They entered a small room, about the size of a theater control booth. Through the large glass window at the front of the booth they could see a soldier seated comfortably in a streamlined recliner chair, on a slightly raised floor resembling a small stage or dais. The man was so still that Retticker thought he might be meditating or sleeping behind the gogglelike Bono shades he was wearing.
“Let’s take a look at what he’s looking at,” Michelson said.
A screen showing a honeycomb of smaller screens lit up before them. From time to time one or another cell of the honeycomb would enlarge to cover most of the screen. Often this zoom-in would be followed by explosions of cars or buildings, or of human beings feebly attempting to flee the fiery onslaught—after which the enlarged cell would go dark and disappear, before cycling to another location. Retticker thought he recognized the imagery.
“Aerial reconnaissance?”
“Attack and reconnaissance drones, actually. UAVs At the moment Sergeant Phillips is monitoring about forty missions, mostly antiterror strikes against jihadist groups in Syria and Jordan. When appropriate, he has his drones fire missiles or strafe the targets. All without saying a word or moving a muscle.”
Retticker arched an eyebrow.
“Impressive. How’s it done?”
“Arrays of nanoelectrodes were injected into his bloodstream. They were then biochemically steered to attachment points in the command and control areas of his brain, mainly the frontal and parietal lobes.
The faint signals from the nanotrode arrays are detected and analyzed by a computer system. The system recognizes patterns of signals that represent particular activities—concentration on something in the visual field, for instance. Or the muscular movements that accompany pushing a missile firing button, or pulling the trigger, on a fighter plane joystick.”
“Hmm. This the stuff MERC helped fund?”
“Yes sir. Public-private cooperation. Military Executive Resource Corporation offset many of our costs, as did its corporate parent, Otis Diversified Industries.”
Ah, Retticker thought. ODI was involved in everything from pharmaceuticals to weapons manufacture—magic bullets and plain old-fashioned ballistic ones. ODI involvement probably meant coordination with one of the stealthy strategic support offices at the Pentagon, too. Otis himself had lots of connections there. And with National Intelligence czar Ethan Watson, too.
“Good. But I don’t see a joystick, or much in the way of ‘muscular movement’ here.”
Michelson smiled broadly.
“When Phillips was training on how to use triggers or firing buttons on an actual joystick in a simulator, the researchers monitoring him were also recording and analyzing the output signals from his brain. Once the joystick and simulator were removed, Phillips quickly learned to assimilate the characteristics of the external devices. The properties of the telemonitoring, the drones, their flight and targeting systems—all have been incorporated into his brain’s neuronal space as a natural extension of his own body.”
Retticker looked thoughtfully at the quiescent soldier, then at the very active screens. Hard to believe the motionless young man was busily destroying things with his extended will.
“Did he need any particular talent to become proficient at this?”
“Not really. He was a decent video-gamer before he came into the program, but no better than tens of thousands of young men and women already serving in the armed forces. He says it’s been like learning to drive, or to ride a bicycle, or use any other kind of tool.”
“That makes sense. But how does it work, exactly?”
“The more we learn to use a tool, the more we incorporate the properties of that tool into our brains.
That, in turn, makes us more proficient in using the tool.”
“Practice makes perfect?”
Michelson nodded enthusiastically.
“In terms of brain-machine interfacing, it’s more like practice shapes the neuronal space of the tool-user to more perfectly approximate the characteristics of the tool or device used. It works both ways, see?”
“Practice-effect feedback.”
“Right. That’s why the neurobiologists here have chosen to call what they’re doing telemorphy, meaning to change the form, shape, or properties of something, from a distance—whether that something is tool or user or, most often, both.”
“I suppose this telemorphy has other applications besides assassination drones?”
“Many, many others. A single soldier could potentially deploy the firepower of a robot platoon, or brigade, or army—”
“Watch it there, son,” Retticker said with a laugh. He’d encountered this attitude of “technolatry”—technological idolatry—often enough to have thought up that private term for it. “You don’t want to go telling the generals who fund your research that you plan to put them out of work!”
“I can show you other uses, in other labs here—”
“No, no. Not today. I take your point. Even if you could equip a soldier with more phantom limbs than a Hindu deity, though, that still leaves a problem.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not certain that having a single soldier control dozens of drones or robots is really the best way to go. These sorts of things have their uses, certainly, but they’re expensive to produce. And there’s another potential problem, too.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t know as I’d want a single soldier controlling so much military hardware. What if he decided to go rogue against his own commanders? The more capability you put into the hands of one man—”
“The greater the danger he’ll abuse it?”
“Exactly. Besides, human beings reproduce on their own readily enough to keep them far cheaper than any comparable robot. You know what one of my supertroopers said to me?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“What would really turn individual supersoldiers into a superarmy would be what he called head-to-head connection.”
“Conjoint consciousness,” Michelson said, grimacing. “That’s still a tough one. We’ve got a pair of nanotroded soldiers, and the neuronal space-state of one can be transmitted by radio to the other. Not conjoint consciousness yet, but we’re—”
“Ah, but that, too,” Retticker said, interrupting, “like your action at a distance here—it’s all based on communicating data by wire, or radio, or other traditional methods?”
