The God Wave (12 page)

“And you acting like a spoiled brat is making me want to be gone,” Eugene said.

“I'm not just doing this for my own glory,” Tim protested. “We're on the edge of something big here. We either take a break or make a breakthrough.”

They all stood and glared at each other for several seconds—except for Chuck, who didn't glare so much as he looked deeply concerned. Then Mike shrugged and said, “Okay, I'm up for some overtime, I guess. I'll call Helen and tell her not to hold dinner up for me. But let's eat first, okay? We can send out for pizza,” he added when Tim opened his mouth to protest. “Or hey, Froot Loops and Dr Pepper if you want.”

Tim grinned.

Chuck looked over and saw Dice standing by the CAD/CAM, with the unnecessary piece of firmware in his hands. “You up for a late session, Dice?”

He nodded. “Sure. Pizza sounds great.” As if to offer an opinion of its own, his stomach chose that moment to utter a deep growl. He figured that was approximately the noise Matt was going to make when he had to cancel his after-hours session with Chen Lanfen.

“Um, someone should probably tell Matt,” he said. “In fact, I'll go do that now.” He set the PC card down and headed for the door.

“Any particular specs for the pizza?” Eugene called after him.

“Nah. Oh, except sausage, not pepperoni; bacon, not anchovies; and tomato sauce, not pesto. I hate pesto.”

“Engineers,” Eugene said, shaking his head. “Working on how to build the perfect pizza.”

THEY ATE DINNER IN THE
small conference room. Matt was in an unpleasant mood. Dice was pensive. Mike and Sara were comparing notes while Eugene asked questions and Tim looked on and sulked. That did not keep him from putting away more than half a pizza all by himself before leaving to hit the head—information that, unlike the pepperoni slices, he graciously shared with the others.

Chuck was too distracted to taste the pizza he ate. His mind darted in a thousand directions at once: to the next experiment, to his TED Talk, to the trade show that was only a few months away, to the papers that would need to be written, to the magazines that would offer peer reviews. That was going to be difficult. There was bound to be much Sturm und Drang when the essence of what they were claiming they'd done hit the journals. A part of him dreaded that, and a part of him relished it.

“How do we make this palatable to the scientific community?” Chuck realized he'd said the words aloud only when everyone else stopped and stared at him.

“What?” asked Matt.

“How do we frame this so we don't get dismissed summarily?”

Matt didn't look surprised or even thoughtful. “Don't worry about it.”

“Don't worry about it? You realize, don't you, that people will say we're hoaxing them.”

“Sure, I do. But they'll investigate, and they'll find that we're on the level. We've documented what we've done. We can repro
duce our results. We can even invite any naysayers to bring in their own subjects.”

“What if we can't reproduce our results?”

“That's absurd!”

“You're kidding me!”

Sara and Mike objected in eerie harmony.

“What I mean is,” explained Chuck, “what if you two are just exceptional individuals? What if this isn't something anyone can do? What if only certain people can do it? If it's not something anyone can do, even in part, then we're going to have a heck of a time proving ourselves. Our first failure could be our last failure.”

Matt dropped a crust onto the pile of crusts on his paper plate and wiped his hands on a napkin. “Chuck, sometimes you can be such a pansy ass. You're like a bluebird of doom. Cheerful as all get-out one minute and certain everything will end in abysmal failure the next.”

“Did you just call me a ‘pansy ass'? Where the hell do you get off? And where did you get your third-grade insults?”

“In third grade.” Matt shrugged, as if that was all the explanation he owed. Chuck half rose from the table, when he felt Eugene's hand on his arm.

“You're just cautious, Doc. Matt is being a putz.”

“I didn't mean anything by it,” he said.

“It sure as hell sounded like you meant something by it,” Chuck said, but sat down.

Matt seemed to ignore that. “You're wrong about something, Eugene. I'm not being a putz. I'm being
confident.
”

“A confident putz,” Eugene muttered, and Chuck smiled slightly.

Whether Matt heard it or not, he ignored that comment as well, saying, “We aren't hoaxing anyone. Therefore, though some people may suspect us of a hoax, we will ultimately be vindicated.”
He put his elbows on the table and leaned in. “Don't you guys get this? We are taking a hand in the evolution of our species.”

“
Homo kineticus,
” murmured Eugene.

A loud cry from beyond the half-open door of the conference room cut off all further discussion. There was the inevitable moment in which everyone's eyes locked over the last open pizza box at the center of the table, and then they were on their feet and out into the hall.

