For a few thousand dollars, Raj purchased boxy-looking robots with spindly arms that handled platefuls of samples, mixed and distributed reagents—and made a fine martini. Some of the units were sophisticated enough that he taught them all the new tricks published in the current journals.
His biggest problem was multiplying the number of electrical outlets.
***
After all his efforts, one month later, Raj verged on defeat. His project needed microfluidic DNA synthesizers which hadn’t yet hit the market. These were needed to write sequences equivalent in size to small bacterial genomes, a capability currently limited to a few academic and industrial labs.
That meant stealing what he needed.
It was time to invite Faarooq to the party. It took him all but five minutes of gut-wrenching agony to finally place the call, and another twenty minutes for Faarooq to arrive, entirely prepared to single-handedly conquer the world while incurring the mild annoyance of his laggard sidekicks.
“You should have called me in sooner to save the day,” Faarooq said, looking over their handiwork. “You’ll never get anywhere with this shit. You can’t afford the best, you’re ten years behind the times, that simple. I’ll get you what you need.”
“Excellent.”
Faarooq wadded their test results into a ball. “But I’m in charge from here on out.” He tossed “the ball” in the waste basket.
“To hell with that.” Raj fished his findings out of the waste basket.
“Without me you have a smart idea, that’s all.” Faarooq picked up one of the pieces of equipment, turned it over in his hands with a condescending look. “Like buying a mine on the hope of finding gold, with no clue where to look or what tools you need to extract it.” He tossed the apparatus in the trash bucket.
“Speak for yourself.” Wajid fished Raj’s broken toy out of the bin like a younger brother used to living on hand-me downs.
In a raised voice meant to penetrate Wajid’s thick head, Faarooq said, “Does no good to write search algorithms for ferreting out information and hack into secure vaults when you don’t even know what’s worth stealing.”
“You know what?” Raj said. “He needs control, give him control. If the only way for him to get out of bed in the morning is to float out of it with his ballooning ego, so be it.”
Wajid laughed. They all did.
“Glad we understand one another,” Faarooq said flatly to sober them.
***
The next few weeks was scarily like watching time-lapse photography unfold, with Faarooq slipping one new tech toy after another into the lab. The biggest challenge for him was getting the things into a flat not exactly made for housing such monstrosities. He had them hoist the machines from lines that extended from a couple windows, as he took an ax and saw to the frames separating the two windows, and merged them into one gaping hole to accommodate his behemoths. He rented the flat directly below them, drilled a hole in the floor, and proceeded to hoist items up from the hole—the ones too big to fit in the enlarged window. Thank God for absentee landlords, Raj thought.
***
Faarooq, who kept a hawk’s eye on both of his sidekicks, picked up the flipchart at Wajid’s station. He pushed the off-button on Wajid’s computer in the middle of his working out the lines of code on his latest search algorithm.
“What the hell?” Wajid squawked.
“How about you check with me before you go off half-cocked?” He took a highlighting pen to the sheets on the flipchart. Then he threw it down. “The rest of the stuff the new equipment can do. The blind leading the freaking blind, I swear to God.” He dismissively turned his back on Wajid.
“God, I hate that guy,” Wajid mumbled, as Raj stepped over to massage his shoulders and reduce the amount of steam coming out Wajid’s ears.
Raj returned to his pipetting. He worked defiantly as Faarooq gave his notebook the evil eye, almost daring him to find something wrong with his experiments. Faarooq threw down the notebook with a “God damn it!” and squeezed the ridge of his nose at his forehead, closed his eyes to shelter them from the truth. Then, in a violent gesture that caught Raj unprepared, he swept the table, smashed the pipettes, sending the shattered glass and liquid down through the crisscrossed rebar, covering the hole they had made.
“You’ve cost us a week or more. This is the price of going it alone without consulting with me. Your experiments were completed by my synthesizers weeks ago! One step forward, two steps back; we’re not trying to dance to music here!”
***
Raj couldn’t believe the spectral analysis findings his printout was showing him. There were definitely components in the hamster mold growing in the dirty water dish that shouldn’t be there; that made this not your garden variety mold. He paced back and forth looking for an explanation.
He found himself pausing to think over the hamster cage as he drank his coffee a little too zealously, watching the dribble pour down his neck and chest until he flicked it off him with his fingers, and watched some of it land in the hamster’s water dish. How many times had he done this before without thinking about it? Was the X-factor a consequence of the mold flourishing on the coffee fertilizer, and adapting itself to its food source? The mold may not be the source of the X-factor at all, but at least it was sending out teasing entreaties to plumb its secrets further; a good sign.
***
Six weeks later, Raj felt they had enough to go on to embark on human trials. He would test an extract of the mold from the hamster’s water dish on himself.
“It’s time,” Raj announced ominously when the fateful day finally came around.
“You’re out of your mind,” Wajid squealed. “We’re years from human trials.”
