Bad Good Bad: Special Edition Read online

  “Then you start to ask yourself who are those people who are scanning you. Then you slowly figure out you can initiate a scan too, it feels like some door is half open. You can try to click in, and if you click into any active patient, chances are they won’t register what is going on. This feels like breaking into somebody’s home. You feel guilty and cheap. You tune in, but you probably want to back out as fast as you can. I think it is hard to tune out if you cross a certain line. It feels like a path is open, and you don’t have full control over the signal. You cannot fully control your feelings and emotions, some of them are coming from your primitive brain.”

  “Eric asked me to tune into you. I believe you were on Eric’s radar just before your accident. Eric asked Tom to reach out to you, but when they found out about the accident they put everything on pause. Back in December, that is when things started to turn very sour between Eric and Tom. I don’t think Tom knows what he is getting himself into. And I did not know what it really meant to tune in back then. At first, Eric told me that I would probably be able to gather your home address, phone number, credit card number, etc. It was a new thing for Eric as well. I have to turn the wifi and my iPhone off at night, dreams are not safe anymore.”

  The kitchen door, saloon style, is pushed open by a tall geek in a sport jacket with no tie, about my age, sporting a biker’s black steelpot on his head, on top of which sits a silly blue, red and yellow propeller. He lets Sarah walk back out with his arm around her shoulder. Clearly husband and wife. Sarah probably owns this place. Eric comes to our table, gives a hug to Kim: “I’m so sorry about putting you through all this. I thought I was doing you a favor when I asked Tom to hire you after the interview.” Then he turns around to me, grabs my right hand, and says “We need your help Kevin. And you need ours like all the other patients in the vault.”

  Eric sits down, puts the helmet on the table, and resumes: “One of those urban cafes that’s blocking cell phone signals and wifi. Faraday cage. Patrons going cold turkey about technology for a change. Fun to watch. Some Social Sciences university undergrads come by once in a while and watch, homeworks.”

  “See, the brain is like a swiss army knife. Plug something in, it will play with it until it figures out if it could be of any use. Sometimes this happens under the radar, consciousness is informed only slowly and bit by bit. Manipulate the genes of a salamander so it grows 3 eyes or 2 more legs, and it will educate itself on how to use them body parts, with time. You’ve seen cats with an extra digit before right? One in a thousand. And they don’t complain about the larger paws, they are cats just the same. It is like re-education after a trauma or an accident, when patients have to relearn to walk or to talk. They basically rewire their brain, maybe a complete different set of neurons and connections, new pathways, approximately the same end result. First, implants allowed people to move a cursor on a screen, and small feats like that, but the problem was the needles. Invasive. “

  “If you insert a rack of pins into someone’s brain, then you basically need to lock their head so the needles would not rip up through brain soft tissues. Let’s say you get punched in the face, or you get into an accident. The interface is using photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. And instead of 32 or 64 pins, you get a spectrum, individual nanotube multi-frequencies LEDs you could say. And not only they lit up, they listen, they can talk to each other.”

  “We are not setting any rules here, anarchy at first, but eventually order emerges naturally. The pattern is actually not completely unpredictable. We now have gathered enough data and statistics to start to formulate theories, but we don’t have a team for theories yet, we are more hands on by nature. Another spin-off maybe. There are only so many ways for nature to grow an eye, right? And you could balance the chip on top of your thumb, it’s about 3 millimeters tick now. 1 centimeter across once unfolded inside the brain case.”

  Kevin: “You say the nanotubes can listen to each other. What is going to make them talk to each other?” Eric sports a big grin now, sparkles in his eyes. He is so proud of his baby. Kim is also smiling, with her arms crossed, waiting for what is coming.

