The God Wave (2 page)

Mini Mause—who, like Sara, could move her mouse smartly from point A to point B and points beyond—came in one morning sleep deprived after a rock concert. Sitting at her station with the neural net over her pert head, she went through a set of protocols she had previously knocked out of the park.

“Oh, man . . .” Eugene raked his fingers through his riotous hair and pushed his glasses up his nose. “She didn't even make it out of the infield.”

Chuck peered over his shoulder at the 3-D EEG graph. “And neither did her brain waves. Look at it. That's one of the most lackluster betas I've ever seen.”

“I'm just a little sleepy. If you let me take a five-minute power nap and brew a cup of tea, I'll be fine.” Mini peered at the two neurologists through the gap between the Brewster unit's tower of electronics and its side-mounted computer display. Her pale, coppery cap of hair glittered with positron jewels, and her heart-
shaped face wore an earnest expression, which—despite being tired—made her look even younger than her nineteen years.

“Sure,” Chuck said absently. “Sure. Go ahead. Um, back in fifteen?”

“Fifteen,” Mini agreed and turned to walk away. “Kitchen's down on the left, right?”

Eugene, far more alert than either his boss or their subject, leapt after her. “Mini! The rig. The net. We need to disconnect you.”

She stopped just short of disaster and put her hands up to her head. “Oh! Oh, yeah. I feel pretty disconnected already.” She giggled as Eugene unfastened the net and slipped it off her head. She left the lab still laughing.

Eugene stood in the middle of the room with the net in his hands, staring after her. “She always like that?”

“What?” Chuck looked up sharply from the data on the Brewster's display. “Oh, yeah. I mean no, she . . . I guess you could say she's a woman of many moods. Right now she's just operating on too little sleep.” He shook his head, muttering to himself. “So the differential isn't just an individual amplitude setting, with some people being louder than others. It's even more variable than that.”

But Eugene heard him, and pulled his gaze from the lab doors, moved back to the brain pattern monitor, and set the neural net on its spherical rest. “You were hoping it was just a matter of adjusting the gain, weren't you?”

“Just,” Chuck snorted, shaking his head. “Even if it were just individual amplitude, I have no idea how to adjust for it. I have no idea how far off the charts Sara and Mini might go or how much boost to give Tim—”

“Troll,” Euge interrupted, informing Chuck of Tim's preferred moniker.

“—or the others. If there's no standard deviation from a norm, and we haven't even calculated the norm, then I don't know how to make this work.”

Eugene considered that for a moment. “Well, maybe someone else does. Maybe if we write up what we've got so far and get it into the community—”

“We'd get laughed at.” Chuck grimaced.

“Not gonna happen, Doc,” Eugene promised him. “You've already proven something: that brain waves can make magic happen.”

Chuck pointed a finger at his assistant's nose. “Don't say that. Don't use that word. It's not magic.” For some reason, the very idea made him angry.

“Okay, okay. Then brain waves make
shit
happen. You like that better?”

Chuck didn't. But it mattered little, for neither magic nor shit happened. Mini did come back from her power nap and tea with more verve, but that served only to underscore the problem: there was no baseline for the raw energy that a given subject's brain waves generated and no way to arrive at a differential to which the interface could adjust.

“GIGO,” Chuck murmured, looking over their results at the end of Mini's session. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Except it's not garbage,” Eugene argued. “It's data. About which you should write a paper, I'm thinking. Who knows? Maybe it's a matter of focus. Maybe our subjects can be trained to moderate or control their brain waves themselves.”

“I don't think it works like that, Euge. When Mini or Sara is interacting with the apparatus, they're both generating beta waves. They're just not generating them in the same energy range, and I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure what I can do about it. We need a . . . a transmission box. Something that ramps the
energy output up or down dynamically, so when Sara and Pierce, say, set out to screw in the metaphorical lightbulb, the same amount of energy is fed to the apparatus.”

Eugene was laughing.

“What?”

“I was thinking about that NPR
Science Friday
interview you're supposed to give next week. I can just hear Ira Flatow asking you to describe your latest project.” He held out an imaginary microphone. “‘Dr. Brenton, what fascinating experiments are you doing at Johns Hopkins currently?' ‘Why, Ira, we're trying to calculate the amount of mental energy it takes to screw in a lightbulb.'”

