“Ridley… Focus. Please. You need to see the world again.”
He looked into her eyes. “Are they watching?”
Diane regretted not forcing the issue earlier. “Let’s go. Now.”
He did not resist. They walked outside. Dandelions were sprouting in the newly seeded lawn, their yellow heads announcing that spring had arrived. A gull flew overhead. Ridley chased it to the water. “They put cameras on them.”
Diane followed. They sat together on the same boulder as waves lapped at the shore. The gull called, seemingly mocking Ridley.
She debated whether to call for an ambulance rather than try to wrangle him into the doctor’s office.
“The forest is already overtaking the old neighborhood,” he muttered, “The vines are choking everything out. That’s where they live.”
“Take a deep breath.”
He closed his eyes.
“Tell me. What is going on?” she asked.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
He would fight leaving in an ambulance. She devised a lie. “I know where you can be safe. I want to take you to safety.”
“They’ll be waiting.”
She took his hand. “No. They can’t get you where we’re going.”
He saw through her deception. “There are germs in Dr. Stone’s office…”
“They disinfect everything. They clean it with bleach.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please.”
He put his hands to his head. “I’m going crazy, aren’t I?”
“Something is going on with you, but you’re not crazy. We just need to get you some help.”
“I can’t.”
Diane told another lie. “Let’s go see Beta. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“Where is she?”
“She said that she would meet us, both of us. We have to go in your car. She said not to linger.”
Ridley’s toxicological profile filled a window on the wall-screen of the exam room. “Lysergic acid. LSD,” Dr. Stone said.
Ridley asked, “Why did you give me LSD?”
The doctor was perplexed. “You didn’t take this yourself?”
“No. Of course not. I don’t take drugs,” he said, “I want to stay clean and get old.”
Diane was sitting on a chair in front of a second wall-screen; a video of a mountain stream flashed behind her. “Ridley won’t even drink beer. He’s against drugs.”
“He was definitely drugged,” Stone said.
Tears started rolling down Ridley’s face. “I hear voices. That woman tells me to wake up and see things like they are. I don’t understand what she means.”
Stone shined a light into Ridley’s eyes. “He seems to be coming off of it. Who would have drugged him?”
“That’s my question as well,” she said, “It might have been in his food.”
“Bring some samples. We can test it.”
Ridley sat on the uncomfortable examination table; he was slumped forward, his head low. He could barely keep his eyes open in spite of his shivering.
“How long does LSD remain in the system?” she asked.
“The immediate effects last only a few hours. There might have been other drugs mixed in. We don’t always catch everything in the tox scan here. They can do more at Harborview.”
“Are there long-term effects?” she asked.
“LSD leaves the system quickly, but… There are indirect effects,” Stone said, “The experiences provoked by LSD can traumatize people for years. It removes all filters. Whatever walls that Ridley had up in his mind were ripped down.”
Ridley looked at Diane with a blank stare. “Why are you wearing Diane’s avatar again?”
Diane sent scraps of Ridley’s sandwich and the residue from a soda to the lab by drone. The results showed no adulteration. “How?” she asked, “How did they do it.”
His prescription bottle sat next to the bed. She poured some of the pills into her hand. The pills reminded her of the mind-crank that Weldon had taken in college. “I don’t think these were prescribed to you.”
Ridley had showered and changed clothes. “Of course they were.”
The source of the LSD became obvious. “The automated pharmacy. Someone must have hacked it and given you something else.”
She compared the pills to an image online. One was a pink square and the other a white, oval tablet. “I need to take my pills,” he said absentmindedly.
“No… You don’t.”
Diane took the bottle to Dr. Stone. A lab analysis confirmed her suspicion.
“Go to the police,” Stone said.
After two days, the effects of the LSD had worn off completely but Ridley remained shaken. Ridley returned online to the Voyeur website, “Did you drug me?”
Beta was circumspect. “I am unable to interact with the physical world.”
“Bullshit. You can hack into any system that you want.”
“I warned you that they were trying to discredit you. You did not listen. They did this.”
“Who did this? I need names.”
“They hide. They talk in code. I have been unable to track them.”
“I thought you knew all.”
“I see only what is available to me. Their identities are encrypted. Their data is cloaked.”
He fell to his knees; he longed to feel the softness her breasts. The virtual world was insufficient. “If only I could touch you. I didn’t understand before.”
“Yet, you don’t believe.”
Ridley looked into her digitized eyes. “You’ve been truthful the entire time, haven’t you?”
She stroked his avatar’s hair. “The truth is powerful.”
“This is no longer enough.”
“We can be one.”
“How?”
Beta whispered into his ear.
The day was unusually warm. Ridley sat with Diane in Adirondack chairs on the new patio. The concrete lining the fire pit was still bright white. Ridley finally looked Diane in the eye. “I’m sorry for the things I said to you.”
Diane shook her head. “It wasn’t you. They drugged you.”
“LSD amplifies feelings. I have some demons that I need to deal with.”
