The God Wave (8 page)

Chuck found himself laughing with exhilaration as she put the final touches on her casually constructed masterpiece.

“You know,” said Eugene wryly, “some people are going to think they're being hoaxed. They're going to think this stuff is all preprogrammed or that someone is doing this offstage.”

Chuck's laughter died in his throat, and he turned to look at his lab director. “That never even occurred to me.” He thought about it some more. “This is a huge problem. How can we prove it's real?”

Euge watched Sara fly through rendering and saving her file. “Well, what if we took requests?”

“Requests?”

“Eugene,” said Sara, “you're a genius.” Chuck noticed that even as she talked, the computer continued to be manipulated.
Impressive
.

“He's right, Doc,” she was saying. “If there are any Doubting Thomases in the crowd, we can ask them to propose tests of their own devising. I'm up for it. It doesn't have to be architec
tural, either. I can do widgets. Same thing for Timmy, I imagine. Someone could hand him a drawing of something, and he could render it for them. Or they could describe it and have him create it on the fly. It'd be fantastic.”

Euge's eyes lit up. “Can we try it?”

“Sure.” Sara swung back to look at the large plasma screen across the room and opened a new, blank file. “What do you want?”

Eugene glanced at Chuck, who nodded at him to take charge. Eugene's eyes went to the BPM readout charting Sara's brain state.

“Okay,” Eugene said. “I'd like a Frank Lloyd Wright–style building with two stories. No, three.”

“Material?”

“Brick below and limestone above.”

She gave him a funny look. “Limestone?”

“Yeah. Like the pyramids.”

“Right. Pyramids. I can build one of those if you'd like.”

“No, thanks. A Prairie School abode will be sufficient.”

She went to it, Eugene adding bits and pieces as she went: tree-of-life stained glass over and around the front door, a water feature along the front veranda, a slate roof. She kept up, creating what he asked almost as swiftly as the specs came out of his mouth.

Chuck glanced at her brain wave readouts:
She is doing this in one immensely long gamma fugue.

He had turned back to watch Euge's house take shape on the computer screen when the BPM uttered the shrill bleat of an alarm. Chuck stared at the digital readout: the wave pattern had literally flown off the chart. The vivid trace of light went up and disappeared at the top of the window. It didn't drop back into visible range until Sara broke concentration. Then it settled down into a normal but heightened beta state.

“What the heck was that?” Eugene asked, leaning in to look at the readout.

Chuck grimaced. “I have no idea.”

“Maybe there's something wrong with the machine,” Sara suggested.

Chuck ran a diagnostic, during which Sara put herself through some simple exercises geared toward generating a series of different states. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the machine.

“The trace flies out of the frame at the top,” noted Chuck. “Maybe Sara's producing an effect outside of her normal parameters. I'm going to try increasing the frequency range.”

He did, and they tried the experiment again.

Again the alarm sounded when Sara was fully engaged in processing Eugene's verbal instructions. Again Chuck increased the range.

The alarm went off a third time.

He recalibrated yet again.

This time the alarm was silent. And this time the brain state appeared on the monitor screen as a solid bar of brilliant amber.

“Seven megahertz,” murmured Chuck, even as Sara continued to design. “That's . . . extraordinary. There's no human brain activity in that range.”

“Gotta be static discharge,” Eugene replied quietly. “Gotta be.” He gave Sara another direction.

“Static discharge?” repeated Chuck. “Why?”

“Because the most common thing I can think of that generates a wave at seven megahertz is lightning.”

After Sara was sent home, Dice dismantled the rig and ran diagnostics on each individual component. While the system wasn't supposed to feed back into the neural net, Chuck refused to take a chance that it might.

Everything checked out clean.

Of course it does.

Dice stared in frustration at the disassembled parts of the kinetic converter. It had to be some permutation of Murphy's law: if something can go wrong it will,
and
you will not be able to reproduce the results or determine the cause by running diagnostics. Or it was a codicil to the aphorism that a watched pot never boils—in this case the screwed-up mechanism would refuse to malfunction while you were watching.

