The God Wave (3 page)

“There's this guy in your office,” said Eugene.

Chuck looked up from the diagnostics he was running on the latest software upgrade to the Brewster unit. “A guy in my office. Can you be more specific?”

“Says his name is Streegman. Dr. Streegman. From MIT. Something about hearing you on
Science Friday
.”

“He drove seven hours to talk to me about
Science Friday
?”

“He says he may have something you need.” Eugene shrugged. “Look, I asked already. He's being mysterious.”

“Great. Just what I need—another mystery. Here.” Chuck slid off the station chair and waved Eugene into it. “Continue the diagnostics on this upgrade. It's checking the transport subroutines right now. When it's done with that, plug in Sara's last session, and see if we're still getting a hiccup on those theta waves.”

Chuck slouched down the hall to his office, hands in his jean pockets, wondering what Dr. Streegman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could possibly have that he needed. He
opened the door and swiftly assessed the man leaning against the window frame, staring out over East Madison as if there were something fascinating happening on a rooftop across town. Streegman was of average height, averagely nerdy-looking, probably in his early forties, wearing standard-issue khakis, blazer, and loafers.

Standing in the doorway in his jeans, sweater vest, and Converse high-tops, Chuck felt indecorously underdressed.

He cleared his throat and held out his hand. “Dr. Streegman? Chuck Brenton. To what do I owe the honor?”

Streegman jerked to attention, turned, and took the proffered hand. His smile was late and superficial. As if he hadn't had to use it in some time. He also looked as if he hadn't slept in a while. He had a nick on his left cheek where he'd cut himself shaving.
Sleep dep, most likely.

“Dr. Brenton, thank you for seeing me.”

Chuck ran through the usual set of niceties—“please sit down, would you like coffee or tea?”—and Streegman asked for coffee with the gratitude of a man who really needed the caffeine.

“Did you really come all the way from Boston just to see me?” Chuck asked as he brought the man a cup.

Sipping his coffee, Streegman sat in the antique wingback chair across from Chuck's desk and nodded at the
Lord of the Rings
action figures on one of the bookshelves.

“Fantasy fan, huh? Funny. I would've expected, I don't know,
Star Wars
or
Star Trek
maybe.”

Chuck smiled. “Those are at home. But they all stir the imagination. So what can I do for you?”

“Imagination . . . exactly. It's actually more what I can do for you . . . I hope.” The smile turned on itself, becoming self-deprecating. “I heard the
Science Friday
broadcast. It was . . . galvanizing.”

Chuck blinked. “Really? I hadn't expected that response from anybody. To be honest, I was expecting derision, which I've definitely received my fair share of in the past few days.”

Streegman put his coffee cup down on the edge of the desk. “That's because they're idiots.”

“But you're not.”

“Definitely not. You said you need some means of establishing a baseline and some sort of standardized adjustment for variation in brain wave output.”

“Yes. Yes, I did—I
do
need that.”

“I have it.”

“You . . .” Chuck shook his head. “What do you do at MIT, Dr. Streegman?”

“Call me Matt. I'm a mathematician, a sometime programmer. I spend a fair amount of my time creating working algorithms for the robotics guys. I'm a locus, Dr. Brenton—”

“Chuck,” he said absently.

“Chuck. I am where math meets robotic interfaces.”

“So how's that help me?”

“It doesn't, completely. But some years ago, I had the occasion to closely observe, over a period of weeks, the EEG activity of a seriously debilitated and eventually dying brain. I rather instinctively view things through the prism of mathematics, including this experience. I naturally began looking at the brain rhythms being generated as mathematical expressions. I set about describing them, calculating them, quantifying them.” He paused, whether for dramatic effect or—as Chuck suspected—because there was a subtext to the story that made it hard to recount. What he said next made any reasons irrelevant.

“When I was done, I had a baseline equation for this individual.”

My God . . .

