The God Wave (16 page)

The pragmatism of that thought frustrated him even more.

He pulled himself back from that abyss. He was not one of those pathetic characters who used the death of a loved one to become an activist in some cause related to their death. He was a polymath. A pragmatist. Sure, Forward Kinetics could devote itself to medical advancements, but if medicine couldn't save Lucy, why did anyone else deserve the chance? To him, the company was a means of reaping scientific credibility and professional standing from a most arduous and painful period of his life. A way of grasping profit from pain, to gain something tangible from his suffering. A way to even the score.

It was also his way of kicking God in the teeth. If God wasn't there to save Lucy, then screw Him. And screw Chuck—a scientist, someone who's supposed to know better—for believing in Him.

Matt reached out and flipped the laptop shut. Forget telling Chuck about his experiments with Lanfen and VR. He knew they were experimenting after hours; Matt knew the same of him and Mini, wasting their time with more imaginary creatures like angels and unicorns.

While the whole team could help work out the VR angle, it wasn't critical to their success, and right now that was all that mattered. Let Chuck be as surprised as everyone else when Lanfen came out onstage at Applied Robotics. Let the physicality of her demonstration kick his angels' asses. Let them all stand in awe of what Matt could do without anyone there to help him.

The way it's always been.

They'd hired a moving van to truck the kinetic interface components to San Antonio, Texas, for the Applied Robotics convention. The setup crew, which included Dice and Eugene, flew out early to supervise the hired hands. Everyone else would follow later in the week, leaving time to rehearse the show and work the kinks out of anything that needed working out.

Bilbo and his nearly identical backup unit, Frodo, had gone by air in the belly of the chartered jet that carried the Forward Kinetics setup crew. Dice felt as if he were involved in some sort of dastardly conspiracy. He hated secrecy, even when—as Matt kept assuring him—it was a
temporary
secret and that, after the show, they'd all work on this together.

“Trust me,” his boss had repeatedly assured him. “Chuck will be thrilled.”

Dice wasn't so sure about either of those things; plus, the matter of Lanfen's unique ability to work with the VR telekinetically intrigued and puzzled him. Was it something as bonehead simple
as the fact that the robot looked relatively human and therefore invited her to identify with it—to literally get inside its empty head?

Ghost in the machine.

Dice shook himself, watching the wisps of cloud that glided past the airplane's fuselage as it descended toward San Antonio International Airport. He was neither a believer nor a disbeliever when it came to the squishy topic of the supernatural (or perhaps hypernatural). Who knew? He was firmly in the camp of agnosticism—as oxymoronic as that probably was—but he had to ask himself: what phenomenon was Forward Kinetics exploring and exploiting? If the zetas were manipulating machinery with their minds, what part of that mind was the actor, and by what agency was it acting?

A more disconcerting question was this: when Chen Lanfen was looking out at the world from inside Bilbo, what part of her was doing the seeing? Even a master puppeteer, though he might throw his voice into the puppet's mouth, couldn't see out through its eyes. While Lanfen was seeing from Bilbo's point of view, what was happening with her body? Were her physical eyes still seeing something? They'd asked her that. She'd suggested they were, though she'd said things looked “different.” She couldn't articulate what she meant, though, and that had only led to more questions.

Were her muscles offline? They'd asked that, too. She couldn't say. She hadn't tried moving her body while going mental. That was the whole point, after all—not to need to move the body while driving the bot. Clearly her autonomic functions were fine. She still breathed; her eyes still blinked; external input didn't seem to distract her.

Recalling how she liked to talk her way into gamma, he realized that she handled multitasking, as she put it, exceptionally well, which might have been the secret of her success with the VR. Chen Lanfen was one of those rare individuals who could
walk, chew gum, pat their head, and rub their tummy all at the same time. The questions were: Was that a learned ability or a native one? Was it in whole or in part responsible for her inconsistency in handling the bot?

On the ground in San Antonio, Dice and Eugene settled in at the hotel, then went over to the venue to begin moving the largest pieces of equipment into the exhibitor's booth. Dice had the two ninja bots brought over from the airport and stowed in the company's storage cubicle beneath the main auditorium. It was just bad, dumb luck that Eugene followed a pallet of empty crates down to their unit and saw the two large Anvil cases that contained the bots shoved up against the front wall.

