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(Bonus chapter)
Jake woke up first. He always did.
"Up. Both of you."
He swung off his bunk and smacked the headboards of his brothers' beds on the way down. Marcus groaned. Dean didn't move.
"Today's the three-person test. Move."
Marcus yawned wide enough to dislocate something. "We've done dozens of these. It's routine."
"Dual connections are routine. This is the first triple. Different animal."
Dean finally sat up, rubbing his face. "Is this the part where you make us go running?"
"Yes."
"Of course it is."
Jake's coping mechanism for any high-stakes event was a five-mile run. His brothers' coping mechanism was complaining about Jake's coping mechanism. The dynamic had been this way since childhood.
They ran the perimeter of the old radar station's athletic field. The new research center was visible through the fence: a massive crescent-shaped structure, steel-framed, thirty meters tall, with hangar-sized doors on its convex face. The building was nearly complete. Everyone at the facility had theories about what would go inside. The doors were sized for something very large.
After the run and breakfast, the three brothers walked to the laboratory. The Sullivan and Peterson triplets were already there. Reeves and the senior team were running equipment checks. Ryan arrived a few minutes later, reading a report.
The drift device sat in the center of the room, its sea-urchin hub gleaming, reaction chambers filled and bubbling faintly, three sensor caps waiting on their articulated arms.
"Take a seat," Reeves told the pilots. "Standard prep. You know the drill."
Ryan settled into a corner with the data report. The three-person test was scheduled for ten, and it was barely nine. He used the time to review Thornton's analysis of the plasma generation experiment. The cross-reference with the decade-old data was promising: core parameters aligned within acceptable margins, and several anomalies from the original tests could now be explained by the focusing lens theory.
Cross approached Ryan with an idea.
"Before we start the triple connection, I'd like to run a secondary experiment. A memory test."
Ryan looked up. "What kind?"
"We give each pilot a unique password in private. During the drift, we instruct them to deliberately recall the moment they received it. If the connected pilots can perceive the password through the shared memory fragments, it proves that directed recall can transmit specific information through the link."
Ryan considered it. The drift's memory sharing had always been involuntary, fragments surfacing at random. Cross was proposing to test whether a pilot could intentionally push a specific memory into the shared space.
"Do it," Ryan said.
Cross and his team moved quickly. Nine passwords, one per pilot, delivered individually in separate rooms. Simple words. Easy to remember. Easy to verify.
At 9:55, a knock on the laboratory door.
Ryan opened it. Patricia stood in the corridor, not crossing the threshold, positioning herself where she couldn't see inside.
"Quick heads-up," she said quietly. "Today's test is being observed remotely. Aegis leadership has access to the laboratory cameras."
Ryan's eyebrows rose slightly. "Leadership as in the division?"
Patricia cleared her throat. "Leadership as in the top. The CEO. He cleared time specifically for this."
Ryan understood. The three-person drift was the milestone that determined whether the Jaeger concept was viable. If three minds could share one neural space, a three-pilot mech became possible. The person who controlled Aegis's entire budget wanted to see it happen in real time.
"Also," Patricia added, "after the experiment, come to my office. There's a call waiting for you."
"From whom?"
Patricia's expression said everything her words didn't. "Just come."
She left. Ryan returned to the lab, glanced briefly at the camera mounted in the upper corner of the room, and said nothing to the team.
"Let's begin."
Jake, Marcus, and Dean took their positions. Three chairs. Three sensor caps. The brothers settled in with the easy familiarity of people who'd done this enough times to find the setup boring.
The caps descended. Contact sensors found their positions. Signal amplifiers locked against temples. Neck cradles clicked into place.
Ryan activated the drift device.
The central hub's reaction chambers erupted into motion. Solutions cycling, foaming, shifting color. The signal processor's fans spun up. Three green lights appeared on three sensor caps.
Three minds entered the same space.
On the monitoring display, three virtual brain models appeared in a triangular formation, drifting slowly toward a central convergence point. The neural patterns in each brain were already beginning to synchronize, their oscillation frequencies pulling toward alignment like tuning forks finding the same pitch.
*Neural Sync: 30%*
The number climbed. Steady. Consistent. No rejection spikes. No instability.
*35%. 40%. 55%.*
Reeves watched the display without breathing. Three-person neural synchronization had never been achieved. Not by any lab, any institution, any researcher in the history of neuroscience. If this worked, the entire field's understanding of inter-brain connectivity would have to be rewritten.
*70%. 80%. 90%.*
The three brain models were nearly overlapping now. Three separate neural architectures, converging into a unified pattern, their activity signatures becoming indistinguishable from one another.
*95%. 98%.*
*100%.*
The room exhaled.
Full synchronization. Three human nervous systems, linked through the liquid neural connection device, sharing a single cognitive space. The display showed a single merged brain model where three had been, its activity pattern a synthesis of all three pilots' neural signatures.
"Holding," Reeves said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "Sync is holding at one hundred percent."
Ryan checked the secondary metrics. Neural pressure: well within safe limits. Signal integrity: perfect. Connection stability: rock solid. The liquid neural system had been designed for three-person operation, and it was performing exactly as specified.
Cross remembered his experiment. "Pilots, please recall the moment you received your passwords. Focus on the memory deliberately."
The three brothers, eyes closed, faces calm, followed the instruction.
A pause. Then they opened their eyes, almost in unison.
"Well?" Cross asked eagerly.
Jake spoke first. "I could feel them remembering something. Both of them. But the images were blurry. Like looking through frosted glass. I could tell there was a scene, a room, a person talking, but I couldn't read the password itself."
Marcus and Dean confirmed the same experience. Directed recall worked. The other pilots perceived that a memory was being pushed into the shared space. But the resolution was too low for specific details. The password itself was invisible behind what Jake described as heavy pixelation.
Cross was delighted anyway. The principle was proven. Directed memory transfer was possible through the drift. The current resolution was too low for practical information exchange, but with deeper psychological conditioning and longer connection durations, the fidelity might improve.
The Sullivan and Peterson triplets followed. Both sets achieved full three-person synchronization. Both confirmed the directed-memory findings.
Three tests. Three full successes. The three-person drift was viable.
Ryan didn't wait for the celebration to finish. He left Reeves and Cross to handle the post-test analysis and walked quickly to Patricia's office.
The door was open. Patricia was standing beside her desk. On the desk sat a red telephone, receiver lifted, line open.
Someone was already on the other end.
Ryan sat down, picked up the phone, and said: "This is Ryan Mercer."
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