Chuck leapt to the BPM’s touch screen and adjusted the output to the 7 MHz range. They all saw it: the solid, 3-D bar of activity. Lightning.
But where is it coming from—the hardware, the software, or the warmware?
Dice thought he knew—that only one answer possibly made sense at this point—but clearly Chuck wasn’t convinced.
“No, no, no,” Chuck murmured, staring at the BPM’s display before finally shouting, “I’m shutting down!”
In the moments before his hand found the “abort” button on the touch screen, Sara broke her concentration and turned to glare at him. The 7 MHz blast simply stopped, replaced by an agitated beta. Chuck hit the kill switch, and the Brewster-Brenton unit went dark and silent.
“Why did you do that?” Sara asked peevishly. “I was flying, Chuck. I was . . . I was totally in sync.”
“Maybe,” Chuck said. “Maybe you were in sync. And maybe you were that close to overloading your synapses.” He pinched the air with a thumb and a forefinger.
“I feel fine,” she told him. “I am fine. I want to go again. I want to see if I can make lightning happen again.”
“Hell,” said Tim, “I want to see if I can make lightning happen at all.”
Chuck shook his head. “No. No, Sara. It could be dangerous. We’re stopping now.”
“Aw, c’mon, Doc,” Tim whined. “Things were just getting interesting. And I want a shot at it.”
Dice glanced at Chuck again. He could tell how badly the neuroscientist wanted to say no but knew how easily he let himself be railroaded by those with stronger personalities. And for an introvert, Troll could be exceedingly pushy when he wanted something.
“It’s four P.M.,” Dice observed, and Chuck shot him a grateful look. “Let’s call it a day. Eugene and I will go back over the activity logs, so they’re ready for the five-thirty meeting, okay? We’re too close to this right now. We need some time to think it through, figure out what to do next.”
“Let’s try a different project—maybe start a new one from scratch,” said Sara. “That’s what makes the most sense to me.”
“We are not taking this any further today,” Chuck said.
Dice had never heard him sound so dictatorial. He supposed raw fear would do that even to someone as mellow as Chuck Brenton.
“All right, Doc. Why don’t you go get a cup of tea or something? Euge and I will upload the material for the meeting.”
Chuck nodded and stepped back from the BPM, looking like a kid who was leaving his pet at an animal shelter.
“Doc,” said Dice. “Tea.”
“No tea.” Chuck turned to Sara. “I’d like to take you over to gamma lab for an MRI.”
“If it will make you feel better, sure.”
“Making me feel better is not the point. I have to be sure we’re not damaging your brain, Sara. I have to be sure.”
She shrugged. “Okay. I’ll tell you what. I’ll go for the MRI right now if you’ll let Tim and me sit in on the meeting tonight.”
“That’s highly irregular,” said Eugene.
One corner of Sara’s mouth tilted upward. “So are my brain waves.”
Chuck and Eugene exchanged glances, and then Chuck acquiesced. He led Sara from the room.
As she slipped through the door, she turned and gave Tim a double thumbs-up.
THERE WAS NOTHING DANGEROUS-LOOKING IN Sara’s MRI, though there was an overall marked increase in activity in the frontal lobe on both sides. Even as she lay in the resonance tube, working out a series of problems in her head, her brain showed activity across a larger area than it had during her last MRI two weeks earlier.
What does that mean? Is it an artifact of the way her brain worked? Or is it something we caused by subjecting her to the rigors of the program?
Or is it both?
Chuck went into the meeting not knowing how to interpret the results of either the experiment or Sara’s MRI. He’d studied neurology for nearly a decade and could say without hubris that he was one of the ten most knowledgeable people on the planet about the subject. And yet this was something so new, it made him feel like a rank undergrad reading his first MRI plot.
“So what you’re saying,” Matt said when Chuck and his team had finished their purely factual description of the situation, “is that Sara has started producing a new brain pattern—one we’ve never seen before. I’m impressed.”
