by Andrew Lane
‘Yeah. I think we’ll keep that one on the back burner. But thanks.’
‘I suppose you’ve got a better idea,’ Sam challenged.
‘Actually I have.’ Kieron paused. ‘You know how the brain produces electrical brainwaves?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you know that thing we did in physics, where you make ripples in a pond and then make more ripples the same size but one-hundred-and-eighty degrees out of phase, so the peaks of the original sound wave are cancelled out by the troughs in the new ones?’
Sam nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah – it’s the principle that noise-cancelling headphones use. They record the background noise of the environment you’re in – like a train or an aircraft – and then play it back a few milliseconds out of phase so it cancels the original sound out.’
‘OK.’ Kieron leaned forward. ‘What happens if you combine the two? If you can record someone’s brainwaves and then play them back out of phase?’
There was a long silence as Sam digested what Kieron had said. ‘It might actually switch the brain off,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I mean, for good. Stop your breathing maybe.’
‘Or it might just suppress your conscious mind and put you into a trance.’ Kieron stared into Sam’s eyes, willing him to buy into the idea. ‘Remember – this doesn’t have to actually work. It just needs to sound like it might.’
‘You know,’ Sam said slowly, ‘this might actually work. We could make a fortune from this!’
‘Baby steps, Sam. Let’s concentrate on the current priority – selling the idea.’
‘OK.’ Sam leaned forward as well, so that his forehead was millimetres away from Kieron’s. ‘How do you record someone’s brainwaves?’
‘Electrodes,’ Kieron replied. ‘Stuck to the scalp.’
‘Easy in a hospital; difficult if you’re facing a guy with a gun.’
‘Right – so how do we make it portable and simple?’ Kieron felt a growing sense of excitement rushing through him as fragmentary ideas started to join up in his brain. ‘We have something like a hairnet, but covered in electrodes. It’s all squished up into a ball. It gets fired at a person from a launcher, and the net unfolds while it’s in mid-air and wraps around their head –’
‘Or it’s like a plastic mesh covered in electrodes that gets warmed up somehow when it’s fired, becomes pliable, folds itself up around the target’s head and then quickly cools down to make a kind of cage.’ Sam shrugged. ‘They use stuff like that for face masks when they give people radiotherapy for brain tumours. They’re moulded to the face, and then bolted down to stop you from moving your head.’ He looked away. ‘My grandad had one. He used to let me play with it. It was purple.’
‘OK,’ Kieron went on, ‘however it’s done, it wraps around the target’s head. There’s a wire connecting it to a device that records the target’s brainwaves and plays them back out of phase, thus rendering them unconscious. It’s genius!’
‘It’s certainly the kind of thing a teenager might come up with. You’d need to convince them that the maths works. You’d also need to show them some kind of prototype. Doesn’t need to actually work – it just needs to look good.’
‘So what do we need?’
Sam thought for a moment. ‘Something appropriately medical. Electrodes, plastic, wires – and maybe an oscilloscope. Oh, and some maths that sounds vaguely convincing.’
‘Where can we get that from?’
Sam considered. ‘I think the kit itself can come from the neurology department of a hospital. They’ll have that kind of thing – I mean, they must record people’s brainwaves all the time.’
‘So – a big hospital then?’
Sam looked dubious. ‘I’m all for a bit of breaking and entering – you know that – but I’m not sure I want to take stuff from a hospital. I mean, what if they need it?’
‘Good point. What if we just borrowed it, and then donated part of the money we’re getting from SIS-TERR?’
‘I could work with that.’
Kieron glanced around the room. Neither Bex nor Bradley were paying them any attention. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that it’s time Bradley took your sister out for a coffee.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Sam said warningly.
Bradley looked up. ‘Did I hear my name being mentioned?’ he asked.
Kieron smiled. ‘We’re thinking of taking a little field trip,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’
It took a good fifteen minutes of arguing and explaining, but eventually the four of them – Kieron, Sam, Bex and Bradley – were outside, getting into the car.
