The God Wave (4 page)

“Can I try it?” Eugene asked.

IN THE END THEY ALL
tried it and then sat down and came up with a game plan. Matt would compose a précis for prospective investors, Dice would begin generating code for a computer interface that would give them access to commercial software controls, and Chuck and Eugene would continue to expand their experiments with Roboticus and a variety of their subjects—experiments they would, of course, record.

“Not,” Eugene noted, “that anyone will believe what they see in a video.”

Matt shook his head, his fingers already flying over his laptop keyboard. “They won't have to commit funds on the basis of a video. We'll let them try it live.”

Chuck frowned. “We're going to bring them here? Matt, that's
not going to work. I mean it's not kosher to use Johns Hopkins resources to start up a private business.”

“We won't be using Johns Hopkins resources. The first thing I'm going to do is lease this rig.” Matt nodded at the brain pattern monitor, his mind racing ahead, making connections, calculating potential. “The next thing you're going to do is figure out how to downsize it, so we can fit it into our own lab.”

“Our own lab,” Chuck repeated as if Matt had just said “our own space station.”

“Of course our own lab. You didn't imagine we were going to continue to work out of Hopkins, did you?” Matt shook his head and dove back into organizing his précis.

I have a lot to teach them,
he thought.

Our own lab.

The words had a sort of magic to them, Chuck thought. Their own lab had a name, Forward Kinetics, and it stood at the center of a technology park (emphasis on
park
) in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was a stand-alone facility—something Matt had insisted on—and was contained in a low, eight-thousand-square-foot, split-level building that seemed to be in the process of tumbling down the gentle slope it occupied. It was beautiful as well as functional, a masterpiece of wood, concrete, and glass with some slate accents. Frank Lloyd Wright would have approved.

Chuck had to admit that Matt had a well-developed sense of aesthetics. Rather than the lightbulb-filled, primary-color, plastic script logos that most other high-tech firms used, theirs—a stylized human brain full of gears that meshed with the letters
FK
—appeared in backlit bronze across the façade.

Chuck noticed the building's external features and parklike setting every Monday morning when he pulled his car into the
small, tree-bordered lot at the top of the slope. But the internal features captivated him iteratively, on a daily basis, moment by moment. From the tall windows that flooded the two-story foyer with light to the Prairie School roofline with its thick cedar beams, and from the travertine floors to the stylized Craftsman light fixtures, the lab was warm and welcoming.

Today was a special day in the nascent life of Forward Kinetics. Today they would finalize their research plan. They had been brainstorming for weeks, looking into the range of applications on which to begin their initial trials. Today they would nail down the final selection and plan the recruitment process.

Chuck already knew that he and Matt did not see eye to eye on what constituted a worthy discipline, but they had agreed to take input from the entire executive staff, which now included Eugene and Dice. Their formal designations were laboratory director and robotics director, respectively. Those were the titles on their business cards and office doors anyway. Chuck doubted either of them thought of himself as a director of anything.

The junior lab staff—there were only six of them—was savvy and self-directing for the most part, so the lab took on the complexion of a parliamentary democracy instead of a benevolent dictatorship . . . at least as long as Matt Streegman wasn't giving the orders. Matt, Chuck quickly learned, had definite opinions about everything—even things he'd only known about for a matter of seconds—and acted on those opinions unless someone could offer him a damn good reason he should not.

That caused some ripples in the smooth flow of ideas and activities, but the upside of Matt Streegman was that once someone showed him that his opinion was flawed empirically, he didn't hesitate to say, “Oh. Right. Well, then let's do it another way.”

The problems arose when no one could prove clearly that his opinion was flawed. Then there were two options: find empirical
evidence or roll over and do things Matt's way. And that's what they did . . . kind of. Chuck was an old hand at appearing to roll over. His mother had always said he was passive-aggressive. It took one to know one.

“Morning, Dr. Brenton.” This from the receptionist who manned a curving, wood-paneled desk in the sunny foyer and who'd had precious little to do since the initial frenzy of moving in had concluded.

“Morning, Barry.” Chuck threw the kid a lopsided grin. “How's that game of Temple Run coming?”

“Uh. Great. I haven't died for fifteen minutes.”

