by Paul Reaver
John’s team had made great strides in its goal to read brainwaves and translate them into coherent information that could be transferred to a computer almost instantaneously. This project was so important to him, in fact, that he made it a priority for the other two people working with him on it (as well as for himself) so that it could move forward as quickly as possible. The biggest challenge was, of course, the translation of the waves to coherent, storable information. With the spoken-word-to-computer software programs that were currently in use, the computer programs had to be able to understand human speech. The main issues that had made this goal so difficult were obvious: accents, slang, and so on, and while impressive, the process was still far from perfect. Developing the ability for brainwave-to-computer communication was unfathomably more complex. John’s team members, as talented as they were, had mostly overcome the brainwave roadblocks encountered so far. He had no doubt, since he had allotted them the time and the right tools, that they would continue to achieve great things with brainwave transmission in a relatively short amount of time. (“Relatively” was definitely the appropriate word given the complexity of the project.) They had already accomplished much, even as only two people; there were three, of course, counting himself. This project was probably the most highly protected of all the ones on which John’s team was working. Someone with the knowledge of it could use it not only to record thoughts onto computers, but they could also use it to read minds once they attained the appropriate level of development! John took the output that his team produced on this project and furthered the research independently. If he found anything that would help the two team members working on it under him, he would circle back around and supply it to them so they could continue to make the most highly measurable strides possible in their advancement. John’s intellect and interest in this project enabled him to provide his team members with information that helped to streamline the way for their progress at an accelerated rate. As it stood right now, his team was already able to transmit single words and short phrases. Full communication should not be far behind. The challenge would then become the transmission of brainwaves from computer to human. Though that was not currently their goal, they had made some progress already with developing the process of transmitting brainwaves to the computer during the security scans, which made brainwave transmission the natural thing to become the next accomplishment. “Completed” was somewhat of a misnomer; it would be years in the making to perfect brainwave/computer communication, though significant interim goals were sure to be achieved.
John’s team had isolated the brain waves necessary for conversion. Now they were working on building a vocabulary that matched individual brainwaves, and had made substantial progress. The “brainwave vocabulary” increased daily. The slowest part of the process was that the people providing the thoughts had to convert a brainwave to a single word (or sometimes a commonly used phrase), and then confirm it with the project member. They had to repeat the process until everyone was sure they had identified the word or phrase correctly. Then they would move forward. They were, in essence, creating a brainwave dictionary. Though the process was slow and tedious, it only had to be done once if done correctly, which was their goal. John could tell by the team’s progress that they would succeed, given time. And he was a patient man.
He stood up from his desk after finishing updates and logs and catching up on his teams’ progress as they had updated their projects on the computer. John's teams were a group of gifted and unique individuals. Most teams consisted of only one person, although he counted himself as being an additional member of each group, and sometimes two or more or even all of them often would come together when needed to pool their intellectual resources. So the use of the words team and teams were very fluid designations. He was ready to make his "rounds," as he liked to call his daily morning visits to each of his team members’ laboratories, but he only called them that to himself. They were simply work areas, and they could configure them as necessary due to the design of the building. They could be made larger, taller, and outfitted with almost any equipment imaginable. He liked to visit each of his team members each morning to chat with them in person. He did not always make his rounds daily, but he visited his team members often enough to stay abreast of their progress. Indeed, and in addition, John's gift of his grasp of physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, and quantum mechanics, among other scientific disciplines, made him indispensable to the numerous projects he directed.
On his rounds, John's first stop was Mark's lab. Mark, of course, was the person who had the car as one of his projects. John did not choose to visit him first because of his earlier ruminations about the car. Mark's lab just happened to be the closest one to his office. Mark was a hard person not to like. Though he was a big man, his easy-going demeanor and friendly smile immediately put people at ease. He had come from another governmental organization. At the time John’s team needed a member with Mark’s skills, he had finished up a project at his then-current position. His reputation preceded him, and he was a perfect fit for the opening that John had available. Though Mark’s previous organization hated to lose him, John’s organization had a lot of “pull.” As a result, Mark ended up working for John.
His success with the car had been due to a couple of things going right the first time, a somewhat rare thing with technologies that were still predominately theoretical. Initially, Mark had to develop a device that would power the car using hydrogen. Once the propulsion device had been built and was working, Mark had to shrink it down from being the size of an office desk to a size that would neatly fit under the hood of a car, and be about the size of a microwave oven. He was working on a combination of quantum mechanics and nanotechnology to be able to pull enough hydrogen from the air to power the car as it was driven. Since it was early in the game for both technologies, he was doing the best he could to combine them for this purpose with the knowledge that was available. Of course, he was a very talented and knowledgeable scientist, and the concept he was working with was strictly his. He built the devices, put them in tandem with a few tweaks here and there, and behold! – it worked. Many physicists in the world were working with these technologies using theories with limited hands-on experience, yet they were making significant headway and breakthroughs.
