The God Wave

by Patrick Hemstreet

  Chuck realized his hand was shaking. He snatched up the flash drive and plugged it into one of the USB ports on his laptop. In seconds he had opened the file and was looking at twin columns of data. On the left an EEG graph of a subject, on the right a mathematical equation describing the brain wave.

  “The first expression in the equation is the baseline,” the mathematician told him. “The second is intended to calculate any deviation from that baseline. Or should I say variation?” He shrugged. “The peaks and valleys.”

  Chuck knew enough math to understand that the second half of the equation would need to be iterative—applied repeatedly to adjust the output of the subject to any interface. He cleared his throat noisily. “You could program this into a software interface?”

  “Not by myself. I have a colleague, though—well, a postgrad student, actually—who would do the programming.”

  “And the mechanical part of the interface?”

  Streegman’s smile was suddenly broad and genuine. “Dice is a genius when it comes to robotics. He’s the whole package—software and hardware. I’d like to bring him in, too.”

  “Bring him into what, exactly, Dr. Streegman?” Chuck asked, his voice distant and breathless. “What are you proposing?”

  “What I’m proposing,” Streegman said, still smiling, “is a partnership. And I’ll go further. If our collaborative efforts yield the sort of fruit I believe they will, I’d like to propose that we go into business together.”

  “Business? What sort of business?”

  “A research and development firm, Doctor. A business that takes what we learn in the lab and applies it to real-world situations in a wide array of disciplines: art, manufacturing, computer science, agriculture. You name it. I propose that we”—the smile became a grin—“change the world.”

  Chuck’s breath stopped in his throat. I’m dreaming, he told himself. I’ve fallen asleep at my desk, and I’m dreaming this. He closed his eyes slowly, squeezed them shut, and opened them again.

  Matt Streegman was still there, still waiting for him to respond.

  “I don’t know. It’s all very sudden, no?”

  “Bigger decisions happen in a fraction of the time. This is a chance to make your ideas a reality.”

  “That sounds wonderful, but I’m an academic, Doctor. Matt. Not a businessman. If numbers represent monetary values, my brain goes tilt.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. Not any of it. I’ve got the math and the money covered.”

  “And the mechanics? This guy, Dice, he’ll build the interface between my EEG reader and the real-world object?”

  “Like I said, he’s a genius. If this algorithm works, he can build an interface to apply it.”

  Chuck licked his lips. “If you build it, he will come?”

  Matt laughed. “If he builds it, everything will come.”

  DICE WAS ASTONISHED BY THE warren of mismatched buildings that made up the Johns Hopkins campus around the Traylor Research Building. It reminded him of a box full of Legos that he was pretty sure still existed in the closet of his room back home in San Francisco—a room his proud parents had turned into a sort of shrine to their only son—that had been upended onto the grounds.

  In fact, the Traylor Building was one of the oddest toys in this particular box. A narrow, sand-colored parallelepiped building sandwiched between two larger, taller, more modern-looking ones, it was unimpressive. Or would have been had it not been sporting the words JOHNS HOPKINS in huge, white letters across the top of the façade. There was nothing else to indicate the level of research that went on there. Nothing to indicate that history was being made in a research facility on the third floor.

  Dice liked that sense of anonymity. He felt sometimes as if he were putting one over on the world—that he was part of a great geek conspiracy that, when the time was ripe, would announce to all and sundry that they had solved society’s problems through the simple application of technology. Ta-da!

  “How goes it, Dice?” Matt Streegman had appeared silently out of nowhere, as he was in the annoying habit of doing, to peer over Dice’s shoulder at the small robot on which he was working.

  Dice put the cover back on the rounded carapace and smoothed out the cabling between it and the Brewster brain wave reader.

  “It goes swimmingly. Not that I advocate robots swimming. Especially after a large meal.” Dice paused for Matt’s laughter, which didn’t come. Dice cleared his throat. “I think our little guy is ready for Dr. Brenton’s subjects. Who do we have?”

