The God Wave

by Patrick Hemstreet

  “Wow,” she said, shivering and rubbing her hands together as she warmed up next to a heater vent. “He’s beautiful, Dice. I love the way his spine flexes.” She grinned. “Hey, Papa, can I have the keys to the robot?”

  Dice returned the grin. “Only if you promise not to wreck him again.”

  Lanfen’s face fell. “I . . . I’m sorry . . .”

  “No,” he said, mortified at his mistake. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it the way it came out. I promise. Look, Matt put on a fresh pot of coffee. Why don’t you have some? Warm up before you take a test drive.”

  She nodded and shrugged out of her coat. She was sipping her coffee when Matt came in, humming. That was unusual in and of itself—Matt hummed only when he was on a high from having pulled off a major coup or germinating a really good mathematical theorem. Dice knew better than to ask outright, but he probed just in case Matt was in a mood to share.

  “You sound chipper, Dr. Streegman. I take it something miraculous has occurred?”

  Matt stopped and looked at Dice as if he’d only just realized he was there. “Miraculous? No. Just positive.” He rubbed his hands together. “Are we ready to rock?”

  “Just a moment,” said Lanfen, setting down her coffee cup. She took off her shoes, walked onto the exercise mat, and went through a series of stretches and breathing exercises. With that done she pronounced herself ready to rock, and Dice wired her up.

  He checked all the inputs, had Matt double-check his algorithm to make sure they had the latest rev of the software running, and fired up the rig. Lanfen had created a sort of routine for herself—a set of exercises she always used to get in the zone, as she put it. Dice was fascinated by the process not just because she was awfully attractive but because of the surreal grace, control, and balance she showed. She looked sometimes as if she were floating above the mat rather than standing on it, and the way she moved from one kung fu pose to another reminded him of Olympic gymnasts on a balance beam—only about ten times more elegant.

  “You’re staring,” Matt murmured. “Not that I blame you. She’s something special. You should ask her out.”

  Dice shook himself. “Uh . . . I’m seeing Brenda.”

  Matt’s eyebrows rose. “Doesn’t she work under you?”

  “This isn’t the military, Matt,” Dice said more sharply than he meant to.

  Matt just shrugged and turned away to watch Lanfen put Bilbo through his paces. She was doing the moves herself at that point, getting used to the balance of the bot and the new VR component that allowed her to see the world from Bilbo’s point of view.

  “What do you think?” Dice asked her. “Ready to go mental?”

  She laughed. “Funny you should put it that way. I feel like I’m mental whenever anyone asks me what I do in my free time.”

  Matt’s head jerked up. “You signed a nondisclosure contract, Ms. Chen. What are you telling people you do in your free time?”

  Lanfen shot him an unreadable glance. “I tell them I do the same thing I do during my workday—kung fu.” She and the robot pivoted toward Matt and performed a most proper bow. Then she settled into a lotus posture and sent Bilbo into a series of moves without as much as a twitch on her part.

  Dice was impressed.

  She’d gone through the sequence of basic postures twice when she began to throw in more difficult moves that she might use in a sparring match.

  “You know,” she said as the bot bobbed and weaved and kicked, “it would be much more realistic if Bilbo had someone or something to spar with. Maybe you need to get another martial artist on staff.”

  “We don’t officially have one on staff now,” Matt reminded her.

  “True.”

  The bot executed a roundhouse kick and rolled into a somersault. It came up on the far side of the mat, then Lanfen flipped the head around and had the bot execute a series of kicks and rolls in the opposite direction.

  “Oh, this is sweet,” she said enthusiastically. “This is really a nice feature!”

  “Why does she have to chatter like that?” Matt murmured.

  “I heard that,” she said. “I’m multitasking. Gets me to gamma faster. I’m in solid gamma right now, right?”

  Dice nodded and glanced wryly at Matt. “Yes, you are.”

  “Okay. I’ve been watching from the outside up to now. I’m going to switch to bot cam.” There was a pause and then she said, “Oh, wow. This is weird. Bilbo is shorter than I am.”