With a lot of patience, work, and inspiration, Mark was successful. He even made the engine more efficient and powerful. Now that he had the device working, and resized to be much more useful, he could apply it to a plethora of devices. This project would be a significant feather in the team’s cap. John had made it clear to Mark just how much he had contributed to the overall team effort. “Uncle Jim is really going to like what you’ve done here,” John had told him.
"Uncle Jim" was the nickname for John's boss, otherwise known only as "James." John had come up with the "Uncle Jim" moniker during a staff meeting - one in which James was not present, primarily because he did not usually attend their staff meetings - and it had stuck.
John's car was one of three identical models that allowed Mark to compare them when changes were made. Contrary to the case of the explosion that had destroyed the earlier model when there was only one car, this approach ensured that there wasn't a "one and only" car that would wipe out all of Mark’s hard work in a catastrophic situation if one would happen again. Now, should something happen to one of the three, they had two more to fall back on. “Identical” was not entirely accurate since Mark was always making improvements to the cars. The first car that received any update would make the other two not identical to it anymore. But Mark updated them all at a reasonably brisk pace when any changes were made to one of the cars so that they would all become identical in a sufficiently short time frame. Unless the change was significant, they were all updated on the same day, as long as Mark could test the first modified car before updating the other two. He needed to make sure the changes he made to the first car were genuine improvements, and he also needed to make sure that the c
hanges did not cause any adverse effects. If he could not complete the testing on the day he made the changes, any updates to the other cars would have to wait until his testing was complete.
"How's the car?" he asked John.
John smiled and said, "It's got a slight vibration in the front end when I get above 175 miles per hour.”
Mark said, "Well, you just need to get it above 200, and that'll clear right up!"
Both men laughed and enjoyed the moment.
John asked, "So what's the latest status?"
Mark said, "I've been working on an upgrade for the body panels. I've come up with a modified carbon fiber where the molecules are more dense but much lighter. So in effect, it’s not carbon fiber anymore; it’s an improvement on that material. Right now, that's a good news/bad news situation. The denser material is stronger than the previous carbon fiber body panels, and it'll even take a pretty good hit without damage. On the flip side, the lighter weight will make the car less stable at high speeds and in high winds. Normally we'd add more weight to the undercarriage for stability. If we didn’t need to continue to make the car look like the Ford sedan it is supposed to be, we could modify the shape of the body to counteract the instabilities due to wind, like any car built for speed. We will replace the panels on the car you have now so it will still look like the Ford sedan, but you'll have to watch your speed and look out for crosswinds and the air interference from passing semis and such. Otherwise, we'll have to make it look like something that belongs at the Indy 500. What do you think?"
John said, "I think it's a good idea and I encourage you to keep working on it. My first thought is to increase the undercarriage weight because it will keep the center of gravity low, and it seems like the only solution. But run some simulations on the computer and see what you get in terms of changes in stability. As you said, any modifications to the body need to keep the overall shape of the car looking like an ordinary and real Ford sedan, as we have done all along. But your comment about Indy gave me an interesting idea. Let’s look toward making a high-performance model of our ‘hydrogenmobile’. I need to get the go-ahead and the funding from Uncle Jim. For right now, start giving some thoughts to a high-performance version and let me know what you come up with. If we get the go-ahead from James, we’ll build a prototype as we have time and run it on a high-speed test track.”
Mark smiled and said, "Sounds good, boss."
John smiled back and headed on to his next destination: Joanne's lab. Between visits to each lab, he dictated notes into the computer so he had the latest updates for the various projects going on. He updated Mark’s information and moved on.
Joanne had been hired right out of college. She had precisely the skills John was looking for, and she was looking for a job. Her forte just happened to be working with gravity. She had made some promising breakthroughs in school, and scholastically she stood head and shoulders above her classmates. Her initial meeting with John was enough to convince both of them where she belonged.
Joanne had the unique combination of a no-nonsense attitude combined with a dry (but really funny) sense of humor. . Her main project was to determine whether anti-gravity was feasible; like all the team members, she had several simultaneous projects going on, and she could switch between them if one became too frustrating from lack of progress, or she needed a change of pace. John found that this made his team members much more productive: if one project wasn't going anywhere, each person would be making headway on a different project.
