I suffocate. Are you ever going to tell me exactly what I'm
supposed to be doing?"
"Try to relax and I'll tell." Carmichael adjusted the volume
of a small speaker next to a nearby oscilloscope-like device; I
I
the speaker began to chirp in a seemingly random pattern. Car- I
michael motioned to one of twenty-five lines on the oscillo-
scope. "Your twenty-five cps beta readouts are still firing.
Relax, Ken. Don't try to force it or it won't come."
"14%at won't come?" Carmichael said nothing. Ken began
to take deeper breaths, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down
his back and the cramp in his right calf. After a few moments,
the chirping subsided. Progress?
"Very good," Carmichael said. "Beta is down . . . your
Hertz waves are increasing. Good. Occipital alpha is increas-
ing. Good. Keep it up. " He turned and with the help of one
DAY OF THE CHEETAH 37
of the techs lifted a huge device off a carrying cart that he had
brought in with him.
"What the hell is that?" James asked as the huge object was
lifted overhead. It was hexagonal, and two wide visors in the
front and cables leading to various parts of the suit and to
controls and boxes nearby.
"Your new flight helmet," Carmichael said. "The final
component of the suit you're wearing. The project is progress-
ing so well, we've decided to proceed with a full-scale test."
"Test of what . . . ?"
"Wait." Carmichael slid the heavy helmet over Ken's head.
"Watch the ears, damn it."
"Watch your beta-you're pinging again." The helmet was
set into place and fastened to a heavy clavicle locking ring on
the metallic suit. The braces holding Ken's head in place took
some of the helmet's weight, but his shoulders were aching
after only a few moments.
A microphone clicked on, and through a set of headphones
in the helmet came: "How do you hear me, Ken?"
"I think you broke my left ear off."
"You'll live. Try to relax and I'll explain." Carmichael's
voice dropped into the familiar deep, even monotone that he
had used weeks earlier during several days of screening: in
fact, Carmichael was hypnotizing him, not with a shiny watch
on a chain, but with his voice only. James' susceptibility to
hypnotic suggestion had made him an especially good candi-
date for this secret project.
"As you know, we've been working here at Dreamland with
several projects. We call them all together 'supercockpit'-
designing an aircraft workspace that allows the pilot to perform
better in a high-speed, high-density combat environment. You
and several other pilots were working with Cbeetah, the F-15
advanced technology fighter demonstrator; that's the state of
the art, and her systems will be incorporated in the Air Force's
new fighter in the next few years. Cheetah makes extensive
use of multi-function computer screens, voice-recognition and
artificial intelligence, as well as high-maneuverability technol-
ogy . . . Well, we've been working on the next generation of
fighters after Cheetah, things like forward-swept wing technol-
ogy, hyper-start engines, super-conducting radar. But the most
fascinating aspect of the new generation of fighters will
38 DAIZ BROWN
be ANTARES-that's an acronym for Advanced Neural Trans-
fer and Response. "
"Neural transfer? Sounds like Buck Rogers thought-control
stuff." Comic books were SOP at Connecticut Academy.
A slight pause, then Carmichael said: "It is."
Inwardly Maraklov was tingling with excitement-Can-nichael's
electroencephalograph must be pinging off the dials, he thought.
They were actually working on thought-controlled aircraft . . . ?
"Relax, relax," Carmichael said. "It might sound like sci-
ence fiction but we demonstrated the rudimentary ANTARES
technology as early as the late nineteen eighties."
"But is it possible . . . ?"
"Well, we don't know that yet. I'm hoping, I'm betting,
we'll find out pretty soon . . . "
"But how can you control by thought?"
"The idea is simple, the mechanism is complex." He waited
a few moments while the subject hurriedly fought to control
his racing heartbeat.
"That's better," he said in his most soothing, uninflected
voice. "Here we go. Remember back to your physiology. The
human nervous system is composed of nerve cells, neurons.
The neurons carry information back and forth from receptor
nerves in the peripheral nervous system-nerves in the body in
general-to the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord.
The information carried through the nervous system is a series
of chemical and electrical discharges between neurons. If one
neuron is stimulated enough so that-its ionic balance is changed,
it releases a chemical into the synapse, the gap between neu-
rons, and that chemical stimulates another neuron."
"Like electricity flowing through a wire?"
"Well, some discharges are purely electrical, like when neu-
rons physically touch, but mostly the connection is chemical.
