The Identity Mine

VII

‘We’ve got something.’

Ethan looked up from where he and Lopez were searching through traffic camera footage from around Fort Benning, hoping to detect vehicle movements that would coincide with General Thompson’s suicidal rampage.

‘What is it?’ Ethan asked Hellerman as he hurried over.

Hellerman was holding a flash — RAM drive that he plugged straight into a nearby laptop, accessing a series of files as he spoke.

‘Traffic camera footage from Columbus, Georgia. We managed to pick up General Thompson’s drive to Fort Benning on the morning of his death. He left real early out of Parkwood, his family home, so we spotted him easily.’

Ethan watched with Lopez as a series of stills appeared on the screen, each depicting the general’s champagne — colored sedan making its way south out of Parkwood toward Fort Benning. It didn’t take long for them to figure out what Hellerman had seen.

‘There’s a goods vehicle in all of the shots,’ Lopez identified it.

A white van, non — descript, travelling in the same direction as the general’s vehicle all the way to Fort Benning. Ethan leaned close to the screen, but the poor resolution prevented an identification of the license plates or the occupants.

‘We already found the vehicle though,’ Hellerman informed them. ‘Local law enforcement found it burned out near a town called Preston, fifty miles south of Fort Benning. The vehicle had been stolen forty eight hours before in Alabama.’

Ethan frowned thoughtfully.

‘That was a dumb move. The smart play is to simply abandon a vehicle, not burn it and advertise its presence to law enforcement. They could have driven it into deep woodland and it wouldn’t have been found for months.’

‘What’re you thinking?’ Lopez asked him.

‘Professional, high — tech equipment used to reprogram a senior soldier’s brain to commit an act of mass homicide, and yet the perps’ are too dumb to conceal their vehicle? That smacks to me of hired help of some kind. Either our perps are not real smart and got somebody else to do their technical work for them, or they’re very clever but are entrusting the actual trigger — pulling to local thugs.’

‘It figures,’ Hellerman said. ‘The labs still haven’t finished working on the implant device yet but they all agree that it’s state of the art, literally. They haven’t seen anything so advanced in their careers to date, and believe me they’ve seen some stuff you just wouldn’t believe.’

‘So have we,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Project Watchman, for instance. Maybe we could use that to check these guys out and find out where they went after they dumped the van?’

Ethan looked at Hellerman expectantly. He and Lopez had learned of Project Watchman during a previous investigation into a man who had apparently been able to see into the future. Desperate to get ahead of their quarry, Jarvis had enlisted the help of NASA and revealed Watchman, a program that enlisted spy satellites to record events on the continental United States in unprecedented detail from multiple angles, and compile the resulting data into a virtual world through which investigators could walk. Despite its flaws, Watchman could have revolutionized criminal investigations, but it was Jarvis who shattered the hope of using Watchman on the case.

‘Watchman was deactivated last year,’ he told them as he entered the room. ‘Too high a risk of congressional investigations of human rights breaches by the National Reconnaissance Office. The Director of the NRO didn’t want Congress knowing anything about our current spying capacity and seeing it spread across every news outlet in the western world.’

Ethan rubbed his temples.

‘So we’ve got the tech’ but we can’t use it?’

‘Afraid so,’ Jarvis confirmed, ‘welcome to a world where terrorist mass — murderers have human rights but their victims don’t.’

Ethan shook his head and stared at the laptop screen for a moment as he tried to think of some other way to pinpoint the perpetrator’s movements and pin them down.

‘What do we have in the arsenal already that uses a similar technology to what we’re seeing here? Is there anything that might point us toward a likely origin of this sort of technology?’

Hellerman gestured to the screen.

‘A white van doesn’t tell us anything about who’s behind this, but it’s fair to say that the technology has existed within the military for some time. Even today, you can go on — line and buy a brain — controlled toy helicopter that you fly with the power of your mind.’

‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked.

‘Sure, they’re not even that expensive,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The medical industry has spent decades developing prosthetics for amputees, but while legs have come on in leaps and bounds, pardon the pun, arms and grasping hands have been a major stumbling point.’

‘You’re a comic genius,’ Lopez smiled at Hellerman, ‘and you don’t even know it.’

‘It’s a gift,’ he replied, embarrassed. ‘The point is that having a chunk of plastic powered by servos stuck to your shoulder wasn’t working for the recipients, and so research in brain function resulted in the creation of prosthetics that actually connect to the brain itself via existing muscles, tendons and by extension neural networks, allowing the brain to control the prosthetic limb directly. If I recall correctly, a man named Igor Spetic was the first recipient to receive one of these radical new prosthetic arms and the effects were spectacular. The phantom limb pain he had experienced for years from his missing arm vanished, and when a researcher brushed the back of his prosthetic arm with one hand, Spetic felt his arm hairs rising in response to the touch.’

‘How is that even possible?’ Ethan asked.

‘The doctors attached electrode cuffs to the arm and then attached those to the nerves that remained in the recipient’s upper arm. Not only could he feel the touch, he could tell what it was that was touching him. Having the prosthetic directly attached to the skeleton and neuromuscular system, by means of what has been termed osseointegration, completely alters the wearer’s perception of their prosthetic and in some cases they forget it’s a replacement limb at all.’

