Patient Number 1 in DARPA’s Super Soldier Programme

WARNING: There are some images in this article which some people may find disturbing. They are all real and you really can’t see anything and because I don’t know Markup very well, I can’t hide them.

This article is a combination of events that have happened to me that are quite unusual and people start to wonder what on earth is he talking about. I can promise this is all true.

Weirdly I was interviewed by the team that were creating a show in the UK based in some castle in Scotland called “The Traitors” and one of the tests was to fool them by telling them 4 truths and a lie on a live video stream.

Slightly off topic but what would you think?

Four Truths and a Lie

1. I once had breakfast with the entire Liverpool Football Team.
2. I was in the Wonder Women movie (The first one)
3. I once got mistaken for Tom Hardy
4. I am the 15th descendant of King Henry VIII
5. I worked on a project which directly affected the outcome of the USA Presidential Election

Answer at the end of the article…

Forgive the slight silliness of this piece but it’s all horrific for me and my family, so when I do look back so I try to think of it in a positive light.

Pre-Story Poll

Before you read the story below, log your initial instinct. Your vote will be tallied against our global community data at the conclusion of the file.

Due to my Chronic Cluster Headaches mentioned in the story “The Cloud Has No Mercy” The Cloud Has No Mercy, I was told after many years of devastating pain that I would require an operation and a device called a Deep Brain Stimulator installed as they had tried everything else open to them.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an advanced, invasive surgical option reserved for patients with chronic cluster headaches who are entirely refractory (unresponsive) to standard medical therapies.

How the Procedure Works

Target Areas: Surgeons implant permanent electrodes into specific deep brain structures, most commonly the posterior hypothalamus or the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which mediate pain and are involved in the Neurobiology of cluster attacks.

The Device: Small holes are drilled into the skull to guide the electrodes into position. Wires connect these electrodes to a battery-powered pulse generator placed under the skin in the chest, like a heart pacemaker, which delivers regulated electrical impulses.

Now this is a big one, First I was awake for 14 of the 16 hours operation, which allowed the Neurosurgeons’ to monitor if they had placed the electrodes in the correct place, if I started speaking Spanish, they would know they were not positioned correctly. But going back a bit, the day started out with a huge cage being attach to my head via screw holes they had made the night before. This is so they absolutely cannot be any movement during the insertion of the electrode(s), and yes there is redundancy built it. All good.

Went into the surgery, there were at least 10 people in the operating theatre and many other watching in the gallery. All good.

I had asked the nurse if someone could let me see the X-Ray afterwards, they said don’t worry about that, give that nurse your phone and we will get you pictures! Now First off, I have never heard that a patient has been allowed to take what is possible a source of bacteria and germs into an operating theatre with them, let alone have pictures taken of themselves. But they did and it’s remarkable to see.

What happened next will hopefully show how bad these cluster headaches were, in the fact for the entire operation I am smiling, like I cannot wait for the pain to be over. This is Level 10 pain, 12 hours a day for 13 years — Its thought to be the world’s most painful medical condition or the equivalent to giving birth 12 times a day.

They numb the top of my head with Lidocaine and get the hand drill out, yes just like the hand drill your Granddad would have used, except cleaner. They then slowly drill into my brain case until they just get through the bone. Now if you have ever drilled something and the final part is always where the drill goes slightly through until you realise and you pull out quickly, well this happened, because I could feel this is what happened.

Now there was no pain because the Lidocaine had numbed the skin, and of course there are no nerves in the brain. So that scene in the Hannibal Lecter film where he cooks little bits of the characters brain whilst he is still alive is completely possible.

I trusted the Science…

They then have a little discussion and tell me to brace myself. Well, I cannot move anyway so was a bit unsure what was going to happen next. I thought they would gently weave the electrodes they were implanting around the bits of my brain eventually reaching the centre and the Hypothalamus (Walnut sized mass in the centre of the brain, it controls the Body clock and Pain). Oh no, they were going to shoot it straight through the brain a reach the mass with millimetre precision.

These are the images that you can’t see anything.

Long story short, it went well, I answered all the questions asked of me (to check they had not disturbed any part of the brain that controlled anything important) having in their words “just destroyed millions of brain cells, but don’t worry you have plenty more”.

To wrap this up, I was let out of hospital the day after. Major brain surgery and was in hospital 3 days.

All this pain and surgery just because someone picked me up as a kid by my neck and swung me around until two bones snapped. Over the years the bone grows slightly abnormally and therefore Chronic pain.

Still, every cloud, what happened next would not have happened if it weren’t for the Deep Brain Stimulator.

Two set of Electrodes for Redundancy

The Study for DARPA

I was contacted through my Neurologist if I would be part of a study for the University of [Redacted] which was funded by DARPA, the USA’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. They were looking for people with my exact Deep Brain Simulator to do some testing on.

I don’t really know why I said yes, but I did have some tough questions for them before I committed to anything.

