by Paul Reaver
Now that the brainwave transceiver was on, John concentrated, and thought “Malcolm, current brainwave status, please.” Malcolm responded immediately. Though it was receiving John’s current short communications via brainwaves, the computer could not return communication using that method. The responses from the computer to John were all auditory.
“Current status indicates that the brainwave transceiver is functioning as expected. Commands of up to an average of eight words have been achieved, depending on the length and complexity of the words being used. The two goals of the current research are as follows: one is to increase the length from which the transceiver can be from the person issuing the commands; the second is to increase the length and complexity of the commands or communication in a single burst. A third more ambitious and longer-range goal is to be able to transmit commands via mobile phone or radio signals. You have not officially added this goal to the project, but you plan to add it within the next three months. Initial attempts at these transmissions would seem to indicate that this goal may be easier to achieve than first considered.”
John concentrated and thought, “Malcolm – thank you. Brainwave off.”
Malcolm replied, “You’re welcome, John. Brainwave off.”
John ruminated on two even longer-range goals he had in mind. These goals had not yet been added to the project. The first would be to develop a method whereby the computer could communicate back to the person via brainwaves. Secondly, and what was a much more exciting goal to John, was that since it was possible to convert brainwaves into recognizable electronic signals, as he was now doing when communicating with Malcolm, then the reach of the project could be expanded. With the same communication method implemented in reverse, he should be able to produce a process imitating telepathy. If it were possible to convert the signals back to brainwaves and transmit them directly to a person’s mind in this form that they could “hear,” he could achieve real telepathy, albeit electronically produced. If two people needed to stay in contact using an undetectable method, this would be ideal. And a receiver could be implanted under the skin in the head so that no external receiving device would be needed.
There were a couple of issues to resolve. Each person’s brainwaves were different, like fingerprints, only they were so much more complicated. It would take time to determine each person’s brainwave “dialect” to accomplish the conversion to electrical signals. The process would require the creation of a vocabulary of sorts, and like learning to listen to a person with an accent and understand them, such would have to transpire with brainwaves. John assumed that this ability would have a snowball effect. Just as a person would more rapidly understand an accent with time and practice, the same would be true with brainwaves. The process might involve the computer’s ability to assess a person’s brainwave “signature” and automatically convert the signals to a form that the recipient would understand. The more likely and more usable method would be to develop computers that were able to make a universal brainwave language that would not require extensive evaluation and interpretation. In other words, John realized that computers could be programmed to convert brainwaves to transmittable signals from anyone without prior interaction with that person for this purpose.
The other thing was that a person would definitely not want all their thoughts to be transmitted all the time, especially as the technology matured. So there would have to be a mind-controlled switch to turn the transmission function on and off so that each person would only send the desired thoughts. This would be similar to John’s commands to Malcom to turn the brainwave communication on and off, although it would undoubtedly become more sophisticated. John saw these drawbacks as minor in the grand scheme of things as far as this quasi-telepathy would go. He was sure they could iron them out as part of the development process. The most simplistic solution was to have the person think of a keyword to start the transmission, and to think of another one to stop it. The brainwave transmitter would automatically handle this on/off function. Also, just as with communicating with computers using brainwaves, without the person concentrating on sending the signal and making it clear and focused, the result would be fuzzy and muddy; it would be unlikely that the other person would understand even if the thoughts were transmitted inadvertently. This could happen if a person was communicating via brainwaves and forgot to turn the transmission “off” when completed; the thoughts would continue to flow. John was not concerned about that now, and he wasn’t sure that the process would function in such a way. But he would certainly have to address this issue before the procedure was put into place and activated. His bottom-line solution, which he was sure would work, would be to supply each person who wanted one with a brainwave scrambler, thereby not allowing their brainwaves to be received clearly under any circumstances.
John’s other specialty was nanotechnology. One of the reasons for this was due to his opportunity to learn about the subject at a very early age, and to work with it early in his career, thanks to his father. He had put this technology on his teams’ radar fairly recently. But the only reason he hadn’t done so earlier was that the applications for this technology were so numerous that he wasn’t sure where to start. Now he knew, and had some irons in the fire. In addition, he had been toying with the idea of parallel development of nanotechnology at the quantum physics level, because there was a relationship there, and since quantum physics was another subject with which he was very well-versed. He felt as though working with this combination of technologies represented the chance for some outstanding opportunities.
