The God Wave (14 page)

“Well, that's the problem. Sometimes I can't hear my mind because my body's talking too loudly. I think you're incredibly sexy, and it's hard to separate that from the other stuff.”

Her expression was suddenly very serious. “Try.”

He nodded. “Okay, I will. But you may have to be patient, too. I don't want to mess this up.”

She smiled suddenly, brilliantly. “Well, that's something right there, isn't it?”

He supposed it was. “What about you?” he had the temerity to ask. “What's your mind saying?”

She picked up her fork again and went back to her linguine. “Oh, it's pretty much in agreement with my heart and all my other parts on this one.

“I've been in love with you from the moment we met.”

“So is what you're saying,” asked the guy in the third row, “that these people have developed a form of telekinesis?”

Chuck glanced back at the screen behind him on the large stage. It was frozen on Sara's “use the Force” moment as she high-fived Tim. He had covered the genesis of the project from inspiration to fruition, had shown each subject during different phases of development (to increasing murmurs and bursts of applause that never seemed to sweep the whole audience), and had stopped with the videos of the team in their pre-zeta gamma states.

Yet the first question was about telekinesis.

He had thought that describing each component of the rig and what it did would have inoculated him against this question. He was momentarily stumped because the truth was something he had agreed he would not tell, and the truth was that, yes, these people had developed a form of telekinesis—a form that relied on their maneuvering the mechanics of whatever it was they were
trying to control. Chuck, who knew himself to be a terrible liar, had to find a way to say less than the truth without telling a lie.

“What I'm saying,” he said finally, “is that these people are . . . flexing mental muscles we didn't know they had. They are manipulating these components using the electrical impulses of their brains thanks to a formula created by Dr. Matt Streegman of MIT that modulates the impulses—or conditions them—so they can be interpreted by the interface.”

“So you have a wireless transmitter and a transceiver that remotely controls machinery.” The guy shrugged. “What additional value do you get over just manipulating the machinery remotely in any other way?”

Chuck smiled. This part he knew cold.

“Well, just imagine you've got a highly skilled programmer who loses the use of his hands. With the Forward Kinetics system, you would not have to lose the knowledge and skill of that programmer, and he wouldn't have to lose his job or go on long-term disability. With our system he could learn to manipulate his software without having to use his hands. Or consider the plight of someone who's had an advanced stroke. He's still in there, thinking, feeling. He just can't communicate. With the Forward Kinetics system, we have hope he will be able to communicate—and more.”

Another man took the microphone. “Have you been approached by the military? Because the military implications of this are stunning.”

Chuck blinked. “The military? No, we haven't been approached by them.”

“Don't you think that's kind of weird? You'd think they'd be all over something like this.”

“They probably think we're just an uptown version of the loony geeks who wear tinfoil hats and build robots in their par
ents' basements.” Chuck got an appreciative laugh from the other geeks in the room (roughly the entire audience) and smiled. But the question did bother him. The military must have noticed him and his partners in some way. The thought gave him a chill.

“Given the state of drone technology,” said someone else, “what are the advantages of a system like this? I mean what might the military gain if they had operatives outfitted with this sort of tech instead of the immersive VR systems they're beginning to use now?”

As uncomfortable as he was discussing military applications, Chuck warmed to contrasting the Forward Kinetics tech with state-of-the-art VR guidance systems.

“Simply put,” he said, “the technology will be smaller, more portable, and ultimately far less expensive. Right now the military spends millions—billions perhaps—on physical VR system interfaces. They'd have none of that with the Forward Kinetics technology.”

“What would someone need to avail themselves of your technology?” was the next question.

Another minefield to peck through. If what Chuck thought was happening to his subjects really was happening, the customer wouldn't need any of the equipment except for training purposes. Their operatives could train at Forward Kinetics, then leave to pursue their missions. He couldn't say that, though, so he answered at the highest level—what they needed to train a zeta operator.