“That’s correct.”
“Well, radio waves can be jammed, wires can be cut. Radioed brain states can be neurohacked, right?”
“That’s true enough, I suppose. But the problems of mind-machine action at a distance are not identical to those facing conjoint consciousness.”
“But doesn’t it boil down to the same thing?” the general said, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice. “We need a system that can’t be jammed or interrupted or interfered with—whether that’s brain to machine, or brain to brain.”
Michelson blinked his owlish eyes several times in succession. Retticker wondered whether the man was accessing information through his AR glasses via such blinking, or whether he was suffering from some kind of nervous tic.
“I don’t think that’s possible, at least not at the level of classical physics,” Michelson said at last.
“Then what about at a level that’s more subtle, as you called it earlier? You know what I’m getting at, Jeremy. The quantum crypto stuff you were working on. Before the Kwok-Cho mess.”
The biophysicist stood with his head cocked, pondering the possibilities with a stillness that almost matched Sergeant Phillips’s. On one screen or another, vehicles and buildings continued to explode.
“Some aspects of quantum cryptography have proven to be impossible to break or interfere with,” Michelson said at last. “As you’d prefer for military uses. Quantum neurocrypto. Hmm. That might still be an avenue….”
Retticker clapped his hands together, almost shockingly loud in the quiet room.
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“Now you’re talking! You said yourself it’s appropriate for this unit of the enhancement program to be housed here. Your science of telemorphy, as I understand it, is already taking old paranormal psi ideas and making them a reality.”
Michelson looked down at the floor, almost shyly.
“You could think of it that way, yes. We have put action-at-adistance and sensing-at-adistance on a firm technological basis. In a sense we’ve already accomplished what the old ideas of telesthesia and psychokinesis were meant to describe.”
Returning his gaze to the quiet soldier, Michelson continued to think out loud.
“Maybe what you’re after is not PK or micro-PK, but quantum telemorphy. The same quantum entanglements that figure in qubit computing and qubit cryptography, especially quantum teleportation, might apply here, too.”
Retticker stared narrowly at the man. He knew that neither of them was unmindful of how quantum computing and crypto had figured in the Kwok-Cho affair and all that Chinese unpleasantness. Still, he couldn’t yet see where the man was headed. Best to draw Michelson out until he had explained his ideas enough to be understood by nonspecialist nongeniuses.
“How so?”
“Well…” Michelson’s voice trailed off, then his face suddenly brightened. “You could, theoretically, teleport not only the quantum state of particles but also of waves. Teleport the entire wave pattern, the entire quantum state description of a neuronal space. Pulse it through the quantum foam!”
Retticker shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”
“Think of an ocean made out of jittery foam,” Michelson said excitedly. “The pulse could be a soliton—a standing wave, or wave of translation…”
“A wave made out of foam,” Retticker said, smiling as he contemplated it. “So translating this wave…it would be like taking the pattern from one brain and imprinting it into another brain?”
“Actually, that’s closer to what we’re already doing with nanotrodes and radio waves.”
“Sounds like turning your brain into a television set, except that both the transmitter and the receiver would be inside people’s heads.”
Michelson shook his head vigorously and negatively.
“This would be more subtle, more fundamental. Brain states are not exactly duplicable. This would be more like two brains sharing one state, for a time.”
“How?”
“Think of each brain’s overall state as an incredibly complex but coherent wave. Their state-sharing via the quantum foam would be like the kind of nonlinear memory that appears when two standing waves merge together, travel as one for a while, and then separate into their two former orders again.”
Retticker glanced momentarily at the still soldier, still blowing things up with his extended will.
“Telepathy, then?”
“More than that. This is where neurobiology might really meet neurophysics! There are probably ways even far less subtle matter could be manipulated at a distance, through a similar method. What were once thought of as telekinetic, telesthetic, and telepathic abilities would cease to be mystical powers—”
Retticker gave the biophysicist a congratulatory whack on the shoulder.
“And they couldn’t be hacked or jammed or otherwise interfered with?”
“I haven’t heard of anyone being able to hack the quantum foam. If what was achieved was truly quantum-level neurocryptography, then there’d be no way to hack it or crack it.”
“Brilliant, Jeremy. What would you need to accomplish it?”
Michelson gave it some serious thought. He seemed suddenly to deflate a bit, as if realizing how hard the task would be.
“I don’t know that it can be accomplished. In some ways you’d have to be able to make the brain function like a room-temperature quantum computer. You’d need enhanced neural sensitivity throughout the cerebral cortex, for one thing. The kind of chaotic, spontaneous neural activity that’s hypersensitive to quantum effects. In both the sender and the receiver.”
Retticker frowned. He glanced again toward Sergeant Phillips, who continued destroying things and people at a distance while remaining steadfastly oblivious to his immediate surroundings.
“Sounds like drugs and consensual hallucinations again,” the general said with a groan.