The cry was repeated, which allowed them to pinpoint the source—the main lab. Dice was first to the door, with Eugene and Chuck practically on top of him as he pushed through into the room.

Tim was standing in the center of the chamber, fists clenched, a fierce grin on his face. His overbright eyes were on the plasma display of the computer dedicated to his work. On-screen, a couple of CG characters were slashing at each other with large swords, which—as the others watched—transmuted into Klingon bat'leths.

“What did you do?” asked Chuck. “Running this equipment without Dice or someone here—”

Tim turned to look at Chuck, grin still intact. He pointed at the display, where the two warriors had frozen. “I'll show you what I did, Doc. I'll show you what I did. And I did it without even touching your precious equipment. Observe.”

He waved a hand, and the screen went dark. He turned to look at the empty digital canvas and said, “New file.”

The software opened in a new window.

“Human wire frame, large.”

A wire frame appeared on the screen.

“Walking.”

It began to walk. Then it acquired muscles, flesh, clothing. The clothing changed style, then color. The warrior's hair went
from blue-black to red. A sword hung at his hip. It grew—became a broadsword. He drew it, took it in both hands, turned, and faced his gaping audience.

Tim had adopted the same stance: feet apart, hands together on an imaginary sword hilt. He threw back his head and uttered the same cry that had brought the others to him.

Chuck stared at the dormant BPM, the neural net lying limply over its rest. Tim had done it. He had made the leap from the converter's assist to fully independent manipulation of the application.

As if he could read their understanding of this singular feat in their faces, he smiled and bowed deeply from the waist.

“Thank you, my adoring fans.” He straightened, his gaze going past Chuck to Sara and Mike. “I told you I meant to have my fifteen minutes. Beat that, bitches.”

Mini's reaction to the newest developments was the last one Chuck might have imagined: “Oh, I'm sure I can't.”

He had always known her as a confident, spirited, creative individual. He hadn't thought the word
can't
was even in her vocabulary, so her sudden diffidence was unexpected, to say the least. He and Eugene had met her for a session on the weekend after the big breakthrough and had brought her directly to the main lab, where they had debriefed her and shown her the video record of the other subjects' sessions.

“But you've done so well with the interface—”

“Right.
With
the interface. The interface is what lets me manipulate the images. There's just no way I could . . .” She made a rolling gesture at the computer.

“Why not?” Eugene asked. “The others have done it. Why should you be any different?”

“Because I
am
different,” she said, pressing her hands over her heart. “They're engineers and programmers. I'm just an artist.”

The two men exchanged glances and then Eugene said, “There is no
just,
Min. You're an artist. You've learned to use the kinetic interface to make art. That's no different than Tim using it to make CG game characters and environments.”

“Yes, Euge, it is. Timmy is a programmer. I'm not. I don't get all that technical stuff. I'm just going on instinct and adrenaline.”

“And,” Chuck argued, “a solid grasp of your tools. You understand your software no less completely than Sara understands hers.”

She shook her head, looking resigned. “It won't work with me, Dr. Brenton. It just won't.”

And it didn't. They got her into a gamma state, although it was harder than usual, and she began working with her constructs. Dragons, angels, people, scenery. When she went into a full zeta, Eugene pulled the firmware, and her creationary celebration shut down.

“As if the cops arrived to break up the party,” Euge murmured when he and Chuck went off in a corner to consult about what to try next.

“What if we don't let her know that the connection is broken?” said Chuck.

“You think she's psyching herself out?”

“Don't you?”

“Maybe. Or maybe this isn't something just anyone can do with the right training. Or maybe someone really does have to understand the raw mechanics of the software.”

“No. That can't be it. Of any of our subjects, I would have pegged Mini as the one most likely to transcend the machinery. She produces very strong signals in zeta, Euge.”

He turned Eugene toward the screen where Mini was working, through the kinetic interface, with a set of drawings. “Look
at her work, Euge. Look at the subtle shading on that horse's flank. Look at the detail in the mane and tail. As brilliant a game designer as Tim is, none of his work has that kind of subtlety. She's got the skills. I think she just doesn't believe she's got them.”

“But how do we do it without her noticing?”

“Leave the firmware alone—she'll see you disable it—and just focus on the machinery on her periphery. Let's prove to her she can do this.”

“Okay. She's in a strong gamma right now. Let's see if we can turn her up to eleven.”

