The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “Honey, can I get you anything?” Vanessa asked John.

  “A sense of humor,” Janis muttered.

  “It’s not funny, Eric! This isn’t funny!” Raimey growled. “Look at us for fuck’s sake!”

  “John, please,” Tiffany pleaded. Vanessa had left to get a snack at the cafeteria.

  “I’m sorry.” John started to struggle like an inchworm, moving his body back and forth, trying to wiggle off the bed. Tiffany got up and went over.

  “What are you trying to do?” Tiffany asked.

  “I have an itch, Tiffany. I have an itch and I can’t get to it.”

  “Well let me. Where is it?”

  John held up his stump. “It’s on the inside of my right forearm and it won’t go away. Can you scratch it? Can you? Because it’s driving me fucking insane!”

  Tiffany deflated. Her husband was breaking in front of her.

  “What do you want me to do, John?”

  “Nothing. I want you to do nothing.”

  “Quit being a dick,” Janis said. His humor was gone.

  “Fuck you, Eric.”

  “No, man. FUCK YOU. You think I like being a potato head? Huh? Half my dick got blown off man, one of my balls is gone. You think I like that? What about our team? How are they doing? Not so good. Couldn’t find some of them, you know. They just ‘poofed’ out of existence. Tell their wives your problems, their kids why you’ve been sulking like a BITCH for the last month. You got a wife and you got a kid and I don’t have shit, except you, your wife, and your kid. So quit being a pussy.”

  Raimey’s eyes had softened during Janis’s thrashing. The room was quiet except for the heavy breathing from adrenaline between the men. Tiffany was frozen: was this how Eric and John’s friendship would end?

  Eric focused on the television.

  “Eric,” Raimey said. Eric didn’t turn. “Eric.”

  Eric looked back. There were tears in his eyes.

  “You’re right, man. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Eric nodded.

  Raimey looked up at Tiffany. “I’ll come back, I swear, okay? I know I’ve been feeling sorry for myself. I’m just scared. I’m really scared and I don’t know what I can do. I’ve always been strong. That was what I was. I’m no scholar, I got no degree.”

  Tiffany got into bed with John and held him. His chest heaved.

  “Eric?” Raimey said through his sobs.

  “Yeah?”

  “At least now your dick won’t hurt women you know? It will be a normal size . . .”

  Eric let out a hitched laugh that comes when crying. “Yeah, that’s the bright side. Let’s get in our wheelchairs and race around or something. I’m tired of sitting here.”

  Vanessa came in and looked at both men. Uncle Eric and Dad were both puffy and their eyes were red. She had missed something.

  “What’s wrong?” Vanessa asked.

  “Nothing, hon,” Raimey said. “Not anymore.”

  = = =

  Evan was a busy bee. Buzz, buzz, buzz. He felt like he was always on a train. New York to Virginia to Washington, D.C.. Rinse and repeat. The King Sleeper was churning and burning a mile beneath Virginian soil swaying the world with his constant whisper. Evan had met with General Boen. He had expected a slouched old man. But Boen, who was in his seventies, looked like a fit early-sixties. Square shoulders, no pooch, his shock of white hair cut short just in case the Corps called. You could tell he ran five miles every day and did old school shit like a thousand push-ups and sit-ups before breakfast. He had unretired from his Texas ranch on the Brazos River and was getting up to speed.

  Their first meeting lasted an hour. General Boen preferred to be outside, so they had walked to the Vietnam Memorial. Evan was panting. Boen apparently didn’t sweat. They sat down and Evan provided him hand-picked files on the projects he was leading. He focused on the collusion between MindCorp and the U.S. against their Coalition allies and a dossier on the Tank Major program. Conveniently, he left out information on the King Sleeper. They discussed the Tank Major candidates and it turned out Boen knew one of them.

  “It’s a shame about John,” Boen had said. He flipped through photos of Raimey laid out naked to assess the damage and gauge his general size for the Tank Major Battle Chassis. “Have you met his wife?”

  “Tiffany? Yes. A strong woman.” Evan tried respectful and solemn, but it was difficult. He was excited.

