by John Akers
Unsurprisingly, Celia wasn’t wearing a Univiz. She was in her mid-forties and had only emigrated to the United States from Honduras shortly before Omnitech was founded. She had grown up so poor she hadn’t even had a cell phone, and she thought the idea of people communicating through UVs instead of face-to-face was absurd. She reminded Pax of this every chance she got until he would remind her it was the Univiz that paid for her generous salary. She would drop the matter for a while, but whenever she saw one she turned her nose up at it as if it were a dead rat.
Celia and the worker both had their backs to the camera. A mischievous smile crept over Pax’s face, and he gestured to connect his microphone with the camera’s speaker.
“Celia!” he barked. Both Celia and the worker ducked as if a bullet had gone over their heads. They glanced around in confusion for a moment before the worker spotted the camera behind them. He tapped Celia on the shoulder and pointed at it. When she looked back and saw it, she quickly stood up and stamped her foot in anger.
“Mr. Pax! You nearly gave me and this nice man heart attacks!”
Pax struggled to keep the grin on his face from morphing into a fit of laughter. “Oh, sorry about that, Celia. I just wanted to make sure the landscaping was getting underway.”
Celia’s eyes widened, and she thrust one arm out straight at the workers walking in the distance.
“Ah, yes…just getting started I see,” Pax said. He gestured to close the audio channel just as a fit of laughter overtook him.
“I should get going,” said the worker. He tipped a finger to his forehead in a goodbye gesture to Celia before walking off the porch and heading toward the other workers. Pax realized he wasn’t just big but enormous, upwards of seven feet tall and built like a tight end on a professional football team.
“Oh!” Celia moaned as she turned to watch him leave. Then she spun back around to face the camera and stamped her foot again. “Mr. Pax, you scared that nice man off! How could you?” She made a gesture at the camera he didn’t recognize but assumed was something inappropriate in her country of origin, before storming off into the house.
Pax re-opened the audio connection and sputtered out, “Sorry, Celia!” before closing the connection and succumbing to another fit of laughter. After a minute, he regained his composure and gestured to clear the display. He saw it was now 15 minutes before the testing started, so he decided to head down to the lab. As the real world reappeared he stood up, and it was only then that he noticed a small piece of paper on the floor below his desk.
He reached down and picked it up. It was a magnified image of some microscopic organism. It had only one cell, a flagellate tail, and a variety of tiny globules inside of it.
“What’s this?” he asked.
A moment later, Gabe replied, “It’s an artistic rendering of an ancient biological organism known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor. It lived 3.8 billion years ago and is believed to be the life form from which all life forms currently on Earth are descended.”
Pax looked around his office, then at the frosted glass wall to his right. “Is anyone in the garage?”
“Nope,” said Gabe.
“Who’s been in my office in the past 12 hours?”
“Hang on, let me check,” said Gabe. After a few seconds, he replied, “Neither the ID log nor the video archive show anyone entering your office since you left yesterday at 7:34 pm and when the security team entered a few minutes ago.”
“Well, this wasn’t here when I left yesterday, so how did it get here?”
“Based on the available data, I’m pretty sure I have no idea,” Gabe snarked.
Irritated, Pax glanced at the image again. No one, not even security, was allowed in his office or lab without him present. Everyone knew that. He couldn’t imagine how someone could have gotten in without being detected. He shrugged and decided someone must be playing a practical joke on him. Maybe someone had put Emma up to leaving it on his chair, and it had fallen onto the floor when he’d moved the chair a few minutes ago. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into a wireframe wastebasket under the table. He’d get to the bottom of it some other time.
He walked through a three-foot gap that ran the entire height of the frosted glass wall into his personal lab. Four times the size of his office, it was a kaleidoscopic mess of modular walls and work desks covered in workflow diagrams, storyboards, isometric drawings, 3-D printers, physical prototypes, and miscellaneous electronic innards. To an outsider, it looked like a MASH unit for a robotic battlefield, but Pax knew exactly what and where everything was. Pax referred to it as his garage, and it was his private, inner sanctum. Only people he specifically invited inside were ever allowed a glimpse of the creative maelstrom within.
While weaving his way through the tables and modular walls, Pax said, “Call Gordon.” A moment later, Gordon’s live video was displayed, taken from one of the cameras outside Pax’s office.
“Yes, Mr. Pax?”
”Hey, Gordy, I just wanted to let you know I'm going down to the labs for a bit."
“We’ll be right there,” said Gordon in a perfunctory tone that indicated he knew what Pax was going to say next.
“Don’t bother, I’m already at the elevator. I’ll be back around lunchtime.”
Pax always dismissed his security when he was on campus to minimize the distraction caused by his presence. He had to do so verbally every time, so the agency had evidence indemnifying them in the event anything ever happened to him afterward. If he left a location without telling them, they would come tearing after him like scalded cats. Then even his office or lab wasn’t off limits. On more than one occasion they had turned the garage into a hurricane of papers as a result of their efforts to locate him.
