What follows is a short story set in the Ghosted universe. I originally intended it to be a part of the main story, but just couldn’t find a place to make it fit into the Ghosted universe smoothly. Consider this one to be a short prequel to the full-length one.
The Missing Links
The colonel called it an opportunity, which should have been my first warning.
I was Staff Sergeant Christina Woods, MOS 7314, an unmanned aircraft systems operator in the United States Marine Corps. I’d spent most of my career flying drones, which meant I spent a considerable amount of time staring at screens while somebody else decided what I ought to be looking at.
I was good at it. Good enough that my commanding officer had apparently recommended me for a classified experimental program.
“What kind of program, sir?”
“Neural interface research.”
I waited for him to explain.
“The idea is to connect an operator directly to an unmanned aircraft. Eliminate the conventional controls. Reduce response time. Improve situational awareness.”
“You’re talking about putting something in my head?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What happened to the last people who tried it?” He looked down at the folder on his desk. “Let’s just say there have been mixed results.”
That wasn’t encouraging. “Am I being ordered to volunteer, sir?”
“Absolutely not, Staff Sergeant. Participation is entirely voluntary.”
He slid the folder across the desk. “Of course, I’d hate to tell headquarters that my best drone operator wasn’t interested.”
There it was: I wasn’t volunteering, I was being voluntold. I took the folder.
The project occupied several buildings at a research facility that had once belonged to the Air Force. There was no school, no established curriculum, and certainly no instructors who had done what we were being asked to do. There were doctors, engineers, neuroscientists, and a few military officers who seemed to spend most of their time asking when the equipment would be ready.
There were also three other Marines in my group. The four of us weren’t the first candidates. Six small groups had come through before us, although nobody would tell us exactly how many people had received implants or how many had successfully completed the program.
One of the engineers described the results as promising. A doctor described them as inconclusive. I noticed neither used the word successful.
The screening took three weeks. Psychological examinations, neurological scans, reaction-time testing, and enough blood samples to make me wonder whether they were planning to take it all.
Then came the surgery. The implant was supposed to be a single procedure. Mine required two, with the first operation installing the interface and its connections. The second, eleven days later, corrected a problem with one of the connections that hadn’t responded properly during testing.
Recovery was miserable. My head hurt. Certain sounds seemed unnaturally loud. I occasionally experienced a sensation like somebody brushing the back of my neck, even when nobody was near me. The doctors recorded everything.
They were very good at recording things, but explaining them was another matter.
Six weeks after the first operation, I sat in front of a monitor while an engineer prepared to activate the link. “We’ll begin with basic directional commands,” he said. “Think of the aircraft moving forward.”
A small quadrotor rested on a platform in the adjoining room. I concentrated.
Nothing happened.
“Try to visualize the motion.”
“I am.”
“Perhaps imagine pushing a joystick.”
“Then why did you put a computer in my skull?”
He didn’t appreciate that. We tried again.
This time I felt something. Not a movement exactly, but a peculiar sense of balance, as though part of me were leaning in a direction my body hadn’t moved. The quadrotor lifted six inches.
The engineer nearly fell out of his chair.
The next three months were equal parts progress and frustration.
Nobody knew how to teach us to use the implants. The engineers understood the software and the doctors understood the anatomy, but neither could tell us what a neural connection was supposed to feel like. We had to figure that out ourselves.
The interface wasn’t like controlling an aircraft with my hands. At first, I kept trying to translate familiar control movements into thoughts. That worked poorly. Things improved when I stopped thinking about controls and began thinking about what I wanted the aircraft to do.
It wasn’t automatic. I still needed to understand the machine, its limitations, and the consequences of every maneuver. But the connection removed a layer between intention and action.
I could fly more precisely. I could respond faster. Eventually, I could look through the aircraft’s camera without constantly referring to a monitor.
That was the strangest part.
