The God Wave (11 page)

Moments later, Mike was suited up, Chuck and Eugene were on the monitors, Dice was looking at a direct feed of Becky's power flow through, and Darya was awaiting her first set of commands.

They had her dig a hole, ferrying each bucket full of sand to a container roughly twenty-five feet away, on the opposite side of the sandy patch. Mike did it all in a pulsing gamma—off for the digging, on for driving the hoe. He didn't enter zeta once.

His next task was to use the front loader to scoop up a stack of railroad ties and move them to a chalked-off area next to the sand container. This was a more delicate task, and Mike was clearly concentrating on getting the ties into the loader without splintering them. He had turned the backhoe and was speeding across the sand to the chalk outline when he went into zeta. He was still in zeta when he carefully spilled the first load of ties onto the ground, still in zeta when he turned and used the bucket to nudge them into order.

“Chuck . . .” Eugene was staring at the clock on the BPM screen. “Chuck, it's been three minutes. He's been in zeta for three minutes. Maybe—”

“Yeah. Pull him out.”

“Okay, Mike,” Eugene said softly. “You can stop now.”

The backhoe continued to move. Mike never took his eyes from it.

“Hey, Mike!” Eugene said more loudly. He put a hand on the man's shoulder. “Let up, okay?”

Mike kept his eyes on the backhoe; Darya kept moving.

Eugene threw Chuck a startled glance and stepped in front of Mike, obstructing his view of the sand patch. It made no difference. Mike stared as if he could see right through Eugene's body.

Tim had clambered up to the loading dock and was calling now, too. “Hey, snap out of it, dude!”

“It's been five minutes,” said Dice tersely. “We should shut down the interface.”

Chuck nodded and tapped a finger on the BPM's touch screen. The BKKI came down.

Out in the sand, Darya continued to juggle railroad ties.

“Shit. Something's wrong with the rig,” Dice said. He stepped over the cabling that was feeding power to both the Brewster-Brenton and Becky and, after a moment of hesitation, yanked the plug out of the back of the rack. The machinery shut down with a mechanical sigh; the screens and meters went dark.

Yet out in the sand, Darya carried her last load of ties to the growing pile and deposited them carefully atop it.

Chuck felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“That's not possible,” said Matt softly. “That's just not possible.”

The conference room was silent as the team filed in and seated themselves. Door closed, they all sat for several minutes staring at each other—and trying
not
to stare at Mike. For his part, the construction engineer looked puzzled and uncomfortable. He kept his eyes on the knees of his jeans and picked at a callus on his hand.

He was the first one to speak. “So . . . what did I do exactly? What was that?”

Chuck cleared his throat. “You, um, apparently manipulated the backhoe directly. You bypassed the interface.”

“But
how
?”

“I don't know.”

“Is that what the zeta wave is?” asked Sara. She'd crossed her arms on the table and rested her chin on them. “It's us manipulating things directly? Telekinesis?”

Tim let out a short bark of laughter. “Zeta wave my ass! God wave is more like it.
Z
is for
Zeus
!” He turned his pale eyes on Chuck. “I want to try it, Doc. I want a shot at it.”

“You'll get it,” said Matt curtly. “Obviously we have to see if this . . . anomaly is reproducible in all of you.”

Tim nodded. “Yeah.”

“Clearly,” Chuck said, “we need to verify that the zeta wave—”

“God wave,” prompted Tim.

Chuck shook his head. “I'm not comfortable calling it that.”

Tim shrugged and made a rude but quiet noise.

“We need to verify whether it's causal or at least concomitant with the . . . the ability to—” Chuck broke off and looked up at Matt. “Do you realize what we've done here? Do you have any conception of what this means?”

Matt grinned. “I get it. Believe me. If these results are reproducible then we have not just invented a human-machine interface. We've invented a training device capable of turning just about every industry on its head.”

“Forget industry,” Tim said. “Think of what you're turning
us
into.”

“Okay,” Chuck said, growing a bit uncomfortable.
Are we making them different?

Are we making gods? Monsters?

He shook that thought away and went to stand by the whiteboard at the foot of the table. Picking up a marker, Chuck began to write. “Okay, so the first thing we need to do is see if Mike can repeat his results. Then we need to get Tim and Sara into zeta states and see if they can reproduce his results.”

He paused to look at his three-item list.

“Then,” said Dice, “we need to see if any or all of them can initiate the telekinetic link without first ramping up using the kinetic converter. That's going to be critical.”

“How so?” asked Sara.

“Well, if Mike was manipulating Becky instead of the actual drive mechanisms of the backhoe, then that raises the possibility
that we'll have to continue to build and market interfaces, so the machine operator is working with something he can understand and therefore manipulate.”