Chuck did just that by asking her to create a landscape with one of her favorite creatures in it. They wanted baselines, he explained—brain waves they could compare to the others. She immersed herself in the exercise, painting her electronic canvas with light and color and life: in a forest of immense redwoods, a wolf with silver-flecked fur tipped its head back to gaze up into a tree where a peregrine falcon looked back in unruffled splendor.

She went into zeta as she was filling her sketch with solid color and form. They let her virtually disappear into her created world before cutting her free of the machinery. Eugene had stationed himself just behind the Brewster-Brenton, but that was not the piece he shut down. The BPM monitor's fans were relatively noisy. Mini had said she could even sense the charge the electronic components gave off. Instead he simply flipped the switch on Becky's transmitter; the BPM continued to chart Mini's brain waves, but the transmitter was no longer feeding them to the kinetic actualizer at the other end. The firmware was no longer getting a signal from the neural net.

And yet Mini's forest scene continued to unfold. Chuck caught Eugene's eye over the top of the BPM and grinned.

DICE'S NEW NINJA BOT WAS
beautiful in its own crazy way. It was about five feet tall when standing, and it had a head—a roughly human-head-size egg of plastic and aluminum that was equipped with a gyroscope and cameras. The body was segmented much like a centipede's; each smoothly rounded segment was about three inches tall, four inches deep, and six inches across. Each one was connected to the ones above and below with a spinal column of wire, fiber-optic cabling, and braces that behaved like the stays in a corset. The limbs were roughly humanoid in form and function with the exception that, unlike human limbs, these could rotate a complete 360 degrees at the shoulder or hip.

“It's like a ball-jointed doll but made of Slinkys,” Lanfen said, then smiled at Matt Streegman. “I don't suppose you'd let me take it home and dress it up.”

Dr. Streegman didn't get it. “Dress it up how?”

“I was thinking it might look cool as a member of Qin Shi Huang's imperial guard—you know, the Terra-Cotta Army?”

“That would impede its movement. Do you really think it needs clothes?”

Lanfen laughed. “Sorry, I realize this is way more expensive than my whole doll collection put together. But seriously, I guess whether you dressed it up or not would depend on what its job was. I mean what if you wanted someone to think it was human? Imagine how surprised a robber would be if he tried to knock over a bodega only to discover that the night watchman was a robot.”

Dr. Streegman was suddenly staring at her in that disconcerting way he had that proclaimed eloquently that the rest of the world had just disappeared as far as he was concerned. “That's . . . that's a very interesting idea,” he said at last.

“Your crown, your majesty.”

Lanfen glanced over to find Dice holding the neural net out to her. She put it on, then stood quietly as he adjusted it to her head.

“So everyone else has made the leap, huh?” she asked. “They've all got spooky mind powers.”

“They're not—” Dice began, but Lanfen waved him down.

“Just kidding,” she said. “I'm just taking it all in. It's hard to believe, you know. And I'm . . . well, I'm not sure what to expect.”

“Don't expect too much,” Streegman told her. “The bot is new, after all. It may take some getting used to.”

“It's not only new,” said Dice. “It's not really complete. We've still got work to do. Right now it's made up of six distinct modules. It was the only way we could get it done in the time frame Matt set.”

He didn't look at Streegman when he said that—something that Lanfen marked.
A little tension there
.
Not really my concern, though.
She wandered away from the two men.

She studied the bot, trying to get a sense of how it would balance and move. It was really a pretty cool design. Standing up on its legs, it really did have a human look to it. If it had clothing on it and a hat or helmet, she could almost believe it was a small adult. The segmented backbone gave the thing a very natural stance. Lanfen found it easy to put herself inside the frame even without the VR connections.

“You're online.” Dice's voice called her out of her study.

She took a moment to reorient herself, then began working the bot. It was just as she'd suspected it would be: the robot's weight distribution was much more natural than its predecessor's. Its thick spine flexed (though not as ably as her own), and the legs and arms moved with more humanlike grace. Its feet had the same rounded, padded bottoms as the last bot (in fact she suspected they were the same feet). She wondered how hard it would be to make a foot that flexed like the backbone.

She put the bot through a series of simple kung fu postures, starting with the basic eight: horse, bow and arrow, low tiger, lotus, empty, rooster, tai chi, unicorn.

“This is great, Dice,” she enthused as she moved the golem. “It feels as if I'm moving a human body. The balance is really nice. The lotus positions are kind of stiff. You might want to work on some sort of flexible pelvis. Just a thought. And I was wondering if you couldn't design some flexible feet . . .”

“Concentrate, Grasshopper,” said Dr. Streegman quietly.

