The God Wave (9 page)

“This felt effortless.”

Chuck frowned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I'm just afraid that if this wave is sustained over a period of time, especially repetitively, it might damage you in some way. Burn you out, even. I have no way of measuring what's happening to your synapses in real time. I can only look at your brain after the fact, which might be too late.” He turned to Matt. “You said you were ‘impressed.' The word I think we should be using is ‘concerned.'”

Matt's gaze bored into him, heavy and unrelenting. Finally the mathematician asked his partner quietly, “What do you suggest we do?” Chuck had learned to distrust that voice. Matt used it in conflicting ways. It could mean he was experiencing trepidation and was legitimately awed by the potential dangers of this new event. However, it could also mean he thought Chuck was being dense and obstructionist, and he was trying very hard not to show how much that annoyed him.

And usually it's the latter.

Regardless, he offered his honest opinion. “I think we should pull back. Have Sara and the others go through some testing to make sure we're not harming them in any way.”

“I thought we agreed we're just bulking up mentally,” said Tim. “Y'know, using the muscles and making them stronger and more efficient. Maybe we're just having muscle cramps.”

“It's not a cramp, Tim,” said Sara. Was there just a hint of smugness in her voice? She was, after all, the only one to have experienced this firsthand. “It's the opposite of a cramp. Everything in my head was running as smooth as glass.”

Chuck shook his head. “Even in the case of bodily muscles, you can overwork them and cause injury. I don't—”

Matt cut him off. “I understand your concern, Chuck. I really do,” he said in that same übergentle voice. “But we can't afford to pull back. We've got commitments now. People who are waiting to see what this technology will do, banking on it doing something useful.”

Chuck continued to shake his head. “Commitments? Banking on it? No, Matt! Dammit, we can't let business imperatives drive our research. Too many people—scientists, politicians, businesspeople, you name it—use business commitments as excuses to take terrible risks. I'm not going to let us go out with a product that is potentially dangerous, let alone risk these people testing—”

“Chuck . . .” Sara leaned forward again and put a hand on his arm. “I promise you if I feel the least bit stressed, if I have the tiniest headache or dizziness or anything like that, I will let you know. Just don't shut us down or ask us to wait to find out what we can do.” She glanced sideways at Tim. “Whatever it is I've done, I'm willing to bet that Tim and Mike won't be far behind. Don't stop us before we can find out what this means.”

“There,” Matt said. “From the horse's mouth.” He felt the icy daggers of Sara's side glance at his equestrian comparison but chose to ignore it. “Let's not hesitate on the verge of a potential breakthrough.”

A breakthrough.
Is
that
what we are on the verge of?
Chuck prayed that was so but couldn't shake the idea that they seemed willing to risk everything, including the scientific method, for it. He knew he should say something else, something to convince the others how
wrong
this felt, but as he looked around the table, all he saw was everyone looking at him with varying degrees of anticipation. He shook his head.

“Are you all on board with this?” he asked quietly.

Everyone nodded or answered in the affirmative. Surprisingly the only hesitation came from Dice, but in the end even he gave a yes vote.

“All right. Tomorrow we'll pick up where we left off. Mike is scheduled for first thing in the morning. We'll bring him in on the situation and give him a choice about whether he wants to continue with the program. Is that acceptable?”

Chuck glanced around the table again. They were all sitting back in their chairs, smiling or looking thoughtful.

“He'll stick it out,” Tim prophesied. “Guaranteed.”

“So what is that, then?” Lanfen asked, running her finger along the bar of light that dominated the BPM's touch screen. She glanced up at Matt.

“We haven't actually named it yet,” he said. “Although I heard someone refer to it as the Tesla coil effect.”

“That's a mouthful. I think you're going to want something catchier for PR purposes.”

He smiled. “Yeah. I'll think about it. Right now what I'd like to do is see if you can reproduce it.”

She stared at him but couldn't read his face in the semidarkness of the delta lab. “Seriously? But I have no idea what Sara's doing.”

Matt crossed the darkened lab to stand at the edge of Lanfen's workout mat. “She said it was like riding a horse at flank speed. I don't suppose you ride?”

“No. Sorry.”

“She described a state in which everything she was doing
went from high tension to effortless. Like she was in sync. In the zone. Do you ever experience that while you're doing kung fu?”

“Of course—that's basically a goal of the discipline.” Lanfen moved to stand beside Matt, gazing at the practice space and the currently inert robot. “So you're hoping I can get into the zone and direct the robot from there.”

“Yes. Willing to try?”

“You bet. Hook me up.”

She worked with the robot for over an hour, until she was weary and dripping with sweat. She'd managed to do most of the workout in a steady gamma state, but the elusive lightning refused to strike.

“I'm too aware that I'm moving a foreign object and not my body,” she said. Sitting cross-legged at the edge of the mat, sipping water, she considered the problem that had both Matt and her frustrated. “There's a disconnect. The bot is not me. Or it's not enough like me to put me in the zone. Either way, I have to be too conscious of everything I'm doing.”