I wasn’t seeing two separate pictures. I was aware of both my surroundings and the drone’s view, although concentrating on one made the other less distinct. The researchers were delighted.
Some of my classmates weren’t doing nearly as well. Staff Sergeant Palmer had been an excellent conventional operator. His initial link tests were better than mine, but after a few weeks he began complaining of headaches and dizziness. Then he started having trouble disconnecting.
He told me once that he could still feel the aircraft moving after the power had been shut off.
Another candidate experienced periods of confusion following extended sessions. She occasionally lost track of whether a sound had come from the room around her or from the aircraft’s microphone. The doctors called it neural adaptation disorder.
They didn’t know what caused it. Palmer was eventually removed from training. So was the other Marine.
Neither had done anything wrong. Their implants simply weren’t working the way the researchers expected. I asked one of the doctors whether the same thing could happen to me.
“We haven’t identified a reliable predictor,” he said.
That was a very scientific way of saying he didn’t know his ass from third base. Training and testing continued.
One of my earliest field test deployments was to Venezuela. We were attached to a Marine platoon that was there to train Venezuelan government forces in warfare tactics. Officially, I was there to evaluate unmanned aircraft operations under field conditions.
Only a handful of people knew about the implant.
The aircraft was a modified reconnaissance drone with conventional controls available as a backup. My neural interface handled flight and sensor positioning. There was no artificial intelligence making decisions for me, no automated battlefield management, and no way to control weapons through the link.
I was still a drone operator, just a rather unusual one. The exercise had been running for four days when somebody started shooting. At first, I thought the gunfire was part of the training scenario. Then the exercise controller began shouting over the radio.
A cartel force had attacked a Venezuelan security position several miles from our location. The attack was coordinated, and the Venezuelans were taking casualties. Our Marines were ordered to assist with evacuation and security.
My drone was already airborne. I turned toward the reported contact and found two trucks moving along a dirt road toward the fighting. I zoomed in.
Armed men filled the truck beds. “Two vehicles approaching from the northwest,” I reported. “Approximately fifteen armed personnel. They’re about three kilometers out.”
The Marine lieutenant asked for a grid. I gave him one, then spotted another group moving through the brush east of the road. “Additional personnel east of the vehicles. They’re moving toward your right flank.”
The lieutenant redirected his Marines. For the next several hours, I flew, watched, and talked.
The neural connection made an enormous difference. I could maneuver the aircraft and follow moving targets without taking my attention away from the larger picture. I wasn’t faster at thinking, exactly. I simply spent less time translating what I wanted into control inputs.
That saved seconds. Sometimes seconds mattered.
The fighting continued into the evening. The cartel force withdrew, regrouped, and attacked again the following morning. We remained in the area for several days, supporting Venezuelan troops and helping locate armed groups moving through the surrounding countryside.
I worked in shifts, sleeping when I could and connecting whenever the aircraft was needed. By the time the operation ended, I’d accumulated thirty-seven hours of neural-link time during actual combat operations.
My total link hours were considerably higher, but those thirty-seven were different. During training, a mistake meant a damaged drone and an unhappy engineer.
In Venezuela, a mistake could mean somebody died.
On the third day, I identified a group of armed men approaching a Marine position through a drainage ditch. The lieutenant had been preparing to move his people forward.
I warned him. He stopped the movement, repositioned his Marines, and waited. The attackers came into view exactly where I’d told him they would.
Afterward, the lieutenant found me beside the ground-control station. “How the hell did you spot them that fast?”
“Been watching them for ten minutes, sir.”
“While you were tracking those trucks?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at the drone, then at me. “Whatever they’re paying you, it isn’t enough.” I didn’t tell him about the implant. He wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
The after-action review lasted longer than the operation. The engineers wanted performance data. The doctors wanted neurological examinations. The officers wanted to know whether the system could be replicated.
That last question was the difficult one.
