The God Wave

by Patrick Hemstreet

  She’d started work with Roboticus like everyone else, pushing him hither and yon with her brain waves, making him twist and turn, spin and zigzag. Once she had perfected that, though, Dice had built her a different sort of robot, one that not so subtly reminded her of the battle droids in the Star Wars movies. It was three feet long and vaguely football shaped, with four legs that could pivot a full 360 on their joints. The feet were about the size of a man’s hand and curved along the bottoms, which had rubber soles. Because of these feet—and the gyroscopic mechanisms at either end of the football—the bot was incredibly well balanced. If Lanfen could balance herself on one foot, Pigskin—as she started calling it—could do likewise.

  She was working through a series of simple exercises with the robot—step, kick; step, tiger-claw strike—when Matt came into her practice area with an older fellow whose thick white hair reminded her of soft-serve ice cream. She hesitated in the middle of a move, and the bot keeled over, its native programming taking control to draw in its appendages and put it into sleep mode.

  Matt frowned at it. “Keep practicing, Lanfen. I’d like Mr. Howard to see what you’ve been doing.”

  She said nothing about the fact that it was their interruption that had stopped her practice in the first place, and she did as requested, settling back into a horse stance as Matt turned to his companion and began a running narrative. Lanfen tracked them peripherally as she put the bot through a series of moves that echoed her own.

  “Ms. Chen is a black-belt-level kung fu practitioner. She’s a native of Shanghai. Began learning martial arts there. As you can see, the robot she’s manipulating is only marginally humanoid. But it has arms and legs, so she can make it echo her movements through the BKKI.”

  “Does she have to do all that herself?” the older man asked, gesturing at Lanfen.

  “Ideally no.” Matt turned to look at her. “Lanfen, can you drill the bot without moving?”

  She stopped in midkick and planted both feet firmly on the practice mat. Then she bowed to the bot, which bowed in return, tucking its front limbs up around its elongated middle. She had never done it this way—using just her mind—but she had listened to Dice talk about the others’ experiences and felt it wouldn’t take much to figure it out.

  At first, nothing happened. But as she concentrated, Pigskin began to exercise a series of odd backflips, tipping backward until it could balance on its arms, then flinging its legs and torso over to repeat the movement.

  It looked like a clumsy Slinky made of oversize bicycle-chain links, but Lanfen’s confidence in the robot’s performance—meaning her performance—was all she needed. When it reached the far wall of the lab, she had it rise up and execute a sequence of kicks, blocks, and turns, her muscles tightening and loosening in time with the robot though she stayed as still as she could.

  When she’d done that, she let the bot revert to its normal pill-bug behavior and turned to the watching men.

  White Hair was nodding. “Let me ask you, young lady: does the shape of the robot offer any particular challenges?”

  Interesting question, she thought, to which she had an immediate answer. “Yes. I realized how important my head is to the art only when I tried to balance a headless mechanism the first time. Also the fact that its torso is solid and doesn’t bend limits the range of movement significantly. Still, I imagine if you had a team of these metal puppies guarding something, they could be quite imposing.”

  “Guard dogs?” he mused.

  “Of course,” said Matt. “And guard dogs that can’t be bought off for the price of a steak with tranquilizers in it.”

  “Yes, but could you make them bulletproof?”

  “To a great extent,” Matt told him. “The materials they might be made of are pretty broad.”

  “Very interesting, Dr. Streegman. I shall most certainly relate the impressive nature of this demonstration to my associates.”

  “That’s all I ask, Mr. Howard.”

  The two men left the lab, Matt favoring Lanfen with a wink and a smile on the way out. She felt good. She was an unofficial member of the Forward Kinetics team, but if she could help generate funding, she might become official all the sooner, which meant more time training with the robots.

  And what girl wouldn’t want to spar with R2-D2?

