Dice raised his eyebrows then afforded Chuck a rueful grimace. “Sometimes I wonder what color the sky is in Matt World. He occasionally has trouble understanding that one equation does not fit all.”
That’s not his only problem, Chuck thought. Chuck sensed this was an ongoing debate between Matt and his engineer—in a series of ongoing debates Matt had with pretty much every person he ever encountered.
And he couldn’t help feel that he wasn’t sure whether he was looking forward to Sara’s session or dreading it now.
CHUCK SEATED SARA WHERE SHE could see the large, flat-screen display of the computer but not reach the mouse, keyboard, or track pad. The kinetic interface was wired to the USB port of the machine, and Sara’s familiar software was running.
“What do I do?” she asked. Her excitement was not evident in her voice. Chuck could only see it in glimmers in her eyes.
“Something drop-dead easy,” said Matt. “Something you do almost without thinking about it. Only this time think. What would you normally do when you first sit down at the keyboard?”
“I’d open a project file or create a new one.”
“Okay, so try that. Think about what moves you make to create a new file.”
Grasping the arms of her chair, Sara gazed intently at the machine. There was a long moment of silence in which absolutely nothing happened.
“What are you trying to do?” Chuck asked.
“Move the mouse. I’m imagining my hand moving the mouse to the ‘file’ menu.”
“I don’t think that’s gonna work,” said Dice. “That would require physically touching the mouse. It’s the sensors in the mouse themselves that need to be affected.”
Sara glanced over at him where he sat on the edge of a worktable. “But I don’t understand the mechanics of that.”
Chuck chewed the cap of his pen. “Try a different input. The track pad or keyboard maybe.”
Sara nodded, took a deep breath, and shifted her gaze back to the computer. Her eyes narrowed, her lips compressed, and a fine dew broke out on her upper lip. On the computer screen, the mouse pointer shifted in a wobbly upward crawl.
The room erupted in cheers and laughter.
“I told you,” Matt said.
You’d think we ended world hunger, Chuck thought. But he was laughing, too, with the sheer adrenaline rush of seeing even such meager success. Because he could see a future where they might just do something equal to that.
It was Dice who brought them back to the present. “What did you do?” he asked. “How did you make that work?”
“I imagined I was touching the track pad. Or that I was drawing a line across the contacts. That I understand. Let me see what else I can do.”
What she could do, she discovered, was move the pointer up to the menu bar by mentally scraping the same spot on the track pad over and over. Doing that, it took her several minutes to get the pointer to the “file” menu, but she did it.
But once there, she hit a roadblock.
“I’m not sure how to click.” Her voice was edgy with impatience.
“How would you do it normally?” Chuck asked.
“I’d tap.” She demonstrated on the arm of her chair. “But I’m not sure . . .” She peered at the track pad again, tapping several times on the chair arm.
Nothing happened.
Chuck was about to suggest she take a break when she growled in frustration, grasped the arms of the chair, and blinked.
The “file” menu flew open.
After a moment in which everyone in the room took a deep breath, Sara snaked the pointer down to the “new” command, gritted her teeth, gripped the chair arms, and blinked again. A new file opened.
There was much celebration.
However, it was the last celebrating they did that day. While Sara could shakily use the track pad to move the pointer, open menus, and click buttons—though she could even type using a mental map of where the letters were on the keyboard—she could not use the higher functions of the software. Nor could she draw a damned thing freehand and place it in the workspace.
“The problem is the user interface,” she told the team later when they paused in momentary defeat. She ran a weary hand through her dark, collar-length hair, mussing its usually sleek texture. “I have to concentrate so hard on triggering the track pad that I can’t focus on what I’m producing. The moment I take my attention off the pad and think about the workspace, I lose control of the mechanics. And, well, frankly I can’t think of a way around that.”
“We’ve got to think of a way around it,” growled Matt. “There’s no reason this device would work for Mike and not work for you—unless it’s your lack of computer savvy that’s the issue.”
Chuck winced at that.
“My computer savvy is just fine, thank you,” said Sara coolly. “What I don’t know about that software and my work you could stick up your cute little button nose and still have room for the Washington Monument.”
“I think we should quit for the day,” said Chuck, flipping his laptop shut to underscore the point. “Let the subconscious work on the problem. It never fails that when I hit a wall and sleep on it, I’ve got some piece of the solution by morning.”
Sara nodded.
Matt sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’ll have to forgive Chuck,” he told the group. “He still believes the science angels visit him in his dreams.”
Chuck shook his head. “I didn’t say anything about angels,” he said quietly.
“And you’ll have to forgive Matt—he still believes he knows what a normal interaction between people is,” Dice said. Chuck smiled, but Matt wouldn’t let it go.
“You do believe in angels, right? Being a religious type and all. Do you think God will visit you with a vision of how to solve our little interface problem?”
Where’s he going with this? He almost seems angry. For a nonreligious person, he sure has his crusades.
“Actually,” said Eugene, hoping to defuse the situation, “they’re more like science fairies. Or elves of invention maybe.”
