“His beta is pinging off the scale,” Carmichael said, rechecking the electroencephalograph readouts. “No alpha or theta activity at all.”
Patrick turned again to James, bent down close to him. “We can reschedule this, buddy. Don’t push it. It’s not worth the grief.”
“No. I’ll be okay. I’m just . . . trying to get ready . . .”
“Then relax, let it come to you, don’t chase it. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”
“Hell of a way to fight a war,” James said—the tension in his voice was obvious. “I can see a fighter pilot telling his squadron commander, ‘I know the enemy is rolling across the base but I can’t fly today—my damn theta isn’t responding . ..’ I’ve got to prove that I can go in and out of theta-alpha in a moment’s notice.”
“Making the system operational is still a few years off, Ken,” Patrick told him. “Don’t worry about all that. Relax, don’t force yourself or the system. Let’s just go up and have some fun. Finish up and buy me a beer at the Club afterward. That’s all.”
Patrick raised a hand in front of the test pilot, and James slapped a metallic-lined glove into it. “Punch a hole in the sky, buddy. That’s an order, too.” He gave James one last thumbs-up and stepped off the lift.
By the time Patrick had stepped back onto the tarmac Dr. Carmichael was shaking his head in disbelief.
“He’s already under alpha-C parameters. I think he’s getting to the point where he can do it anytime. If we had him hooked up outside the plane, he could probably go into theta-sine A before we strap him in.”
“He gets nervous every now and then,” Patrick added, “especially before a big test like this one. Back me up on monitoring him, Alan.”
An external power cart was running on Cheetah by the time Patrick returned, climbed into the aft cockpit and strapped in. Aircraft power was already on, and his crew chief and test-range officers had already done a fast preflight of the telemetry and data collection instruments packed into the cockpit. Because Cheetah was the only jet around that could even try to keep up with DreamStar, it was now used to fly photo-chase on training and test flights. The special high-speed camera Cheetah carried tracked DreamStar as it went through its paces. Patrick could monitor all of DreamStar’s important electronic indications and if necessary take control of the plane by remote control.
With all of DreamStar’s power off, however, there was only one readout to monitor—the EEG of Ken James himself. Like Carmichael, Patrick was amazed as he watched the electronic traces of James’ different brainwave patterns. He clicked open his interphone.
“He’s almost into theta-sine alpha already.”
“Does that mean I can go to sleep too?” J. C. Powell said.
“How fast could you go into theta-alpha?” Patrick said, watching the readouts change. “I know you’ve flown the DreamStar simulator. Could you do any better?”
“Patrick, I’m a pilot, not a robot.” J.C.’s voice had lost its sardonic tone. “Seems to me ANTARES turns pilots into nearrobots. But to answer your question: sure, I could go into theta- sine-alpha quickly. Couple of minutes. Staying in theta-alpha was another trick I could never quite get the hang of. But I didn’t lose DreamStar, I gained Cheetah. I figure I got the better deal.”
Which was a long speech for J. C. Powell; it underscored his dislike for ANTARES. ANTARES might be the great addition to DreamStar’s already amazing array of avionics, it might be the future of air combat—but J.C. Powell didn’t see it in his future.
“It doesn’t turn anyone into a robot,” Patrick said. “You still have full control. I don’t see what your problem is about ANTARES.”
“Full control? Of what? A computer tells him what to do, and he does it.”
“It’s still the pilot calling the shots, J.C.”
“Sure, he can pick up his own options out of a list the computer presents to him, or he can override everything and go his own way. I know that. But if a smart computer offers up a list of a hundred options, well, most guys will pick something out of that list.” Powell spread his hands out across his lap. “Say you’re at a fancy restaurant.” He motioned an imaginary waiter to his table. “You’ve been to this restaurant before because they have the best steak in town, but Pierre hands you the menu. What do you do?” Powell opened his imaginary menu and pretended to read it. “You look at the menu. Why? Because it’s there. So maybe you order the steak because that’s what you always order, but you still look at the menu.
