Nerve Center

The dark night surrounding him grew even blacker. The rain fell more strongly, began to pound. A low peal of thunder heralded an intense outburst; more thunder, more, and then a fierce flash of lightning.

Kevin Madrone felt his brain fold open and his body catch fire; he exploded into the forest and the storm, becoming the rain, becoming the thunder, becoming the flame that flashed at the center of the universe.

I’m in.

Most of the other successful subjects described reaching Theta as something like a rusty nail slicing through their skull, followed by the rush of a roller coaster heading downhill. The sensation of pain had been a constant for all the subjects, nearly all of whom said it progressed incredibly as they moved beyond the Stage Two experiments, which involved simple manipulation of a sequence of lights. Stage Three involved manipulating a series of switches; Stage Four called for interpreting data from the interface unit. Most of the test subjects who managed to reach Theta washed out in those stages, never reaching Five, which called for controlling an aircraft simulator, much less Stage Six, which was actual flight.

But Madrone felt no pain on reaching Theta; it was all rush. He went from the Stage One tests to Stage Three on his second day. He was ready for the primitive simulator sequences the next afternoon; that afternoon, he told Geraldo he wanted to work with C3, the Flighthawk controller. When she told him the programming updates needed for the gateway link between ANTARES and C3 hadn’t been completed, Madrone suggested he could help by working with the gear.

Overjoyed at their unprecedented progress, Geraldo called in the scientist working on the gateway software—Je

Three days later, he was ready to fly for real. They moved to the Flighthawk command bunker, where with Zen as a backup, he got ready for a ground takeoff.

The plane nearly broke him in half.

He’d spent the night before chanting the procedure for takeoff and the flight plan, committing it all to memory—military thrust, brakes off, roll, speed to 130 indicated, back on the stick, maintain power, climb, clear gear, alpha to eight, 250 knots, indicator check, level flight at bearing 136, orbit twice. Walking into Bunker B that morning, he felt confident, as sure of himself as he had ever been. Someone asked him if he wanted a cigarette and he laughed. Someone else—Zen—remarked that he’d gained weight. Kevin nodded confidently, ready to nail this sucker down.

But in the control chair, full ANTARES flight helmet strapped on, sweat oozed upward from his spine to his neck. As he practiced changing the visor image from the forward video feed to the synthetic IR view, a fist grew inside his brain, knotting the inside of his head and then punching the top of his skull. Bile rose in his throat and he screamed—red and purple flares flew across his eyes, and then blackness as he lost the link.

They tried again. Nearly the same thing happened, this time even quicker. Kevin fought to hold the link. A spear of ice pounded into his ear, tearing a hole in his skull as he held on. He tried pushing the ice away, but couldn’t reach it. Then he tried closing the hole. He went out of Theta and lost the link.

The rest of them wanted to take a break. Madrone said no. He’d already flown the plane on the simulator, and knew this was merely a kind of performance anxiety, the sort of thing that might happen to a star second baseman who thought too much about the throw to first. To get into Theta, he had to relax and let the process take over, walk blindly into the night.

And to fly the plane, he had to let the computer take over, let the data come to him—not as thoughts exactly, more as waves of feeling, the kind of thing you felt as you rode a bicycle into the wind on a mountain road. The computer knew how to fly—the key to ANTARES was to accept the knowledge the computer gave him, to learn to trust what seemed to his mind instincts. For when he was in Theta, the computer’s knowledge became his instincts.

They began again. He warmed his head as soon as the jungle appeared, pulling the sun through the trees around him. The Flighthawk came to him gently, pulling itself over his consciousness like a warm mitten over a cold hand. He took his hand off the control stick and closed his eyes.

The image from the visor screen stayed in his brain, projected there by C3, working through ANTARES. As he relaxed, he realized he could see much more in his head than with the visor—with the computer’s help, he could see the video, IR, and radar-enhanced views simultaneously, three-dimensional overlays around his head. Seeing wasn’t the right word—it was more like a new sense that had sprung into his mind.

To fly, he had only to release himself from the ground. The U/MF lifted off the runway perfectly. For the next three hours, he learned to fly for real.

Zen coached him through the com co

He knew how to fly. He knew everything in the computer’s extensive library. C3 was part of him, his arms and legs. He became oblivious to the image in the control helmet; it was redundant. He didn’t bother to use the complicated joystick controls—thought was so much faster.

They went from one plane to two planes on the third day. The day after that, they boarded Hawkmother—a specially modified 777 that housed ANTARES and C3—and air-launched two U/MFs. The only thing that took some getting used to was the sensation of the plane he was sitting in. It felt unsettling to bank sharply while he was controlling the Flighthawks in level flight. Zen had laughed when he told him about that later—after months of flying the Flighthawks from the belly of an EB-52, Stockard told him, he still couldn’t get used to that.

That made Kevin determined to beat it. By the third drop on the second day of trials, he had.

He amazed everyone with his progress. To Kevin, it seemed no more difficult than moving through the levels of a video game. He had merely to relax and feel the cues of the computer. And then he let his mind run, flying into the wide blueness. It made him hungry, it made him want to grow.

Geraldo had asked him yesterday if when he entered Theta he felt as if he’d become a Greek god. He’d laughed and said no. He couldn’t describe exactly what it felt like—as if he walked onto the threshold of a different kind of existence. Thoughts felt different, more like the sensation that accompanied tasting exotic food for the first time. His appetite grew every moment; once in Theta, he needed to explore more, to see and feel as far beyond himself as possible. Flying the U/ MFs, he felt, was merely a metaphor, a device he used to interpret the world. ANTARES demanded, and provoked, new metaphors—the rain forest, which had become the way he entered Theta; the world itself, a dark mass beyond his center core demanding to be explored.