Sara gave Matt a frosty smile. “I think maybe Chuck’s right. Happens to me all the time. A design is intractable, impenetrable, unworkable. I go to bed whacking my head against the wall and wake up and realize there’s a gate hidden behind some ivy. Don’t mock the elves of invention, Dr. Streegman. They work.”
Chapter 6
ELVES OF INVENTION
This time the elves of invention didn’t work. Not fairies or angels or elfish intercessors or even Elvis himself visited any member of the Forward Kinetics team overnight, and when they began their day’s work with Sara back in the harness and Tim the Troll postponed until the afternoon, little had changed.
Matt’s look said it all: I told you so.
As if we did this to him on purpose, Chuck thought. Despite that resentment, he couldn’t help feeling frustrated, too.
Certainly Sara’s skills with the basic maneuvers were slightly smoother, but she still had no clue how to manage the simplest activities within an interface she knew inside and out. She could move the mechanisms. What she could not do was create objects.
They worked at it all morning. Just before lunch she suggested she go back to working with Roboticus for a while. That sabbatical relaxed her and renewed her confidence.
Unfortunately, it did little for her performance with the software she used every day.
By 2:20 P.M., the time Tim Desmond chose to stroll in late, Sara was sagging in her chair, the neural net twinkling like stars in her hair, while the others tried to assess the situation.
“It’s clear that the kinetic converter is working,” said Matt tersely. “And that the subject’s brain waves are generating sufficient triggers to drive it. The problem has to be the warmware.”
Sara shot him a sideways glance. “Meaning me, right?” She shook her head. “Maybe it’s because I don’t understand the computer side of the equation. I only understand the computer operator’s s
ide. You’re asking me to direct the computer’s internal processes, but I don’t understand them well enough. If that’s how your interface is supposed to work, then even someone with my experience and training won’t be able to use it. That’s not a warmware problem, Dr. Streegman. It’s a technology problem. Your technology problem.”
Matt opened his mouth to reply, but thankfully Tim forestalled whatever he’d been about to say.
“So how’ve you been doing what you’ve been doing so far?” the programmer asked. Hands in the pockets of his blazer, he lounged against a nearby worktable.
Sara explained her work with triggering the track pad and keyboard and how she lost it every time she pulled her attention away to consider the workspace.
Tim wandered over to the test machine and wiggled the mouse. The pointer did a wild jig on the screen. “So you’ve been interacting with the input devices and trying to use them to make stuff happen.”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”
Chuck winced. He hated it when people got short with each other, and there had been a lot of that this day.
“Okay, so that’s what you’ve done,” said Tim. “What’ve you been trying to do?”
Sara made a frustrated gesture at the computer. “Draw a damn cube. A stupid, simple, three-dimensional object. I can’t manipulate the input devices the way I normally would to create it.”
Tim shrugged. “Then don’t manipulate the input devices. Manipulate the input. Use the Force, Luke.”
Sara blinked at him, her face going red. “What?”
“Didn’t you ever see Star Wars? Use the Force. Obi Wan Kenobi says that to Luke Skywalker when he’s trying to save the day, and he shuts down his onboard computer interface and just shoots. Bam! One dead Death Star. A little too easy, if you ask me.”
Sara glared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This isn’t a movie, Troll Boy. I am not shooting swamp rats or vampire squirrels or whatever it was Luke was taking potshots at on Tatooine.”
While Tim congratulated Sara on knowing what Tatooine was, Chuck stared at the wide, flat computer display and had a quiet epiphany . . . or a gift from the elves of invention. “No, Sara, he’s right.”
“What?” Sara said.
“What?” Matt said.
“Told you,” Troll said, although it was clear he didn’t know what he was right about.
But Chuck did. “I’m serious. Don’t think about manipulating the interface. That’s not what you want to do. Just draw something. There’s a CAD/CAM in your head. Use it.”
“What?” Sara said again, and everyone else in the room—except for Tim—stared at him as if he’d spoken in Swahili.
Chuck took a deep breath. “I know it sounds crazy, but trust me. Think of it this way: Before you interact with the physical interface of your CADware, you form a mental model of an object. You instinctively draw the thing in your head a split second before you draw it on the screen. I think what Tim is saying is that you don’t want to interact with an input device at all. You want to interact with the software directly.” He glanced at the programmer, who shrugged.
“Yeah. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Make the thing in your head, and let the software interpret those impulses instead of using the track pad as a go-between.”
Sara let out a breath of pent-up air. She thought about it, calculating—if Chuck had to guess—whether or not Tim was trying to pull a fast one on her. But Chuck gave her an encouraging nod, and she nodded back. “A go-between. Sure. Sure, why not?” She straightened in her seat. “Am I up and running, Euge?”
Eugene checked the machinery. “You’re online.”
She took a deep breath, grasped the arms of her chair, and closed her eyes.
The others all watched her at first—the play of tension and release on her face, the furrowed brows, the subtle twitches of her fingers. They watched her until Tim said, “That’s what I’m talking about.”
The spell broken, Chuck jerked his head around to look at the large display monitor. A cube was coming into being there, growing in size. When it stopped growing, it rotated slowly on one corner, stopped, and diminished in size.