  “For this phase we have us. Well, Chuck anyway. He’d like to do the test drive before we bring in his lab rats.”

  “About that . . .”

  “What?”

  Dice grimaced. “I’ve actually done a bit of a test drive, hence my messing with Roboticus here.”

  “It works?”

  Dice rolled his eyes. “Of course it works. I just had a little glitch in one of the connectors—a bent pin. I soldered it. Should be fine now.”

  “Show me.”

  “Before Chuck tries it?”

  “You did.”

  “Touché.”

  “I just want to know how excited to be.”

  Dice grinned. “You should be very excited.”

  “And of course I want to be able to maintain my professorial mien in the face of your world-shaking accomplishment.”

  “Right.”

  “So show me.”

  Dice set the robot in the middle of the lab floor. It was basically a glorified Roomba—little more than a drive mechanism in an aluminum and plastic casing—but it was all they needed as a proof of concept. It had a little red joystick mounted on the top of it that would allow an operator to steer it manually. And, if all went right, with his mind.

  He allowed himself a moment of glee at that thought.

  He moved back to the Brewster unit and took the neural array from its stand. He put that on his head, making sure he had the transceivers pressed as tightly against his skull as possible. A gleaming twist of lightweight fiber-optic cabling ran from the neural net to the brain pattern monitor and thence to the robot.

  The important part of the device—the kinetic converter—was a software module that resided in the BPM and fed commands to the firmware aboard Roboticus.

  Dice flipped the EEG monitor on. “Okay, now, Roboticus. Let’s see what we can do.”

  He thought at the ersatz Roomba. He thought it forward. Or, more accurately, he thought of pushing the joystick forward. After a moment of hesitation, the robot went.

  “Okay,” Dice murmured. “Let’s go right.”

  The joystick toggled right; the robot turned and trundled off in that direction.

  “Left.”

  It went left.

  “Let’s pop a wheelie.”

  The little bot executed a slow 360.

  “God, it’s working.” Chuck Brenton’s airless whisper issued from the lab doorway.

  Technically the last move hadn’t worked, but still Dice was pleased. He glanced up. Dr. Brenton and his senior assistant, Eugene, stood staring at the now-motionless robot.

  “Oh, hey. Sorry, Doc,” said Dice. “I just wanted to make sure it works before we have you try it. I hate it when the machinery flakes during a demonstration.” He switched the Brewster to standby and reached up to unfasten the neural array.

  “That’s a good look for you,” said Eugene.

  After two weeks of close proximity, his flat, nasal voice was only minimally irritating. His sarcastic attitude . . . well, Dice had to admit, it had sort of grown on him.

  “I’m thinking that’s a great sideline,” Dice came back. “While the good doctors are making millions with their oh-so-helpful and socially redeeming technology, I figure we market the blinky net as the latest in futuristic fashion.”

  Dice helped Dr. Brenton don the net and position the transceivers. With the BPM on, Brenton turned to face the robot. He rubbed the palms of his hands on his
jeans. “Okay. What do I do?”

  “See the little red joystick on the top of the carapace?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You just think about operating it.”

  “As if by hand.”

  “Exactly. The kinetic converter will take a second to establish your baseline, then it should respond to your directions.”

  Dice watched the neurologist closely. He was half-afraid the guy was going to hyperventilate and pass out. He didn’t, though. He faced the robot with a look of intense concentration.

  Roboticus responded—tentatively at first, then with more certainty. In about three minutes, the scientist had the little bot running straight lines at flank speed and weaving slowly around obstacles. At this point Chuck was seized by a sudden fit of laughter that left the robot quivering in the middle of the lab.

  “Can I try it?” Eugene asked.

  IN THE END THEY ALL tried it and then sat down and came up with a game plan. Matt would compose a précis for prospective investors, Dice would begin generating code for a computer interface that would give them access to commercial software controls, and Chuck and Eugene would continue to expand their experiments with Roboticus and a variety of their subjects—experiments they would, of course, record.

