Mind's Eye (18 page)

Megan digested all of this and shook her head. “I am so glad I’m not you,” she said. “I don’t know how you’re handling this as well as you are.”

“Mostly because of you, Megan,” he replied earnestly. “You’re a big part of my coping mechanism. And I’m probably not handling things as well as you think.”

Megan found herself drawn to his expressive brown eyes, and she lost herself there for several long seconds. If she was going to fall for a guy, did it really need to be in the context of the most complicated and bizarre set of circumstances in history?

“So any other epiphanies last night?” said Megan, breaking out of her trance.

 “Nothing too earth-shattering. The ESP thing is driving me batty and making me wish I weren’t human a lot of the time. But being able to surf the web with my thoughts is more amazing than I could ever explain. I must be a super nerd. Because being able to learn about anything that crosses my mind, effortlessly, is like the ultimate nirvana to me.”

“I don’t think you’re a super nerd because of that,” said Megan, fighting to keep a straight face. “I think you’re a super nerd because you use words like
nirvana
.”

Hall laughed, and for just a moment a smitten expression flashed across his face, but he quickly concealed it.

“I had a memory last night of a presentation given by an author of kids science fiction books maybe twenty years ago. I don’t remember anything but the content, but I remember this quite well. The guy spoke about writing—and technology. About how the rate of change was accelerating at an insane pace. He talked about how big a deal it had been when he was a little boy when his family went from a black-and-white to a color television. He said he remembered when they got their first microwave oven, and they all gathered around with their mouths open to watch it boil a glass of water, as if by magic. He remembered going on a family outing to marvel at the wonders of the first ATM machine in their neighborhood.

“He talked about how lucky kids were—again, I think this was about twenty years ago when I was little—to live in the computer age. He said that in his day, they had a device called a typewriter. He described how it worked, how mechanical keys would strike a ribbon of ink and slam into a piece of paper. And he said that the thing was, if you made a single mistake, you’d often have to start the entire page over again. A mistake of a single letter! You could try to correct it by backing up and using correcting tape, but that often failed. Or you could brush this white paint over your mistake and try to line it up again, and type on the dried paint. But usually, for him at least, one wrong letter typed and he’d have to start the page from scratch.”

“We really do take technology for granted, don’t we?”

“That’s why this guy’s talk was so fascinating. He reminded kids how lucky they were. That with a computer, one could make endless changes, effortlessly. Move sections of text around to see where they fit best. Improve a sentence a hundred times. He said that anyone who had been able to write a novel using a typewriter was truly a
god
. He was a successful author, but he insisted that if he would have had to use a typewriter, he couldn’t have done it.”

Megan thought about how limiting graphic design would be without computer technology, and had trouble even imagining it.

The waitress returned with their desserts, outwardly as pleasant and professional as anyone could want. Megan didn’t even want to consider what she might be thinking this time.

Megan pushed a spoon into the tiramisu she had ordered and brought it to her mouth as Hall continued.

“This author said his father had worked in the office equipment field when he had been a kid. One day, his father took him into his office and told him about a revolutionary new invention. You took a piece of paper with text or images on it and you put it on this machine. And
thousands
of miles away, an identical copy of the paper came out the other end. It was called a
fax machine
. He said when his dad told him about it, it seemed like something from
Star Trek
. Like the transporter machine. He thought his dad was making it up.”

“And the fax machine became practically obsolete overnight.”

Hall swallowed his first bite of the chocolate ganache and nutella crepes he had ordered, and paused for just a moment to savor it. “Exactly,” he continued. “He made this exact point. The Internet came along, so instead of faxing documents, you could just attach them to e-mails. He considered the Internet humanity’s greatest achievement. A single repository of all human knowledge, including images, audio, and video, that could be instantly searched for the occurrence of any subject matter or phrase. And one that allowed users to jump off the page to reference a related topic millions of pages away and then jump back again in an instant.

“Of course, even at that time, kids had grown up with the Internet, so they weren’t as impressed as he was. But he drove the point home. He said that in his day, if you wanted to know Grover Cleveland’s date of birth, it would take you hours. You’d have to go to the local library, go through a card catalog, find a book about him, and search by hand for his birth date. Now it takes you seconds to find out. And if you wanted to know a dozen recipes for asparagus, you were out of luck. Period. There was no way possible to get that information. Now, of course, you search for ‘asparagus recipes’ and you get hundreds instantly.”

“It really is amazing,” said Megan. “I wonder what he would have had to say about
you
.”

“He’d be astounded, that’s for sure. Even our generation would be astounded by this. Although a lot of the research I did last night suggested many people think a marriage between man and computer is inevitable.”

“Maybe some implants and artificial limbs, but it isn’t like we’ll stop being human any time soon.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Last night, I found some writing by a guy named Ray Kurzweil that spoke to this.”

“You really are a super nerd, aren’t you?”

“Sure seems that way.”

“You kept
busy
last night. When did you find the time to fleece two tables of unsuspecting gamblers?”

“I’ve always been good at multitasking,” he said in amusement. “At least I
think
I have.”

“So go on.”

“This guy writes about what he calls a singularity event. A point at which humanity sort of combines with computers—I guess I’m the start of this—and then quickly evolves into something transcendent. He says it won’t be long. Not thousands of years. Not even hundreds. Sooner than anyone thinks. He believes we’re just a hair away from a tipping point.”