As much as he didn't want to, Chuck laughed. He laughed all the way back to his office, where he sat down to compile his notes. He had no intention of mentioning anything about his brain wave experiments on national radio.

He had no intention of ever talking about it with anyone at this point.

Matt Streegman glanced up at the clock over his office door and realized it was too dark to see it. Stupid anyway. He was sitting at his computer, his face bathed in the glow of his cinema display. All he needed to do was glance at the menu bar at the top of the screen: 1:10 a.m. On a Wednesday night. Correction: Thursday morning.

A long, depressing holiday weekend was already under way. He wished, not for the first time, that he could crawl into a suspended animation tank that would let him sleep away Thanksgiving without having to move or interact with people or think.

That was the worst thing about most weekends: the thinking. The worst thing about this particular weekend was the people.

Oh, he'd found a myriad of ways to keep working on projects he was supposed to leave in the lab and games he could play that challenged his Mensa-class brain. His favorite weekend pastime was to head over to Dice's house to help him (or, mostly, watch him) build robots. Dice—aka Daisuke Kobayashi—had, alas,
gone down to his parents' house in Charlotte for the Thanksgiving weekend. No joy there.

There was a tap at the door of his office. A shadow fell across the bubbled glass along the right-hand side.

“Yeah?” Matt rubbed his eyes and blinked at the code he'd just generated. He caught three syntax errors in the time it took for the night watchman to open the office door.

“Oh, hey, Dr. Streegman. It's, um, it's getting kind of late, sir.” The security guard—a twentyish fellow named Zack Truman—regarded him apologetically from the half-open door.

“Yeah. I know. I was . . . just finishing up.”
Hell, I was just making a complete mosh of this code.

“It'd be great if you could do that pretty quick, Professor. The whole campus is shutting down for the rest of the week. We've been asked to lock this building down, in fact.”

“And I'm in the way.” Matt smiled and held up a hand when Zack started to protest. “No, don't apologize. You're just doing your job. Give me about ten minutes to upload some stuff, and I'll be out of your hair.”

Zack glanced at the computer. “You're not going to work over Thanksgiving, are you? You should be, y'know, with your family and friends. Drinking eggnog and eating turkey, not . . .” He gestured at the screen.

Zack, Matt had come to know, was newly married and very happy, and as is the nature of very happy people, he wanted everyone else to be equally ecstatic about life. It would not occur to him that someone might not have close friends or might not want to spend some Hallmark holiday in the bosom of his ersatz family.

Matt was not, however, going to say anything about that. When Zack had wandered off, he uploaded the program he was working on to the cloud, backed it up onto his flash drive for good
measure, and snagged his laptop from the corner of his desk. He was out and had locked the office door before Zack reappeared.

At home, the message light on his telephone blinked accusingly.
You have seven unanswered, unlistened-to messages. What are you going to do about it?

He considered listening to them, his hand poised over the playback button, but the fact was he didn't want to listen to them. He knew that at least three would be from his sister, Chelsea, asking where the hell he was.

Instead, he picked up his iPhone, opened the remote for his entertainment center, and flicked on NPR, hoping there would be something distracting to listen to. There was—a repeat broadcast of
Science Friday
was in progress. He took some General Tso's out of the fridge, removed the metal handle from the container, and popped it in the microwave.

A few minutes later, lulled by the voices of public radio, Matt dove into his reheated dinner and considered taking a hot shower before he turned in. He was half-asleep already, only barely managing to chew his food. He polished it off, put the dish in the sink, and flicked off the kitchen light.

Shower or straight to bed?

“. . . your work,” Ira Flatow was saying on the radio. “I read your paper, ‘A Musical Mind.' I was especially taken by your description of the gamma waves your cellist friend generated.”

Gamma waves?

Matt paused in the middle of his living room. Who was Flatow interviewing?

“I was wondering, Dr. Brenton, if you've come to any new insights since you wrote that piece.”

Brenton. Where had he heard that name before?
Had
he heard that name before?

“A few.”

“A few,” Flatow repeated.

Brenton laughed. “I'm really not trying to be coy. It's just that what I'm working on right now probably sounds more like science fiction than science.”

“Try me.”

“Well, as Erica was playing, it occurred to me to wonder if the same brain waves that move a pulse on a computer screen or a needle on a graph can move physical objects, given the proper interface.”

