The God Wave Read Online Free PDF Page A

“If he builds it, everything will come.”
    DICE WAS ASTONISHED BY THE warren of mismatched buildings that made up the Johns Hopkins campus around the Traylor Research Building. It reminded him of a box full of Legos that he was pretty sure still existed in the closet of his room back home in San Francisco—a room his proud parents had turned into a sort of shrine to their only son—that had been upended onto the grounds.
    In fact, the Traylor Building was one of the oddest toys in this particular box. A narrow, sand-colored parallelepiped building sandwiched between two larger, taller, more modern-looking ones, it was unimpressive. Or would have been had it not been sporting the words JOHNS HOPKINS in huge, white letters across the top of the façade. There was nothing else to indicate the level of research that went on there. Nothing to indicate that history was being made in a research facility on the third floor.
    Dice liked that sense of anonymity. He felt sometimes as if he were putting one over on the world—that he was part of a great geek conspiracy that, when the time was ripe, would announce to all and sundry that they had solved society’s problems through the simple application of technology. Ta-da!
    â€œHow goes it, Dice?” Matt Streegman had appeared silently out of nowhere, as he was in the annoying habit of doing, to peer over Dice’s shoulder at the small robot on which he was working.
    Dice put the cover back on the rounded carapace and smoothed out the cabling between it and the Brewster brain wave reader.
    â€œIt goes swimmingly. Not that I advocate robots swimming. Especially after a large meal.” Dice paused for Matt’s laughter, which didn’t come. Dice cleared his throat. “I think our little guy is ready for Dr. Brenton’s subjects. Who do we have?”
    â€œFor this phase we have us. Well, Chuck anyway. He’d like to do the test drive before we bring in his lab rats.”
    â€œAbout that . . .”
    â€œWhat?”
    Dice grimaced. “I’ve actually done a bit of a test drive, hence my messing with Roboticus here.”
    â€œIt works?”
    Dice rolled his eyes. “Of course it works. I just had a little glitch in one of the connectors—a bent pin. I soldered it. Should be fine now.”
    â€œShow me.”
    â€œBefore Chuck tries it?”
    â€œYou did.”
    â€œTouché.”
    â€œI just want to know how excited to be.”
    Dice grinned. “You should be very excited.”
    â€œAnd of course I want to be able to maintain my professorial mien in the face of your world-shaking accomplishment.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œSo show me.”
    Dice set the robot in the middle of the lab floor. It was basically a glorified Roomba—little more than a drive mechanism in an aluminum and plastic casing—but it was all they needed as a proof of concept. It had a little red joystick mounted on the top of it that would allow an operator to steer it manually. And, if all went right, with his mind.
    He allowed himself a moment of glee at that thought.
    He moved back to the Brewster unit and took the neural array from its stand. He put that on his head, making sure he had the transceivers pressed as tightly against his skull as possible. A gleaming twist of lightweight fiber-optic cabling ran from the neural net to the brain pattern monitor and thence to the robot.
    The important part of the device—the kinetic converter—wasa software module that resided in the BPM and fed commands to the firmware aboard Roboticus.
    Dice flipped the EEG monitor on. “Okay, now, Roboticus. Let’s see what we can do.”
    He thought at the ersatz Roomba. He thought it forward. Or, more accurately, he thought of pushing the joystick forward. After a moment of hesitation, the robot went.
    â€œOkay,” Dice murmured. “Let’s go right.”
    The joystick toggled right; the robot