“Based on what?” asked Megan.

“We all know the rate of computer advances is exponential. That power and memory and speed doubles or so every twelve to eighteen months, and has done so for decades. Well, a lot of things are like this. Internet nodes. The speed of sequencing DNA. And so on. But Kurzweil explains how exponential growth sneaks up on you. If you double a penny every day for forty days, at the end you’ll have over ten billion dollars. But in the first week you hardly notice. When one penny doubles to two pennies, who cares? But when five billion dollars doubles to
ten
billion,
that’s
what you call a noticeable increase. So in the beginning the line for growth on the graph seems to barely be going any higher. But there comes an inflection point at which the graph almost looks like it’s going vertical. When each step taken becomes
enormous
.”

Hall paused. “According to Kurzweil, we’re just about there. And when that happens, we’ll make more progress in a year or two than we did during the entire twentieth century. We’ll reach this man/machine transcendence faster than anyone realizes.”

“Do you think he’s right?”

“A lot of scientists thought he was far too optimistic when he first wrote about this. But I checked predictions he made in 2000 for where we’d be today. His were the most aggressive of anyone’s, and he’s not that far off, especially when it comes to computer technology. The speed and power of the 6G WiFi system now in place is even
more
impressive than his predictions, which were considered ridiculous at the time.”

Megan nodded soberly. There were a lot of things
she
had once considered ridiculous. In the past twenty-four hours she’d had to rethink much of what she thought she knew. There was no doubt that getting to know the phenomenon that was Nick Hall was changing her perspective dramatically.

She lowered her spoon and stared happily at the man across from her. Yes, getting to know him was definitely changing her perspective. In more ways than one.

20

Alex Altschuler walked through the computer lab, thick with oversized monitors and electronics debris of every type, past a dozen workstations, past a door leading to the adjacent facility at which rodent, and occasionally primate, experimentation was conducted, and to a set of glass doors, on which the words
Theia Labs
were stenciled in blue. He opened the doors and quickly paid for his pizza before returning to his office.

As usual, he was the last one in the lab—although, to be fair, it
was
Saturday at six p.m., and a number of his team had put in a full day’s work anyway. Also, as usual, he was eating alone.

He was a scrawny geek; a fact of which he was well aware. A
brilliant
, scrawny geek. He had skipped ahead in high school and had finished his doctorate at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in only four years. He well knew that his appearance fit the geek stereotype exactly, right down to the glasses on his face, an appliance that was accelerating toward extinction.

But God had played a practical joke on him. He had a condition where his eyelids were very tight to his eyeballs, and he didn’t tear a lot. So no matter how many times he struggled with contacts that others raved were the essence of comfort, he ended up being miserable. And the idea of his eyes being sliced and then hit with a laser was something he couldn’t get comfortable with, even knowing intellectually that the procedure worked perfectly almost all of the time, just as he could never bungee jump off a bridge, even if he intellectually believed he would survive the ordeal. After vision correction eye surgery had become fully automated a few years before, and the price had plummeted, he was one of the few remaining holdouts.

There were two diametrically opposed male stereotypes that had been around forever. The dumb jock stereotype. And the brilliant, socially awkward, unattractive, uncoordinated geek—with bad eyesight—stereotype.

And while there were endless counterexamples, in Altschuler’s experience, these stereotypes were stereotypes for a reason. It seemed to him they had an evolutionary basis—at least somewhat. Every male was competing for mates. The most successful passed down their genes to numerous offspring, ensuring their traits would survive. Strong, handsome, tall, athletic men didn’t need any other redeeming qualities to find a mate. Mates found
them
. If they were brilliant this was just a bonus.

But if you didn’t possess these positive physical traits, being very bright could compensate—at least to some degree. You could use this intellect to accumulate wealth and power, which were also appealing to a mate, ensuring the spread of these characteristics to future generations.

 Altschuler lifted a piece of his meat lovers pizza, which was spewing irresistible aroma molecules into the air around him like lava from Mount Vesuvius, and tore off a large bite. He finished shoving the entire piece into his mouth without once taking his eyes from the large monitor in front of him, covered with the complex computer code he had been writing.

The progress he had been making this year was nothing short of
stunning
. He felt sure that Theia Labs was on the verge of any number of revolutionary, world-changing breakthroughs, which his boss and Theia’s CEO, Kelvin Gray, continued to insist they sit on for inexplicable reasons.

Gray, who stomped all over the geek stereotype by being a triple threat: handsome, charismatic,
and
brilliant, had recruited Altschuler only three years out of MIT, luring him away from Intel by making him a financial offer he couldn’t refuse. One that easily outdistanced even the most aggressive offer he had received from other global electronics, computer, and Internet behemoths. In just a year, Altschuler had built a nest egg that he might not have managed in three years at his previous job. Another few years and he’d have the house on the beach, the Lamborghini, and everything else he needed to signal to women that he was loaded.

The irony, of course, was that the only girl he really wanted, Heather Zambrana, wasn’t the type to be impressed by wealth. Which was one of the many reasons he liked her so much. She was a few years older than he was, reported to him, and although better looking for a woman than he was for a man, was a certifiable geek, just like him. But unless she left the company there was no way for him to even ask her out, which was maddening, but also a great relief to his inner insecure geek, who was sure she would reject him anyway.