The God Wave

For Abby, Gideon, and Ezra

Charles “Chuck” Brenton had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. For this he credited (and sometimes blamed) his philosopher-artist father and musician mother, both of whom had bequeathed to him a fascination with the hidden things that made people tick. He was most interested in what drew people headlong into particular callings, what caused them to choose specific careers, to follow whatever paths their lives took. That fascination had decided his own calling, which now had him seated behind a desk in the Traylor Research Building at Johns Hopkins University as a full professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience.

He pulled off his glasses and put his chin down on his crossed arms to study the electroencephalogram rhythm on the computer display before him. While the screen was flat, the image on it was not. Once upon a time, EEG charts had been composed of simple lines, but the scan Chuck was viewing looked more like a topographical map of a mountain range than the seismic pattern of squiggly lines usually associated with an EEG.

This particular mountain range, rendered in jewel-like hues, represented his favorite rhythm and one of the rarest: gamma. It belonged to a cellist he'd had in the studio that morning. She'd been hooked up to his prototype EEG machine as she'd sight-read a complicated and unfamiliar chamber piece. Her lack of familiarity with the composition had ensured she would be multitasking, using eyes, ears, and hands as she navigated the music. The result was a literal symphony of brain waves, the so-called gamma rhythms that happened only when a subject blended brain states instead of juggling them.

Gammas were frenetic little rhythms—sharply pointed and closely set but elegant, Chuck thought. They were also hard to maintain. The brain preferred switching rapidly between solo states to performing a concert, but his cellist had produced a steady stream of beta waves before slipping into a gamma pattern she'd maintained for several passages, the longest of which was close to twelve seconds.

He'd worked with this subject before, charting her brain waves while she played pieces she knew well. Her rhythms were different then, and though her body was in motion, she produced a delightful montage of theta and beta waves—rhythms usually associated with meditative and actively focused states, respectively. These states were not supposed to overlap, but the cellist closed her eyes, relaxed into the music, and meditated while active.

That had been interesting enough, but this concert was exhilarating. Chuck reached out to touch the spiky gamma rhythm on the monitor, as if he could feel its ridges and vales beneath his fingertips.

“Remember when we did this with little inked needles and lo-o-ong pieces of gridded paper?”

Chuck looked up from his ruminations into the face of his
senior lab assistant, Eugene Pozniaki, a graduate student in his second year in the Snyder program.

“No,” Chuck said, “and neither do you. No one's used paper for a decade.”

Eugene gave him a lopsided smile and handed him a small stack of half-sheet forms. “New study subjects who've cleared the initial interviews.”

Chuck leafed through them. There was an architect and a specialist in computer-aided design, a classical guitarist, a video game designer, a sculptor, and—he smiled—Mini.

“What?” asked Eugene.

Chuck held up the card. “Minerva Mause. She's a graphic artist. Junior at Maryland Institute. Her dad is a friend of Pop's from their college days. The way Pop describes their relationship, I've always pictured them sitting around smoky coffeehouses after midnight, wearing berets, and chatting about life and art.”

“Minerva Mause?” Eugene looked as if he wanted to laugh.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. And she goes by Mini, too. Spelled M-i-n-i. But don't call her . . . you know.”

“Minnie Mouse? Aw, c'mon, Doc. You can't avoid it.” Eugene was laughing outright now. Catching Chuck's look, he cleared his throat and pushed his glasses up his prodigious nose. “So are you gonna bring her in?”

“Probably, just as a favor to the old man. I've already got data on a couple of graphic artists, although Mini is a unique personality. But I think this CAD/CAM architect looks interesting. Maybe her and the game designer. We've already looked at several musicians. Can you see if there are any folks from more-physical disciplines?”

“Such as?”

Chuck looked back up at the cellist's gamma rhythms and studied them for a moment. “Well, some of our musicians have pro
duced interesting combinations of alpha, beta, and theta waves and given us marvelous gamma patterns. But I'd be interested in seeing the contrast between people who deal entirely with representations of reality and those who interact with reality directly. The architect and game designer are great for one end of the spectrum, but I'm wondering what sort of activity we'd get from a baseball player or an airplane pilot or someone who operates heavy machinery.”

