Extinction (8 page)

The auditorium filled up quickly. About half the attendees were disheveled journalists and half were well-dressed venture capitalists eager to make a killing from Arvin’s latest invention. Financially, Conway had a good track record. In addition to developing prostheses for the maimed and retinal implants for the blind, Singularity, Inc., had become the leading manufacturer of the deep-brain implants used to treat Parkinson’s disease. The company had enriched plenty of investors over the past two decades, but Arvin had never really cared about the money. He had a dream, and he’d named his company after it—the Singularity, the much-anticipated point in the future when the intelligence of machines would leap past human intelligence. Arvin saw himself as a prophet of this coming revolution. He’d pursued it with unswerving devotion, gradually isolating himself from the more level-headed researchers in the bioengineering field. He was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, but like most prophets he was a little crazy.

At eleven o’clock sharp, the lights dimmed and techno-pop music blasted from the auditorium’s speakers. A giant video screen descended like a stage curtain, displaying a rapid-fire montage of images: circuit diagrams, brain scans, microchips, fabrication labs. Then Arvin Conway came onstage, waving to the crowd. He was seventy-five years old, with a big shock of white hair and an ample belly. Jim was surprised to see him holding a cane. Arvin had never needed one before, but now his steps were labored and slow as he crossed the stage. His face, though, was untroubled. Arvin grinned like a kid.

“Good morning, everyone!” he boomed cheerily. “Good morning, mercenary members of the technology press! And good morning, well-fed representatives of Wall Street! I trust you’re all doing well?”

The crowd laughed and applauded. Arvin was a popular figure in the industry. Like Steve Jobs, he had a talent for showbiz. “I have some good news and some bad news,” he announced. “Which would you like to hear first?”

More laughter. Arvin waited for it to die down, then removed a pair of glasses from the pocket of his tweed jacket. Jim recognized them at once—they were video camera glasses. Although they looked like ordinary spectacles from the front, the earpieces were a little thicker than normal because they held all the electronics. The glasses in Arvin’s hand had black frames, just like Kirsten’s.

“First the good news.” Arvin held up the glasses for everyone to see. “For the past few years Singularity has focused on improving the performance of our vision systems. We’ve upgraded the cameras and now—” He froze. Jim realized that Arvin had just spotted him in the front row. Their eyes locked for a second, and then Arvin turned away. “And, uh, now I’d like to give you an update on our progress. Allow me to demonstrate.”

He dropped the glasses, which landed on the floor with a thunk. At first Jim thought this was an accident, perhaps triggered by Arvin’s surprise at seeing him in the audience. But then Arvin very deliberately placed his foot on the glasses and stomped them. “We won’t need these.”

Reaching into his pocket again, Arvin pulled out a miniature camcorder, a sleek black device about the size of a cigarette lighter. He held it up in the air with the lens turned toward himself. A huge projection of Arvin’s face appeared on the video screen behind him. He pulled the camcorder closer and one of his eyes filled the screen. “I designed the system to be inconspicuous, so you wouldn’t normally notice this. But take a close look at the pupil of my eye as I increase the ambient lighting.”

The spotlights on the stage intensified. On the screen, Arvin’s pupil constricted, and Jim saw a tiny flash of silver on the inside edge of his hazel iris. Then Arvin aimed the camcorder at his other eye and Jim saw a second, barely noticeable flash. A murmur rose from the crowd as they realized what they were seeing. Arvin had removed his natural corneas, irises, and lenses. He’d replaced them with miniature cameras.

Jim was appalled. As far as he knew, there was nothing wrong with Arvin’s eyesight.

“Putting the video cameras directly in the eyes has many advantages over wearing them in the glasses,” Arvin said. “With the glasses, you have to turn your head to focus on what you want to see. But the ocular camera moves along with the eye, turning effortlessly in its socket, thanks to the wonderful ocular muscles.”

