The God Wave (6 page)

“We've got to think of a way around it,” growled Matt. “There's no reason this device would work for Mike and not work for you—unless it's your lack of computer savvy that's the issue.”

Chuck winced at that.

“My computer savvy is just fine, thank you,” said Sara coolly. “What I don't know about that software and my work you could stick up your cute little button nose and still have room for the Washington Monument.”

“I think we should quit for the day,” said Chuck, flipping his laptop shut to underscore the point. “Let the subconscious work on the problem. It never fails that when I hit a wall and sleep on it, I've got some piece of the solution by morning.”

Sara nodded.

Matt sighed and rolled his eyes. “You'll have to forgive Chuck,” he told the group. “He still believes the science angels visit him in his dreams.”

Chuck shook his head. “I didn't say anything about angels,” he said quietly.

“And you'll have to forgive Matt—he still believes he knows what a normal interaction between people is,” Dice said. Chuck smiled, but Matt wouldn't let it go.

“You do believe in angels, right? Being a religious type and all.
Do you think God will visit you with a vision of how to solve our little interface problem?”

Where's he going with this? He almost seems angry. For a nonreligious person, he sure has his crusades.

“Actually,” said Eugene, hoping to defuse the situation, “they're more like science fairies. Or elves of invention maybe.”

Sara gave Matt a frosty smile. “I think maybe Chuck's right. Happens to me all the time. A design is intractable, impenetrable, unworkable. I go to bed whacking my head against the wall and wake up and realize there's a gate hidden behind some ivy. Don't mock the elves of invention, Dr. Streegman. They work.”

This time the elves of invention didn't work. Not fairies or angels or elfish intercessors or even Elvis himself visited any member of the Forward Kinetics team overnight, and when they began their day's work with Sara back in the harness and Tim the Troll postponed until the afternoon, little had changed.

Matt's look said it all:
I told you so
.

As if we did this to him on purpose,
Chuck thought. Despite that resentment, he couldn't help feeling frustrated, too.

Certainly Sara's skills with the basic maneuvers were slightly smoother, but she still had no clue how to manage the simplest activities within an interface she knew inside and out. She could move the mechanisms. What she could not do was create objects.

They worked at it all morning. Just before lunch she suggested she go back to working with Roboticus for a while. That sabbatical relaxed her and renewed her confidence.

Unfortunately, it did little for her performance with the software she used every day.

By 2:20
P.M.,
the time Tim Desmond chose to stroll in late, Sara was sagging in her chair, the neural net twinkling like stars in her hair, while the others tried to assess the situation.

“It's clear that the kinetic converter is working,” said Matt tersely. “And that the subject's brain waves are generating sufficient triggers to drive it. The problem has to be the warmware.”

Sara shot him a sideways glance. “Meaning me, right?” She shook her head. “Maybe it's because I don't understand the computer side of the equation. I only understand the computer
operator's
side. You're asking me to direct the computer's internal processes, but I don't understand them well enough. If that's how your interface is supposed to work, then even someone with my experience and training won't be able to use it. That's not a warmware problem, Dr. Streegman. It's a technology problem.
Your
technology problem.”

Matt opened his mouth to reply, but thankfully Tim forestalled whatever he'd been about to say.

“So how've you been doing what you've been doing so far?” the programmer asked. Hands in the pockets of his blazer, he lounged against a nearby worktable.

Sara explained her work with triggering the track pad and keyboard and how she lost it every time she pulled her attention away to consider the workspace.

Tim wandered over to the test machine and wiggled the mouse. The pointer did a wild jig on the screen. “So you've been interacting with the input devices and trying to use them to make stuff happen.”

“That's what I just said, isn't it?”

Chuck winced. He hated it when people got short with each other, and there had been a lot of that this day.

“Okay, so that's what you've done,” said Tim. “What've you been trying to do?”

Sara made a frustrated gesture at the computer. “Draw a damn cube. A stupid, simple, three-dimensional object. I can't manipulate the input devices the way I normally would to create it.”