  Eric: “I was hoping you would ask, Kevin. Thank you, very good question. This is the breakthrough. Kamal, what a smart kid! He runs the User Experience subproject at Neocuris right now, as a manager. During the early design of the interface, he asked me and the group if that was part of the plan to allow for cross talkpoint communication. At first I was a bit off balance, not ready for the question. I responded with a question of my own: ‘Why do you think that is something we should discuss now?’ Then he paused for a couple of minutes, scratching his shoulder, then he went: ‘because that is one of the factors that will allow us, in principle, to update the software on both sides of the interface, provide new features, without having to physically replace the interface.’ The whole engineering team in the room was trying to absorb the implications. Some of the engineers started to think about how to allow for crosstalk amongst talkpoints.”

  “Kamal decided to break the silence by going to the whiteboard, he drew an arrow from the brain, firing a nanotube talkpoint to reach to the mobile app, then drew some round circle for processing at the app level, then another arrow going back to the interface, firing up a different talk point to modulate the first arrow from the brain’s signal and the outbound talkpoint electromagnetically. ‘Bio feedback’ he said, turning around to the team. ‘We need to allow this now, before we start to push the interface out the door’.”

  “Then another engineer grabbed the marker, went to the whiteboard, that was Anima, another superstar. She basically drew the same diagram, but kind of upside down, with the arrow going from the app, down to the interface, firing a talkpoint, and modulating, or amplifying, the response from the brain through a subset of outbound talkpoints using a second inbound talkpoint. That’s the tuning in. Picture a good old transistor radio with 2 wheels, Tune and Volume. We had opened the Pandora box. We decided that we needed to add this support in the chip, but add some filters between the vault and the app for now until we could fully map out all the implications, and swing that by the Ethical committee. That’s labelled ‘for future use’ in standard software or hardware development.”

  Chapter 9

  Food is served on the table by Sarah, family style, small plates, vegan it appears. We slowly start to sample the small plates, they look so good that we can’t resist.

  The small plates were delicious and creative. Surprising combinations of ingredients, tasty herbs mixed with yogurt like non-milk middle-eastern dish, roasted vegetables including some amazing Brussel sprouts and beets. Eric was trying to use analogies and simplifications for me as much as for himself. I was starting to appreciate the vastness of the enterprise and the importance of being able to maintain cohesion between the growing number of teams through leveraging a menagerie of visual aids.

  Eric: “We started to remove some the filters slowly, back in September. But I believe the December release I have yet to be introduced to, accelerated the pace. Kamal thinks that eventually this is going to turn into AI. I can’t wait to catch up with him on his User Experience project. He told me back in July that if he gets the clearance from the committees, and if he can successfully mitigate any potential risk with enough vault-app filters, this could turn the beetle simplified dashboard into a piece for the museum. But we got to put some guardrails here. That could open the door to abuse. Think about for example a ‘Brain, go to sleep’ button. Do we really want that to be part of the app?”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. Back in September we also removed some filters to improve the heuristics for trending for vital signs monitoring. That opened the door to communication between distinct instances of the app, through the vault. Now a new patient can benefit on day one from the baseline generated and updated on a continuous basis by other instances, in near real-time. Diagnostic precision skyrocketed right away, especially when we started to factor in geolocation. Air pollution or
smog in a specific city, and the weather, dictate different interpretations of the data. And combine that to app-vault filters being relaxed, now new paths are starting to emerge. Again, I don’t think any single person today can fully appreciate all the implications across and between all those moving parts. A mesh, designed for self-tuning at multiple autonomous points.”

  “As a general rule of thumb, we looked at what was available first, Bluetooth, RFID, infrared, name it. If it exists already, don’t reinvent it. We got a team that focused on carbon nanotubes, mini-engines and dynamos, coming out of universities and private research labs. We acquired some talent and patents. We looked at how to get rid of the battery charger, which used to be a wearable headset similar to phone headsets, etc. We tried to get rid of any remote chargers that use high frequencies too close to the brain. Not that we found real issues, we did not investigate that too deep: We knew that from a go-to-market perspective, that would be in the way, with all those urban legends about phones frying people’s brains… Nanotubes need only micro-current to operate, so we looked at using brainwaves and salinity differentials to make our nanotube dynamos to generate it.”

