They moved to a comfortable room with eight reading chairs surrounding a small round glass table that brought thoughts of King Arthur to mind. Isaac sat next to Vince and Tasha sat next to Anthony. Looking at the two empty seats, Vince thought, We must recruit two more knights for Camelot. I know this Lancelot guy...
“Well,” said Isaac, “thesis projects were coming up in a year. Tasha and I kept in touch over the years, and we were shooting pool up at the hall and tossing around ideas.”
“Wait,” Vince interrupted. “Your physics, she's biology right?”
“Biological Physiology, and physical engineering, but close,” said Tasha with a grin.
“Right, that's what I said,” said Vince. “I'm not seeing much overlap there.”
“That's what made it interesting,” said Isaac, “And Anthony brought up different types of computer interfaces and how various languages are starting to intuitively interact with each other.”
Vince nodded and turned to Anthony, “So you’re a programmer?”
“Yeah. Do you code?”
“Javascript, HTML, a bit of PHP. Nothing serious. I've never thought about coding at the doctoral level. What does that--”
Tasha, her nerd-rant senses tingling, stepped in. “Anthony brought up the idea of using some of the algorithms used to translate between different programming or spoken languages to interface between electrical signals transmitted by the nervous system and a computer.”
Vince waited for a second, and then asked, “So what you're saying is... you are working on a way to have human thought interact with a computer... like voice recognition except further?”
“Exactly,” said Jay. “Isaac brought me in to work on computer hardware, and Anthony brought in Veronica for advanced mathematical computations. The speed of interaction and signal recognition was staggering, and we needed a way to measure it. Trying to get the electrical signals parsed was--”
“Stop for a second,” said Vince. “You are parsing electrical neural transmissions? Before you start going way over my head, let me ask this. Have you made this thing?”
Jay grinned. “We got the first version of it working three week ago. We've tweaked it a bit since then, cleaning up filters, improving interaction between different thought processes. It's strange how different neural transmissions simultaneously have similar patterns even though--”
“Wait wait wait,” said Vince. “Sorry for interrupting again Jay. You said simultaneous transmissions.” Jay nodded like a bobble-head working triple time. “So you have two people's thoughts, neural transmissions, being parsed at the same time.”
“The goal,” said Veronica, “was to have one person be able to think 'hello' and have the second be able to perceive the 'hello' and respond appropriately. Throughout the process, the algorithms would deal with the alterations in thought patterns, and allow each other to perceive the other’s thoughts as understandable language.”
“That's brilliant,” said Vince. “The ability to communicate in that fashion would revolutionize human interaction. Can you use this over distance? The speed of information exchange would be amazing. This parsing would be able to serve as a great firewall. Any type of direct interaction would improve security of general data, not to mention delivery of sensitive information. I could give verbal assessments to students privately in seconds. People in oppressive countries could give information without leaving a digital record or...” Vince looked up and realized everyone was staring at him.
“And you said this works?” Vince asked. “You could get the Nobel Prize.”
“Oh it works,” said Jay. “And then some.”
“That's amazing... So what's the problem? From what I've heard so far you should be celebrating, but when I walked into the room the only one who didn't look like they were waiting on a hung jury was Jay.”
“That's what I'm saying,” said Jay, offering a fist for bumping to Vince. Not one to ever turn down a fist bump, Vince obliged. “Zuckerberg's going to be shining my shoes.”
“Nice... so why am I here then?” The room grew quiet for a moment.
Despite Jay's enthusiasm, there was definitely an air of tension in the room. No one volunteered to answer the question, so Vince tried to put himself in their shoes. So I'm a group of genius/semi-genius students who have just invented indoor plumbing. This is going to be valuable, so I'm going to be rich. What is the problem?
We team of Superbrains can not solve the problem, so we brought in outside help. The help is not a member of the Superbrains, so this is not a science thing. If the problem was technical, they would either work it out or bring in a specialist.
So, the problem therefore must not be technical, but involve... distribution? Advertising? There are marketing firms for that. They needed someone they trusted. They needed perspective, so the problem is something they are not seeing. They need a different vantage point, one that looks from the perspective of society... So is society a problem? Did they recruit one of the bad guys?
Vince shook his head, and wondered if his use of comic book metaphors was getting a bit out of hand, but the thought seemed to hold. “So the problem is not with the tech, but what's going to happen to it once everyone finds out it exists. You're worried it's going to be taken from you, aren't you?”
Jay looked a bit startled. Veronica smiled ever so slightly. “Hook him up,” said Anthony decidedly. Isaac and Tasha both gave him a surprised look. “If he's going to help, he's going to need to see how the constructs work.”
“Alright, hook me up,” said Vince, and he promised himself that if this fried his brain, he was going to kill Isaac.