  SARA CROWELL WAS A PRODIGY. Since her “use the Force” breakthrough, she had sailed ahead of the rest of the team in the sheer ease with which she’d learned to work with Becky. In fact, she had expanded beyond the CAD/CAM program to manipulating software programs in general. Tim could do likewise, but Sara’s use of the kinetic interface seemed effortless by comparison. She had surpassed the Jedi Master and was now capable of ease and speed that neither Tim nor Mike could demonstrate.

  She was also, Chuck noted, able to do simple things like open and close programs and set up her workspace with her attention half on other things: a conversation, note taking, watching another subject work.

  Tim, on the other hand, could move mountains (literally, in the case of the software he used to build strange alien worlds for his video games), but he had to concentrate every ounce of himself on the task at hand. Distracting him derailed his train of thought, which brought on a fit of dark sulks.

  It’s as if Sara is a fine-tuned athlete, used to using multiple muscles in harmony to execute a particular skill, while Tim is a power lifter, only able to handle one—albeit substantial—task at a time.

  Chuck realized this was the only time Troll would ever be compared to a power lifter. Either way, it was impressive to watch both of them work.

  Sara was in the lab one day, under Eugene’s and Chuck’s watchful eyes, as she ran through the demonstration she was prepping for the Applied Robotics conference. It was as impressive as all get-out, Chuck thought. She started with the easy stuff—opening a new file, setting up the workspace, and launching into a whiz-bang, lightning-fast demonstration of design at the speed of thought. Buildings grew up out of the digital ground like time-lapse crystals; trees and shrubs slid into place as bright, wire-frame skeletons and gained texture and color as if sentient paint flowed over them.

  It was a potent demonstration, made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Sara was no longer connected to her computer by strands of fiber-optic cable. With the neural net, she was free to stand, pace the room, stare out a window—whatever would aid the creative processes going on in her nimble brain.

  Chuck found himself laughing with exhilaration as she put the final touches on her casually constructed masterpiece.

  “You know,” said Eugene wryly, “some people are going to think they’re being hoaxed. They’re going to think this stuff is all preprogrammed or that someone is doing this offstage.”

  Chuck’s laughter died in his throat, and he turned to look at his lab director. “That never even occurred to me.” He thought about it some more. “This is a huge problem. How can we prove it’s real?”

  Euge watched Sara fly through rendering and saving her file. “Well, what if we took requests?”

  “Requests?”

  “Eugene,” said Sara, “you’re a genius.” Chuck noticed that even as she talked, the computer continued to be manipulated. Impressive.

  “He’s right, Doc,” she was saying. “If there are any Doubting Thomases in the crowd, we can ask them to propose tests of their own devising. I’m up for it. It doesn’t have to be architectural, either. I can do widgets. Same thing for Timmy, I imagine. Someone could hand him a drawing of something, and he could render it for them. Or they could describe it and have him create it on the fly. It’d be fantastic.”

  Euge’s eyes lit up. “Can we try it?”

  “Sure.” Sara swung back to look at the large plasma screen across the room and opened a new, blank file. “What do you want?”

  Eugene glanced at Chuck, who nodded at him to take charge. Eugene’s eyes went to the BPM readout charting Sara’s brain state.

  “Okay,” Eugene said. “I’
d like a Frank Lloyd Wright–style building with two stories. No, three.”

  “Material?”

  “Brick below and limestone above.”

  She gave him a funny look. “Limestone?”

  “Yeah. Like the pyramids.”

  “Right. Pyramids. I can build one of those if you’d like.”

  “No, thanks. A Prairie School abode will be sufficient.”

  She went to it, Eugene adding bits and pieces as she went: tree-of-life stained glass over and around the front door, a water feature along the front veranda, a slate roof. She kept up, creating what he asked almost as swiftly as the specs came out of his mouth.

  Chuck glanced at her brain wave readouts: She is doing this in one immensely long gamma fugue.

  He had turned back to watch Euge’s house take shape on the computer screen when the BPM uttered the shrill bleat of an alarm. Chuck stared at the digital readout: the wave pattern had literally flown off the chart. The vivid trace of light went up and disappeared at the top of the window. It didn’t drop back into visible range until Sara broke concentration. Then it settled down into a normal but heightened beta state.

