‘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.