The NY Times catches up with the current state of hypersound. They’re long past theory and now have actual hardware…
Nimbly holding a big black plate, Norris stands with me in an A.T.C. sound chamber. Since he’s poised behind the weapon, he will hear no sound once it’s powered up: not a peep. ”HIDA can instantaneously cause loss of equilibrium, vomiting, migraines — really, we can pretty much pick our ailment,” he says brightly. ”We’ve delivered a couple dozen units so far, but will have a lot more out by June. They’re talking millions!” (Last month, A.T.C. cut a five-year, multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with General Dynamics, one of the giants of the military-industrial complex.)
Norris prods his assistant to locate the baby noise on a laptop, then aims the device at me. At first, the noise is dreadful — just primally wrong — but not unbearable. I repeatedly tell Norris to crank it up (trying to approximate battle-strength volume, without the nausea), until the noise isn’t so much a noise as an assault on my nervous system. I nearly fall down and, for some reason, my eyes hurt. When I bravely ask how high they’d turned the dial, Norris laughs uproariously. ”That was nothing!” he bellows. ”That was about 1 percent of what an enemy would get. One percent!” Two hours later, I can still feel the ache in the back of my head.