by Dima Zales
“Lots of vegan-safe dishes,” Ada says wistfully as she scans the menu. “I’d like to try the beetroot pkhali with walnuts, but I’m too full.”
“I’ll bring you here on an empty stomach tomorrow,” I promise. “Also, Mom knows how to make some Georgian dishes since they’ve made their way into Russian cuisine, so I’ll tell her to make something for you next time.”
“Are we ready for the meeting?” Muhomor sends Mitya, Ada, and me an invite from the Teleconference app.
“I’m ready.” Mitya shows up as a see-through holographic image in one of the empty seats at the table, making our meeting look like the Jedi Council gathering from Star Wars.
“Let’s begin, then,” Muhomor says in Zik via the Teleconference app and uses the Augmented Reality interface to give himself giant ram horns that humorously complement his usual pajamas.
“Speaking of you being horny,” Ada says to him in Zik. “Mike told me Lyuba is in town.”
“Lyuba’s vacationing in the US, yes.” Muhomor looks confused. “What does that have to do with my horns?”
I almost choke on my tea, and Ada bursts into laugher, probably getting Borjomi water into her nose. Of course, the way-too-normal and gorgeous Lyuba isn’t Muhomor’s girlfriend. Ada now owes me a beer and a sexual favor since we made a bet on this topic earlier. She was sure Lyuba and Muhomor were in a long-distance relationship, and I said that wasn’t possible. Mitya and I call Muhomor bisexual behind his back, only the “bi” is short for “binary code.” The guy eats, sleeps, and dreams cryptography, hacking, and coding, and he doesn’t have any interest in either gender when it comes to sex. Two weeks ago, one of my investors invited us to his bachelor party. Muhomor came with us and proceeded to hack the stripper’s phone instead of getting a lap dance or even looking at the girl. He also hacked the website of the club where the event was taking place.
“Whose turn is it to speak?” I ask. I opt not to spruce up my avatar today, beyond putting a gun holster on the outside of my jacket in the Augmented Reality. In the real world, my unlicensed Glock 19 from the gun range is hidden right behind the virtual one inside my blazer. After Russia, I can’t bear to walk around unarmed—another issue I should probably work on with the shrink.
“Ladies first, as usual?” Mitya winks at no one in particular.
“Isn’t that reverse sexism?” Muhomor complains.
“I don’t have much to share anyway.” Ada ignores Nikolozi as he brings out a tray with food and starts putting it on the table. “I’ve worked out a method to mass-produce nanomembranes, and Mike has helped me set up a company that will fabricate an ultra-rapid water filtration system by the end of next year. The prices should be low enough for anyone to afford it, and it will be easy for a philanthropist”—she gives Mitya and me a pointed look—“to make a huge dent in solving the world’s clean drinking water problem.”
We nod approvingly, and Ada shares a couple more things she’s developed, all with the theme of bringing global abundance and prosperity.
“What about Brainocytes development?” Mitya asks when Ada pauses to mentally take a breath and sip her real-world water. “Did you put together any interesting apps?”
“I have,” Ada replies and examines her glass. “Mike and I pair programmed it and plan to test it out, but I’m not ready to disclose the details yet.”
Ada likes to be mysterious, and in this case, I’m glad she is. From what I understand from observing Ada coding it, the app does something like the Vulcan mind meld, only in real time. The two individuals who use this app together will have their brains temporarily connected. The sex applications are so obvious that I’m glad Ada doesn’t give my friends any new fodder with which to tease us for being a couple. When it comes to this topic, Mitya and Muhomor have the maturity of fourth graders in detention.
“Fine.” Mitya bites into a Snickers bar, and I assume he does it for real since I see no reason for him to fake it using Augmented Reality. With mock grumpiness, he adds, “Is that all?”
Ada shakes her head. “I also figured out an extremely efficient technique that will allow us to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon nanotubes.” In the real world, Ada tells Nikolozi that she’s not interested in more dessert, while at the same time, in Zik, she says, “The nanotubes can be used as batteries or even as the water filters I mentioned. That’s what sparked that idea in the first place.”
