The damage was already catastrophic and getting worse by the second. Several hundred dead, power stations and electrical towers in six states leveled by explosions, police and medical teams delayed by malfunctioning GPS systems, online defensive response and coordination efforts paralyzed by DOS attack viruses and worms, millions of Americans left in the dark without power or phone service. The offensive was being carried out simultaneously in major cities across the country, all with the same goal, which was to destroy the nation’s power grid and emergency response abilities and foment chaos and panic in the civilian population.
In a windowless room filled with wall-size screens, Duggan watched the disaster unfold on a map of the United States as dozens of technicians and cyber-defense strategists struggled to fight back. Nearby, a young man in a white shirt was calmly humming to himself and pressing buttons on a tablet computer. He spoke to Duggan without looking up from his screen. “Having fun yet?”
“Nothing fun about losing a cyber war.”
The man looked up at the situation map. “We’re not losing,” he said. “We have auxiliary backup systems on the eastern grid and satellite offensive options that the Russians can’t match. This is just the beginning. You wait and see.”
A text popped up on Duggan’s phone. It was from Jordan Sharpe, asking for a meeting, just as JT had predicted. They agreed to coffee at a Denny’s not far from the operations facility. Sharpe was slightly pudgy, balding, and visibly stressed—classic NSA. Duggan was pretty sure there would be no official record of anybody named Sharpe attending the cy-ops games. Sharpe had the drooping posture of a man who carried the weight of the earth’s atmosphere on his sloped shoulders.
“JT tells me you’re discreet,” Sharpe said wearily, “which is the only reason I’m here.” Sharpe emptied a pack of sweetener into his coffee and slowly stirred it. “I hear you got fed a pile of crap in Kandahar.”
Duggan gave Sharpe a brief description of his trip to Afghanistan. As Duggan told his story, Sharpe’s foot started to jiggle slightly. It made Duggan nervous to see Sharpe getting excited.
“Have you heard from Mr. Post-it?” Sharpe asked.
“You think I will?”
Sharpe shrugged. “It’s possible. But that’s not the part I find interesting.”
“Go on.”
“No offense, but NCSD is small potatoes for Cyber Command. If they were serious, they never would have outsourced an investigation for something this juicy. From what you just told me, I’d guess that your visit was a pro forma Band-Aid designed to stop anyone else from kicking the tires.”
“I’ve come to the same conclusion.”
“Did you tell your boss?”
“He declared the case closed and sent me here to watch the cyber games.”
“Ouch.” Sharpe’s condolence was genuine. “Look, you can do what you want, but your boss might be right. There’s no upside in getting your tit caught in a tiff between NSA and Cyber Command. Plus, whatever happened is probably outside your jurisdiction anyway. My advice would be to enjoy the games and double down on room service.”
“Maybe, but I don’t like getting on airplanes for no discernable reason. Twice.”
Sharpe sighed. “Only amateurs take this stuff personally.”
Duggan started to get up.
“Hang on,” Sharpe said. For the first time during the entire conversation, he looked Duggan straight in the eye. “There’s a DOD research wonk who turned up MIA just a few days after your buddy Westlake went apeshit. The only reason we know about it is because DOD wanted to make sure we didn’t have him. The inquiry came from the Cyber Command office in Afghanistan. There might be a connection. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking.”
Duggan put a ten-dollar bill on the table and rose to leave. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said.
Back at his hotel room, Duggan ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and two rye whiskey and sodas before noticing the blinking red message light on the phone. It was Sharpe’s voice, uttering a single sentence: “My missing friend was studying electromagnetic effects on the human brain.”
