In the dome above the bunker’s pods, Everett Finch holds Robert Langdon and Katherine Solomon at gunpoint while calmly outlining what he believes is the coming struggle for dominance: whoever perfects a true human-to-machine interface will control immense financial and intelligence power. Finch claims the CIA has pursued this goal in secret, avoiding public legal fights over patents by burying the work inside classified programs.

Finch explains that Threshold’s breakthrough is not merely an implant that captures what someone sees through their eyes, but one that can monitor and display the “mind’s eye”—the images a brain generates internally through memory, imagination, dreams, and nightmares. Katherine reacts with astonishment, recognizing the implications for consciousness research, while Langdon is disturbed by the surveillance potential.

Noticing the suspended-animation pods, Katherine realizes Finch is using people placed near death to watch what their minds perceive. Finch confirms that Threshold targets the “threshold” between life and death because near-death altered states, he argues, provide access to knowledge and perception beyond normal cognition—something decades of CIA-funded psychic and remote-viewing efforts could not reliably achieve.

Finch says the problem with near-death experiences is their fleeting, dreamlike recall, but Threshold can record the experience as it happens and stream it to the dome’s screens. He claims that when a subject nears death, consciousness becomes “untethered,” producing an out-of-body state; Threshold calls such a subject a “psychonaut,” whose real-time point-of-view can be monitored as the consciousness moves beyond the pod.

When Katherine asks about the cockpit stations, Finch reveals that implanted brains can be paired so a “grounded mind” can guide and help navigate the psychonaut’s confusing out-of-body state. He frames this as piloting invisible, undetectable “drones” of consciousness that could be sent anywhere to gather intelligence, making Threshold an ultimate surveillance weapon.

Though Langdon struggles to accept the implications, he recognizes the growing body of evidence Finch invokes and sees Katherine’s exhilaration at what she views as proof of nonlocal consciousness. Finch abruptly rejects any scientific or public purpose, insisting Threshold is a military operation, and ends by claiming the CIA’s earlier remote-viewing program, Stargate, “never failed”—it simply evolved into Threshold.