“And?” Muhomor makes sure Ada can see him bite into his pork shashlik. He knows she doesn’t like the idea of pigs being killed for food. She thinks pigs are cuter than and as smart as dogs—not that this argument would work on Muhomor. He’d probably eat dog shashlik if it were on the menu.
“Dude.” I send Muhomor a private telepathic message imbued with a touch of anger. “Don’t piss off my girlfriend. Besides, Georgian food is famous for lamb, not pork shashlik.”
I also tell Ada to ignore Muhomor’s shenanigans.
“You think Ada prefers baby sheep as food?” Muhomor replies and, as usual, makes the telepathic message disproportionally snarky. “You realize Georgians believe in having the whole sheep family watch the killing.”
“They do not,” I counter, but then realize I’m doing exactly what I warned Ada against—paying attention to Muhomor’s crap. Still, I can’t resist adding, “In any case, in America, lamb doesn’t always mean baby sheep.”
“And that’s it,” Ada says in conclusion, not looking at Muhomor or his food. She clearly took my advice of not rising to Muhomor’s bait better than I did.
“Perhaps I can go next?” Mitya is now drinking a Red Bull, another item inconsistent with our Georgian cuisine. “Ada’s given me a nice segue, because my ‘benefit for humanity’ idea would provide those batteries she mentioned with cheap energy.”
“Yes, go.” I sip my tea and, not for the first time, wonder how crazy we must look to Gogi, Nikolozi, and even Mr. Spock. The whole meeting is happening virtually, in our heads, so to them, with maybe the exception of Mr. Spock, we must look like we’re sitting there, eating in silence. Ada, Muhomor, and I can multitask by talking to Gogi while keeping the meeting going, but Gogi doesn’t seem to mind the silence today.
“Fusion,” Mitya says triumphantly. “Specifically, ‘star in a jar’ technology that will provide nearly limitless energy in two years, or thereabouts.”
Everyone looks at Mitya with a mixture of wonder and skepticism.
He smirks and says, “I’m sending you the details, but to sum up, I invented a three-dimensional shape that will allow us to cheaply confine plasma inside a powerful magnetic field.”
“Hold on,” Muhomor says after a moment. “You’re talking about a tokamak—technology Soviet scientists invented back in the fifties.”
I look up “tokamak” and find that the idea has indeed been around.
“Sure.” Mitya grins. “That was the inspiration, of course, but unlike all the early designs and plans, mine will be built, will be cheap, and will change the world more than anything we’ve come up with thus far.”
We all let our imaginations run wild at the thought of what limitless energy could do for the world.
The purpose of the Brainocytes Club, or one of its purposes, is to benefit humanity. More accurately, we figured we owe it to the world to use our enhanced brainpower for its betterment. And if our various contributions toward that goal were a contest, Mitya would be winning. I guess it shouldn’t be a big surprise; the guy always had grand visions, and the brain boost only multiplied his talents many times over.
“Anything else?” Muhomor asks sarcastically and with obvious jealousy. “Did you figure out how to have world peace and save all the kittens from starving? Oh, wait, that’s Ada’s thing.”
“I respect Ada’s endeavors.” Mitya gives Ada a good-natured thumbs-up. “Since you asked, though, why yes, I do have something else. Several things, actually. A few things I’ve saved for last. A) I’ve gotten us more server space, B) I’ve designed another set of b
rain regions we can simulate, C) I’ve designed a way of caching access to the servers, resulting in faster performance, and last but not least, D) I’ve optimized our overall brain boost allocation algorithms while still keeping it as max-min fair as I could.” Mitya stops and notices that the second part of his statement wasn’t fully understood, even by Ada. “In other words,” he clarifies, “we’re ready for brain boost v9.”