“On the contrary,” Michelson said, blinking his eyes rapidly again in that manner which was either nervous tic or info-accessing. “If the quantum teleportation angle works, I think the telemorphic effects could be rendered rational, scientifically explainable, and predictable. It would be more a conscious alteration of quantum states than an altered state of consciousness.”
Retticker smiled, thinking of classified Medusa Blue and Tetragrammaton research about which he knew a good deal, but of which Michelson, he was sure, knew nothing.
“Work on that, then,” he said to the biophysicist, then checked his wristwatch. “My time’s up. I need to be moving on, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Michelson said, looking genuinely downcast. “I haven’t had much of a chance to show you our other work, or even introduce you to anyone else on staff.”
“Another day, another time,” Retticker said, shaking Michelson’s hand. “It was good having this chance for a private briefing. Let’s keep in touch, shall we? I can show myself out.”
Waving farewell to Michelson, and to the undistractable Sergeant Phillips beyond him, the general walked away down the corridor. Retticker smiled, then exhaled a sigh.
He had been spending an awful lot of time lately inspiring these scientific specialists to look for the larger implications of their research, nudging them in practical, strategic, and tactical directions. People who’d been involved during the Kwok-Cho matter—even peripherally, like Michelson—were especially reluctant to look at the larger implications of their work. Once burned, twice shy.
Retticker hadn’t thought such motivational and inspirational efforts would prove to be this challenging, but they had. A job of work, as his father used to say—and nothing easy about it.
THE MIRROR BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE
“This place always reminds me of Stonehenge somehow,” Dan Amaral said to the NSA director as they walked through the World War II Memorial. Dan was deputy chief of mission and chief political officer for the U.S. embassy in Cairo, but he was first and foremost an old friend and comrade in arms.
They had served together during Desert Storm more than twenty years ago. That in itself was enough to make Jim Brescoll more forgiving of his friend, despite Dan’s affectations. His ever-present Sheik Abdullah mustache and goatee, his Anubis-headed walking stick, his clunky briefcase, his often unorthodox views—none of those much surprised Jim anymore.
“The pillared circle, you mean?”
“More that it’s something out of another time,” Dan said as they walked. “The America they fought for was so different from the one we live in now.”
“Seventy, seventy-five years—that’s long enough to change any culture.”
“You know that’s not what I mean, Jim. What they were fighting for was still pretty much a democratic republic, or a republican democracy, whichever you prefer. Then came the long militarization of America and Russia during the cold war, and everything began to change.”
Jim glanced away into the middle distance of memory.
“Well, we won that one, anyway.”
“You really think so? I don’t know. Seems to me our country, in ‘winning’ that war, moved away from democracy and toward empire. Russia, in ‘losing’ that war, moved away from empire and toward democracy—at least for a while. A fun house–mirror symmetry if I ever saw one.”
They both paused to take in a panorama that included the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, but Jim’s mind was elsewhere. The fun house–mirror reference reminded him of a meeting he’d had with Wong Jun, his opposite number in Guoanbu, the Chinese Ministry of State Security, after the Kwok-Cho affair.
&nbs
p; Over dinner, Wong had maintained that during the twentieth century the world had been locked in a zero-sum game, with capitalism and socialism perversely mirroring each other.
“Reduced to simplest terms,” Wong had said, “the capitalist makes a fortune out of someone else’s misfortune—”
“—and the socialist makes a misfortune out of someone else’s fortune,” Jim said jumping in to finish Wong’s thought. They had clinked glasses then, toasting to perfectly understanding each other.
Looking at Dan now, Jim thought that while they had not always perfectly understood each other, they had remained friends nonetheless.
“But we’ve entered the age of asymmetric conflict long since, ol’ buddy,” Jim said, taking a seat on the bench they’d stopped before. A short distance down the mall, a group of young tourists had their eyes closed and hands lifted to Jesus in prayer. Dan gave them a lingering look.
“Only in terms of hardwar tactics,” he said, sitting down. “I’ve been serving overseas for a long time.
Five years in Yemen, nine in Morocco, these last five in Egypt.”
At his friend’s glance, Jim nodded but said nothing.
“When I entered diplomatic service and got stationed in the Muslim world,” he went on, “what struck me most wasn’t the women in veils or the donkeys in the streets—it was the public presence of prayer. Men rolling out prayer mats and kneeling on the sidewalk to pray. The muezzin coughing or clearing his throat, unself-consciously, over the loudspeaker, as he got ready to call the faithful to prayer. Nowadays the call is mostly prerecorded, but you get my point.”
“I’m not sure I do, actually,” Jim said, peering at his old comrade.
“I thought it was all so different from America. In the old days you didn’t see people praying out in public in the middle of a workday.”
Jim followed his friend’s glance toward the group praying nearby. Their minister or youth pastor exhorted them and they closed their eyes and held up their hands in praise of the Lord. Oh, I see. So that’s what he’s on about, Jim thought.
“In the old days it wasn’t considered polite to talk about politics or religion in mixed company either, as you’re doing now, Dan,” he said. “Besides, I don’t know that young people praying is such a bad change.”
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