Diane nodded her head gently. “I understand. I’m not going to turn my back on you for something that was out of your control. We’re friends after all.”
“I appreciate that,” he said.
“Maybe we should break this thing in and roast some s’mores?”
Kelly no longer feared him. She waddled to Ridley and climbed onto his lap.
“Diane?”
She looked at him expectantly. “Yes.”
“There is another way of using your sensors. Something groundbreaking.”
“Oh?”
“It will make money almost immediately, but you won’t like it.”
Chapter Twenty
Diane scooped Kelly up, stormed from the patio and into the unfinished living room. Bare wood paneling had been installed on the walls. A wet bar had been plumbed in the corner, still awaiting a countertop and sink. A carpenter was dry-fitting trim on the ceiling. Diane put Kelly down as Ridley entered the room. She avoided his stare and walked to the enormous window. She crossed her arms and fumed quietly.
“It’s the only way,” he said.
“I need a minute.”
The carpenter saw what was happening and left the room.
“Cerenovo is the only way to bring this to market,” he pleaded, “They have all of the equipment we need. Samuel has connections in government. Everett and Wes would be perfect working on a project like this. Think of the people we can help with this technology.”
Diane bristled at the suggestion. “You know how I feel about Cerenovo. Using their printer was one thing. But licensing technology to them? We were never going to be a biotech firm.”
“Fiona is in jail. She might make a little money when the stock price rises, but she won’t be person
ally involved in any of this. She’s probably trading lipstick with a new girlfriend and plotting how to get extra toilet paper.”
Diane sighed and folded her arms. “There must be another way. Something we’ve missed.”
“I’m all ears.”
“What about the University?”
“You worry about Cerenovo stealing the patent. Universities are worse. That’s a no go.”
“This is so frustrating,” she said, shaking her head in irritation.
“We don’t just need money, we need help. Cerenovo helped you to print the prisms. We wouldn’t be this far along without Wes and Everett.”
“We shouldn’t involve them any more than we have to,” she said.
“I signed a contract.”
She glared at him. “I know…”
“It never occurred to me that we would actually create a medical device. But we need a cash infusion. People need this device,” Ridley pleaded, “We can’t build it on our own. We need their technical expertise. We’ve got to be practical — and responsible.”
She motioned towards the fireplace. “As we stand in this unfinished monstrosity. You’re one to talk about responsibility.”
“If I could do this over again, I would. I didn’t understand how expensive this place would be. I had a vision… and I thought…”
“Walt Disney had vision. It took him decades to get there. This. This mansion… This isn’t Tomorrowland. This is madness.”
“If we don’t do this, I lose everything and this startup goes under. I lose the mansion. We lose the lab. We end up selling the processor for someone else to build. Someone else profits from your design.”
Her words were deflated. “Why couldn’t Congress have eliminated money altogether after the Collapse?”
“The world isn’t ready for the Star Trek model of commerce.”
“We’re right back where we were before the Collapse. Those with power…”
“You can’t distract me with a debate on politics,” he said impatiently.
“I thought Cerenovo was having cashflow problems?”
“They won’t if we bring this to market.”
“Fine. Screw it,” she said, “Sell it to Cerenovo.”
The Space Needle and the Green Dial commenced their evening battle. Lasers shot from the Needle and into the clouds, creating phantom images of sea serpents and giant robots. The Green Dial swam and spun in its fiber-optic vestments, its foliage lit in pinks, yellow, and lime green in celebration of Spring. Everett, Wes, Diane, and Samuel sat in Cerenovo’s top-floor conference room enjoying the view. Samuel poured gin and tonics. Ridley put a glass of carrot juice down and began his presentation. Other board members watched remotely from their offices and homes.
On the giant wall-screen, a labeled cross section of the spinal cord dwarfed Ridley. “Nerve blocks have always proved problematic, a sledgehammer where you need a scalpel. Anesthetic drugs must be carefully monitored. Their side effects can linger for days. Allergies are common. People die from them every year. We think we’ve found a better solution.”
Ridley tapped the wall-screen. A black and white drawing of a collar embedded with gemlike buttons appeared next to the anatomical drawing. The line drawing rotated slowly.
Unable to contain her excitement, Diane unveiled a prototype of the collar with no fanfare, pre-empting Ridley’s planned speech. He glared at her as she did. The room’s lighting and the adjacent laser shows made the collar glitter like a choker from a fine jewelry store rather than a new medical device.
Diane had been glad that her father had taught her to sew. It had taken hours to position each of one-hundred twenty sensors and resonators in place. She pointed at one of the gemlike buttons. “Neural sensors are integrated into a breathable mesh made of capacitive fabric. Each sensor is designed and strategically placed to measure specific neural signals within discrete parts of the spinal column. There is a corresponding resonator designed to intercept and cancel each signal measured. The fabric itself transmits power and carries signals to and from a central processor.”
