Reading fiction written by people in the know is a great way to stay informed and explore the possibilities of Future War. Check out Art Of Future Warfare Project.
The fact that he couldn’t feel the drill going into the back of his skull made the noise all the more terrifying.
His eyes darted around the room. He tried to turn his head, but he couldn’t move. A computer display in front of him was all that he could see; the screen showed a surgeon drilling into a shaved skull. A puff of bone dust smoked up from the metal boring through the skull on the screen. Then the screen itself was covered with a fine white powder that wafted in from behind him. His vision blurred as some of the powder fell into his eyes. He tried to blink but couldn’t. Someone outside his field of view squirted a liquid into his eyes and dabbed the corners as the liquid dripped out.
A second and third time, the drill bored through the skull on the video screen, sending more puffs of bone dust wafting over. He wanted to close his eyes to stop watching, but he couldn’t. After the second squirt of liquid into his eyes, he realized it was because his eyelids were no longer there. He couldn’t do anything, in fact, but watch as the surgeon began to insert thin fiber-optic wires into the three holes in the skull. He knew the wires were filled with over five hundred electrodes, each as thin as a human hair, that would link the interrogator’s computer with the electromagnetic signals of his brain.
The Power of What Ifs
Our new book Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World Warexplores something quite scary: the risks of war breaking out between the US and Russia and China. The above scene may be the scariest moment in it, because it lays out how a real-world technology originally developed to aid the paralyzed and those suffering from PTSD (the brain-machine interfaces in DARPA’s Braingate and SUBNET project, which are now migrating into things like video gaming), will also be used in terrifying new ways.
Read the Remainder at Wired
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