“There's nothing wrong with the mechanics,” Eugene said wearily. “And there's nothing wrong with the software program.”

“There has to be, though,” said Chuck. “Somewhere among these pieces of the puzzle, there has to be one that's malfunction
ing. Which means we have to find it—we can't ask our subjects to interact with a faulty system. There's no lab on earth in which that should be an acceptable risk, and especially not ours.”

Dice rubbed his eyes. “What if we test it on one of us?”

“To what end?” Chuck asked.

“We all know how the rig works. If there's something wrong, it should go wrong no matter who's at the helm, right?”

“Theoretically,” Chuck admitted. He was gazing at the neural net, his hazel eyes suddenly vague and unfocused.

Eugene was watching him. “I know that look. What are you thinking?”

“That I might be wrong.”

“It's been known to happen.”

Chuck gave Eugene a withering look, but the young man just smiled.

“Seriously, I'm thinking it might not be the converter. It might be the subjects. They're building mental muscles—we know that. What if the result is simply that this is a new muscle group? One that's producing a higher voltage of output? One that's producing a new rhythm?” Chuck's eyes went from vague to laser focus so fast, it made Dice's hair stand on end. “Reassemble the rig. I'm going to test it.”

“No, you're not,” said Eugene. “If something fries your brain, Forward Kinetics comes to a screeching and high-profile halt. It's kaput.
I'll
test it.”

“Euge—”

“Time-out, guys.” Dice made a T with his hands. “Let me reassemble it first, make sure there's nothing in the connections that's misfiring. Might as well eliminate mechanical reasons so we can confirm Chuck's theory. Then we can draw lots or something.”

“Draw lots for what?” Tim had just wandered in for his after
noon session, making Dice realize belatedly that they'd forgotten to call the other participants to cancel their lab times.

“Becky had a bit of a meltdown during Sara's session this morning,” Dice told him. “Shot out a burst of static in the seven-megahertz range.”

“Seven megahertz? No kidding. That's like lightning, isn't it?”

“Exactly.”

“So you were afraid you were going to stir-fry Sara's brains?”

“Something like that.” Dice winced, forgoing the idea of Chinese for dinner.

“So you want me to go home?”

“Yes,” Dice said, then added, “No, wait. There is something you can do, Timmy Troll. While we're reassembling the mechanics, can you check the software modules again just to make sure I didn't miss something big and incriminating?”

Tim smiled. “Nothing would make me happier. You write beautiful code, man. I love the way you self-document. I wish some of the guys at work could learn to do that.”

Dice took a moment to set the programmer up at a workstation and showed him which files to check.

“Wouldn't it be a laugh if it was, like, an odd curly bracket or something?”

Dice grimaced. “I'm almost hoping it is something that mind-blowingly simple.”

It wasn't something that mind-blowingly simple.

Troll's perusal of the interface code revealed nothing out of place and only served to make him more of a Daisuke Kobayashi fanboy.

They drew lots, excluding Tim, who pouted and then consoled himself with a can of Pepsi. Dice won the right to test the rig, which was fine with him. He had more online time with it than either Chuck or Eugene, after all.

Under the neural net, he interacted with a block of code he'd
been working on to enhance his virtual reality interface. He wanted his test to be as close to the conditions Sara was in as possible. With the code, he was in his element: he knew the ropes, and he knew what he wanted it to do. But while he managed a couple of decent gamma bursts, he was unable to make the BPM shriek like a banshee or generate even a spark of lightning.

“Let me try.”

That was Timmy Troll, of course. For being such an archetypal loner, he hated to be left out in matters of archgeekitude. The three scientists argued with him for several minutes, at the end of which he recited the entire fourth clause of the waiver he'd signed, taking care to point out that “acceptable risk” was a vague concept and surely one he could define for himself.

