by M. C. Norris
A mechanical thump underfoot indicated that the electromagnetic turbines were finally being engaged. Interior lights blazed brightly, as all six engines came to life with a powerful whine. The craft immediately stabilized itself amidst the elemental chaos, and at last the team breathed a collective sigh of relief. Hotspot rose from his bed at the back of the hovercraft, ears pricked, and emitted a long and baleful groan.
“What was that all about?” J.J. shouted from the back of the aircraft. “Why’d we wait so long to engage the turbines? Was he trying to kill us?”
Obviously, there was some anger in the emotional cocktail, and for good reason. Piloting the Devil Ray was supposed to be J.J.’s job, and this time, there was a stranger in their midst. They’d barely had time to glimpse their nameless chauffeur, let alone establish some basic level of trust. It seemed so typical of the Navy to put their lives in the hands of an inexperienced pilot, and just shove them out the door before anyone had a chance to realize the danger. Takashi’s hands were trembling, as he did his best to remain calm while reassembling the tangled mess that had been made of his equipment. Jill was sending a text message on her phone. Her face was crumpled. She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. Collin turned back around in his seat, and took a deep breath. This had all happened so quickly that they’d not been afforded the luxury of time to really think about what they were getting themselves into, and perhaps that was all part of the plan.
“Sorry about that.” The pilot’s voice through the overhead speakers was punctuated with an electrical pop.
“You should be!” J.J. wiped the back of his arm across his mouth, and then hauled himself up off the armrest.
Collin glanced back at Jill again. She had the phone to her ear, still tearful, whispering to her caller and nodding her head. It appeared as though she was assuring someone that she was alright. When she swept a lock of hair behind her ear, that sparkling ring on her finger never seemed more portentous. The person sitting there in Jill’s usual seat looked a lot like Jill, but it wasn’t her. It was someone else, someone new, whose best interests were invested elsewhere. Their reunited team, if there was even a team at all, was hanging by the thinnest thread. Nothing was set in stone. No contracts had been signed. No terms had been discussed. “Psyjack” was nothing more than a cool brand name slapped upon the sort of rushed and disorganized mess where human lives were likely to be lost.
“Is everyone alright?”
Collin turned back to the front of the aircraft, where Ms. Skyler Hale had emerged from the cockpit. There was something about her presence that induced an immediate calming effect. Whether it was because she inspired confidence as a celebrity hero, or simply because she was a vision of beauty in an ugly place, Collin couldn’t be certain, but he liked looking at her.
“What’s up with that pilot?” J.J. asked. “Did he just earn his wings this morning, or what?”
“No. We took a direct hit to the main electromagnetic drive from a bolt of lightning. He had to manually reboot the system from a portable drive that we’re all very lucky he’d brought along. He’s good. Captain Roswell assured me that he’s the very best.”
Skyler edged her way toward the team, gripping an overhead handrail for support. Although it was strange to see someone in civilian clothing aboard their Devil Ray, or anyone else in addition to the usual foursome, for that matter, Skyler didn’t throw the dynamic off balance, because her presence was critical. She seemed to be the missing link between their fledgling program and the military brass, as well as a voice of reason.
“What’s the matter, hon?” she asked, as she approached Jill.
Jill shook her head, wiped away another tear, and lowered her phone to her lap. “I just don’t know if I can do this. I mean, I really shouldn’t even be here.” As Skyler took a seat in an empty chair next to her, Jill drew a deep breath, exhaled, and cast an imploring glance to the ceiling.
“You want to talk about it?” Skyler asked.
“This is all just—crazy.” Jill threw up her hands. “I mean, what is this? What’s even happening here?”
Skyler frowned, shook her head, and placed her hand atop Jill’s. “I guess I don’t understand what’s bothering you right now.”
“What’s bothering me? Well, one minute we were all just living our normal lives, and now, here we are, flying right into what’s probably the most dangerous place in the entire world. Nobody saw this coming. Nobody warned us. We haven’t had time to talk to our families about what’s going on, or when we’ll be coming home.”
“There is no time,” Skyler replied, as gently as possible, “and those normal lives you mentioned? They’re over now, and I mean for everybody. Here, at least you have an opportunity to make a real difference.”
“You know. I get that, and I appreciate the opportunity, but some of us have other responsibilities and higher priorities.”
“What priority could be higher than this one? We’re talking about the fate of the entire world, and you’re—”
“My entire world is my daughter.”
Collin felt his stomach drop like a sack of pudding. He knew it. Some part of him knew it the very instant that he saw that ring. They weren’t what they used to be. They weren’t anything at all. They were like the cast in a really bad joke, where a waiter, a housewife, an ex-boxer, an engineer and a crippled scientist were all aboard a plane in a storm …
“We’ve got a problem,” Takashi said, as he cross-checked one of his laptop screens with the one in front of Jill. “You’re not coming up in my feed.”
“What does that mean?” Skyler asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. Something may have been damaged when everything fell. I’m just not getting Jill.” Takashi pulled up his hologram instrument panel, and gestured toward a dark area in the main stream between the dolphin pilot and the available hosts, where Jill’s familiar icon was missing.