Eugene was nodding. “What're the differences between designing a building and actually constructing it, you mean.”

Chuck matched his assistant's nodding, up for down.

“You realize,” said Eugene as he gathered up the cards Chuck had set to one side, “that just for a moment there, we looked like a couple of academic bobblehead dolls.”

“I prefer to think of us as academic action figures. So leap into action. Get me some more lab rats.”

With Eugene gone, Chuck once again considered the cellist's varied rhythms. Alpha, beta, theta, and then the elusive gamma. He shook his head. Beta—you'd expect that in a performance situation, but the meditative theta waves and the blending . . .

He used the touch screen to move the wave chart to just below the cellist's face, so he could study her expressions in tandem with the rise and fall of the bright mountain peaks. He watched the graph as she read, concentrated, executed difficult figures, and, on the last refrain of the piece, leaned back, closed her eyes, and played the new passage with emotion and vigor.

How amazing that this level of concentration could move pixels on a screen and, as Eugene had reminded him, had once moved a needlelike pen up and down on a piece of graph paper.

Chuck frowned as an idea tried to push its way into his conscious mind. He sat back in his chair and hit the space bar to pause the playback. The cellist's eyes were half-open; a smile
played on her lips. Her right arm was a blur. The graph below showed the tightly packed gamma grouping.

The bow, the arm, her face were all responding to that wave.

Like a needle dancing on paper.

What if . . .

What if these electric impulses could be harnessed to move something other than a pulse of light on a screen or a slender filament of metal? What if they could make other objects dance?

He was on his feet and standing in the doorway of Eugene's office before he realized he'd moved.

“What if the brain waves a person generates to screw in a lightbulb could actually screw in the lightbulb?”

Eugene, sitting at his chaotic desk, looked up and gawped at Chuck. “Is this a lightbulb joke?”

“No. It's a ‘what if.'”

Eugene's side chair was covered with papers that had oozed onto it from his desk. Chuck swept them to the floor and sat down.

Eugene pointed at them. “Do you see what you just did?”

“I cleared off a chair and sat down.”

“You made a mess. You. Made a mess.”

“
You
made a mess. I simply moved it.” Chuck held up his hands. “Forget the mess. Forget the lightbulb. Listen. Even with old-style contact probes, a person's brain waves could operate a digital EEG reader or an old analog reader.”

Eugene's brow knit. “Well,
operate
isn't really the word, is it? I mean it's more like a trigger—”

“Stop distracting me, Eugene. God, you're disorganized. Listen. If brain waves can move a needle or a digital image, why couldn't they move the actual thing, given an appropriate interface?”

Eugene opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Actually screw in the lightbulb, you mean?”

Chuck waved his hands. “Bad example. Don't know why
I chose it. Imagine our architect—what's her name? Sara?—imagine Sara sitting at her CAD console, thinking about what it takes to draw elevations. The touches, the mouse clicks, the drags. Whatever. But instead of putting her hands on the keyboard or the drawing pad, the interface is an EEG net with positron transceivers instead of contact electrodes. The net is connected directly to the CAD/CAM.”

Eugene blinked. “Connected how? USB? Oh! Or Bluetooth! Bluetooth could be wireless—” He faltered to a stop and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Um, please continue, Professor.”

“Do you get the gist of what I'm saying, Euge?”

“Yeah. Of course I get it. You're talking about telekinesis.”

Chuck took a deep breath and counted to ten very quickly. “No. Telekinesis means moving an object directly with your mind. I'm talking about harnessing the electrical power of the human brain using a mechanical interface. Think about it, Euge. How does an EEG work?”

“The electrodes sense electrical impulses in the brain and chart them as pulses of varying degrees of amplitude—as waves.”

“Right. Now, what if the energy used to generate the picture of the wave could instead be used to generate something else? Some real activity in the external world? Like Stephen Hawking's typing mechanism, but more.”