Chuck's smile deepened. “To the disappointment of zombie monkeys everywhere. Enjoy the lull, Barry. I have a feeling it's about to get crazy around here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chuck trotted down the short flight of stairs to the office level of the building. Matt was already sipping coffee in the small conference room where they gathered every morning for a brief review of activities and goals. So far the meetings had been focused on establishing the lab's basic equipment and processes. That done, they now turned their attention to the primary goal of identifying lucrative and profound uses for kinetic tech.

“Hey,” Chuck greeted his partner. “Dice and Euge in?”

Matt glanced up from his iPad and nodded. “They've been here awhile, doing their geek thing in the lab. Want to make a bet?”

Chuck set his laptop bag down on the oblong conference table and moved to the sideboard to get coffee. “I don't gamble. I'm terrible at it.”

“This one's easy. I bet you and I don't have any overlap on our short lists.”

Chuck snorted. “Are you serious? I'm not taking that bet.”

“C'mon. Ten dollars says I'm right.”

Chuck crossed back to the conference table, set down his coffee mug, and unpacked his laptop. “I told you I don't gamble. If I did, I sure wouldn't gamble with you, especially not with real money.”

“What else is worth gambling with?”

“I think that's the wrong question. I think the question is: what else is trivial enough to gamble with?”

Matt opened his mouth to retort but was interrupted when Dice and Eugene sailed through the door in the throes of one of their frequent yet friendly fights.

“I'm telling you, Euge,” Dice was saying, “until we can sever our reliance on firmware, this is all just exploratory. Who the hell is going to want to run a deep-sea exploration at the end of a freaking umbilical cord? One of the first things we've got to do is design a remote interface.”

“Be that as it may,” Eugene protested, “to focus on that now would be to put the cart before the horse.”

“You see?” Dice made an “I give up” gesture at the two men already in the room. “He's a Luddite. Carts and horses.”

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Matt said. “If you're going to get coffee, please do it now, so we can get down to business.”

Eugene saluted and pirouetted toward the coffeemaker. Dice set his laptop down and pulled a can of Coke out of his jacket pocket. Matt called in the senior lab assistant, Ventana Salazar, to take notes.

Matt drove a tight meeting—something Chuck alternately appreciated and regretted. There were times when a little digression was good for the creative juices. It's why emotional quotient had become almost as important a human diagnostic tool as IQ. Matt's mind, however, dealt more readily with numbers and statistics than it did with touchy-feely creativity. And it was Matt's numbers, Chuck reminded himself, that had allowed him to take the field of neurokinetics from theory to reality.

“Chuck?”

Matt was looking at him with an expression that accused him (correctly, as it happened) of woolgathering.

“Sorry. Thinking.”

Matt gestured at his laptop. “You want to trot your list out first?”

“Yeah, sure. Um, I've got five: the handicapped, especially people with cerebral palsy, Parkinson's, or MS; medical applications; law enforcement; first responders; and artists, especially computer-based applications in art and music.”

“That's six, Chuck.”

“Well, okay, just art then.”

The big plasma display at the end of the table went live as Ventana typed up Chuck's short list.

“Good thing you didn't take that bet,” Matt told him. “Good thing for me, that is. I was wrong. We do actually have some overlap. I've got computer-aided design, manufacturing, private security—not quite law enforcement but close—video game creation, and video game play.”

Chuck frowned. “What about medicine? We've at least got to do medicine.”

Matt raised a hand. “Lists first, then discussion. Dice, what do you have?”

Dice had firefighting/law enforcement (“bomb squad, I'm thinking,” he said), construction, handicapped access, and medical.

Euge offered handicapped mobility, medicine, computer art, deep-sea exploration and salvage, and archaeology.

Chuck nodded at the big screen. “So are the ones where we overlap automatic ins?”

Matt shook his head. “No.”

No?

But before Chuck could protest, Matt said, “I think we should discuss the pros and cons of each selection. Let's go for the low-hanging fruit first, though. Take law enforcement or private security. Great market there. Just think of the applications: disarming bombs, using bots to secure—well, whatever needs securing. Physical safety of the remote operator would be a big plus.”

“You can already do that with mechanical drones,” Chuck argued.

“Not like this, Doctor,” said Dice. “It would be as if the guard were there. Combine the kinetics with VR—that'd be an unbeatable combination.”

“Not to mention that removing the safety of the officer out of the equation, you can eliminate a lot of fatal error in the heat of the moment,” Eugene mused, “and I can see it having a strong social impact.”

