Chapter 15 Excerpt: Extinguish the Flaming Arrows
Nate stepped through this portion of the Perry display in ten-millisecond steps. On the helmet video, Nate saw Lancer had looked at his cockpit time-to-impact clock for the incoming missile a full second before the three rapid brain waves occurred. Lancer’s eyes were focused on the image of the incoming missile on his helmet visor.
After the three rapid brain waves appeared, there was an almost immediate surge in cognition and motor-commanding brain waves. Within a few of the ten millisecond steps, Lancer’s aircraft started the roll and pulled away from the missile trajectory. After a few more of these steps, the DAS instrument panel display showed the Archer missile detonating on a chaff cloud three hundred meters to Lancer’s right rear.
Nate paused the Perry displays and selected the three rapid brain waves. He wanted to confirm what Lindsey had told him, so he used PQ function to access Perry’s assessment of the initially unassociated three brain waves. The PQ display sprayed some text across the screen:
Based on no sensory triggering input correlation with these brain waves, yet subsequent pilot actions that resulted in a successful but uncured maneuver for successful missile escape and survival, Perry sought potential triggering sources of origin of these brain waves.
Perry noted, 0% neurological data correlation for brain wave triggering.
Based on the pilot’s previous occurrences of similar triad brain waves, observed pre-mission prayers and scripture, and resultant pilot’s non-doctrinal flight maneuvers, Perry assesses with 18.2% probability, that a Holy Spirit encounter triggered these brain waves.
On a whim, Nate pulled up the generative AI tool to probe Perry’s logic. This function could delve through the thousands of Perry’s neural network decision branching trees and select key sources that Perry accessed along the way to interpret these brain waves. Typically, these were drawn from the tens of thousands of online neurological and psychological research papers on brain wave experiments.
But on these three brain waves, Perry reported no neurological or psychological sources, instead using sources from scripture. Nate keyed in a PQ query asking Perry to list the most significant data source for assessing the three waves as a Holy Spirit interaction.
Almost instantly, Perry’s response flashed on the screen:
Highest correlated data source - Ephesians 6:16-18 - In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.
Nate read Perry’s scripture that referenced “flaming arrows” and looked up at his Perry screen that had just shown the Archer missile.
Paul’s Ephesians scripture letter was to the church body at Ephesus, a Mediterranean port city in neighboring Turkey adjacent to where Lancer was flying today. Paul wrote to “pray in the spirit on all occasions” and to “be alert.”
Was that the clincher for Perry? A flaming arrow referenced two thousand years ago in scripture to a group of people in a neighboring country to where Lancer encountered a flaming missile attack today?
Nate leaned back in his chair. As he thought back to the years of developing the Perry AI system, he had gone to extreme measures to prevent any biases in Perry’s data access and logical processes to access and weight external data sources and derive cause-effect associations. Never in his wildest dreams did he think Perry would encounter situations where the scouring of online sources for applicable corroborating data to follow and validate a pilot’s neural activity and subsequent actions would take him to scripture.
He reflected on the how and why, two-thousand years ago, would an omniscient God and creator leave such a perfect description of a future Christian pilot who would “pray in the spirit,” to be protected by the “shield of faith,” and “be alert” for an attack by “flaming arrows?”
This scripture felt to Nate like a glaring prophecy to what Lancer had perfectly lived out today.