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.

WIRED Opinion About P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America. August Cole is Non Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. They are the authors of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.

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 War explores 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.

We both work in the policy world, exploring the technology and trends of the 21st century. Over the years, we have learned from various war games we helped organize for the military that narrative and storytelling can play a powerful role in illuminating real issues. Fiction can aid in truth telling by asking tough questions that might otherwise be too complex, too contrarian, or too uncomfortable to posit directly. Questions such as: Have we spent trillions of dollars on weapons that might let us down? Could ubiquitous sensors and artificial intelligence utterly change the way we think of humanity's role, not just in the economy, but also in war? And, perhaps most uncomfortable of all (because no one wants it but it must be weighed as a real risk) what would the 21st century version of full-out, great power, state-on-state warfare look like?

That's the question we felt compelled to dig into. Do we think such a war is inevitable? No. Let us repeat: No. But it is a risk in years ahead, given the geopolitical landscape (indeed, the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper has declared “A U.S.-China war is inevitable...” if the US doesn’t change its policies in the Pacific, while leaders in both the US and Russia this last month declared the other their No. 1 threat), and therefore it’s important to consider why it could happen and how to avoid it.

In exploring such futures, fiction can also flesh out a looming danger not just of a war, but new technologies used within it. One of the best examples of this is the story “Danger!” written by Arthur Conan Doyle just prior to the outbreak of World War I. He warned that the new technology of submarines would rewrite the rules of what was possible in war, turning strengths, like big fleets of battleships, into sunk costs, in both meanings of the term.

What would the 21st century version of full-out, great power, state-on-state warfare look like?

What technologies and trends are similarly about to rewrite the rules for the next iteration of warfare? During the next decade, the US will become an energy export powerhouse; the Internet of Things will move from marketing concept to a reality that operates in the background; while China’s Navy will outnumber the Pentagon’s fleet by over 100 warships.

That’s the power of fiction: you can move the dial forward and explore “what ifs” (think HG Wells and how he envisioned the way a new device he called an “Atomic Bomb” might change the world). You can envision future worlds in new kinds of detail, and explore potential pathways in a way that is sometimes difficult in nonfiction and nearly impossible within bureaucratic confines.

Hacking an F-35

Worm banked the F-35B hard to the left immediately after takeoff. The jet shifted smoothly into forward-flight mode, and he tried to gain some kind of situational awareness, just like they’d taught him in flight school.

The AN/AAQ-37 electro-optical distributed aperture system fed his helmet with data from visual and IR sensors located around the plane, allowing him to “see” through the plane below. And what he saw was chaos. He’d once flown through a forest fire during a training mission in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains; this was worse. All the smoke and debris in the air had created a swirl of darkness with patches of bright sun. Chinese drones darted in and out of the smoke at low levels, and on the deck, his squadron’s fighters lay scattered about like puzzle pieces. He scanned up and around the sky and confirmed what he’d feared: his was the only U.S. jet in the air.

He started to check on the jet’s other systems. No sound came over his radios. The fighter’s GPS-coupled inertial navigation system was wrong, showing him as flying over Maui when he knew damn well this was Oahu. Electronically generated false targets flickered on the horizontal situation display and then disappeared. The plane, with its novel software systems and millions of lines of code, was designed to be its own copilot, capable of automation and interpretation never before possible in battle. But at this moment, Worm thought, the fifth-generation fighter was having trouble getting out of its own way, electronically speaking.

This section of our book illustrates one of the closest equivalents we may have today to Doyle’s warning about submarines. Our ubiquitous digital systems, which have given us amazing new powers, have created unprecedented vulnerabilities. One of us broke the story on the F-35 program being hacked as far back as 2009, while the other has worked with business and government to mitigate the vast campaign of IP theft and espionage that has hit everything from defense contractors to Silicon Valley to most recently the Office of Personnel Management. With that background, the above fictional scene let us explore the ultimate risks of these cybertheft campaigns and connect them to how they would change the tide of an actual battle. Sound far-fetched? Well, last year the Pentagon’s weapons tester found every single major weapons program had “significant vulnerabilities” to cyber attack.

Our ubiquitous digital systems, which have given us amazing new powers, have created unprecedented vulnerabilities.

And the cross of fiction and nonfiction can also crystalize issues and draw new insights, even on the most controversial debates. For example, an international campaign has called for the preemptive ban of “killer robots” (a narrative inspired in part by science fiction), culminating in a letter last week signed by nearly 2,000 scientists and technology leaders like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and physicist Stephen Hawking. And yet, there are as many as 21 different current projects where AI technologies are being designed today to be used in a future war, as we explore in our book. They range from autonomous drones and AI battle management systems to submarine hunting robotics. If the campaign to stop this future is going to succeed, it will have to overcome such use cases being imagined for a future war, which is why these weapons are being worked on in the real world.

Such insights point to the utility of “useful fiction,” which culminates in a wider reach. We’ve been asked to brief our book’s findings with groups that range from 4-star generals and members of Congress to 600 Navy officers at the service’s annual strategy conference. And the reason isn’t just that novels are more fun to read than policy memos. Rather, packaging real world lessons within a fictional format lets people reflect on how many long-held assumptions about our world simply won’t be true in the future.

And that may be the broader lesson from the experience. As our main character advises a young officer on how much the world is poised to change, “Just because you see the world one way today does not mean it will be that way tomorrow.”