The God Wave Read Free

Her pale, coppery cap of hair glittered with positron jewels, and her heart-shaped face wore an earnest expression, which—despite being tired—made her look even younger than her nineteen years.
    â€œSure,” Chuck said absently. “Sure. Go ahead. Um, back in fifteen?”
    â€œFifteen,” Mini agreed and turned to walk away. “Kitchen’s down on the left, right?”
    Eugene, far more alert than either his boss or their subject, leapt after her. “Mini! The rig. The net. We need to disconnect you.”
    She stopped just short of disaster and put her hands up to her head. “Oh! Oh, yeah. I feel pretty disconnected already.” She giggled as Eugene unfastened the net and slipped it off her head. She left the lab still laughing.
    Eugene stood in the middle of the room with the net in his hands, staring after her. “She always like that?”
    â€œWhat?” Chuck looked up sharply from the data on the Brewster’s display. “Oh, yeah. I mean no, she . . . I guess you could say she’s a woman of many moods. Right now she’s just operating on too little sleep.” He shook his head, muttering to himself. “So the differential isn’t just an individual amplitude setting, with some people being louder than others. It’s even more variable than that.”
    But Eugene heard him, and pulled his gaze from the lab doors, moved back to the brain pattern monitor, and set the neural net on its spherical rest. “You were hoping it was just a matter of adjusting the gain, weren’t you?”
    â€œJust,” Chuck snorted, shaking his head. “Even if it were just individual amplitude, I have no idea how to adjust for it. I have no idea how far off the charts Sara and Mini might go or how much boost to give Tim—”
    â€œTroll,” Euge interrupted, informing Chuck of Tim’s preferred moniker.
    â€œâ€”or the others. If there’s no standard deviation from a norm, and we haven’t even calculated the norm, then I don’t know how to make this work.”
    Eugene considered that for a moment. “Well, maybe someone else does. Maybe if we write up what we’ve got so far and get it into the community—”
    â€œWe’d get laughed at.” Chuck grimaced.
    â€œNot gonna happen, Doc,” Eugene promised him. “You’ve already proven something: that brain waves can make magic happen.”
    Chuck pointed a finger at his assistant’s nose. “Don’t say that. Don’t use that word. It’s not magic.” For some reason, the very idea made him angry.
    â€œOkay, okay. Then brain waves make shit happen. You like that better?”
    Chuck didn’t. But it mattered little, for neither magic nor shit happened. Mini did come back from her power nap and tea with more verve, but that served only to underscore the problem: there was no baseline for the raw energy that a given subject’s brain waves generated and no way to arrive at a differential to which the interface could adjust.
    â€œGIGO,” Chuck murmured, looking over their results at the end of Mini’s session. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
    â€œExcept it’s not garbage,” Eugene argued. “It’s data. About which you should write a paper, I’m thinking. Who knows? Maybe it’s a matter of focus. Maybe our subjects can be trained to moderate or control their brain waves themselves.”
    â€œI don’t think it works like that, Euge. When Mini or Sara is interacting with the apparatus, they’re both generating beta waves. They’re just not generating them in the same energy range, and I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure what I can do about it. We need a . . . a transmission box. Something that ramps theenergy output up or down dynamically, so when Sara and Pierce, say, set out to screw in the metaphorical lightbulb, the same amount of energy is fed to the