‘I still don’t think this is a good idea,’ Sam muttered as Bex started the ignition.
It took just twenty minutes to get to the Walkergate Hospital. They headed in to the main building and looked for the Programmed Investigations Unit, where Sam’s sister was working. As they headed up in the lift, Bex took over the planning.
‘Sam, Bradley – you head into the unit and look for Courtney. Tell her you wanted to check when she was finishing so you could take her for a meal to thank her for everything. I’ll snaffle a porter’s jacket and a wheelchair from somewhere. When you see me come into the unit, Bradley – you fake an attack of some kind.’
‘Might not be a fake,’ Bradley said. He was, Kieron had to admit, looking a bit pale.
‘While Courtney is sorting you out, I’ll come in with the wheelchair as if I’m collecting someone. Courtney should be distracted enough that she’s only looking at Bradley, but I don’t want her catching sight of me by accident. I’ll take a set of electrodes and an EEG machine. The great thing about hospitals is that everything is labelled so that new nurses can find stuff quickly. While you’re stopping Courtney from turning around, I’ll put the things on the wheelchair and get out of there. Clear?’
‘Clear,’ they all said together.
In the event, it all went like a dream. Courtney was alone in the PIU, as she’d previously told Sam and Bradley.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said, surprised.
Bradley switched into what Kieron assumed was his ‘smooth pick-up routine’. ‘We thought we could take you for dinner when your shift is over,’ he said. ‘As a thank-you for looking after me.’
‘What – all of you?’ she said, glancing at Sam and Kieron.
‘Yes – all of us,’ Sam said firmly.
Bradley smiled. ‘They insisted,’ he added. ‘Bless them.’
‘My shift’s over in half an hour – do you want to wait here for me? We haven’t got any patients in this afternoon.’
Kieron saw, out of the corner of his eye, Bex pushing a wheelchair through the doorway. Before Courtney could spot her, he nudged Bradley in the back.
Bradley raised a hand to his forehead and winced. ‘Actually, I could do with sitting down. Those stairs …’
‘Oh, you didn’t take the stairs, did you?’ Courtney fussed around him, moving him towards a bay with a bed. ‘In your condition?’
‘I thought I was better,’ he protested.
As the three of them helped get Bradley to the bed, Kieron glanced over his shoulder. Bex had moved to a set of cupboards and was opening one. She pulled something out, then glanced at Kieron and nodded. She had it.
Now all they had to do, Kieron thought to himself, was get through dinner without acting suspiciously.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘This isn’t going to be enough though,’ Bex pointed out, holding the net of electrodes she’d ‘liberated’.
It was the morning of the next day, and they were all sitting around the lounge of the apartment that Bex had rented. Kieron and Sam were still enthused by the success of their covert mission to get the EEG brainwave electrodes, while Bradley was just looking wiped out by the exertion.
Kieron glanced over at her. ‘It’s a standard head-size – one size fits all.’
‘That’s not what I meant. You’ve got the medical-standard electrodes for placing on the scalp. That’
s great – but it’s just a prop. Just set-dressing. You can’t go into a high-tech corporation with a prop in your hand and an idea in your head. You need more than that.’
Kieron frowned, while Sam said, ‘Like what?’
‘OK – explain your idea to me again, slowly enough that someone not brought up with YouTube can understand it. Then I’ll tell you what else we need.’
Kieron leaned forward. ‘Sound is a wave, right? Just a pressure wave travelling through the air. Sounds you hear are caused by the increases and decreases of pressure against your eardrum.’
‘With you so far.’
‘Imagine those pressure waves on a graph, like mountains and valleys.’
She nodded. ‘Keep going.’
‘Now imagine that you can play another sound that’s the exact opposite of that graph – wherever there’s a mountain on one, there’s a valley on the other. And vice versa.’
