The God Wave Read Free Page A

apparatus.”
    Eugene was laughing.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI was thinking about that NPR Science Friday interview you’re supposed to give next week. I can just hear Ira Flatow asking you to describe your latest project.” He held out an imaginary microphone. “‘Dr. Brenton, what fascinating experiments are you doing at Johns Hopkins currently?’ ‘Why, Ira, we’re trying to calculate the amount of mental energy it takes to screw in a lightbulb.’”
    As much as he didn’t want to, Chuck laughed. He laughed all the way back to his office, where he sat down to compile his notes. He had no intention of mentioning anything about his brain wave experiments on national radio.
    He had no intention of ever talking about it with anyone at this point.

Chapter 2
MATT
    Matt Streegman glanced up at the clock over his office door and realized it was too dark to see it. Stupid anyway. He was sitting at his computer, his face bathed in the glow of his cinema display. All he needed to do was glance at the menu bar at the top of the screen: 1:10 a.m. On a Wednesday night. Correction: Thursday morning.
    A long, depressing holiday weekend was already under way. He wished, not for the first time, that he could crawl into a suspended animation tank that would let him sleep away Thanksgiving without having to move or interact with people or think.
    That was the worst thing about most weekends: the thinking. The worst thing about this particular weekend was the people.
    Oh, he’d found a myriad of ways to keep working on projects he was supposed to leave in the lab and games he could play that challenged his Mensa-class brain. His favorite weekend pastime was to head over to Dice’s house to help him (or, mostly, watch him) build robots. Dice—aka Daisuke Kobayashi—had, alas,gone down to his parents’ house in Charlotte for the Thanksgiving weekend. No joy there.
    There was a tap at the door of his office. A shadow fell across the bubbled glass along the right-hand side.
    â€œYeah?” Matt rubbed his eyes and blinked at the code he’d just generated. He caught three syntax errors in the time it took for the night watchman to open the office door.
    â€œOh, hey, Dr. Streegman. It’s, um, it’s getting kind of late, sir.” The security guard—a twentyish fellow named Zack Truman—regarded him apologetically from the half-open door.
    â€œYeah. I know. I was . . . just finishing up.” Hell, I was just making a complete mosh of this code.
    â€œIt’d be great if you could do that pretty quick, Professor. The whole campus is shutting down for the rest of the week. We’ve been asked to lock this building down, in fact.”
    â€œAnd I’m in the way.” Matt smiled and held up a hand when Zack started to protest. “No, don’t apologize. You’re just doing your job. Give me about ten minutes to upload some stuff, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
    Zack glanced at the computer. “You’re not going to work over Thanksgiving, are you? You should be, y’know, with your family and friends. Drinking eggnog and eating turkey, not . . .” He gestured at the screen.
    Zack, Matt had come to know, was newly married and very happy, and as is the nature of very happy people, he wanted everyone else to be equally ecstatic about life. It would not occur to him that someone might not have close friends or might not want to spend some Hallmark holiday in the bosom of his ersatz family.
    Matt was not, however, going to say anything about that. When Zack had wandered off, he uploaded the program he was working on to the cloud, backed it up onto his flash drive for goodmeasure, and snagged his laptop from the corner of his desk. He was out and had locked the office door before Zack reappeared.
    At home, the message light on his telephone blinked accusingly. You have seven unanswered, unlistened-to messages. What are you