  Boen let out a deep sigh. “I’ll have to see Raimey one of these days. It’s been too long. One of the best soldiers I’ve ever worked with.”

  Boen handed back the docket.

  “You can have it,” Evan said. “It’s to get you up to speed.”

  “giant soldier that’s nearly invincible and has an artillery punch that can blow through armor and buildings,” Boen said.

  “That sums it up,” Evan said.

  “No reason to get into the minutiae, I got enough on my plate. You’re the engineer, Don supported it, I’m sure it’s an amazing piece of weaponry.”

  Boen suddenly probed Evan with his eyes. “Why do you think Don killed himself?” It felt like sunlight through a magnifying glass.

  “I think he felt ashamed for what had happened. He took national security personally,” Evan said. His gaze did not falter.

  “You don’t think it had anything to do with MindCorp and the U.S., a blackmail of some kind?”

  “No, Cynthia is on the up and up as far as I know,” Evan replied. No reason to feed Boen’s suspicion.

  “Anything else that could have caused it?”

  The gaze was so intense Evan pictured his fat cheeks burning through to gum and teeth. But he didn’t blink.“No. I don’t know. The world just lost two thirds of their leaders on U.S. soil under his nose. Other than that . . .” Evan shrugged.

  Boen broke his gaze and nodded to three soldiers that walked by. “Maybe you’re right. Don just never seemed the type. I’d like to meet Cynthia soon. My daughter uses that damn thing all the time.”

  “It saved the world.”

  Boen rolled his eyes. “Ehh. Numbed it maybe. I can’t get my daughter to the damn dinner table and she’s thirty. One step forward for technology, two steps back for society. How much of it is used for porn?”

  Evan couldn’t help but smile. He intrinsically didn’t trust the new General because he had a secret (and it was a doozy) but Boen was a tough SOB. Evan respected that.

  “Most of it,” Evan replied.

  “Exactly,” Boen said with finality. Case closed.

  “I’ll arrange for you to meet Cynthia.”

  = = =

  Now Evan was back in New York for the last battery of tests. Both Janis and Raimey were extremely well trained and they had excellent psych reports (at least before they were turned into talking meat loafs). Janis dealt with stress by joking. Raimey was the quiet type. Either/or, flip a coin. But he was leaning toward Janis. He had no family ties. Evan rode the elevator up to their floor. Two burly men in suits accompanied him.

  It was hard looking at either of them. They were so disfigured. Evan had always had a hard time with those things. Deformities, midgets, nerve or muscle disorders. It was all evidence to Evan that either there was no God, or God checked out of this roach motel a long time ago. You see a kid with spindly arms cocked like chicken wings, his head cast down because he can’t control his neck and you know what? That God can go fuck himself. The alienness of disfigurement bothered Evan, but more so, it reminded him that life was too short and certainly not fair, and afterwards, best guess, we’re just tasty food for the worms.

  Developing the implant for the Tank Major platform had been more difficult then Evan had predicted. But it left no doubt that Cynthia was a coding genius. Even with the first iteration, there were only a few unforeseen bugs. They surfaced with his first test with Raimey and Janis. Evan reported them to Cynthia and a week later he had the new implant simulator in hand, officially: “Mindlink Spec Op TM V1.01.” Evan was back at
the hospital to make sure the implant still worked properly with the candidates.

  The test for Tank Major implant compatibility seemed simple. Lindo put a modified, self-contained Mindlink on a prospective candidate that was wired to a tablet computer. On the tablet’s screen was wireframe drawing of a man. Evan would ask the candidate to raise the man’s right arm. If the candidate had the aptitude, he could do it without much thought. Evan would then go through the major muscle movements of the body. The motions that required fine dexterity were what tripped most candidates up. Move the pinky and thumb of the man’s left hand, wiggle the toes, etc.

  Both Janis and Raimey passed these series of tests easily. Next was an image of what amounted to a gun mechanism. A loading system that held ammunition rounds was attached to it. First, the candidate had to understand and then manipulate the loading system, then they had to load a round into the ‘gun.’ Then they had to fire that round and reload another.

