Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(81)

Heather felt a blockage rip loose in her head. It wasn’t a vision, but the equations in her mind cascaded through a set of multidimensional matrix calculations. For several seconds she just stood there, so involved in the complexity that she almost forgot that Mark and Jennifer stood next to her.

As a new wave of dizziness came and went, she slumped down into the chair.

“Heather?” Mark asked. “You all right?”

When she looked up again, she felt her jaw tighten.

“We’d better get busy. We have a lot of work to do.”





82


Mark had been meditating for more than three hours, periodically pausing to mentally tag everything about what he was feeling. The idea had come to him shortly after he had finished savoring the last piece of Mrs. McFarland’s legendary apple pie at dinner. When the final morsel had been swallowed and the wonderful sensations in his mouth were only memories, it had come to him.

Memories. Thanks to the augmentation he had received on the Second Ship, his memories were perfect in every respect. Sitting on the couch he had played back the memory of eating the slice of pie, the flaky texture of the crust, the sweet tang of the fresh apples, the cold smoothness of the vanilla ice cream as it mixed with the still-hot filling on his tongue. He could feel it, taste it, smell it every bit as realistically as the original experience. Amazing.

If he could do that with an experience like eating, maybe he could get control of his emotions using the same technique. The problem with meditation was that it took time. But remembering how he felt took almost no time at all. If he could play back the feeling in his mind, every detail the same as it was during meditation, he should be able to achieve exactly the same brain state.

Retiring to his bedroom, Mark sat down on his bed, vividly recalling how he felt during one of his meditation sessions. Almost instantaneously he was there, calm yet completely alert, aware of every hair on his skin. There was no doubt in his mind that if he were hooked to a device that displayed his brain waves that they would be an exact match with what they had been during that past meditation.

Thrilled with this new discovery, Mark moved his memory around through different parts of previous meditations, adjusting his brain state accordingly. One thing he determined was that he needed a better system of recalling exact levels of meditation, depending on the state he desired to achieve. Borrowing Jennifer’s idea of tagging memories in a scheme that let her easily find the memory she desired, Mark set to work. Rather than play back and tag parts of old meditations, he started fresh, taking himself through a wide variety of meditative techniques, progressively going deeper and deeper. As he did, he began setting the mental tags at points he thought he might want to recall quickly.

Finishing with a close approximation of the deathlike trance in which he had frightened Heather and Jen on the starship, Mark brought himself back to full alertness with a shift of thought.

Rising from the bed, he pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!”

Despite that they had all attained the ability to use 100 percent of their brain capacity, most of that potential was completely untrained and yet to be explored. Mark had no idea what might lie along those unexplored neural pathways, but tonight’s success left him more eager than ever to find out. In one fell stroke, he had accomplished something that had eluded him for weeks—he had regained his sense of self-control.





83


So close. As Heather watched Jennifer’s fingers stroke the keyboard, she could feel the equations in her head converging. The software approximations Jen had implemented on the computer were almost within the variance allowed by Heather’s mathematical derivations.

For two weeks, the three friends had immersed themselves in the new project, to make a miniaturized version of the subspace receiver-transmitter. To make it truly portable this one had to be no bigger than a laptop computer and include its own internal power supply and wave packet generator. The only truly challenging piece of the effort was this last item.

To generate the wave packets that produced the proper range of frequencies to create the tiny gamma pulses required laptop modifications. That meant the addition of four central processor chips and four floating-point processors. Even these additions proved inadequate until Heather worked out a mathematical approximation, which provided much faster computational solutions.

News reports from around the world only added to their sense of urgency. The new president had requested, and been granted, a special assembly of the United Nations, one in which he brought down the house. Never had a United States president been given a larger or longer standing ovation from the traditionally hostile assemblage. Not only had he acknowledged the legitimacy of the UN’s requests for access to the Rho Ship’s nanotechnology, he had promised to begin worldwide shipment of the serum by Monday, November 5, a date that provided time to ramp up production and to get the necessary congressional approval.

This last had proven to be the sticking point, with a small but vocal congressional minority joined in adamant opposition to the plan. House approval was a certainty, but the Senate appeared to be just short of the support required for cloture, the three-fifths majority required to cut off filibusters. At least that had been true until yesterday, when the leader of the opposition, Senator Pete Hornsby of Maine, was killed in a fiery automobile accident on the Acadia Byway as he returned from a Bar Harbor weekend getaway.