The program had produced only a few reliable operators. Some candidates couldn’t establish a useful link at all. Others developed symptoms severe enough to end their participation, but nobody understood why.
I underwent another series of examinations. My implant was functioning normally, although the doctors admitted they still didn’t know what normal meant.
Then I received orders to report to a meeting with the program director. There were two colonels, a civilian scientist, and a Navy commander waiting for me.
“Staff Sergeant Woods,” one of the colonels began, “we’ve been reviewing your performance in Venezuela.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your results suggest applications beyond unmanned aircraft control.”
I said nothing.
“We’re considering expanding the program to include communications, electronic systems, and battlefield integration.”
“That’s quite a jump from flying drones, sir.”
“It is.”
The civilian leaned forward. “We believe the interface could eventually allow an operator to interact directly with multiple systems.”
“Can it?”
“We don’t know.”
At least he was willing to admit it.
The colonel continued: “We’re establishing a course to give selected operators a broader technical foundation. Basic Electromagnetic and Autonomous Systems. BEAS.”
He slid a folder toward me. “We’d like you to attend and give us some input.”
I opened it. There were no promotion incentives, no special pay provisions, and no guarantee that the program would even exist five years from now.
“What’s the career path, sir?”
“We’re still developing that.”
“What’s my assignment afterward?”
“Also under consideration.”
I looked at him. “So you want me to go to a school that hasn’t been established yet, for a job that doesn’t exist, using equipment you don’t completely understand, with possible complications you can’t predict?”
The Navy commander coughed into his hand.
The colonel didn’t smile.
“That’s a fair summary, Staff Sergeant.”
I thought about Palmer, who could still feel a drone moving after he’d disconnected. I thought about the Marines in Venezuela who’d depended on information I could provide because of that same technology.
“All right, sir. I’m interested.”
BEAS was followed by months of testing, exercises, and arguments. Over the next two years, I helped write procedures for operating several unmanned systems together, although the hardware still required considerable modification. We experimented with communications interfaces and began studying whether the implant could help operators recognize patterns in electronic signals.
Some ideas worked, most didn’t. A few worked in ways nobody had anticipated.
We wrote down what we learned, tested it again, and argued over the results. Gradually, those notes became operating procedures. The procedures became training material.
Eventually, somebody decided the program needed its own specialty. Not everyone was pleased about that.
One major told me that Marines had been conducting reconnaissance and controlling aircraft perfectly well without having computers implanted in their heads, and he saw no reason to create cyborg killing machines. I told him that was true.
Then I asked whether he intended to stop using radios because Marines had once communicated perfectly well with signal flags, bugles, and smoke signals. He didn’t appreciate that either. I can be a pain in the ass like that. My attitude comes as standard issue with the red hair, and it isn’t always career-enhancing.
The Marine Corps eventually decided it needed officers who understood the technology well enough to supervise its development. I was selected for the warrant officer program. By the time I was promoted to Chief Warrant Officer Two, the experimental drone-control project had grown into something none of us would have recognized when we volunteered.
There were still only a handful of successful operators. The implants remained difficult to install, harder to master, and impossible to predict with certainty. We had no satisfactory explanation for the neurological problems that had ended so many promising careers, but one thing we did know was that only about one in every three thousand people had the neurological characteristics making them capable of successfully integrating with the implant.
We were in the early days of what would eventually become one of the most distrusted, yet sought-after specialties in the Marines. We didn’t even know what we could or even should do, but we were learning.
One afternoon, a young engineer asked me what I thought the system would eventually be capable of doing for the Marines. I considered the question.
I’d started with a drone that could barely lift off its platform. I’d watched Marines survive an ambush because I could see something they couldn’t. I’d helped write procedures for systems that hadn’t existed when I received my implant, and I still didn’t know why I could use the thing when so many others couldn’t.
“Son,” I told him, “I don’t think we’ve even figured out what questions to ask yet.”
It would turn out to have a much larger impact than any of us realized in those early days.
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