A physicist, Joanne was working with the graviton particle within the framework of the quantum field theory. Though she had made progress in the area of quantum mechanics, so far she had barely scratched the surface. Once quantum mechanics was more fully understood, and more importantly, able to be utilized, it would change the world forever. Joanne's tireless work ethic also made her perfect for this project. That and the fact that she had produced a momentary instance of antigravity is what helped imbue her with a "never give up" attitude. Though she had once created antigravity, it had been purely a lucky break. She had her lab set up to do (yet another) antigravity experiment when she accidentally touched a button that sent a power surge through the system. The surge burned out many of the more delicate components. At the same time, her instruments registered that the subject of the experiment, a tiny piece of titanium, had lost a measurable amount of weight for a fraction of a second. Since the power surge burned out some of the most critical components, and the entire system had been affected, she could not be sure what had caused the antigravity to occur. She set up the whole system again to reproduce the original configuration and sent the same power surge through in an effort to replicate the earlier results. Unfortunately, it seemed there had been a specific chain of events during the first power surge that, quite by accident, produced the positive results. So far, she could not duplicate them. No matter. To Joanne, if she had done it once, she could do it again. She continued to try to reproduce the earlier antigravity results.
John had entered the lab, and for a few moments, he watched Joanne at work. Like many scientists, when she was working, she was utterly absorbed in what she was doing. What made her somewhat different was the animated way in which she went about her work that made her interesting to watch. She wasn't even aware that she did it. John, Joanne, Mark, and Abigail often worked together when it came to the subject of quantum mechanics since they were all working with it. Joanne was using it in her gravity project, Abigail’s project currently touched on it, Mark was using it with the car, and John had gained a rather masterful understanding of it in college. With the depth of knowledge they needed to achieve in this field, the more minds working on it, the better. John expected there to be more and more of what he called “cross-pollination” with different team members working together on various projects but with the same technologies.
John cleared his throat so as not to startle Joanne and said, "Good morning!"
She looked up at him and said, "I'd appreciate it if you didn't sneak up on me like that!" (Was she kidding? Yes! She had seen him enter out of the corner of her eye. John, who knew her well, thought it best to play along.) "Sorry, Joanne. It's just so intriguing to see genius at work!" They looked at each other for a few moments, then both burst out laughing.
"OK," said John, still smiling, "enough shenanigans. How's it going?"
Joanne said, "I've come to the conclusion that the power surge did more than burn out some of the critical components. I think what happened is that the surge went through one of the components as it burned it out. However, because of the surge, the output from that component was altered, causing the antigravity instance. I'm studying each of the burned-out components to see what sort of modified output the process may have created. In some ways, it's the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack.’ Fortunately for me, the pile of hay, in this case, is relatively small; I'm making progress.”
"Great!" said John. "Is there anything you need?", realizing too late that he had just given Joanne a big conversational opening, perfect for her sense of humor.
"Well," she said, "it sure would be nice if I could cut out these interruptions." The corners of her mouth tugged upwards as she fought to keep from smiling. John knew when to beat a hasty retreat, and this was one of those times.
“Nuff said. Please keep me posted, especially if you discover a breakthrough." And with that, he turned on his heel and left the lab. Joanne looked after him and allowed the smile to appear. John was really a great boss.
Next on John's path was Max’s lab. Max's main goal was cold fusion, and like Joanne, he had produced his first positive result by accident. Unlike Joanne, however, he was able to not only reproduce his initial results, but was able to build upon his initial success to generate successively and increasingly better fusion generators. Max was working for NASA when he showed up on John’s radar. Though he was very good at what he did, he had gotten stuck in an administrative black hole in the organization and was frustrat
ed because he felt underappreciated. John’s scouts saw the situation for what it was, and once he had seen Max’s credentials, he knew he wanted him. Max was underappreciated; his superiors didn’t realize what they had and let him go at John’s request. Max took the position because it not only intrigued him; it fit his experience and skills like a glove. NASA did not appreciate Max’s work with fusion because he was working with cold fusion, and they considered it to be a pathological science; in other words, they thought that all cold fusion efforts that appeared to produce positive results were false or wishful thinking.
What NASA would not give Max credit for was the progress he had made, regardless of whether he had found the “holy grail” of fusion, either the type that required extremely high temperatures such as occurred on the Sun, or the cold fusion approach he was working on. Anyone who bothered to examine the current status of his reports closely would see that the results he had achieved put him on the plus side of the threshold of success. However, Max had not attained this success until after he had joined John’s group. And NASA hadn’t bothered to provide the support that John did; their other scientists believed that cold fusion was far beyond the grasp of current science.
Max waved to John as he came in, and as John approached, Max asked, "What's up, fearless leader?"
"Just checking to see if Uncle Jim is getting his money's worth," John said.
Max chuckled and said, "Well, he's certainly getting his pound of flesh out of me."