The God Wave (10 page)

Dice grinned. “Boy, do we. She's a pearl, that one. State of the art and then some, with Becky on board.”

“Great.” Chuck turned to Mike. “Tomorrow, class, we're going on a little field trip to the sandy patch out back.”

Mike smiled. “Now we're talking.”

WHILE THE CORE GROUP WAS
working with zeta, Mini was doing her own thing. It wasn't lightning, but it definitely sent off sparks. Mini loved to move. She loved to paint. This experiment that Professor Brenton had made her a part of allowed her to do both. No more keyboards. No more mice. No more GUI. She could just put on her neural net and create things in her art program unencumbered. She did dragons and kelpies and Pegasuses (or was that Pegasi?) at first just because she liked fantasy creatures and fantasy worlds—and, at the moment, felt a little like she was living in one.

Her paintings were heavily influenced by Roger Dean, John Howe, Alan Lee, and her own imaginings. She liked creating landscapes and fanciful buildings, but she loved creating crea
tures most of all. It puzzled her truly and down to the bottom of her soul that she and Tim could not have a conversation about creature creation without setting each other off. Tim, who also made up creatures out of a fabric of dreams and visions and memories from his childhood, did not love his creations the way Mini loved hers. His relationship with his dragons was one of king and serf or wizard and golem.

Mini was her creatures' mother. Their liberator. Their friend.

“How can you create what you don't love?” she'd asked the programmer once.

“Creating this stuff makes my blood pound and my head spin and my d—” He'd swallowed whatever he'd been going to say and said instead, “It's kind of sexy, if you get my drift.”

“Sexy?” she'd repeated, wrinkling her nose. “I guess.”

Mini didn't find her creatures sexy. Not in the way she found Eugene sexy. But she did find that creating them filled her with a deep and profound joy. It made her feel buoyant, competent, and complete. And yet, when she was particularly on in the creative sense, she had to admit it
was
exciting.

She was on now, moving beneath her glittering halo of transceivers, making a quartet of colorful dragons come to life on the big display in the beta lab. There was a dragon for each point of the compass: white, black, red, and gold.

The dragon of the north was the white one. She gave it a patterned effect that looked like the pearly layer of ice atop wet snow. The southern dragon had to be black, and she chose an effect from the filter gallery that made it glisten like obsidian. East was golden, and west was red—the colors of sunrise and sunset.

Her arms swept them into curving shapes, and her fingers scattered tiny points of light across their scales, and in the midst of making them pop and glow and appear to come to life, she swept herself into a prolonged gamma state where she seemed
to be more dancing than moving. It didn't end until she spun around and caught a glimpse of Eugene, who'd been manning the BPM throughout her session. He was staring at her, his face beet red and his forehead shiny with perspiration. When their eyes met, he blinked several times in quick succession.

Mini frowned, suddenly self-conscious. “What's the matter, Euge? Is there something wrong with the machine? It seemed to be working okay.”

“Oh . . . no,” Eugene said, sounding breathless, as if he'd been dancing with her. “Everything's . . . everything's fine. It's just. Uh. You . . . uh. Can I . . . ?”

“Can you what?”

“Can I just say that . . . that was about the most erotic thing I've ever seen?”

“Erotic?” Mini stared at him. Tim thought the act of creation was sexy; Eugene apparently found
her
act of creation erotic. How did she feel about that?

On one level she was pleased that Eugene thought she was sexy. On another level she was appalled that Eugene thought she was sexy. At least while she was doing this—creating her beloved creatures. But then sex is creative in a primal, physical way. Why did it feel wrong here?

“Erotic?” she said again.

“Is there something wrong with that? I find you really attractive. You know that. It's no secret.”

She carefully removed the neural net. “It's just that for me, this is like . . . like worship. Like prayer. And when you get turned on by it—well, it's sort of like saying watching me
pray
is erotic.”

He blinked as if viewing an image of her at prayer. He reddened again and looked away.

“Really?” she said. “
Really?
Oh, that's . . . that's . . . men!” She left the neural net lying on the floor and stalked across the lab.