“I’m not sure that’s what we’re saying,” argued Chuck. “What we may be saying is that the machinery is creating a sort of feedback loop and exciting Sara’s brain to unusual activity.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the machinery,” said Dice quietly.
“We don’t know—”
“Yes, we do know,” Dice said. “Whatever is happening, it’s not happening because of the hardware or the software. The hardware is fine, and the software is only reading what Sara’s brain is outputting—a wave in the seven-megahertz range. The wave is a legitimate neurological event that’s originating in Sara’s brain. Hell, Chuck, you’re a neurologist. Why can’t you accept this?”
Sara, who was seated next to Chuck at the table, leaned in and tried to capture his gaze. “What he said. It’s me, Doc. I’m doing it. I can even feel it when I get into the state that’s producing the pattern.”
“You can feel it?” Chuck asked, locking eyes with her. “You didn’t mention that before. In what sense can you feel it? A headache—”
“Nothing like that. It’s . . . look, have you ever ridden a horse?”
He laughed. “No.” It was about as emphatic as he’d ever said anything.
“Fine. But you know about riding horses, right? That some people do it?”
Chuck nodded, slightly amused.
“Well, there’s a moment when a horse is at a full gallop and hits its stride, and suddenly you can’t feel the individual hoofbeats anymore or the movement of the animal under you. It’s as if you’re riding on the air—smooth, flowing. That’s what this felt like. It was that kind of all-encompassing sense. I couldn’t hear the sounds of the room. I couldn’t see anything but the results of my work. I felt as if I was riding on air. Getting to the gamma was hard work.
“This felt effortless.”
Chuck frowned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’m just afraid that if this wave is sustained over a period of time, especially repetitively, it might damage you in some way. Burn you out, even. I have no way of measuring what’s happening to your synapses in real time. I can only look at your brain after the fact, which might be too late.” He turned to Matt. “You said you were ‘impressed.’ The word I think we should be using is ‘concerned.’”
Matt’s gaze bored into him, heavy and unrelenting. Finally the mathematician asked his partner quietly, “What do you suggest we do?” Chuck had learned to distrust that voice. Matt used it in conflicting ways. It could mean he was experiencing trepidation and was legitimately awed by the potential dangers of this new event. However, it could also mean he thought Chuck was being dense and obstructionist, and he was trying very hard not to show how much that annoyed him.
And usually it’s the latter.
Regardless, he offered his honest opinion. “I think we should pull back. Have Sara and the others go through some testing to make sure we’re not harming them in any way.”
“I thought we agreed we’re just bulking up mentally,” said Tim. “Y’know, using the muscles and making them stronger and more efficient. Maybe we’re just having muscle cramps.”
“It’s not a cramp, Tim,” said Sara. Was there just a hint of smugness in her voice? She was, after all, the only one to have experienced this firsthand. “It’s the opposite of a cramp. Everything in my head was running as smooth as glass.”
Chuck shook his head. “Even in the case of bodily muscles, you can overwork them and cause injury. I don’t—”
Matt cut him off. “I understand your concern, Chuck. I really do,” he said in that same übergentle voice. “But we
can’t afford to pull back. We’ve got commitments now. People who are waiting to see what this technology will do, banking on it doing something useful.”
Chuck continued to shake his head. “Commitments? Banking on it? No, Matt! Dammit, we can’t let business imperatives drive our research. Too many people—scientists, politicians, businesspeople, you name it—use business commitments as excuses to take terrible risks. I’m not going to let us go out with a product that is potentially dangerous, let alone risk these people testing—”
“Chuck . . .” Sara leaned forward again and put a hand on his arm. “I promise you if I feel the least bit stressed, if I have the tiniest headache or dizziness or anything like that, I will let you know. Just don’t shut us down or ask us to wait to find out what we can do.” She glanced sideways at Tim. “Whatever it is I’ve done, I’m willing to bet that Tim and Mike won’t be far behind. Don’t stop us before we can find out what this means.”