“Double-check your connections,” J.J. said.
“I did. I’ve double-checked them all a dozen times.”
“She’s showing up online on her end.”
“That’s what’s confusing me. If it’s not the connections …”
As the eyes of all his teammates flicked in his direction, Collin swiveled toward the empty mounting bracket where his Mindbender Rift headset should’ve been secured. It wasn’t there. Panic seized hold of an indefinite part of him, at his core. He located the missing headset quickly. It was down on the floor, near his feet. It must have been jarred loose along with everything else when they were hit by that thermal. Collin retrieved it, and flipped it over in his lap to examine the wireless receiver. A blackened halo burnt onto the side of the helmet explained the odor of burning plastic he’d smelled.
“Oh, boy.” Collin turned back to the team, holding the helmet up to display the damage. The most critical component was smashed. The collective feeling of doom was the same stricken mask worn on each of their faces. Without a functional receiver, there would be no communication with Jill, and without Jill, there would be no piloting of dolphins. He could of course borrow a headset from one of his teammates, but that meant reintegrating new hardware into Jill’s system. Some of those headsets had never even been used in the field. Years of updates had been missed. No telling what operating systems they were running.
“See? This is the whole problem,” J.J. said. “I’m actually glad that this happened. There’s never been any sort of built-in redundancy with this program. No protocol for this kind of a situation. I’ve been telling them this for years, and nobody ever listens. Maybe they’ll start listening now.”
“You guys don’t need me,” Jill said.
All eyes fell on her. Jill’s face relaxed, as if the admission brought her some sense of relief. She wiped away the last of her tears, and reached for a duffle bag that she’d brought along with her. She pursed her lips and nodded, as she unzipped the bag and began removing items. “I’m glad that it happened, too.” She placed a component that Collin di
dn’t recognize on the desktop in front of her. “See, I realized that I was expendable in the first few months of the program, back when we were all stuck in those stupid barracks with nothing to do but think.” She sniffed, and cleared her throat. “That’s when I came up with the design for this.”
“What is it?” Takashi asked, examining the technological trinket through his glowing eyes. “A new type of receiver?”
“I call it a ‘mouse piece,’ because it fits inside the pilot’s mouth, like a mouthpiece, but it functions like a touchpad mouse. One cable jacks straight into the receiver port on the Mindbender Rift, and these plug into the audio and video feeds. All the options are now available to the pilot rather than here, in front of me. Collin will use the tip of his tongue to toggle between hosts, and he can drop himself into a host wherever and whenever he chooses. I built four of them. One for each of your headsets.” Jill passed them out to each of the stunned team members.
Collin stared down at the ingenious component in the palm of his hand. “Are you telling us that you’ve had these things—the entire time?”
Jill nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Why did you sit on them for so long?”
“Why do you think? I’d just made myself irrelevant. Basically, I invented my own replacement. Too smart for my own good. Isn’t that what you always used to say to me, back in college?” She smiled at J.J., and shrugged. “Obviously, I wasn’t going to advertise what I’d discovered, but I knew that one day the need was probably going to arise, and today just happened to be that day.”
“Jill, we do still need you,” Takashi said.
“No. I promise you. You really and truly don’t, but thanks.” Jill folded her hands atop the duffle bag, and sighed. “The only person in this world who really needs me is my daughter. I’m a mommy, y’all, and I need to get back home to my baby girl.”
“What’s her name?” Skyler asked, after a long moment of silence.
“Luna.”
Collin fumbled the headset in his lap. His hands were quivering, and he wasn’t sure why. He disconnected the wiring from the fried receiver, and snapped the dead component off the side of the helmet. If Jill’s new tech worked—and there was no doubt in his mind that it would, because Jill was nothing short of brilliant—then it was going to be a huge leap forward for the program. That should’ve made him happy, but it didn’t. In fact, it was making him feel a little sick to his stomach, almost as though he’d just witnessed Jill sacrificing her own life for her friends. He didn’t want the new tech. An infantile part of him kind of wanted to smash it to pieces, and to pretend he’d never seen such a thing, but that wouldn’t change the fact that Jill was leaving their team behind. Collin plugged the red cable into the receiver port, and connected the auxiliaries to the audio and video feeds. Of course, everything fit perfectly.
“Go ahead. Try it on,” Jill said, beaming, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “I’m as excited as anyone to see if it actually works.”
Already, her state of mind seemed to be improving by leaps and bounds, while Collin was feeling sicker. It was as though he’d just been dumped, and now that the hard part was over, she was happily assuring him that they would still remain friends. It was unfair to judge her. Collin knew that. He couldn’t possibly relate to her parental obligations from his own limited life experience as a dog owner, but he couldn’t help it. This all felt so messed-up and wrong. He lifted the newfangled helmet over his head, dropped the visor, and then hesitated before inserting the device into his mouth.
“Yep. Just pop it in there, and switch it on.”
“Takashi, we got any dolphins out there?” Collin asked.
“Oh, right.” Jill chuckled. “I guess I was putting the cart before the horse.”