  “But what about the communication part? Well we looked again at what was available, e.g RFID, and how we could re-assemble these cheap technologies into a cohesive brand new thing. We figured out at one point how to initiate all communication from the app, queuing the signal from the brain at the interface layer, polling it from the app, without really suffering from a lag in communication between the interface and the app, and without having to power a booster inside the brain case. Eventually, after 6 years or so, we were ready to hit the market with clinical trials and deal with the FDA. With a bang! That was roughly 2 years ago.”

  “I am suffering from narcolepsy, I used to fall asleep at red lights or in line ups at the airport. Probably chronic lack of sleep, working the nightshifts at the lab, coordinating all those multi-disciplinary teams around the clock, trying to come up with the perfect solution. The chip warns me when I am most at risk, and it can even modulate my brainwaves so my level of awareness does not go below the threshold when I need to be alert. But I am getting better now, away from the lab. The break is good. One year now. I don’t think I need the chip for that anymore.”

  Eric: “Back in December, I started to tune in into someone’s head, without realizing at first what was going on. That was shortly after I started to feel a presence around me sometimes. At first it was all gibberish but then some numbers started to emerge, 10 000, 100 000, and a timeline, like Phase 1, Phase 2. Numbers are the easiest, they stand out on their own on a pedestal, unlike words, worst: Sentences. Try to pick thoughts from the lose grammar that we often use to run our thoughts, bits and fragments. Numbers, especially phone numbers, addresses, access codes. We spell them out in our head, we try to leave an imprint by resorting to mnemonics and tricks. We repeat them. We visualize them. We even speak them out, or lip sync them. That adds up to a strong signal sometimes.”

  “Then I started to feel some anger, some very negative stuff, I thought I was going nervous breakdown or something. Then I recognized the pattern of a coordinated attack. I could feel it more than I could hear or visualize it. And you know what happens when you are surrounded by hackers and scary PowerPoint all day long? You quickly start to inventory worst case scenarios, mobiles, motives. And yes, after numbers, emotions. Well, it kind of makes sense, because they also stand out. They leave a strong imprint, many senses and brain processes are recruited. They all point in the same direction all of a sudden. Especially strong, primitive emotions. They leak out. Well that’s my theory, based on my recent personal experiences and the time I had on my hands to rationalize and extrapolate lately.”

  “Kim, how much does he know, who else knows about this?”

  Kim: “Well, I had to unpack my whole bag. Kevin and his wife Carolyn would have not trusted me otherwise, big drama scene when I showed up at their house like you would have asked me to, if you could have. I guess I was unprepared for it.”

  Eric: “She’s not safe. The kids are not safe. Let me figure out something.”

  “I am not sure who was the person with the chip I was able to tune into back in early December, but he is not active anymore, not that I can tell. Not sure what happened to him. But after a meeting with the suits, when they realized I was looking at them differently all of a sudden, within 3 hours the channel was gone. Then we found this place me and Sarah, Social, not for sales initially but we fixed that with a few extra dollars. If I can tune in, they can too, they probably initiate the channel. Knowing is unsafe. And many rogue transmitters out there, I think my house in the suburb is compromised.”

  Then Eric hands me over a small USB key: “Here is some reading for the airplane ride back home. If you have a doubt about your situation, break the seal at the top, that will fry the content. This is the global architecture as it was in November. You go home, someone with a sign will wait for you at the arrivals, just follow the instructions. They know you are here. I mean the bad guys.”

  Chapter 10

  No wifi on this airplane, no comfort either. Thanks Eric for tracking down this old bird still in service. Ever got the feeling you are sitting in a flying pipe, Eric? I guess he wanted to protect me while I am reading some confidential documents. I am scanning through the content on my iPad. But my thoughts keep going back to Carolyn and the kids. I can’t wait to be with them again, even if it has just been a few days this time.