“Yeah, but it's erotic in a
wholesome
sort of way,” he called after her. “And you have to remember—I went to Catholic school.”

She stopped. “So if I came back in here wearing a short, plaid skirt?”

“My brain waves wouldn't be the only thing to spike.”

She turned back to glare at him, then burst into laughter. She laughed until she started to hiccup. Eugene took matters into his own hands at that point and stopped her hiccups by marching across the lab and kissing her.

“I think I'm in love with you,” Eugene said with a breathy whisper when he'd raised his head and brought his eyes back into focus.

“Let me know when you're sure,” she told him, then turned and swept out of the lab.

MIKE SEEMED, IF NOT HAPPY,
at least contented to be finally taking their trials out into the real world of construction. Their outdoor lab was outfitted with a real, full-scale John Deere 310K backhoe loader with a digging depth of a little more than fourteen feet. Mike had picked the unit. It was a machine he knew inside out.

It was sitting at present in a flat, sandy area just to the northeast of the Forward Kinetics building, flanking the parking lot and kitty-corner to the loading dock onto which they'd rolled the BPM machine and Becky's transmitter. Becky generated its own Wi-Fi hotspot, so Chuck had no doubt the signal would be plenty robust for the real-world trials.

While Matt and Dice argued the pros and cons of staging a full-scale demo of the backhoe for the Applied Robotics show, Mike inspected it. Or maybe he made friends with it, the way one would with a horse.

“Beautiful machine,” he said, patting the backhoe's vivid yellow flank. “It's gonna feel weird not sitting in it, doing the work, though.”

Chuck looked over in time to catch the flash of wistfulness in the construction engineer's eyes and was momentarily stunned. How in God's name had he overlooked that aspect of the subject's neural activity? Pushing buttons wasn't just about pushing buttons. It was about interacting with the environment, tactile feedback. He made a note to ask the team about their subjective feelings when working in this way. Sure, they were all excited now, but once the newness wore off would they mourn that missing physical interaction? Would it make the work less fulfilling? Less attractive? Less engaging?

He thought about how he'd felt the first time he'd been able to do some simple work wearing the kinetic interface. He'd been manipulating neural plots from MRI sessions—nothing complicated—but he had missed the tactile sense of keys beneath his fingertips and, absurdly, mouse clicks. Sara seemed not to care that she no longer had to finger mouse buttons, but he knew the response was still there by the way she tapped and stroked the arm of her chair during a session.

“Euge.” Chuck glanced over the top of the BPM module at his assistant, who was detangling the power cables on the off side. “Could you take over here for a moment? I need to go talk to Mike about something.”

“Sure. Where are you on your checklist?”

“I was just getting ready to run a quick diagnostic on the neural net.”

“Got it.” Euge came around the five-foot-tall bank of machinery to take Chuck's iPad from his hand. “You know we're going to have to reduce the size of this thing by a lot if it's ever going to be commercially viable anywhere but a factory setting.”

Chuck looked at the Brewster-Brenton and nodded. “That'll come. Dice already has a team working on miniaturization. Just out of curiosity,” he added, “how'd your last session with Mini go?”

To his surprise, Eugene colored all the way to the roots of his hair. “It . . . it went . . . great. I guess.”

Chuck read his expression and laughed. “I don't need to know about that part of it. What I'd really like to know is if she misses working with the GUI and other things like the keyboard, drawing pad, mouse, whatever.”

Eugene cleared his throat. “She doesn't seem to miss that at all. She moves so freely, she practically dances, you know. When she's being creative . . .” He waved his arms in the air. “It's really . . . interesting.”

“I'll bet.” Chuck turned away, still snickering, and made his way off the loading dock and across the sandy patch to where Mike was still getting acquainted with the backhoe.

“Have you named her yet?” he asked, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“What?” Mike blinked at him, then smiled. “Well, not officially. But she seems sort of like a Darya to me. That's my daughter's name.”