Anyway, this electrochemical and ionic activity can be de-
tected and read by electroencephalographs, which you've be-
come very familiar with the past weeks. " He would have
nodded if he could. -EEGs in the past could only measure
electrical activity-they couldn't analyze, decode that activity.
It was like the Plains Indians putting their ears up to a telegraph
pole, which they used to call the spirit trees, by the way. They
could hear the telegraph clicks and tell that something was hap-
DAY OF THE CHEETAH 39
pening, but they couldn't decipher the clicks or tell which di-
rection the clicks were coming from, and of course, they didn't
know how it was being done, just as we are ignorant about so
many things in the nervous system. Sure, lots of clicks usually
meant the army was coming, but that was about all. Ditto for
us twentieth-century wizards."
Carmichael paused to ad ust his oscilloscope. "Well, a few
years ago we built an EEG i that could read the spirit tree. You
could lift a finger or hand and this EEG could tell a researcher
that you lifted a finger. And the opposite was true, too-when
you generated a thought command to lift your hand, that im-
pulse could be detected and read-in effect, we could read your
mind.
"Of course, the military got their mitts on the system right
away. The new-style EEG, nicknamed Spirit Tree-hey, I'm
famous-was the ultimate lie detector. But there was much
more potential in Spirit Tree than use as a glorified polygraph.
We already knew the general path of nerves and which areas
of the brain corresponded to certain thoughts or activities-that
all came about during Nazi Germany's infamous lab experi-
ments on human guinea pigs, when they would surgically re-
move parts of a prisoner's brain and see what the victim could
no longer do. The new idea was, if we could now r
ead the
information flowing through the system, was there a way we
could interject outside or foreign stimuli into the nervous sys-
tem? Instead of receptors in, say, the fingers generating the
initial sensory impulse, could we send information from a com-
puter into the system and read how the brain reacted to it? And
could the opposite be true-could we think about, say, moving
a finger, and have a computer read that nervous instruction and
execute the command electronically?"
The more James heard, the more excited he became, though
now it was an intellectual response and his signs stayed re-
laxed. A computer issuing instructions to a human via his own
nervous system . . . a computer reading the human nervous
system ... For a while he thought his time might better be spent
making drawings or photographs of the F-15 Advanced Tacti-
cal Fighter named Cheetah. But now . . . well, the Academy
hadn't imagined anything like this when they sent him to
America. Of course nobody could have . . .
"Got all that?" Carmichael asked.
40 DALE BROWN
"I think so ... You're going to try to read my mind with
this ... whatever it is
"But how strong are those electrochemical discharges across
the synapse? Don't you have to clip some electrodes onto my
skull?
"In the past that's how EEGs were done. Every human body
has a basic electrical potential, an electrical aura, so to speak,
and that potential is affected by the central nervous system.
Simple electrodes could read the tiny impulses generated by
the brain and nervous system. But those electrodes couldn't
measure anything except the change in electrical potential .
"Like the telegraph clicks . . . "
"Exactly. But now we have two new technologies that
have improved our ability to read those electrical impulses-
very high-speed integrated circuits and NRTS, near-room-
temperature superconductors.
"Your helmet and that large device on your spine are huge
superconducting antennae. They're so powerful they not only
can measure your nervous activity, they can read it, analyze it
and map its direction as the impulses move around your pe-
ripheral nervous system. And as they do, the computer issues
instructions to the other large device you're wearing-that
metallic flight suit. Actually, the suit is an integrated circuit
that records the route each and every nervous impulse takes
and studies it. After repetitions of the route the artificial-
intelligence computer actually learns the route and proper
timing and intervals between a certain set of impulses from
certain areas of the central nervous system."
This project did sound remarkable, but it also appeared to
involve a long period of passive training. Maraklov preferred
action. Could he sustain the process . . . ? "You're going to
map out every muscle twitch, every movement, every breath I
take . . . ?"
if "To the contrary," Carmichael said. "We'd be overloaded
we tried to record every muscle twitch, just as your question
implies-so the idea is, we don't want you to twitch any mus-
cles. We don't want mere muscular activity to show up. We
don't need it-once we map out your peripheral nervous activ-
ity, we'll know what impulses are necessary to move things
like muscles.