“There,” Matt said. “From the horse’s mouth.” He felt the icy daggers of Sara’s side glance at his equestrian comparison but chose to ignore it. “Let’s not hesitate on the verge of a potential breakthrough.”
A breakthrough. Is that what we are on the verge of? Chuck prayed that was so but couldn’t shake the idea that they seemed willing to risk everything, including the scientific method, for it. He knew he should say something else, something to convince the others how wrong this felt, but as he looked around the table, all he saw was everyone looking at him with varying degrees of anticipation. He shook his head.
“Are you all on board with this?” he asked quietly.
Everyone nodded or answered in the affirmative. Surprisingly the only hesitation came from Dice, but in the end even he gave a yes vote.
“All right. Tomorrow we’ll pick up where we left off. Mike is scheduled for first thing in the morning. We’ll bring him in on the situation and give him a choice about whether he wants to continue with the program. Is that acceptable?”
Chuck glanced around the table again. They were all sitting back in their chairs, smiling or looking thoughtful.
“He’ll stick it out,” Tim prophesied. “Guaranteed.”
Chapter 10
THE GOD WAVE
“So what is that, then?” Lanfen asked, running her finger along the bar of light that dominated the BPM’s touch screen. She glanced up at Matt.
“We haven’t actually named it yet,” he said. “Although I heard someone refer to it as the Tesla coil effect.”
“That’s a mouthful. I think you’re going to want something catchier for PR purposes.”
He smiled. “Yeah. I’ll think about it. Right now what I’d like to do is see if you can reproduce it.”
She stared at him but couldn’t read his face in the semidarkness of the delta lab. “Seriously? But I have no idea what Sara’s doing.”
Matt crossed the darkened lab to stand at the edge of Lanfen’s workout mat. “She said it was like riding a horse at flank speed. I don’t suppose you ride?”
“No. Sorry.”
“She described a state in which everything she was doing went from high tension to effortless. Like she was in sync. In the zone. Do you ever experience that while you’re doing kung fu?”
“Of course—that’s basically a goal of the discipline.” Lanfen moved to stand beside Matt, gazing at the practice space and the currently inert robot. “So you’re hoping I can get into the zone and direct the robot from there.”
“Yes. Willing to try?”
“You bet. Hook me up.”
She worked with the robot for over an hour, until she was weary and dripping with sweat. She’d managed to do most of the workout in a steady gamma state, but the elusive lightning refused to strike.
“I’m too aware that I’m moving a foreign object and not my body,” she said. Sitting cross-legged at the edge of the mat, sipping water, she considered the problem that had both Matt and her frustrated. “There’s a disconnect. The bot is not me. Or it’s not enough like me to put me in the zone. Either way, I have to be too conscious of everything I’m doing.”
Matt was silent for a long moment, then asked, “What if you were looking at the world from the robot’s point of view? What if you were looking out from inside the bot?”
She thought about it for a second. “Well, I imagine that might improve my mental mapping. I’d still say the bot is pretty limited in the ways it can move, though.”
“I’ll work on improving that,” Matt told her. “Though I can’t do anything about it immediately. The other part—the viewpoint issue—that I can deal with right now.”
Lanfen looked at him askance. “Really? How?”
“Dice has integrated a VR helm into the rig in the alpha lab.”
Lanfen gestured at the room. “Doesn’t do me much good down here.”
“No. We’re going to have to move you upstairs.”
Her heart leapt. “Officially? I can be an official member of the program?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, no. Not yet. I’m thinking spring of next year. In fact, I’d like your debut to be at the Applied Robotics show in April.”
“Then we’d better get working on that VR component, Professor.”
WHEN CHUCK BRIEFED MIKE ABOUT Sara’s new wave the next morning, the construction engineer took the news with characteristic tranquility. His only indication of surprise was a slight raising of one eyebrow.
