“Sounds perfect, General. Thanks.”
“You deserve this and much more,” replied Girdler.
He turned his head and surveyed the entire group. “But for now, I say let’s take the rest of tonight and tomorrow off. But after this, I’m afraid there’s a daunting amount of work to be done.”
No truer words had ever been spoken, thought Hall. The responsibilities of their small cabal had grown exponentially. Now, all they had to do was take down global terrorism, cure ESP, and solve quantum encryption so they could make the world safe for the most revolutionary technology in history.
No problem, he thought wryly. He was just surprised Girdler hadn’t also tasked the group with curing cancer and inventing an anti-gravity machine, just for good measure.
But despite the enormity of what they needed to accomplish, having full knowledge of the extraordinary talents of this group of people, and how well these talents, and their personalities, meshed together, he would be the last person to ever bet against them.
“Daunting, yes,” said Hall, looking as content as he had ever been. “But nothing this group can’t handle.” He glanced around the room, and each of his friends were responding to his confident declaration in the same way, with expressions of resolve and eyes that gleamed with unbridled enthusiasm. “And I know I speak for everyone here when I say, I can’t wait to get started.”
From the Author:
Thanks for reading BrainWeb. I hope that you enjoyed it!
As always, I’d be grateful if you could post however many stars you feel the novel deserves on its Amazon page.
Also, please feel free to Friend me on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author, and to write to me at [email protected].
BrainWeb: What’s Real, and What Isn’t:
As you may know, I conduct fairly extensive research for all of my novels. In addition to trying to tell the most compelling stories I possibly can, I strive to introduce concepts and accurate information that I hope will prove fascinating, thought-provoking, and even controversial.
Although BrainWeb is a work of fiction and contains considerable speculation, some of it does reflect reality. Naturally, within the context of a thriller, it is impossible for me to go into the depth each topic deserves, nor present the topic from all possible angles. I encourage interested readers to read further to get a more thorough and nuanced look at each topic, and weigh any conflicting data, opinions, and interpretations. By so doing, you can decide for yourself what is accurate and arrive at your own view of the subject matter.
The Attack on the Oscars: The plastic explosive described in the novel is purely fictional as are the electronic bloodhound devices. This being said, a number of devices designed to detect chemical signatures of explosives and narcotics are currently in use, and more are being developed, although none are as sophisticated as the device depicted in the book.
The Cosmopolitan Theater is fictional, although information about the Dolby Theater, which does host the actual Academy Awards, is accurate, including the number of speakers inside the venue and the fact that the orchestra really was stationed a mile away from the theater in 2013.
As most people know, Hugh Jackman has hosted the Academy Awards (and will again, five or ten years from now when this book takes place :)). Finally, while star popularity is subjective, the group of actresses the fictional terrorists planned to kill appear on a number of published lists of the most popular stars, at least in 2015.
Thought-Controlled Web Surfing: Artificial limbs and video games are being developed that can be controlled by thoughts, although these don’t even approach a fraction of the sophistication of the fictional BrainWeb implants. This being said, thought-controlled Web surfing is being worked on. Below are excerpts from a November 20, 2009, article in ComputerworldUS, which is also excerpted in my novel, Mind’s Eye.
Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets, and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.
The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie. . . . Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.
"I think human beings are remarkably adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people twenty years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop. There are a lot of things that have to be done first, but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."
Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau said that users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers.
Instead, they'll simply manipulate their various devices with their brains.
"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed . . . to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."
With respect to digitizing incoming data and tying this directly to the visual centers of the brain, this is being actively worked on, most notably by Dr. Sheila Nirenberg at Cornell. I’ve excerpted a few paragraphs of an article from National Geographic below (Oct 1, 2013), entitled, “MacArthur Genius Working to Bring Sight to the Blind.”
Nirenberg thought if she could just rewire the eye's output cells so that they started translating images into electrical signals, those signals could be sent to the brain and vision would be restored.
