“The important thing is not to push too hard,” she told him now. “Let it come to you. It will. Are you ready?”
Madrone took a last bite of his pastry, then got up and followed her into the lab. He stripped off his shirt, holding his arms up while the techies carefully taped wire leads that would monitor his heartbeat and breathing. Shirt back on, he slipped into the subject chair, which looked like a slightly wider version of the one found in most dentist offices.
“Going to prick you, Captain,” said Carrie, one of the assistants, as she picked up his hand. He nodded, trying not to stare at her breasts as she poked á small needle into his right thumb. She held the needle against his finger as she retrieved a roll of white adhesive tape from her lab coat pocket. A small tube ran from the needle to a device that measured gases in Madrone’s bloodstream, analyzing his respiration rate during the experiment.
It was all but impossible not to imagine the outlines of her nipples rising as she attached the device.
In the meantime, the other assistant — Roger, whose long nose, wide stomach, and long legs made him look like a pregnant stork — got ready to put the ANTARES helmet on Kevin’s head. The helmet was actually more a liner made of a flexible plastic with bumps and veins; a full flight helmet would go over it when they got to the point where he was actually working in a plane. Besides the thick metal band that connected with the chip, there were two classes of sensors strung in a thick net within the plastic. The first and most important picked up brain waves and fed them to the translating unit, backing up those that were fed through the chip and band interface. The other sensors helped the scientists track Madrone’s physical state.
With the helmet on, Roger lowered a shieldlike set of visual sensors to track rapid eye movements over his eyes. These backed up the translating sensors, and gave the scientists another way of monitoring their progress. In the next stage of the experiments, the sensors would be part of the flight helmet and would be used by ANTARES to help it interpret his thought commands.
The physical feedback input from electrodes, which would be connected to the spider and grafted onto the nerves of the skin behind the eyes and ears, wouldn’t be used until Madrone demonstrated he was capable of achieving and controlling Theta. The electrodes would allow the computer to send data to him, first by affecting his equilibrium, and then by interacting with his brain’s Theta-alpha wave production.
A ponytail of wires connected the ANTARES helmet with a bank of workstations and two servers. These fed data to a set of supercomputers the next level down via a set of optical cables. The interface modules for the Flighthawk’s C units were still being worked on, but eventually would be hooked into a smaller, portable (and air-cooled) version of the ANTARES computer array.
Madrone sat stoically in the chair as the technicians prepared him. Geraldo had given him breathing exercises to do as a form of relaxation; he tried them now, imagining his lungs slowly squeezing the air from his chest. He pictured his upper body as a large balloon, gradually being emptied. He relaxed his arms and hands on the seat rests, easing himself into the chair. When the visor was placed on his face he accepted the darkness.
His lips and cheeks vibrated slightly, as if set off by some internal pitchfork tuned to their frequency. Someone placed headphones over his ears. The Mozart concerto played softly in the background.
The music called up memories of the past, times in junior and senior high school, learning the cello. Orchestra was his favorite class, though not his best — B’s and B+’s compared to the A’s and A+’s in math and science. The thickness of the notes matched the feel of the bow in his hand, the vibration shifting in his senses. Sounds morphed into movement through space, and space itself transformed, the high school halls a jungle of jagged shadows and sharp corners.
“Kevin, are you ready?”
Geraldo’s voice intruded like a bully bursting from the shadows. Junior and senior high school were in the same building, seventh-graders mixing with towering twelfth-graders, always cowering in fear of being pummeled.
“Kevin?”
“Yes,” said Madrone.
“Your hippocampus has grown two percent since our measurement twenty-four hours ago,” said the scientist. “That is extremely good. Surprising even. Incredible.”
“Off the chart,” said Roger approvingly.
The hippocampus was one of the key areas of the brain involved in ANTARES, since it produced nearly all the Theta waves. Also responsible for memory control and other functions, it was actually a ridge at the bottom of each of the brain’s lateral ventricles. Geraldo had explained that she wasn’t sure the size of the ridge or the number of cells there mattered. Nonetheless, the ANTARES diet and drug regime included several hormones that were supposed to help stimulate the grown of brain cells.
“Our baseline frequencies this morning are 125 percent,” continued Geraldo. “Kevin, I must say, we’re doing very well. Very, very well. Can you feel the computer? If I try a simple tone, do you feel it? The feedback?”
He shook his head. Her praise was misplaced. He had no control over his. thoughts, let alone the growth of his brain cells. He was worthless, a failure, useless. Karen had seen that and left.
His brain began to shift, ideas floating back and forth like pieces of paper caught in a breeze.
Something hot burned a hole on the side of his head.
Red grew there. His skull bones folded inward, became a flute.
Maria Mahon, the flute player in ninth-grade orchestra.
He had a crush on her. Thomas Lang, a senior, was her boyfriend.
Stuck-up rich kid bully slimebag.
Go out for the football team, his dad urged.
He broke his forearm and couldn’t play the cello anymore.
Very red and hot.
The light notes moved down the scale. He was a horrible trumpet player. Try the bass, pound-pound-pounding.
Red knives poked him from the sides of the hall. Someone took a machine gun from the locker.
Respond with the York Gatling gun. He had one in his hands. His head was the radar he’d worked on.
Pounding red lava from the cortex of his brain.
Madrone heard words, hard words that shot across the pain, spun him in the displaced hallway of his distorted memories.
“Kevin, try to relax. Let your body sway with the music.
You’re fighting too hard.”
Relax, relax, relax. Don’t think about the bullies.
The tanks. He was in Iraq, alone with his men.
“Lieutenant?”
“Go left. I’m right. Just go!”
He screamed, running faster. He drew the Iraqis’ fire and his men did their jobs, it was all so easy in his memory now, without the pain and the nervousness, knowing exactly how it would come out, the elation, the adrenaline at the end, the smell of the burning metal, the extra grenade still in his hand.