‘What conspiracy?’ Lopez asked. ‘Do you mean Majestic Twelve?’
‘For once,’ Jarvis replied, ‘MJ–12 are as behind the curve as we are. It’s this way.’
Jarvis led them down a corridor of pristine white panels illuminated from behind and in deep contrast to the impenetrable blackness of the building’s exterior.
‘We’re being scanned for recording devices,’ Jarvis said as they walked. ‘The scanners are implanted behind the walls.’
As they reached the end of the corridor a door opened and two armed soldiers stood to attention before checking their security passes against a log and then waving them through.
Jarvis led them through a doorway and into a large Watch Room that looked not dissimilar to the ones Ethan had seen at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Large screens ringed the walls at the front of the Watch Room in the manner of a space agency’s control room, and rows of desks with operatives seated behind them monitored events across the world.
But this time, there was something odd about the images on the screens, the pictures indistinct, slightly blurred.
‘The news feeds are out of focus,’ Lopez said.
Jarvis shook his head. ‘Those are not news feeds.’
Jarvis walked to one corner of the room and then turned to face them, speaking softly so as not to disturb the thirty or so operatives at work behind their desks.
‘Welcome to The Identity Mine,’ he said simply.
‘The what?’
Jarvis gestured to the Watch Room around them. ‘This room is used specifically to monitor the activities of thirty or so of the most wanted people on the planet,’ he explained. ‘Their activities are observed in a way that no other country on Earth has ever been able to do before so that the NSA is able to predict when and where they’re going to strike next. This program is in its infancy, just a couple of years old and so clandestine that even Edward Snowden wouldn’t have been able to get near it.’
Ethan frowned and looked at the screens. Several of them showed slightly blurred images of people talking to the camera and responses coming back from somebody out of sight. Others showed the view through a car windscreen as it drove along a highway, yet another the interior of a busy shopping mall. Several of the screens were almost black but filled with bizarre little points of light swimming and zipping about on them.
‘I don’t get it,’ he admitted finally. ‘What are they actually watching here?’
Jarvis smiled, clearly enjoying himself once again, standing in the center of something so secret that barely a handful of people in the world knew about it.
‘They’re not watching the criminals,’ Jarvis said. ‘They’re watching what the criminals are seeing.’
Lopez stared at the screens for a moment longer and then her jaw dropped. ‘This is what the criminals are doing, right now?’
‘Right this very instant,’ Jarvis confirmed, gesturing once more to the screen. ‘Welcome to the future of intelligence gathering, where the criminal leads law enforcement directly to the scene of their next crime. You’re not seeing through the eyes of a camera, and not even precisely through the eyes of the person in question. You’re seeing what their brains are seeing, literally as it happens.’
Ethan blinked and almost missed a breath as he tried to digest what Jarvis was saying.
‘Their brains? How is that even possible?’
Jarvis smiled, clearly as amazed as Ethan at the technology before them.
‘You’re watching the brain waves created by what they’re seeing converted into moving images here in the Watch Room. Effectively, you’re seeing their thoughts.’
XXVIII
‘We’re seeing their thoughts?’ Lopez gasped as she surveyed the Watch Room’s myriad screens. ‘That’s insane.’
Ethan shook his head in disbelief, his arms folded as he realized that the blurry images of talking people and the responses from off — screen were in fact ordinary conversations being conducted between two people.
‘I myself wouldn’t have believed it possible until I was given the clearance necessary to get full disclosure about this program,’ Jarvis said, ‘but this technology is in use today and has far — reaching consequences for law enforcement and personal privacy. If it was to become public knowledge, it would make Snowden’s PRISM leaks look like a joke in comparison.’
‘How does it work?’ Ethan asked.
Jarvis leaned against the wall as he spoke.
‘Almost a decade ago, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan figured out a way to sample electrical signals moving from the retina to the brain’s visual cortex. They realized that for any given image witnessed by an observer a unique signal was relayed to the brain, and thus those individual signals could be recorded, analyzed and stored. They wired volunteers up to a series of simple electrodes and showed them around four hundred images, recording each signal into a database. When they were done, they then reversed the process and placed random images in front of the subjects. A computer in a room nearby recognized the relevant visual signal and produced an image of what the subject was seeing.’
Lopez frowned. ‘That’s not quite what we’re seeing here,’ she said.
‘The technology was considered by the scientists involved to be useful in developing a better understanding of cognitive thought, dream analysis, psychology and so on,’ Jarvis replied. ‘But the NSA was way ahead and had recognized the tech’ as being tremendously promising in the field of intelligence gathering, and they had made copies of earlier data during a discreet hacking operation from an NSA listening station in Hawaii.’
‘And then they militarized it,’ Ethan guessed.
Jarvis shrugged in agreement.
‘Of course they did,’ he said. ‘I can’t think of a technology that hasn’t been militarized or emerged as a result of military research. The NSA realized that the technological leap to go from seeing thoughts on a screen to seeing real — time imagery was not particularly great, requiring only a larger database of source imagery, better and smaller hardware and a way of installing that hardware into an unsuspecting host.’
‘That sounds like a virus or something,’ Lopez said with an expression of disgust.
‘In a sense that’s exactly what it is,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Effectively, the NSA was developing a program to hack the human mind; to intercept signals on their way to the brain, code them into data and send them back here.’
Ethan shook his head in wonder.
‘And they did it,’ he murmured to himself. ‘How many federal and international laws does this Identity Mine of theirs break?’
‘It would probably be quicker to ask how many of them it doesn’t break,’ Jarvis admitted, ‘and the evidence obtained here could never be used in a court of law, much like that gathered by Operation Watchman. But it can lead law enforcement to catch criminals of all kinds in the actual process of committing their crimes. It’s the next best thing to predicting the future — watching the present play out in the perpetrator’s mind.’
Lopez shook her head. ‘How did they go from a handful of recorded images to this?’
‘The NSA picked up the technology but it was already moving quickly in the civilian field. The same Japanese firm that developed the initial technology then started looking into whether they could see dreams instead of thoughts. They started monitoring again, this time as the subjects were falling asleep and witnessing something known as hipnagogic imagery, the half — dreams we experience when falling asleep. They recorded the signals in the same way as before into a database and then let the subjects sleep while watching the monitors. Sure enough when the subjects entered REM, or Rapid — Eye — Movement sleep, which is normally associated with dreams, they could see the dreams in motion.’