“See, even with ANTARES it takes time to scan the menu. A real pilot will use that time to use his head and instincts to execute a real maneuver. In ANTARES there’s no thought, analysis, decision making . . . it’s been done for you. And I call that programming.”
“But if it results in a better system?”
“ANTARES hasn’t been proved to be better than a human pilot . . .”
“We still use a human pilot, J.C.”
“More or less, I guess,” Powell said sarcastically, returning switches to their proper positions. “But in a significant way we don’t—I say ANTARES can be beat.”
“Well,” Patrick said, rubbing his eyes wearily, trying to massage away the headache that usually happened when arguing with J. C. Powell, “it’s a moot point, at least for now. Like I said, we’re not concerned with how well DreamStar fights, deploying her is still a ways off. We’re here to test the aircraft and test the concept.”
J.C., slumping so far down in his seat Patrick couldn’t see him, said, “But all those generals and congressmen don’t care about testing the concept. They all want to know the same thing—can she win dogfights?”
“And you’re saying she can’t.”
“I’m saying that she can be beat. A pilot with the right combo of skill and balls can beat ANTARES. And if ANTARES is forced out of the combat loop, the pilot in DreamStar has to be able to take charge and fight on his own. DreamStar’s not really set up for pilot-directed dogfighting. For me that’s her weakness . . . And look what we’re doing to our combat pilots”—J.C. motioned toward DreamStar—“Ken James is one of the best pilots in the Air Force. He’s been a star ever since he graduated from the Zoo. So what have we done with him? We’ve trussed him up in a steel flight suit, a twenty-pound helmet and more damn electrodes than Frankenstein’s monster. We’re using his brain but not his mind. There’s a big difference, I figure. Are all our best military pilots going to be used as protoplasmic circuit boards for ANTARES?”
For a guy that was only thirty years old, Powell could be a real stick-in-the-mud sometimes. Patrick scanned the EEG readouts. “Everything looks normal. It should be a while before he radios in that he’s ready. I’ll let you know when he’s coming around so we can crank engines.”
“Roger that. I’m gonna do another flight-control check.” “Didn’t you just do a computer self-test?”
“Having a computer check a computer to see if a computer is working is just looking for trouble. One of these days all those computers will get together and drive us into the ground. I wanna catch them before they do it. I’m doing the check manually. Let me know when you’re ready to go.”
“Rog.” Patrick was tired of arguing. Besides, J.C. had a point. He turned again to the EEG monitors.
Theta-sine-alpha indicated that James was relaxed, but it was a much deeper level of relaxation, more neurological, much more than ordinary muscle relaxation. The ability to get to theta-sine-alpha had taken months of training. They called it biofeedback when psychologists would hook a patient up to a mini-EEG or polygraph that would beep whenever a beta wave would be detected, indicating stress or irregular muscular or nervous activity. The idea was to relax the body or control nerve activity until the beeping stopped. James had to go far beyond such muscle relaxation—he had to relax his mind, open it, create a window into the subconscious.
* * *
For Kenneth Francis James, the window to his mind did not open like a door or a window—it opened like a ho
t, rusty knife ripping through pink flesh. But that was the nature of the Advanced Neural Transfer and Response System that linked the brain with a digital computer. James had gone far beyond Carmichael’s lectures. This was the real thing, the link-up between the computer on the plane and his suit.
The first mind-numbing phase of transition was activation of the system itself, which occurred automatically once ANTARES detected that James had entered theta-sine-alpha. In order to pick up the tiny changes in electrical activity in James’ body, the metallic ANTARES flight suit itself had to be electrified. Even though the charge was very small it was applied to almost every part of the body, from the skull to the feet; it was like touching one’s tongue to the terminals of a nine-volt battery and feeling the tiny current jolt the taste buds, except that James felt that sweet, tingling sensation in every part of his body. And through it all, he had to maintain theta-alpha . . .
Enduring activation of the ANTARES system was only the first step; the now familiar slight physical pain was easy to block out. The next assault, however, was on the mind itself.