Matt was silent for a long moment, then asked, “What if you were looking at the world from the robot's point of view? What if you were looking
out
from inside the bot?”

She thought about it for a second. “Well, I imagine that might improve my mental mapping. I'd still say the bot is pretty limited in the ways it can move, though.”

“I'll work on improving that,” Matt told her. “Though I can't do anything about it immediately. The other part—the viewpoint issue—that I can deal with right now.”

Lanfen looked at him askance. “Really? How?”

“Dice has integrated a VR helm into the rig in the alpha lab.”

Lanfen gestured at the room. “Doesn't do me much good down here.”

“No. We're going to have to move you upstairs.”

Her heart leapt. “Officially? I can be an official member of the program?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, no. Not yet. I'm thinking spring of next year. In fact, I'd like your debut to be at the Applied Robotics show in April.”

“Then we'd better get working on that VR component, Professor.”

WHEN CHUCK BRIEFED MIKE ABOUT
Sara's new wave the next morning, the construction engineer took the news with characteristic tranquility. His only indication of surprise was a slight raising of one eyebrow.

“New brain wave, huh? What are you gonna call it?”

Chuck clearly hadn't considered that. “I don't know . . . um, a supergamma?”

“Lame, Doc,” Tim offered. “We can do better than that.”

“We've been sort of calling it the Tesla coil effect,” Dice offered.

“Oh, man, that's almost as lame,” said the game developer. “Don't the other waves all have Greek alphabet names? What comes after gamma?”

“Delta,” said Dice. “But I think that's taken. Epsilon comes after that.”

Tim wrinkled his nose and looked at Mike as if to ask what he thought. Mike shrugged, and Tim rolled his eyes.

“Let me ask you this,” he said to Chuck. “It's several stops past just the next letter in the alphabet, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Chuck.

“What if we call it a zeta wave, then? That's a three-letter jump, and
z
is at the tail end of the English alphabet.”

“Zeta wave,” said Chuck, testing it out. Tim, on the other hand, was already committed.

“Yeah. I like it. It's not lame.”

And that's how decisions get made at Forward Kinetics,
Chuck thought ruefully.

By not being lame.

Regardless, zeta it was . . . and yet zeta it wasn't. Because although they spent the day trying to coax it into showing itself in Tim and Mike's brain waves, it was always without success. They put Sara back in the harness, and she was able to generate the wave after roughly ten minutes of sustained work. Chuck let her carry on for about two minutes, then broke her concentration and pulled her out of the state.

“Maybe it's something not everyone can do,” suggested Eugene.

“Unacceptable,” said Tim. “I'm going to keep trying until I can do it. I mean look at it from the usefulness standpoint. What good is the tech if only rare individuals can use it to its full potential? This is proof of concept, man. You gotta have proof of concept. Am I right?” He directed this comment at Matt, who had come into the lab to witness their progress and in whom Tim found a ready ally—at least when it came to taking risks with the subjects.

“Troll's right,” Matt said. “We need to know how rare or how common this state is. If it's really as rare as all that, we need to develop a procedure by which our customers can quickly and efficiently identify people who can generate it before they've invested a ton of resources in training.”

And that's the other way decisions are made here:

Matt makes them.

SO CHUCK SPLIT THE TEAM
up, putting Eugene in charge of working with Tim in bay one while he set Mike up with his current device—a large, mechanical arm he had been using to move weighted boxes from a shipping pallet to a raised platform that
stood in for a truck bed. He asked Dice to float between the two teams, monitoring the interface.

That duty suited the engineer just fine. He was legitimately curious to see what would happen with both of these guys but was willing to wager that Tim would be the first of the two to achieve a zeta state.

MATT WANDERED OVER TO WATCH
Dice start a preflight check of Mike's rig; the robotic arm used a computerized drive mechanism not unlike the backhoes and cranes Mike was used to piloting in his workaday life.

“I have a favor to ask of you,” Matt said quietly.

Dice paused to read the expression on his boss's face. It didn't take a degree in robotics to tell that what he was about to say was for Dice's ears alone.

“Yeah?”

“Karate bot. I need you to do some extracurricular work on it.”

Dice turned his attention back to the servounit. “What sort of work?”

“It needs to flex more like a human body. It's too stiff. I know you were experimenting with more-humanoid forms back at MIT.”

“I was. I turned it over to my minions. Brenda Tansy is in charge of the robotics program now.”

“I remember her. Bright. Postgrad now, right?”

Dice nodded.

“I'd like to get a unit like that here. Money is no object.”

Dice took a deep breath, considering. “Are you thinking we buy one off the university or just get the schematics or—”

“If you had the schematics and the materials, how long would it take you to put a prototype together?”

“If I had an experienced team . . . three months maybe.”

“Steal undergrads from MIT. They can intern. I'll pay them.”

Dice felt his heart rate kick up. He loved his job. “Okay. Sure. But why the sly?”

Matt smiled. “It's . . . sort of a surprise. Something I'm hoping to spring on Chuck at the AR show.”

Although Dice didn't really like the secrecy, he couldn't help but think this sounded like a lot of fun. He grinned.

