Fear the Survivors (17 page)

He stumbled at this, his mind rewinding back through the last minute to find the thread of thought that had led him to blurt his question at the poor woman. It took a moment, but when he found it, his young olive features illuminated with the memory.

“Err, yes, Dr. Hauptman, err, I asked only, well, if you had ever learned the piano as a child,” he said, feeling the inanity of the question as he said it, out of context as it was.

She looked at him quizzically, curious as to the root of it, but then shrugged and said, “No, I never had lessons on the piano.” Then a simple blush escaped her, “But I’ve played the French horn pretty much every day for at least forty years.”

A shared smile spread across their faces as they both allowed the image of her with the burlesque brass instrument to come to mind. But in a moment, she saw his candid amusement turn to curiosity, and a hesitant request form just behind his lips.

Curious, she prompted him, “Tell me, Amadeu, were you simply curious about my musical training because you wanted to see if I was qualified to listen to Beethoven, or did your question have import to something else?”

The question bridged the gap between Amadeu’s stammering voice and his insightful mind, and the original flow of his thoughts came through like a surge of confidence. “Actually, Dr. Hauptman, I think it may be more relevant to my work than you can imagine. You see, my team and I have been wrestling with a problem for weeks now, months, really, as we try to tap into the mess of wiring that is the human brain. And I think you may have just given me a clue to deciphering it.”

- - -

The sound of the French horn was a strange addition to the typical whir of the air recycling plant and countless computers of the laboratory space. John Hunt had picked up on it as soon as he passed through the pressure sealed doors that guarded the Research Group’s multifaceted space.

John had been working with the teams over the last couple of months as they developed their own version of the scientific knowledge he had managed to bring with him. He would download patches of information to teams and give guidance on application and dangers through discussions with the team leads.

Only a handful of the leads knew of John’s real identity, and along with Neal and Madeline they decided on the ebb and flow from the massive reservoir of information John had at his disposal. They needed to balance the desire to move forwards speedily with the need to not overwhelm the teams too early with the sheer scale of the task at hand. Everyone had, of course, been given an overview of the enemy they faced, and the Armada’s approach that dictated their timeline. But to scare them with the depth of the Mobiliei’s true technological advantage risked paralyzing them with the size of the mountain they had to climb.

But a phone call this morning from one of the Research Group’s younger members had intrigued him. Amadeu was among the more engaging and creative scientists in the group, due in no small part to the fact that the scientific establishment and the rigmarole of growing up in it had had less time to beat his creativity into submission. But then one of the other truly enigmatic geniuses he had encountered in the team was Birgit Hauptman, thirty years Amadeu’s senior and the preeminent leader in her field, so it was more than just his age that made him interesting. The fact that Amadeu had mentioned Birgit during his brief call had only fueled John’s curiosity more.

As he approached the Spinal Interface Team’s lab, the sound of the double horn became ever clearer, and his acute hearing told him it was not a recording he was hearing, but someone playing live. The music stopped abruptly when he knocked on the door, and a moment later he stepped into the room to find Amadeu and his two English colleagues standing around a bemused-looking Birgit Hauptman.

The esteemed scientist was sitting amongst a sea of wires and monitoring equipment that looked like a Dr. Frankenstein experiment gone right. Pads were stuck to her temples and wired under her salt and pepper shoulder-length hair to monitor her brain activity. Amadeu rose with evident excitement as John stepped into the room, and the Agent found himself sharing a quizzical glance with Birgit as the boy ran over to greet him.

“Come in, Mr. Hunt. Come in.” John noted that the other two computer whizzes were silent as Amadeu ushered John round to where the results of his experiments were scrolling across his computer screen.

“As you know, Mr. Hunt, the way our brain is designed is fundamentally at odds with the neurology of the Mobiliei. This is natural, of course, as we evolved in completely different ways,” Amadeu said, skipping any formalities in his excitement, and getting straight down to business. But he was unlikely to outstrip John’s capacity to process new information, so John let the young scientist run.

“Well,” continued Amadeu, “one of the biggest differences that makes the human mind so very different is the separation of function into two distinct lobes: the right and the left. The left lobe, as you are no doubt aware, is responsible for language and mathematics, all things logical and rational. The right side is more esoteric: spatial dynamics, facial recognition, what we like to call intuition.”

He paused to see if John was keeping up, and got a nod as a sign he should proceed. A glance at Birgit told John that the woman was as keen for John to hear Amadeu’s point as the boy clearly was, and seeing that Amadeu had impressed the German doctor was high praise indeed.

The boy went on, “So, as you know, the linking software that we have been working on has managed to tap that logical side of the brain with ease. Our test subjects have been able to communicate simple commands to our machines. But we have been unable to establish a link with the right side of the brain, where intuition and spatial dynamics is processed. The link allows basic systems operation, but if our pilots and tactical officers are to have a chance in combat, we will need a real-time link to the more intuitive and creative side of the brain, without having to process things through the corpus callosum.”

Amadeu referred to the thick cable of neurons that linked the two sides of the brain: two hundred fifty million wires parsing information between our logical and creative minds.

“Well,” said Amadeu now, his eyes becoming even more intent as a broad smile spread across his face, “after an enlightening conversation with Dr. Hauptman this morning, it occurred to me that the problem we were facing was that we were relying on language as the method by which we got information out of the brain. But we know from years of working with epilepsy sufferers and stroke victims that language is the sole domain of the left side of the brain.” He smiled broadly. “For the right side of the brain to be heard clearly, we were going to need something more … inspiring.”

