“What about the codes that arm the warheads— the PAL codes?” Dalton asked. He had some knowledge of nuclear weapons, having served on a “backpack nuke” team for a while. That was before Special Forces gave up the mission of infiltrating tactical nuclear weapons in backpacks with the advent of cruise missiles, which could do the job more efficiently. “Even if the Mafia gets the warheads, I’m sure even the Russian army isn’t stupid enough to ship the PAL codes on the same train.”
“And the Russian Mafia isn’t stupid enough to attack this target if it didn’t feel confident it could get the arming codes somehow,” Raisor said.
That was the first thing Raisor had said that made sense to Dalton. “How do we stop them?”
Raisor turned to Hammond. “That’s your area of expertise.”
Hammond nodded. “What we’re going to do is design combat forms for each of your men using Sybyl. These forms, which we call avatars, will be what you use when you come out of the virtual plane into the real.”
“What exactly is an avatar?” Captain Anderson asked.
“An avatar,” Hammond said, “is a representation of a person in virtual reality. Gamers use it when they participate in a virtual reality session. For our purposes, we use the term for the cyber-self that goes into the virtual world. We also use the term for the form that comes out of the virtual world at the far point. Let me show you what I mean.”
She stood up and walked to a TV on a cart in the corner of the room and wheeled it to the front. She took a videocassette from the rack on the bottom and slid it in the VCR.
“This is a tape of the avatar used during our test run.”
The screen showed an empty room, the floor covered with various objects. For a minute nothing happened, then there was a shimmer in the air, about four feet above the center of the room.
Raisor spoke up. “The RVer who conducted this operation was in an isolation tank here at Bright Gate. This room— the far point— was in the basement of CIA headquarters at Langley.”
Hammond tapped the screen. “Our man has now found the room and is beginning to gain coherence. The avatar used here was very basic. A program that copies a mechanical arm. Two joints, you could say an elbow and wrist, and five digits. The arm is about ten feet long, which makes each finger eight inches long.”
Dalton could now make out the vague outline of the arm Hammond had described, but he could still see straight through it. Then, from the high end, the arm began to solidify in small squares, each one about four inches on each side, the colors ranging from red to orange, each one slightly different.
“We added the color in order to be able to see the avatar,” Hammond said.
“Can it remain invisible?” Dalton asked.
“Not quite invisible, as you saw when it first started to appear,” Hammond said. “You can remain invisible if you stay in the virtual world, but once you enter the real world, there will be some disturbance of the light spectrum. The light goes through, but it is affected. There is also a disturbance of the electromagnetic field, but that can only be noticed with special imagers.”
“So if you wanted, you could keep our forms— avatars— relatively invisible?” Dalton pressed.
“I have a tape of the avatar operating when we don’t add color,” Hammond said. “You’ll be able to see what it looks like.”
The arm was now solid, floating in air. The long fingers, actually looking more like a series of rectangles, began moving.
“Our man is testing the avatar now,” Hammond said.
The arm bent at the elbow, then at the wrist. The fingers continued to move.
Then the hand reached down and picked up a block of wood about four inches square. It moved through the air and deposited the block on the other side of the room. Hammond hit the fast-forward and the arm raced through a series of maneuvers.
“What was the heaviest weight the arm moved?” Dalton asked.
“Four hundred pounds,” Hammond answered. “That was the heaviest we tested it for. Really there is no limit to what it can do as long as the power coming from Sybyl is sufficient to support the proposed action.”
“What’s the limit of the power, then, that you can send from Sybyl?” Dalton asked.
“We’re not exactly sure,” Hammond said, “but based on our data, we have set up some basic parameters. The limit on avatar size will be about eight hundred parts per projected unit.”
“Parts?” Anderson asked.
“It’s a power unit that flows into size for Sybyl. To put it in terms you can understand, eight hundred parts would equal a 170-pound human being.”
“Not exactly Godzilla,” Dalton noted.
“It’s the best we can do right now,” Hammond said. “Eventually we might be able to produce Godzilla-like avatars, but there seem to be some limits on what can be sent through the virtual plane and then reassembled in a coherent form at the target.”
“And power?” Dalton asked.
Hammond frowned. “That is a problem. Using Sybyl, we can only send a set limit. That one arm could lift four hundred pounds, but if we’d put another similar arm into the room, also powered by Sybyl, each one could only lift two hundred pounds.”
“So the more men we send over,” Dalton summarized, “the less power they will have?”
“Yes,” Hammond said. “I’ve got our computer people working round the clock to increase the flow, but there seem to be some mathematical limits to the virtual physics that we don’t quite understand.”
“There seems to be a hell of a lot that you don’t understand about all of this,” Dalton said.
Hammond pointed at the screen. “It works.”
“It picks up blocks,” Dalton countered. He tapped the satellite imagery on the desk. “This will be real, Doctor. With real people. And real nuclear warheads. Your stuff had better work then.”
“It will.”
“I’m a little confused,” Captain Anderson said. “You told us it could do only eight hundred parts. How many different avatars can you send over?”
“We’re not sure,” Hammond said. “We do know, though, that the total power is limited and the amount allocated to each avatar is inversely proportional to the number of avatars generated.”
“Can you get the entire team operational?” Dalton asked.
“I think we can,” Hammond answered.
“What about weapons?” Dalton asked. “We reappear as 170-pound ‘forms’ in our birthday suits, we’re asking for trouble.”
Hammond smiled. “That’s something I think you will be very happy with.” She grabbed another tape off the rack.
Dalton and Anderson leaned forward as a small, hovering sphere appeared in a different room. They recognized it as an indoor pistol range.
“That’s the range at Langley,” Raisor said. “The RVer was here at Bright Gate.”
The avatar elongated until it was a tube about six feet long by six inches in diameter, bright red in color, the surface pulsing.
“We only gave it this form in order to get some idea of aim.”
There was a glow on one end of the tube. Then, faster than they could see, the glow shot along the tube and down range. The wooden target exploded in a shower of splinters.
“How much power is that?” Anderson asked.
“Enough to punch through an inch of plate steel,” Raisor said. “More than sufficient to go through any type of body armor a target might be wearing.”
“How often can it fire?” Dalton asked.
“We’re working on that,” Hammond said. “There is a direct correlation between power and frequency of firing.”
“If I wanted enough power to kill someone,” Dalton said, “how often can I fire?”
“Once every two seconds,” Hammond said.