The crowd fell into an uneasy silence. Jim guessed that the other people in the audience were just as shocked as he was. Arvin had thrown away his natural eyesight to make this demonstration.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Arvin said, still grinning. “Old man Conway is off his rocker, right? What kind of loon would blind himself just to get the attention of a few potential investors?” He chuckled, but no one else joined in. “My decision, though, was quite logical. In the past, the vision provided by our cameras and retinal implants was, at best, roughly equivalent to natural eyesight. But now, thanks to improvements in both the hardware and software, it’s far superior. Let me show you.”

Stepping to the left side of the stage, he pulled a remote control from his pocket. A moment later, a short, squat robot on caterpillar treads rolled onstage from the right. It looked like a mobile end table. Resting on the robot’s flat top was a bottle of Chivas Regal, and extending from its side was a mechanical arm. This appendage, Jim noticed, had the same design as his Terminator prosthesis.

“This is my delivery boy,” Arvin said. “His name is Robbie. He rolls into my lab every evening at six and brings me a scotch and soda. He also delivers my reading materials. Robbie, show the audience my favorite book.”

The robot’s arm stretched toward its flat top and picked up a rectangular object lying next to the bottle of scotch. It was a thin, gray e-book reader. One of the mechanical fingers pressed the e-reader’s power button, and a book title appeared in big letters on the screen:
I, ROBOT.

Arvin smiled. “Can someone in the audience please call out a random number? Nothing higher than 3,493, please. The electronic book is divided into 3,493 locations.”

Someone called out the number 2,583. The e-reader’s screen automatically turned to that page.

“Now, can anyone read the words at the top of the page? Perhaps someone in front?”

Jim was on the right side of the front row, less than fifteen feet from the e-reader, but even so, the text on the screen was much too small for him to read. Some of the people in his row leaned forward and squinted, but they couldn’t read it either.

“No? Well, I’ll read it then.” Arvin paused for dramatic effect. He was all the way on the other side of the stage, at least twenty-five feet from the robot. He cleared his throat and began to read. “‘There’s just one more thing. You must make a special effort to answer simply. Have you been entirely clear about the interstellar jump?’”

The crowd murmured in disbelief. Arvin smiled again. Then he shouted, “Robbie, throw!” and the mechanical arm hurled the e-reader across the stage. The thing pinwheeled straight at Arvin’s head, but the old man raised his hand and deftly caught it. “Not bad, eh? My ocular cameras and retinal implants give me enhanced motion-detection capabilities. Thanks to the new system, I can spot a curveball faster than Alex Rodriguez.”

The murmurs grew louder. Arvin tossed the e-reader back to Robbie, who caught it with the mechanical arm and moved offstage. Then the old man reached into his pocket once again and pulled out a small piece of silvery foil about the size of a postage stamp. “The implant is a biocompatible sheath that lines the back of each eye. It’s imprinted with more than a million electrodes, which is a hundredfold increase over earlier models.” Using his pinky, Arvin pointed at a tiny computer chip attached to the foil. “But the real key to the implant’s success is this microprocessor. The ocular camera wirelessly transmits its video to this chip, which organizes and processes the visual information in the same way that a natural retina does. Then the electrodes feed the processed signals to the optic nerves that lead to the brain. In essence, the chip translates the camera video into neural code. For the first time ever, we can send a signal to the brain
in the brain’s own language
.”

The audience was chattering wildly now. Jim could see why the venture capitalists were so excited. Arvin’s new implants weren’t just for the blind. They would also appeal to perfectly healthy people who wished to enhance their eyesight. Baseball players, say. Or sharpshooters.

Arvin held out his hands, trying to quiet the crowd. “Before we get ahead of ourselves, I’m obliged to report the bad news. Obviously we’ll need to conduct clinical trials before the FDA approves these implants. But if Singularity attracts some new investors and raises enough money, we can complete the trials in less than a year.” He grinned confidently. Then his face turned sober. “And there’s another piece of bad news. Our implants won’t help everyone. They won’t work for people whose retinas have been completely lost, because they have no nerve cells to receive the signals. We’ve tried to help these patients by developing implants that send the video signals directly to the brain, but unfortunately those experiments have failed. Direct stimulus of the brain’s visual cortex can allow a blind person to perceive crude patterns, but it’s not even close to the kind of vision provided by the retinal implants.”