Raj flicked on the TV. God bless CNN’s latest channel, 24/7 Tech News, which he could count on to wage his argument for him. He waited for the commercial to end. When the newscaster burst back on the scene, however, she was more content to talk about the latest advances in neural net bio chips. He muted the broadcast and brought up the same channel on the internet, scrolled to the video post he wanted, and clicked on it.
“RiTel Industries stands to make seventeen billion off its over-the-counter cocaine analogue,” the newscaster said, “beating SimTech to the market by a matter of days. They allege that SimTech is working with a variation of their patent, whether this was intended or not. And they will sue. The medication, for those of you who haven’t been following the news, is the latest smart drug to hit the counter.”
“Well, gentlemen,” Raj said. “You still think we have years for human trials?”
“This is madness,” Faarooq insisted. “You can’t rationalize madness.”
“Can’t I?” Raj rolled up his sleeve and injected himself to the bulging eyes of his compatriots.
***
Wajid and Faarooq monitored Raj’s vitals every hour on the hour. And they scrutinized his work, pored over every line of his scientific ledgers. They exchanged the books with one another without saying anything while throwing wary glances at him.
Finally, however many hours or days later, he saw them inject themselves. And he smiled. Vindication for his long travails had arrived at last.
Confidence was high. Euphoria was a given after nearly non-stop work, and relegating sleep to twenty-five minute Jack La Lane catnaps throughout the day, two or more of those if they were lucky. (Raj had gotten the idea from watching Jack La Lane reruns on the TVland channel in an effort to keep himself going with the least amount of exercise in the least amount of time, and the least amount of sleep.)
Like fools, they had taken the substance all at once in an equally ill-advised high concentration. They should have known to stagger the trials better, and test different intensities of the drug, but their zeal overcame them. The pressure to get to market ahead of all the other human-makeover options got to them. The human rat-race had advanced far enough in the early 21st century to make selling anything short of human upgrades o
f one kind or another, from smart phone app life organizers to smart drugs to smart cars—anything to squeeze more performance out of people in less time—a worthless endeavor. The 24/7 Tech News channel broadcasting nearly constantly in the background for motivation bolstered his reasoning even now.
Raj had inherited the strongest kidneys of the lot, and so his system didn’t shut down as rapidly as the others. Still, his capacity for mobility survived theirs by mere hours. Long enough to record a new living-will for himself, suggesting the next obvious step, to isolate the enzymes in the hamster’s GI tract. He wished now he’d started there. There had been a little voice in back of his head all along whispering that the secret ingredient was in fact hidden in the animal’s gut. But he ignored sage advice funneled straight from the Godhead.
Maybe his resistance to the idea was born out of no more than a self-destruct mechanism in his mind. Some part of him didn’t want to succeed, was afraid of success, was programmed for failure. He hated to think that, but it seemed a suitable enough meditation in his final minutes so, upon reincarnation, he could start where he’d left off, with that lesson learned, and he could avoid repeating it.
What other outcome could there be for a poor boy from a remote shanti-village in India but failure? He’d been brainwashed to fail from day one with low self-esteem and low self-worth. His mind flashed back to those formative years, his mother’s verbal lashes that had left him scarred: “You’re just a poor Indian boy, one of hundreds of millions. Faceless. You’ll never amount to anything. Delude yourself if you want. You don’t have the strength to face the truth. Failure is what it means to be Indian. It’s on account of lack. Lack of skills. Lack of resources. Lack of food in your stomach. Lack of being able to see something lurking around the corner until it’s too late. All the lack in the world removed, and we Indians will find more of it. It’s what we were born to do.”
If only he’d taken the time to first overhaul his mind, strip the tarnish off the surface-layers of his brilliance so it could shine brightly without casting even bigger shadows on himself and those around him.
TWELVE
Griswald paced his loft on 6th Street in Berkeley. Tom Dolan, the designer, built the intimate Ocean View units around a central courtyard and fountain. Softer materials used in the interiors such as wood beams on ceilings and pine floors in bedrooms lent them a more residential character than other more industrial live/work spaces. The Ocean View Lofts were located, furthermore, in West Berkeley near UC Berkeley and great University Avenue shopping and dining. Those were the design considerations that got him in here, initially. Although, looking around at what he’d done to the place, he couldn’t imagine that the deliberately relaxing ambiance he originally sought to create for his test subjects mattered much.
Brainwave machines, set apart every few feet in cubicle-sized spaces, made the overall environment as soul-sucking as any corporate office, bleach wood floorboards and hanging wildly budding bougainvillea be damned. Alas, if the experiment proved successful, these little setbacks would only strengthen the value of the results, as it meant that much more stress which the brainwave machines had to fight to overcome in the test subjects.
There was evidence ELF magnetic waves affected brainwaves. Griswald designed this set of experiments to study the effects of ELF rotating magnetic fields on the brain.
The specific ELF frequencies he was interested in studying were in the range of six to ten Hertz. These frequencies were the same as those produced by the human brain in the theta and alpha states.