  The bot blocked an imaginary assailant then kicked, came down in a crouch, and flipped backward several times. Then it ran, executed a flying kick, and tucked into a forward roll.

  Dice’s jaw clenched. This was approximately what Lanfen had been doing when the catastrophe had occurred. This time, though, the bot popped up at the edge of the mat, reversed its orientation, and did a similar set of kicks and rolls back again. Dice glanced at the monitor; Lanfen was in a solid but spiky zeta. A moment later, as Bilbo touched down after a terrifying and spectacular twisting leap, Dice silently shut the kinetic interface down. There was a tiny hesitation in the metal man’s next move, but it was small enough that Dice doubted anyone watching would have noticed it.

  He glanced at Matt. The professor’s expression was unchanging. Dice almost smiled. The boss hadn’t noticed the difference, and Lanfen . . .

  Whoa. Hold the phone.

  “Hey, Lanfen,” Dice said casually, “you getting used to the view?”

  “You mean vertically challenged Bilbo cam? Uh-huh.”

  And that’s what was so crazy: she was still seeing from the bot’s point of view. The mechanical interface was shut down, and she was somehow using the robot’s camera eye. Dice was about to speak to Matt when he was distracted by something beyond the lab window. Over in the main wing, lights had come on in Chuck’s office.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Matt looked at him and followed his gaze. “Dammit. He would have to come in his first night back. I should’ve known.” He made a frustrated noise then nodded toward Lanfen. “See if you can’t wean her off the interface. I’ll go over and make sure you’re not interrupted.”

  “She’s been on her own for the last three and a half minutes, and, Matt, she—”

  “Good work. Fantastic!” Matt clapped a hand on his shoulder and breezed out of the lab. Out on the mat, Bilbo continued to dance.

  “Tell her, not me. I just work here,” Dice murmured at his boss’s back.

  “SO IT IS YOU.” MATT leaned in the door of Chuck’s office.

  Chuck blinked up at him past his desk lamp. “Uh, yeah. It’s . . . who else would it be? The cleaning crew comes in over the weekend, doesn’t it?”

  Matt sauntered in and sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the desk then rolled it toward the door a foot or two to draw Chuck’s eyes away from the window. The horizontal blinds were down, but they were half-open; if Chuck looked, he’d be able to see there were lights on in the delta lab in the lower wing. He might have noticed already.

  “So how was the conference?”

  Chuck took a deep breath and let it out before answering. “Interesting.”

  “A Mr. Spock sort of interesting or actually interesting?”

  “A bit of both, actually.” Chuck closed the lid of his laptop and propped his elbows on it, running his long, slender fingers through his hair. “I had the most mixed bag of reactions you could imagine. People who thought it was a hoax and said they were going to complain to the organizing committee, people who were so excited they wanted to apply for work or internships here, people who were fascinated by the machinery, others who were intrigued by the neurological implications, and those who asked if we thought it was the next-best thing to telekinesis.” He shook his head. “In fact, the very first question was ‘Is this telekinesis?’”

  “And you said . . . ?”

  “I tiptoed carefully around the subject and simply reiterated that this is merely an interface between the brain’s naturally occurring elect
rical impulses and output devices. No interface, no go. It wasn’t that big a deal.” He was silent for a moment, then asked, “Matt, have we been approached by the military?”

  Matt’s internal warning bells went off. “You mean has the Pentagon come knocking on our door, asking us what the hell we think we’re doing?”

  Chuck looked at him. “Something like that.”

  Matt had a moment of hesitation, which was not something he was used to. Chuck—however geeky, however inconvenient—was the closest thing he had to a friend. Hell, in a moment of weakness he’d even told him about Lucy and given him a copy of her readouts. Inscrutable as it was to him, that was the only sacred text Matt had ever known. Now, with his partner’s trusting hazel eyes fixed on him, he felt as if he were plotting to kick a puppy. And yet he couldn’t help himself.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It came up. A few times, actually.”

  Chuck had clasped his hands together and was wringing them—a gesture that betrayed the depth of his concern.