“
That
law enforcement and private security firms would be willing to pay a significant amount for,” concluded Matt. “I think we definitely need to consider security applications relatively soon.”

“That'll take some more doing in the robotics department,” Dice admitted. “But, yeah, I'd prioritize it.”

“Good. That will also give us some ancillary technologies to go with the primary offering. Security robotics.”

“Do I hear a yea on security?” asked Tana, looking askance at the four men.

Matt glanced fleetingly at the others and then made a thumbs-up gesture.

I guess so
, Chuck thought.
But it is a good use of the tech.

Tana typed and highlighted the words “security, law enforcement applications.”

“Great,” Matt said. “Now how about computer-aided design? Benefits are obvious, and we've already got someone in the program.”

“We've got two people in the program, actually,” said Chuck. “Sara and Mini.”

Matt was silent for a moment, his expression opaque. “Mini doesn't do CAD. She does art.”

“With a computer.”

“Different application, Chuck. There are industrial applications for what Sara does. There's a market for it. Can you really claim that what Mini does, as creative as it might be, is marketable?”

Chuck felt his throat tighten up. He swallowed. “Matt, Mini's been with the program from pretty early on. She has a bright, experimental nature.”

“She's helped us hone our approach a lot,” Eugene added.

Matt skewered them both with his too-direct gaze. “We need to prove to potential investors that what we're working on can have real-world benefits.”

“Real world?” Chuck laughed, pointing at the screen. “Video games?”

“Not only is video gaming a huge market,” Matt said calmly—infuriatingly so, if Chuck was being honest about it—“but it provides a great prototype process to show that neurokinetics will allow programmers to code and test that code much more efficiently and effectively. And again, we've already got a programmer in the existing plan who happens to be an artist as well. Troll creates his own creatures, after all, and programs their movements. I'd say he's ideal—as is his discipline—to give us the sort of model that would interest investors and potential customers.”

Chuck exhaled noisily. “Fine. Okay. I see that. But what about applications for people with mobility issues?”

“I don't think we need to test using handicapped people at this juncture,” said Matt, glancing at Chuck. “Whatever Troll can do in the realm of programming or Sara can do with a CAD/CAM machine, a handicapped programmer or designer could do just as
well.” He swung his chair toward Chuck, his eyes bright. “Think of it. Our neural interface could allow a handicapped engineer to run a CAD/CAM program and let construction workers safely run dangerous equipment or perform dangerous procedures from a distance. Just think of the benefits to rescue operations or firefighting.”

“I
am
thinking of those things.”

“Have you thought about how hard they'd be to test, though? Are we going to burn down some buildings to show that a fire truck can put out a blaze without a squadron of firefighters putting their lives on the line? Have you considered how expensive it would be to even attempt to explore that before we've proven the efficacy of the tech for other, smaller disciplines?”

He had a point. “Fine, but computer games?”

Matt leaned toward his partner, his elbows on the table, his face earnest. “Chuck, today computer games, tomorrow medical programs that allow doctors to do delicate manipulations inside the human body without having to use tools that are too large for the job. We need to demonstrate the efficacy of the process in a way that makes the point but without endangering any lives. Say we did test a medical application right out of the box. Who'd sign up for that study?”

“Nobody.”

“Exactly. Now, let's get back to work here. We have security, CAD/CAM, and video game creation and testing. What's next?”

What was next was construction. Chuck started to argue against it, but Matt convinced him this was the ideal way to find out if their tech could allow a seasoned construction worker to manipulate large machinery. Surely they could afford one little backhoe.

The final list was tightly focused: CAD/CAM, programming, video game play, construction, and security. Matt's argument—
from which he could not be turned—was that those were gateway applications for all others.

Chuck could not help but note that they were also the most commercial—and were Matt's original list.

CHUCK HAD EXPECTED IT WOULD
be hard to tell Mini Mause she wasn't needed for the program anymore. He hadn't expected it would be harder on him than it was on her and that she would end up consoling him for letting her go.

“Hey, it's okay, Doc,” she told him, one small, capable hand on his shoulder.

They sat face-to-face in a couple of side chairs in his large, bright office on the lower level of the building. He had been unable to sit across a desk from her like a college professor flunking a student . . . or a boss firing an employee.