“What are those two big silver cases in the storage area?” he asked as he strolled back to the booth. “I don't remember anything like that on the manifest.”

Moment of truth. Dice was surprised to realize his overwhelming emotion was relief. “It's a surprise. For Chuck. Something Matt and I have been working on.”

“A surprise? That you're going to pop in public? That sounds a little dangerous.”

“You know Matt. He's Mr. Risk Taker. Plus he assures me that Chuck will love it. I dunno . . . d'you think Chuck likes surprises?”

“I'd say that depends entirely on what the surprise is,” said Euge cautiously. “What is it?”

“Just a piece of tech we've been working on.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. The security bot. Matt mentioned that to Chuck already, though.”

“Well, there's a bit more to it than that . . .”

Euge raised his hands. “Say no more. Far be it from me to rain on another man's
khidesh
.” He lowered his eyes and glanced off down the red-carpeted aisle. “Chuck has a surprise, too.”

“Really?” Dice was gratified to hear it.

“Really.”

Message received. “Ooookay. Well, I guess the surprise will be mutual.”

“When's Matt planning on springing his?”

“Day two.”

Euge looked relieved. “Good. Chuck was going to wait until day three.”

Dice laughed. “Can you believe these guys? All this revolutionary stuff, and they're acting like it's a surprise birthday party.”

Euge grinned back. “Well, let me know if you need help with yours. I promise I will not leak a word of it to Chuck.”

Dice regarded him solemnly for a moment, then took a deep breath, glanced around, lowered his voice, and said, “Okay, here's what we've got . . .”

MATT AND CHUCK ARRIVED LATE
the next day, bringing with them the various videos of the work they'd done in the lab. Chuck also brought an edited-down version of his TED Talk to explain the technology after the formal presentations. In addition to those, Sara or Tim would be available to provide a live demonstration of their software, followed by a show-and-tell on how the results had been achieved, followed by Mike performing a drill with Roboticus III. A key component to the demonstration was audience participation. They'd experimented enough with their own interns to know it was possible for a rank novice to drive Roboticus in mere minutes with Becky's aid. They'd practiced the show repeatedly at home and did so again here at the convention center behind a concealing set of curtains that ran on a track down both flanks of the booth.

The secrecy was crucial. Anyone who wanted to know about Forward Kinetics needed to attend the show, and so everything currently available to the public was designed to suck them in.
Brochures were distributed throughout the conference hall, and yet were singularly uninformative: long on background and goals and descriptions of the components of the FK system and short on information about what the technology actually did. Each rack of brochures was accompanied by a computer set into a niche along the outer wall of the booth that would show videos of the TED Talk . . . and beyond, but only if the visitor had seen the stage presentation and received a key code.

Control of information would build anticipation. At least that was Matt's idea.

Anything having to do with control usually was.

CHUCK WAS MORE NERVOUS THAN
he'd ever been in his entire adult life. The Applied Robotics show was either a dream come true or his worst nightmare. He suspected he would not really know which until it was all over. Possibly not even then.

At nine the doors of the convention center opened, and the Forward Kinetics booth immediately attracted a lot of attention. It was what Eugene had called “stupid big”; it was done up in a silvery gray offset by electric blue and gold graphical elements and chairs, and it sat on the trade show equivalent of a Miracle Mile.

The paid interns and lab assistants dealt with most of that attention. All were dressed in “nice casual”—black jeans and attractive, logo-bearing T-shirts, and electric blue Converse sneakers. Not that they needed them to stand out.

Chuck spent most of the first hour of the show behind the stage, going over the presentation in his mind. From his hiding place (and he was honest enough to recognize it as such), he could hear the booth staff trying to deflect questions about what sort of technology they were going to be showing. This early in the morning, with the time for the first show fast approaching, the grumbles were mild.

It was far too soon when Matt entered the backstage area from a side door and said the inevitable:

“Showtime, team.”

Sara, who was perched on an Anvil crate, reading from her iPad, glanced up and nodded. She looked businesslike, poised. Almost grim. Apparently that was how she showed nerves.

Chuck smiled crookedly at Matt. “Are you sure you don't want to run the circus?”

“You're the word guy. I'm the numbers guy. I'll be stage right if you need me to step in and answer technical questions . . . or catch tomatoes and whip you up a salad.”

