“Like electricity flowing through a wire?”
“Well, some discharges are purely electrical, like when neurons physically touch, but mostly the connection is chemical. Anyway, this electrochemical and ionic activity can be detected and read by electroencephalographs, which you’ve become very familiar with the past weeks.” He would have nodded if he could. “EEGs in the past could only measure electrical activity — they couldn’t analyze, decode that activity. It was like the Plains Indians putting their ears up to a telegraph pole, which they used to call the spirit trees, by the way. They could hear the telegraph clicks and tell that something was happening, but they couldn’t decipher the clicks or tell which direction the clicks were coming from, and of course, they didn’t know how it was being done, just as we are ignorant about so many things in the nervous system. Sure, lots of clicks usually meant the army was coming, but that was about all. Ditto for us twentieth-century wizards.”
Carmichael paused to adjust his oscilloscope. “Well, a few years ago we built an EEG that could read the spirit tree. You could lift a finger or hand and this EEG could tell a researcher that you lifted a finger. And the opposite was true, too — when you generated a thought command to lift your hand, that impulse could be detected and read — in effect, we could read your mind.
“Of course, the military got their mitts on the system right away. The new-style EEG, nicknamed Spirit Tree — hey, I’m famous — was the ultimate lie detector. But there was much more potential in Spirit Tree than use as a glorified polygraph. We already knew the general path of nerves and which areas of the brain corresponded to certain thoughts or activities — that all came about during Nazi Germany’s infamous lab experiments on human guinea pigs, when they would surgically remove parts of a prisoner’s brain and see what the victim could no longer do. The new idea was, if we could now read the information flowing through the system, was there a way we could interject outside or foreign stimuli into the nervous system? Instead of receptors in, say, the fingers generating the initial sensory impulse, could we send information from a computer into the system and read how the brain reacted to it? And could the opposite be true — could we think about, say, moving a finger, and have a computer read that nervous instruction and execute the command electronically?”
The more James heard, the more excited he became, though now it was an intellectual response and his signs stayed relaxed. A computer issuing instructions to a human via his own nervous system … a computer reading the human nervous system … For a while he thought his time might better be spent making drawings or photographs of the F-15 Advanced Tactical Fighter named Cheetah. But now … well, the Academy hadn’t imagined anything like this when they sent him to America. Of course nobody could have …
“Got all that?” Carmichael asked.
“I think so … You’re going to try to read my mind with this … whatever it is …”
“In a sense, yes.”
“But how strong are those electrochemical discharges across the synapse? Don’t you have to clip some electrodes onto my skull?”
“In the past that’s how EEGs were done. Every human body has a basic electrical potential, an electrical aura, so to speak, and that potential is affected by the central nervous system. Simple electrodes could read the tiny impulses generated by the brain and nervous system. But those electrodes couldn’t measure anything except the change in electrical potential …”
“Like the telegraph clicks …”
“Exactly. But now we have two new technologies that have improved our ability to read those electrical impulses — very high-speed integrated circuits and NRTS, near-room-temperature superconductors.
“Your helmet and that large device on your spine are huge superconducting antennae. They’re so powerful they not only can measure your nervous activity; they can read it, analyze it and map its direction as the impulses move around your peripheral nervous system. And as they do, the computer issues instructions to the other large device you’re wearing — that metallic flight suit. Actually, the suit is an integrated circuit that records the route each and every nervous impulse takes and studies it. After repetitions of the route the artificial-intelligence computer actually learns the route and proper timing and intervals between a certain set of impulses from certain areas of the central nervous system.”
This project did sound remarkable, but it also appeared to involve a long period of passive training. Maraklov preferred action. Could he sustain the process …? “You’re going to map out every muscle twitch, every movement, every breath I take …?”
“To the contrary,” Carmichael said. “We’d be overloaded if we tried to record every muscle twitch, just as your question implies — so the idea is, we don ‘t want you to twitch any muscles. We don’t want mere muscular activity to show up. We don’t need it — once we map out your peripheral nervous activity, we’ll know what impulses are necessary to move things like muscles.
“So we need you totally relaxed, limp, deeper than relaxed — we need you as detached as you can be from your physical body. We practiced biofeedback techniques before to get you to what we call, for lack of a better term, alpha state — it simply means the propagation of alpha brain waves and the suppression of beta waves, the latter activity indicating conscious brain activity. But alpha state has many levels — nine known ones, to be exact. You’ve reached perhaps the second or third level, where you can totally relax both smooth and ridged muscle and even exert control over certain autonomous functions such as heart rate, respiration and blood pressure. That’s fine — but we need more.”
Carmichael’s voice became even deeper, even more steady. There was no hint of tension, no emotional cues, no inflection. Somehow he had even managed to cut out most of the background noise in the laboratory — or was that part of the hypnotic state the subject knew he was slipping into?
“There’s a level of activity called theta-alpha,” the voice continued, so melodic and penetrating that it seemed to bypass his eardrums and enter directly into his brain … “Theta-alpha. It’s a stage where the central nervous system in effect cuts out the peripheral nervous system. In higher life forms it’s a defense mechanism, a way to protect the central nervous system from sensory overload.
“Without any peripheral functions to control, the brain expands its powers. Areas of the brain that normally go unused are suddenly put into service to control autonomous functions. The average person uses only thirty percent of his available brain capacity, but under theta-alpha the other seventy percent is suddenly put on line. That new seventy percent has the memory and computational power of all the computers in this building, packed into a ten-pound package that needs no power, no cooling air, no bench or field maintenance. And, like a computer built by humans, it’s programmable and erasable, with its own built-in operating system.”
James was finding it progressively harder to concentrate. When he tried to speak he couldn’t make his jaw work. It felt as if he was asleep, but in that weird half-in, half-out state of sleep where you could hear and feel everything around you but were still deeply resting. His body felt very warm, but not sweaty or cocooned any more. The oxygen being fed into the face mask was cool and soothing as it streamed into his lungs. It was as if his body were somewhere else, as if he was detached …
Suddenly, he felt his whole body burst into flame. Every pore, every cell, every molecule of his body spit red-hot lava. He jerked out of his semi-sleep state and screamed.