“Professor Streegman, you got yourself a stealth robotics project.”

MIKE YENOTOV HAD NEVER GONE
to college. He had a high school diploma, which he'd earned by being thoroughly average in every class but two: math and machine shop. He had played football, enjoyed working on cars, and was now married with two kids. Neither that bio nor his blunt manner—not to mention his regular-guy view of the world—hinted at how truly bright he was. Chuck stood in frank admiration of the man. From a fabrication standpoint, he was a gold-plated marvel when it came to figuring out logistical problems.

When Dice had first constructed the scale-model backhoe, it had tipped over when Mike had tried to move some “boulders” with it. Dice had sworn loudly and colorfully. Mike had waited for him to calm down, then explained in simple, competent terms why that was happening despite the fact that the engineer had calculated the weight differential. Dice had then built a counterbalance and a bracing leg for the rig, and it had performed just like its larger cousins.

“I should've known that,” he'd told Chuck later. “I freaking build robots for a living, but I've never had to build one to function as a backhoe. I failed basic logistics, and Mike got the gold star.”

Mike got a gold star on this day, too. His task was to move a scattering of colored crates from chaos to an orderly stack. He'd been working his hydraulic arm for perhaps half an hour, per
forming a series of exercises with the rainbow crates, when he'd fallen into a breathtaking gamma state. He was cruising.

Chuck was thrilled. “Okay, let's try this,” he told Mike. “I'd like you to stack the crates in a pyramid. The goal is to be careful enough that they won't fall over.”

Mike hunkered down and constructed a colorful pyramid that did not fall until he was trying to seat the last crate. He did everything from the second row up in a solid gamma state. He was visibly frustrated by the failure of his last placement.

“I'm gonna do it again,” he announced.

Chuck opened his mouth to say that wasn't necessary, but he could see by the mulish look on the other man's face that it was indeed necessary. Mike ran the drill again, this time getting it right.

“So,” he said, “Sara got this zeta thing happening when Dice was telling her what to do, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eugene told him. “She was taking instructions, interpreting them, and making them happen in the plotter. It was pretty cool.”

“Okay, so you give me instructions, too,” Mike said. “Why don't you tell me which blocks to use for the pyramid?”

Chuck was impressed. Mike instinctively caught which elements of Sara's exercise might have contributed to her zeta fugue. Eugene looked to him for a thumbs-up. He gave it unhesitatingly.

Mike used the robotic arm to knock the boxes down, then Eugene called out colors, and the builder constructed a seven-tiered pyramid.

The zeta burst occurred as he was setting up the third course of crates. It lasted for several seconds, until the construct began to become a bit unstable. He then reverted to gamma until he was in the center of the fourth course, when it recurred.

“Huh,” Eugene grunted.

Chuck glanced sideways at him. “What?”

“I'll tell you when we're done.” Eugene stepped a few paces to the right of the growing pile of blocks, watching as Mike slipped in and out of the zeta state to complete the pyramid.

They sent Mike off to lunch at that point and sat down to debrief.

“What did you see?” Chuck asked Eugene.

“I'm not sure.” Eugene shook his head, tugging at an ear. “It seemed to me that every time he went into the zeta state, the robotic arm . . . I don't know, shimmied or hesitated or something.”

“Are you thinking the apparatus is causing the phenomenon?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I just wondered if the zeta might be too much for the bot's onboard unit, that's all. Maybe we should have Dice come take a look at it, and it just needs a little tweak.”

Just a little tweak—that'd be a nice change.

After lunch they went back to it, putting Mike through the same drill. He fugued out, as Dice put it, as he reached the center point of the three upper courses this time. Dice watched the robotic arm carefully throughout and agreed with Eugene.

“Yeah, I see it,” he said after their first trial. “It's definitely bucking a little bit.”

“You think Mike might be overdriving the onboard unit?” Chuck asked.

“Possible, I suppose. Let me set up a diagnostic and see what voltage he's generating.”

“Is there any way to detect feedback?”

Dice looked down at the floor. “Sure, but I don't see why we'd need to since I can't see how the system could feed back in such a way that it would harm the subject . . . if that's what you're worried about. The zeta is being generated at this end.” He pointed at a returning Mike, who sniffed.

Chuck nodded. “Yes, I know that. But if Mike is overdriving the system, any feedback generated might affect the interface or the onboard computer. If it can do that, we'll need to have Matt
take a second look at his equations and see if he needs to adjust for this new frequency.”

Dice's eyes widened. “Oh, sorry, Doc. That should've occurred to me. Yeah. Let me check this out.”

Dice's diagnostics, however, showed no bump in Becky's output.

Oh, joy,
Chuck thought.
A mystery
.
Or, rather, another mystery
. Just what they didn't want with a trade show looming. The good news was that Mike wasn't overdriving the arm's CPU. But that was also the bad news.

Whoever said no news is good news wasn't a scientist.

“Okay,” Chuck said. “I think maybe it's time to put Mike in his element. Do we have that John Deere ready to go?”