As a stray thought crossed John’s mind, he smiled to himself. As with many scientific breakthroughs, some of the ones his team was working on had come from ideas dreamed up by science fiction authors. It seemed that, once an idea had been put forth in fiction, it then had a chance of becoming a reality. John also had some mental irons in the fire from books or articles that he had read, which had been written by science fiction authors. Such authors had at least mentioned several of his current projects; another source for ideas was from scientific theories he had read about. “What the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve,” he thought.
Chapter 3
Max was working on the latest version of his fusion generator when Abigail walked in. "Hi!" she said. "How's it going?"
Max said, "It keeps getting better; I just wish my patience could keep up with my limited progress."
"I know that feeling," said Abigail.
"Is there something I can help you with?" asked Max.
"Since you mention it, there is," said Abigail. "I've been thinking about my invisibility project and the power it requires. At the same time, I've been thinking about your fusion project and the high amount of power it can conceivably produce. I wanted to see if we can get your fusion generator to produce enough power to create an invisibility event. It can be the smallest of the small at first, but if we are successful, the results may give you some insight on how to make your generator more powerful."
"Sounds like a winner to me," said Max. Let me give you the information on the specs for the power coupler from the fusion generator so you can develop the connections to hook up your invisibility device."
"Great!" said Abigail. "Please send it over on our interoffice link, and I'll check it out."
Max was extremely intelligent, as were all of John’s team members; he knew that the fusion generator was useless to Abigail unless they made the connection between the generator and the invisibility device. Therefore, at this point, the most crucial goal for the interaction between their projects was to have the ability to link the power coupler to the invisibility engine. He had been toying with ideas for simplifying the connections to the coupler. He was ready to implement those ideas and was going to do so now before he sent the connection specs to Abigail. This would make her job of accessing the power much more straightforward.
"I’ll send it your way," said Max. “I have some changes to make to the coupler; I probably won�
��t finish those until this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”
“That’s fine,” said Abigail. “There is no rush.”
By the way," said Max, "we will need to share this with Joanne when we get it working. I know she had a one-time success before her system burned out, but when she gets it working again, she will need all the power she can get."
"I'll share any information I obtain with my work on connecting to your fusion system as far as linking to an outside system with her," said Abigail. "That should help her with her need for a source for high power."
Chapter 4
John pulled into the driveway of his house, located many miles away from the nearest neighbor. Its design was a country-style two-story house with a three-quarter front porch, a brick first floor, and a top floor in wood style country blue finish. He was a modern man with a scientific mind, but he had left the design of the house to his wife, and she preferred the country look. Once they had built the house, he found that he preferred it as well.
Though the house had an attached garage, he drove around the house toward a neat-looking barn-like building in back. He opened a garage door in the middle of the front of the barn with what looked like a conventional garage door opener, but wasn’t; it used a unique signal, and this made the barn virtually impenetrable. Even with the door open, there was a force field that only allowed the car to enter so that no one could dash in past the car to gain entrance. John drove in and parked. Once he had closed the garage door, he pressed a hidden button under the dash of the car. Immediately, the floor beneath the car began to descend. Four stories or so below later, the elevator stopped. Up above in the barn, it appeared as if no one had ever entered, including the removal of the tire tracks from the car. Down here, instead of the typical garage or barn-like interior, sophisticated computer and scientific equipment of all kinds dominated the room.
This was John’s place for work away from work, a place where he could continue his efforts of the day if he so desired, or if he had a new idea with which he wanted to experiment. The area was hidden from scanners by electronic scramblers explicitly designed to thwart such scans. As far as anyone could tell, there was nothing beneath the ground floor of the barn except soil and rocks.
At any rate, tonight was not one of those nights when he needed or desired to follow up on a work project, so he exited the car and walked to the northeast corner of the room. Upon pressing a hidden button, a panel slid back to reveal an ordinary-looking elevator. Stepping in and touching the proper button took him up three floors to a room just beneath the level of the barn. He got out of the elevator and walked up a flight of stairs into the barn, a panel above his head opening automatically as he did so to allow his access to the main floor. Once he was on the ground floor, the panel closed again, leaving no trace of a method of entrance or egress. The elevator stayed hidden below-ground.
