The Identity Mine

V

‘Hellerman!’

Jarvis led the way into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Research and Intelligence Engineering Section, known as ARIES, allowing Ethan his first glimpse in a long time at one of the most secretive departments in the US defense arsenal.

Created to support to the work of other agencies such as the NSA, CIA and DARPA, ARIES was specifically tasked with emulating the technology of other nations that had been uncovered by overt overseas operations, for the purpose of finding effective defenses against those technologies. In a world where cyber — warfare was becoming more widespread with each passing year, with foreign hackers accessing everything from the computers of major film studios to even the Pentagon and other defense installations, the risk of exposure and manipulation of sensitive material and equipment had never been higher.

Hellerman was a short, bearded and bespectacled operative who had long been Jarvis’s right hand man at the agency. He hurried over, his cheerful demeanor infectious.

‘Hi guys,’ he beamed, and then at Lopez. ‘Ma’am.’

Unusually Lopez, more than used to fending off the attentions of men, fawned over Hellerman and hugged him tightly.

‘What’s up, brainbox?’ she asked.

Hellerman, his cheeks flushed with color as Lopez pulled away and a slightly vacant glaze over his eyes, blinked and beamed again.

‘Quite a lot, actually. Has Doug brought you up to speed?’

‘We know about the implant and what it does,’ Ethan said as he shook the scientist’s hand. ‘But we don’t know the how.’

‘Then step this way,’ Hellerman said as he guided them through the laboratory.

Although not quite the marvel of technological fecundity seen in a Bond movie, it was hard not to draw comparisons to Q’s infamous contraptions. Ethan could see scientists experimenting on numerous highly classified objects, including body armor woven from spider web silk and what looked like a self — reassembling, shatter — proof window.

‘It’s a window made from a temperature sensitive fluid contained within a silicon film,’ Hellerman explained as they passed by the sealed lab. ‘When a bullet strikes the window, the heat released by the impact causes the fluid within the film, which is solid at room temperature, to melt and stretch. The heat from the impact is dissipated through the fluid, the fluid begins to solidify, and the bullet is captured in mid — flight and contained by the surrounding film. It all happens in milliseconds, of course. It’s a nifty way of protecting the interiors of vehicles and identifying the offending bullet’s origin and direction of travel all at once.’

Hellerman led them to a busy little office in one corner of the lab and gestured to something on his desk.

‘Check this out,’ he said as he reached for a small black box with a dial and a couple of switches mounted upon it.

Ethan saw Hellerman activate a switch and then he flinched as from Hellerman’s desk a large bee suddenly lifted off, its wings buzzing loudly in the small office.

‘Jesus,’ Lopez uttered as she stepped clear of the bee, ‘how did that get in here?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Hellerman said cheerfully. ‘It’s entirely under my control.’

Ethan watched in amazement as Hellerman guided the bee around the periphery of the office using the control box, speaking as he did so.

‘The guys at DARPA have been working on creating miniature synthetic drones for decades, mostly copying from nature itself and funding civilian programs to assist them. Some bright spark at the University of California, I’d like to think a guy a bit like me, had the idea of simply attaching their control system to a live bee instead of trying to build replica creatures.’

‘Genius,’ Lopez mumbled as she ducked to avoid the buzzing insect. ‘They’re going to sting our enemies to death? How does it work?’

‘The bee has a small rig glued to its belly that contains a microchip, which itself connects to the insect’s brain and flight muscles. Then, we control it via a laptop computer and this remote unit. Engineers at a place called the Center for Robot Assisted Search And Rescue, at Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Center, are developing these little guys to help complex search and rescue missions and disaster relief, flying them into danger zones or small cavities in collapsed buildings to look for survivors.’

‘What happens if the bee gets too tired?’ Lopez asked.

‘Ah,’ Hellerman said, ‘they stop flying, but we can monitor their wing beats and if performance starts to degrade then we simply fly them out of the danger zone and across to one of these advanced devices.’

Ethan watched as the bee hovered over Hellerman’s desk and landed gently alongside a large spoon filled with a clear fluid.

‘Sugar water,’ Hellerman announced, ‘the world’s cheapest fuel. The bee takes a drink and is soon ready to get back into action.’

Lopez watched the bee suspiciously as she spoke. ‘It’s not exactly a stealth bomber though is it, and the technology is not complex enough to control a fully grown man?’

‘No,’ Hellerman admitted, ‘but this is a simpler program that’s not a part of DARPA’s Black Budget research. That stuff really is top of the line.’

Ethan knew that the US Government’s Black Budget was a vast sum of money annually presented to the defense community for development programs so secret that even Congress was not informed of their purpose or content.

‘You think that somewhere in the Black Budget there might be an answer to what happened to General Thompson?’ Ethan asked.

‘For obvious reasons we don’t know much about what happens deep within DARPA’s most classified projects,’ Jarvis replied for Hellerman as he joined them in the office, ‘but I do know that DARPA runs a program called Robotic Challenge, and that recently a robot named ATLAS that was part of the program “went dark”. It was also being developed as part of programs inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, creating an ability to send machines into areas that would be hazardous to human beings, but I’ve heard rumors that ATLAS is now being militarized into the world’s first fully combat — capable robot. A Terminator, effectively.’

‘General Thompson wasn’t a robot,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Could somebody have figured out a way of doing to him what you’re doing to that bee?’