Ada claps in excitement, Muhomor almost chokes on his meat in glee, and I have a hard time suppressing my grin. Every time we’ve boosted our intellect, the gains have exceeded all of our lofty expectations, and with each boost, our expectations have grown higher and higher. The only downside, and it’s a tiny one, is that each boost triggers side effects in the beginning. Still, the worst side effect so far has been dream-like pre-cog moments. I’ll never forget the one that scared me so much during Mom’s rescue. Nowadays, though, we’ve figured out a way to cope with these deceptively realistic hallucinations by remaining vigilant during our boost upgrade times and asking ourselves, “Is this really happening?” more often than a normal person would. So far, we’ve all reported that asking ourselves that question short-circuits the pre-cog moments—if that’s what’s happening. Pre-cog moments are different from dreams, in that I have asked myself, “Is this really happening?” during a nightmare, and it didn’t wake me up.
“I take it you want me to launch it.” Mitya looks too smug for his pseudo-Jedi avatar. “It’s ready to go.”
“Of course you should launch it,” we scream, almost in unison. Muhomor actually says it out loud in the real world, and Gogi raises his unibrow at him.
“Okay then.” Mitya’s avatar pushes the big red button that appeared next to him. “Get ready to be smarter.”
Chapter Seven
Unlike with the other brain-boost upgrades, I feel a difference in my perception. It’s as though I took a drug that makes the world around me slow down. The feeling is reminiscent of how everything seems in moments of extreme duress—something I experienced quite a bit during the trip to Russia.
“Wow,” Ada says, probably experiencing the same effects as me.
“You rock.” Muhomor salutes Mitya’s hologram with his glass and gulps down the wine. “I feel like Mike should speak next, since Mitya’s work is impossible to follow up.”
“Fine, I’ll go.” I pick up Mr. Spock and scratch his chin like the EmoRat app told me he wanted me to. I don’t care if my friends make snide remarks about me looking like a movie villain with my pet rat. “I’ve been pair coding with all of you, as well as writing code for various open-source projects. I now feel confident enough to write Brainocyte apps on my own, so unless someone objects, that’s what I’ll start doing.” I give them a moment to object, but they seem to agree that I’m ready, making me feel warm on the inside—though Mr. Spock’s bruxing is helping with that too. “When it comes to my big idea, I’m still obsessed with giving Brainocytes to the whole world. I think we should make it open source right now, if Muhomor finally agrees.”
I’ve been arguing that Brainocytes should be widely available, even if it means Techno, and by extension Mitya and I, makes less money in the process. If the mere four of us have begun to noticeably change the world for the better, what would happen if millions or billions of people like us existed? Surprisingly, it’s Muhomor who objects, and we try to run the Brainocytes Club through unanimous votes.
“I’m still not ready.” In the real world, Muhomor asks Nikolozi for pakhlava, a dessert similar to Turkish baklava and one of my favorites. “But now that I’ve finally made Brainocytes traffic secure, we’re closer than ever to being able to release this technology without plunging the world into a dystopian surveillance state where the government can read your thoughts.”
“Hey, you’re taking someone else’s turn to talk about your agenda.” As usual, Ada is acting as the moderator of the Club meeting. “We’ll come back to you in a second. Let Mike finish. I happen to know he has more to say.”
“Thanks, Ada.” I bend down to put Mr. Spock on the pavement, as the little guy wants to go to the bathroom by a tree. “One of the things preventing wide Brainocytes adoption is the lack of a way to mass-produce some of the nanoparticles required for Brainocytes. So, I’ve developed a way to do just that. How much do you guys know about microfluidics—a way of manipulating tiny droplets of fluid in a narrow channel?”
Everyone gives me a look that says, Are you kidding? We know all.
“Right, okay.” I spot a cat far in the distance and use the EmoRat to alert Mr. Spock. “My idea should reduce the cost of Brainocytes development from obscene to less ridiculous levels. Of course, there’s still a ton of work that needs to happen in the manufacturing space, but I think once the incentives are there and more people are looking at the Brainocyte designs, the costs will drop further. This is yet another reason to release the technology into the world.”
“I agree,” Ada says. “That’s what always happens when you make technology open: costs go down.”
“Especially technologies susceptible to Moore’s Law, which the Brainocytes are,” I add as I feel Mr. Spock run up my pant leg and jump back onto the table.
