The God Wave (7 page)

A little white lie—it was true they
might
not have been accepted. They didn't need to know that they were
already
accepted for both because Matt had clout in some quarters and knew how to exercise it. As the group continued to voice their concerns, Matt took up his pen and continued his doodle.

“This gamma burst is almost a minute in length!” Matt stood in the doorway of the main lab, his iPad in one hand and a cup of orange juice in the other.

Chuck, Dice, and Mike were in bay three, setting Mike up for a session with Dice's new Wi-Fi system. Chuck was adjusting the neural net over the engineer's head but stopped and looked up, the focused expression on his face clearing like a morning fog.

“That the data from Mike's last session?” Chuck asked. “Interesting, isn't it?”

“Thank you, Mr. Spock. Yes, it is interesting. It's more than interesting. But what does it mean?”

“You know what it means. It means they're—”

“Yeah, yeah. They're double- and triple-tasking. I get that. But the bursts are growing longer. Hell, they're not even bursts anymore, Chuck. They're full-blown states.”

“Yes. They are,” Mike said, awe mixing with pride.

Chuck made a final adjustment and turned to face his partner,
jamming his hands deep into the pockets of the white lab coat he insisted on wearing. “I think what we're seeing is like muscle memory. I think their brains are becoming more effective and efficient at working this way.”

Matt stared at him, aware suddenly of the beating of his own heart. “You mean they're building mental muscles?”

“That's what I'm thinking, yes. It's like any other skill. Take skiing or playing tennis, for example. You may be awkward and slow when you start out, you may tire easily, but if you keep doing what you're doing, you get better. You develop the muscles appropriate to the activity, and you learn how to use them most effectively.”

“So what we're seeing here is . . . evolution on a micro scale.”

Chuck flashed a winsome smile. “Yes! Exciting, isn't it? I mean we know that the human brain is plastic, adaptable. But just how adaptable, we're only now discovering.”

Matt came farther into the lab, looking at Mike a little differently now. “To be clear, what we're doing here is creating an evolutionary imperative.”

“Well, I wouldn't call it an imperative. More like an evolutionary opportunity.”

“An evolutionary opportunity. Can I quote you on that, Doc?”

“Sure. Why not? But if anyone laughs, tell them it was Dice's idea.”

Dice snorted and stood up from where he'd been tinkering with Roboticus's Wi-Fi transceiver. “We're ready to give it a try. You all set, Mike?”

“Yeah. Can't you see me flexing my brain muscles?”

Dice smiled and glanced at Matt. “You got a moment to watch the maiden voyage of the Wi-Fi interface?”

“Sorry, no. I have to go write a speech.”

“AND THAT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
is perhaps the most exciting thing about our research: the subjects we are working with on a frequent basis are rewriting their own internal software. They are, in essence, taking advantage of an evolutionary opportunity afforded them by the Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface. And as they do, we've discovered one other thing: the possibilities are endless.”

Matt wrapped up his talk to thunderous applause, after which he did some Q and A. Mostly the questions were about real-world applications, which he was more than happy to provide. Here Matt was careful to speak his audience's language. He was courting a mixed group of politicians and businessmen, with a handful of medical professionals who worked for a medical equipment manufacturer thrown in. That audience required a broad-based approach that made use of some of Chuck's favorite words:
transcend,
surmount,
and
quality of life.

“Imagine,” Matt told one manufacturer of printed circuitry, “that you have an employee—a highly skilled, well-trained employee—whose job is to design PC boards. That employee suffers a broken finger. Your normal course of action in that case might be to put the employee on disability, right?”

The man nodded.

Matt walked to the whiteboard that was set up behind him in the hotel ballroom and wrote “short-term disability.”

“Okay, and you'd have to put someone else in the position, meaning you'd have to hire and train another CAD/CAM operator, yes?”

“Yes.”

Matt wrote “hire and train” on the board.

“And while that person is coming up to speed, is he or she going to be as productive as the original designer?”

“Hell no.”

Matt wrote “lost productivity” beneath the other notations.

