Ethan turned for the door.
‘What’s waiting for us downstairs?’ Lopez asked.
‘You’re going to have to see and hear that for yourselves to believe it,’ Jarvis said.
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.’