  “Not,” Eugene noted, “that anyone will believe what they see in a video.”

  Matt shook his head, his fingers already flying over his laptop keyboard. “They won’t have to commit funds on the basis of a video. We’ll let them try it live.”

  Chuck frowned. “We’re going to bring them here? Matt, that’s not going to work. I mean it’s not kosher to use Johns Hopkins resources to start up a private business.”

  “We won’t be using Johns Hopkins resources. The first thing I’m going to do is lease this rig.” Matt nodded at the brain pattern monitor, his mind racing ahead, making connections, calculating potential. “The next thing you’re going to do is figure out how to downsize it, so we can fit it into our own lab.”

  “Our own lab,” Chuck repeated as if Matt had just said “our own space station.”

  “Of course our own lab. You didn’t imagine we were going to continue to work out of Hopkins, did you?” Matt shook his head and dove back into organizing his précis.

  I have a lot to teach them, he thought.

  Chapter 4

  FORWARD KINETICS

  Our own lab.

  The words had a sort of magic to them, Chuck thought. Their own lab had a name, Forward Kinetics, and it stood at the center of a technology park (emphasis on park) in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was a stand-alone facility—something Matt had insisted on—and was contained in a low, eight-thousand-square-foot, split-level building that seemed to be in the process of tumbling down the gentle slope it occupied. It was beautiful as well as functional, a masterpiece of wood, concrete, and glass with some slate accents. Frank Lloyd Wright would have approved.

  Chuck had to admit that Matt had a well-developed sense of aesthetics. Rather than the lightbulb-filled, primary-color, plastic script logos that most other high-tech firms used, theirs—a stylized human brain full of gears that meshed with the letters FK—appeared in backlit bronze across the façade.

  Chuck noticed the building’s external features and parklike setting every Monday morning when he pulled his car into the small, tree-bordered lot at the top of the slope. But the internal features captivated him iteratively, on a daily basis, moment by moment. From the tall windows that flooded the two-story foyer with light to the Prairie School roofline with its thick cedar beams, and from the travertine floors to the stylized Craftsman light fixtures, the lab was warm and welcoming.

  Today was a special day in the nascent life of Forward Kinetics. Today they would finalize their research plan. They had been brainstorming for weeks, looking into the range of applications on which to begin their initial trials. Today they would nail down the final selection and plan the recruitment process.

  Chuck already knew that he and Matt did not see eye to eye on what constituted a worthy discipline, but they had agreed to take input from the entire executive staff, which now included Eugene and Dice. Their formal designations were laboratory director and robotics director, respectively. Those were the titles on their business cards and office doors anyway. Chuck doubted either of them thought of himself as a director of anything.

  The junior lab staff—there were only six of them—was savvy and self-directing for the most part, so the lab took on the complexion of a parliamentary democracy instead of a benevolent dictatorship . . . at least as long as Matt Streegman wasn’t giving the orders. Matt, Chuck quickly learned, had definite opinions about everything—even things he’d only known about for a matter of seconds—and acted on those opinions unless someone could offer him a damn good reason he should not.

  That caused some ripples in the smooth flow of ideas and activities, but the upside of Matt Streegman was that once someone showed him that his opinion was flawed empirically, he didn’t hesitate to say, “Oh. Right. Well, then let’s do it another way.”

  The problems arose when no one could prove clearly that his opinion was flawed. Then there were two options: find empirical evidence or roll over and do things Matt’s way. And that’s what they did . . . kind of. Chuck was an old hand at appearing to roll over. His mother had always said he was passive-aggressive. It took one to know one.

  “Morning, Dr. Brenton.” This from the receptionist who manned a curving, wood-paneled desk in the sunny foyer and who’d had precious little to do since the initial frenzy of moving in had concluded.

  “Morning, Barry.” Chuck threw the kid a lopsided grin. “How’s that game of Temple Run coming?”

