She told us a story that was equal parts fantastic, tragic, and horrible. About a genius boy who never believed he was entirely human and who found comfort only in two things. His dreams and science. Prospero said that the idea for his escape machine — that was how Greene referred to it — came to him in dreams. He said that its design was somehow encoded in the parts of his DNA that were not human. In order to find his way home — or to the place he truly believed was his home — Prospero began building versions of a device. A doorway. A gateway. The God Machine.
When Oscar Bell realized the potential for the machine, he took the first prototype away from him and sold it to the military as a new weapon of war. The thing was that the prototype was far from complete and it malfunctioned constantly. But it was those malfunctions that were the basis of the contract the kid’s father sold to the Department of Defense.
“Did he explain the nature of those side effects?” asked Bolton. He seemed very excited by this and was even sweating a little. I guess we all were.
“In general. Dr. Greene was not a physicist,” she said. “And also the Closers took all of his case notes. He had to rebuild everything in his files from memory. But… sure, he said that there were two of these ‘faults’ that Oscar sold to the government. One sounds like what’s happening around the country, like what happened in Houston, though I don’t understand how ISIL could have gotten their hands on it.”
She described the first fault for us. When the machine was first turned on there was something like a reverse power surge. All machinery around the machine — but not including the machine itself — would stop working. This included batteries. It only affected nonorganic electrical conduction. It did not shut down the central nervous system of people inside that nullification field cast by the machine.
“That’s Kill Switch,” I said, slapping the table. “There’s no way it’s not.”
“Agreed,” said Church, and even Bolton nodded.
“This means that we know what they were doing at Gateway, and it means that the ISIL attacks are our case. Boom,” I said. “Get the president on the phone.”
Bolton patted the air with a calming gesture. “Slow down, Joe. This is still theory. We can’t prove any of this.”
I started to say something loud and nasty, but Junie touched my arm. “Let me tell the rest of it, honey,” she said.
“Do we need to hear more?” asked Bolton. “Kill Switch is the thing we need to be afraid of and it’s what we need to stop. My guess is that Erskine was using it to create a weapon to be used against drones. Don’t forget, they had a project in the works called Freefall.”
“And we’ll pursue that,” said Church, “but for now let’s hear the rest of what Ms. Flynn has to share.”
Bolton looked annoyed and impatient. I could sympathize. I wanted to jump right on this. If ISIL had a directed-energy weapon that could knock down our drones, then it would cut our combat effectiveness down by one hell of a lot. I started to say something but caught Church watching me. He gave me a tiny shake of his head.
Junie said, “Dr. Greene said that one of the other faults of the machine was that while it was in idle mode some people — not most, just a small percentage — experienced two distinct types of unusually vivid dreams. The largest majority of those affected had dreams in which they saw monsters and alien landscapes and images that can best be described as psychedelic. Surreal. The boy told the doctor that he believed these people were actually traveling to those worlds, that the energetic discharge transported their consciousness through the dimensional barriers so that what they saw were beings and locations that existed in other worlds than ours. Greene said that the boy was convinced that the entire surrealism art movement was brought into being because certain people had been touched, in one way or another, by this energy. They had journeyed to other worlds in their dreams and then tried to capture what they’d seen in their paintings. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst… artists like that. Greene said that the boy told him that there was a whole group of writers who had been similarly influenced.”
“Let me guess… H. P. Lovecraft and his crew?”
She frowned. “How did you know that?”
“We’ve been chasing pieces of this,” said Church. “Continue, please.”
“Well,” she said slowly, “even though Greene lost contact with the boy and had to flee the Closers, he never let go of this. He did a lot of very quiet research. He thinks the energetic discharge may have been what drove Hitler mad. And he thought that these same kind of dreams might have been what kicked off the psychedelic movement of the sixties. People who’d had those dreams who were using drugs to find their way back to that other world.”
“I don’t see how this is useful to us,” said Bolton. “It’s interesting as a cultural phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem like it poses a threat. The Kill Switch is our primary concern.”
She looked at Bolton for a long, thoughtful moment. “You’re with the CIA?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“I’m surprised you don’t already know about this stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remote viewing,” she said. “Project Stargate?”
“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.
“It was a program started by the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“Wait,” I said, “I’m lost. Wasn’t Stargate an old TV show?”
“This is different,” said Church. “Project Stargate was a clandestine research project.”
He gave us the lowdown. The Stargate project had been a covert line of research based primarily at Fort Meade in Maryland and overseen by the Defense Intelligence Agency and SRI International, a defense contractor. The goal of Stargate had been to determine the authenticity and potential of psychic phenomena. The officer in charge of it was Lieutenant Frederick Atwater, known as “Skip” to his friends. Skip was an aide to Major General Albert Stubblebine. According to DIA and CIA legend, Skip was a “psychic headhunter” for the project, searching for candidates who scored high on the ESP evaluations. People whose abilities might open the door to the first generation of psychic spies.
The project was high concept and, had it worked, it would have changed the nature of espionage. Imagine it. A psychic spy was, according to Stargate, an operative who would not need to physically visit an enemy location or foreign country, but who would instead be able to project his consciousness there and remotely view the enemy, view their installations, overhear conversations, and so on. It was an outlandish idea that everyone took seriously, and the United States was far from being the only nation actively involved in this research. The Russians had gone farthest with it and had spent millions trying to not only get inside the heads of enemy agents and scientists, but to hijack them, to psychically control their actions. It was like carjacking someone’s mind.
Scary stuff. Considering that I have at least three people inside my head at any given time, I knew the terror of ceding control. I was a different person when the Modern Man or the Killer was in the driver’s seat.
Junie said, “The DIA handed the Stargate program to the CIA.”
“And the Agency canned it,” said Bolton, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “It was nonsense and it didn’t work.”
He told us that the Agency officially concluded that ESP was not provable, any results were not reproducible, and it was all, essentially, a waste of time and money. If the Russians got anywhere with their program, which was nicknamed “Remote Control,” it didn’t keep the Soviet Union from collapsing. Bolton said that everyone dropped their research on it. A book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was written about it, published in 2004 and made into a George Clooney movie in 2009. Neither the book nor film actually mentioned Stargate, though conspiracy theories abounded. From the military intelligence perspective, however, it was a failure and it was dumped.