‘It’s amazing, sure, but what’s this got to do with General Thompson?’

Hellerman gestured to the screen and the image of the white van.

‘I’ve been thinking about what happened to the general and of how anybody could control a human being so precisely. I mean, they couldn’t just type in a command to a keyboard like: “kill yourself”, and expect the recipient of the command to then turn a pistol to their own head. It involves too many competing neural pathways, too much to get in the way, too many things that could go wrong.’

‘So, what then?’ Ethan asked. ‘You think that somebody in that van was sitting their talking Thompson through killing dozens of people?’

‘No,’ Hellerman said. ‘I think that they were using the power of their own mind to send signals to the implant in Thompson’s brain. I don’t think that they were directing him at all — I think that they’d taken over his thoughts, that they’d literally hacked his brain.’

A moment of silence enveloped the room in the wake of Hellerman’s statement.

‘Hacked his brain,’ Lopez echoed. ‘How could anybody make an otherwise sane person commit such awful acts without stopping themselves?’

Hellerman got up from his seat and hurried across to a pile of journals stacked in an unsteady pile in the corner of his office. He fumbled through them for a moment, muttering as he went.

‘There is a process known as transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS for short, that’s become something of a phenomenon in recent years. There are freely available plans on — line directing people how to build these things, which mimic actual medical equipment, and attach them to their heads.’

‘What the hell for?’ Ethan asked.

‘Ah, here we go,’ Hellerman announced triumphantly as he produced a journal and flicked it open to a relevant page. ‘TDCS is the direct application of electrical current to the brain in order to induce an altered state that enhances cognition, motor control and memory in order to manage chronic pain and motor, sensory and neurological disorders.’

Lopez frowned as she glanced at the page Hellerman was showing him. ‘People are zapping their own brains for fun these days?’

‘The currents are tiny compared to those used in electroconvulsive therapy,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The devices apply current for ten to twenty minutes and the results have been extremely encouraging. The theory behind it all is that a weak direct current alters the electric potential of nerve membranes within the brain, which is said to make it easier for neurons to fire. There have been reports that tDCS can reduce pain and depression, repair stroke damage and improve recovery rates from brain injuries, as well as improving memory, reasoning and fluency. And it’s not a temporary thing — those improvements persist for days and even months.’

‘And you think that this technology also applies to what happened to General Thompson?’ Ethan pressed.

‘Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina managed to link the brains of two rats together and showed that signals from one rat’s brain could help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve. The rats were in different cages with no way to communicate other than through electrodes implanted in their brains. The transfer of information even worked when one rat was in a lab in North Carolina and another was in a lab in Brazil.’

‘So as long as a signal was available and able to get through,’ Jarvis said, ‘one person could technically control another person’s brain from afar with nothing more than the power of thought?’

‘Precisely,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘Brain hacking, or using electrical stimulation to control a person’s movements or medical conditions, has been used for a long time and so signal control is only a modern version of the same principal. Scribonius Largus, a Roman physician who lived in the first century, prescribed the electric ray shock as a cure for headaches, and nineteenth century pioneers like Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani created bioelectric experiments with similar aims in mind. With today’s technology it’s potentially possible that a person could be completely remotely controlled from a distance, given the right conditions.’

Ethan leaned back against one wall of the office as he rolled what Hellerman had said through his mind. Thompson had committed a terrible atrocity, completely at odds with his character, before taking his own life. But Thompson had also been known as an extremely strong character, not somebody who would easily bend to wayward electrical impulses firing through his brain.

‘Could they really have controlled somebody like Thompson in such a way? Wouldn’t a four — star general have been able to mentally fight back?’

‘That depends on what his mental state was like at the time,’ Hellerman countered. ‘Remember, the implant we found could have been capable of altering his mental state too. If he felt as though he were in a dream of some kind, barely conscious, then he may not have had any awareness at all of his situation. That’s what this tDCS represents, the ability to directly affect not just mental state but actual cognition through electrical stimulation of certain brain regions. If this technology is good enough then one human being could come under the control of another human being and be completely powerless to oppose their commands not through a lack of will, but through a lack of awareness that they’ve been hacked at all. Like I said earlier, they may have felt as though they were asleep and may not have had any recollection of their actions at all.’

Ethan looked at the image on the screen for a moment longer and then at Jarvis, who was leaning against another wall and listening to the conversation.

‘We can’t track these people down,’ he said, somewhat alarmed. ‘We don’t have a damned thing to go on and they could be out of the country by now.’

‘We need more signals data,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘And for that, we’ll need…’

‘Another attack,’ Lopez finished the sentence. ‘Damn, we really don’t know who or where they’re going to strike next?’

‘We’re blind,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘Just like their victims we don’t know anything about the next target. Our country is facing lone wolf terrorist attacks where even the wolves don’t know they’re the enemy.’

‘All we have is General Thompson’s medical history,’ Ethan said. ‘He was targeted somewhere by somebody. We need to know how that implant got into his head.’