Psinapse Read online

  Chapter One - Sensory Shutdown

  Chapter Two - Soldering On

  Chapter Three - Pixel People

  Chapter Four - Sinking Ship

  Chapter Five - Night Caller

  Chapter Six - Home and Dry

  Chapter Seven - Identification

  Chapter Eight - Violation

  Chapter Nine - Infiltration

  Chapter Ten - Look Around

  Chapter Eleven - Guesswork

  Chapter Twelve - Crashes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  * * *

  Sensory Shutdown

  "See? It's not doing your test pilot friend any good whatsoever. We've been trying everything we can, so far with minimal effect. There's been absolutely no change in his condition since you brought him to us." the consultant neurosurgeon affirmed with a note of impatience in his voice.

  "And that stuff's his last hope?" asked Sedgwick, himself rather hoping for something further.

  "Of course it is, you idiot!" snapped the accompanying MoD official. "Do you think the doctor would call us here, at the crack of dawn, if he wasn't absolutely critical?" His years had made him an impatient man, someone who never suffered fools gladly; His patience being further strained by having to hang around waiting for the doctor, and for the drugs to take effect, necessary though the wait was. No amount of time was going to help the young pilot's obviously dire condition, and it was apparent to him - and probably Sedgwick too by now - that they were going to have another cover-up on their hands.

  The three of them stood around the bed saddened by the tragic case they saw before them. Sedgwick dipped his eyes towards the floor, feeling the finger being pointed at him.

  Flying Officer Richard Gordon was twenty-nine, married with a young daughter. A promising pilot with over eight hundred hours of flying experience to his credit, predominantly in the military scramjet fighters which would ultimately bring about his premature demise. He would have had a whole life in aviation ahead of him, but instead here he lay helplessly before the three onlookers, involuntarily twitching and sweating feverishly, confronted by mental horrors known only unto himself.

  His entire body was in frequent spasm. Taut muscles and tendons sprang him so strongly that his head occasionally left the yellowing pillow. His saline drip, applied to counteract the exhaustion brought on by such a frenzy, flapped around violently as he did so. Painful grimaces only emphasised the agony within. Both eyes twitched and rolled as if in a state of rapid eye movement, themselves making a futile attempt to make sense of the chaos within.

  The electrodes secured around his temples and forehead sent grim messages to the monitor. The spurious glitches of brain activity occurred so rapidly and randomly that it was little wonder the doctors had had such negligible effect on his grave condition. The electroencephalograph traces spiked and peaked tumultuously. The cardio-trace below was barely more uniform or promising.

  It was obvious to anyone that this unfortunate patient had had his brain scrambled in the most severe manner imaginable. He was in sensory shutdown.

  SENSORY SHUTDOWN: A state of mental trauma where much of the brain's neural networks are randomly organized. This results in complete loss of memory, and a breakdown in most if not all mental functions. The victim becomes disconnected from the world around and if revived, needs to relearn everything.

  This affliction is not known to ever have occurred naturally as the causes are chiefly from external contamination. e.g. electromagnetic and/or gamma radiation. Contamination brings about drastic restructuring of the synaptic connections through random destruction of old and combative creation of new pathways sparked by the foreign entity, resulting in the effects described.

  This condition is critical and in no known case has any treatment resulted in the recovery of the victim. The victim invariably dies of cardiac arrest or other exhaustion-related cause.

  "We can delay the onset of exhaustion and temporarily prevent heart attack to give the family time to come to terms with his inevitable death, but in my opinion it would be unnecessarily raising their hopes and it would probably be better for them not to see him like this. I'm sorry we couldn't do more but..." The doctor sighed. He was barely five years older than the patient himself. He could identify with the tragedy and see the situation should be handled with the utmost care and delicacy.

  "Yeah, you're right Doc. It would be best for us to turn him off and then we'll tell his missus some story and sweeten them all up later with a cheque and flowers." Sedgwick interjected oblivious to the callousness of his remark. He was never particularly diplomatic, but his outburst surprised even the MoD official who had been acquainted with Sedgwick for some time.

  After a lengthy and uncomfortable silence which must have been only a split-second, the MoD official tried to repair the damage by staring daggers at Sedgwick and turning to the doctor. "What he meant was that we will inform the family and break the terrible news to them gradually..." Sedgwick nodded obsequiously while the MoD man continued.

  "...and when all the loose ends are sorted out, we will comfort them financially in any way we can."

  The doctor's face relaxed on hearing this. The MoD man promised that all medical bills would be covered by Psi Industries and themselves, and that the body would be collected later that day. As the doctor started removing probes and electrodes, the MoD man beckoned Sedgwick to leave from the other side of the bed with a motioning of his index finger and the two disappeared through the white curtains leaving the doctor to finish their business.