‘They would cancel out,’ Bex said, picturing it in her head. ‘There would be no landscape – sorry, noise – at all. Everything would be flat.’
‘Correct.’ Kieron looked as if he was going to continue, but Sam jumped in.
‘Brainwaves are like sound waves, except that they are caused by positive and negative electrical currents rather than the physical movement of air molecules. If you look at a graph of your brainwaves they look just like sound waves. The maths is the same.’
‘So,’ Bex said, following the thought process along, ‘if you can find a way to project a brainwave into a brain that’s opposite to the brainwave it’s already experiencing, the two will cancel out. That’s your theory? It has the benefit of simplicity, I suppose.’
Kieron nodded. ‘That’s it,’ he said hurriedly, before Sam could interject again. ‘The question is – how do you get the new brainwave into the brain?’
‘And also,’ Bradley murmured from where he was slumped, eyes half closed, ‘how do you know you’ll switch the brain off temporarily rather than permanently?’
‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.’
Bex had to admire Kieron’s acting skills. She suspected he wasn’t anywhere near as confident as his tone suggested.
He explained his theory. ‘We’re not stopping the brain producing the brainwaves – we’re just cancelling them out after they’re produced. Going back to the sound-wave analogy, the tuba is still playing, it’s just that you can’t hear the music.’
‘I hate tubas,’ Bradley said quietly. Bex wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, making a joke or losing his grip on events. He straightened himself up a bit and went on: ‘When you say you’re cancelling out the brainwaves, does that include the signals that tell the heart to keep beating or the lungs to inflate and deflate?’
Bex relaxed. Bradley still knew what was happening.
‘We’re not saying it’ll work,’ Sam pointed out. ‘We’re just saying it has to sound as if it could.’
‘And besides,’ Kieron added, ‘we’ve been researching this. We really have. The brain produces a whole complicated set of brainwaves – alpha waves, beta waves, gamma waves, delta waves, and probably others as well. Some of them are associated with conscious thought – those are the alpha waves. Some are more associated with autonomic bodily functions like heartbeat and breathing. Those are, like, the delta waves and stuff. We aren’t planning to cancel them all out – just the ones that are linked to conscious thought.’
‘“And stuff”,’ Bradley said, settling back with his eyes closed again. ‘I like the tech-talk. It’s very reassuring.’
‘We’re not planning on cancelling any of them out,’ Sam reminded them all again. ‘We’re just saying that we can do it.’ He pointed to the hairnet of electrodes that Bex held. ‘That’s the microphone and the loudspeaker combined, if you like. We’re saying we can use that to record the waves that the brain is producing and then play them back but reversed.’
Bex tried to picture it. ‘So – you fire a net like this over someone’s head, then feed signals into it. Sounds complicated.’
‘I’ve actually put together a flash animation of it in action,’ Kieron said. ‘It looks good.’
‘I’m sure it does.’ She thought for a minute. Sam tried to say something, but she held up her hand to stop him. ‘OK – the problem as I see it is this: you’ve got your prop, and you’ve got your flash animation. That’s enough to get you through the Goldfinch Institute’s door. That’s the lure, if you like. It attracts the fish. But look at it from the fish’s point of view. Once it gets close to the lure and realises there’s actually no worm there, it’ll swim off. What’s your worm?’
Sam just looked confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
Kieron was keeping up though. He nodded slowly. ‘You mean, if we just dangle the idea in front of them, they can say, “Cool idea, lads,” then pat us on the head, send us away and use the idea themselves. We need to have something that they can’t develop – at least, not in a hurry. Something they need us for.’
Bex nodded. ‘You need a worm.’
Kieron and Sam swapped glances. Bex was impressed by the way they seemed to almost share the same thoughts sometimes. They didn’t need to talk – they just each knew what the other one was thinking. That was a close friendship.
‘We need –’ Kieron started to say.
‘– some kind of mathematical simulation of brainwaves,’ Sam continued.
‘One that’s connected to a simulated heart, respiratory system and so on,’ Kieron went on.