Duggan erased Sharpe’s message and opened his laptop. For the next few hours, he trolled the Internet, delving into something he had always known bits and pieces about but had never really paid much attention to until now. Duggan was surprised, intrigued, and finally alarmed by the mountain of verified information he encountered, some of it published by various departments of the US government itself. The origin of mind control as a weapon, Duggan learned, dated back at least to the 1950s, when a Chicago-born MD of Yugoslavian descent named Andrija Puharich discovered that electromagnetic pulses of extremely low frequency, or ELF waves, had dramatic—and potentially destructive—effects on people and the environment. Puharich was influenced by Nikola Tesla, the turn-of-the-century mathematician who had already explored the concept of using radio waves to transmit electrical energy through the Earth and its atmosphere, even filing a number of US patents based on that idea. Puharich found that a person’s emotional state and health could be modified by exposing him or her to signals that corresponded to particular points on the electromagnetic spectrum, literally “tuning” a person’s mind like a radio set. In tests conducted in conjunction with Robert C. Beck, Puharich reported that human reactions to various ELF frequencies ranged from headaches, nausea, and anxiety to a sense of well-being, as well as aggression and riotous behavior. Tesla himself had foreseen a form of future warfare that would be “conducted by direct application of electrical waves.” In 1908, Tesla predicted that the greatest achievement of science would be to master the universe by manipulating the invisible ether, a “tenuous fluid” of matter that encapsulated the earth, and usher in a new reality in which “old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being” and man would “fulfill his ultimate destiny.”
Duggan’s fingers drummed on the imitation wood veneer desk as he scrolled down a list of news reports and documents that cataloged a zigzagging trail of mind-control weapon experiments conducted by the CIA and the DOD, beginning in the 1940s and continuing right up to the present day. Was this why Sharpe had gotten so excited at Denny’s? And why the delay before telling him about the DOD researcher who’d gone AWOL?
A related news link took him to an article published the same day in the New York Times under the headline “Agency Initiative Will Focus on Advancing Deep Brain Stimulation.” The article mentioned that one hundred thousand people with Parkinson’s disease had already received electrical implants to help them control involuntary movements. Then it got to the point of the story, which was that DARPA had announced that it was spending more than seventy million dollars to develop technology that would help scientists “acquire signals that can tell them precisely what is going on with the brain.” DARPA’s project, the article continued, was “partly inspired by the needs of combat veterans who suffer from mental and physical conditions,” which by definition included PTSD.
Duggan thought about what the Post-it had told him: Look for what’s not there.
He rubbed his eyes and took a gulp of his second whiskey. He had read enough to know what he was going to do next. It was Thursday. Duggan e-mailed the office to say he was taking a personal day and spending the weekend with friends on the West Coast. Then he logged on to Expedia and booked a flight to Spokane, Washington.
Tom was still exhilarated from the endorsement of his victory over Munificent Life when he logged onto Luminescence and made his way to their usual trysting place near the castle. In the magical mythical reality where Tom and Lucy courted and flirted as 3-D avatars, Mr. Aws was a dashing young wizard, powerful enough to unleash lightning bolts from his hands and repel attacks from trolls, zombies, and dragons. Lucy always looked lovely, her long blond hair cascading over a white gown studded with glowing stars and planets, a crown of diamonds floating above her head. Her hidden power was an ability to control the weather. Her freezing rainstorm could immobilize large animals and paralyze stout knights who found themselves trapped inside their own icy armor.
The key attraction of Luminescence was the way any group of players could pool their power to create new areas of the game, ranging from Jurassic jungles and futuristic clone colonies to medieval kingdoms, like the one Lucy and Tom had chosen as the pastoral setting for their amorous trysts. The very real politics of how and why different players came together to create—and sometimes destroy—virtual realizations of their wildest communal desires and dreams was what gave the game its addictive charm.
It didn’t take Tom long to cross the meadow, making sure to avoid the testy winged lizards that lurked in the weeping willows, and climb the hilly path that skirted the battlefield. He could hear the clinks and zaps of swords and wands, grunts and screams, and the whooshing sound of a fighter using earned credits to increase his powers. Deaths in Luminescence were always temporary, but in order to buy back one’s soul, it was necessary to earn regeneration crystals by doing good deeds. The key to survival, besides being courteous and kind to everything and everybody, was to stay in the brightly lighted parts of the kingdom, where unicorns roamed and butterflies floated over the ferns. Those who wished to indulge their darker fantasies could seek out like-minded adventurers in the Dionysian caves and crannies of Pan’s forest.
When Tom approached their special spot, he immediately knew something was amiss. A steady rain was falling, and the flowers were drooping dejectedly. He couldn’t be sure, but the drops streaming down Lucy’s face looked like diamond tears. Tom raised his staff and scanned the area for troublemakers.
Lucy, what happened?
Nothing. I mean, there’s nobody here but us.
So then why the bad weather?
I’m starting to get a little freaked out. I don’t even know who you are.
I told you already that it’s for our own safety.
Yours or mine?
Both.
