACPAD
Cyberlink
"Not only has this technology been used by experimental psychologists, everything I've talked
about up to now has also been used for the past couple of years in the Bright Gate program by our remote viewers. It is only in the past six months that we’ve developed the critical piece of technology that takes us one step beyond.
"The last component that makes the Psychic Warrior program possible is the cyberlink." Hammond paused for a second in thought. "You've all seen or used simulators that act like the outside environment, like the ones pilots practice on?"
Everyone nodded.
"In a way, the cyberlink reverses the simulator process." Hammond reached into the TACPAD and held up a black pad about two feet long by eight inches in width with numerous wires coming out of the back. "We can use our mainframe computer, code-named Sybyl, to help you locate where you are going on the virtual plane and also to orient you. More importantly, the computer gives you form—what we call an avatar—in hyperspace that you can project into real space."
"Form?" Anderson asked.
"That’s the key to being a Psychic Warrior," Hammond said. "You have to be able to come out of hyperspace, or virtual reality, and into the real world. By using the precoded avatar formats that our programmers have developed with Sybyl, you’ll be able to stay oriented while in the virtual world and come out into the real.
"Sybyl is one of the most powerful computers in the world, perhaps the most powerful. She’s able to calculate at a rate that was unheard of even six months ago. Because of that, she’s capable of the vast number of concurrent calculations needed to give your virtual reality avatar enough substance so that you can project it into the real world. She also projects the power into the virtual plane that you reconfigure into mass when you want your avatar to materialize. The power she sends out is critical. That's what allows us to make the transition from just remote viewing into being able to project the avatar form in both the virtual and real planes."
Hammond was now walking back and forth across the front of the classroom, her eyes gleaming. "But Sybyl does more than that. She is also your communications link back here to the operations base. You can also access the computer's database for information as needed." Hammond's words were tumbling over each other as she raced to get them out. "It's truly remarkable. You've never experienced anything like it. Through the link, you can get whatever knowledge you could ever possibly need. It's like you’re part of the computer."