I asked — is it a paid study? They said no it wasn’t paid but they would cover expenses. So, I said OK. (I would not do well in an interrogation )

Arrival Day at some University in Southern England

Then came the day, I arrived as you can see and they booked me in as Patient Number 001. I said is this meant to be anonymous? And they said yes which is why we have used Patient Number 001. I said how many others in the program. They said just me, they couldn’t find anyone else up to that point who qualified, and they might not even get their PhD because of that reason.

Then they told me what the study was meant to be for. Its part of a “Super Soldier” program where they were investigating what having one of these implants could do to a human if the settings were altered.

W.T.A.F. !

They would monitor me closely over the course of two nights when I was sleeping and then awake and one of those nights, they would alter the brain implant signal and use settings not allowed via my patient programmer and not even accessible to the doctor programmer device. They would administer a series of tests during the night and when I woke up.

As hard as I tried I still couldn’t get Radio 1

All ready for the first night…

So, this was what I looked like each evening before I fell asleep (With 20 PhD students all watching me through one way glass) Also the kept interrupting me because the electrodes kept falling off during the night.
 
 Night one went OK and when I woke up I got through the testing ok, it was very boring and a bit simple I thought, I was pretty annoyed because I had planned to go and do some tennis serve practice on the courts which were 50 metres away. I could see them from my hospital room. They said I couldn’t leave, I said I was leaving, they got the big boss in, who by this time was annoyed himself as it was a Saturday and he was at home. I said I was leaving the study if I couldn’t go outside, what was the harm.

So, I got to hit about 10 serves and the rain just poured down so I didn’t quite maximise the “prison break” and went back for the second night. I woke up the next day, full of happiness and joy and pleased basically because I was going home. I ran through the tests without even blinking, hard IQ type tests just answering, list 10 things we spoke about yesterday, now tell me them backwards. I would just tell them ten, backwards, forwards anyway they wanted just to get out of there.
 Finally I was allowed to go home.

Then it struck me, it was the second night, the one where they turned it onto different settings — the “Super Soldier” settings where I had ace’d through the tests like they weren’t even there and was generally invincible, or were the settings changed on the first night where the next day I was as p-ssed as any human could be and struggled with the tests? Did they change it both days? Did they leave me with the bad one or the good one? Even today life feels a bit like the Manchurian Candidate or Pelican Brief.

I guess I will never know…

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The Cyber-Vulnerability Fact

In a terrifying twist of real-world history, the major medical manufacturers responsible for building these advanced thoracic IPG units (who also dominate the global heart pacemaker market) notoriously left glaring security holes in their systems and devices. For years, implantable devices and transmitters faced massive FDA cyber-security roll-outs because firmware lacked basic encryption. Historically, hard-coded master technician keys and default factory settings — colloquially mocked by white-hat hackers as equivalent to leaving the device password as “Password123” — left hundreds of thousands of hearts and neurological pacemakers vulnerable to remote signal interception.

Which is nice…

Even when I had lunch with Tim Berners-Lee all we spoke about was getting the data off and seeing what it was doing — he was speaking on the Semantic Web 3.0 that day and unveiling a ¾ bronze statue of himself and all we spoke about was my brain.

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Is it weird?

Er, yes, it’s very weird, when I turn it on I go cross-eyed the wrong way and I can take down a WiFi network in the 5 GHz range by walking into a room, other than that it reduces the pain from a 10 to a 2, and that’s all I care about. Yes, there are side effects and charging yourself up is always a bit strange, especially when people ask where do I plug myself in?
 
 But who cares what I look like, or if I have to suffer the embarrassment of wearing the harness they first gave me, which to be honest looked like I was going for a night out in London’s famous Torture Gardens Fetish club. But I do have a new harness now which is far better as they have upgraded the charging device itself to be a super-charger. Its still working, it’s meant to last approx. 2–3 years and mine has been going for 7 so far.

It will have to be soon as it’s starting to lose its charge, trouble is I doubt they will replace it whilst I have cancer so wish me luck….

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Four Truths and a Lie

1. I once had breakfast with the entire Liverpool Football Team. **TRUE
**I did have breakfast with the Liverpool football team when I was 10 years old.

2. I was in the Wonder Women movie (The first one) **FALSE
**I didn’t appear in the Wonder Women movie, but my friend Eugene Brave Rock did. He stayed with me when he was filming it.

Gene Brave Rock & Gal Gadot (Filmed in Leavesden)

3. I once got mistaken for Tom Hardy **TRUE
**I did get mistaken for Tom Hardy and I have been loving this ever since.

4. I am the 15th descendant of King Henry VIII TRUEAt the time I did believe I was the 15th descendant to King Henry VIII but since found out that it was a mistake and actually my DNA is closely related to Beethoven and Oscar Schindler.

5. I worked on a project which directly affected the outcome of the USA Presidential Election TRUEI worked on the Voter Registration system in Tallahassee, Florida in the District Attorney’s Office where Jed Bush had an office next door to ours. I was sent out to fix* the database. This is the election where George Bush became president over Al Gore.

• When I say fix I mean “make it better”, not “alter the outcome”, that had already happened 😉

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