Eugene sat back in his chair and stared sightlessly over the top of his computer display.

Chuck watched his facial expression. Good. He was engaging. Finally. When Eugene wiggled the temple of his glasses, that meant he was getting ready to verbalize something. God only knew what until it came out of his mouth, but Chuck held out hope this time.

Eugene spoke: “The interface would have to be interpretive, wouldn't it?”

“To a degree, yes. As it is, the human brain is exactly that: an interpretive interface between the mind and the human body—or, more broadly, between the mind and the external world. When you use your mouse there to click or drag something on the computer screen, your brain is interpreting what your mind wants to accomplish, then it does whatever representational translations are necessary to produce on the screen what you preconceive in your mind. When it does that, it generates energy patterns. There's a difference—a measurable difference—between the electrical impulse that puts your hand on the mouse and the one that depresses the mouse button.”

“Well, yeah. I suppose there is. But are the transceivers fine-tuned enough to capture the difference?”

Chuck felt like bouncing out of his chair and dancing around the room, which would, he supposed, be undignified for a man of his position.

“I don't know. At this point, no—probably not. But I'd like to find out. Wouldn't you?”

Eugene's expression was wary. “O-o-okay. What do we have to do?”

What indeed?

Chuck had already modified a state-of-the-art Brewster Brain Pattern Monitor to work with his enhanced BPTs—Brenton Positron Transceivers. The transceivers looked like little LEDs in a variety of colors, but they were far more than that. While the lights jigged or foxtrotted or waltzed over the outer contours of the net that held them to the subject's scalp, the emitters fired a stream of positrons into the brain to pick up the most delicate of energy pulses. As a result, the EEG rig that Chuck used was capable of generating three-dimensional images and, he was beginning to hope, much more.

I think we can do this.

THE INTERFACE WAS SIMPLE, REALLY
. . . for Chuck and Eugene, that is. They used fiber-optic cabling to bridge the Brewster unit and what they referred to as the “activity platform,” or the receiver of the neural impulses from the subject. They used USB to send and receive data, and so naturally the computer interface had been the most readily adapted. It required only a software program to be written, an extended version of the signal detection software that already ran on the Brewster and that allowed an interpreter to read its data.

Chuck had selected a handful of subjects who were conversant with computers and worked with them regularly: CAD/CAM engineer Sara Crowell, game designer Tim Desmond, two gamesters Eugene had recruited from among the underclassmen in his mentoring program (and whom he referred to as Tweedledee and Tweedle
doh!
), a writer named Pierce Flornoy, and Mini Mause.

Chuck had constructed a testing profile that moved from the utterly simplistic (pushing pixels around on a screen and doing field entries) to the specialized and complex. He hoped it would get the subjects to interact with their most familiar software programs and, as Eugene put it, make magic happen.

The problem they encountered immediately was that magic didn't happen. Or at least the expected magic didn't happen.

Because even though Sara Crowell generated a perfect beta wave while imagining she was moving the mouse pointer a hundred pixels to the right, the pointer didn't do what the brain wave predicted; it flew off the screen. At the same time, Tim “Call Me Troll” Desmond was able to perform the same mental mouse move, but the bloody thing would barely wiggle—notwithstanding that his beta waves were every bit as pronounced as Sara's. On top of all that, there was the problem that they were not in the same range. To his 10 Hz waves and 3 microvolts of
energy, Sara was generating 15 Hz waves with 6 microvolts of energy—which meant there was nothing Chuck could parse from their attempts.

So Chuck backtracked. He got real computer mice, not connected to anything, and asked the subjects to physically move them as they watched the computer display. The results were the same. Sara's mouse pointer went into hyperspace, and Tim's just did a tiny dance.

The rest of the subjects did the same simple exercise. The results were all over the map. Even when Chuck and Eugene pared the experiment down to the simple act of moving the mouse pointer between two fixed boxes on a black screen, the subjects achieved no repeatable results. And when Chuck and Eugene arrived at the conclusion that different individuals must simply generate stronger impulses than others, they were thrown another curveball.