After dinner, Heather took her turn cleaning dishes before walking through the open alcove onto the veranda. It was a beautiful fall evening, temperature hovering in the high seventies, with just enough breeze to make the humidity comfortable.
Although Sunday was usually the day set aside for their headset exploration of the Bandolier starship, Jack had decided it was time to change up the routine. Even though the headsets worked through a subspace link that was undetectable by earthly technology and Dr. Stephenson was rotting in an American prison cell, predictable patterns of behavior violated Jack’s sense of security. But Heather detected something else in Jack’s demeanor, an eagerness she had never before observed.
Slipping into a wicker chair, Heather inclined her head toward Mark and Jen, each occupying a similar chair, all three arranged around a low wrought iron table. In the center of the table, an open aluminum case held the four alien headbands, the area dimly illuminated by an oil hurricane lamp that hung suspended from a support beam.
Jack leaned against the wall, his eyes studying the full moon that shed almost as much light as the lamp itself. The scene reminded Heather of a séance more than a serious scientific experiment. But then, in a strange way, maybe that’s what it was.
“You ready?” Jack asked, his strange eyes locking with hers.
“Yes.”
“Good.” Jack pulled up a wooden stool, seating himself where he could see the faces of all three of his trainees. “Because tonight you’re going up against the artificial intelligence controlling the Bandolier Ship. Your mission is to gain access to the ship’s restricted data banks. In order to make that happen, you’ll have to convince the ship’s artificial intelligence that you are truly the crew and not just candidates that have attuned to the headsets.”
“And how do we do that?” Jennifer asked.
“That’s something you’ll have to figure out together once you’re all linked in. Don’t rush it. Heather’s intuition should guide you, but she won’t be able to do it alone. The ship must fully accept you all.”
“And if something goes wrong?” Mark asked.
“I’ll be here watching you. If I think you’re in trouble, I’ll remove the headsets. But remember, you have to retain control of your own minds. Don’t lose your way back.”
Heather reached for the metal case. The four headsets lay nestled in its dark foam-padded interior, each exactly like its mates, the strange metal picking up the dancing lamplight so photons seemed to bead up and crawl along its surface. Wasn’t it odd how her hand was drawn only to the one she recognized as her own?
Lifting the light band from its resting place, Heather leaned back, letting Jennifer and Mark select their own. Then, as their eyes met, they all slid the bands up over their temples.
As the small nubs at the ends of Heather’s headband touched her head, they elongated, the massaging pulse spreading through her body as each sought its optimum position. Then the world dissolved.
She was on the starship, her virtual self standing on the command deck, its smoothly curved walls, ceiling, and floor as beautiful as she remembered. Glancing to her right and left, she saw Jennifer and Mark settle into their crew couches, the translucent material flowing around them to cushion their bodies, as if they were preparing for takeoff.
Jennifer had been the first to discover this unique capability available to wearers of the starship’s headbands, something they had come to call the Avatar Projection. If they imagined themselves physically on the starship, the interaction between the ship’s computer and their own enhanced minds created the impression that they were physically there. It was an illusion, but it sure as hell felt real, far more real than a dream, so real that she could reach out and touch things, including Mark and Jennifer.
While they were in the Avatar Projection, all their senses worked. Not just when they were roaming the ship either. From the first summer they’d spent exploring their Bandolier Ship, they’d known how to have it surround them with sights and sounds of other places and scenes, like Bora Bora or the starship’s arrival in this solar system. But now when the ship presented sensory experiences, it went far beyond mere sounds and scenery. This was the full monty.
The closest thing she’d seen to this was the dream implants in the movie Total Recall, which provided all the neural stimulation of a real experience. It played out in such detail that it surpassed Heather’s visions of the future, making it hard to remember she wasn’t physically there. That was the reason Jack had cautioned them against losing their way back.
Heather settled into her own command couch, opening her mind to the touch of Mark’s and Jennifer’s. They were all there sharing the same link—to varying degrees, sharing the same thoughts. It was another aspect of exploring the ship’s neural linkages that had, at first, startled Heather. Jennifer had been the one most familiar with the experience, having used a version of the ability on other people for several months.