“What about the quality of their work? Is that going to be up to par?”

“No.”

Now others were shaking their heads.

Matt turned back to the board and wrote “increased quality-assurance hours.”

“So all in all, you're looking at a pretty costly situation. What does it cost to hire and train these days?”

“Pretty close to ten grand for that level of employee,” said the manufacturer.

“Ten grand,” Matt repeated. “Per employee.” He capped the marker. “Now let's imagine that the same injury befalls someone trained to work with the CAD/CAM machine through Becky. That employee could return to work almost immediately. Heck, they could even lie down on the job if they needed to. As long as they could see their workspace using our patented kinetic converter, they could continue to output designs or finished product. No need to hire and train anybody to take their place. No need for them to avail themselves of disability insurance, thus cutting their paycheck. No need for their quality to fall off, thus creating more work for your QA teams and more rework for them or another employee.”

“I'd like to see this in action,” said one older gentleman with a ramrod-straight bearing that spoke of the military.

“Absolutely. We'll be demonstrating our technology at the Applied Robotics show coming up this spring. If you aren't going to be there, or if you would like a preview, let me know, and I'll arrange a visit to the lab.”

As it turned out, he did end up scheduling a walk-through for the older guy, who was, he learned, an ex-marine by the name of
Leighton Howard. He did it on a day when Chuck was off doing a gig of his own, and Eugene and Dice were running the lab.

And he did it close to quitting time, too, so that after Howard was impressed by Sara and Mike, he could be equally dazzled by Chen Lanfen.

FOR CHEN LANFEN, KUNG FU
was more than a workout routine, more than a means of self-defense, even more than a martial art form. It was a whole body and spirit meditation, for she understood the words
kung fu
as much in their original meaning of “work” or “accomplishment” as she did their later application, which referred to a particular set of martial arts. When she'd first undertaken learning kung fu, she had also sought to master the highly ritualized Fujian tea ceremony, kung fu cha. She used the principles of kung fu in Chinese calligraphy, in cooking, in music. She wrote the odd line of poetry, too, but did not feel she rose to the level of kung fu there. Hard work, maybe, but not much achievement.

Her initial work with the device Matt called Becky had been awkward. Martial arts required a free flow of energies through the body and a free flow of the body through space. That had not been possible wearing a crown of transceivers and twinkly lights, and she had immediately gotten out of the meditative state required for her discipline and into a stormy mental funk.

Then Matt's assistant, Dice, had presented her with a Wi-Fi alternative to the fiber-optic cable and linked her to the funny robot that had become an extension of her will.

She'd started work with Roboticus like everyone else, pushing him hither and yon with her brain waves, making him twist and turn, spin and zigzag. Once she had perfected that, though, Dice had built her a different sort of robot, one that not so subtly reminded her of the battle droids in the Star Wars movies. It was three feet long and vaguely football shaped, with four legs that
could pivot a full 360 on their joints. The feet were about the size of a man's hand and curved along the bottoms, which had rubber soles. Because of these feet—and the gyroscopic mechanisms at either end of the football—the bot was incredibly well balanced. If Lanfen could balance herself on one foot, Pigskin—as she started calling it—could do likewise.

She was working through a series of simple exercises with the robot—step, kick; step, tiger-claw strike—when Matt came into her practice area with an older fellow whose thick white hair reminded her of soft-serve ice cream. She hesitated in the middle of a move, and the bot keeled over, its native programming taking control to draw in its appendages and put it into sleep mode.

Matt frowned at it. “Keep practicing, Lanfen. I'd like Mr. Howard to see what you've been doing.”

She said nothing about the fact that it was their interruption that had stopped her practice in the first place, and she did as requested, settling back into a horse stance as Matt turned to his companion and began a running narrative. Lanfen tracked them peripherally as she put the bot through a series of moves that echoed her own.

“Ms. Chen is a black-belt-level kung fu practitioner. She's a native of Shanghai. Began learning martial arts there. As you can see, the robot she's manipulating is only marginally humanoid. But it has arms and legs, so she can make it echo her movements through the BKKI.”