  Janis flew threw that. It took Raimey about five minutes. But after that, he could do it at a one hundred percent success rate. No sweat. His brain was like a mouse in a maze, a few dead ends meant nothing, because his mind was remembering, adapting, no different than a stroke victim who learns to speak again.

  The last test was the hardest for the mind to resolve. The brain was designed to move arms, fingers, piston legs while running. But it was not designed to comprehend superhuman strength. When a person lifted weights and got stronger, the mind adapted easily. But to comprehend that it could lift four tons was an entirely different matter.

  “Think of our ability to gauge effort and apply equal or extra force as a ten thousand step system,” Cynthia had explained when they first began. “When a person lifts an egg there is a certain amount of effort required NO MATTER the person’s strength. An eighty-year-old woman and a thirty-year-old power lifter need the same strength—and judgment of strength—to do it. Until our body cannot lift something due to strength limitations, our brain perfectly handles looking at an object, figuring out its mass—gathered from past experience—and picking up the item. And it does this without fail, within a fraction of an ounce, all the way up to the physical limitations of that person.”

  “That’s why when you think an item weighs a certain amount and it’s lighter it shoots up in your hand,” Lindo said.

  “Exactly,” Cynthia replied. “We take it for granted. So the granny and the power lifter have the exact same mechanism until the granny runs out of strength. Then the power lifter can lift x amount more. His body is trained to do it and his mind—which has evolved over the last millions of years—has adapted to what the body is capable of and what the man has experienced in his lifetime: the same object and its weight, similar objects and their weight, you get the idea. It’s logarithmic.

  So the man can lift three hundred pounds and anything below it within a fraction of an ounce. That’s nine thousand and six hundred steps of weight acknowledgement and processing.”

  Lindo could see where she was going. While Lindo could build Superman, could a person’s mind handle being Superman?

  “Now ask that same mind to lift four tons over its head,” Cynthia said. “That’s one hundred and twenty-eight thousand steps.”

  “Can it be done?” Lindo asked. He had dreams of a Tank Major army.

  “Yes. Not with everyone and not without massive software manipulation and maintenance of the implant and the mind. The mind has to be tricked into believing it can lift eight thousand pounds. We’ve already dived into this and let me say, it’s very complicated, the scope of this work is much more detail and resource intensive than I had originally thought.”

  “But you’re still interested?” Lindo asked.

  Cynthia smiled. This was the first smile she had sent Evan’s way that was genuine.

  “I’m more interested,” she said. “The implant works, so that obstacle’s out of the way. We are now building maintenance software that a candidate must use daily to manipulate the brain to use the implant and the Tank Major battle chassis to its full capability. They will have to do this daily for the rest of their lives as a Tank Major.”

  “What happens if they don’t?” Lindo asked.

  Cynthia shrugged. “Some will stroke out, we guess. The most likely thing is you’ll have a Tank Major that can only lift two hundred pounds because the mind can’t comprehend lifting any more.”

  = = =

  Fascinating, Lindo thought. The whole thing was fascinating. He and his entourage were walking down the hall to Janis and Raimey’s room. He heard a squeal down a perpendicular hallway and glanced over. His candidates were in powered wheelchairs using their mouths to move a joystick as they, apparently, raced each other down the hallway. The Cripple 200.

  Lindo’s jaw dropped, and for a moment, even he was having fun. A nurse darted out of the way as Janis and Raimey raced neck-and-neck toward Lindo and an invisible finish line. In Raimey’s lap was his daughter, Vanessa. She cheered her dad on.

  “Come on Daddy! Beat him!” she urged. Suddenly Janis darted his wheelchair toward Raimey. Raimey immediately corrected away.

  “Hold on!” Raimey slurred to Vanessa between the joystick in his mouth. He slammed into Janis’s wheelchair. Lindo could hear the electric engines of the wheelchairs grind from the sudden load. Their wheels rubbed against the other, a horrible sound, like a nail down a chalkboard, offset by Vanessa’s laughter.