Sara nodded. “Of course. That was the problem I had with the computer initially. I didn't know how the optical interface on the mouse worked, so I couldn't operate it. But I understand pixels, I guess.”

Chuck added “isolate what's being manipulated” to the list of items.

“And,” said Matt, “depending on what we determine, we'll have to rethink our upcoming presentations.”

Chuck turned to look at him. “I have a TED Talk in two weeks. What do I tell them? These are open-minded people, Matt, but if I tell them we've induced telekinetic powers—”

Dice pointed a warning finger at the scientist. “Don't use that word—
powers
. Don't
ever
use it. It will totally give the wrong impression and create all sorts of weird images of mad scientists and Frankenstein monsters. We are cultivating abilities.”

“Capacities,” said Chuck.

“Talents?” That was Sara.

“Mental muscles.” Mike looked up and glanced around the table. “Isn't that really what we're doing? Building mental muscles? It's all perfectly natural, right?”

“Yes, yes, it is,” said Chuck. But he knew damn well that some people would refuse to see it that way. He looked at Matt. “But we still need to
sell
that. What do I say at the TED conference?”

“Maybe we should cancel,” suggested Eugene.

“No, no, and no,” said Matt. “We are not going to cancel. Let's stick with the program. We're developing an interface. The interface works. We let the audience see there's something new going on here. We simply say we don't know quite yet what it is. But I think we should plant the idea that our subjects are learning new
methods of mental mapping. That they're developing new capacities. Then when we hit Applied Robotics in April, that's where we pull the rabbit out of the hat.”

“Publicly?” asked Chuck. He fought images of torches and pitchforks and Senate hearings. “Is that wise?”

“We'll play it by ear. If it seems like the right time, we'll go with a public display. If not . . .” Matt shrugged. Then he looked around the table for consensus. “Plan?”

Everyone nodded.

“Great. Now, do we want to take the rest of the day off to design experiments, or do we want to dive back into it?”

Tim raised his hand. “I'm for diving.”

Sara echoed the movement. “Me, too.”

“Sure,” said Dice, and the others nodded.

Mike, Chuck noticed, was the last one to give his silent approval. A nod. “As long as I can go home on time,” he added.

“You all right with this?” Chuck asked the engineer later in the lab, as Dice wired him up to work with his robotic arm.

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“Telekinesis has been a fantasy—a dream or night terror for human beings for a very long time. It would be understandable if you were leery of playing with it.”

“But I'm not playing, Doc,” said Mike, meeting Chuck's eyes. “This is important work. It's important to me, to my kids. They're five and eight. By the time they've grown up and are getting jobs, the world could be really different.”

Chuck nodded and then got sucked into a debate with Eugene and Dice over whether they should remove the neural net once zeta had been achieved.

Mike just stared ahead, wondering how different the world would be.

IT TOOK MIKE TEN MINUTES
to achieve a zeta state, but once he did, he completed a series of complicated activities while Chuck and his scurrying minions brought down the system one element at a time. The last thing they did was remove the neural net from his head. That made Matt want to shout out loud. Once it was off, there was nothing—
nothing
—in the outboard machine interface that seemed necessary to the kinetic link between Mike and the robot.

That left him with only one puzzle to solve: was Mike manipulating the robotic arm's native mechanisms, or was he manipulating the part of the Brenton-Kobayashi interface that was resident in the machine? He tugged at his lip, watching the arm swing to and fro, stacking colorful milk crates.

“Mike,” he asked when the last crate was stacked, and Mike pulled himself out of the zeta state. “Can you articulate—can you tell me what you're doing to move the robot arm?”

“I know what
articulate
means, Dr. Streegman. The robot's got gimbals. I move the gimbals. I move the robot.”

Matt turned to Dice. “That's part of the interface, right?”

“Well, yeah, but it's not as simple as ‘this is part of the bot, and this is part of Becky.' When my team built Becky's mechanisms into the robot, we really built them in. The signal that Becky interprets for the drive mechanism acts like a thought transmitted by the human brain. The interface acts as a synapse. When Mike was using the Wi-Fi transceivers to execute his commands, the impulses were traveling through the entire physical interface. Now they're jumping the gap somewhere. I'm just not sure where that is. So when Mike says he's moving the gimbals, we won't know until we've offlined all the connections from the servomechanisms whether he's moving them directly or through the synapses.” Dice grimaced. “Did any of that make sense?”

“Did to me,” said Mike, giving Matt a wry look. “Let's see if I can
articulate
it. Are my mental fingers pushing the gimbals, or are they firing impulses through Becky's synapses and moving the gimbals that way?”