“Like drones?”

“Not just drones. I mean when the human brain is engaged in an activity—even just going through the mental motions of the activity—it creates rhythms that describe that activity via brain waves. Theoretically it should be possible to harness those brain waves and channel them, so they can perform the activity remotely.”

Flatow laughed. “That
does
sound like science fiction. What sort of applications are you considering?”

Matt sank onto the sofa without registering that he'd done so.

“Sky's the limit, isn't it?” Brenton answered. “I mean just imagine what it would mean for disabled people. A thought to perform an act—operating a wheelchair or even a car or a computer. Imagine if, I don't know, a scientist of the caliber of Stephen Hawking could perform any action just by thinking about it. Or people who are completely paralyzed but still have working minds that produce discrete brain waves. Those rhythms could allow them to communicate with the outside world, with their loved ones. Could permit them to manipulate their environment, even create art. Write. Perform.
Live
.”

Matt was stunned by the thought.

Lucy . . .

He remembered Lucy—his wife, his
everything
—lying in a hospital bed, dead to the outside world—dead to him—while her brain, her magnificent brain, continued to pulse out brain rhythms he could read but not understand. Did this man understand them? Matt still had the record of the last weeks of her life as EEG readouts. If this guy could read and translate these brain waves into some sort of coherent message, what would it be? What had Lucy's mind been doing once her body stopped translating its messages?

“Or imagine,” Brenton was saying, “being able to perform operations in the vacuum of space without sending astronauts outside. Or even robots. The spacecraft could be built in such a way that between the mind of the technician and the interface, they'd be reparable by remote thought.” He laughed again. “I know—science fiction. There would be commercial applications too, of course. Theoretically brain waves could drive some tools with far more nuance than the hands, even hands with robotic extensions.”

“So what's stopping you?”

“At this point, you name it,” Brenton said with a chuckle. “But the main issue is the interface. Or, more to the point, a translation device.”

Matt realized his heart was pounding in his chest. They didn't have a translation device? He listened as Brenton described the problem he'd encountered with the relative amplitude of the brain waves generated by different brains or the same brain under different circumstances, and his mind forgot all about sleep or showers or anything else.

“What we need to develop is a translation interface that will allow us to set a baseline and then compensate for variances in the energy generated by a subject's brain waves.”

“How might that be done?” Flatow asked.

“Mathematically,” Matt murmured. “It would have to be done mathematically.”

He knew that better than anyone. He had done it. Or at least he had described the variance in the oscillations of Lucy's brain waves mathematically. He had worked on the algorithms persistently as he'd sat by her bed, watching her EEG speak to him in a language he couldn't interpret.

He had his laptop out and open in mere moments and then dithered between digging Lucy's files out of a folder with her name on it that he hadn't opened for two years and Googling the
Science Friday
guest. He opted for going to the NPR site and finding out who this guy was, maybe read a transcript of the session.

The name of the scientist was Dr. Charles Brenton, from Johns Hopkins. That covered a lot of territory. There were Johns Hopkins campuses and hospital facilities in as disparate population centers as Baltimore, Maryland, and Nanjing, China. He figured the main campus in Baltimore was the most likely. He e-mailed the transcript of the interview to himself and began an online search for Dr. Charles Brenton.

A few links later, Matthew was looking at a photograph of the good doctor, a fellow at the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience.

Surprise. The neuroscientist was younger than Matt had expected—even younger than Matt himself. He had a boyish face, a smile that probably still made his mother want to bake him cookies, hair that was a little too long.

Does your mommy know you're doing science, Professor?

He tracked down the paper Ira Flatow had referenced in his interview: “A Musical Mind.” Halfway through it, he felt one of his math fugues coming on. He navigated to the Lucy folder on
his laptop and opened a file named LM_alg_001. His eyes filled with the equations based on the output of Lucy's dying brain.

The samples in Charles Brenton's paper were based on the output from several different subjects. If Matt's observations were accurate, if his calculations were on—and he'd bet good money they were—it would be a relatively simple matter of testing the algorithms he'd gotten from Lucy's EEGs against the sample waves. When he was done, he should have a way of calculating a baseline for any subject.

He opened a new document and set to work.

He decided he might have a good holiday after all.