“Well, there's the brain pattern monitor, the neural net, and the kinetic interface, which is made up of the Streegman converter software and the Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface, which includes an actualizer unit. We're working to miniaturize all of that. Theoretically they wouldn't even need a huge facility for their operatives. Anyplace they had access to a power supply
would do. We're working on that, too, of course—enabling the use of a variety of power sources.”

“What is the mechanism, though, Doctor?” asked a young woman with an earnest expression. “What exactly is it that the subjects are manipulating? I mean the diversity in your group is . . .” She broke off, looking at the screen. “Manipulating hardware and manipulating software would seem to be two completely different modalities.”

Back on terra firma, Chuck relaxed. “Well, not really. Even the robotic arm you saw Mike working with before and the John Deere backhoe on which he took his,” he paused, thinking of how to put it before settling on, “midterm exams, I guess you'd say, have a software component that requires a command set. Even a mechanical device has a command set. It's just that the command set for Tim's or Sara's software-hardware combination is written in ones and zeroes, and the command set on a mechanical device is written in ergs, in units of applied energy. It's still binary—on/off, forward/backward, left/right—and all of these things can be accomplished using the electrical impulses of the brain. That's the difference between what we're doing and direct telekinesis. Our subjects aren't moving things; they're manipulating the mechanisms to cause things to move.”

The thought hit him just as the last word left his mouth. He'd flirted with the idea before, but now it came back to roost: if what he'd said about impulses and ergs was true, then
could
his subjects one day manipulate any material object directly?

The implications of that were swept away on a tide of questions: If the gamma wave showed a variety of brain modalities working in concert, what did he theorize the zeta wave represented? Did he think anyone could generate zetas? What was the next step in the Forward Kinetics process? Were they accepting job applications?

He was sitting in the hotel restaurant enjoying a late-night dinner when his mind wandered back to the question of the zeta wave's implications. Clearly the fact that they'd been able to spur the state in all three of their primary subjects and Mini meant something. It suggested that this new brain state was very near the surface in some individuals. Which, in turn, suggested that they were evolutionarily close to its emerging on its own.

How close? If they sped up the process artificially, would humanity be ready for it? In a world where power-hungry men still used any tools at their disposal to arrogate control, resources, and territory, was even the most enlightened society ready for the God wave?

He was shaking himself and trying to put the idea out of his head when two of his talk attendees sidled up to the table and asked if they could chat for a moment. He smiled, was pleasant, and said he welcomed their questions.

They were far more welcome than his own.

MATT, TRUE TO HIS WORD,
had not pressured Dice to make his bot ready any earlier than he'd promised. It took close to two weeks of intense work, but Bilbo the Second was finally ready for a workout. Chuck was in transit from the TED conference in Long Beach and not expected back in the office until the next morning, so they brought the video rig down from the main lab to record their activities.

Bilbo was beautiful in his own way, Dice thought. His head was humanoid, of clear, molded, high-impact plastic and steel. It had LEDs that marked where his cameras were set—not strictly necessary, but as Brenda said, “very cool-looking.” The front set was blue, the rear set red, the side set green. The cameras had infrared lenses that could be deployed, presumably, at a thought. The VR rig would allow the operator a 360-degree view in day
or night. Dice and his team had built small headlamps into the forward video apparatus as well.

The head swiveled on a pair of shoulders that were roughly as wide as Lanfen's. The hips were of equal width. The whole body was covered with a shiny, silver, titanium aluminum alloy skin that was tough as nails and flexible and hid the vulnerable spine. The arms and legs were jointed more or less like a human body's, but the joints could be flipped so the bot could reverse course by simply swiveling its head 180 degrees and repurposing its joints. That was supposed to happen pretty much automatically when the operator reoriented the head and began backward momentum.

In theory.

It was features like these, Dice thought, that spoke to the recurring question of what a zeta operator could do that a manual VR operator could not. An operator wearing a standard VR rig could not spin his head around 360 degrees—or even 180—or reverse direction fully without turning around. Even with a normal human operator in a full VR suit that transferred kinetic information directly to a humanoid bot, the bot would be limited to what the human body could do.