Yeah, I know, you keep saying that, but somehow it doesn’t make me feel any safer. If you really love me, then why don’t you trust me?
Tom made a flower appear and held it out to her.
That won’t work anymore.
The flower dissolved into a yellow puddle on the forest floor.
The make-believe dimension of their relationship had started out as a playful tease, a way to get to know each other with no strings or limbs attached. At first, the strangeness of dating a mysterious cyber legend in an artificial paradise had appealed to Lucy’s imagination. They could talk about anything, do anything, be anything. They could fly over the hills or swim with weird fishes in the crystalline river. Once they had even made friends with a lute player and a unicorn and joined them for ersatz tea in a treehouse made of feathers on the shores of a purple lake. But Lucy’s emotions were becoming stronger, and she was growing tired of the charade.
I thought we agreed that it’s perfect like this. Why mess it up?
It’s not perfect, Mr. Aws, or Swarm, or whoever the hell you actually are.
You promised …
I know, I’m not supposed to use that word. An enchanted chipmunk might overhear us and call the FBI. How do I know that’s not bullshit too?
Lucy, please don’t
Don’t what? Type my actual feelings? Sometimes I think you just love me for my name. Not the real one, of course. I mean the fake one.
They had been virtually seeing each other for about a month when Tom asked what had led her to choose lucyinthesky as her online moniker. She told him the inspiration had come from an anthropology class where she learned about the paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson, who in 1974 discovered a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of a female skeleton in Ethiopia. The scientific name for the missing link was Australopithecus afarensis, but Johanson had decided to name her after the title character in the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Intrigued, Tom decided to do some online research on Johanson’s Lucy. It turned out that a cassette recorder in the camp had been playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while they were celebrating their historic find. A woman Johanson was dating at the time had suggested that he call the fossil Lucy. Afterward, Johanson’s students started asking him when they were going back to the Lucy site. Decades later, he told a reporter, “Initially I was opposed to giving her a cute little name, but that name stuck.”
The Lucy discovery catapulted Johanson into one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists, but that wasn’t why Tom was thunderstruck by the scientist’s story. The connection between Lucyinthesky of Austin, a ravishing soldier in the flash mob rebellion, and Lucy of Ethiopia, a female fossil that proved protohumans once walked the earth, was more than just an interesting tidbit of kismet in the history of their relationship. The alignment of collective action with an unexpected acceleration in the calendar of human evolution was too significant to be random or inconsequential. It touched directly on theories that Tom had been kicking around in relation to Swarm, a growing conviction that quantum social change was coming, that the species was about to take another leap, like when the first prehumans left the forest and set out together on the savannas, their enlarged brains conjoining through touch and sounds and a germinating recognition of shared destiny. Tom couldn’t foresee the next level of human evolution, but he sensed that Lucy and Swarm were interlocking pieces of a bigger puzzle, two enigmas conjoined into the contours of an answer, like fragments of bone dug up in a dusty ravine suddenly fitting together.
I want to hear your voice. I want to see your body. Flesh and blood. I’ve got to know that you’re not a creep or a bot, or some algorithm in a box running an auto-seduction program.
The rain stopped, replaced by a fine mist that made the atmosphere murky and drained the color from the plants. A veil fell between them, and Tom was suddenly worried that Lucy might disappear altogether.
Okay, we can Skype, but no faces.
The fog lifted, and the flowers regained their brilliance.
When?
Next week.
I don’t suppose you’re going to give me your Skype name.
I’ll come to you Wednesday, 9 p.m.
How will I know it’s you?
That’s a silly question.
I’m worried.
I promise you it’ll be different.
No, not about us.
Then what?
The animals have been acting even stranger than usual, and the witches in the netheregion are babbling about omens.
What sorts of omens?
They say a great darkness is coming, that all the flowers and trees will be pulled up from their roots. They say the Great Eraser will reclaim his domain and the dead will rise from their catacombs to suck out the souls of the living, and the alt-world as we know it will end.
Do you believe that?
Of course not, but it’s still creepy. Everybody is on edge, and you don’t hear as much laughter as you used to.
Nothing will happen as long as I’m here to protect you.
But what if you’re not? Can I trust you?
There will be time for you and time for me.
Then prove it.
The wizard of Aws took Lucy’s hand and kissed it. She moved closer, but before she could embrace the man of her dreams, he disappeared in a puff of blue smoke.