  Janis’s wheelchair rose up on two wheels and balanced on the fulcrum. Raimey’s eyes narrowed—he smelled blood—and he snapped his head to the right a little more. Janis flew out of the wheelchair as it crashed over. Even as a stump, Janis squirmed his body so he landed squarely on his back, his chin tucked to his chest to avoid injury.

  Raimey crossed the finish line—a janitor cart that was at the side of the hall. He stopped almost exactly in front of Lindo. Raimey took his mouth off the joystick.

  “Good morning, Dr. Lindo,” he said

  “Good morning!” Janis echoed from behind them. Two nurses and Tiffany were righting his wheelchair and putting him back into it.

  “You almost killed one of my candidates, John,” Lindo said, smiling.

  “It ain’t racing if you’re not trading paint,” Raimey replied. Vanessa beamed up at Evan.

  “So here’s the deal,” Lindo said when they were all back in their room. “I only need one of you right now for this project.”

  “You’ve been vague on what this project is, sir,” Janis said.

  “It has to be that way right now. But it’s a very important project for our nation’s security. Maybe the most important project in the last fifty years. We have a lot of pressure on our nation and it’s coming from all quarters. The President’s death, the Secretary of Defense taking his own life . . . these are things our enemies will prey on. They’ll use this turmoil to their advantage. We can’t let them.”

  “Still pretty vague,” Janis replied.

  Lindo smiled. “I know. Let’s just say that this project eliminates any notion of our nation’s weakness.”

  Lindo pulled out the Mindlink interface and put it on Janis. “I need to run a few more tests on you just to make sure everything is working properly.”

  Raimey cleared his throat. “What about me?” he asked. Lindo has already explained that Janis was the likely candidate because he had no family. It made sense, but still, during these tests Raimey had felt useful, relevant. He didn’t want to go back to the abyss, where if he had hands, a bottle would most likely be in one.

  “You’re in queue, John,” Lindo said. “I might need you in a month, a year, or tomorrow.” Lindo turned back to Janis. “Let’s get started. If all goes well, you’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

  Lindo began the test with Janis and suddenly Raimey felt like the third person on a date meant for two. Tiffany and Vanessa appeared at the door and Raimey smiled sadly at them.

  “Is it cool for them to come in?” Raimey asked.

  Lindo glanced back and saw
them in the doorway. “Sure.”

  They came in quietly. Vanessa climbed into the bed and rested her head in the crook of where Raimey’s right arm used to be. Tiffany mouthed “are they going to use you?” and Raimey shook his head. She kissed him on the forehead and rested her hand on his shoulder.

  “It’ll be ok,” Tiffany said quietly. Raimey nodded. It would. He felt better since Janis had put him in his place. He had it bad, but a lot of people had it worse. He needed to remember that.

  Evan took the Mindlink off Janis and then did a routine physical, checking his vitals.

  “Okay, we’re good,” Evan said. “Tonight’s your last night in the hospital.”

  “What is that?” Vanessa asked Evan. She was pointing to the self-contained Mindlink interface.

  “It’s a computer I use to test Eric and your Dad for a really important project,” he said in the tone spoken to children.

  “What kind of test? I’m good at tests,” she said.

  Evan knelt down and smiled, glancing at Raimey and Tiffany who smiled back at his effort to engage the child.

  “It’s a test that shows how a mind works with different machines. This thing,” Evan held the Mindlink in front of her. “Uses radio frequencies to read your mind or send stuff to it like pictures and movies. Cool, huh?”

  “I know what a Mindlink is. Could I try it?”

  “Vanessa, enough questions,” Tiffany said.

  “It’s fine,” Evan said. He looked to Tiffany. “It’s harmless.”

  Evan put the Mindlink on Vanessa and adjusted it to fit her head. He brought up the test and before he explained what she was to do—

  “There’s a man on the other end,” she said.

  “Yes, there is,” Evan said. On his tablet, the man started to dance. Vanessa giggled.

  “I’m making him dance!” she said, still not looking at the screen. The wireframe man’s legs and arms were moving like a marionette doll. Evan turned off the program.

  “Aww, he went away.” Vanessa took off the Mindlink. “What happened?”

  “The program went goofy,” Evan said.