6
It’s the weirdest dream. Airwaves are visible. They fill the corridors of the Oakland Memorial Hospital and I follow the signal into the wires underneath the city. The signal the doctor sent, from the handheld device AKTW-7947-000-1. That’s what I am following. Leaping from server to server, node to node, data packages dispersing and reassembling 1.17 seconds later at the Data Center used by the application named The Global Doctor Project.
I flag an occurrence. One in a list of 1,437,228 patients. Then, as I was programmed to do, run a quick comparison routine:
Name: Claudia Yinyin Yang
Diagnostic: cluster headache.
Probability of compliance: 83%.
Ranking position: 1.
I’m a creature of shadows, with no sign of pride or excitement. I send a signal back to the source, and finally delete myself, sucking everything around into my hole of absolute nothingness. Then, agony! My lungs expand, stretch, filling with the most unsatisfying of airs. What is that? The heart gallops, the agony expands. I try to scream but the voice is sucked into the void too.
Help!
Then I sit up. Startled. A nightmare, I tell myself. It was just a nightmare. Then a pinch, on the top of my hand. A needle, a tube. Around me, a hospital room, just like the one where Mrs. Lee and I met Jason. But that was…a long time ago. Or was it? They are both there again, staring, worried. Almost a déjà vu. My hands brush the shoulder. The scar is back there.
“Honey? Are you Ok?” asks Mrs. Lee. She is different now. New hair, new clothes. A bit older than that day. I touch her face; her skin is so soft…Jason stands next to her. No tablet in his hand, this time. No calming smile either. Behind the oxygen pump, my breathing is so loud, but I can hear his too, almost a growl, the air hissing through his tight airpipes. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
What is he talking about? And why is he so mad?
“You could have died,” he continues.
Think, Yinyin. “I know that you like fighting,” he insists, “You know. I get it.” Oh, the Crusher, the headache, my perfect record…destroyed. I remember now. The side of my face pulses, as if it has a life on its own. The world seems so strange.
Mrs. Lee holds my hand, looks at me, then at him and the giant nurse quietly standing by—Zach, his name, he does judo, has fingers as thick as carrots and Jason likes to keep him around when patients have a hard time staying in bed. I guess that’s a message.
“I’m going to leave the two of you alone,” Mrs. Lee says. I remember her prophetic read from the last time we lived that same scene. She does too, I’m sure: my man of yin, my balance…When did it all go wrong? Oh, yes, when he decided it was up to him to choose how I should live or die.
“Stay,” I beg Mrs. Lee. “Jason and I can talk later.”
“Of course. Oh, and you have visitors outside. From your job, apparently” he says, professional but with an edge. Who could that be? He stares me down with a fire-filled shrug, then makes a sign to the heavyweight nurse. Like a robot, big Zach opens the door for the young, clearly angry Buddhist doctor who shouldn’t show anger but makes sure everyone notices it anyway.
Very mature, Jason. Doctor and judo nurse leave. “You can get in now,” says his muffled voice. “Thanks,” says someone else. Then steps, the plastic sounds or some sort of wrap, and two bodies enter the room, each one holding a half-eaten chocolate bar, fairly oblivious to the soap opera tension around them.
“Good assortment, they have here,” says the old man with thinning hair, chewing on his thick chocolate bar.
Mrs. Lee tightens her eyebrows. With her entire face, but silent, she asks me if I want her to stay. We are all right, I let her know.
“O-two, good for you,” says the younger of the nerds, pointing at the oxygen tank beside my bed. “May I?” Simon, I believe, yes, that’s his name. Before I could reply, he takes the mask, turns the valve on and takes a deep breath himself. Then walks toward the TV and turns it on. On Fox News, images of first responders, hazmat suits, flashing lights. Mayhem in a foreign country. At the bottom of the screen, the lettering:
Toxic leaks in India. Hundreds killed, incl. children.