The idea? Creating a coding and translator device that would take the images being processed, encode them into electrical pulses, and then send them to the brain.
The patient would have to undergo a brief gene-therapy session in order to redirect the output cells in their eye—normally used to transmit image signals to the brain—into also accepting signals from a camera.
“We shoot a compound into the eye that will get expressed in the output cells,” Nirenberg said. “The person will wear a sort of camera that has an encoder device that takes the information from the camera and translates that into the retina's code.”
A tiny processor—about the size of the one in a cell phone—helps in the process.
And voila: a person who previously had cloudy vision at best would suddenly not just be able to discern between light and dark, but could actually see again.
Finally, the following paragraph is part of a description of Nirenberg’s work on the MacArthur Foundation website:
In another line of research, Nirenberg is adapting and applying her discoveries in neural coding to machine vision algorithms with the goal of advancing the state of the art in robotic “vision” and brain-machine interfaces.
Mind Reading: Dozens of books have been written about a variety of ESP abilities and I won’t comment on these here. Some studies purport to show that some subjects are able to read the identity of a card from another’s mind, for example, at an accuracy above that which would be expected from guesswork alone. I have read research papers that use huge sample sizes and complex statistics, but there is too much data and I am not a good enough mathematician to feel comfortable making a determination if this is a real phenomenon or not.
What I can say is that perfect mind reading like that depicted in the novel is almost certainly not real. If someone truly could read minds like Nick Hall, you wouldn’t need thousands of trials and complex statistics to make a case, you could show this in seconds.
Could this type of mind reading be done in theory? I don’t see why not. We’ve already shown we can get computers to decipher thoughts based on the electrical activity of the brain. While these signals seem far too weak to me
to make it through two skulls (from the brain of the person being read to the brain of the mind reader), one could imagine thoughts producing other signatures: electromagnetic, quantum, or something as yet undiscovered.
For a hypothetical mind reader to be able to pick up these brainwaves, so to speak, and interpret them seems absolutely impossible to me. But then again, in a fraction of a second, my cell phone can convert my voice into a digital signal and beam this signal to a friend thousands of miles away, where it is then converted back into my voice. This seems impossible to me also, and yet my cell phone seems to work perfectly, despite my extreme skepticism.
Politicians: The novel is a little hard on politicians of both major parties, but then again it is fiction, and it is a thriller (and thrillers are much less fun if everyone is a saint).
I’m sure many politicians are good people who are in this profession for the right reasons. But it is also true that most of us can be easily fooled by unscrupulous people, and the more of a conscience we have, the less we are able to believe the charming person on our television is the opposite of what he or she seems.
The unscrupulous often don’t come across as monsters at all. Quite the opposite. Bill Cosby is a perfect example. While at the time of this writing, his guilt or innocence has not been determined, if he did even half of what he is accused of, this would be stunning, since Cosby was seen by huge swaths of the population as one of the most kindly, beloved grandfather types in American history.
I think few would argue that some politicians are quite well meaning, while some are in it only for themselves. Differences of opinion chiefly arise as to the percentage of politicians in each of these camps. I admit to only reading one book on this subject, leaving me with an unbalanced view, so I encourage anyone interested to do a more thorough study than I did. I also should admit that I only read this book because I happened to catch one of its authors being interviewed by Stephen Colbert.
The book, The Dictator’s Handbook, written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and Alastair Smith, a Professor of Politics at NYU, provides arguments and research indicating that, in general, politicians, even in democracies, will do what it takes to achieve and maintain their own power, even at the expense of doing what is right for their constituencies and country. Here is an excerpt from a review by R. James Woolsey, Undersecretary of the Navy under President Carter, and Director of the CIA under President Clinton.
“In this fascinating book Bueno de Mesquita and Smith spin out their view of governance: that all successful leaders, in dictatorships and democracies, can best be understood as almost entirely driven by their own political survival—a view they characterize as 'cynical, but we fear accurate.' Yet as we follow the authors through their brilliant historical assessments of leaders' choices—from Caesar to Tammany Hall and the Green Bay Packers—we gradually realize that their brand of cynicism yields extremely realistic guidance.”