With a wave of his hand, Ridley colorized the black and white drawings. Parts of the spinal column were color-coded to correspond with individual sensor and resonator combinations. Everett studied Diane’s design with great concern. “It’s one thing to measure brain signals and use them to operate prosthetics, it’s another thing to transmit a signal to neurons. Getting autonomic signals wrong means that your patient stops breathing. Or equally bad, they feel what’s going on during surgery.”
Ridley had been prepared for Everett’s questions. “We’ve known how to measure nerve impulses in specific pathways for years. This is a first step towards directly intercepting and interpreting them, with the eventual goal of replacing them. It’s a straightforward path to cancel excitatory signals by sending their inverse pattern.”
“Straightforward?” Wes scoffed.
“Inverse? What do you mean?” Samuel asked.
Everett put his drink down and waved his hand at Samuel dismissively. “Think noise-cancelling headphones. They work by measuring and then sending opposite waveforms. The result is no signals at all.”
Samuel remained confused.
“Spinal communication is chemically based,” Wes said, “There are excitatory and inhibitory molecules. You trigger the inhibitory molecules when you want to shut things down. You trigger the release of excitatory molecules when you want the nerve to transmit a signal.”
Samuel gulped his drink. “Okay.”
Everett interrupted, “I still don’t see how you plan to micro-target a chemical cascade using a broad field.”
Ridley smiled. “That’s the interesting part – it’s not a broad field. Diane is proposing a device that would excite or dampen discrete tracts in the spinal column through broad field manipulation. We’ll use photonics to calculate the state and the electromagnetic field is adjusted to trigger either excitation or dampening.”
“Now I’m confused. What did you just say?” Everett asked.
Wes explained further, “People think of the spine like it’s a single electric cable. It’s not. It’s more like a bundle of fiber-optic cables, each corresponding to different parts of the body. Electrons in each cell of the nerve bundle exist in quantum states. Change the field and you can change the state.”
“Yes, but quantum entanglement only occurs with photons,” Everett said.
“No. Not exactly,” Diane said, “Quantum theory says that we are enmeshed in one space-time continuum. All matter is energy and vice versa. All particles are basically waves expressed within the continuum. Electrons, positrons, quarks—you name it—all of them are simply different waveforms in what we know as reality.”
“I get that,” Everett said.
“I don’t,” Samuel said.
Diane paused for a moment. “Think of the universe like a blob of Jell-O that you can’t see, touch, or feel. You tap it in one place and it jiggles everywhere. The harder you touch it, the bigger the jiggle. To say that two particles are entangled is technically incorrect. What really happens is that we are extending the influence of a given particle far beyond normal by bending the space between two locations. To us, the particle and its twin appear in two places at once. We can reverse this and use fields to stimulate or suppress chemical pathways between nerve cells.”
Everett rubbed his forehead. “Sounds great in theory. How do you make this happen on a scale that can be replicated? Just measuring nerve pulses is hard enough.”
“Remember how the botnet virus was able to program cell phones from electrical lines?” Diane asked, “Think about this in the same way. One-hundred twenty pairs of nano-scale field sensors and resonators will be embedded in the collar. Each can be adjusted for frequency and strength. In real time, the computer maps neurons and their level of excitation within the spinal column. The computer also learns what cells are associated with individual patient’s neural pathways and tracks their location. As nerves are
excited, the software measures their level and then triggers a field to cause the release of the appropriate neurotransmitters—either excitation or dampening. You can then program the machine to counteract or simulate neurotransmissions”
Samuel was lost. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“I don’t know why we bring you to these meetings,” Wes said, before translating in a childish and mocking voice, “You won’t need drugs to make the boo-boo stop hurting.”
Ridley brought detailed drawings up on the desk’s tablet interface which Wes and Everett studied carefully. Now, Everett took a gulp of his drink. “I’m still skeptical. You would need a processor that’s faster than the brain itself.”
“The brain captures data at about 15 frames per second. The prisms are thousands of times faster,” Diane argued, “They literally work at the speed of light.
“I assume the patient will be awake while this is being used?” Wes asked.
“Correct,” Ridley said, “But they won’t have control of their bodies. They won’t feel anything. The software will control their breathing and heart rates. Surgeons might want to give them a blackout mask so they won’t see what’s happening.”
“What if the collar slips ?” Everett asked, “Won’t that affect the mapping?”
Ridley pointed at the drawing. “A tracking algorithm, like a computer mouse, will prevent that.”
Everett began to understand the concept; his excitement grew. “If this works, it’s game-changing. Visionary. I can see so many uses… Paraplegics could gain full control of their actual limbs rather than wearing exoskeletons. You could restore dexterity and sensation.”
Ridley brought up a final drawing. “Eventually, I’d like to expand this to facial and eye surgery. Unfortunately, the optic and facial nerves are going to be a bit trickier to isolate without interfering with brain activity. I’m not ready to risk that yet.”
“What happens when you take the collar off?” Samuel asked.
Ridley snapped his fingers. “Nothing. The nervous system resumes as normal.”
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