In the end Chuck relented and allowed Dice to hook Tim up to Becky. They'd no more than gotten him suited up when Sara sauntered back into the lab.

“Thought you could have a party without me, did you?” she asked.

“I sent you home,” Chuck said.

“Obviously I didn't go home. I took the day off to work in the lab here, so I'm working in the lab. I've been watching from up there.” She tilted her chin up toward the wraparound gallery.

Dice had all but forgotten about it. He looked to Chuck and shrugged. “She signed the same waiver Tim did. If she wants to stay . . .”

Dice could interpret the expression on Chuck's face as nothing other than raw anxiety—possibly even fear. But he nodded anyway.

“All right. Stay. But if it does that again . . .”

Tim worked with the rig for half an hour with no recurrence of the Tesla coil effect. By the time he gave up on it, he seemed disappointed.

Typical programmer,
Dice thought.
Gets a giggle out of breaking someone else's code
but pouts when he can't crack it.

They were on the verge of giving up for the day, but Sara was having none of it.

“Look,” she said, “you've been through the system from front to back, and no one's caused the Tesla thing to happen again. Since I'm the one who broke it in the first place, it makes sense to have me test it just to make sure.”

She was perfectly correct, of course. That was the logical thing to do. So, Chuck's visible angst notwithstanding, they did it.

Sara, being Sara, was calmer than any of them—except possibly Tim, who opted for an air of relaxed boredom. Dice could tell, though, that Troll was as anxious to see her do it as he was to see her fail.

Once Chuck had adjusted the BPM back to its original range, Sara donned the neural net and fired up the project she'd been working on when the alarms had gone off. She archived the work she'd done on the garden and had Eugene feed her a fresh set of instructions from which she laid out hardscape areas, built fountains and statuary, and created trees and shrubs. She slid easily into a steady gamma pattern, her eyes on the creation process.

Dice was just beginning to relax when the alarm shrilled, its tone unwavering and continuous. He glanced at Sara's face and was surprised to see no reaction from her—it was as if she didn't even hear the sound the machine was emitting. He looked from her to the big display. The garden was coming into full bloom as if caught by a time-lapse video. Patterns and colors coalesced on the screen. It was like watching a Pixar movie, with digital greenery taking over the entire screen.

Chuck leapt to the BPM's touch screen and adjusted the output to the 7 MHz range. They all saw it: the solid, 3-D bar of activity.
Lightning
.

But where is it coming from—the hardware, the software, or the warmware?

Dice thought he knew—that only one answer possibly made sense at this point—but clearly Chuck wasn't convinced.

“No, no, no,” Chuck murmured, staring at the BPM's display before finally shouting, “I'm shutting down!”

In the moments before his hand found the “abort” button on the touch screen, Sara broke her concentration and turned to glare at him. The 7 MHz blast simply stopped, replaced by an agitated beta. Chuck hit the kill switch, and the Brewster-Brenton unit went dark and silent.

“Why did you do that?” Sara asked peevishly. “I was flying, Chuck. I was . . . I was totally in sync.”

“Maybe,” Chuck said. “Maybe you were in sync. And maybe you were that close to overloading your synapses.” He pinched the air with a thumb and a forefinger.

“I feel fine,” she told him. “I
am
fine. I want to go again. I want to see if I can make lightning happen again.”

“Hell,” said Tim, “I want to see if I can make lightning happen at all.”

Chuck shook his head. “No. No, Sara. It could be dangerous. We're stopping now.”

“Aw, c'mon, Doc,” Tim whined. “Things were just getting interesting. And I want a shot at it.”

Dice glanced at Chuck again. He could tell how badly the neuroscientist wanted to say no but knew how easily he let himself be railroaded by those with stronger personalities. And for an introvert, Troll could be exceedingly pushy when he wanted something.