Sara’s eyes opened, the light in them fierce. “How’s that for using the Force?”
Tim strolled over and held up a fist. “Good work, Padawan.”
She laughed—more emotion than Chuck had ever seen her display—and joined the programmer in a fist bump.
“What do you mean Padawan, Troll Boy? I’m a freakin’ Jedi!”
IF SARA CROWELL WAS A Jedi, Troll Desmond was a Jedi Master. Attached to Becky, with lights sparkling through his spiky hair, he was ultimately, after several days of work, able to make the CPU jump through hoops. And he discovered a variety of ways to do it.
Matt was particularly interested in the programmer’s manipulation of what was under the hood: binary. Numbers. Mathematics. Troll could reach down into the stream of ones and zeroes and pull the strings that made them dance. He drew directly to the computer display, graduating swiftly from smiley faces to words to opening higher-level programming modules and coding.
He was not fast at first, something that frustrated him greatly—and Troll was a sight to behold when frustrated—but he did it. He spent long hours doing it. Then he moved on to manipulating even higher-level programming languages and from there to the graphics software he used to create gaming environments.
At that point, Sara, who insisted on being in the lab whenever Troll was—to keep an eye on him, she said—began to kibitz.
“I know this software package,” she said the first time he fired up his 3-D graphics program. “I use it to create settings for some of the architectural work I do.”
They compared notes and traded places under the neural net. She taught him to run her CAD system. He taught her how to raise buildings from the virtual ground and play first-person RPGs.
He stopped calling her Padawan; she stopped calling him Troll Boy.
As an aside, Chuck said to Matt, “Look, we’ve succeeded at something already. Here are two people who seem on the surface to have nothing in common. Two people who had been antagonistic toward each other at the beginning of it all.”
Matt agreed with Chuck’s assessment but not his understatement. Sara had thought Troll was thick; Troll had thought Sara was a bitch.
“They may never be soul mates, but they’re already teammates,” Chuck went on.
Matt tried not to sigh. Leave it to my “teammate” to focus on the people, not the results.
Chapter 7
ELVES OF INVESTING
“What we need,” Matt said, “is investment money. A lot of it. More than I can marshal.” He looked over at Chuck, who sat at the far end of the worktable, tapping away at his laptop, his brow knit in a way that suggested one of his EEG plots had just started to talk to him in a language he didn’t understand.
“Did you hear me?”
Chuck flicked a glance his way. “Uh . . . uh-huh. But I thought you said Becky was going to turn a profit by the end of the year.”
“It is. The problem is while we can make a marginal profit building one-off units, we can’t go into production on them anytime soon. And building them one-off is soaking up all of Dice’s time and energy. I need him to get out of the fabrication business and back into the design end, where he belongs. We need the material resources to build a small manufacturing facility.”
Chuck sat back from his computer keyboard and considered that. “Yeah. That was what we’d discussed going into the subfloor.”
Matt shook his head. “We can’t afford it, though. Not the way we’re going. It’s time to try to stir up some interest. Give some presentations, approach some investors.”
“What kind of investors?”
“Ones with money.”
Chuck rolled his eyes. “I mean who—”
“Not as important as the what,” Matt interrupted. “All those other disciplines we targeted that we couldn’t take on
. . . If we had the right investors, you could expand your research. Bring Mini into the program officially, maybe.”
Chuck’s eyes kindled. “Well, I’m all for that. I’m glad one of us has a brain for business. I wonder what sort of waves yours generates.”
Chuck threw Matt a lopsided grin and went back to whatever it was he was doing, which suited Matt just fine. He hated having to explain things to people. Hated having to account for his actions and thoughts. Hated having to dumb things down.
Not that Chuck was dumb—he wasn’t. He was a brilliant neuroscientist, but he really understood nothing at all about economics or business or cash flow. He was an academic. In Chuck’s experience, money was something you wrote a grant for, not something you had to earn by offering a return on investment. Matt had some ideas about that and had already set processes in motion to get what Forward Kinetics needed to succeed beyond Dr. Chuck’s wildest dreams.
He glanced at his watch. In fact he needed to go check up on one of those processes right now. He got up from the worktable and tucked his iPad under his arm.
“Gotta run. I’ve got an appointment off campus. See you this afternoon.”
“Oh, sure. We’ve got Tim—Troll in the shop later today. He’s going to be trying out Dice’s new VR helm.”
“I’ll be there,” Matt promised.
He definitely would. That virtual reality helm, which Dice had worked hard to integrate with the neural sensor net, would be of paramount importance to the direction in which he was planning to take Forward Kinetics in the next year.
“DR. STREEGMAN? I’M CHEN LANFEN.”
The young woman who approached his table in the sunny courtyard of the Café Clatch Bistro could have been Emma Peel in a previous life, if Emma Peel had been Chinese. She was unusually tall for an Asian woman, dressed in black skinny jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Her shoulder-length hair was black as well, which gave her a vaguely gothy look—except that her skin was an even shade of gold, and she appeared to be wearing little or no makeup. She was striking.
The God Wave Page 5