Once ANTARES was open it would transmit a complex series of preprogrammed questions to various conscious and subconscious areas of James’ mind. The questions, programmed months earlier by countless hours in a simulator-recording unit, would match the existing brainwave patterns of each level encountered. After scanning, recognizing and matching the patterns, ANTARES would then overpower that particular neural function, force the original pattern to a compatible subconscious level and allow the ANTARES computer to control that level. It was like submitting a series of passwords to several levels of guards, except each time ANTARES would reach a level it would hammer, not knock, on the door, demanding entry. Once admitted, it would first befriend, then overpower, the resident inside. The takeovers accomplished by ANTARES were sometimes painful, sometimes soothing. At times images would force their way out of James’ subconscious, long-stored memories of childhood that Maraklov had long forgotten.
His conscious mind was now like a big living room that had just had all its furniture moved to different parts of the house. ANTARES had taken over control of most conscious activity, keeping only a few essential activities in the conscious foreground while relegating the rest to higher parts of the brain. Now ANTARES was ready to start remodeling.
With the doors and windows to James’ subconscious mind wide open, his mind was ready to receive and process vast amounts of information. Normally that information would come from the five senses, and even with ANTARES some still did, but now altogether new sources of information were open. ANTARES could collect and transmit digital data signals to James’ conscious mind, and James could receive that information as if it came from his own five senses. But James no longer had five senses—he had hundreds, thousands of them. The radar altimeter was a sense. The radar was a sense. So was the laser rangefinder. Dozens of thermometers, aneroids, gallium- arsenide memory chips, limit switches, logic circuits, photocells, voltmeters, chronometers—the list was endless and ever- changing.
But it was an enormous shock to the system to find that the list of senses had grown from five to five thousand, and here ANTARES was no help at all; when the “room” was full it simply began cramming in more input sources. For James the new impulses weren’t coherent or understandable. They were random flashes of light or crashes of sound, battering his conscious mind, all fighting for order and recognition. Put another way, as he once had, it felt like a crushing wall of water, a wave of unbearable heat, and the swirling center of a thunderstorm all mixed up at once. And ANTARES was relentless. The instant an image or an impulse was set aside, a hundred more took its place. The computer only knew that so much had to be learned. It had no conception of rest, or defeat, or of insanity.
Suddenly, then, the flood of input was gone. The tornado of data subsided, leaving only a room full of seemingly random bits of information lying scattered about. The furniture was overturned—but it was all there, all intact. Now, like a benevolent relative or kindly neighbor, ANTARES began sorting through the jungle of information, creating boxes to organize the information, placing boxes into boxes, organizing the mountains of data into neat, cohesive packages.
The random series of images began to coalesce. Undecipherable snaps of sound became long, staccato clicks; the clicks turned to a low whine; the whine turned into waves of sounds, rising and falling; the waves became words, the words became sentences. Flashes of lights became numbers. And then the numbers disappeared, replaced by numbers that James wanted to “see.”
The energy surges generated by ANTARES were still coursing through James’ body, but now they were acting like amphetamines, energizing and revitalizing his body. He was aware of DreamStar all around him, aware of its power waiting for release.
James’ eyes snapped open, like those of a man awaking from a nightmare. Swiveling his heavy helmet on its smooth Teflon bearings, he looked across at Cheetah’s open canopy. Powell was busy in the forward cockpit; McLanahan was watching his instruments. But he must have read something in the instruments in Cheetah’s aft cockpit, because just then McLanahan looked over toward him. He could see the DreamStar project director with his oxygen visor in place, apparently talking on the radios. Patrick was looking directly at him now—was he talking to him . . . ?
. . . And suddenly the energy was unbearable. It was as if DreamStar was a wild animal straining on a leash, hot with the scent of prey, demanding to be released.
James looked down at the left MFD, the multi-function display, on the forward instrument panel. He imagined the index finger of his left hand touching the icon labeled “VHF-i.” Immediately the icon illuminated. Now, hovering right there in front of his eyes, was a series of numerals representing the preprogramed VHF radio channels—the image, transmitted from DreamStar’s computers through ANTARES to his optic nervous system, was as clear and as real as every other visual image. He selected the proper ship-to-ship channel on the computer-generated icon and activated the radio. The whole process, from deciding to activate the radio to speaking the words, took less than a second.