Specific brainwave frequency ranges were associated with mood or thought patterns. Frequencies below eight Hertz were considered theta waves. While these seemed to be some of the least understood frequencies, they also seemed to be associated with creative, insightful thought. When an artist or scientist had the “aha” experience, there was a good chance he or she was in theta.
Alpha frequencies ran from eight to twelve Hertz and were commonly associated with relaxed, meditative states. Alpha waves were strongest during that twilight state when we were half asleep and half awake.
Beta frequencies (above twelve Hertz) coincided with our most “awake” analytical thinking. If Griswald tried solving a math problem, his brain was working at beta frequencies. Most of the waking hours of adults were spent in the beta state.
The question of importance for Griswald was: Would his test subjects’ consciousness change to coincide with their brainwaves, even if those brainwaves were electronically induced? This was an important question with far reaching implications.
When he began these experiments, he was well aware of the possible ethical implications involved in ELF research. For example, if he were carrying an ELF transmitter operating at alpha frequencies, would people unconsciously gravitate toward him because they became more relaxed as they did so? Would they like Griswald more because they felt “good” when they were around him? What if a salesman were carrying an ELF transmitter? Would people be influenced to buy something because of how much better they felt around the salesman? Could entire populations be influenced to be comfortable with ideas they would normally reject? These ethical considerations could not be taken lightly.
Griswald undertook his research realizing there was the potential for misuse, but a desire for knowledge and understanding was part of being human, and the potential benefits to humanity were great. What if he could treat depression, insomnia, anxiety, stress and tension with ELF magnetic fields? What if he could increase intelligence or improve learning?
Subjects were asked not to use any drugs or alcohol for twenty-four hours before their appointment, and not to wear any metal jewelry. It was thought that metal jewelry might distort the magnetic field, thus creating uncontrolled inconsistencies between subjects.
Walking the aisle and examining the test results for himself, Griswald observed several interesting facts.
The brain was sensitive to a wide range of intensities. Griswald observed lock-on (the state in which brainwaves synchronized with the machine) with power settings down to one half of a milliwatt.
Psychics and “sensitives” were neither more nor less prone to lock-on than anyone else.
Extended exposure to ELFs did alter moods, but the effect was subtle. Griswald had failed to achieve a dramatic psychoactive response.
With the final entries made to his computer log, Griswald officially ended the experiment.
The results were solid enough, just not dazzling. Nothing short of revolutionary was going to much impact a marketplace with so many technologies vying for numero-uno for making people smarter, more creative, more productive, all while lowering stress and helping them to live longer. With the right tweaks, he could be a billionaire. With things remaining as they were, he was a pleasant, if commendable footnote on the scientific lore regarding brainwave manipulation.
Just beyond reach were the reputed results of experiments going on with permutations of the original Tesla devices. They were touted to affect psyches en masse from a distance, as he had hoped to do. With most of that research being conducted in secret by governments who denied any such thing, Griswald was down to two options. Option one: steal the test results by hacking the pertinent computers. Option two: simply get more radical with his testing, ethics be damned.
He would sleep on it, and in the morning decide which path to take.
On the walk home, the sea breeze blowing in off the Berkeley marina, sharp against his nostrils, failed to revitalize him. The cloying sense of despair and defeat quickly neutralized any negative ions that entered his bloodstream. The heavy feelings, what’s more, wore like a lead blanket just beneath his skin; they made him feel as if he were walking underwater. Even his muscles, which relayed for the first time something besides stiffness to his brain, enjoying finding purpose in being put in the service to which they were designed, could grant little relief. He’d consider throwing himself into the ocean if he didn’t already feel like he was drowning.
***
Griswald awoke the next morning convinced he could manufacture real gurus. Not false prophets. Not the ones handing out magic Kool-Aid so their subjects could follow them through death’s door to heaven and bypass the painful birth-pains of higher consciousness currently being experienced worldwide. Birth-pains he hoped to lessen. Not any of these charlatans, but real, bona fide gurus. The world needed them in wholesale numbers to promote the forces of light and bolster a new Renaissance age born out of the Dark Age of a collapsed world economy.
Before he could lock in the guru-effect of his mind-wave machines, Griswald had to first identify it as something more specific than an ELF wave somewhere in the six to nine Hertz range.
***
Griswald traveled to Plum Village monastery in France, where Thich Nhat Hanh resided in exile, having already pumped out more than one hundred books on Zen. There, Griswald calibrated the sensitivity of his instruments to the one true source.
His scientific nature getting the better of him, he continued his pilgrimage to The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, a monastery and retreat center located on a property near Ukiah, California. From there he journeyed to the FAS society in Japan. Both in America and Japan, he also chased after members of the Sanbo Kyodan lineage.
Finally, when he could actually rank Zen masters’ according to their ability to generate the true guru-effect, he headed back to Berkeley, where, as it turned out, he managed to test several unknowns with even higher readings.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 9