DAY OF THE CHEETAH 41
"So we need you totally re axed, imp, deeper than re-
laxed-we need you as detached as you can be from your phys-
ical body. We practiced biofeedback techniques before to get
you to what we call, for lack of a better term, alpha state-it
simply means the propagation of alpha brain waves and the
suppression of beta waves, the latter activity indicating con-
scious brain activity. But alpha state has many levels-nine
known ones, to be exact. You've reached perhaps the'second
or third level, where you can totally relax both smooth and
ridged muscle and even exert control over certain autonomous
functions such as heart rate, respiration and blood pressure.
That's fine-but we need more."
Carmichael's voice became even deeper, even more steady.
There was no hint of tension, no emotional cues, no inflec-
tion. Somehow he had even managed to cut out most of the
background noise in the laboratory-or was that part of the
hypnotic state the subject knew he was slipping into?
"There's a level of activity called theta-alpha," the voice
continued, so melodic and penetrating that it seemed to bypass
his eardrums and enter directly into his brain . . . "Theta-alpha.
It's a stage where the central nervous system in effect cuts out
the peripheral nervous system. In higher life forms it's a de-
fense mechanism, a way to protect the central nervous system
from sensory overload.
"Without any peripheral functions to control, the brain ex-
pands its powers. 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 new seventy percent has the mem-
ory and computational power of all the computers in this build-
ing, packed into a ten-pound package that needs no power, no
puter built by humans, it's programmable and erasable, with
its own built-in operating system."
James was finding it progressively harder to concentrate.
When he tried to speak he couldn't make his jaw work. It felt
as if he was asleep, but in that weird half-in, half-out state of
sleep where you could hear and feel everything around you but
were still deeply resting. His body felt very warrn, but not
sweaty or cocooned any more. The oxygen being fed into the
42 DALE BROWN
face mask was cool and soothing as it streamed into his lungs.
It was as if his body were somewhere else, as if he was de-
tached ...
Suddenly, he felt his whole body burst into flame. Every
pore, every cell, every molecule of his body spit red-hot lava.
He jerked out of his semi-sleep state and screamed.
"Easy, Ken, easy," Carmichael said. Pure oxygen flooded
his face mask. The visors on his helmet opened, and Carmi-
chael and a medical technician peered inside to check his bulg-
ing eyes.
"What . . . what was that?"
"It worked," Carmichael said. He nodded to the med tech,
and they both disappeared out of view. Ken tried to move his
head but found it still securely fastened in place.
"Get me out of here-"
"No, Ken, relax," Carmichael was saying. The room noise
seemed louder than-ever. Ken rolled his eyes, trying to blot
out the hammering in his head. "Everything's fine. Relax, re-
lax . . . "
"I felt like . . . like I was-"
"Shocked. Electrocuted," Carmichael fini
shed for him.
"You did it, Ken."
"Did what, dammit?"
"You entered theta-alpha. The final stage of alpha state.
You were so relaxed, relaxed in such a deep neurological sense,
that your mind opened up to its maximum capacity."
"So what was that shock-electrocution, you said . . . ?"
"ANTARES. The system detects when you enter theta-alpha
and begins the process of integration. The shock you felt was
the Activation of the ANTARES system-it was the first time,
Ken, the very first time, so far as we know, that a computer
and the human mind have been linked, even if it was only for
a split second. You've made some history, my friend. Decem-
ber third, in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-four, at
seven-thirty-eight A., a human mind and a computer were
linked-not merely in contact, but linked-for the first time."
"Forget history, Carmichael. I asked you what that shock
was. "
"Yes, well to facilitate the tracing of your neural impulses,
we created a slight electrical field of our own through your
suit. We charged the suit with a tiny electrical-"
DAY OF THE CHEETAH 43
"Tiny? You call that tiny? I felt like I was frying!"
"Milliamperes, I assure you," Carmichael replied jovially.
"About the same as a nine-volt toy battery. It does no per-
manent damage that we can detect-"
"That's real reassuring, Doc."
"You're experiencing the same irritation that anyone feels
when violently awakened from REM sleep," Carmichael said.
"Try to relax. We'd like to try for another interface."
"So you can shock me like some chimpanzee?" There was
a limit.
"Ken, we're on the threshold." Carmichael had turned on
the microphone again and had closed the visors. "We've
proven that our system works, that our equipment can respond
to a specific and up to now unexplored neurological state. If
we can complete the interface we may actually be able to
establish communications between a machine and the human
mind. I don't mean to sound overly melodramatic, but this is
at least comparable as a scientific breakthrough to the discov-