“Darya Deere. Lovely name.” Chuck patted one fat tire. “Hello, Darya. Pleased to meet you.” He nodded up at the cab. “You gonna miss that a lot? Sitting in the cab, hands on the controls?”

“I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't. It helps me concentrate, y'know? That sense of touch. I imagine part of the problem with making this tech work right is getting people to concentrate hard enough. It could be pretty bad if someone, I dunno, sneezed or got a phone call or got distracted in some way while they were doing some kinds of work.”

Chuck ran a hand through his hair, only now realizing how long it was getting. “Yes. That's something we're clearly going to have to address.”

“You bet. I mean when you're in the cab, driving, and you have a stray thought, worst that happens is you idle for a second or two
until you get your hands moving again. If it's all up here”—he tapped his head—“then a stray thought could cause you to drop the ball. Literally. Or throw it somewhere it doesn't belong.”

Chuck pulled a little three-ring notebook out of his back pocket and made another note. Mike made a sound Chuck realized was a titter. He looked up from his notes. The other man was pointing at his notebook.

“See what I mean: all this technology, with you right in the thick of it, and you still write notes with a pencil.”

Chuck looked down at the pencil in question—a .07 mechanical one—and grimaced. “Tactile feedback's important to me, too, Mike. I'm not sure why that only just occurred to me. In some ways what we're doing to you all is putting you in a self-constructed isolation chamber.”

Mike shrugged at that. He then jerked a thumb up at the backhoe's cab. “I'm gonna climb up and check out the controls. Make sure I know where everything is. Wouldn't want to push the wrong button—kinetically speaking.”

Chuck nodded and returned to the loading dock. The rest of the team had appeared to watch the trials. Tim and Sara sat on the edge of the dock, while Matt and Dice hovered around the BPM. Eugene handed Chuck his iPad as he hit the top of the loading dock stairs.

“So what was that about?” Eugene asked, nodding toward the backhoe. Mike had started it and was raising and lowering the loader and flexing the digging arm.

“Just following up on my thoughts about tactile feedback. Mike really enjoys the sensations of being in the machine, having his hands on the controls.” He glanced down at Sara and Tim. “Do either of you have any thoughts on that? The loss of tactile feedback, I mean.”

Tim disappeared inside himself for fewer than two seconds,
then shrugged and shook his head. “Not me, man. I like the new
me
interface.”

“Sara?”

She looked pensive. “I suppose . . . yeah, there is a certain enjoyment level that goes with clicking and dragging or holding a stylus in my hand. But it's so much slower to work that way. I think the trade-offs are all on the side of this technology. To be able to create blueprints and elevations as fast as my brain and the computer interface can work? That is priceless. If I miss a mouse, I can always click one while I'm playing Timmy's games.” She smiled at the programmer, who bent at the waist in a sitting bow.

“And for people who do need that feedback,” Dice said, “we can probably use the VR to at least allow them a mental map of some interfaces—like Mike's backhoe cab, say.”

“That's definitely something we'll want to consider in the next phase,” Matt said.

“Okay. But there is one other thing we need to discuss now,” Chuck said, his gaze going to Matt. “Mike brought up an important point: distractions. When your thought is your reality, marshaling those thoughts is critical. Concentration is critical. We already know that the human mind can only concentrate at high levels for relatively brief periods of time.”

Sara was nodding. “He's right. If I can draw plots at the speed of thought, I can screw up at the speed of thought, too. In my work it's no big deal—just undo, redo. But if you're piloting an aircraft or running one of those”—she nodded toward the Deere—“you could seriously hurt people.”

“Failsafes,” Dice said. “We'll just have to build failsafes into Becky, so when an operator loses concentration and their brain waves lose focus—go from a strong gamma to a beta, say—the interface holds steady rather than returning to a default or starting state. I can work on that.”

“Hey, I'm ready to go.” Mike was climbing the stairs to the loading dock. “You want me to sit there?” He gestured at the chair Eugene had brought out. The neural net was draped carefully across its back.

Eugene hastened to pick up the net. “Yeah. Have a seat, and we'll get you set up.”