“I believe,” Streegman continued, “that if I were to have access to your data, I could provide you with the equations to establish a baseline for each subject and, further, with equations that would adjust for the variations in their output. In fact . . .” He dug a flash drive out of his pocket and placed it on Chuck's desk. “I did some sample calculations using data from your paper on the musical mind.”

Chuck reached for the drive, barely conscious of what he was doing. His hand hovered over it. “What software do I—”

“It's just a set of charts and equations in a document file. Your word processor should read it. Though if your application has a programming feature set, it will allow you to parse the equations more clearly.”

Chuck realized his hand was shaking. He snatched up the flash drive and plugged it into one of the USB ports on his laptop. In seconds he had opened the file and was looking at twin columns of data. On the left an EEG graph of a subject, on the right a mathematical equation describing the brain wave.

“The first expression in the equation is the baseline,” the mathematician told him. “The second is intended to calculate any deviation from that baseline. Or should I say variation?” He shrugged. “The peaks and valleys.”

Chuck knew enough math to understand that the second half of the equation would need to be iterative—applied repeatedly to adjust the output of the subject to any interface. He cleared his throat noisily. “You could program this into a software interface?”

“Not by myself. I have a colleague, though—well, a postgrad student, actually—who would do the programming.”

“And the mechanical part of the interface?”

Streegman's smile was suddenly broad and genuine. “Dice is a genius when it comes to robotics. He's the whole package—software and hardware. I'd like to bring him in, too.”

“Bring him into what, exactly, Dr. Streegman?” Chuck asked, his voice distant and breathless. “What are you proposing?”

“What I'm proposing,” Streegman said, still smiling, “is a partnership. And I'll go further. If our collaborative efforts yield the sort of fruit I believe they will, I'd like to propose that we go into business together.”

“Business? What sort of business?”

“A research and development firm, Doctor. A business that takes what we learn in the lab and applies it to real-world situations in a wide array of disciplines: art, manufacturing, computer science, agriculture. You name it. I propose that we”—the smile became a grin—“change the world.”

Chuck's breath stopped in his throat.
I'm dreaming,
he told himself.
I've fallen asleep at my desk, and I'm dreaming this.
He closed his eyes slowly, squeezed them shut, and opened them again.

Matt Streegman was still there, still waiting for him to respond.

“I don't know. It's all very sudden, no?”

“Bigger decisions happen in a fraction of the time. This is a chance to make your ideas a reality.”

“That sounds wonderful, but I'm an academic, Doctor. Matt. Not a businessman. If numbers represent monetary values, my brain goes tilt.”

“You don't have to worry about that. Not any of it. I've got the math and the money covered.”

“And the mechanics? This guy, Dice, he'll build the interface between my EEG reader and the real-world object?”

“Like I said, he's a genius. If this algorithm works, he can build an interface to apply it.”

Chuck licked his lips. “If you build it, he will come?”

Matt laughed. “If he builds it, everything will come.”

DICE WAS ASTONISHED BY THE
warren of mismatched buildings that made up the Johns Hopkins campus around the Traylor Research Building. It reminded him of a box full of Legos that he was pretty sure still existed in the closet of his room back home in San Francisco—a room his proud parents had turned into a sort of shrine to their only son—that had been upended onto the grounds.

In fact, the Traylor Building was one of the oddest toys in this particular box. A narrow, sand-colored parallelepiped building sandwiched between two larger, taller, more modern-looking ones, it was unimpressive. Or would have been had it not been sporting the words
JOHNS HOPKINS
in huge, white letters across the top of the façade. There was nothing else to indicate the level of research that went on there. Nothing to indicate that history was being made in a research facility on the third floor.

Dice liked that sense of anonymity. He felt sometimes as if he were putting one over on the world—that he was part of a great geek conspiracy that, when the time was ripe, would announce to all and sundry that they had solved society's problems through the simple application of technology. Ta-da!

“How goes it, Dice?” Matt Streegman had appeared silently out of nowhere, as he was in the annoying habit of doing, to peer over Dice's shoulder at the small robot on which he was working.

