The God Wave (5 page)

“Really. I think I got a little too caught up in it all anyway, you know? I wasn't getting as much artwork done as I was daydreaming about what I would do the next time I was in the lab.” She laughed—a light, breezy sound that made Chuck at least want to feel better. “Who knows? Maybe I could come in on a volunteer basis. You know, sort of a proof of concept after you've tried the gear out on the other guys.”

Chuck studied her pert face carefully. “You'd do that? Just on your own time?”

“Sure, why not? I love using this lab as an art studio. Where else would I get access to this kind of equipment? Not to mention a fully stocked kitchen? Besides, this is cool stuff, Doc. This is like, you know . . . what the future is made of.”

He sat back in his chair and regarded her with narrowed eyes. “I suppose the fact that you're sweet on my lab director doesn't enter into it.”

Her cheeks went pink.

“Heck, no. I don't have to be here every day to get to Eugene.” She flashed him a blinding smile and popped out of her chair. “Now, I'm going to go over to the lab and see what he thinks of my being let go. Wanna watch?”

He followed Mini as far as the door to the lab where Eugene was slaving over a computer model for the CAD/CAM interface. She went directly to his workstation and stood silently for a moment, then moved just enough to make the fabric of her long skirt rustle.

Eugene glanced up at her, his eyes focusing on something outside his head faster than Chuck had ever seen.

“Mini. Hi. I didn't know you were here.”

“I'm just here to say good-bye, Euge. Doc Brenton just told me he won't be needing me anymore for the program, so . . .” She shrugged artlessly. “I guess I won't see you.”

Euge's eyes were locked on hers with a stunned expression. He'd known, of course, that her part of the program was going to be terminated but, in true Eugene Pozniaki fashion, had apparently not considered the ramifications of that.

He glanced from Mini to the clock on the wall above his lightboard. Almost one. “Look, I'm at a stopping point here. Can you . . . that is, can we go get some lunch?”

She nodded, smiling. With her hands laced together in front of her, her head tilted to one side, and her short hair haloing a heart-shaped face, she managed to look pleasantly surprised by the whole exchange she had just orchestrated. Chuck almost felt sorry for Eugene.
Almost.

Grinning, he turned and went back to his office. Minerva Mause might be small, but she was clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Matt loved to win. He had definitely won the battle to steer the neurokinetics program toward the commercially viable side. He could only shake his head at Chuck's wish list of disciplines for initial experimentation. Leave it to the academic to come up with impractical, feel-good choices. Of course looking at medical and mobility applications would make sense at some point, but medicine was a low-margin operation given that only well-funded teaching hospitals such as Johns Hopkins had the wherewithal to make substantial financial commitments. People covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act were underwritten by public funds that were at the mercy of the ballot box, which shivered every time the political winds changed. Besides which, the Food and Drug Administration was notorious in delaying approval, and delays were the last thing they needed.

Matt had his eyes on a cadre of investors that would be able to provide almost limitless funding and would enable Forward Kinetics to produce commercially viable applications for Chuck
and Dice's co-invention, the Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface, or BKKI.

The Brenton component was a highly modified Brewster Brain Pattern Monitor—so modified, in fact, that Matt was already pursuing a patent on the unit. The CPU ran a program based on his conversion algorithm. Dice's input, in addition to continual work on the miniaturization of the monitor, was a lightweight transceiver system that linked the monitor to the mechanism it was intended to drive.

It was all coming together.

And now, after months of preparation, they were ready to begin working with their first round of subjects.

They were in the lab, getting ready for some field testing with the devices Dice and his select team of self-described minions had modified to take input from the BKKI, or Becky, as they insisted on calling it. In addition to Sara Crowell and Tim Desmond, there was a raw recruit named Mikhail Yenotov.

They were a study in diversity, Matt reflected as he watched them through the high window of the gallery, which gave their main lab the appearance of a huge operating theater. Sara was a tall, cool brunette in her thirties. No nonsense. Remote. Watchful, with high-intensity gray eyes. Matt understood that she used her privacy like a shield.
Understand? Hell, I practically invented that
. Like him, something in her past had hurt her, had gotten in somehow. Probably a relationship. Possibly a woman—Matt couldn't see her getting worked up over something as stupid as a man.

While Sara kept her private life to herself, the same could not be said for her opinions. Those she spread liberally, almost joyfully, like in those old experiments in which DDT was sprayed over swimming pools full of smiling children. A lot of those opinions were reserved for the male-dominated industry in which she worked. She had bumped up against the glass ceiling so many
times it had given her a thicker skull, and she refused to even entertain ideas that she might not be as good as the boys, which she'd been hearing all her life, starting with her father. It was this constant battle that made her hard. But it also made her better.