Matt smothered the flash of irritation Mike's pointed phrasing sparked and raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, don't look at me. I'm just a paper-pushing math geek. I'm out of my element. This is the realm of practical engineering, which I will leave you practical engineers to work out. What we need to know at the end of the day—and I mean that literally—is how direct Mike's manipulation is.”

Dice glanced at Chuck, who nodded. “Sure. We can do that.”

Matt stifled another surge of annoyance. It took him a moment to recognize the cause. It bothered him, he realized, that Dice—whom he had brought into the business in the first place—had looked to Chuck for guidance, not him.

Stupid,
he thought. Jealousy was a stupid reaction to something so small, not to mention a waste of energy. Chuck was the genius behind all of this. Why
shouldn't
Dice look to him for guidance?

Matt decided the best use of his time would be to monitor the progress of Dice's ninja-bot squad and start reworking their R&D and promotional plans. What Mike had done—and what Sara, Tim, and Lanfen might soon do—would change the entire direction of Forward Kinetics. If this turned out to be something they could teach anyone to do, they wouldn't need to build a factory; they'd need to build an academy.

He tried very hard not to think of it as Hogwarts.

TIM ACHIEVED ZETA AFTER TWENTY-TWO
minutes; Sara did it in twelve. Cut off from the Brewster-Brenton, they were both able to continue manipulating their respective environments.
Dice wasn't sure whether he should be stoked or bummed out. His inventions had been the beginning, middle, and end of the mechanics involved in the process. Now he'd be lucky if he even got to participate in the endgame.

Dice snapped out of his mental whining. If nothing else he'd be expected to design special mechanisms for the new or modified applications. Ninja bot was just the beginning, but that wasn't the most important consideration by any means. He recognized that, and the knowledge stunned him.

They had set out to create a human-machine interface and had instead obviated the need for it entirely. They had created . . .

He shook himself, trying to keep his attention on the piece of firmware he had just pulled out of Sara's CAD/CAM. What had they created? Wizards? Demigods?

Nightmares?

“What do you think, Dice? Will it work?”

He jumped. Chuck was standing about four feet away, a frown rippling his brow.

“Is there a way to disconnect Becky entirely without disrupting Sara's zeta state?”

Dice brought himself back to the here and now. “Yeah, I think so. It will be a kludge. I'll have to go in and pull this card loose while the computer is running. I can't right offhand think of any reason that should disrupt things—that is if Sara's manipulating the machine directly. If she's using the USB connection to the firmware to trigger the software, then . . .” He shrugged, then replaced the card in the machine, reattached the USB connector, and left the rear panel open.

Sara was put through her paces a second time. She made zeta in nine minutes and forty-five seconds, and they shut down the rig. All of it, starting with the Brewster-Brenton. Then, while Sara was in full swing, making buildings rise up out of the vir
tual ground as fast as she could visualize them, Dice pulled first the USB connector then the card out of their sockets.

On the CAD screen, buildings continued to grow like crystals.

There was a mass exhalation in the room. Dice only then realized that he, along with everyone else, had been holding his breath. He also realized he had expected her signal to fail. Her system was, in its way, much more straightforward than Mike's. There were no mechanical parts; the entire interface was a matter of driving electrons.

Even as he registered the awe, excitement, and speculation of the rest of the team, he found himself wondering about the way Sara and Mike used their new kinetic capacities: were they the same or fundamentally different? There was a chance Mike was manipulating matter while Sara was manipulating energy. If that was the case . . .

His thoughts were interrupted by a debate that had broken out among the experimenters. Timmy Troll was loudly arguing that he didn't care how late in the day it was. He wanted his shot at the brass ring, wanted to know if he could replicate the hands-on stuff Mike and Sara were doing.

Chuck was arguing just as vehemently—if not as loudly—that they at least needed to take a dinner break. “Really, wouldn't you rather come at this fresh?”

“Hell, no!” objected Tim. “I do my best work between one and three
A.M.
on a liter of Dr Pepper and a bowl of Froot Loops. I'm ready now, dammit!”

“Uh . . .” said Eugene.

“Can't we call it a day?” asked Sara. “I'm shot.”

“I could eat an elephant,” said Mike in a deadpan. “Doubt Helen's cooked me one, though. Have to settle for a cow or two.”

“Well, fine,” said Tim. He looked as if he might be ready to
descend into a fit of sulks. “I think there's a zoo about four blocks from here. Go find an elephant to chew on. You and Sara already got your fifteen minutes of fame, big guy. I want mine now, okay? You guys can just go home and rest if you're too tired to stick around and watch.”

Sara shook her head, setting her dark hair swinging. “No way, Tim. I'm not missing any of this. Not one moment. We're either all here, or we're all gone.”