Tim shrugged. “Then don't manipulate the input devices. Manipulate the input. Use the Force, Luke.”

Sara blinked at him, her face going red. “What?”

“Didn't you ever see
Star Wars
? Use the Force. Obi Wan Kenobi says that to Luke Skywalker when he's trying to save the day, and he shuts down his onboard computer interface and just shoots. Bam! One dead Death Star. A little too easy, if you ask me.”

Sara glared at him. “You've got to be kidding me. This isn't a movie, Troll Boy. I am not shooting swamp rats or vampire squirrels or whatever it was Luke was taking potshots at on Tatooine.”

While Tim congratulated Sara on knowing what Tatooine was, Chuck stared at the wide, flat computer display and had a quiet epiphany . . . or a gift from the elves of invention. “No, Sara, he's right.”

“What?” Sara said.

“What?” Matt said.

“Told you,” Troll said, although it was clear he didn't know what he was right about.

But Chuck did. “I'm serious. Don't think about manipulating the interface. That's not what you want to do. Just
draw
something. There's a CAD/CAM in your head. Use it.”

“What?” Sara said again, and everyone else in the room—except for Tim—stared at him as if he'd spoken in Swahili.

Chuck took a deep breath. “I know it sounds crazy, but trust me. Think of it this way: Before you interact with the physical interface of your CADware, you form a mental model of an object. You instinctively draw the thing in your head a split sec
ond before you draw it on the screen. I think what Tim is saying is that you don't want to interact with an input device at all. You want to interact with the software directly.” He glanced at the programmer, who shrugged.

“Yeah. I guess that's what I'm saying. Make the thing in your head, and let the software interpret those impulses instead of using the track pad as a go-between.”

Sara let out a breath of pent-up air. She thought about it, calculating—if Chuck had to guess—whether or not Tim was trying to pull a fast one on her. But Chuck gave her an encouraging nod, and she nodded back. “A go-between. Sure. Sure, why not?” She straightened in her seat. “Am I up and running, Euge?”

Eugene checked the machinery. “You're online.”

She took a deep breath, grasped the arms of her chair, and closed her eyes.

The others all watched her at first—the play of tension and release on her face, the furrowed brows, the subtle twitches of her fingers. They watched her until Tim said, “That's what I'm talking about.”

The spell broken, Chuck jerked his head around to look at the large display monitor. A cube was coming into being there, growing in size. When it stopped growing, it rotated slowly on one corner, stopped, and diminished in size.

Sara's eyes opened, the light in them fierce. “How's that for using the Force?”

Tim strolled over and held up a fist. “Good work, Padawan.”

She laughed—more emotion than Chuck had ever seen her display—and joined the programmer in a fist bump.

“What do you mean
Padawan,
Troll Boy? I'm a freakin' Jedi!”

IF SARA CROWELL WAS A
Jedi, Troll Desmond was a Jedi Master. Attached to Becky, with lights sparkling through his spiky hair,
he was ultimately, after several days of work, able to make the CPU jump through hoops. And he discovered a variety of ways to do it.

Matt was particularly interested in the programmer's manipulation of what was under the hood: binary. Numbers. Mathematics. Troll could reach down into the stream of ones and zeroes and pull the strings that made them dance. He drew directly to the computer display, graduating swiftly from smiley faces to words to opening higher-level programming modules and coding.

He was not fast at first, something that frustrated him greatly—and Troll was a sight to behold when frustrated—but he did it. He spent long hours doing it. Then he moved on to manipulating even higher-level programming languages and from there to the graphics software he used to create gaming environments.

At that point, Sara, who insisted on being in the lab whenever Troll was—to keep an eye on him, she said—began to kibitz.

“I know this software package,” she said the first time he fired up his 3-D graphics program. “I use it to create settings for some of the architectural work I do.”

They compared notes and traded places under the neural net. She taught him to run her CAD system. He taught her how to raise buildings from the virtual ground and play first-person RPGs.

He stopped calling her Padawan; she stopped calling him Troll Boy.