  “What the heck was that?” Eugene asked, leaning in to look at the readout.

  Chuck grimaced. “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with the machine,” Sara suggested.

  Chuck ran a diagnostic, during which Sara put herself through some simple exercises geared toward generating a series of different states. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the machine.

  “The trace flies out of the frame at the top,” noted Chuck. “Maybe Sara’s producing an effect outside of her normal parameters. I’m going to try increasing the frequency range.”

  He did, and they tried the experiment again.

  Again the alarm sounded when Sara was fully engaged in processing Eugene’s verbal instructions. Again Chuck increased the range.

  The alarm went off a third time.

  He recalibrated yet again.

  This time the alarm was silent. And this time the brain state appeared on the monitor screen as a solid bar of brilliant amber.

  “Seven megahertz,” murmured Chuck, even as Sara continued to design. “That’s . . . extraordinary. There’s no human brain activity in that range.”

  “Gotta be static discharge,” Eugene replied quietly. “Gotta be.” He gave Sara another direction.

  “Static discharge?” repeated Chuck. “Why?”

  “Because the most common thing I can think of that generates a wave at seven megahertz is lightning.”

  Chapter 9

  MURPHY’S LAW

  After Sara was sent home, Dice dismantled the rig and ran diagnostics on each individual component. While the system wasn’t supposed to feed back into the neural net, Chuck refused to take a chance that it might.

  Everything checked out clean.

  Of course it does.

  Dice stared in frustration at the disassembled parts of the kinetic converter. It had to be some permutation of Murphy’s law: if something can go wrong it will, and you will not be able to reproduce the results or determine the cause by running diagnostics. Or it was a codicil to the aphorism that a watched pot never boils—in this case the screwed-up mechanism would refuse to malfunction while you were watching.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the mechanics,” Eugene said wearily. “And there’s nothing wrong with the software program.”

  “There has to be, though,” said Chuck. “Somewhere among these pieces of the puzzle, there has to be one that’s malfunctioning. Which means we have to find it—we can’t ask our subjects to interact with a faulty system. There’s no lab on earth in which that should be an acceptable risk, and especially not ours.”

  Dice rubbed his eyes. “What if we test it on one of us?”

  “To what end?” Chuck asked.

  “We all know how the rig works. If there’s something wrong, it should go wrong no matter who’s at the helm, right?”

  “Theoretically,” Chuck admitted. He was gazing at the neural net, his hazel eyes suddenly vague and unfocused.

  Eugene was watching him. “I know that look. What are you thinking?”

  “That I might be wrong.”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  Chuck gave Eugene a withering look, but the young man just smiled.

  “Seriously, I’m thinking it might not be the converter. It might be the subjects. They’re building mental muscles—we know that. What if the result is simply that this is a new muscle group? One that’s producing a higher voltage of output? One that’s producing a new rhythm?” Chuck’s eyes went from vague to laser focus so fast, it made Dice’s hair stand on end. “Reassemble the rig. I’m going to test it.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Eugene. “If something fries your brain, Forward Kinetics comes to a screeching and high-profile halt. It’s kaput. I’ll test it.”

  “Euge—”

  “Time-out, guys.” Dice made a T with his hands. “Let me reassemble it first, make sure there’s nothing in the connections that’s misfiring. Might as well eliminate mechanical reasons so we can confirm Chuck’s theory. Then we can draw lots or something.”

  “Draw lots for what?” Tim had just wandered in for his afternoon session, making Dice realize belatedly that they’d forgotten to call the other participants to cancel their lab times.

  “Becky had a bit of a meltdown during Sara’s session this morning,” Dice told him. “Shot out a burst of static in the seven-megahertz range.”

  “Seven megahertz? No kidding. That’s like lightning, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you were afraid you were going to stir-fry Sara’s brains?”

  “Something like that.” Dice winced, forgoing the idea of Chinese for dinner.