Dice put the cover back on the rounded carapace and smoothed out the cabling between it and the Brewster brain wave reader.

“It goes swimmingly. Not that I advocate robots swimming. Especially after a large meal.” Dice paused for Matt's laughter, which didn't come. Dice cleared his throat. “I think our little guy is ready for Dr. Brenton's subjects. Who do we have?”

“For this phase we have us. Well, Chuck anyway. He'd like to do the test drive before we bring in his lab rats.”

“About that . . .”

“What?”

Dice grimaced. “I've actually done a bit of a test drive, hence my messing with Roboticus here.”

“It works?”

Dice rolled his eyes. “Of course it works. I just had a little glitch in one of the connectors—a bent pin. I soldered it. Should be fine now.”

“Show me.”

“Before Chuck tries it?”

“You did.”

“Touché.”

“I just want to know how excited to be.”

Dice grinned. “You should be very excited.”

“And of course I want to be able to maintain my professorial mien in the face of your world-shaking accomplishment.”

“Right.”

“So show me.”

Dice set the robot in the middle of the lab floor. It was basically a glorified Roomba—little more than a drive mechanism in an aluminum and plastic casing—but it was all they needed as a proof of concept. It had a little red joystick mounted on the top of it that would allow an operator to steer it manually. And, if all went right, with his mind.

He allowed himself a moment of glee at that thought.

He moved back to the Brewster unit and took the neural array from its stand. He put that on his head, making sure he had the transceivers pressed as tightly against his skull as possible. A gleaming twist of lightweight fiber-optic cabling ran from the neural net to the brain pattern monitor and thence to the robot.

The important part of the device—the kinetic converter—was
a software module that resided in the BPM and fed commands to the firmware aboard Roboticus.

Dice flipped the EEG monitor on. “Okay, now, Roboticus. Let's see what we can do.”

He thought at the ersatz Roomba. He thought it forward. Or, more accurately, he thought of pushing the joystick forward. After a moment of hesitation, the robot went.

“Okay,” Dice murmured. “Let's go right.”

The joystick toggled right; the robot turned and trundled off in that direction.

“Left.”

It went left.

“Let's pop a wheelie.”

The little bot executed a slow 360.

“God, it's working.” Chuck Brenton's airless whisper issued from the lab doorway.

Technically the last move hadn't worked, but still Dice was pleased. He glanced up. Dr. Brenton and his senior assistant, Eugene, stood staring at the now-motionless robot.

“Oh, hey. Sorry, Doc,” said Dice. “I just wanted to make sure it works before we have you try it. I hate it when the machinery flakes during a demonstration.” He switched the Brewster to standby and reached up to unfasten the neural array.

“That's a good look for you,” said Eugene.

After two weeks of close proximity, his flat, nasal voice was only minimally irritating. His sarcastic attitude . . . well, Dice had to admit, it had sort of grown on him.

“I'm thinking that's a great sideline,” Dice came back. “While the good doctors are making millions with their oh-so-helpful and socially redeeming technology, I figure we market the blinky net as the latest in futuristic fashion.”

Dice helped Dr. Brenton don the net and position the transceivers. With the BPM on, Brenton turned to face the robot. He rubbed the palms of his hands on his jeans. “Okay. What do I do?”

“See the little red joystick on the top of the carapace?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You just think about operating it.”

“As if by hand.”

“Exactly. The kinetic converter will take a second to establish your baseline, then it should respond to your directions.”

Dice watched the neurologist closely. He was half-afraid the guy was going to hyperventilate and pass out. He didn't, though. He faced the robot with a look of intense concentration.

Roboticus responded—tentatively at first, then with more certainty. In about three minutes, the scientist had the little bot running straight lines at flank speed and weaving slowly around obstacles. At this point Chuck was seized by a sudden fit of laughter that left the robot quivering in the middle of the lab.