The God Wave (17 page)

He let them stare at the screen for a moment or two while Sara made magic happen on the screen, and her brain waves danced like a sea in a storm. Then he said, “This is a Brewster-Brenton Brain Pattern Monitor. What you're seeing displayed is the three-dimensional representation of an EEG. I'm sure you're familiar with those—at least with the two-dimensional version. The neural net Sara is wearing is a literal net of positron transceivers that read the brain waves she's generating. The positrons are able to penetrate the brain to pick up electrical impulses deep inside, thereby making the resolution much finer.”

He turned back to the podium, where he'd set the iPad from which he was controlling the show. A touch, and the half of the big display showing the BPM output switched to a series of standard, two-dimensional tables showing different types of brain waves.

“I heard someone say they'd never heard of zeta waves. Here you can see the standard set of brain waves the human brain generates. From lowest to highest frequency: Delta, which runs up to four hertz. Theta. Alpha. Beta, which is the dominant active rhythm. Gamma, which is a veritable brain symphony and tops out around one hundred hertz. Then there's the overlapping mu wave, which, like alpha, is a resting wave. By comparison the zeta wave has a frequency of seven megahertz.”

He paused to let that sink in for a moment, glancing again at Sara's progress with the drawing. She was adding shrub roses to the garden.

“YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF ZETA
waves? Well, neither had we,” Chuck admitted, “until we started tracking the changing brain waves through a variety of activities and started wondering why, if a brain wave could make a needle jump on a chart, it couldn't also make other things happen.”

Sara continued her design, and Chuck continued to answer questions while going deeper into the science he and Matt had developed. Eventually, though,
the question
came from the floor.

“Wait a minute,” said Sharkskin. “When she started her demo, she wasn't wearing the neural net. What exactly was she doing? What is it you're selling?”

Okay . . . moment of truth
.

At the periphery of his vision, Chuck could see Dice and Eugene standing together near one of the booth's clear Plexiglas support pillars, attention fixed on the stage as if it might suddenly explode. He was aware that it might do just that, at least metaphorically.

“When we started our exploration,” Chuck said carefully, “we were trying to see what sort of activity the brain's normal range of waves could accomplish through the Brenton-Kobayashi interface, aka Becky.”

That got a chuckle.

Chuck tried not to notice how dry his mouth was. He licked his lips. “The first experiments were exceptionally straightforward—the simplest instruction set we could contrive. Mike, are you ready?”

Mike waved at him from the rear of the audience.

“This is Mike Yenotov. He's a construction engineer who's
been working with our robotics team. He and Roboticus are going to demo what is probably the simplest set of activities.”

Mike lifted Roboticus 3.0 over his head. The little bot now looked like a gleaming, silver version of a ghost from the old Pac-Man video game. Mike set the bot down and began moving it in a large circle around the audience and out into the aisles, around the booth, and finally up a ramp onto the stage.

Once there he moved the robot back and forth, around in circles. Finally he parked it beneath Sara's chair.

“That was about what you could do with the normal range of brain waves if you were wearing the neural net and were connected to the slave unit via the kinetic interface,” said Chuck.

“But he wasn't using the interface,” said a guy sitting in the front row. His face was red, as if he wanted to yell something.

“As I said, we had no idea that something beyond these waves existed until Sara and Mike here spiked into the seven-megahertz range. It scared the stuffing out of us,” he admitted. “We thought the machinery had malfunctioned. Then we realized Dr. Streegman's brain wave conversion algorithm just didn't cover a broad enough range. He adjusted it, and then . . .” He glanced at Mike and scratched his forehead. “Well, then we discovered that the zeta waves were interacting directly with the slave unit—either through its native mechanisms or through the actualizer. Which depended on the subject, but all three of our initial subjects were finally able to control their slave mechanisms without the kinetic interface.”

He stopped talking and let that idea settle.

“You're talking about psychokinesis,” said Red Blazer. “That's nuts.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Sharkskin, gathering his stuff. “What could you possibly be selling besides snake oil?”