The bad news didn’t seem to diminish the crowd’s enthusiasm. If anything, the chatter grew more feverish.

“But one of the great truths of science is that even failures can teach us something,” Arvin continued. “During the course of our experiments with the brain implants, we learned a lot about the visual system. We discovered that after the visual cortex receives the signals from the optic nerve, it relays the information to other parts of the brain. And we found that one of these regions, the pulvinar nucleus, combines the visual signals with information from the other senses. This region is located deep inside the brain, on both sides of the structure called the thalamus. The pulvinar nucleus is about a centimeter wide and shaped like a cushion, so anatomists named it after the Latin word for cushion,
pulvinus
.”

The venture capitalists started to get restless, shifting in their seats. They didn’t want to hear about the science. They wanted to hear more about superhuman vision. Because it was a freakin’ gold mine.

“We focused our attention on the pulvinar nucleus because it seemed to be one of the places in the brain where
perception
takes place. Where the most important information from the visual field is sent after it’s been deciphered by the cortex. Using implanted arrays of electrodes, we tried to deliver a visual signal to this part of the brain, and as I said, we failed. But as we did our experiments, an amazing thing happened. Although we couldn’t
deliver
a visual signal directly to the brain, we found that we could
retrieve
one.”

Arvin moved to the center of the stage, where a laptop had been placed on a round table beneath the giant video screen. He sat down in a chair beside the table, then pulled aside his long white hair to reveal a patch of shaved skin on his scalp, just above his right ear. A small silver disk was embedded in the center of the patch. “As you can see, I was the primary human subject in this experiment. Implanted in my pulvinar nucleus is a device that acts like a neural wiretap. It picks up the electromagnetic signals generated by millions of brain cells, and then it amplifies and wirelessly transmits those signals to this microprocessor on the outside of my skull.” Arvin tapped the silver disk in his scalp. “I call this processor the Dream-catcher. It’s similar to the microchip used in our retinal implants, but in the Dream-catcher the translation process is reversed. Whereas the retinal implant converts a video feed to neural signals that are sent to the brain, the Dream-catcher converts the neural signals of my brain into digital images that can be transmitted to a computer. Please take a look at the screen.”

Arvin leaned over the table and pressed a key on the laptop. Then he sat very still in his chair, staring at the audience. In a few seconds an image appeared on the screen overhead. The picture was fuzzy at the edges but clear at its center. It was a real-time image of the journalists and venture capitalists sitting in the front row of the auditorium. For a brief moment Jim saw himself on the screen. Every few seconds the image blacked out for an instant, disappearing in time with Arvin’s eyeblinks.

“This is my visual perception of the auditorium,” Arvin explained. “
The brain’s view
, if you will, which is very different from a camera’s. Notice how my perception focuses on just one person at a time. And notice how quickly that center of focus darts around the room.” As Arvin surveyed the crowd, the image on the video screen leaped from one person to the next. “From a neuroscientist’s perspective, this is a remarkable breakthrough that will open up new avenues of research. Future studies can show us how animals perceive their environments. Or how schizophrenics view the world. But the potential for commercial applications is also remarkable. Watch this, please.”

Arvin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The video screen went dark. After a few seconds, though, blobs of color flashed across the screen. Then a shape emerged, an image of a woman. It first appeared as a black-and-white silhouette and gradually became more detailed and colorful. The woman was heavyset and her hair was gray. She tilted her head and smiled, and then the image froze.

Arvin opened his eyes and pointed at the screen. “Do you recognize her?” he asked. “I didn’t expect you to. She was never famous. And she died more than twenty years ago.” He pressed a different key on the laptop and another image appeared on the screen, framed in a window just to the right of the smiling gray-haired woman. This second image was eerily similar to the first—it was the same woman in a slightly different pose. “She’s my mother, Irma Conway. The image on the right is a photo of her that I took in 1971. And the image on the left is my visual memory of her.”