“I am concentrating.” She kept the bot moving through a series of kicks and punches while maintaining her horse stance. “I should be in gamma now, right?”

She peripherally saw Streegman turn his head toward the BPM's display.

He chuckled. “Yes, you're in gamma.”

“Know thyself,” she shot back and tried to get the bot to execute a leg sweep. It fell over gracelessly. She saved it by tucking it into a roll and managed to get the thing back up on its feet.

“Yeah,” said Dice. “I see what you mean about the pelvis. We'll work on that.”

“Same deal with the shoulder area,” Lanfen told him as she righted the ninja and began again with the basic poses. “I also think he needs a name. I'm going to call him . . .” She took the bot from a low lotus to lotus to high lotus. “Bilbo.”

“Cool,” said Dice. “He's about the right size.”

Lanfen was silent for a moment, thinking about shoulders and hips and the widths they should be. The bot's shoulders and hips were narrow and ball-jointed directly into the first and last spinal segments. She tried to imagine that her own were narrower than they actually were—tried to adjust her imagined movements to that paradigm.

Ah, that's better.

She slid into sync with the little metal hobbit, trying to tailor her mental moves to its slightly off-kilter conformation. In a moment she was immersed in the movement, simply trusting that the bot was echoing her thoughts. She closed her eyes, imagining she was the robot.

This is so easy,
she thought.
So natural.

“I can hardly wait for you guys to get that VR piece in place. That'll be cool.”

Lanfen became bolder in her mental movements. Without the real weight of her body, without its limitations, she felt freer and even attempted a flying roundhouse kick, laughing when she heard Dice gasp and Streegman murmur, “Atta girl.”

She swung the bot into a shoulder roll, bounced it upright, and made it do a cartwheel then a series of three backflips, which took it to the edge of the mat.

“It's intermittent,” she heard Dice say.

“Wait for it to go solid,” said Streegman.

But their voices were background noise now. She ignored them, feeling like an Olympic gymnast about to do a final tumbling pass.

She started the bot into a run.

“That's it,” Streegman said.

Backflip.

Somersault.

Up.

Roundhouse kick . . .

Then something went wrong. She could feel her mental grasp on the bot slip. She grabbed hold of it with her whole mind and forced it into a tuck and roll. There was a clatter of sound, then a loud popping noise, followed by a shouted curse from Dr. Streegman.

Lanfen's eyes flew open in time to see Bilbo the ninja hobbit break apart, its upper half crashing to the mat while its lower half flipped through the air and into the equipment rack, sending Matt and Dice scrambling. It struck the BPM dead-on, smashing the console and the display as if they were made of tin and calling forth a cascade of sparks. The equipment rack wobbled, then toppled in slow motion, falling against a workbench before skidding along it and crashing to the floor. The sound was deafening. The silence after more so.

Lanfen pulled the neural net from her head and ran across the mat to the fallen machine.

“Oh my God, I'm so sorry.” She was winded; the words barely made it past her lips. She glanced from Dice to Streegman. “Are you all right?”

Dice, who had fallen, picked himself off the floor. “I'm fine. That wasn't your fault.”

Streegman was already kneeling over the broken equipment. “What happened? Was it her intermittent signal?”

Dice shook his head, sinking to his haunches beside his boss. “No. How could it have been? The bot came apart because it wasn't ready for this level of trial yet. The spine is a weak point. I think it needs an exoskeleton as well as a backbone. Or at least a musculature to hold the frame together. Look. It broke apart right at the fourth vertebra.”

Lanfen moved to stand behind the two men. She could feel Dice's anger, could see Streegman's determination to ignore it in his icy-blue eyes.

“My signal was intermittent?” she asked.

Streegman glanced up at her. “You weren't producing a solid zeta, just spikes in a strong gamma.”

“Then why did you—”

“You gave us a sustained burst. I figured it would stabilize, so I had Dice turn the back end of the interface off. The monitor was still tracking your brain waves, but the kinetic converter in the Brewster was dormant. Only Becky's actualizer was still live.”

“Well, it's dead now,” said Dice. He held up the bot's onboard computer. It had been crushed.

Lanfen wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the two men pried the broken machinery apart, laid the robot out on the mat in pieces, and stood the machine rack back up on its casters. Intermittent. What did that mean? That she didn't have what it took to do this? She'd spent years learning the meditative state necessary to master kung fu and couldn't focus well enough to create a decent zeta state? That was too ironic for words.

Matt stood. “I'm going to take the hard drive out of the Brewster and see if I can get the data off it. Is there someone on your team who's especially handy with that?”