  The two walked together along the ward gesticulating frantically, with the MoD man having the best of the argument; Sedgwick frequently conceding points to his older, and wiser, colleague.

  Flying Officer Gordon was the fourth pilot to die in this manner. The other three before him all having tested Psi Industries' experimental helmet for near-instantaneous interfacing with fighter aircraft.

  Fighter aircraft had become so advanced that the rate-determining step in every action was the moment between the pilot thinking what to do and actually doing it.

  In an effort to reduce this delay, it was conceived that by scanning the pilot's intentions directly from his brain, a judgement on them could be made, and the action performed before his fingers would even have time to twitch. Planes were already fly-by-wire and with the fantastic improvement in processor speeds in recent years, it was seen as a viable option. Implementing this into the cockpit design would make all conventional instruments redundant. The HUD (Head-up display) already contained all the necessary dials and gauges to navigate the aircraft by, and now it was contemplated that the controls could be similarly reduced.

  It was exactly this thought which occurred to an aircraft manufacturer who needed a new angle to pitch their sales from. There had been no serious wars for over seventy years now. (With the exception of a few aerial scuffles here and there fought entirely for the purpose of advertising new aircraft.)

  The fighter plane market was drying up. There had been barely any radical design improvements for fifteen years and consequently there were few takers on new fighters at eighty million Dollars each. Most countries were in the economic doldrums as it was and the idea of shelling out for a new fleet of over twenty planes - hardly better than their existing force - would have their people rioting in the streets.

  "No planes today thanks. Perhaps next year."

  Silicon Revolution

  That was before the silicon revolution, and the arrival of chips beyond any digital engineer's wildest dreams.

  These newfound miracles of technology were making what was once exotic, now mundane and commonplace. Their arrival pushed back the frontiers of microelectronics making the unthinkable suddenly possible.

  Spe
ech recognition and voice synthesis took off in every area. Companies were plugging the chips everywhere they could. Useless items like talking kettles, voice-activated doorbells and similar plasticky junk were sweeping the world. Shopping channels lapped them up.

  Processing power rose exponentially with silicon slice size. The supercomputers now found in toasters, were a breed apart from the 'cool' processors.

  Cool processors stayed cool. They never warmed up when the workload grew. Cool processors were made from a silicon-yttrium compound that remained cool and lost no energy through heat. They never slowed down. They never cracked. As with all major innovations, 'defence' uses were discovered first, and this was again the case.

  The aforementioned aircraft manufacturer had found itself a silicon saviour to their ever-diminishing industry, and as usual, this saviour was to be embodied in a massive computer project.

  This computer would be like no other before it. It would be able to actually read thoughts directly from the brain as they were happening; realtime.

  Sure there had been computers before which could read thought. Universities and laboratories built them, all around the world. Most could read "Yes" or "No" and some could even manage "Perhaps" and "Possibly" but none were on the scale of this. These computers took up to five or six minutes for a decision. Some occupied a whole room. Most only worked with one particular person whose brain worked in one particular way. This computer would have to work fast; lightning quick. It had to fit inside a manageable-sized helmet. It had to work on every pilot. A seemingly hopeless task.

  But where this would triumph over its predecessors was in military expertise, recent technological breakthroughs in processor development, new landmarks in programming languages, fuzzy logic, optical processing and most of all - military funding.

  This anonymous aircraft manufacturer had all the resources of its own massive company with still more coming from government black budgets, craving for a new and saleable commodity, to bolster their ailing economy.

  The green light was given and PsiNapse was born.

  Double Birth

  PsiNapse was Psi Industries' Neuron and Adjacent Pathway Scanning Equipment. As its name suggests, it actually scans the individual neuron states and the transmissions along their adjacent pathways - the building blocks of thought itself. It reads these electrical charges as they travel between neurons, along the synapses from which its name was derived.

  Progress in neural networks had recently illustrated how thoughts are formed and stored and it was with this that the sudden wave of expectation was carried. Could A.I. really be on its way after so many years of apparent standstill? It was out of these joint medical / computer science developments and the emergence of a new processor generation that PsiNapse was soon to be conceived.

  Processors had gone from strength to strength in recent years. From 900 mips (Million Instructions Per Second) up to around 5 bips (Billion Instructions Per Second) in the last decade. This quantum leap in calculation speed had brought about such reductions in processing time, that virtually any calculation could be performed in the blink of an eye.

  MLSI (Mega Large Scale Integration) chips were being snapped up quicker than they could be stamped out. Chip factories were springing up all over the Far East, straining to cope with demand. These one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pin wonders could do more calculations alone than sixty-four of the preceding model.

  The very newest innovation was the SYC 70020, and it was eight of these that would carry the burden of PsiNapse's workload. These were what made it all possible.