A digital security specialist from a place called CERN, in Switzerland, talks about how he had to deal with same malware before. Dr. Lambrechts, yes, that’s the name of the bald one, points at the screen: “They say it’s a cyber-attack.”
The other one continues, “As far as we’re concerned, this seems like a diversion.” He pauses for drama, or because he noticed the wrinkles of confusion on my forehead, then continues, rather professorially. “This individual, this man giving the interview right now, in India, away from his job, happens to be in charge of the security of the most powerful quantum computer in the world.”
“What kind of sick person would kill kids just so they can steal his super-computer?”
“Not a who, a what,” says Simon. “Did I say it out loud?”
Dr. Lambrechts scoffs and continues, “We have reasons to believe, Ms. Yang, this hack was a diversion created not by humans, but by a piece of software, an artificial intelligence agent.”
“How do you know that?”
They shrug to each other, and for a second, avoid my eyes. Both of them. The older doctor adjusts the flowers on a vase, leaving them exactly how they were before. “Horrible, isn’t it? But you can help,” he says with a lowered voice, not of a secret being told though, more of a hospital voice, of respect for someone’s quietude. He hands me a card. His name, his email, a company logo: Oak Tree Technologies. The paper is thick, and the words are printed in silver, under a stylized tree with blue dots as leaves. “But that’s for when you get better,” he says. “Now you need to rest.”
They head to the door, quiet, almost solemn, their sights aiming at the floor, their moves paced very, very slow. Then, under the door frame, Simon pauses on a Chinese Opera character pose. He turns back at me, “Oh, almost forgot…We can fix you.” Another flippant pause. “They can’t do anything about it here. But we can.”
What?!
“You know what I mean,” he says, and gives me a victorious smirk.
Behind him, the older doctor shoots me a dark, silent stare. He taps his forehead twice and disappears beyond the wooden frame.
“Wait!” I yell. But they are gone.
Mrs. Lee walks back in, intrigued. “How do you know Dr. Lambrechts?”
“Do you know him?” I reply.
“That man was a legend at Berkeley, had one of the most sought-after classes and his seminars used to gather people in hundreds.” she says, “He was much better looking back then. The girls were all over him, but he was either gay or super-religious, I don’t remember.” She grabs her phone and angrily waves it in multiple directions, “Is signal always this bad here?” Things come through, eventually. She taps the little screen and hands it to me, midway into a video. “Here,” she says.
The title reads “Cerebral Connections—Stanford, 1982.” I skip to the middle, where a young professor makes fun of a helmet with loose wires hanging from his own head. “Cybernetic Rapunzel. Pretty, huh?” The massive crowd cackles.
“He was funny.” Mrs. Lee says.
The laughter in the video recedes and the young Dr. Lambrechts continues: “Electroencephalography,” he continues, “created in 1924! It’s been available for a while, we just haven’t been audacious enough to use it right. Ambitious enough to push it far. If we can measure brain waves, theoretically, with just a few extra leaps in technology, we can also…transmit them!” He takes a dramatic pause.
The camera turns to the audience, and students with too much gel and shoulder pads can’t seem to hold their jaws together. There’s electricity in the room. “Mind reading, anyone? We can do it, what we can’t do is understand what it’s saying, as if we’d just landed in Japan and tried to understand what they tell us without having ever studied the language. But you know who knows the language of a brain? Another brain.”
He looked so much more interesting when he was young. Handsome, confident, even a bit cool. I pause the video for a second and point at the mini fridge in the corner. Mrs. Lee helps me with the oxygen mask and hands me a glass of water. I take a sip, resume.
From my little screen, he takes his time removing the machine from his head and surveys it as if the goofy prop was a precious real thing. Then hooks it to an identical one he takes from inside of a box behind the podium. “Oh, another one!” The audience laughs again. He moves toward two girls on the front row and puts a helmet on one of them. “Imagine the device receiving these waves…” then places the other helmet on the girl seated next, “…could beam a signal to this other one. Signals her brain could pick up and understand. Can you imagine the revolution?” He bends his legs to level his eyes to theirs and pretends to whisper, “Now the two of you can gossip about the young man on the other side of the room without distracting me again.”