As Pax approached the far wall, the doors to a private elevator opened. Interpreting Pax’s conversation with Gordon, Gabe directed it to go to the second floor, where the usability testing labs were. After a few seconds, the doors re-opened onto a short hallway. Pax walked out and gestured for Gabe to display a presence map of the area.
A moment later the map appeared in the lower right quadrant of his display. Pax saw two blips in a larger hallway that intersected with the one he was in. He walked to the end of the smaller hallway, then waited. After the blips had passed by and turned a corner, he opened the door and headed quickly in the opposite direction. As his eyes focused on the hallway, the map turned mostly transparent so he could see where he was going. He walked quickly, hoping to make it to the lab without running into anyone. He turned down a smaller hallway, then stopped in front of an unmarked door. Gabe displayed a text overlay in the center of the door.
Project Simon - Highly Confidential
Next test - 7 minutes
The name of the project had come about as a joke. Originally Pax had called it “Psy Man,” for the psychic powers it would appear to impart to users. Later he had abbreviated it to “Simon,” a joking reference to the popular children’s pattern matching game from the 1970s.
Pax swiped a hand from left to right in front of him. The door slid open, and he stepped quietly into the darkened interior inside.
Chapter 5
One day, three weeks into the semester, as he walked into the lecture hall, Pax had the spontaneous impulse to puncture the no-fly zone around Cevis, just to see what would happen. He sat in the front row, two seats away from Cevis, and began imitating him by slouching back in his seat, clasping his hands in front of him on the desk, and assuming a look of polite condescension. This drew a few titters of amusement from the other students, but Cevis didn’t react except for a brief glance in Pax’s direction.
As soon as the TA asked a question he could answer, Pax raised his hand a few inches off the desk, the way Cevis always did, as if he could barely be bothered with the effort. The TA, who along with the rest of the class had noticed Pax’s violation of the normal seating arrangement, nodded at him. “Yes, Mr. Pax?”
Pax answered with a spot-on imit
ation of Cevis’ bored drone. “Obviously, pentane and butane are structural isomers of one another, so the differences in their molecular arrangements cause them to have different chemical and physical properties.” Several people behind them laughed. Pax looked at Cevis and with a shrug and said, “Dude, I know—it’s just too easy.” The entire class, including the TA burst out laughing. Even Cevis was unable to avoid cracking a smile.
Shortly afterward, the TA, perhaps hoping to vicariously put Cevis in his place by attacking his doppelganger, called directly on Pax with a question he couldn’t answer. Pax leaned toward Cevis and started wheeling one hand toward himself in a “help me” gesture, which led to more laughter. At first Cevis pretended not to notice, but eventually, he said, “I believe what Mr. Pax is trying to say is that it is possible for polymer subunits to have resonance. Assuming there are conjugated π-bonds present, of course.”
“Correct, Mr. Pierson,” the TA said with a frown, as he turned and headed back to the other side of the room. “Now, who can tell me about the electron delocalization required for resonance to occur?”
Pax had entered the right rear corner of what looked like a miniature movie theater. Ten rows of stadium-style seating with ten seats per row faced a giant one-way mirror that enabled observers to see into the test room but not the other way around. A series of steps in front of Pax led up to the rear of a central aisle that split the seating into two halves. To his right, another aisle ran down the right side of the room.
As Pax walked down the right aisle, he saw the Project Simon team leaders huddled in conversation at the front of the room. Denise McIntyre, the user experience (UX) lead, was the first to notice him. She was wearing a cream-colored blouse and knee-length navy blue skirt, and her curly red hair bounced energetically as she waved at him to join them. Next to her, also facing Pax was Omnitech’s chief software architect, Qathi Nguyen—all 4’ 9” of her. She wore blue jeans, sandals, and a black t-shirt with the quote “I dunno what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off,” in white text on the front. Pax had met both of them at his first job after college, and they were two of the first people he had convinced to come work with him back when the Univiz was nothing more than a bunch of concept drawings.
“Hey, look who’s here, the big genius himself,” said Denise. “You should have told us you were coming.”
“You know, I am a genius,” said Pax as he reached the group. “Only someone of supreme intellect could convince such a brilliant group of people to do all this hard work for me.”
“It was your wallet that won me over, not your brains,” said Denise, with a look of feigned annoyance. ”I could have had a comfortable life working 50 hours a week at a normal company, but nooooo, Mr. Megabillions had to come waving some of his spare change in my face and lure me into working 100 hours a week instead."
Pax laughed. “I’m pretty sure I was broke when you first started helping me out. Regardless, I know how hard it must have been to give up a career of designing remote controls to working on the device that manages human existence. Are you sure you made the right decision?"
Now it was Denise’s turn to laugh. "Unfortunately, I’ve got way too many stock grants to ever bother asking myself that question.”
“That,” said Pax, shaking a forefinger at her, “is the kind of burning commitment to the job I like to see around here!” They all laughed. “So, what were you all gabbing about before I interrupted?”
“We were discussing the results of the first test this morning,” said Qathi in her high, pipsqueak voice.
“The first test? I thought the first test was at eight?”
