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.
How had that happened automatically when she’d been under heavy stress? When the Rag Man had grabbed her, she hadn’t been aware of exactly where Mark and Jennifer were. With the tiny signal strengths generated by the human brain, the signal would have to be tightly focused and precisely directed to avoid the inverse-radius-squared loss associated with spherical waves.
Apparently her brain had produced a rapidly scanning pencil beam that had first located Mark and Jennifer and then, given that information, had identified the appropriate communication patterns and frequencies that their brains accepted.
Again she felt the rush of near discovery. She was so close to the answer she could taste it and, with rising anticipation, she felt herself crawl ever deeper into her savant trance.
Dr. Jacobs glanced at his watch as he spoke into the digital recorder.
“Subject entered fugue state at oh-nine-eighteen hours and has remained quasi-comatose for the last thirty-two minutes. At oh-nine-forty-seven, subject’s vitals began exhibiting significant fluctuations. Heart rate and blood pressure are up, although well within the expected range for a person in an agitated state. EEG readings correspond to the unusual results catalogued by Dr. Sigmund during her Los Alamos observations.”
He clicked off the recorder and returned his attention to Heather McFarland. As he stared down into that beautiful face with those strange, milky eyes staring right through him, thin lines of concentration furrowed her brow. Dr. Jacobs thought he detected the leading edge of a smile caress her lips.
Starting first on his arms and legs, gooseflesh tightened, raising the fine hairs to attention, spreading rapidly up the back of his neck to his scalp. As he stared down at this young woman, Dr. Jacobs felt the strength leach from his legs, forcing him to grab the instrument table for support. And though his mind rebelled at the notion, he suddenly found himself more frightened of this girl than of anything he’d ever experienced.