by Kyle Mills
While comparisons to Steve Jobs had been obvious, Smith had always thought Willy Wonka was a more apt analogy: an odd recluse who suddenly burst on the scene with something incredible and then retreated to the safety of the factory.
“I want to thank you for coming,” he said in the slight German accent that he’d never shaken off. “I hope you’ll be as excited about my new project as I am.”
The screen behind him came to life with an image of a hand holding a device that looked a little like a gray iPhone with no screen.
“Electric cigarette case?” Janine said, nudging Smith in the ribs as a confused murmur rose up around them.
He honestly didn’t know. A tiny switch and a blue indicator light were visible on the right side, but other than that it was just a graceful piece of plastic.
Dresner pulled his jacket back and showed an example of the real thing hung on his belt. “I’d like to introduce you to Merge. The next — and maybe final — generation of personal computing devices.”
“Oh, God,” Janine groaned, actually slapping her forehead. “He’s invented the cell phone. And he’s carrying it in a holster.”
“How many of you out there use augmented reality systems?” Dresner continued, blissfully unaware of Janine’s sarcasm. “You know — astronomy apps, something that tells you how good the restaurant you’re standing in front of is…anything.”
More than half the audience raised their hands and Smith joined them. Janine just folded her arms across her chest and scowled.
“And how many of you really find them practical?”
His hand dropped along with everyone else’s. As much as he loved his $2.99 constellation finder, holding a phone at arm’s length and looking past it at the sky wasn’t exactly a seamless experience.
“GPS has definitely moved that technology forward, but we’re still stuck with an interface that isn’t all that much different from the one we had when the first personal computers came out more than thirty years ago. It’s that, and not the software, holding the technology back. It’s not particularly hard to imagine augmented reality’s potential, but almost no one is pursuing it because of the lack of a workable hardware platform. I’m hoping to change that.”
He walked back to the lectern. “Let me switch you over to what I see.”
The screen behind him faded into a video of the crowd as he scanned across it. Along the left side was a series of semitransparent icons glowing various shades of red and green. Across the top was some general data — that he was connected to the Las Vegas Convention Center wireless network, the temperature inside and outside, as well as a number of abbreviations and numbers that Smith couldn’t decipher.
Janine leaned into him again. “That actually looks pretty good. I tried the Google Glasses prototype and they just have a cheesy head-up display at the top of one of the lenses.”
Smith nodded. “I tested a prototype from a British company that projects onto your retina, so it can work with your entire field of vision and create that transparent effect. Great idea but the images were blurry and every time the glasses moved on your face, the image would break up. Maybe Dresner’s nailed it.”
“I’ll admit it’s a little cool,” she said with a shrug. “But hell if I’m spending the rest of my life walking around in glasses that make me look like I’m using a chain saw.”
Dresner looked down from the stage and focused on a man in the second row, his surprised face suddenly filling the screen. “Let’s make a phone call. Bob, why don’t you stand up?”
He did, looking self-consciously at the crowd behind him. Either he was a damn fine actor, or this wasn’t a setup.
“Now, I know that Bob is a good citizen and turned his cell off before he came in. But could I bother you to turn it back on?”
Dresner looked out over his audience again. The phone icon at the edge of the screen expanded and the address book went immediately from names starting with “A” to names starting with “S,” finally scrolling to “Stamen, Bob.” A moment later, the tinny sound of Blondie’s “Call Me” filled the room.
The increasingly nervous-looking man answered and his voice was transmitted through the PA system by Dresner’s Merge. “Hello?”
“Hi, Bob. How’re things?”
“Good.”
Janine leaned forward, squinting at Dresner as he chatted. “How is he controlling those icons and scrolling through the names? Is it tracking his eye movements?”
Smith had been wondering the same thing. “I don’t think so. You’d see the screen image moving around. He was looking straight at the crowd when that app opened.”
“Maybe this was all set up beforehand. Maybe the system’s just in some kind of demonstration mode.”
“I don’t know. Maybe…”
Dresner pulled out his Bluetooth headset and laid it on the lectern before walking back to center stage. “I’ve always hated those things. They hurt my ear. How about you, Bob?”
“Um…” Stamen said, missing a few beats as he wrestled with the same thing everyone else was — why was Dresner’s voice still being picked up by the PA and why could he still hear the phone call? “I don’t like them.”
“Exactly! Me neither. So I thought, What if I just had a tiny microphone built into a custom cap that clamps to one of my back teeth? And on top of that, what if I had a much smaller and more sophisticated version of my hearing implants route sound directly to my brain?”
There was complete silence in the auditorium for a few seconds before everyone started talking at once. The tone wasn’t necessarily excitement, though. More of an impressed skepticism apparently shared by the young woman sitting next to him.
“Okay, he’s definitely into cool nerd territory now, but if you find your Bluetooth so uncomfortable, there are a bunch of companies that will make you a custom earpiece. That’s gotta be cheaper and easier than getting a dentist to make something that fits on your tooth and getting studs screwed into your skull.”
