Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(55)
It was time to figure out where she was, how she’d gotten here, and how she was going to get herself, Mark, and Heather out. A coldness, like ice on an arctic trawler, crept over Jennifer Smythe.
Jennifer clenched her jaw. One thing was certain. These people had no idea whom the hell they were screwing with.
She opened her eyes, her gaze coming to rest on Eric Frost, the NSA employee whose twisting fingers controlled the heroin drip line.
Frost found his latest duty boring at best, slightly disturbing at worst. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done his share of black ops, but hooking a teenage girl on drugs didn’t seem like something he would be spotlighting on his résumé.
Then she moved unexpectedly, her head turning toward him. His eyes widened in surprise as he felt his body tense. As he stared down at the suddenly smiling girl, he felt a sense of gentle peace envelop his soul.
“That’s right, Eric. No use fighting it. Now you’re mine,” she said.
And she was right.
Heather felt the nudge in her mind, light as a feather, distant as Andromeda. Jennifer.
As startling as the idea was, Jennifer was attempting to initiate a direct mind link. Heather knew they’d achieved versions of that link before, but those occurrences had been random or at times of intense stress, and, as far as she knew, always initiated by her own subconscious mind. But this was different. Jennifer was attempting something they’d never been able to manage without the alien headsets: a consciously directed mind link.
“Heather, are you listening to me?”
Dr. Jacobs scooted his chair closer to her bed. True to his word, she was no longer restrained. And in return she had feigned grudging cooperation with Jacobs’s probes of her sanity. The man had access to her medical records, had discussed her case with Dr. Sigmund. He thought her deeply psychotic and Heather had done nothing to disabuse him of that notion.
“Heather?”
Since he was expecting to induce a psychotic episode, Heather found this a convenient moment to oblige him. Directing the full power of her mind at helping Jennifer complete the mind link, Heather went deep, leaving only the whites of her eyes staring sightlessly, right through Dr. Jacobs.
Jennifer’s nearby mind groped for hers like a mole, unable to see her, but having caught her scent. And now Heather had hers: not a true smell, but like a smell, difficult to follow.
Heather had often thought about how their minds telepathically linked through the alien headsets. If it hadn’t been for those rare occurrences when she’d somehow managed to share her thoughts with Mark and Jennifer without the headsets, she could have convinced herself such contact was only possible via their common connection to the Bandolier Ship’s computer.
So how had her mind managed to achieve those direct links?
Jennifer’s abilities to achieve empathic links to other people were impressive. But that was child’s play compared to the complexity of a complete mind link. Now Jen was close to figuring it out. As with a fuzzy radio station that she hadn’t tuned to quite the right frequency, Heather knew Jen was there, but that was about it.
Sudden insight flashed through her. Frequency! Heather reviewed what she knew about the changes the Bandolier Ship had wrought in their brains. The human brain held over a hundred billion neurons, each with thousands of synaptic connections to other neurons, hundreds of trillions of synapses involved in the massively parallel chemical and electrical operations that gave the human mind its power.
The difference between the way Heather’s, Mark’s, and Jennifer’s brains functioned and the way the average person’s did had little to do with the number of synapses in use. It was the way their functions were timed and coordinated into one synchronized whole. That tightly coordinated signal timing allowed their brains to function as a phased array.
Heather had first heard of phased array radars in middle school while studying the first Gulf War. The US had deployed Patriot missile batteries to protect key assets in Saudi Arabia and Israel; at the heart of each missile battery was a flat phased array radar that painted the sky in front of it with a powerful pencil beam of radar energy, steering the beam back and forth across the sky many times per second. She’d been fascinated by the fact the beam could be directed at so many different spots so quickly without any moving parts in the radar.
It all worked by timing the energy output from thousands of radar emitters spread across the radar surface. If you turned on all the emitters at once, the energy went straight out. By precisely controlling the pattern and timing of each emitter, the radar created a focused beam that could be rapidly and precisely directed. The principle worked for directed communications signals or for any application in which directed energy was required.
What kind of signal processing efficiency could be achieved with a phased array formed from hundreds of trillions of emitters and receivers? Good enough to relay signals to other parts of the same brain without the delay of traversing the intervening neural pathways. And if it could do that, it should be able to accomplish similar signal communication to another’s brain.
A surge of adrenaline flooded Heather as she zoomed in on the answer. There were still a number of problems associated with establishing that sort of communication link. First, every brain was different. That implied that targeting of the brain’s phased array was just part of the problem. You would also have to identify the frequency and pattern of the other person’s receptor array.