The God Wave

by Patrick Hemstreet

  “About that,” Dice said. “Is it just that she’s erratic, or is she überpowerful?”

  “Her baseline is different, and her range is longer. Maybe the chaos isn’t anomalous, or maybe it’s not really chaos. Maybe it’s because she meditates regularly. I’ve heard there are studies showing that people who meditate generate significantly different brain patterns than those who don’t.”

  “Chuck might be able to tell us that.”

  Matt lowered his gaze and turned his laptop back around. “I’m not ready to have Chuck know what we’re doing.”

  Dice was silent for a moment, then said, “Well, if we’re going to make this work with Lanfen, he may have to know.” He turned and left Matt’s office without further comment.

  When Dice was gone, Matt sat back down at his desk and studied Lanfen’s zeta signature. Letting Chuck in on his work with the martial artist wouldn’t be his first choice. There was just something about the doctor that was too cautious. He thought back to the time in the conference room, when Chuck had gotten angry at Matt. He couldn’t remember the exact reason—it had seemed so trivial at the time, and even more so now—but if Chuck could get so upset then, he wasn’t sure how the man would react to this news. And yet Dice was right—it was something he might just have to do.

  Might.

  “SO YOU’RE NOT GOING WITH Dr. Brenton to the TED conference?” Mini was clearly pleased by that prospect. In the pool of flickering light from the single candle that sat in the middle of the restaurant table, her smile was brilliant, her green eyes sparkled, and her skin took on a golden glow.

  Eugene was inclined to tell her that he wouldn’t go to that show even if Chuck ordered him to if it meant being away from her for an entire week. What he said was, “No. He thought about it but decided we couldn’t afford to slack off on the program for a week. So I’m staying here to keep things moving.”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “No.” He hesitated, then added, “Frankly I’d rather be with you than with Chuck at a conference.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said, then her smile slipped a bit. “You’re not just saying that, are you?”

  “Just saying it? I just said . . . what do you mean just saying it?”

  “You know. Are you just saying it because you’re trying to impress me?”

  “Of course I’m trying to impress you. Obviously I want you to be impressed with me, but I’m saying it because I mean it. I like being with you.”

  “Why?”

  Minerva Mause could be the most disconcerting person when she half tried. Eugene glanced toward the ritzy, wrought-iron servers’ elevator, hoping their two orders of linguine Pomodoro would come sailing out and forestall this conversation. He was all thumbs when it came to dating and was beginning to think there was no way this could end well.

  Two paths diverged in the snowy wood of his brain. One led to some simplistic “how to talk to women” lines he’d read in Esquire magazine, the other to something entirely other and alien: dissecting his actual feelings and trying to articulate them. A glance into Mini’s eyes blew all his Esquire training right out of his head.

  “I’m not good at this,” he warned her. “I’m really not. I don’t know how to talk to women.”

  “I’m not women,” she said. “I’m me.”

  He blinked. “There. That’s why I like to be with you. You’re you. You’re quintessentially Mini. You’re alive and fresh and creative, and you’ve got all these things going on inside you that I really want to know about. And okay, you’re also very beautiful, and you’re . . . you’re . . .”

  “Erotic in a wholesome way?” she asked teasingly.

  “Yeah.”

  She was still smiling but pulled her eyes away to look down at her hands. “Here’s the thing, Euge. I don’t always feel beautiful. I mostly feel like a gawky tween. And I sometimes think my creativity is all in my head.” She was silent for a moment while he tried to formulate a response. Then she looked up at him and said, “Guys are always telling me I’m cute. Like a kitten or some other small animal no one takes seriously. They want to pet me or put me on a leash. They think my art is cute, too. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Impulsively Eugene reached across the table and took her hand. “Yeah, I think I do. And I don’t. I mean I don’t think you’re cute—at least not like a kitten or a pet. I think your art is amazing and powerful. I think you’re amazing. When I first met you, I thought you were a little . . . odd. But you’re just so creative and smart. Heck, the last thing I’d want to do is put you on a leash, Mini. It’s that sense of freedom and impulsiveness you have that’s so intriguing.”

  She was smiling at him full tilt now—a thousand-candlepower smile. She squeezed his hand. He’d somehow managed to get it right, to speak the right words. He was breathless with the sheer unexpectedness of it.

  He smiled back. The candle on the table suddenly flared, making both of them sit up straight and let go of each other’s hands.

  “Whoa,” Eugene said. “What was that?”

  “I’m so sorry. Let me replace that for you.” The server, who’d arrived at the table unobserved, set their entrées down in front of them, picked up the candle in its cup, and blew it out. “I’ll just bring another one. They sometimes do that when they burn all the way down.”

  He went away then, frowning into the candleholder.

  Looking after him, Mini laughed, and Eugene reflected that he understood exactly how that candle flame felt. Something was flaring in him at the moment, too. It prompted him to ask, “So are you happy I’m not going to Long Beach with Chuck?”