“New brain wave, huh? What are you gonna call it?”
Chuck clearly hadn’t considered that. “I don’t know . . . um, a supergamma?”
“Lame, Doc,” Tim offered. “We can do better than that.”
“We’ve been sort of calling it the Tesla coil effect,” Dice offered.
“Oh, man, that’s almost as lame,” said the game developer. “Don’t the other waves all have Greek alphabet names? What comes after gamma?”
“Delta,” said Dice. “But I think that’s taken. Epsilon comes after that.”
Tim wrinkled his nose and looked at Mike as if to ask what he thought. Mike shrugged, and Tim rolled his eyes.
“Let me ask you this,” he said to Chuck. “It’s several stops past just the next letter in the alphabet, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Chuck.
“What if we call it a zeta wave, then? That’s a three-letter jump, and z is at the tail end of the English alphabet.”
“Zeta wave,” said Chuck, testing it out. Tim, on the other hand, was already committed.
“Yeah. I like it. It’s not lame.”
And that’s how decisions get made at Forward Kinetics, Chuck thought ruefully.
By not being lame.
Regardless, zeta it was . . . and yet zeta it wasn’t. Because although they spent the day trying to coax it into showing itself in Tim and Mike’s brain waves, it was always without success. They put Sara back in the harness, and she was able to generate the wave after roughly ten minutes of sustained work. Chuck let her carry on for about two minutes, then broke her concentration and pulled her out of the state.
“Maybe it’s something not everyone can do,” suggested Eugene.
“Unacceptable,” said Tim. “I’m going to keep trying until I can do it. I mean look at it from the usefulness standpoint. What good is the tech if only rare individuals can use it to its full potential? This is proof of concept, man. You gotta have proof of concept. Am I right?” He directed this comment at Matt, who had come into the lab to witness their progress and in whom Tim found a ready ally—at least when it came to taking risks with the subjects.
“Troll’s right,” Matt said. “We need to know how rare or how common this state is. If it’s really as rare as all that, we need to develop a procedure by which our customers can quickly and efficiently identify people who can generate it before they’ve invested a ton of resources in training.”
And that’s the other way decisions are made here:
Matt makes them.
SO CHUCK SPLIT THE TEAM up, pu
tting Eugene in charge of working with Tim in bay one while he set Mike up with his current device—a large, mechanical arm he had been using to move weighted boxes from a shipping pallet to a raised platform that stood in for a truck bed. He asked Dice to float between the two teams, monitoring the interface.
That duty suited the engineer just fine. He was legitimately curious to see what would happen with both of these guys but was willing to wager that Tim would be the first of the two to achieve a zeta state.
MATT WANDERED OVER TO WATCH Dice start a preflight check of Mike’s rig; the robotic arm used a computerized drive mechanism not unlike the backhoes and cranes Mike was used to piloting in his workaday life.
“I have a favor to ask of you,” Matt said quietly.
Dice paused to read the expression on his boss’s face. It didn’t take a degree in robotics to tell that what he was about to say was for Dice’s ears alone.
“Yeah?”
“Karate bot. I need you to do some extracurricular work on it.”
Dice turned his attention back to the servounit. “What sort of work?”
“It needs to flex more like a human body. It’s too stiff. I know you were experimenting with more-humanoid forms back at MIT.”
“I was. I turned it over to my minions. Brenda Tansy is in charge of the robotics program now.”
“I remember her. Bright. Postgrad now, right?”
Dice nodded.
“I’d like to get a unit like that here. Money is no object.”
Dice took a deep breath, considering. “Are you thinking we buy one off the university or just get the schematics or—”
“If you had the schematics and the materials, how long would it take you to put a prototype together?”
“If I had an experienced team . . . three months maybe.”
“Steal undergrads from MIT. They can intern. I’ll pay them.”
Dice felt his heart rate kick up. He loved his job. “Okay. Sure. But why the sly?”
The God Wave Page 8