Tim—or Troll, as he preferred to be called—was in his twenties. The guy was such an archetypal computer-gaming nerd that he made Dice and Eugene both look like high school jocks. He had that pale, damp mushroom complexion one associated with dimly lit computer grottos and game arcades. It went with his riot of thick, unevenly cut hair. His watery, colorless eyes reminded Matt of photos he'd seen in
Nat Geo
of bush babies or whatever those little big-eyed buggers were called. Troll spoke in monosyllables except when describing his latest creations or nattering about computer code with Dice or Eugene—or insulting someone. Even then most of what came out of his mouth was incomprehensible to half the listeners half the time.

And then there was Mike Yenotov. A meat-and-potatoes construction engineer in his early forties, he was straight up, straightforward, blunt, and quietly, mulishly stubborn. What he didn't understand he filed away with a blink of his brown eyes and a shrug that Matt took to mean, “I don't get it. I don't need to get it. If I need to get it, someone will just have to stop and explain it to me . . . and if they condescend to me, I'll leave—after punching them in the mouth.” Mike was practical and knowledgeable about his craft—what he didn't know about heavy machinery could probably fit on the head of a very small pin—but seemingly little else.

Then there was Minerva. If Chuck thought he was being clever about sneaking her around like a pet mouse in his pocket to hide her continued involvement from his business partner, he was fooling himself. Matt knew Mini was still coming in after hours (if there really was such a thing in a place like this) and working
with the interface. He let it happen as a way of throwing Chuck a bone after blackballing most of his list of applications. What made Chuck happy made Matt's life easier. He also wasn't sure how effectively a no would work on Mini. One, could he bring himself to say it to her face? Two, would she understand what no meant anyway? Naturally she would not get as much time on the equipment as the three official subjects, not by a long shot. But if it was enough time to make Chuck content, that would be all that was necessary.

In the event that Chuck demanded she have greater access (requested, rather, because it was hard to imagine Chuck Brenton demanding anything), Matt was prepared to offer her an official place in the program, but he had no intention of doing that voluntarily . . . and only as a last resort. Time with Becky was at a premium—they had only the one unit until Dice's team could assemble another—and Matt was determined not to waste any time on what he viewed as a frivolous pursuit.

Seeing Chuck enter the lab through the main doors below, Matt left the observation gallery and hurried down the stairs.

Leaving Chuck to steer the sessions alone was a bad idea.

THERE'S AN OLD APHORISM ABOUT
being happy as a clam. Chuck had no idea what clams had to be happy about, only that they lacked the neural mechanisms to be unhappy about anything. Nonetheless, he was, he decided, happy as that proverbial clam when he rolled into the lab on the first morning of official experimentation with the new Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface.

Because up until today, the subjects had been working with Dice's Roboticus, learning to steer it smoothly about the lab. And while that was exciting to see, now they'd begin working within their own disciplines.

One step closer.

There were two arenas of experimentation set up in different sections of the large laboratory. One involved a powerful computer system that was outfitted with both Sara's CAD software and Tim's programming package; the other required a scale model of a backhoe that had been placed in a ten-by-ten-foot container, three feet deep in sand.

Despite his being the rookie, the experiments started with Mike Yenotov, figuring that his discipline was closest in nature to driving Roboticus, which he had proved apt at. Sara was slated for the next day and Tim for the day after that.

Mike's first session went about as well as hoped. The kinetic converter functioned flawlessly, capturing his brain waves as he envisioned himself controlling the model backhoe and translating them into energy and force that Becky could use to manipulate the machine's modified mechanisms.

The backhoe was joystick operated, just like Roboticus, and after about a half hour of getting used to the model's controls, Mike was almost making it dance as it dug a hole in the lab's sandbox.

“I gotta tell you,” he said, his voice betraying just a hint of New Jersey, “this is bonehead simple. I'm thinking one guy could operate a team of hoes and watch what each one is doing from the most useful POV. Viewpoint, I mean,” he added. “Think of it: if I don't gotta be in the cab, I don't need a spotter tellin' me about depth and dimensions. I can be checkin' that stuff myself.”

Chuck did think of it, and the prospect excited him. It hadn't occurred to him until just that moment that the most useful POV, as Mike had put it, wasn't always the first-person one. Dice, meanwhile, was almost dancing at the prospect of combining the Forward Kinetics system with the VR piece—a virtual reality component he intended to meld with the neural net.

“Just think of the possibilities,” he enthused at the end of the
day as they assessed their work with Mike. “The construction guy or the firefighter or the security guard now has a choice—look at the environment from inside the remote mechanism or look at it from the external viewpoint. All at the speed of thought.”