Chuck's throat went completely dry, but this was what they'd
prepared for. “We don't know if everyone can learn to generate zeta waves,” he admitted, “or manipulate machinery without the kinetic interface. For some applications we may be selling a training program, for others an actual mechanism—hardware and software.”

“You can train people to do that?” asked someone in the fourth row—a woman in an Astros jersey.

“It's a hoax,” said Sharkskin. “The concom didn't vet them thoroughly enough.” He stood and straightened his suit. “I may lodge a formal complaint.”

Chuck was vaguely aware of sudden movement at one side of the stage. A moment later Dice was standing next to him.

“Would you like to try it yourself?” the robotics expert asked.

Sharkskin snorted. “Pushing pixels with my mind?” He gestured at Sara. “She's not even really manipulating that CAD software. It's preprogrammed.”

On the screen the program stopped in the middle of a shrubbery. Sara turned her head to spear the guy with steely gray eyes. “No, it's not, and I can prove it. Pick any element in the rendering and tell me how to change it. As you can see, I can rock this stuff way faster than anyone could do it with a mouse or a track pad.”

The guy made a face.

“Aw, c'mon,” the Astros fan told him. “Don't be a wuss.”

“All right. The building material—red sandstone.”

Sara swung back to the screen. A split second later, a red sandstone façade melted over the front of the building.

“An oak grove where the swimming pool is.”

She did it.

“Red maple by the front door.”

She grew the tree out of the soil.

“In a container.”

“Material?”

“Brass.”

“Brass it is,” Sara said and made the pot happen.

The guy made an exasperated sound. “It's a trick! It has to be a trick. There's someone backstage—”

“Who can translate your verbal command into an image as fast as you give it?” asked Dice. “Why? Why does it have to be a trick? I've been working on this project for over a year, and I can tell you it's just science—though I admit it sometimes seems like magic.”

“And who would you be?” Sharkskin wanted to know.

The young woman in the jersey was grinning from ear to ear. “He's Daisuke Kobayashi, the robotics wiz from MIT. I've seen your work.”

Dice actually blushed. “Right. Thanks. I ask again, who wants to come up and try this?”

Sara took off the neural net and held it out. There was a long moment of silence before the woman in the Astros jersey rose.

“Oh, right,” said Sharkskin. “A fangirl. You planted her.”

“Then you come up,” Dice said, taking the helm from Sara. “You can push the bot around, or you can push pixels on a screen. Which do you prefer?”

Chuck was sure the guy was going to refuse, but he didn't. He put his conference bag down and went to the stage with an arrogant swagger.

“I'll try the bot.”

It took only a moment to hook the guy—Greg was his name—to Roboticus's kinetic interface. Dice explained the mechanism in the bot: a dead-simple four-way joystick.

“You think about pressing the joystick forward; it will go forward. Right to go right. Left to go left. Back to go back. If you get crazy confident, you can push it diagonally left or right to make a shallower turn.”

“I think . . .”

“You think about the joystick,” Dice repeated. He glanced at Chuck, who turned to the rest of the audience, which had grown considerably, and explained how the Becky interface translated the subject's brain waves into kinetic motion.

Chuck tried not to read the expressions of distrust on many faces, instead concentrating on the Astros “fangirl” and others who looked merely curious or actively interested.

Greg's first efforts were shaky, but they produced results. Roboticus moved tentatively at first, then with more confidence, and Greg's brain waves played across the big display behind him. The expression on his face went from skeptical to intent as the bot moved shakily around the stage. He completed his dance with Roboticus by turning the gleaming little bot into a tight left-hand spin and generated a fitful gamma wave on the display.

Dice shut down the interface and lifted the net from Greg's head. “Questions?”

The expression on the man's face was priceless. The open mockery was gone, replaced by a look of bewilderment. “It worked. Or at least it seemed to work.
How
did it work?”

“Well, sure it worked,” said a man in jeans and a sweatshirt, standing on the sidelines. “You obviously work for them.”