“Storm Two ready for engine start,” James reported. Although the ANTARES interface did not take away his ability to speak or hear, all traces of inflection or emotion usually were filtered out. So the voice that Patrick heard on the radio was eerie, alien.
“Welcome back, Captain,” Patrick said. “I saw you come out of theta-alpha. Ready to do some flying?”
“Ready and waiting, Colonel.”
“Stand by.” Patrick switched to a secondary radio. “Storm Control, this is Storm One.”
* * *
In the underground command post of the High Technology Advanced Weapons Center a four-star Air Force general seated at a large cherry desk replaced a phone on its cradle, then looked down with disgust at his right leg. He reached down, took his right calf in both hands, straightened his leg, then raised himself out of his leather seat using the stiff right leg as a crutch. Once fully standing he unlocked the graphite and Teflon bearings in the prosthetic right knee joint, allowing it to move much like a regular leg.
An aide held the office door open for General Bradley Elliott as the director of HAWC stepped out and down the short hallway to the command post. He used a keycard to open the outer door to the entrapment area. A bank of floodlights snapped on, filling the entrapment area with bright light, and the outer door automatically locked behind him.
Two security guards armed with Uzi submachine guns came through the doors on either side of the area. They slowed when they recognized who it was but didn’t alter their moves. While one guard quickly pat-searched Elliott and ran a small metal scanner over his body, the other stood with his Uzi at port arms, finger on the trigger. The metal detector beeped when passed over Elliott’s right leg. Elliott tolerated it.
The guards watched as Elliott signed in on a security roster and double-checked the new signature against other signature samples and the signature on Elliott�
�s restricted-area badge pinned to his shirt. Satisfied, the guards slipped away as quickly as they had appeared.
A tall black security officer wearing a nine-millimeter Beretta automatic pistol on his waist walked quickly to the general officer as he emerged from the entrapment area.
“Sorry, sir,” Major Hal Briggs said, handing Elliott a cup of coffee. “New guy on the security console. Buzzed the sky cops when the metal detector in the entrapment area went crazy. He’s been briefed again on your . . . special circumstances.”
“He did right. You should have commended him. The response guards too.”
“Yes, sir,” was all Briggs had time to mutter as Elliott pushed on past him and entered the communications center. One of the controllers handed him a telephone.
“Storm Control Alpha, go ahead.”
“Alpha, this is Storm One. Flight of two in the green and ready to taxi.”
“Stand by,” Elliott said. As he lowered the phone Briggs handed him a computer printout.
“Latest from Lassen Mountain Space Tracking Center,” Briggs said. “Three Russian satellites will be in the area during, the test-window: Cosmos 713 infrared surveillance satellite still on station over North America in geostationary orbit, but it’s the other two we’re concerned with. Cosmos 1145 and 1289 are the kickers. Cosmos 1145 is a low-altitude, high-resolution film- return photo-intelligence satellite. Cosmos 1289 is a radarimaging film-return bird. We believe they’re mainly groundmapping satellites with limited ability to photograph aircraft in flight, but obviously they can be damaging. Both will be over the exercise area during the test throughout the day. Do you want to reschedule, sir?”
“No,” Elliott said. “I don’t want to give the Russians the pleasure of thinking they can disrupt my schedule with a couple of old Brownies. Just make sure DreamStar and Cheetah stay in the bluff while they’re overhead.”
He took a sip of coffee, scowled at it, then set the cup down with an exasperated thump. “Besides, it seems like they have all the information they need on DreamStar anyway. I could have dropped my teeth when I saw that DIA photo of the Ramenskoye Flight Test Facility in Moscow with the exact same short-takeoff-and-landing runway-test devices as ours here at Dreamland. The exact same ones. In precisely the same position right down to the inch.”
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