As an aside, Chuck said to Matt, “Look, we've succeeded at something already. Here are two people who seem on the surface to have nothing in common. Two people who had been antagonistic toward each other at the beginning of it all.”

Matt agreed with Chuck's assessment but not his understate
ment. Sara had thought Troll was thick; Troll had thought Sara was a bitch.

“They may never be soul mates, but they're already teammates,” Chuck went on.

Matt tried not to sigh.
Leave it to my “teammate” to focus on the people, not the results.

“What we need,” Matt said, “is investment money. A lot of it. More than I can marshal.” He looked over at Chuck, who sat at the far end of the worktable, tapping away at his laptop, his brow knit in a way that suggested one of his EEG plots had just started to talk to him in a language he didn't understand.

“Did you hear me?”

Chuck flicked a glance his way. “Uh . . . uh-huh. But I thought you said Becky was going to turn a profit by the end of the year.”

“It is. The problem is while we can make a marginal profit building one-off units, we can't go into production on them anytime soon. And building them one-off is soaking up all of Dice's time and energy. I need him to get out of the fabrication business and back into the design end, where he belongs. We need the material resources to build a small manufacturing facility.”

Chuck sat back from his computer keyboard and considered that. “Yeah. That was what we'd discussed going into the subfloor.”

Matt shook his head. “We can't afford it, though. Not the way
we're going. It's time to try to stir up some interest. Give some presentations, approach some investors.”

“What kind of investors?”

“Ones with money.”

Chuck rolled his eyes. “I mean who—”

“Not as important as the
what,
” Matt interrupted. “All those other disciplines we targeted that we couldn't take on . . . If we had the right investors, you could expand your research. Bring Mini into the program officially, maybe.”

Chuck's eyes kindled. “Well, I'm all for that. I'm glad one of us has a brain for business. I wonder what sort of waves yours generates.”

Chuck threw Matt a lopsided grin and went back to whatever it was he was doing, which suited Matt just fine. He hated having to explain things to people. Hated having to account for his actions and thoughts. Hated having to dumb things down.

Not that Chuck was dumb—he wasn't. He was a brilliant neuroscientist, but he really understood nothing at all about economics or business or cash flow. He was an academic. In Chuck's experience, money was something you wrote a grant for, not something you had to earn by offering a return on investment. Matt had some ideas about that and had already set processes in motion to get what Forward Kinetics needed to succeed beyond Dr. Chuck's wildest dreams.

He glanced at his watch. In fact he needed to go check up on one of those processes right now. He got up from the worktable and tucked his iPad under his arm.

“Gotta run. I've got an appointment off campus. See you this afternoon.”

“Oh, sure. We've got Tim—Troll in the shop later today. He's going to be trying out Dice's new VR helm.”

“I'll be there,” Matt promised.

He definitely would. That virtual reality helm, which Dice
had worked hard to integrate with the neural sensor net, would be of paramount importance to the direction in which he was planning to take Forward Kinetics in the next year.

“DR. STREEGMAN? I'M CHEN LANFEN.”

The young woman who approached his table in the sunny courtyard of the Café Clatch Bistro could have been Emma Peel in a previous life, if Emma Peel had been Chinese. She was unusually tall for an Asian woman, dressed in black skinny jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Her shoulder-length hair was black as well, which gave her a vaguely gothy look—except that her skin was an even shade of gold, and she appeared to be wearing little or no makeup. She was striking.

But she wasn't Lucy.

“So,” Matt said, standing to take her proffered hand and shaking it, “you're Shifu Chu's star pupil.”

She smiled. “Is that what he said?” she asked in barely accented English.

“Well, it's what I asked for when I called him. I said, ‘Send me your star. Your best and brightest.'”

The smile deepened, and she sat down at the small, round table and nodded toward the server, who was making his way toward them. “Well, if you're going to flatter me that way, Dr. Streegman, then I really ought to buy you a latte.”

“Call me Matt, and I'll have a large cappuccino.” This last part he delivered to the waitress, who'd just arrived at the table.