  “So you want me to go home?”

  “Yes,” Dice said, then added, “No, wait. There is something you can do, Timmy Troll. While we’re reassembling the mechanics, can you check the software modules again just to make sure I didn’t miss something big and incriminating?”

  Tim smiled. “Nothing would make me happier. You write beautiful code, man. I love the way you self-document. I wish some of the guys at work could learn to do that.”

  Dice took a moment to set the programmer up at a workstation and showed him which files to check.

  “Wouldn’t it be a laugh if it was, like, an odd curly bracket or something?”

  Dice grimaced. “I’m almost hoping it is something that mind-blowingly simple.”

  It wasn’t something that mind-blowingly simple.

  Troll’s perusal of the interface code revealed nothing out of place and only served to make him more of a Daisuke Kobayashi fanboy.

  They drew lots, excluding Tim, who pouted and then consoled himself with a can of Pepsi. Dice won the right to test the rig, which was fine with him. He had more online time with it than either Chuck or Eugene, after all.

  Under the neural net, he interacted with a block of code he’d been working on to enhance his virtual reality interface. He wanted his test to be as close to the conditions Sara was in as possible. With the code, he was in his element: he knew the ropes, and he knew what he wanted it to do. But while he managed a couple of decent gamma bursts, he was unable to make the BPM shriek like a banshee or generate even a spark of lightning.

  “Let me try.”

  That was Timmy Troll, of course. For being such an archetypal loner, he hated to be left out in matters of archgeekitude. The three scientists argued with him for several minutes, at the end of which he recited the entire fourth clause of the waiver he’d signed, taking care to point out that “acceptable risk” was a vague concept and surely one he could define for himself.

  In the end Chuck relented and allowed Dice to hook Tim up to Becky. They’d no more than gotten him suited up when Sara sauntered back into the lab.

  “Thought you could have a party without me, did you?” she ask
ed.

  “I sent you home,” Chuck said.

  “Obviously I didn’t go home. I took the day off to work in the lab here, so I’m working in the lab. I’ve been watching from up there.” She tilted her chin up toward the wraparound gallery.

  Dice had all but forgotten about it. He looked to Chuck and shrugged. “She signed the same waiver Tim did. If she wants to stay . . .”

  Dice could interpret the expression on Chuck’s face as nothing other than raw anxiety—possibly even fear. But he nodded anyway.

  “All right. Stay. But if it does that again . . .”

  Tim worked with the rig for half an hour with no recurrence of the Tesla coil effect. By the time he gave up on it, he seemed disappointed.

  Typical programmer, Dice thought. Gets a giggle out of breaking someone else’s code but pouts when he can’t crack it.

  They were on the verge of giving up for the day, but Sara was having none of it.

  “Look,” she said, “you’ve been through the system from front to back, and no one’s caused the Tesla thing to happen again. Since I’m the one who broke it in the first place, it makes sense to have me test it just to make sure.”

  She was perfectly correct, of course. That was the logical thing to do. So, Chuck’s visible angst notwithstanding, they did it.

  Sara, being Sara, was calmer than any of them—except possibly Tim, who opted for an air of relaxed boredom. Dice could tell, though, that Troll was as anxious to see her do it as he was to see her fail.

  Once Chuck had adjusted the BPM back to its original range, Sara donned the neural net and fired up the project she’d been working on when the alarms had gone off. She archived the work she’d done on the garden and had Eugene feed her a fresh set of instructions from which she laid out hardscape areas, built fountains and statuary, and created trees and shrubs. She slid easily into a steady gamma pattern, her eyes on the creation process.

  Dice was just beginning to relax when the alarm shrilled, its tone unwavering and continuous. He glanced at Sara’s face and was surprised to see no reaction from her—it was as if she didn’t even hear the sound the machine was emitting. He looked from her to the big display. The garden was coming into full bloom as if caught by a time-lapse video. Patterns and colors coalesced on the screen. It was like watching a Pixar movie, with digital greenery taking over the entire screen.