“Does she have to do all that herself?” the older man asked, gesturing at Lanfen.

“Ideally no.” Matt turned to look at her. “Lanfen, can you drill the bot without moving?”

She stopped in midkick and planted both feet firmly on the practice mat. Then she bowed to the bot, which bowed in return, tucking its front limbs up around its elongated middle. She had
never done it this way—using just her mind—but she had listened to Dice talk about the others' experiences and felt it wouldn't take much to figure it out.

At first, nothing happened. But as she concentrated, Pigskin began to exercise a series of odd backflips, tipping backward until it could balance on its arms, then flinging its legs and torso over to repeat the movement.

It looked like a clumsy Slinky made of oversize bicycle-chain links, but Lanfen's confidence in the robot's performance—meaning
her
performance—was all she needed. When it reached the far wall of the lab, she had it rise up and execute a sequence of kicks, blocks, and turns, her muscles tightening and loosening in time with the robot though she stayed as still as she could.

When she'd done that, she let the bot revert to its normal pill-bug behavior and turned to the watching men.

White Hair was nodding. “Let me ask you, young lady: does the shape of the robot offer any particular challenges?”

Interesting question,
she thought, to which she had an immediate answer. “Yes. I realized how important my head is to the art only when I tried to balance a headless mechanism the first time. Also the fact that its torso is solid and doesn't bend limits the range of movement significantly. Still, I imagine if you had a team of these metal puppies guarding something, they could be quite imposing.”

“Guard dogs?” he mused.

“Of course,” said Matt. “And guard dogs that can't be bought off for the price of a steak with tranquilizers in it.”

“Yes, but could you make them bulletproof?”

“To a great extent,” Matt told him. “The materials they might be made of are pretty broad.”

“Very interesting, Dr. Streegman. I shall most certainly relate the impressive nature of this demonstration to my associates.”

“That's all I ask, Mr. Howard.”

The two men left the lab, Matt favoring Lanfen with a wink and a smile on the way out. She felt good. She was an unofficial member of the Forward Kinetics team, but if she could help generate funding, she might become official all the sooner, which meant more time training with the robots.

And what girl wouldn't want to spar with R2-D2?

SARA CROWELL WAS A PRODIGY.
Since her “use the Force” breakthrough, she had sailed ahead of the rest of the team in the sheer ease with which she'd learned to work with Becky. In fact, she had expanded beyond the CAD/CAM program to manipulating software programs in general. Tim could do likewise, but Sara's use of the kinetic interface seemed effortless by comparison. She had surpassed the Jedi Master and was now capable of ease and speed that neither Tim nor Mike could demonstrate.

She was also, Chuck noted, able to do simple things like open and close programs and set up her workspace with her attention half on other things: a conversation, note taking, watching another subject work.

Tim, on the other hand, could move mountains (literally, in the case of the software he used to build strange alien worlds for his video games), but he had to concentrate every ounce of himself on the task at hand. Distracting him derailed his train of thought, which brought on a fit of dark sulks.

It's as if Sara is a fine-tuned athlete, used to using multiple muscles in harmony to execute a particular skill, while Tim is a power lifter, only able to handle one—albeit substantial—task at a time.

Chuck realized this was the only time Troll would ever be compared to a power lifter. Either way, it was impressive to watch both of them work.

Sara was in the lab one day, under Eugene's and Chuck's
watchful eyes, as she ran through the demonstration she was prepping for the Applied Robotics conference. It was as impressive as all get-out, Chuck thought. She started with the easy stuff—opening a new file, setting up the workspace, and launching into a whiz-bang, lightning-fast demonstration of design at the speed of thought. Buildings grew up out of the digital ground like time-lapse crystals; trees and shrubs slid into place as bright, wire-frame skeletons and gained texture and color as if sentient paint flowed over them.

It was a potent demonstration, made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Sara was no longer connected to her computer by strands of fiber-optic cable. With the neural net, she was free to stand, pace the room, stare out a window—whatever would aid the creative processes going on in her nimble brain.