  “Uh. Great. I haven’t died for fifteen minutes.”

  Chuck’s smile deepened. “To the disappointment of zombie monkeys everywhere. Enjoy the lull, Barry. I have a feeling it’s about to get crazy around here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chuck trotted down the short flight of stairs to the office level of the building. Matt was already sipping coffee in the small conference room where they gathered every morning for a brief review of activities and goals. So far the meetings had been focused on establishing the lab’s basic equipment and processes. That done, they now turned their attention to the primary goal of identifying lucrative and profound uses for kinetic tech.

  “Hey,” Chuck greeted his partner. “Dice and Euge in?”

  Matt glanced up from his iPad and nodded. “They’ve been here awhile, doing their geek thing in the lab. Want to make a bet?”

  Chuck set his laptop bag down on the oblong conference table and moved to the sideboard to get coffee. “I don’t gamble. I’m terrible at it.”

  “This one’s easy. I bet you and I don’t have any overlap on our short lists.”

  Chuck snorted. “Are you serious? I’m not taking that bet.”

  “C’mon. Ten dollars says I’m right.”

  Chuck crossed back to the conference table, set down his coffee mug, and unpacked his laptop. “I told you I don’t gamble. If I did, I sure wouldn’t gamble with you, especially not with real money.”

  “What else is worth gambling with?”

  “I think that’s the wrong question. I think the question is: what else is trivial enough to gamble with?”

  Matt opened his mouth to retort but was interrupted when Dice and Eugene sailed through the door in the throes of one of their frequent yet friendly fights.

  “I’m telling you, Euge,” Dice was saying, “until we can sever our reliance on firmware, this is all just exploratory. Who the hell is going to want to run a deep-sea exploration at the end of a freaking umbilical cord? One of the first things we’ve got to do is design a remote interface.”

  “Be that as it may,” Eugene protested, “to focus on that now would be to put the cart before the horse.”

  “You see?” Dice made an “I give up” gesture at the two men already in the room. “He’s a Luddite. Carts and horses.”


  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Matt said. “If you’re going to get coffee, please do it now, so we can get down to business.”

  Eugene saluted and pirouetted toward the coffeemaker. Dice set his laptop down and pulled a can of Coke out of his jacket pocket. Matt called in the senior lab assistant, Ventana Salazar, to take notes.

  Matt drove a tight meeting—something Chuck alternately appreciated and regretted. There were times when a little digression was good for the creative juices. It’s why emotional quotient had become almost as important a human diagnostic tool as IQ. Matt’s mind, however, dealt more readily with numbers and statistics than it did with touchy-feely creativity. And it was Matt’s numbers, Chuck reminded himself, that had allowed him to take the field of neurokinetics from theory to reality.

  “Chuck?”

  Matt was looking at him with an expression that accused him (correctly, as it happened) of woolgathering.

  “Sorry. Thinking.”

  Matt gestured at his laptop. “You want to trot your list out first?”

  “Yeah, sure. Um, I’ve got five: the handicapped, especially people with cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, or MS; medical applications; law enforcement; first responders; and artists, especially computer-based applications in art and music.”

  “That’s six, Chuck.”

  “Well, okay, just art then.”

  The big plasma display at the end of the table went live as Ventana typed up Chuck’s short list.

  “Good thing you didn’t take that bet,” Matt told him. “Good thing for me, that is. I was wrong. We do actually have some overlap. I’ve got computer-aided design, manufacturing, private security—not quite law enforcement but close—video game creation, and video game play.”

  Chuck frowned. “What about medicine? We’ve at least got to do medicine.”

  Matt raised a hand. “Lists first, then discussion. Dice, what do you have?”

  Dice had firefighting/law enforcement (“bomb squad, I’m thinking,” he said), construction, handicapped access, and medical.

  Euge offered handicapped mobility, medicine, computer art, deep-sea exploration and salvage, and archaeology.