The thing was, he didn’t quite know what making a link really meant. Geraldo said it would be like shaking hands with the computer, except that it would seem imaginary. He’d feel it more than think it.
Neither description cleared up his confusion. Zen, who had gone through ANTARES before his crash, described it as a smack on the head with an anvil, followed by the warm buzz of a beer when you’d spent the day working outside in the sun.
That didn’t help either. Not only had he never been hit by an anvil, Madrone rarely drank, and frankly didn’t like the loss of control that came with being buzzed, let alone drunk.
Geraldo bent down in front of him, so close he could smell the tea on her breath. “You’re worried this morning.”
“A little nervous.” He felt his thumb twitch.
“You’ll be fine,” she told him. “The link will come. It takes time. Everyone is different. There are different pathways. Trust me.”
Shorn of its classified and complicated science, descriptions of the ANTARES system tended to sound either like Eastern religion or sci-fi fantasies. The bottom line was an age-old dream—ANTARES allowed a subject’s brain to control mechanical devices. It was hardly magic, however. The subject could not simply think an item into existence, nor could he—for some reason not totally understood, no woman had ever been an effective ANTARES subject—move items by simply thinking of them. Thought impulses, which corresponded to minute chemical changes in synapses in different sections of the brain, controlled a series of sensitive ultralow-voltage electrical switches in the ANTARES interface unit, which in turn controlled the external object—in this case a gateway to a special version of C3, the Flighthawk control computer.
But before Madrone could interface with C3, he had to reach Theta-alpha, the scientists’ shorthand for a mental state where he could produce and control the impulses of the hippocampus in his brain. The production of the waves were measured on an electroencephalograph. All humans, in fact all carnivorous animals, produced such waves. But few people could actually control them, let alone use them to project thoughts as instructions. Successful ANTARES subjects could do just that, using the brain waves as extensions of their thoughts, in effect talking to a computer without bothering to use their mouths.
In Theta-alpha, the brain began utilizing resources that it normally didn’t tap. Or as an ANTARES researcher explained it on the introductory video: “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 seventy percent would be augmented by the computers it was interfaced with. When he mastered Theta and ANTARES, Kevin would tap into their memories and, to some extent, computational abilities.
ANTARES had physical components. A special diet, drugs, and feedback manipulated serotonin and other chemical levels in the subject’s brain. A chip implant in the skull supplied and regulated the vital connection to the ANTARES input and output system: this was physically taped to a receptor or, alternatively, overlain by a copper connection band in the ANTARES control helmet. ANTARES subjects had to either sit in a special chair or wear a flight suit that contained a sensor that ran parallel to their spine, allowing the ANTARES monitoring units to record peripheral nervous-system impulses. But the most important component was the subject’s mind, and his will to extend beyond himself. Kevin had to think himself beyond the interface into the object itself. As Geraldo was fond of saying, he had to discover a way to think in harmony with the machine. He needed to invent a new language with its own feelings, metaphors, and even thoughts.
“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 AN-TARES 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.”