‘It’s a question of complexity,’ Hellerman said. ‘There’s a company in the US that’s selling something called RoboRoach, which is the first commercially available kit that allows people to remotely control a cockroach. There’s an uproar at the moment about the ethics of all this, but official programs have developed various insect drones. A species of beetle named Mecynorrhina torquata has been controlled using pulses directed to the insect’s optic lobes, with batteries harvesting energy from the insect’s own movements to power the pulses. Something closer to a human application involves Dogfish sharks that have had electrodes implanted into their brains which were then used to control their movements, with an aim to using them as underwater research vessels or for seeking out mines in hazardous waters. Even birds have been controlled, with researchers at Shandong University of Science and Technology in China implanting micro — electrodes into a pigeon’s brain and flying it at will. Again, much furor among animals rights’ groups over such research.’

‘But wouldn’t anybody controlled in such a way just shout out that they were being manipulated?’ Ethan asked. ‘A pigeon or shark can’t protest what’s being done to them, but General Thompson certainly would have done had he been able to do so.’

Hellerman gestured to an image pinned to the wall of his office that depicted a human brain via a CAT scan of some kind, the various regions of the brain highlighted.

‘According to the autopsy report, the artifact was removed from General Thompson’s brain and had originally penetrated the frontal lobes, one of four main lobes in human brains and those of all mammals. The precentral gyrus, which is located near the rearmost border of the frontal lobe, contains the primary motor cortex which controls the voluntary movements of our various body parts. However, it also contains the dopamine sensitive neurons of the cerebral cortex which are associated with reward, short term memory, planning, motivation and attention.’ Hellerman tapped the image of the frontal lobes with one finger. ‘If you can control this region of the brain sufficiently, stimulating the dopamine sensitive regions while at the same time controlling the victim’s motor cortex, then you won’t have to worry about them crying foul when they open fire on their own family because they’ll be smiling and dreaming while they’re doing it.’ Hellerman shrugged. ‘They may even be asleep.’

‘Asleep?’ Lopez asked.

‘It’s quite common for people to conduct quite complex tasks while effectively being alseep,’ Hellerman explained. ‘Have you ever driven along a stretch of road for a prolonged period of time and then suddenly wondered what happened over the last ten minutes?’

‘Occasionally,’ Ethan admitted.

‘Then you were in some respects asleep,’ Hellerman replied, ‘driving on autopilot. The processes involved were so natural and instinctive to you that your brain did not need to be fully involved and so it began to quieten down. I know that now and again I’ve been dreaming while behind the wheel and still watching the road in front of me at the same time. I’m not going to admit that to a police officer, but we all know that it’s happened once or twice. If the people that developed the device that was found in General Thompson’s brain had perfected a means of keeping their victims in a pliant state while controlling their actions, then they could have created the perfect assassin: an individual with access to anywhere, who could be controlled from afar and would raise no suspicions. Can you imagine what could be done with such individuals? Area 51 workers could be sent into Groom Lake to find the aliens, or Wall Street financiers used to get the lowdown on the latest stock market developments, or senior government figures used to get into the Pentagon to gather state secrets.’ Hellerman became somewhat sobered. ‘Or scientists to sabotage nuclear facilities and create Hell on earth.’

Ethan peered at the image of the human brain and then looked down at the bee on the desk, still sipping from the sugar water.

‘That’s our clue,’ he said finally.

Jarvis looked at Ethan. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They wouldn’t be able to infiltrate Area 51, or a nuclear facility,’ Ethan explained.

‘Why not?’ Lopez argued. ‘If they can control an individual long enough to get them into Fort Benning, they could do the same at the Pentagon or even the White House.’

‘It’s not about the control,’ Ethan said. ‘We need to look at all photo and video footage of the Fort Benning attack, because our real killers will be on it.’

‘General Thompson did the shooting,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘His killers could be anywhere within signal range, many miles away.’

‘No,’ Ethan countered. ‘All of these mind control programs have one thing in common. They control the body, even the brain to a point, but they do not control the eyes.’

Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘The hackers would need line of sight to control their victims.’

‘To see what they see,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘It’s possible they could attach micro — cameras to their victims.’ Ethan turned to Jarvis. ‘Have the lab people check out General Thompson’s uniform, see if there’s a concealed camera anywhere on it.’

Jarvis turned away as he reached for his cell phone and began dialing.

‘You think they’d have to be close to the victims to make this all work?’ Lopez asked.

‘Think about it,’ Ethan said. ‘You’ve got a senior official under your control and you walk them straight into the Pentagon. If you’re not inside the building with them then you’re effectively blind and cannot control your victim, you can’t see where they’re going.’

‘And they can’t be allowed any degree of autonomy,’ Hellerman agreed, ‘or they’d break free and cry for help.’

‘So they would need visual aids of some kind,’ Ethan went on, ‘either that, or they’d need further implants to see what the victim was seeing and further signals to relay that information to whoever was controlling the victim.’

Jarvis turned to Ethan.

‘They found nothing,’ he reported. ‘General Thompson was in the open when he killed the recruits at Fort Benning, but he killed his family as they slept in their beds.’

Ethan frowned. ‘Then how could his controllers see what he was doing?’

‘Whoever did this, they’re already in the country and they’ll have more victims lined up because the technology must already be in place,’ Jarvis said. ‘I don’t think that General Thompson’s rampage was the main act. I think it was a test run.’

‘Test run for what?’ Hellerman asked.

‘Something bigger,’ Lopez realized. ‘Much bigger.’