“Oh my God!” he jokes, now back to the audience, “The world is so much better, right?”
The guy is good. Or was. Whatever. Mrs. Lee smiles at me and makes a gesture implying I should keep going. I do. The man now heads to the blackboard and marks broad strokes of chalk. Letters as tall as his arms. T-E-L-E-P…
“Now forget I ever told you about this computer-assisted…telepathy,” he says, while he finishes the word on the board. “For as much as I’d love to have students never distract me with their mumbling again, there are other applications of this technology that can be quite remarkable too. Imagine these helmets are so precise, they can target signals to very specific areas of the brain. So precise we can connect each area of Brain A, to the same area of Brain B. Not just words, but…thoughts. Parts of thoughts. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Then what do we have? A double brain!”
There’s a “ooh” in the room. He tips his imaginary hat at them and continues, “Want more? If we could track the neurological path of various processes, we can use this machine to train the brain to change the path they use and rewire those synapses too. The only reason why we currently can’t do it is because there’s way too much information for us to deal with.”
He points at someone in the audience and the camera follows and zooms into a Japanese girl. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“Tobiko,” she says.
“Let’s say I fly all the way to Tobiko’s land. Japan, right? I get into a plane and fly to Japan. I don’t speak a word of Japanese, but I am a smart guy. I can observe, take notes….Eventually, I will learn. It will just take a lot of time. Or I can bring all of you with me, and have you all take notes. And at night we talk and learn together.” The man now paces around the stage, circling his podium and gesticulating fast. He doesn’t look at anyone, rather, he seems lost in his own thoughts, which now happen to be broadcast live through his entire body. “That’s the same challenge we have with the brain. Computational power. We need more processing to rev up the understanding of those millions of synapses. We need more computer power to detect the brain’s patterns and decode them. That may take time, but once we do, once machines get faster and can compute more data at once…that’s when the magic happens. If we can read and interpret brain pulses, we can tell how it operates!”
He’s now back in front of the two girls in the front row. They still wear the silly helmets. There is a quick silence and a shift of tone and he’s now delicate. “Gonna need that, dear.” He takes the helmet back from the girls and puts one of them back in his own head. “As I was saying before, communication is just one of the possible applications of a technology like this. With plentiful computational power, we can learn how to stimulate particular areas of the brain to teach them new patterns and forms of operating.8 Forms that may make us smarter or even help fix some of the bugs in our hardware God left for us to fix. How about Parkinson’s? Or strokes? Once we understand the neurological processes better and can influence them with pulses of nanometer-precision, we can redirect the neural paths to avoid dead areas of those patients and rehabilitate them. But because I have my Professor X helmet on, I can already hear your thoughts and I can tell that Brian in the back row is thinking none of this matters because it’s not going to be on the test. You can do better, Brian. This is Berkeley, can you at least pretend that you care? Come on, you can do it.”
Dr. Lambrechts closes his eyes, as if receiving a long thought from the student. “Ok…Brian is asking if there is any application for people with less than seventy. Not nice, Brian, but I will tell you anyway. Who here has ever experienced a migraine?”
The cameraman pans through the crowd and captures dozens of arms raised. “Pretty bad, huh? What if I told you that by re-routing your synapses you can possibly cure any kind of headaches?”
8. Despite the difference in the nature of the brain analog and the computer digital architecture, the field of bio-engineering is full of research trying to hack the brain. It’s said that companies like Neuralink seem to be using brain trauma and diseases like Parkinson as a starting ground for research on high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces. (See the article published on Bloomberg.com on July 16, 2019 called “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Says It’s Ready for Brain Surgery” by Ashlee Vance)