Amadeu nodded emphatically to Dr. Hauptman, who could not help but laugh at his untethered enthusiasm. Shaking her head slightly, and causing the twenty or so wires springing from it to sway a little, she shrugged and brought the tip of her big, brass horn to her lips, an instrument born out of a childhood whim of a much younger Birgit, and now spurring something wholly unexpected in a strange young Portuguese boy’s imagination.

Her first few notes were a little skewed, her dry lips not forming the close bond they needed with the mouth of the instrument.

“Sorry,” she said, licking them quickly. Her next note was clear and true, her left hand tracing tiny patterns on the brass levers at the center of the instrument’s twirl of brass, and sending her notes swimming up and down the scale as she tripped through a basic piece. As she played, Amadeu pointed to the screen and John watched as the notes flared in the left side of her brain.

“Faster, Birgit, have fun with it,” said Amadeu, and John and the other two computer programmers’ eyebrows rose in surprise at the familiarity. But Birgit didn’t flinch. Straying from the simple piece she had started out with, she broke into something more elastic, moving from classical into jazz, and starting to improvise, her stream breaking into lyrical twists and turns.

The screen danced with the signals flowing from her mind, the left side vibrant as usual, but now supported and outshone by the right side as it flowed at a speed and coordination that the left side could not match. The left side just spent too much time processing its signals into interpretable language that could be shared, but the right side glided down valleys of thought and surged up intuitive avenues that the left side simply couldn’t follow.

John sat down by the computer and surreptitiously pressed his finger to the computer’s USB port under the desk, connecting himself to the machine and allowing the signal to flow into him. Powerful and pure. There was a crispness and speed that matched or even exceeded even the best of the neural links back on Mobilius, while the previous links Amadeu had worked on had been a sad approximation of the taps his generation had grown up with back home.

Certainly it would mean learning to communicate with the machine the same way that you learned to play an instrument, but maybe they could find a way around that with time. Either way, Amadeu had found the Rosetta stone. He had found a way to tap into the human mind’s creative well, and it was going to make an astronomical difference in the efficiency of the link. The splitting of the human mind down the middle was one of those foibles of evolution that had no practical application, but because it had no downsides great enough to have prompted natural selection to weed it out, it had remained.

But the Mobiliei had no such division, their brains’ many lobes were each globularly attached and acted as one, each module of the mind had evolved with a distinct purpose, and it served that purpose, be it motion, language, mathematics, lyricism, or short-and long-term memory. But the grouping in the human mind was what led to humanity’s strange separation of intuitiveness and logic. Up to now it had been a hindrance, but now they might have found a way to turn that to their advantage.

The discussion moved to next steps. To methods of interpreting this powerful signal and turning it to their ends. To ways of ‘learning’ to adapt both the mind and the machine to best take advantage of this potent discovery.

Amadeu was as quick as ever, and Birgit and John enjoyed working with him. His colleagues were clearly disgruntled at being subjugated, but the auspicious reputations of both Dr. Hauptman and Mr. Hunt kept them focused on the task at hand, and over the next hour the diverse team explored a set of methods that may take them to the next level.

Eventually Birgit and John left the young programmers to their devices. The two of them had a multitude of other less exciting, but no less important topics to discuss. But as they walked off down the corridor, Amadeu came running after them.

“Do you have time for one more question, Mr. Hunt?” Amadeu asked, and John nodded, Birgit smiling and excusing herself to return to her own laboratory at last.

“How can I help you, Amadeu?” asked John.

“Actually, I just wanted to confirm a theory I have,” said Amadeu with a penetrating stare.

They waited a moment while Amadeu scrutinized the man he knew as John Hunt, and then the young Portuguese neurologist suddenly said, with quiet curiosity, “Are you one of them?”

At Amadeu’s junior level, he had not been made privy to John’s true identity. They did not need everyone knowing that an alien assassin was wondering in their midst, no matter how benign his intentions.

John looked at him, curious as to how to respond.

Amadeu did so for him, “Over the last hour, I referred to the alien … I mean Mobiliei technology, as
yours
twice, Mr. Hunt, and I noticed that neither you nor Dr. Hauptman corrected me.”

John smiled. The boy was smart, but surely that was a tenuous starting point from which to leap to the conclusion that Amadeu had come to. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it. That single piece of the puzzle was just the boy’s logical brain confirming something that his extraordinarily capable intuitive brain had surmised from a thousand seemingly innocent hints and clues. Intuition. It was what separated humans from Mobiliei. It was why humans seemed so obsessed with seeming irrelevancies. It was why they took so much more pleasure from art and literature and music than his own culture did.

Of course, it was also why they were so obsessed with superstition, their pervasive organized religions being the greatest incarnation of that particular foible. But as ignorance diminished, so would the sway of such beliefs, as it had in his own culture.

But that did not address how John should handle the boy’s question.

He stared at the boy, and Amadeu’s expectant expression seemed to deflate as he started to worry about what his mouth had spurted without his mind’s approval. Sensing the boy’s apprehension, John smiled.

“Amadeu, I think you had better come with me,” said John, starting toward Birgit’s lab. It was still early and, unlike Amadeu’s rudely awoken cohorts, the rest of Birgit’s team had yet to arrive.

“Birgit?” said John as he walked into her space. “It appears we have a new recruit to our inner circle, as it were. Young Amadeu has had a busy morning, and it appears he has figured out something else from our already productive conversation.”

Birgit looked passed John to the student standing in her doorway and was reminded of his frail frame standing in just that spot only a few hours beforehand. She frowned at him a little, and then waved him in, asking him to close the door behind him. And, in a hidden and highly secret man-made cave, a long forgotten military facility from the Second World War, deep under the Yatsugatake Mountains of Japan, a German scientist and an alien agent told a young, Portuguese neurolinguist into their circle.