‘That way –’
Kieron again, continuing rather than interrupting: ‘– we can show that transmitting a reversed brainwave will cancel out the top-level brain functions while allowing the lower level ones to keep going.’
‘We need a simulated person,’ they chorused together.
‘Correct.’ Bex didn’t know if it was correct or not, but it sounded convincing. ‘So how do you get one?’
The two boys just stared at each other.
‘Neural network?’ Sam queried.
Kieron nodded. ‘Something like that. Let me check.’ He slipped the ARCC glasses back on and started to wave his hands around, accessing information from the ether.
Bex glanced over at Bradley. ‘How are you doing, Brad?’
‘Hanging on,’ he said, eyes still closed. ‘I get little peaks of energy, and then it all seems to fade away for a while.’
‘Hopefully the doctor will be able to sort that out.’ Bex tried to sound less worried than she actually was.
‘When’s she coming?’
Bex winced. ‘Unfortunately I think it’ll be after the three of us have left for America. Will you be all right to let her in?’
Bradley smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll invite Courtney over. She can let her in.’
Bex was about to say that she didn’t want any strangers in the flat when she realised that this doctor who was coming to see Bradley was technically a stranger and Courtney wasn’t. Before she could resolve the logical discontinuity in her mind, Bradley went on:
‘Did you get in contact with SIS-TERR? Have you accepted the new mission?’
She nodded but then, realising that Bradley’s eyes were closed, said, ‘Yes – I sent them a message. Just a simple acknowledgement.’
‘And what about our last job – the one in Mumbai? What did you tell them about that?’
Bex frowned. ‘That was trickier. Obviously I couldn’t admit what had really happened – Blood and Soil stealing the briefcase, me going after it, discovering that there were five neutron bombs set to explode across the Middle East and Pakistan, joining up with a multi-billionaire to locate the devices and then relying on two teenagers to block the signal that would launch them. I mean, that would just be stupid. Even if they did believe me – and frankly I barely believe it myself – they’d drop us like a hot potato.’ She sighed. ‘In the end I went back to the simple fact that my brief was to witness the handover of the case containing the information on where the last neutron
bomb was located. I told them I watched it being handed over to two Westerners with close-cut blond hair. That’s the truth, pretty much. They don’t need to know about anything that happened after that.’
‘Just so I know,’ Bradley said. ‘I didn’t want to contradict you, if asked.’
Bex noticed that Kieron looked as if he wanted to say something. ‘What is it, Kieron?’
‘There’s a researcher at Newcastle University who’s doing research on the brain/body interface,’ he said. ‘He’s trying to work out whether self-awareness is an inevitable result of linking a brain and a body up, or whether it’s something else.’
‘Self-awareness?’ Bradley asked.
It was Sam who answered. ‘Dogs are self-aware,’ he pointed out. ‘You put a dog in front of a mirror and it knows that the image is a reflection of itself, not another dog. You put a cat in front of a mirror and it thinks it’s looking at another cat. Dogs are self-aware, as are elephants and dolphins. Cats aren’t.’
‘And people get paid to research this kind of thing?’ Bex was impressed. ‘We’re in the wrong game!’
‘Anyway,’ Kieron went on, ‘this bloke’s developed a simulated brain that produces brainwaves just like a real brain does. He intends to connect it to various mechanical arms and sensors, like cameras, to see if it develops a sense of self. That’s what we need to take with us – the simulation. We can demonstrate it to this Todd guy at the Institute.’ A frown crossed his face. ‘There’s one problem though. The research is being sponsored by the Ministry of Defence. They’re hoping to develop ways of commanding aircraft and tanks using brainwaves rather than hands-on controls or remote control. The lab is separate from the rest of the university, and it’s in a high-security environment. We’re going to have trouble getting in there and taking his simulation.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, that does mean it’s something the Goldfinch Institute won’t have access to.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a worm that nobody else is using to fish with.’