  “Ah. Well, no. The Pentagon has not asked us out on a date. Nor have we heard a peep out of the men in black.”

  “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

  Matt blinked. That was unexpected. “Do you?”

  “Yeah. What we’re doing has obvious military applications—you even brought it up when we were considering what disciplines to include in our primary study. If they haven’t made an overture, I have to wonder why.”

  Matt relaxed farther back into the chair, striving for nonchalance. “You have any theories?”

  “One. They think we’re a box of wing nuts, and our technology is one step away from dowsing or Kirlian photography.”

  Relieved that Chuck hadn’t tumbled to the real reason he hadn’t heard a peep out of the military, Matt laughed. “The Men Who Stare at Goats: Next Gen?”

  Chuck smiled wanly. “Yeah. That. Do you think that’s it?”

  Matt heaved himself out of the chair and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Probably. Don’t let it get to you, though. We’re going to knock their socks off at Applied Robotics.”

  Chuck unplugged his laptop and started rolling up his power cable. “I’m not sure I want to knock their socks off. I like that they think we’re wing nuts.”

  “You really don’t like the military, do you?”

  “Five sides,” Chuck murmured. He set his power supply down atop the computer and stood stock-still.

  “What?” God, but Chuck could be unnerving sometimes.

  “The Pentagon. Why five sides? Pentacle. Pentangle.”

  Oh, good grief. “Five branches of the military? Army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard?”

  Chuck laughed and ran his fingers through his hair again. “Yeah, that was weird, wasn’t it? I’m tired. Jet-lagged probably. My brain makes random connections when my mind is too tired to supervise.”

  “What?” Matt said again, hoping it hadn’t come out sounding like a guffaw.

  Chuck’s dark gaze fastened on his face. “Brain and mind aren’t the same thing,” he said deliberately. “You know that, right? The brain generates the electrical impulses that run our bodies. The mind is what steers them, oversees them.”

  “Okay, that at least sounds scientific. You had me going there for a moment. I thought you’d been smoking religion or something.”

  Deep down in Chuck’s eyes, something flashed a warning. “Why can’t a scientific idea also be a religious idea? ‘Greater than the senses is the mind. Greater than the mind is Buddhi, reason; and greater than reason is He—the Spirit in man and in all.’ Bhagavad Gita, chapter three, verse forty-two.”

  “Forty-two, huh? Answer to life, the universe, and everything?”

  “I think so.”

  Matt held up his hands in surrender. He was not going to get into a religious argument with St. Chuck, the true believer. “You on your way out?”

  Chuck took a deep breath and glanced around. “Yeah. I just came in to get some notes Euge left me.”

  “I guess I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

  Chuck nodded, then scooped up his computer bag and slid the laptop into it. Matt turned and walked toward the door.

  “So what are you doing here this late?”

  Matt stopped and scratched behind one ear. “Oh, Dice and I are working the kinks out of a robot his team’s been developing. A security bot. He’s been using it to alpha-test the VR unit.”

  “How’s that supposed to work with the zetas? The VR works fine when you’ve got a hard interface, but how can it work when Becky goes offline?”

  Matt stared at him as if he’d begun to recite “Jabberwocky” backward in Yiddish. Had the VR interface continued to work when Dice offlined the hardware? The question sent his heart and brain (mind, whatever) into hyperdrive.

  “That’s a damn good question, Dr. Brenton. I’ll go ask the expert.”

  He escaped before Chuck asked him something else he should have asked himself.

  MATT FOUND HIMSELF IN THE peculiar position of holding information that could be critical to the course of Forward Kinetics. He was unable to discuss it with anyone but Dice, because he was the only other person who knew that of all the zetas, only Chen Lanfen was able to use the VR interface without Becky’s physical connection. Why that should be so while her control of the bot was still problematic was a mystery.

  Matt didn’t know what that anomaly meant—whether it had to do with Lanfen’s discipline as a master of kung fu or her meditation techniques or the unique functioning of her brain. He only knew that while the other subjects had the ability to control their various mechanisms, they could not transfer kinetically to VR on their own. When Becky’s connection was cut, Mike could still motivate his machinery, but he could not see the world from its viewpoint. Tim, whose coded characters were not physical entities and therefore possessed no VR capabilities, could not view the world from his creatures’ eyes at all.