The girl favored him with a nod, then glanced at the woman with him. “And you, miss?”

“Soy latte, please. Triple shot.”

The waitress headed into the shop to fetch their order, and Matt seated himself, setting his iPad on the table.

“So,” he said, “Chen Lanfen. Which is your surname?”

“Chen. I maintain the traditions of my very proper family, so please call me Lanfen.”

“Of course.”

“Thanks. Master Chu said you have some sort of technology you want me to test?” She spread her hands questioningly. “I can't even imagine what that might be—or how I'll be of help.”

“Robotics. Specifically a line of humanoid robots that might be used for security work.”

She shook her head. “Using kung fu?”

“Let me begin at the beginning, and all will be made clear,” Matt told her, opening his iPad and starting up the recruitment slide show he'd created. “I'm the COO of a unique technology company called Forward Kinetics . . .”

CHUCK WAS ONLY VAGUELY AWARE
of Matt's leaving the small ancillary lab. It had become their favorite place to collate data, and they often inhabited it together in companionable silence as they analyzed their various collections of information. Chuck rather enjoyed that. It made him feel as if they were on the same wavelength, though Matt seemed to deal chiefly with financial numbers these days while Chuck pored over EEG charts.

He was surprised to think that he actually missed Matt.

He didn't dwell on it, though, so focused was he on a new set of charts. The ones he was looking at now were, in a word, baffling. All of the subjects, but especially Sara, had been experiencing more and more frequent spikes of gamma waves. This latest session, in fact, showed not just spikes but several sustained spikes that lasted for roughly thirty seconds each.

Chuck tugged at his lower lip. What did that mean?

Of course biologically it meant she was in several different states at once or juggling states so swiftly it was effectively the same thing. But what did that mean to her mental state?

He knew from postsession interviews how exhausted she and her cohorts were by the end of an experiment. The data he was looking at now, from the session they'd had yesterday, reflected a particularly exhausting set of tests. Sara had commented on it. Mike had also shown a couple of fifteen- and twenty-second gamma peaks and had retreated into an uncharacteristic taciturn state. Tim . . . well, Tim was always aloof and moody. Even with that established, though, at the end of his session yesterday afternoon he had drunk three cans of Pepsi in quick succession rather than the usual two.

Which means . . .

He just didn't know.

“You look unhappy.”

Chuck glanced up to find Dice standing in the doorway, regarding him quizzically over the rim of his coffee cup.

“Not unhappy. Not at all. Just . . . puzzled. Concerned, maybe.”

“Concerned about what?” Dice wandered farther into the small lab and over to where Chuck pondered what was on his laptop's broad display.

Chuck gestured at the screen. “That's Sara's last session with the CAD/CAM.”

“Uh-huh. What concerns you about it?”

“This here. This long gamma pattern.”

“That's where the brain is playing a concert, right?”

Chuck smiled. “Good metaphor. Yes.”

“So what was she doing during that time?”

Chuck popped up a second window that showed what had been happening in the CAD program during the prolonged gamma burst. She had been doing detail work apparently, creating and placing landscape elements for the exterior of a building.

Dice glanced back and forth between the EEG and the video of Sara's architectural project. “I see. She's doing creative work.”

“She's always doing creative work.”

“No, I mean she's designing as opposed to simply placing design elements. She's designing the garden area.”

Chuck reran the sequence, watching for what Dice meant. He opened a third window that showed what had been happening on the subject's face as she was experiencing the gamma waves.

“Heh. Sara Cam,” said Dice. “There, see? Watch her eyes. I know that look. That is the look of someone who is concentrating very hard on a pattern problem.”

“A pattern problem,” repeated Chuck.

“She's thinking about the shape the garden will take. The same way I might think about the shape a robotic arm would need to take in order to fulfill different uses. Make sense?”

Chuck frowned, knowing Dice was onto something, but he still wasn't sure what.

And then it clicked.

“Yes!”

“Chuck?”

