After about a week of this I guess everything was where it was going to be, and they told me they were going to turn on the network, and that if everything worked then I would be seeing through a camera they set up on a desk, and that I would be able to talk through a speaker. Then I felt something like an electric shock and I could see myself on the bed, bald, with this ugly scar across the top of my head that made me look like Frankenstein’s ugly cousin. And I thought, Jesus, I look like shit, and suddenly I heard the words I was thinking, coming through the speaker. The network was reading my thoughts. I realized I was going to have to be careful with what I thought until I could actually control myself. And then that came over the speaker.
Then I started to talk to anyone who was in the room because it had been so long since I could talk to anyone about anything. I was just asking people’s names and what they were wearing and about their kids and their pets—it didn’t matter because I could talk again and it was the best thing in the world. After a few minutes of this I got a weird itch on my face and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that I had tears and they were just, like, pooling on my face because I was lying down and not able to wipe them away. I had to ask someone to wipe them for me.
It was amazing. The most amazing thing. It was like being born again. It was like being free.
PART FOUR
THREEPS
Summer Zapata, Author, “The Silent Revolution: Technology in the Wake of Haden’s Syndrome”:
The development and rapid production and installation of the neural networks was obviously the first big event in the technological history of Haden’s. We spent what some not incorrectly felt was an appalling amount of money, and arguably abandoned medical morality, to develop the networks, but at the end of the day it got done, the proof of concept was there and suddenly two dozen companies, some established, some start-ups, were in the neural network business.
But the neural networks were only a partial solution. The networks gave Haden’s sufferers their ability to communicate again with the outside world, but their bodies still didn’t work. They still couldn’t move. They were still trapped. And in many way they were still terribly isolated.
The federal government threw billions into medical research trying to get brains to talk to the voluntary nervous system, or to grow new nerve connections, but none of that was progressing at a rate that anyone was considering satisfactory. This opened the door to a left-field solution that absolutely no one saw coming.
Rebecca Warner, Chairwoman, Sebring-Warner, Inc.:
Charlie Sebring and I knew each other growing up, but not all that well, since he was a class behind me in school and we ran in different circles. I was the stereotypical student government type and he was a classic nerd. When I graduated I went to Brown and he went to Rensselaer and I didn’t see him again until the summer before my senior year, when he and I both interned at GreenWave, which my father owned. I got an internship in management, while Charlie was down in engineering. Until I caught him making things in the printers, I pretty much didn’t have any contact with him.
My internship was mostly just for show because I was the owner’s daughter and we all know how that goes. On one hand I was irritated with this because by this time I knew I wanted to run a company, and I didn’t like people thinking I wasn’t a serious person. On the other hand I really wasn’t a serious person at the time, and I spent most of my time planning my summer evenings. So I couldn’t complain that they give me a bunch of chumpy tasks that a monkey could do.
One of the chores I had to do was to prepare a weekly efficiency report for the GreenWave’s printers. GreenWave handled a lot of bespoke production jobs for design studios and small manufacturers—everyone has their own printers but they weren’t designed for large-object jobs or jobs that required more than a couple of dozen copies made. GreenWave manufactured industrial-scale printers and also kept a manufacturing wing open to handle work from other companies. Our printers were good but they were finicky and prone to breaking down, so we tracked their efficiency, and every week I compiled a report for the CTO. It was dead simple, especially since each of the printers imported their data into a spreadsheet automatically. All I really had to do was press a button to print it out.
So every week I printed them out. Most weeks I didn’t look at them, but one evening I was out with friends and remembered that I forgot to do the spreadsheet, and I didn’t want to be known as so inept that I couldn’t even do that. So I left the party early—11pm—and went back to the office to run off the report. As I was collating the paper I actually looked at the report and noticed one printer had a weird usage pattern. It usually went off-shift at 10pm, which was the end of our second shift, but every day in the last week it was active between 11pm and midnight. So I pulled up the real-time monitor and saw the printer was running right at that moment. I went down to the printer floor to see what was going on and there was Charlie, printing out something that looked like a hand. He looked very surprised to see me.
Naturally, I asked him what he was doing. He said he was doing some last minute client work, so I said, fine, so show me the work order. We didn’t do anything at GreenWave without a work order. Then Charlie got a panicked look in his eye, and that’s when I realized whatever he was doing, he wasn’t supposed to be doing it. So I decided to get tough with him and told him that he could either tell me what he was doing, or he could tell his boss the next morning, with me providing the spreadsheet as incriminating documents.
Charlie gave in and told me he was making a prototype. Great, I said, a prototype of what? And he explained that he had been following the development of the neural networks they were making for the Haden’s syndrome people, and realized that even if they got the networks to function, people would still be stuck in bodies that didn’t move. He was building a machine that would integrate with the networks so that people would be able to walk and move and get out in the world.
I asked him to tell me more, and we spent the next five hours going over everything. GreenWave had access to the Haden research database because we contracted with GE for elements of their neural networks, and Charlie had been keeping up with the neural network development. A lot of research money was going into biological solutions to fixing Haden bodies but almost nothing for machine solutions—the closest thing was an old design of a scooter with a large tablet sticking up on a post. It gave minimal mobility but no ability to hold or grasp objects or interact with people in a way that didn’t feel like, well, you were a scooter with a tablet on it.
What Charlie was prototyping was much better: An actual body with touch input, shaped like a human body and with all a body’s capabilities. It was a robot, but instead of a robot brain, it had a human brain controlling it. It would be a new body. One that wouldn’t get tired or ever get sick like the Haden’s victims own bodies would.