  PsiNapse was intended to be the saviour of the military aircraft industry, so secrecy was paramount. Out of this necessity, Psi Industries was founded to develop and build the equipment without possible backlash or embarrassment to its parent company or the secret service.

  Funds were poured in and work started overnight. Every imaginable resource was made available and money was to be no object. This project had to be finished as soon as was humanly possible. Time was of the essence.

  The brightest and most promising minds in the computing, electronics and neurological fields were brought together along with acknowledged experts to form the ultimate in research and development. Everything that such a project demanded.

  Over a hundred graduates were recruited along with a further twenty experts, and all were put to work immediately. Equipment was shipped in, lorryload after lorryload. The outskirts of a university city were deemed to be the most suitable location, full of the right talent, conveniently near to the parent companies as well as a test airfield and as far from prying eyes as one could hope. Premises were chosen and everything was up and running in a matter of days.

  It was early Spring the following year, March 26th, when Psi built their first working prototype helmet ready for experimental test flights. [The pilot would be 'fitted' for his helmet, which not only involved measuring his head diameter with precision, but also calibration of the scanning circuitry. The pilot would be sat in front of a computer flight simulator and asked to think "climb", "dive", "bank left", "bank right" etc increasing in complexity. The speeds and quantities had to be carefully set. After each, the computer would store the thought pattern as a three-dimensional array of fantastic resolution. These would be stored - hundreds in all - to form the whole range of decisions made by the pilot at any given eventuality.]

  The Theory Behind PsiNapse

  The theory was concocted that fuzzy logic algorithms, ever faster and more complex than any previous undertaking, could scan the pilot's current thought pattern at regular and almost infinitesimal intervals to give a complete digital 'picture' of what the pilot's reactions and thoughts were. A match to this array would then be sought at fantastic speed, to find the pilot's decision of what action to take at that particular instant.

  When this (or a suitable likeness) was found amongst the vast data bank, it would be compared with Autoflight's decision and between them, a compromise would be made. This compromise theoretically should be the best course of action at any given instant.

  Autoflight was the on-board computer which aided the pilot's flight by preventing him carrying out any manoeuvre that would endanger himself or the aircraft through a judgement error or lack of knowledge.

  For example, the pilot couldn't crash into hills, buildings, other planes etc because Autoflight knew of their existence through radar, and even if the pilot himself was oblivious to their existence, Autoflight would momentarily and instantaneously override his control, until the danger was averted. Likewise, a pilot would be prevented from going into a climb or dive from which it would be impossible to recover.

  (Autoflight had been in aircraft for years, especially in civil aviation where the aircraft could be completely flown throughout the whole journey by Autoflight without the pilot's need for intervention. In military aircraft though, weaponry is involved and there was justified reluctance in letting computers totally handle its deployment.)

  In air-to-air combat, even in such a technologically advanced age, the pilot is the predominant difference between the two adversaries, and the more work Autoflight relieved him of, the more capable he would be when such a telling moment arose.

  Autoflight took the drudgery out of flying and the pilot was left to fly only the unpredictable and illogical (human) parts of each mission.

  Could a computer such as PsiNapse combine a pilot and plane so that the computer's reliability, knowledge and speed and the pilot's human quirkiness would work in perfect harmony?

  This was the theory, but in practice it seemed that between any two modern fighter planes, performance and automatic pilot were virtually identical and the skill of the human pilot, or lack of it, seldom made a telling difference. Each on-board computer had such fantastic evasive manoeuvrability that no pilot could shoot another down without the computers always avoiding the other's strike. (Except on occasions when they collided instead!)

  It was with this predicament in mind, that th
e notion was born years before to find if the pilot could be made to interface in some way. Perhaps his flying abilities could have more sway in the eventual outcome of the dogfight and the best pilot-plane combination could win.

  The delay here came from the fact that it was unimaginable to get the pilot to interface in any way other than direct brain scanning. Nothing else could ever be quick enough.

  And here lay the stumbling block. How could a brain scanner ever be built small enough, quick enough and light enough to ever be incorporated into a fighter plane?

  Recent History

  Work in neural networks had recently found that the type of thought needed to accomplish a task such as piloting a plane, is situated entirely around the brain's surface - in the temporal lobes above the ears and in the cerebrum along the surface of the upper brain. Never anywhere else. This discovery reduced the amount of scanning sensors and related equipment required and in turn, cut the speed, memory and general spec necessary for such apparatus.

  In addition to this, the machine's cost and weight could be cut, reducing the overall complexity and development costs of such an undertaking. The interfacing idea was becoming plausible, if not yet totally viable.

  Similar equipment was being made, ever-decreasing in size, by various experimental scientists in universities everywhere. As technology improved it became inevitable that the vital constituent parts would become smaller, faster and cheaper. It had always been thus.

  Unknown to even the experts, it would happen more rapidly than ever. Almost overnight.

  Silicon2