“No. They’re flat.”
“Ah, crap,” Dalton muttered. He turned and left the room, heading for the control center.
Dr. Hammond was at her normal place, behind the main console, surrounded by computer terminals that gave her access to Sybyl, the master computer that controlled the entire facility and the Psychic Warrior program.
“Sergeant Major,” she said, nodding in greeting.
“Doctor.” He grabbed a seat and rolled it over next to her as Jackson did the same on the other side. “Anything on our people?”
“Nothing. We’re keeping the bodies alive, but their psyches…” Hammond trailed off.
“Let me ask you something,” Dalton said. “Sybyl tracks us when we go over to the virtual plane, right?”
“Track isn’t the right word,” Hammond said. “Sybyl has to supply your avatar with both power and form, so it is always in contact with you, but the computer really can’t tell exactly where you are. We don’t really know what space and distance is on the virtual plane.”
“Does the computer track where we come out in the real world?”
“No, because the link is through the virtual.”
“Is there any sort of record of our trips when we go over to the virtual?” Dalton asked.
“Sybyl records all data on the link, both reported and requested,” Hammond said.
“Could you pull up the data for the first team?” he asked.
Hammond turned to the computer and typed in a rapid series of commands. “Here it is.”
Dalton looked over her shoulder but could make little sense of the words. “What does that mean?”
Hammond pointed. “Real time is recorded here. This is power data. This is communication’s linkage. The first team was over for, let’s see…” She scrolled down. “Forty-two minutes in real time before the linkage was cut.”
Dalton saw something on the right side of the screen. “What does this mean?”
Hammond read what he was pointing at. “One of the team members, Eileen Raisor, was requesting information from Sybyl about a location.”
“What location?”
Hammond moved the mouse and clicked. She read the letters out loud. “A-F-S-M-S-C.”
“Which stands for?” Jackson asked.
“Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center,” Hammond answered.
Dalton wondered what that had to do with HAARP.
“She wanted to know where it was and what it did,” Hammond continued. “Sybyl gave her the data. The team was cut off less than a minute later.” She continued to use the mouse and keyboard, searching further into the data, when she suddenly stopped. “Oh my.”
“What?” Dalton asked.
Hammond ’s eyes shifted about, as if afraid of being overheard even though there was no one else in the room. “Sybyl’s been infected.”
“Infected?” Dalton repeated. “With what?”
“A bug.”
“From where?” Jackson asked.
Hammond frowned as she looked at the data on her screen. “That’s the weird thing. I think the bug has been there all along. An integral part of the master program.”
“A time-delay activation?” Jackson asked.
“It’s been active all along,” Hammond replied.
It was Jackson ’s turn to look confused. “What does the bug do?”
“As far as I can tell by looking at this, it tracks Sybyl’s activity and notes whenever the virtual plane is accessed here. I think there’s more to it than that, though-it’s going to take me a while to break down the lines of code. But someone had access to this data real-time as that first team was on the psychic plane.”
“So whoever it was knew about the request reference AFSMSC by Eileen Raisor?” Dalton asked.
“Yes.”
“Who could have put the bug in there?” Dalton wanted to know. “And why?”
“It had to have been someone here inside Bright Gate,” Hammond said. “We’re secure to the outside world.”
“No, you’re not,” Dalton said. “I don’t know much about computers, but you just told me someone’s monitoring Sybyl, which means that information is getting out of here in some manner, correct? And if information from the computer can go out, then someone on the outside can get into Sybyl, right?”
“No.” Hammond was shaking her head. “We were tested by the NSA. We’re secure from hackers.”
“Unless the NSA did the hacking,” Dalton said. He thought of what Eichen had said about the government being infiltrated and about Jenkins, Hammond ’s predecessor. “Raisor said the first PW team was betrayed by someone in our own government.”
“But why would someone outside of here want to know when Sybyl is active on the virtual plane?” Hammond asked.
“To hide something from Psychic Warriors when they’re deployed,” Dalton said. He thought about it. “We’ve got two problems. One is we don’t know who is doing this surveillance. The second is we don’t know what’s being hidden from us.”
“I think-” Jackson began, but suddenly stopped.
“Go ahead,” Dalton urged her.
“I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t really know for sure, anyway.”
“Know what for sure?” Dalton asked.
Jackson glanced at Hammond. “You weren’t with the original Bright Gate program, were you?”
Hammond shook her head. “I was brought in after Professor Jenkins died in a car crash.”
“Who brought you here?” Jackson asked.
“I was working for the Department of Defense at Livermore. A General Eichen approached me.”
Dalton considered that. Since she mentioned Eichen’s name so easily, Dalton assumed that she was an unwitting participant and not reporting back to him. “So you weren’t NSA or CIA?”
“No, why?”
“Because the NSA and the CIA started Bright Gate,” Jackson said. She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Really.” She quickly walked out of the room, leaving Dalton alone with Hammond.
“She’s right,” Hammond said.
“Right about what?”
“There’s something really strange about this place, this program. All of it. Beyond the technology. I was working on quantum physics at Livermore when Eichen tapped me to come here and take over, and we had no clue about any of this level of advancement in physics. It’s like it came out of the blue.”
“The Russians had the hyperspace howitzer way back in the early sixties,” Dalton noted.
“Yeah, and where did they get that from? I’ve been studying the data the Russians recovered on that, and it’s definitely too far advanced for the time it was developed. Hell, it’s too advanced for us now. I don’t think we could duplicate the howitzer even with what we know. It’s good it was destroyed.”
Hammond leaned back in her chair, exhausted. “There’s something else. I’ve been looking at some of the information you brought back from the Russian SD-8 base.”
“And?”
“Chyort-the devil avatar-he was…” Hammond trailed off into silence.
Dalton waited a few moments. “Tell me.”
“Even with what they did to his mind-making a direct interface with the computer-he was more than the sum of his parts.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t understand this.” Hammond shifted her tired gaze to Dalton. “You’ve constantly accused me of not knowing what I’m doing, and I’m admitting to you now that I agree with you. All of this”-she waved her hand to indicate the Bright Gate control center-“it’s based on concepts we don’t really understand. I don’t think the Russians really had much of a clue what they were doing either.”
Dalton was trying to follow what she was getting at. “But you said it didn’t matter if you understood the concepts as long as you can use them.”
Hammond gave a weary smile. “I did say that, didn’t I? But I’ve been thinking about that, and the best analogy I can come up with is that it’s like saying we didn’t understand the concept of the internal combustion engine, but we built one and used it in a prototype car. The question is, who did understand the concept enough so that we could build it? Who was able to invent and build a mind-computer interface at SD-8 so well that the results were far beyond what we could have imagined?”