“I dunno,” Smith responded. “I’ve worked with a lot of people who use Dresner’s hearing system and they all say it aches a little for a couple of days and then you forget the studs are even there until they need to be recharged. And he’s saying he made them even smaller.”
She scowled and leaned back in her chair, arms folded across her chest again. If there was any great truth, it was that her generation was virtually impossible to impress where technology was concerned. They always wanted more.
“Thanks, Bob. I’ll talk to you later,” Dresner said. The color drained from the phone icon and it tucked itself back into the side of the massive screen.
He started pacing again, the audience following his every move. “I’ve had terrible vision my entire life and I know I look ridiculous with these huge lenses but I’ve never been able to get comfortable with contacts.”
He took his glasses off and let them hang loosely in his hand. Instead of the screen behind him suddenly tracking the floor, the image of the audience held steady but turned distorted and blurry.
“I don’t get it,” Janine muttered, but Smith ignored her. He was pretty sure he did understand, but he was having a hard time believing what his mind was telling him.
Illegible words appeared across the top of the screen and he concentrated on them as they slowly came into focus.
PROCESSING VISION CORRECTION
Confused silence prevailed as Dresner returned to the lectern and leaned against it. “So then I thought, if I can send sound to my audio cortex, why can’t I send images to my visual cortex?”
This time there were no voices at all. The only sound was of a hundred people attacking their cell phones in a desperate effort to be the first to text word of Dresner’s new miracle to the world.
5
Marrakech
Morocco
Gerhard Eichmann slid his chair farther into the shade and tried again to wave off a shoeshine boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. A few stern Arabic words from a wa
iter finally got the job done and the boy retreated into the road, dodging the chaotic traffic in search of a less resistant customer.
Despite having lived in Marrakech for more than a decade, Eichmann had never been to this particular outdoor café. Most of the tables were surrounded by local men drinking tea. The only other white faces belonged to a French couple battling the midday heat with bottles of overpriced local beer.
Eichmann nervously examined the people flowing by on the sidewalk, occasionally making eye contact that gave him hope this would soon be over. Every time, though, he ended up watching them hurry off toward the walls of the old city and the crowded markets beyond.
It was the constant motion, the tumult, the mix of modern and ancient that had convinced him to make Marrakech his home. It offered anonymity to those who craved it, without stripping away all the trappings and conveniences of the civilized world. It allowed him to be a ghost suspended between the past, present, and future.
A man in a sweat-stained linen shirt and blue slacks emerged from behind a cart piled with oranges and jogged onto the sidewalk. This time the eye contact was more than fleeting.
“Can I join you?” he said, pointing to an empty chair pushed up against the tiny table. “I twisted my ankle shopping in the souks.”
Eichmann’s mouth went so dry, he found it difficult to respond. “Of…of course. The cobblestones here can be treacherous.”
He hated this — leaving the tiny world he’d so carefully closed around himself, coming into contact with these types of men. But he’d been forbidden to use the Internet. It was too uncontrollable, too populated by clever and curious eyes.
“Do you have it?
The man — Claude Géroux — waved a muscular arm in the waiter’s direction and used French to order a sparkling water.
“Do you have it?” Eichmann repeated, hiding his fear but letting his irritation come through. He was scheduled to leave for North Korea in less than three hours and after everything he’d gone through to get permission for the trip, he would not let this meeting delay him.
“Of course,” Géroux said, switching to accented English. “And you?”
“Yes.”
The Frenchman didn’t display his fear either, but in his case that was likely because he felt none. Why would he? Eichmann knew he looked like exactly what he was: an academic reaching an age when thin became frail and pale became sickly. Géroux would look on him with little more than amusement.
Comfortable that he had the upper hand, the Frenchman casually handed a thumb drive across the table. Eichmann pulled a small laptop from its case and slid the drive into the USB port. After a quick glance to confirm that the only thing behind him was a cracked wall and the feral cat perched on top of it, he entered the agreed-upon password and opened the video file that appeared.
Skipping through the violent footage for a few moments, he felt the strange mix of fascination and revulsion that had become so familiar to him over the last quarter century.
“I didn’t think there was anything new under the sun,” Géroux said, accepting a bottle of water from the waiter and falling silent until he’d moved on. “They didn’t fight back or even try to save themselves. The Afghans always fight. In fact, you could say that it’s all they do.”
Eichmann ignored him, connecting the laptop to the Internet and pulling up a bank account in Yemen.
“Was it the plastic boxes they had strapped to their waists — the ones that were taken from them? Was it drugs?”
Eichmann continued to concentrate on what he was doing, acting as though he hadn’t heard. The boxes Géroux was referring to did not contain drugs; nor did they still exist. He had confirmation that they’d been delivered to an obscure military outpost and incinerated more than twelve hours ago.
“It’s done,” Eichmann said, shutting down the laptop and slamming the lid shut.