And last, an excerpt from a review in the Wall Street Journal:
“To political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, the authors of ‘The Dictator's Handbook’—a lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how dictators, and politicians in democracies, preserve political authority—it's not only unsurprising that politicians craft legislation with an eye toward re-election but also deeply rational. All leaders, whether of democracies or autocracies, dictatorships or monarchies, desire the same goals. ‘Why do leaders do what they do? To come to power, to stay in power and, to the extent that they can, to keep control over money.’
In a style reminiscent of ‘Freakonomics,’ Messrs. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith present dozens of clever examples of how researchers identify and compare graft in autocracies and democracies. Messrs. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith are polymathic, drawing on economics, history, and political science to make their points.
The reader will be hard-pressed to find a single government that doesn't largely operate according to Messrs. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith's model. So the next time a hand-wringing politician, Democrat or Republican, claims to be taking a position for the ‘good of his country,’ remember to replace the word ‘country’ with ‘career.’”
Psychopaths: Everything in the book about the behavior characteristics of psychopaths and the prevalence of this condition is accurate. For those interested, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among us, By Dr. Robert D. Hare, is the definitive work on this topic for the layman.
While one percent of the general population can be classified as psychopathic (based on something called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, Revised), studies have shown that three percent of business executives fall into this category. And while no studies have been done on our political class, given that psychopaths are deceitful, narcissistic backstabbers who never take blame and don’t get embarrassed, even when caught in a bald-faced lie, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if they were enriched among politicians as well.
Internet Addiction: Much of the material discussed in the fake ABC news show, between made up guests Sandra Finkel, Jacob Resnick, and the host, Blake Shaw, is accurate, with the exception of those parts pertaining exclusively to the fictional BrainWeb implants.
The Carr book that is quoted, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is real, the Boston Consulting Group study is real (many people really would be willing to give up sex before the Internet), and so on.
Web surfing really does have a physical impact on our brains, and addiction is becoming a real problem.
As far as I know, the story about the experts in 1880 predicting New York City would ultimately find itself drowning in horse manure is real, also. As someone interested in technology and future trends, I love this story, because it does a beautiful job of highlighting the dangers of extrapolating the future from what we know now, since we aren’t capable of foreseeing game-changing technologies that often appear.
Botulism Toxin: The information in the novel about this toxin is accurate. This is the most deadly substance known to science. As an interesting aside, I got to know the man responsible for the development of Botox, Les Kaplan, President of R&D at Allergan, when I was a biotechnology executive and he was on our board of directors.
Miscellaneous: The two programs attributed to the NSA, PRISM and Dirtbox, are real, although Dirtbox was conducted under the auspices of the Justice Department. The information about the USS Boxer is accurate, as is the policy of interrogating terrorists on warships (although I have no idea if the Boxer has ever been used for this duty).
Descriptions of the Mayflower Hotel, the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, and the locations of military bases and relative distances are accurate. The Oregon hunting lodge used by Victor as his headquarters is entirely fictional, although the trees described are accurate for this part of the country, and there are many ranches in Oregon that are similar to this one.
Finally, today’s PDAs, beginning with Siri and now including numerous others, aren’t nearly as sophisticated and integrated into our lives as the one’s depicted in BrainWeb, but it is clear to me we are heading in this direction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas E. Richards is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of six technothrillers, including Wired, Amped, Mind’s Eye, BrainWeb, Quantum Lens, and The Cure. He has also written six middle grade/young adult novels widely acclaimed for their appeal to boys, girls, and adults alike. Douglas has a master’s degree in molecular biology (aka “genetic engineering”), was a biotechnology executive for many years, and has authored a wide variety of popular science pieces for National Geographic, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Earth and Sky, Today's Parent, and many others. Douglas has a wife, two children, and two dogs, and currently lives in San Diego, California.
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