“Easy, Ken, easy,” Carmichael said. Pure oxygen flooded his face mask. The visors on his helmet opened, and Carmichael and a medical technician peered inside to check his bulging eyes.
“What … what was that?”
“It worked,” Carmichael said. He nodded to the med tech, and they both disappeared out of-view. Ken tried to move his head but found it still securely fastened in place.
“Get me out of here—”
“No, Ken, relax,” Carmichael was saying. The room noise seemed louder than — ever. Ken rolled his eyes, trying to blot out the hammering in his head. “Everything’s fine. Relax, relax…”
“I felt like … like I was—”
“Shocked. Electrocuted,” Carmichael finished for him. “You did it, Ken.”
“Did what, dammit?”
“You entered theta-alpha. The final stage of alpha state. You were so relaxed, relaxed in such a deep neurological sense, that your mind opened up to its maximum capacity.”
“So what was that shock — electrocution, you said …?”
“ANTARES. The system detects when you enter theta-alpha and begins the process of integration. The shock you felt was the activation of the ANTARES system — it was the first time, Ken, the very first time, so far as we know, that a computer and the human mind have been linked, even if it was only for a split second. You’ve made some history, my friend. December third, in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-four, at seven-thirty-eight A.M., a human mind and a computer were linked — not merely in contact, but linked — for the first time.”
“Forget history, Carmichael. I asked you what that shock was.”
“Yes, well to facilitate the tracing of your neural impulses, we created a slight electrical field of our own through your suit. We charged the suit with a tiny electrical—”
“Tiny? You call that tiny? I felt like I was frying!”
“Milliamperes, I assure you,” Carmichael replied jovially. “About the same as a nine-volt toy battery. It does no permanent damage that we can detect—”
“That’s real reassuring, Doc.”
“You’re experiencing the same irritation that anyone feels when violently awakened from REM sleep,” Carmichael said. “Try to relax. We’d like to try for another interface.”
“So you can shock me like some chimpanzee?” There was a limit.
“Ken, we’re on the threshold.” Carmichael had turned on the microphone again and had closed the visors. “We’ve proven that our system works, that our equipment can respond to a specific and up to now unexplored neurological state. If we can complete the interface we may actually be able to establish communications between a machine and the human mind. I don’t mean to sound overly melodramatic, but this is at least comparable as a scientific breakthrough to the discovery of the semiconductor. It is important that we try again. But this time you must try to ignore the electrical charge when it happens.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“There’s no training manual for this … you must maintain theta-alpha through the interface process. I’m really not sure how to tell you to do that. Think of something else, try to shut out the pain. After a while the system will help you, but you must be able to endure the first wave of it until the system can learn how to help.”
“What about drugs?”
“Drugs would interfere with the neurological impulses in your system. Besides, this program is based on creating an aircraft that responds to thought commands. We can’t very well go around drugging all our pilots before sending them into combat.”
The full realization of what was happening finally hit him. “You really intend to put this system on an aircraft. You say you can control an aircraft just by thinking?”
“Exactly. We already use sophisticated computers to fly our jets. But with ANTARES, we’ve developed the most powerful computer of all — the human brain. It’s a thousand times more powerful, a hundred times faster, and a million times more reliable than any computer ever conceived or conceivable.
“You’ve flown Colonel McLanahan’s F-15 ATF — imagine putting all this on a plane like Cheetah. Or a plane more sophisticated than Cheetah — you’ve seen the plans for the new fighter they’re developing, the X-34. Imagine the speed and power of your mind going into the X-34. It would be all but invincible, more powerful than a squadron of F-15s. It would rewrite most everything we know about fighter combat.”
Carmichael paused. “And you would be the first pilot.”
Maraklov was stunned. This was miles beyond anything he’d hoped or bargained for. Carmichael was serious. They actually were going to move ahead. with’ plans to put all this on an airplane.
“But how can all this gear go into an aircraft?”
“Ken, this is a laboratory. We do everything on huge scales because we have the room to spread out. But in the real world we’d miniaturize all this. With new ‘microchips and superconducting technology, most of the computers in this lab can be miniaturized to the size of a steamer trunk. In three years that trunk-sized computer could be the size of a toaster. By the turn of the century it could be down to the size of a walnut.”
He relaxed and smiled for the first time since entering what he had once thought of as Carmichael’s chamber of honors. It sounded far-fetched, but they could really be on the verge of a massive technological breakthrough. If they were, then Ken James, alias Andrei Maraklov, a newly promoted major of infantry in the KGB, was to be the principal, the key actor in a remarkable scientific discovery.
“All right,” he said. “Fire it up again.”
Carmichael signaled to his technicians.
“But make sure you spell the name right in the history books. It’s—”
“I know,” Carmichael said. “J-A-M-E-S.”
No, he said to himself, beginning his deep breathing exercises, starting from his toes and consciously ordering every muscle to relax. Spell it M-A-R-A-K-L-O-V.
The Kremlin, Moscow, USSR
“In summary, then, General Secretary,” General Boris Cherkov, Chief of Staff of the military forces of the Soviet Union concluded, “we still command a substantial lead in both conventional and nuclear forces in Europe and Asia, and we should be able to maintain that superiority through the rest of this century. I am ready to take questions.”
No one in the Kollegiya raised any; few ever did during these briefings. The men and women who made up the leadership of the Soviet military, intelligence and state bureaucracy sat mute, nodding to Cherkov as if congratulating him on his presentation — the same one he had given during the past three years, and very similar to the one that the General Secretary had heard since assuming the office. Now he turned to Vladimir Kalinin, chief of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB. “Do you have a comment?”
“Just this. How is it possible that we are so superior? With respect, sir, I question the conclusions made here this afternoon. Since the late eighties and in this year of 1994 as well, the Americans have begun a steady increase in levels of conventional forces all over the world, including western Europe. We know they have a space-based strategic defense system in place that is more sophisticated than our ground-based one. Intermediate-range nuclear forces have been eliminated, our strategic nuclear forces have just been cut in half, and biological weapons have been eliminated. We have been forced to draw down the size of all our forces to help relieve our budget problems and promote perestroika. How can we be maintaining such a large advantage over the United States and the NATO forces—?”