  Wow, redundant paths everywhere, strong encryptions and certificates. I am wondering which vault is the most secure, the one with EHR patient records, or the one with all the consent forms… Clearly legal had a say into this architecture. This thing is growing organically!

  I am about to land in Montreal. Light snow, mid-January, late evening. Good thing my manager did not blink when I asked for 2 more weeks. John said “Take your time. We are so glad you’re doing well.”

  I am slowly connecting the dots between how the datacenters are connected, and how the New Forensics Portland campus has a privileged backdoor access to key critical assets. What is missing in diagrams is how the New York campus is hooked up. I am assuming in a similar fashion, since Tom brought with him enough of the engineers. But whatever changed in December is not included in the documentation. We are one version behind when it comes to the beetle and the vault.

  My Global Entry card gets me through customs in no time. Now I turn the corner past the luggage area and the last checkpoint, and here stands a woman who looks like a tour organizer holding a square of paper with my uncle’s name on it, Samuel Tremblay. My uncle’s dead. I guess that’s for me. Too much security is almost like not enough, I almost missed that cue.

  I follow the lady to the taxi area. She tells me to let 3 parties get in front of me in the line-up, then she makes eye contact with a driver that looks like a regular Joe. That’s a van. I am alone with one carry on luggage. Once in the van, the driver gets on the highway after 2 sets of lights, then he gives me instructions: “Call you wife now. Tell her to wake up the kids. They meet you outside once we park. They leave everything behind”.

  Kevin: “Carolyn, get the kids ready, I am picking you up. I know it’s late, I’ll explain later.”

  Carolyn: “Kevin, I am so glad you are back. Did you leave the garage back door unlocked when you left? When I got back home this afternoon, it was wide open. Footsteps in the snow in the backyard. I don’t feel safe here anymore.”

  Hard to hug and kiss everybody in the van with our seatbelts on. The driver insisted that we get going right away. Now more instructions: “I will park underground. You follow me to ground level, we enter the steak house, then out through the backstreet entrance. Across the street is your hotel. You register at the front desk. You will be safe there. Don’t initiate contact if you spot security staff, ignore them unless they initiate contact. You can access the restaurant downstairs and the concierge lounge, you will find some clothes, gym wear and sw
imwear in the rooms.”

  “Welcome to our hotel, we have upgraded you to concierge level. You have two communicating junior suites, gym is open 24 hours, pool closes at 10 pm, reopens at 6. And by the way we apologize, but our wifi access is down right now on your floor, but you are welcomed to use the public access in the lobby, or the guest wifi in the lounge and the gym. Just use this access code on this card.”

  Everybody was super tired, the boy crashed on the bed couch and the girls managed to tolerate each other in the king size bed, all 3 of them in the second room. Carolyn is already asleep, she probably needed to catch up some sleep, and now her nerves have to let go. Sex was not even an option tonight, it was mutually understood that our intimacy has been put on the back burner for now. And not only because of the brain connection with Kim, but with those security people keeping an eye on us. Who knows if they are not eavesdropping from the room next door!

  Finally, after appreciating this short but precious few hours with Carolyn and the kids, I carefully put my lips on the back of her neck where I spot an opening in her night gown and gently kiss her goodnight.

  I am falling asleep as well. Good night Kim. I turn off the phone.

  Chapter 11

  Back at Social tonight. I needed some company. I am sitting with Sarah at a table, quiet evening, I guess the regular patrons had to reconnect in anticipations of some big thing to happen. It’s in the air.

  I stop flipping the pages of a recent beauty magazine of sorts. Warmth is filling my heart all in a sudden. I look at Sarah with a smile and some tears of joy in my eyes: “He’s with them now. They are safe. I can feel it. Goodnight Kevin.”

  Sarah grabs my hand and looks at me with the smile of a mother, with compassion.