“It's four
P.M.,
” Dice observed, and Chuck shot him a grateful look. “Let's call it a day. Eugene and I will go back over the activity logs, so they're ready for the five-thirty meeting, okay?
We're too close to this right now. We need some time to think it through, figure out what to do next.”

“Let's try a different project—maybe start a new one from scratch,” said Sara. “That's what makes the most sense to me.”

“We are
not
taking this any further today,” Chuck said.

Dice had never heard him sound so dictatorial. He supposed raw fear would do that even to someone as mellow as Chuck Brenton.

“All right, Doc. Why don't you go get a cup of tea or something? Euge and I will upload the material for the meeting.”

Chuck nodded and stepped back from the BPM, looking like a kid who was leaving his pet at an animal shelter.

“Doc,” said Dice. “Tea.”

“No tea.” Chuck turned to Sara. “I'd like to take you over to gamma lab for an MRI.”

“If it will make you feel better, sure.”

“Making me feel better is not the point. I have to be sure we're not damaging your brain, Sara. I have to be sure.”

She shrugged. “Okay. I'll tell you what. I'll go for the MRI right now if you'll let Tim and me sit in on the meeting tonight.”

“That's highly irregular,” said Eugene.

One corner of Sara's mouth tilted upward. “So are my brain waves.”

Chuck and Eugene exchanged glances, and then Chuck acquiesced. He led Sara from the room.

As she slipped through the door, she turned and gave Tim a double thumbs-up.

THERE WAS NOTHING DANGEROUS-LOOKING IN
Sara's MRI, though there was an overall marked increase in activity in the frontal lobe on both sides. Even as she lay in the resonance tube, working out a series of problems in her head, her brain showed
activity across a larger area than it had during her last MRI two weeks earlier.

What does that mean? Is it an artifact of the way her brain worked? Or is it something we caused by subjecting her to the rigors of the program?

Or is it both?

Chuck went into the meeting not knowing how to interpret the results of either the experiment or Sara's MRI. He'd studied neurology for nearly a decade and could say without hubris that he was one of the ten most knowledgeable people on the planet about the subject. And yet this was something so new, it made him feel like a rank undergrad reading his first MRI plot.

“So what you're saying,” Matt said when Chuck and his team had finished their purely factual description of the situation, “is that Sara has started producing a new brain pattern—one we've never seen before. I'm impressed.”

“I'm not sure that's what we're saying,” argued Chuck. “What we
may
be saying is that the machinery is creating a sort of feedback loop and exciting Sara's brain to unusual activity.”

“There's nothing wrong with the machinery,” said Dice quietly.

“We don't know—”

“Yes, we do know,” Dice said. “Whatever is happening, it's not happening because of the hardware or the software. The hardware is fine, and the software is only reading what Sara's brain is outputting—a wave in the seven-megahertz range. The wave is a legitimate neurological event that's originating in Sara's brain. Hell, Chuck, you're a neurologist. Why can't you accept this?”

Sara, who was seated next to Chuck at the table, leaned in and tried to capture his gaze. “What he said. It's me, Doc.
I'm
doing it. I can even
feel
it when I get into the state that's producing the pattern.”

“You can feel it?” Chuck asked, locking eyes with her. “You
didn't mention that before. In what sense can you feel it? A headache—”

“Nothing like that. It's . . . look, have you ever ridden a horse?”

He laughed. “No.” It was about as emphatic as he'd ever said anything.

“Fine. But you
know
about riding horses, right? That some people do it?”

Chuck nodded, slightly amused.

“Well, there's a moment when a horse is at a full gallop and hits its stride, and suddenly you can't feel the individual hoofbeats anymore or the movement of the animal under you. It's as if you're riding on the air—smooth, flowing. That's what this felt like. It was that kind of all-encompassing sense. I couldn't hear the sounds of the room. I couldn't see anything but the results of my work. I felt as if I was riding on air. Getting to the gamma was hard work.