But this went well beyond what Jennifer could do. If they weren’t careful, they found each other sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, something that went beyond frightening to downright embarrassing. After the first experience, Heather had de-linked, refusing to wear the headset again unless she did so alone. Only Jack’s insistence that they retry the experiment had overcome her resistance.
In a series of tentative practice sessions, Heather, Mark and Jen gradually learned to establish mental barriers that effectively shielded parts of their minds from each other. Connected through the headbands, their minds each had the capacity to open to the others. Fortunately, that openness could be selectively disabled, effectively firewalling off layers of thoughts and feelings. The bad news was that if a person got interested, aggressively pursuing another’s thoughts, it became very difficult to disentangle him or her from the deeper parts of one’s mind.
After every headset session, Jack and Janet directed an intense debriefing. Upon discovering the difficulty Heather had encountered in mentally ejecting an uncooperative headset wearer, namely Mark, from her mind, Jack locked in on the problem. He devised a series of trials that became mental wrestling matches. One by one they would each probe each other’s mental defenses, under strict instructions that once they had penetrated another’s barriers, they were to disengage and debrief.
Over the weeks, as Mark, Jen, and Heather grew stronger, it became harder and harder to bypass their opponents’ mental blocks. But when a block failed, those brief glimpses into each other’s souls were both traumatic and thrilling.
Now, settled into the alien couch on the Bandolier Ship’s command deck, Heather recognized Jack’s deeper purpose. All their mental wrestling practice had been designed to ready them for this moment. Only this time their opponent wouldn’t be a living, breathing person.
Mark? Jen?
Right here. Mark’s mind softly touched hers.
Me too, Jen intoned. Following your lead.
Heather centered, focusing her thoughts on the Bandolier Ship, its crew, and the headbands, pulling forth the visions that lurked just beneath her mind’s calm, dark surface. And as those visions intensified, she felt herself sucked across the boundary into a different alien reality.
Mark felt the alien couch enfold his virtual body as Heather’s visions whispered at the corner of his awareness. Lowering all barriers, he allowed the visions in, succumbing to the raw power of Heather’s mind.
In rapid succession, she played back every time they had been on the Bandolier Ship, every time they had been connected to the headsets. Mark felt Jennifer join the effort as Heather absorbed his sister’s solo visits to the Bandolier starship.
Again and again the sequence replayed itself, and each time the emphasis of the vision shifted, replaying the scenes at different speeds and from different perspectives. Suddenly the focus narrowed and intensified.
Gabriel! The name rang their joint minds like the tolling of a distant bell. One of three biblical archangels, regarded as the angel of mercy by most Christians, as the angel of judgment in the Jewish tradition. It was said the sounding of Gabriel’s horn would signal the end of days.
The Rag Man had been the first to find the Bandolier Ship, the first to wear the fourth headset. He had seen the alien visions, his sick mind interpreting his assigned role as that of the new Gabriel, the one destined to sound the horn to end all things.
And the Rag Man had watched as Mark, Jennifer, and Heather had found the cave and the alien craft. The probabilities clicked into place in Heather’s mind. He had known they had worn the other three headsets. The Rag Man’s access to the starship had been more extensive than their own. The ship had used the Rag Man to evaluate them, seeking to assess their fitness to fulfill the roles represented by the other three headsets, gradually granting them more access as they were deemed worthy.
The shock of that realization stunned Mark. Their Bandolier Ship had granted the Rag Man full access to its data banks, something it continued to deny them. And in the end, the Rag Man had decided that Heather, like Jack’s partner hanging on the meat hook in the Rag Man’s cave, was only worthy of death. What kind of artificial intelligence could be complicit in such judgments?
At the edge of Mark’s consciousness, a subtle change drew his attention. Withdrawing slowly from his link with Heather and Jennifer, Mark shifted his focus toward the thing that had distracted him. The déjà vu feeling reminded him of when he had first detected the pinhole anomaly in his bedroom, the feeling of being watched. But this was different. The cold shiver that crawled slowly up his spine told Mark they had now attracted the attention of something far more dangerous.