surprised that Layla was in such a lighthearted mood. Considering the horrors they’d experienced just twelve hours ago, he expected her to be traumatized, or at least a bit distressed. But, instead, she was babbling about the range and habitat of Burmese shrikes and how they had this interesting habit of impaling their dead prey on thorns to make it easier to rip them apart. Jim wondered if maybe Layla was piling on all this ornithological talk just to bury the memory of their ordeal in the Operations Center, but as he studied his daughter he got the feeling that her happiness was genuine. She seemed jubilant and relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from her.
Then they reached the trees and saw the birds flying. They had black heads and plump white bodies and striated wings that were the color of old rust. Jim suspected that even with ordinary eyesight it would be a lovely thing to see these creatures jump from the branches of the palm trees and dive through the clouds of mosquitoes that filled the jungle before sunset. But when Jim viewed it with his new eyes he was absolutely awestruck. He could see every beat of the shrike’s whipping brown wings.
Layla stood beside him, still babbling, but she wasn’t talking about birds anymore. She said that when they got back to the States she was going to reenroll at MIT, but instead of pursuing computer science, she was going to study evolutionary biology. And she was going to take courses in Mandarin, too, because she wanted to keep in touch with Wu Dan and Li Tung. And she also wanted to pay a visit to someone she’d met at the University of Texas, a graduate student in aerospace engineering who was smart and funny and phenomenally hot.
And as Jim listened to his daughter go on about her plans and dreams and desires, he felt his heart melting. He was so in love with this girl. He couldn’t understand how he’d lived for so long without her.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE SCIENCE BEHIND
The development of brain-machine interfaces, which link the human mind to microchips, sensors, and motors, is one of the most momentous trends in twenty-first-century science. Here are some of the real technologies I highlighted in
Powerful Prostheses. In 2011 researchers at the University of Pittsburgh conducted one of the first human trials of a prosthetic arm guided by the user’s thoughts. The scientists implanted an array of electrodes on the surface of the brain of Tim Hemmes, a thirty-year-old paralyzed in a motorcycle accident seven years before. By sensing the brain cell firing patterns that correspond to specific arm motions, the device enabled Hemmes to mentally send commands to a nine-pound prosthesis and move its hand and fingers. The research is partly funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D agency, which has invested $100 million to develop better artificial limbs.
Artificial Eyes. Researchers have given eyesight to the blind by linking a video camera to an implant attached to the retina. The camera wirelessly transmits its video to the implant, which reproduces the images on a grid of electrodes. The electrodes stimulate the adjacent nerve cells in the damaged retina, and the pattern of nerve signals conveys a rough picture to the brain. Second Sight Medical Products has already introduced the first commercial retinal implants in Europe, and the device may soon become available in the United States as well.
Cyborg Swarms. Spurred by funding from DARPA, scientists have developed the first “bugs with bugs”—insects with implanted electronics designed to turn them into remote-controlled surveillance drones. By transmitting radio signals to electrodes attached to the brains and flight muscles of beetles, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, steered the insects left and right as they flew across the lab (see “Cyborg Beetles” in
The Singularity. A growing number of so-called Singularitarians, inspired by the writings of futurist Ray Kurzweil and others, believe that people will achieve immortality in this century by downloading the contents of their minds into advanced computers. Although many scientists scoff at this prediction, researchers demonstrated in 2011 that they could extract memory traces from the brains of rats. Implanted electrodes recorded signals in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories, while the rats performed a simple task. When the researchers replayed the signals later in the rats’ brains, it helped the animals remember the task.
What Is Consciousness? Speculation about the nature of consciousness has long been the province of philosophers, but in recent years neuroscientists have tried to answer the question using brain- imaging experiments and other studies. One hypothesis is that the synchronization of signals from various regions of the brain generates the experience of consciousness. The region called the thalamus may play a vital role because it relays so many of the brain’s signals. Two excellent books on the subject are
Supreme Harmony. China is already building surveillance networks similar to the ones described in
While writing this novel, I was constantly aware of the parallels between fiction and reality. In fact, I came to think of the book as an allegory for the current situation in China and other countries that are using new technologies to silence dissent. If, like me, you’re outraged by this trend, I urge you to join Amnesty International, which fights government repression across the globe.
I’d like to thank my colleagues at
Also by Mark Alpert
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARK ALPERT, author of the internationally bestselling thriller
Learn more at www.MarkAlpert.com.
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