Géroux kept his dead eyes on him and took another sip of his water before pulling a smartphone from his pocket. A nearly imperceptible smile broke across his lips as the screen registered the funds transferred into his account.
“You’ll have to excuse my curiosity,” he said, beginning to rise. “I’ve fought in many wars, in many places. And this…”
He shook his head and threw down a hundred-dirham note before standing and weaving through the busy tables. Eichmann watched him wade into traffic, jogging athletically past a rusting cab as he made his way toward a median crowded with people waiting for an opportunity to cross the remaining lanes.
He was almost there when a truck piled with mattresses lost control and swerved out of its lane. It crossed into the median, catching him dead center in its grille with enough force that his head shattered the windshield. The entire vehicle listed right as terrified people dove out of the way and oncoming traffic veered onto sidewalks crowded with pedestrians.
Everyone in the café was on their feet, surging toward the accident and then retreating when a pickup slammed into a car parked at the curb. Eichmann, now completely forgotten by everyone around him, stood, fighting off a wave of nausea and slipping the precious flash drive into his pocket.
He stayed close to the wall, clutching his laptop to his chest until he was able to slip into an empty, urine-scented alleyway. He increased his pace, daring a glance behind him at the frantic people swarming the road and the bloodstained front of the mattress van.
Apparently, Géroux’s curiosity had not been excused.
6
Las Vegas, Nevada
USA
Christian Dresner beamed from the lectern as the dull click of thumbs on cell phones filled the convention center. Smith didn’t have anyone to text since he still had no idea why he was there, so he just sat quietly and tried to wrap his mind around the potential of Dresner’s new hardware.
To call it revolutionary was an almost laughable understatement. Smith was one of the few people who had recognized Dresner’s hearing aid for what it was: a first hesitant step on the road to changing humanity forever. What made it so new — so extraordinary — was that it had been the first prosthetic that wasn’t a wildly imperfect facsimile of what had been lost. Instead, it was an order-of-magnitude improvement over what evolution had spent millions of years creating. In the end, his great accomplishment hadn’t been helping impaired people to hear. It had been demonstrating that we were entering a world where Mother Nature could be beaten at her own game.
This step, though, was in no way hesitant. Dresner was throwing humanity headlong into what could be the next phase of its existence. Where would it go? Where would it stop? Hell, where should it stop?
Smith looked over at Janine, but she was completely immersed in her iPhone — a device that had seemed so sophisticated a few minutes ago but now seemed a little like a steam-powered stone tablet.
Having said that, a few critical questions needed to be answered. First, did it really work? Innovative technology was great but if it was hard to use or impractical, it tended to fade pretty quickly. Touchscreens, headsets, and standard voice interfaces already worked pretty well.
The second was about the body modifications. He’d spent his life trying not to be perforated and, with the exception of a few stray bullets and a knife or two, had been fairly successful. Would average people want to have bolts screwed into their skulls for the privilege of getting rid of their smartphones?
He glanced at Janine again, noting the diamond nose stud and the colorful tattoo on her upper arm. There was his answer. The generation after his seemed to look at body modification with the same trepidation he felt when changing his shirt.
The sound of thumbs on plastic died down and Dresner began pacing again, the screen behind him following along as though it were connected to cameras embedded in his retinas. “As all of you know, a piece of hardware is only as useful as the software available for it. In the end, the Merge is just a platform. It’s what we’re putting on that platform that really interests me. Of course, we have all the basic apps
you’d expect: phone, email, social networking, GPS, and the like. But we’ve also created applications for the financial services industry and politics — two areas that are critical to society and I think everyone agrees need help.”
“Oh, God,” Janine mumbled, a look of horror overcoming her youthful features. “He may have invented the coolest technology since the printing press and he’s going Boy Scout on us.”
Dresner seemed to read her mind. “But don’t worry. We’ve done some fun stuff too.”
On screen, the doors of the convention center burst open and a horde of blood-drenched vampires rushed in. It was realistic enough to elicit more than a few screams from the audience as they spun in their chairs to take in the empty room behind them. When they turned back to Dresner, he was holding his hand like a gun, happily picking off the ghouls as they charged up the aisle.
“No way!” Janine said, attacking her Twitter account again. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I once saw George Clooney in a Speedo.”
The monsters faded and Dresner looked out over the slightly ruffled crowd. “The strange truth is that the main idea here wasn’t the hardware — I just needed something to run the search engine I had in my head.” He paused for a moment, seeming to ponder his next words. “The problem with the Internet — and the world in general — isn’t the availability of information, it’s that there’s too much information. And most of it’s nonsense. But what if we had a way of instantly vetting the quality of what we’re taking in? And I’m not just talking about things we look up on the ’net, I’m talking about everything around us.”
He motioned to Bob Stamen again. “Could you stand up one more time?”
He did, if a bit reluctantly, and an icon on the screen that looked like a listing wedding cake activated. Suddenly Stamen was surrounded by a hazy green aura, and his name hovered over his head in subtle lettering.