“No, I don't.”

“No, he doesn't,” said another guy in an immaculate suit. “He works for Minolta. In the same department I do.” He flashed his convention badge. It matched Greg the sharkskin skeptic's.

“You could be in on it, too.”

“In on what?” asked Chuck, suddenly fascinated by the phenomenon of knee-jerk disbelief. “What is it about this you find so hard to accept or even consider?”

Sweatshirt Man made a broad gesture. “Well, it's . . . it's fantastic.”

Chuck mirrored the gesture—arms out, palms up. “As fan
tastic as robotics itself? As fantastic as brain surgery? Or having a space station orbiting the planet that can support human life? As fantastic as discovering new subatomic particles by building massive underground racetracks on which they collide?

“As fantastic as having a machine that tracks brain waves through their direct manipulation . . . like an EEG?

“What is it, exactly, that you find so much more fantastic about this?”

When he got no answer, he came out from behind the podium and gestured at the screen behind him, still showing the last brain waves recorded from Greg the skeptic's session with Roboticus.

“That is just a three-D EEG. It's not magic. It's not supernatural.” He paused and considered that. “Well, it's not magic anyway. I'd argue that what the human mind does is supernatural by definition, but that's a different discussion. If human brain waves can push a pin up and down on a piece of paper, why can't they move other things, like Dice's robot here?

“Sara can do it. Mike can do it. This man,” he said, pointing to Greg, “can do it. Why can't anyone?”

There was a lot of nodding at that. Murmurs of agreement. People slid into empty seats, wanting to see more. Chuck summoned Tim to the stage and gave them more.

CHUCK, MATT, AND EVERYONE ELSE
on the team were run ragged for the rest of the day. Their presentations were standing room only from then on; their interns were slammed, each one having his or her own bevy of curious, eager, skeptical, and sometimes combative conventiongoers to take through the TED Talk or the various components of the Forward Kinetics system or the significance of brain waves. They gave out a ton of literature, answered several complaints that sent Matt to Con Ops to present the same credentials they'd had to show to apply for a
presentation booth, and required the security guards to come and shoo off patrons who couldn't tear themselves away.

They ate dinner off campus, toasting each other, Roboticus, and each link in the Forward Kinetics chain. They began the meal with a high degree of energy and a lot of chatter and finished it almost falling asleep over their plates.

It was a short walk back to the hotel, and Matt and Chuck ended up strolling side by side at the rear of the group. Matt scuffed along with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans. The evening was balmy but cool, normal for April in San Antonio.

“So,” said Chuck, “you were fielding the business cards. Any serious bites?”

“A couple I'd call serious. A major teaching hospital is interested in the machines for retraining people with disabilities. They asked about the cost of the FK systems and hiring trained personnel to run an installation.”

Chuck's eyes lit up. “Really? That's . . . that's just what I was hoping—”

“I know.” Matt looked off down the curve of the river as they turned to climb up to street level. “Not sure they're going to be able to come through with the bucks, though. You've worked in a medical school with public outreach. You know what it's like.”

“Which hospital?” Chuck wanted to know.

Matt chuckled. “Johns Hopkins, as a matter of fact.”

Chuck grinned. “Anybody else?”

“New York State.”

“New York State what?”

“New York. The state. You know, where the Statue of Liberty is?”

“The state government is interested in the kinetic system?”

“Well, the attorney general's office anyway . . . so law enforcement.”

“That's all?”

Matt glanced over at his partner. Good God, he was actually disappointed. “Chuck, it's the first day of the con. We just unleashed a brand-new, squeaky-clean science fictional idea on people—”

“A lot of people. Hundreds.”

“Maybe even a thousand. But this is revolutionary stuff. We need to be realistic about how people are going to react and how long it's going to take them to go home and look around and see practical applications. But, hey, we've got two more days of the convention to go. And tomorrow is going to be the biggest day. We'll get a bigger bite then, I promise.”