“Okay, I’ve been sold on sharing Brainocytes with the world for a while.” Mitya must’ve gotten bored of his avatar, because he’s replaced his regular visage with a gray, faceless blob. “Send me the specs for the microfluidics idea. I think it might be an interesting read.”
“Me too.” Ada steals the saucer from under my teacup, pours water into it, and pushes it toward Mr. Spock.
“Me third,” Muhomor echoes and takes a piece of pistachio from the top of his dessert and throws it in my rat’s general direction. “Maybe you’ll impress me enough for me to stop vetoing this Brainocyte-sharing idea.”
“That’s it for me,” I say. “Muhomor, the baton is yours. Go ahead and spew your security-related wisdom at us.”
“Before I start, has anyone cracked Tema?” The hacker looks challengingly at Mitya, the only person he deems capable of even coming close to such a feat.
“No.” The gray blob that Mitya chose as his new avatar looks down, as if in shame. “And not for the lack of trying, believe me. You can rest assured, Big Brother doesn’t stand a chance.”
I also tried cracking Muhomor’s cryptosystem—mainly to wipe that smirk off Muhomor’s face—but alas, I had no luck. Ada also failed, and she likes annoying Muhomor more than I do. It’s safe to say the Tema cryptosystem is unbreakable, but none of us will admit this to Muhomor. He’s already too arrogant to let live.
“I doubt any of you can crack my baby,” Muhomor says and grabs a cup with his honey-sticky fingers. “Did you do as I asked and rewrite all the AROS apps to use Tema?”
“Yes,” Mitya and Ada say, as I knew they would since I was looking on while they made the necessary code changes to all our communication apps.
“What about EmoRat?” Muhomor points at Mr. Spock, who decided to munch on what’s left of my gozinaki. “The rat is happy right now, isn’t it? It wants to jump into your pocket soon, right?”
“Unlike you, Mr. Spock is a he, not an it.” I know Muhomor didn’t simply guess Mr. Spock’s EmoRat messages to me, but rather hacked my connection with the little guy. The hack was possible because the app must not be encrypted with Tema. “I’ll fix the app now.”
I open the AROS integrated development environment, aka AROS IDE, to work on the code in question.
“Outside of Tema,” Muhomor continues, “I developed a way to use Brainocytes as a biometric authentication system—a sort of brain print as it were. Emailing you all the deets.”
I skim the specifications Muhomor sends and exchange glances with Mitya. I think we’re both wondering if it’s worth boosting Muhomor’s already enormous ego yet again. Ada must not share our qualms, because she turns to Muhomor and says out loud in the real world, “Muhomor, this is brilliant. I wish I’d come up with this.”
Gogi raises his unibrow
even higher—aiming it at Ada.
“I try.” Muhomor looks like he might have an aneurism from pride. “Once Brainocytes are widespread, people can start using my brain-print technology and not bother with passwords, since most people can’t create a strong-enough password to save their bank accounts. The final thing I want to report is my success in penetrating the IARPA systems.”
Short for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, IARPA is a government agency that does high-risk/high-payoff research for the US government intelligence community. So naturally, the mood at the meeting grows solemn, and Mitya speaks for everyone when he says, “Dude, how many times do we have to ask you to stop doing illegal stuff? You’re in the US on my H1B visa. If you get caught, I’ll be guilty by association.”
“I was cautious.” Muhomor runs his fingers through his anime haircut and scratches his skull. “What I found was worth it. IARPA is working on reverse engineering the human brain’s algorithms. Can you think of anyone interested in those results?”
“They’ll eventually publish their research to the public,” Mitya says, but the idea of reading whatever Muhomor stole seems to have mollified him. “I guess what’s done is done. Let’s see the papers. I know you’re dying to share.”
Ada and I aren’t so easily placated. I’m about to give Muhomor a piece of my mind, when the paranoid feeling of being followed returns and then gets multiplied a thousand-fold.
I focus all my attention on the strange feeling, and as though from a distance, I hear Ada complain about Muhomor’s hacking escapades.
Something tells me it’s not paranoia this time, though I guess that’s how paranoid people always feel. That same something tells me there are people stalking me more openly, and that same instinct insists I was being followed before.