  It was annoying enough to have the anomaly surface, but to have it surface in a subject who was not an official part of the program was doubly so. The fact that Matt’s co-conspirator felt they should come clean was triply annoying for the simple reason that Matt knew Dice was right. Keeping Chuck and company in the dark about Lanfen was keeping Matt and Dice in the dark about what Lanfen’s peculiar strengths and weaknesses augured.

  And he needed the neurological expertise of Chuck and Eugene to examine the problem.

  Yet he said nothing and forbade Dice to say anything as well. “All in due time,” he told his lab director. “All in due time.”

  “The time,” Dice had said during their last encounter, “is due.”

  He’d made it his walk-off line—something Matt thought was cheap and unprofessional. It had caused him to chase Dice down and ensure that regardless of his strong feeling they should let everyone else in on their progress with the ninja bots; he would keep their secret. Matt had an arsenal of arguments up his sleeve. That he had taken him under his wing when he was still just Daisuke, a no-name, and fast-tracked him professionally. That he had brought him into Forward Kinetics in the first place. That he’d have Brenda and the rest of the lab assistants fired if he breathed one word to Chuck. Or that they’d all work together on this and every following development after the show.

  But none of that was necessary.

  Dice had turned around and said just one sentence to him: “I’ll do it for you out of loyalty—but I’ll do it just this once, and then we’re even.”

  Fair enough, Matt thought, though he didn’t see himself and any of the other members of FK as “even.” He would always have an advantage, always put himself first. After all, he was a numbers guy.

  Now Matt leaned back on his apartment sofa and took a sip of the merlot he’d poured half an hour before and forgotten about. His eyes were still on the screen of the laptop that sat on his coffee table. The image was of Chuck’s face, frozen in a moment of crusader zeal as he described his vision
for the Forward Kinetics technology at the TED conference.

  His last words still echoed in Matt’s head: “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.”

  Still in there, thinking, feeling.

  God.

  No.

  Matt Streegman did not believe in God—not a God who had imprisoned Lucy’s soul or spirit or mind in a body that had ceased to work. Caged her in a brain that was slowly being eaten away by anonymous entropy.

  He knocked back the last of the wine, barely tasting it, and tipped his head back and stared at the wood-paneled ceiling. Had Lucy still been locked in her slowly malfunctioning brain somewhere, like Rapunzel in her great stone tower? If she were alive today, would the Forward Kinetics technology serve as her hair rope?

  He remembered a walk he’d taken through a shopping mall in the days before Lucy had died. Howl’s Moving Castle had been playing on a high-def TV screen in a video store window, and he had stood, mesmerized—stricken—by a sequence in which the sentient castle, relieved of its animating spirit, staggered through the hills, losing pieces of itself with every step. The analogue to Lucy’s deteriorating condition had been more than he could bear.

  Something had broken inside Matt that night. Something had changed. He couldn’t say he had believed in God then—he hadn’t—but he had not regarded God as his enemy. He had since. If there were a God worth worshipping, surely Matt would have met Chuck Brenton before Lucy’s illness had set about destroying her.

  His mind whispered the obvious: if he’d met Chuck then, they would have had nothing in common, for Chuck had not yet begun his experiments with brain waves, and Matt had had no reason to spend endless hours calculating their range and power and pondering their meaning.

  The pragmatism of that thought frustrated him even more.

  He pulled himself back from that abyss. He was not one of those pathetic characters who used the death of a loved one to become an activist in some cause related to their death. He was a polymath. A pragmatist. Sure, Forward Kinetics could devote itself to medical advancements, but if medicine couldn’t save Lucy, why did anyone else deserve the chance? To him, the company was a means of reaping scientific credibility and professional standing from a most arduous and painful period of his life. A way of grasping profit from pain, to gain something tangible from his suffering. A way to even the score.