“It makes perfect sense. And it explains the data I was getting from the cellist I had in a while back. She went into gamma when she was beginning to interpret a piece she was still sight reading. What you're telling me suggests we're seeing gamma bursts from our subjects when they're molding original content.”

“Yeah. I guess you could put it that way.”

“How would you put it?”

“I'd say they're investing themselves in it, I guess.”

That
is
a good way to put it
. Chuck nodded. “Which might explain why Sara has seemed especially tired after a session in which she's produced a lot of gamma rhythms. But here's what I'm wondering: These gamma fugues are growing in duration. Are they dangerous? Are they harmful to the subject?”

Dice shrugged. “I have to assume a lot of people experience
them. Especially creative people—musicians, writers, painters. Are those people more likely to be, I don't know, unstable than your average bank teller or factory worker?”

Chuck stared at the engineer, his mind filling up with the data from decades of research into mood disorders. Kay Redfield Jamison had written several volumes about it. One of them came to mind now, a historical retrospective on the link between creativity and mood disorders.
Touched with Fire,
she'd titled it.

Chuck Brenton briefly contemplated the possibility that the course of experimentation they were pursuing might be pouring gasoline on neurological flames . . . and it worried him.

MATT, ON THE OTHER HAND,
couldn't have been more excited about the direction the company was going in. With his new recruit tentatively on board, Matt moved to the next part of his plan to put Forward Kinetics on the road to real success. He had contacts at MIT who could help him with that—people who could suggest where he and/or Chuck might speak or present to garner attention and backers for their enterprise. A TED conference was a real possibility for Chuck. He could wax poetic about the strides that could be made in medicine. Get an audience to empathize with a quadriplegic who could use the technology to manipulate his or her environment.

Matt, on the other hand, would represent the company to those whose interests were more about commercial applications and ROI and less about warm fuzzies. Both polarities, he knew, could be exploited to take Forward Kinetics from science fiction to science fact—from a small-scale entrepreneurial shop to a large-scale commercial powerhouse.

It's why he hadn't dismissed the warm fuzzies out of hand.

The third stage of his plan was to get Forward Kinetics' tech
out in front of an assemblage of potential backers. With that in mind, he registered the company for a major robotics trade show that was months away.

He did this work from his apartment, leery of being overheard. He guarded his business plans as a writer might guard an unfinished manuscript; there were few things more annoying than having someone peeking over his shoulder. Also, if he was being honest with himself, he knew Chuck would object. Better to ask for forgiveness . . . no, screw that. Better to be right, and let others catch up to him when they finally realize it.

By the time he walked into the afternoon meeting at their corporate HQ, he had set in motion a sequence of events that would crescendo at that April trade show. After the meeting he would contact a design house that specialized in fabricating eye-catching booths for such events. He already had a series of sketches he'd made for a two-story megabooth; it would sit in a corner and incorporate three separate stage areas on the ground floor, with two small conference rooms upstairs . . .

“Hello? Earth to Dr. Streegman.”

Matt looked up from his booth doodles to find Dice staring at him pointedly.

“Sorry?”

“Chuck just asked if you have anything to bring to the table.”

Matt hesitated. He was actually quite full of news, but now, glancing around at the others, he wasn't sure how much he wanted to share.
Well, it can't hurt to float a trial balloon.

“Actually I've spent the morning putting some plans into action. I've scheduled several presentations of our technology with regional business organizations, submitted a proposal for a TED Talk, and registered us for the Applied Robotics conference in April.”

Chuck gaped at him. “You did
what
?”

“Holy mother of pearl,” murmured Eugene. “D'you think we'll be ready for that?”

“Why not?” Dice challenged him.

“Exactly,” Matt agreed. “Why not? The presentations are easy. The TED Talk, too. We can use video for some of that. Although for the TED conference, if we can present a live demonstration, maybe using Sara or Troll, that would be best. By the time the AR conference rolls around . . . well, we'll just need to make sure we're ready. But there's no reason to think we won't be.” He shrugged. “Of course all of this may be academic, since acceptance isn't guaranteed.”