  She paused in the act of coiling linguine around her fork and gave him a look that questioned his intelligence. “Of course. Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Oh, I think you definitely should be. No, sorry, that came out wrong. I mean I hope you are. I mean if I had my way, you’d be head over heels in love with me already.”

  “Head over heels,” she repeated, and wrinkled her perfect nose. “Have you ever thought about that saying? Our heads are always over our heels. It should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t love upset the natural order of things?”

  He met her eyes and couldn’t look away. Something was certainly upsetting his natural order.

  “I told my mom about you,” he said, surprising both of them.

  “Really?” She was looking at him as if he’d said the most fascinating thing she’d ever heard. “What did she say?”

  “She said I should be patient but not stupid patient.”

  Again the nose wrinkle. “That sounds like great advice . . . for a fisherman.”

  “I am sort of fishing,” Eugene said, twirling up some linguine and popping it into his mouth.

  “Have you been stupid patient before?”

  He nodded. “Mom thinks so. She thinks I’ve blown my chances with women before by not speaking my mind. But honestly, this is the first time I’ve had a strong mind to speak.”

  She set down her fork and gave him her entire attention. “What’s your mind saying?”

  He set his fork down, too, glancing around to make sure there was no one within earshot. Their table was up on a low balcony overlooking the noisier lower room of the restaurant. He took a deep breath and hoped he wasn’t screwing this up.

  “Well, that’s the problem. Sometimes I can’t hear my mind because my body’s talking too loudly. I think you’re incredibly sexy, and it’s hard to separate that from the other stuff.”

  Her expression was suddenly very serious. “Try.”

  He nodded. “Okay, I will. But you may have to be patient, too. I don’t want to mess this up.”

  She smiled suddenly, brilliantly. “Well, that’s something right there, isn’t it?”

  He supposed it was. “What about you?” he had the temerity to ask. “What’s your mind saying?”

  She picked up her fork again and went back to her linguine. “Oh, it’s pretty much in agr
eement with my heart and all my other parts on this one.

  “I’ve been in love with you from the moment we met.”

  Chapter 14

  QUESTIONS

  “So is what you’re saying,” asked the guy in the third row, “that these people have developed a form of telekinesis?”

  Chuck glanced back at the screen behind him on the large stage. It was frozen on Sara’s “use the Force” moment as she high-fived Tim. He had covered the genesis of the project from inspiration to fruition, had shown each subject during different phases of development (to increasing murmurs and bursts of applause that never seemed to sweep the whole audience), and had stopped with the videos of the team in their pre-zeta gamma states.

  Yet the first question was about telekinesis.

  He had thought that describing each component of the rig and what it did would have inoculated him against this question. He was momentarily stumped because the truth was something he had agreed he would not tell, and the truth was that, yes, these people had developed a form of telekinesis—a form that relied on their maneuvering the mechanics of whatever it was they were trying to control. Chuck, who knew himself to be a terrible liar, had to find a way to say less than the truth without telling a lie.

  “What I’m saying,” he said finally, “is that these people are . . . flexing mental muscles we didn’t know they had. They are manipulating these components using the electrical impulses of their brains thanks to a formula created by Dr. Matt Streegman of MIT that modulates the impulses—or conditions them—so they can be interpreted by the interface.”

  “So you have a wireless transmitter and a transceiver that remotely controls machinery.” The guy shrugged. “What additional value do you get over just manipulating the machinery remotely in any other way?”

  Chuck smiled. This part he knew cold.

  “Well, just imagine you’ve got a highly skilled programmer who loses the use of his hands. With the Forward Kinetics system, you would not have to lose the knowledge and skill of that programmer, and he wouldn’t have to lose his job or go on long-term disability. With our system he could learn to manipulate his software without having to use his hands. Or consider the plight of someone who’s had an advanced stroke. He’s still in there, thinking, feeling. He just can’t communicate. With the Forward Kinetics system, we have hope he will be able to communicate—and more.”

  Another man took the microphone. “Have you been approached by the military? Because the military implications of this are stunning.”

  Chuck blinked. “The military? No, we haven’t been approached by them.”

  “Don’t you think that’s kind of weird? You’d think they’d be all over something like this.”

  “They probably think we’re just an uptown version of the loony geeks who wear tinfoil hats and build robots in their parents’ basements.” Chuck got an appreciative laugh from the other geeks in the room (roughly the entire audience) and smiled. But the question did bother him. The military must have noticed him and his partners in some way. The thought gave him a chill.

  “Given the state of drone technology,” said someone else, “what are the advantages of a system like this? I mean what might the military gain if they had operatives outfitted with this sort of tech instead of the immersive VR systems they’re beginning to use now?”

  As uncomfortable as he was discussing military applications, Chuck warmed to contrasting the Forward Kinetics tech with state-of-the-art VR guidance systems.

  “Simply put,” he said, “the technology will be smaller, more portable, and ultimately far less expensive. Right now the military spends millions—billions perhaps—on physical VR system interfaces. They’d have none of that with the Forward Kinetics technology.”

  “What would someone need to avail themselves of your technology?” was the next question.