He'd seen the models the Japanese were experimenting with. In his opinion their approach was all wrong. They were thinking C-3PO and Data when they should have been thinking Slinky. If the real estate mantra was “location, location, location,” the robotics mantra was “application, application, application.” This application clearly required flexibility and balance above all else, so trying to make the robot more humanoid in the ways the Japanese had made little sense. It was the flexibility of the human spine—the shock-absorber qualities of its joints and muscles—that he wanted to emulate more than its upright stance or proportions or even the precise way in which it was jointed.

When Lanfen came in at nine that night, she gratified him by agreeing that Bilbo II was indeed a work of art.

“Wow,” she said, shivering and rubbing her hands together as she warmed up next to a heater vent. “He's beautiful, Dice. I love the way his spine flexes.” She grinned. “Hey, Papa, can I have the keys to the robot?”

Dice returned the grin. “Only if you promise not to wreck him again.”

Lanfen's face fell. “I . . . I'm sorry . . .”

“No,” he said, mortified at his mistake. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it the way it came out. I promise. Look, Matt put on a fresh pot of coffee. Why don't you have some? Warm up before you take a test drive.”

She nodded and shrugged out of her coat. She was sipping her coffee when Matt came in, humming. That was unusual in and of itself—Matt hummed only when he was on a high from having pulled off a major coup or germinating a really good mathematical theorem. Dice knew better than to ask outright, but he probed just in case Matt was in a mood to share.

“You sound chipper, Dr. Streegman. I take it something miraculous has occurred?”

Matt stopped and looked at Dice as if he'd only just realized he was there. “Miraculous? No. Just positive.” He rubbed his hands together. “Are we ready to rock?”

“Just a moment,” said Lanfen, setting down her coffee cup. She took off her shoes, walked onto the exercise mat, and went through a series of stretches and breathing exercises. With that done she pronounced herself ready to rock, and Dice wired her up.

He checked all the inputs, had Matt double-check his algorithm to make sure they had the latest rev of the software running, and fired up the rig. Lanfen had created a sort of routine for herself—a set of exercises she always used to get in the zone, as
she put it. Dice was fascinated by the process not just because she was awfully attractive but because of the surreal grace, control, and balance she showed. She looked sometimes as if she were floating above the mat rather than standing on it, and the way she moved from one kung fu pose to another reminded him of Olympic gymnasts on a balance beam—only about ten times more elegant.

“You're staring,” Matt murmured. “Not that I blame you. She's something special. You should ask her out.”

Dice shook himself. “Uh . . . I'm seeing Brenda.”

Matt's eyebrows rose. “Doesn't she work under you?”

“This isn't the military, Matt,” Dice said more sharply than he meant to.

Matt just shrugged and turned away to watch Lanfen put Bilbo through his paces. She was doing the moves herself at that point, getting used to the balance of the bot and the new VR component that allowed her to see the world from Bilbo's point of view.

“What do you think?” Dice asked her. “Ready to go mental?”

She laughed. “Funny you should put it that way. I feel like I'm mental whenever anyone asks me what I do in my free time.”

Matt's head jerked up. “You signed a nondisclosure contract, Ms. Chen. What are you telling people you do in your free time?”

Lanfen shot him an unreadable glance. “I tell them I do the same thing I do during my workday—kung fu.” She and the robot pivoted toward Matt and performed a most proper bow. Then she settled into a lotus posture and sent Bilbo into a series of moves without as much as a twitch on her part.

Dice was impressed.

She'd gone through the sequence of basic postures twice when she began to throw in more difficult moves that she might use in a sparring match.

“You know,” she said as the bot bobbed and weaved and kicked, “it would be much more realistic if Bilbo had someone or something to spar with. Maybe you need to get another martial artist on staff.”

“We don't officially have one on staff now,” Matt reminded her.

“True.”

The bot executed a roundhouse kick and rolled into a somersault. It came up on the far side of the mat, then Lanfen flipped the head around and had the bot execute a series of kicks and rolls in the opposite direction.