From there, he went out of the barn’s front door and down the walkway to his house. Once in, he flipped on the kitchen lights and headed toward the refrigerator. Grabbing a few items, he made a quick snack and sat down at the dining-room table. As he ate, he pondered his lot in life.
He was one of the lucky few who truly loved his job. He had a great team, and their ability to work together was something he often found very heartening. John would never admit it, but his management style is what made the team as successful as it was. Indeed, the gift of his grasp of physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, quantum mechanics, and other technical disciplines made him indispensable to the numerous projects he directed. Without that knowledge, he could not lead the team to be as fruitful as they were. Neither would he be able to help one of his team members over the occasional “rough spot” or plateau they found themselves up against as they often did. No, John was convinced in his mind that his team was achieving their outstanding accomplishments independently, and that his contribution was simply to coordinate their efforts. Unbeknownst to him, this quality was what endeared his team to him, and therefore was also another reason his team had done so remarkably well.
It was then that he remembered that he wanted to check something on the car. He walked back out to the barn, unlocked the door, and walked over to the hidden passage that led to the underground elevator. Sliding open a secret panel in the wall, he repeated the sequence that he used at work for access: fingerprint scan, retinal scan, heart signal scan, and brain wave scan. Once he passed the tests, the panel opened for the stairway that led below.
When he was back in his underground workshop, he opened the car door and flipped the hood release latch. Walking around to the front of the car, he lifted the hood and looked in. It was truly amazing to see all of the sophisticated electronics; that you might expect. What was even more surprising was the – for lack of a better word – “tiny” power train. If anyone else outside his team had looked at it, they would have sworn they were looking at a turbine engine. But they would have been wrong. Though they based the engine on a turbine design as a sort of ancestor, it had several things going for it that turbine engines did not. For one thing, this version was much smaller. For another, it was exceedingly more powerful for its size. And perhaps last but not least, it did not emit the typical turbine whine when running; in fact, the device was silent when running. On the passenger side was a device that emitted both the combustion-engine sound and pseudo exhaust emissions through the tailpipe. The whole engine compartment was empty enough to still allow them to mount a V-6 engine in the space that was left. Since James had already approved the change, John had toyed with the idea of having Mark install a facsimile of a V-6 engine in each car, a copy that would pass a cursory examination by the average person. He was inclined to follow up on this idea; though there had never been a time when someone in the outside world had even come close to looking under the hood, it didn’t mean that it might not happen someday. Putting in the faux V-6 would be excellent camouflage, and they could make it easy to install and remove so that it would not take a lot of Mark’s time to do so. He made a mental note to mention this idea to Mark tomorrow. If at some point they installed enough additional equipment under the hood so that the simulated V-6 would no longer fit, so be it. They wouldn’t use it anymore. Mark might have other helpful ideas; John would find out tomorrow.
Walking around to the passenger-side fender, he leaned over slightly and pressed open the cover on a computer screen mounted on top of the inside fender well. Pressing a few buttons displayed the information he was looking to find: the stats for that day’s drive home. Mark had made recent changes (he had made them today in fact), and he wanted to see the results. What he saw brought a quirky smile to his face. What a team he had! He saw the improvements and the information that the computer screen now showed him provided confirmation that all was working well and as expected. He would have to compliment Mark on his upgrades tomorrow.
A few minutes later found him back in the house and headed toward the den. He flipped on the big-screen TV, and his was huge – it had a 12-foot diagonal measure! It took up the majority of the wall that was across the room from John’s recliner, and of course, it was ultra-high definition and 3-D. He cycled through the channels and decided to let it rest on a news channel while he made a phone call.
Muting the TV and grabbing his cell phone, which had an unbreakable encrypted signal, he called his sister-in-law. She was one of the few people he knew that had a high enough security clearance with whom he could discuss work issues. “Hi Jeanne,” he said. “How are you?
“I’m fine,” she said. “How are you?”
“I remembered that today would have been the 10th wedding anniversary for Angela and me,” he said.
Jeanne could hear the melancholy tone in his voice. “John, how many times do I have to tell you that the accident was not your fault?”
“My intellect tells me so,” he said, “but my heart tells me otherwise.”
“Bear in mind that she would not want you to think what you are thinking,” said Jeanne. “She would want
you to go on with your life; she would not want it to appear that she is causing you distress or holding you back in your life. She would want you to keep the fond memories but move on.”
“Okay,” said John. “That’s why I called. You always tell me what I need to hear.”