“The participant, Eric, called early this morning to say he had a conflict with his afternoon appointment,” said Denise. “He asked if he could come in at seven instead. I let the team know, but I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Never mind,” Pax said, waving his hand dismissively. “I wasn’t sure myself I’d be able to make it until a little while ago. So, what did you learn?” Pax always stressed the importance of learning something from every test. Not getting the results you expected was fine. Not learning something was not.
“It was interesting,” Denise said. “At the beginning, Eric struggled to even select an object, and he was getting visibly frustrated. Anil had him take a short break, but when they resumed, Anil made a subtle but important change to the instructions. Eric’s performance improved almost immediately, and eventually, he was able to complete the task several times.”
Pax’s face brightened. “What was the time on task?”
“Almost 30 percent faster than his gestures and voice baseline.”
“Are you serious?” said Pax. Denise smiled and nodded. Pax's insides, which had been scrunched up in knots since his talk with Cevis, begin to relax. This was even better than they had anticipated. Maybe I can stitch together enough of a story here to satisfy the investors — and Cevis — after all.
“Yeah,” said a melancholy voice, “but his accuracy was terrible.” It was Larry Poulson, the project manager. He stood with his arms folded and a dejected slump in his shoulders. Larry had a morbid fear of missing deadlines, which was why Pax had assigned him to this project. Research efforts like this could drift for months, even years, unless there was someone whose sole focus was to push it across a finish line, even an arbitrary one. “We’re going to have to give users some training for this to work,” he said.
“Come on, Larry,” said Denise. “Oreste’s said a million times any new UV program can’t require training. It's got to be intuitive right from the start.”
Pax said, “Amen, sister!” and reached over to give her a high five.
"This kind of user interaction has never been done before, though,” said the fourth member of the group. A tall, thin man with a thoughtful, expressive face, Jean Prudhomme had been the founder and chief neurosurgeon at CortiTrac. Two weeks earlier he had personally supervised the application of the BCIs to each of the five test participants. A robotic surgeon had punctured a tiny hole in the back of each person's nasal passage, then inserted a two-millimeter-wide endoscopic tube through the hole. The tip of the tube had delicately traversed the narrow gap between the brain and the skull and squirted small blobs of gelatinous material containing microscopic, hexagonally shaped signal emitters all over the surface of the brain.
Over an eight-hour period, the emitters had sunk down through the gel and corticospinal fluid to form a microscopically thin web that covered every sulci and fissure of the cortical topography. The gel washed out later through the spaces around the cortico-spinal roots as part of the normal CSF production and replacement cycle. While the participants recovered over the next two weeks, their UVs had been outfitted with wireless receivers capable of detecting the signals from the emitters, which were powered by the naturally occurring electricity in the brain.
The project team was now engaged in the Herculean task of interpreting the signals from 100 billion neurons in real time to determine which ones contained action intents, and what those intents were. Pax had always been resolute in his belief they would eventually be able to accurately extract meaning from the blizzard of cortical activity continuously raging in each person’s brain.
“Manipulation of virtual objects through thought alone has no pre-existing paradigms,” said Jean, “and with the CortiTrac BCI, there is a tremendous amount of data to process. Plus, there will be individual differences, sometimes very large ones. Without some acclimation exercises in which each user can familiarize themselves with the system, and our processing algorithms can calibrate to that individual’s brainwaves…” Jean’s voice trailed off, leaving his unspoken doubts hanging in the air.
“Perhaps we can build in some training implicitly, as part of the first use experience,” Qathi suggested. “Teach them how to manipulate objects as a part of their normal system setup.”
“Or we could give them negative reinforcement shocks when they get something wrong,”
quipped Larry.
Ignoring Larry, Pax asked, “What was it like when Eric got a trial right?”
“It’ll be easier to let you see for yourself,” said Jean. He made some gestures, then a video invitation appeared in Pax’s UV. Pax accepted it, and thumbnail images of both his and Jean’s avatars appeared at the bottom of his display. A moment later the avatars for Qathi, Denise, and Larry appeared as well.
The rest of the screen was white, except for the dark gray outline of a large rectangle. A dozen smaller, light gray geometric shapes were arranged outside the perimeter of the rectangle. In the center of the large rectangle was a solid, light gray triangle. A small red plus sign indicating the participant’s retinal focus darted spastically between the various shapes. To the right of the test stimuli, 32 animated micrographs showed the neural activity in each region of the brain. In each one, multitudes of tiny vertical bars bounced up and down like miniature volcanic eruptions.
“The red crosshairs show where Eric was looking,” said Jean. “The goal of the task was to move the light gray shape in the middle to its corresponding shape on the perimeter. From our previous research at CortiTrac we had detailed mappings of neural activity to particular body movements, but with virtual objects, we’re starting from scratch. Therefore, we’ve simplified the activity as much as possible. We want to focus on identifying the brainwave patterns that map to a particular movement intent. If the program identifies a signal as being an attempt to select the light gray shape, the color of it changes to dark gray. The participant can then move the object by looking at where they want it to go.”