“Technical questions like, ‘Are you freaking kidding?'”

“Chuck, we know we're not kidding. It's weird, it's unexpected, but it's real. You know it. I know it. It's time for the world to know it.”

Chuck nodded, flipped on his nearly invisible headset microphone, took a deep breath, sent up a prayer for calm, and nodded at Sara. Together they stepped out onstage.

He had heard the murmured voices of the audience and so knew there was one. It was smaller than he'd hoped, though. Of the forty-two chairs they'd set up, only about twenty-five were filled, though there were a few noncommittal souls hanging out on the periphery. In a way, it was a relief.

Fewer people to laugh us off the floor.

He leapt into his introductory comments as the big-screen TV behind and to his left switched from the company logo to a computer desktop. Sara, meanwhile, moved to sit in a chair at extreme stage left, facing the computer screen at an oblique angle. Chuck introduced her as Sara Crowell, CAD/CAM engineer, and then introduced himself, giving his full credentials and affiliations. He saw at least one member of the audience checking her smartphone, ostensibly looking him up online.

He described the company's work as being an exploration of
the interface between man (or woman) and machine. All during this Sara was opening her CAD program and creating an elevation of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses—something she had virtually memorized. She kept her eyes on the huge monitor, her hands on the arms of her chair.

“For the last minute or so, you've been watching a demonstration on the screen to my left.”

He glanced at it. In the time it had taken him to rattle off their creds, Sara had erected the two-story frame of the home and sketched in the main areas for landscaping.

“I'd like you to watch a moment longer,” he said, “then answer a question for me.”

Sara, a smile ghosting across her lips, completed the building's frame and clad it in finishing materials. Then she laid out pathways and started on the plantings—all at a pace hampered only by the speed of the software itself.

Chuck turned back to the audience and was gratified to see that several of those standing at the periphery had found seats. “So here's the question: what do you think we're demonstrating here today?”

There was a puzzled silence before a man in the front row said, “Well, it's not the software. I recognize that app. We use it for architectural drafting, too.”

As frequently happened in classroom situations, the bold first commenter opened a small floodgate of guesses.

“It's not the monitor. I think we're all familiar with Samsung.”

“The chair?” someone guessed, and everyone laughed.

Chuck laughed with them. “No, not the software or the monitor or the chair.”

“No-brainer,” said a middle-aged woman in a bright red blazer about three rows back. “Your company is Forward Kinetics. You create interfaces. She's using some sort of new controller.”

“Bingo. What sort of new controller?” Chuck asked.

All eyes went to Sara, who was putting a glittering, cream-colored exterior material on the Wright house.

“Palm glove?” the woman asked.

“Sara?” Chuck found he was actually enjoying playing game-show host.

She paused momentarily to show the audience her empty hands, holding them palms out in plain sight.

“Retinal?” someone asked.

“She'd be triggering the menus,” said the woman. “She's doing this with finger macros—in a manner of speaking.”

“It's in her mouth,” called a man in a pale gray sharkskin suit who was standing at the fringes of the group. “Some sort of oral manipulation.”

“Oooh, baby,” said someone else to more laughter.

Chuck was shaking his head. “No and definitely no.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said the woman in red. “You're a neurologist, right? Oh, I heard you on Ira Flatow's show ages ago.”

“I am a neurologist,” Chuck said, “and when I did
Science Friday,
I had a wild idea about brain waves and nothing to show for it. Today, I do have something. First of all I'm going to show you what's driving the demonstration.”

He left the podium and moved upstage, where he drew back the curtain behind it.

“I am Oz,” someone in the front row murmured, “great and powerful.”

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” said someone else.

Of course there was no man behind the curtain. But there was Becky, now far more portable on a sleek stand with casters. Chuck rolled it to the front of the stage, lifted the neural net from its stand, and moved to place it on Sara's head. Then he touched a
button on his iPad, and the image on the giant display split—one half showing the ever-growing Frank Lloyd Wright house, the other showing the peripatetic roil of Sara's brain waves.

“What you're seeing on the big display is the EEG output from Sara's brain. Specifically those are zeta waves.”

There was a general burst of static from the audience. Of the comments, Chuck heard: “They're what?” “I've never heard of zeta waves.” “What sort of readout is that?” “You've got to be kidding.” “Oh, wow!”