“Umm—yes. Wow. We’ve got several, and I’m not familiar with any of them.”
“How is that possible?” J.J. asked.
“Surprise. We’ve been preparing for you guys for a long time,” Skyler replied. “We’ve got a fleet of close to fifty dolphins now, with a dozen stationed right here in the Yellow Sea. All subjects have been trained to respond to coordinates, and they’re all already armed with nanobot harpoons.”
“I’m getting eight swimmers, right now.”
“Guys, I realize that from your perspective, it might’ve seemed like the Psyjack program was thrown together in haste,” Skyler said, “but, in fact, we’ve been busy laying the groundwork for you guys for eighteen months, and I’ve been here for every step of the way. This is a program that I’m very proud of, and I truly believe that it’s the best and only way forward.”
Collin switched on the Mindbender Rift. When the visual display leapt up on the backside of the visor, an unexpected matrix of independent feeds nearly made his eyes cross. He was seeing everything that had once appeared on Jill’s screen. Sweeping the tip of his tongue across the touchpad of the so-called mouse piece slid the highlighter cursor from one available dolphin to the next.
“When you’re ready to select a feed and stream, just double-click.”
The name and vitals of every dolphin appeared in the upper corner of their windows, as did their location on a separate radar screen that seemed to be streaming from Takashi’s station. It struck Collin that Jill’s brilliance had not only marginalized her own role in the team, but J.J.’s and Takashi’s as well. The pilot no longer needed a support system. It was as though a leash around Collin’s neck had just been unfastened. For the first time, he realized, he was free. All of the tools now belonged exclusively to the pilot, who was in complete control. Collin grabbed for the headset, and pulled it off, wide-eyed and out of breath.
“What’s the problem?” Takashi asked.
Collin leveled his gaze at his old roommate, but he didn’t know what to say. He could only stare back into those soulfully robotic eyes, and feel pity for him. Due to his physical handicap, Takashi was unable to receive the replicated stream of visual data from the nanobots associated with the optic nerves. While J.J. would still be able to serve Psyjack as a secondary dolphin pilot, Takashi didn’t exactly have that option. As Collin stared at him, he wondered how you were supposed to tell your best friend that he’d just been made irrelevant, and while you’re about to move up in the world, he’d be moving down.
“Well, what’s the word? Does it work?” Jill asked.
Relieved for the opportunity to look away from Takashi, Collin nodded softly at Jill. “It works,” he replied. “What you’ve done here is amazing.”
Collin knew that he’d have to warn J.J. before he ever strapped on a headset. Together, they’d swear to never breathe a word about their newfound independence from their technological handler. The Navy was bound to figure it out eventually, but that didn’t need to happen right away. By the time that bit of redundancy in the program was discovered, they’d hopefully have developed a new and important role for their friend.
“We’re reaching position off the coast of Shanghai,” the pilot said, his voice crackling over the speaker. “I’ll maintain an elevation of five hundred feet throughout the operation. Just off the port side, the decoy is being launched from the harbor. Be advised, things are bound to happen fast.”
All heads swiveled toward the windows on the hovercraft’s port side, where the Pearl of the Orient’s garish skyline rose bejeweled in neon trimming. Hot lancets of lightning jagged down through swarming drones to bridge the angry skies with architectural marvels that appeared to defy the laws of physics. Shanghai’s harbors, once congested superhighways of commerce connecting every corner of the earth now stood at a standstill, choked with the thousands of landed ships that idled at their moorings.
“There it is,” J.J. said, pressing up to a window. “There’s our decoy.”
Dripping with strings of glittering lights, a single ship plied the waters of Shanghai’s harbor, headed out toward open sea. It was still recognizable as a battered Chinese hulk beneath all of that sparkling décor. Its hull was blackened by f
ire. It listed on its keel from the tons of seawater in its bilge. Looked like a casualty from the End War, and it probably was. Enmeshed in flickering lights meant to invite a Kaiju attack, the old warrior chugged toward its fateful rendezvous with an almost admirable deliberation.
“Alright,” Collin said, sliding the Mindbender Rift back over his head. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Except now, there was only Collin. He could hear Takashi’s fingertips rattling away on a keyboard, pausing now and again to swipe through his floating layers of hologram windows. It pained him to know that whatever the wizard was doing back there was no longer necessary. Collin popped the dangling hardware into his mouth, scrolled through the dolphin feeds until the one nearest the ship became highlighted in red, and he tapped the mouse piece with the tip of his tongue. Collin heard himself suck a sharp breath through his teeth, and just like that, he was freefalling into his host.
A culture of nanobots being activated inside your brain was a sensation that was more than a little strange. Their electrical feedback alone felt like streams of tiny bubbles inside your head, or crawling bugs. It took some getting used to, but the incoming flood of visual and auditory data took your mind off of those nanobots in a hurry. Without the headset, streaming would be neurological chaos, mixing the pilot’s sensory experience with everything streaming in from the host. The Mindbender Rift was both a filter and a stabilizer that softened the experience of the stream. Technically, it wasn’t necessary, but Collin couldn’t imagine the psychological torment of existing in two bodies at once.