Chuck was thinking of the possibilities, even as he looked ahead to pairing Sara Crowell with her CAD software for the first time. Because although he was optimistic based on Mike's performance, he couldn't help but be cautious, too. There were bound to be differences between operating a purely mechanical device—even one with onboard computer assist, like Mike did—and operating software. One was solid, logical; it was obvious how the parts all moved and fit together. The other was ethereal, abstract. It relied on code to call it into existence. Chuck expected it would be a challenge to operate the intangible.

He'd said as much aloud when he, Dice, and Matt were alone in the conference room at the end of the debriefing session. Matt looked at him in a way that made Chuck feel as if he'd somehow turned plain old English into something untranslatable. “I don't foresee any problems, Chuck. You're such a damn worrywart. Clearly if they've driven the robot, they can run other machinery.” He got up, took a last drink of soda, tossed the can into the recycle bin, and left the room.

Dice raised his eyebrows then afforded Chuck a rueful grimace. “Sometimes I wonder what color the sky is in Matt World. He occasionally has trouble understanding that one equation does not fit all.”

That's not his only problem,
Chuck thought. Chuck sensed this was an ongoing debate between Matt and his engineer—in a series of ongoing debates Matt had with pretty much every person he ever encountered.

And he couldn't help feel that he wasn't sure whether he was looking forward to Sara's session or dreading it now.

CHUCK SEATED SARA WHERE SHE
could see the large, flat-screen display of the computer but not reach the mouse, keyboard, or track pad. The kinetic interface was wired to the USB port of the machine, and Sara's familiar software was running.

“What do I do?” she asked. Her excitement was not evident in her voice. Chuck could only see it in glimmers in her eyes.

“Something drop-dead easy,” said Matt. “Something you do almost without thinking about it. Only this time think. What would you normally do when you first sit down at the keyboard?”

“I'd open a project file or create a new one.”

“Okay, so try that. Think about what moves you make to create a new file.”

Grasping the arms of her chair, Sara gazed intently at the machine. There was a long moment of silence in which absolutely nothing happened.

“What are you trying to do?” Chuck asked.

“Move the mouse. I'm imagining my hand moving the mouse to the ‘file' menu.”

“I don't think that's gonna work,” said Dice. “That would require physically touching the mouse. It's the sensors in the mouse themselves that need to be affected.”

Sara glanced over at him where he sat on the edge of a worktable. “But I don't understand the mechanics of that.”

Chuck chewed the cap of his pen. “Try a different input. The track pad or keyboard maybe.”

Sara nodded, took a deep breath, and shifted her gaze back to the computer. Her eyes narrowed, her lips compressed, and a fine dew broke out on her upper lip. On the computer screen, the mouse pointer shifted in a wobbly upward crawl.

The room erupted in cheers and laughter.

“I told you,” Matt said.

You'd think we ended world hunger,
Chuck thought. But he was
laughing, too, with the sheer adrenaline rush of seeing even such meager success. Because he could see a future where they might just do something equal to that.

It was Dice who brought them back to the present. “What did you do?” he asked. “How did you make that work?”

“I imagined I was touching the track pad. Or that I was drawing a line across the contacts. That I understand. Let me see what else I can do.”

What she could do, she discovered, was move the pointer up to the menu bar by mentally scraping the same spot on the track pad over and over. Doing that, it took her several minutes to get the pointer to the “file” menu, but she did it.

But once there, she hit a roadblock.

“I'm not sure how to click.” Her voice was edgy with impatience.

“How would you do it normally?” Chuck asked.

“I'd tap.” She demonstrated on the arm of her chair. “But I'm not sure . . .” She peered at the track pad again, tapping several times on the chair arm.

Nothing happened.

Chuck was about to suggest she take a break when she growled in frustration, grasped the arms of the chair, and blinked.

The “file” menu flew open.

After a moment in which everyone in the room took a deep breath, Sara snaked the pointer down to the “new” command, gritted her teeth, gripped the chair arms, and blinked again. A new file opened.

There was much celebration.

However, it was the last celebrating they did that day. While Sara could shakily use the track pad to move the pointer, open menus, and click buttons—though she could even type using a mental map of where the letters were on the keyboard—she
could not use the higher functions of the software. Nor could she draw a damned thing freehand and place it in the workspace.

“The problem is the user interface,” she told the team later when they paused in momentary defeat. She ran a weary hand through her dark, collar-length hair, mussing its usually sleek texture. “I have to concentrate so hard on triggering the track pad that I can't focus on what I'm producing. The moment I take my attention off the pad and think about the workspace, I lose control of the mechanics. And, well, frankly I can't think of a way around that.”