  Another minefield to peck through. If what Chuck thought was happening to his subjects really was happening, the customer wouldn’t need any of the equipment except for training purposes. Their operatives could train at Forward Kinetics, then leave to pursue their missions. He couldn’t say that, though, so he answered at the highest level—what they needed to train a zeta operator.

  “Well, there’s the brain pattern monitor, the neural net, and the kinetic interface, which is made up of the Streegman converter software and the Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface, which includes an actualizer unit. We’re working to miniaturize all of that. Theoretically they wouldn’t even need a huge facility for their operatives. Anyplace they had access to a power supply would do. We’re working on that, too, of course—enabling the use of a variety of power sources.”

  “What is the mechanism, though, Doctor?” asked a young woman with an earnest expression. “What exactly is it that the subjects are manipulating? I mean the diversity in your group is . . .” She broke off, looking at the screen. “Manipulating hardware and manipulating software would seem to be two completely different modalities.”

  Back on terra firma, Chuck relaxed. “Well, not really. Even the robotic arm you saw Mike working with before and the John Deere backhoe on which he took his,” he paused, thinking of how to put it before settling on, “midterm exams, I guess you’d say, have a software component that requires a command set. Even a mechanical device has a command set. It’s just that the command set for Tim’s or Sara’s software-hardware combination is written in ones and zeroes, and the command set on a mechanical device is written in ergs, in units of applied energy. It’s still binary—on/off, forward/backward, left/right—and all of these things can be accomplished using the electrical impulses of the brain. That’s the difference between what we’re doing and direct telekinesis. Our subjects aren’t moving things; they’re manipulating the mechanisms to cause things to move.”

  The thought hit him just as the last word left his mouth. He’d flirted with the idea before, but now it came back to roost: if what he’d said about impulses and ergs was true, then could his subjects one day manipulate any material object directly?

  The implications of that were swept away on a tide of questions: If the gamma wave showed a variety of brain modalities working in concert, what did he theorize the zeta wave represented? Did he think anyone could generate zetas? What was the next step in the Forward Kinetics process? Were they accepting job applications?

  He was sitting in the hotel restaurant enjoying a late-night dinner when his mind wandered back to the question of the zeta wave’s implications. Clearly the fact that they’d been able to spur the state in all three of their primary subjects and Mini meant something. It suggested that this new brain state was very near the surface in some individuals. Which, in turn, suggested that they were evolutionarily close to its emerging on its own.

  How close? If they sped up the process artificially, would humanity be ready for it? In a world where power-hungry men still used any tools at their disposal to arrogate control, resources, and territory, was even the most enlightened society ready for the God wave?

  He was shaking himself and trying to put the idea out of his head when two of his talk attendees sidled up to the table and asked if they could chat for a moment. He smiled, was pleasant, and said he welcomed their questions.

  They were far more welcome than his own.

  MATT, TRUE TO HIS WORD, had not pressured Dice to make his bot ready any earlier than he’d promised. It took close to two weeks of intense work, but Bilbo the Second was finally ready for a workout. Chuck was in transit from the TED conference in Long Beach and not expected back in the office until the next morning, so they brought the video rig down from the main lab to record their activities.

  Bilbo was beautiful in his own way, Dice thought. His head was humanoid, of clear, molded, high-impact plastic and steel. It had LEDs that marked where his cameras were set—not strictly necessary, but as Brenda said, “very cool-looking.” The front set was blue, the rear set red, the side set green. The cameras had infrared lenses that could be deployed
, presumably, at a thought. The VR rig would allow the operator a 360-degree view in day or night. Dice and his team had built small headlamps into the forward video apparatus as well.

  The head swiveled on a pair of shoulders that were roughly as wide as Lanfen’s. The hips were of equal width. The whole body was covered with a shiny, silver, titanium aluminum alloy skin that was tough as nails and flexible and hid the vulnerable spine. The arms and legs were jointed more or less like a human body’s, but the joints could be flipped so the bot could reverse course by simply swiveling its head 180 degrees and repurposing its joints. That was supposed to happen pretty much automatically when the operator reoriented the head and began backward momentum.

  In theory.

  It was features like these, Dice thought, that spoke to the recurring question of what a zeta operator could do that a manual VR operator could not. An operator wearing a standard VR rig could not spin his head around 360 degrees—or even 180—or reverse direction fully without turning around. Even with a normal human operator in a full VR suit that transferred kinetic information directly to a humanoid bot, the bot would be limited to what the human body could do.

  He’d seen the models the Japanese were experimenting with. In his opinion their approach was all wrong. They were thinking C-3PO and Data when they should have been thinking Slinky. If the real estate mantra was “location, location, location,” the robotics mantra was “application, application, application.” This application clearly required flexibility and balance above all else, so trying to make the robot more humanoid in the ways the Japanese had made little sense. It was the flexibility of the human spine—the shock-absorber qualities of its joints and muscles—that he wanted to emulate more than its upright stance or proportions or even the precise way in which it was jointed.

  When Lanfen came in at nine that night, she gratified him by agreeing that Bilbo II was indeed a work of art.