Recursion(10)
Marcus insists that she exercise five days a week to keep her spirits up and her mind sharp. There’s a gym on the first level, which she uses when the weather is bad, and on the rare calm days of winter, she goes running on the track that circumnavigates the platform. She loves those runs the most, because it feels like she’s doing laps at the top of the world.
Her research lab is 10,000 square feet—the entire third floor of the Fawkes Station superstructure—and she has made more progress in the last ten weeks than during her entire five-year stint at Stanford. Anything she needs, she gets. There are no bills to pay, no relationships to maintain. Nothing to do but single-mindedly pursue her research.
Up until now, she had been manipulating memories in mice, working with specific cell clusters that had been genetically engineered to be light-sensitive. Once a cell cluster had been labeled and associated with a stored memory (for instance, an electrical shock), she would then reactivate the memory of the mouse’s fear by targeting those light-sensitive cell clusters with a special optogenetics laser inserted via filaments through the mouse’s skull.
Her work on the oil platform is a whole other ball game.
Helena is leading the group tackling the main problem, which also happens to be her area of specialization—tagging and cataloging the neuron clusters connected to a particular memory, and then reconstructing a digital model of the brain that allows them to track memories and map them out.
In principle, it’s no different from what she did with mouse brains, but orders of magnitude more complex.
The technology the other three teams are handling is challenging, but not groundbreaking—cutting-edge tech, yes, but with the right personnel and Marcus’s giant checkbook, they should be able to re-create it with no serious roadblocks.
She has twenty people working under her across four groups. She’s heading up the Mapping Team. The Imaging Team has been tasked with finding some way of filming neuronal firings that doesn’t involve shoving a laser through a person’s skull and into their brain. They’ve landed on building a device that utilizes an advanced form of magnetoencephalography, or MEG for short. A SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) array will detect infinitesimal magnetic fields produced by individual neurons firing in the human brain, right down to the level of determining the position of each neuron. They call it the MEG microscope.
The Reactivation Team is building an apparatus that is essentially a vast network of electromagnetic stimulators that forms a shell around the head for 3D pinpoint accuracy and precision-targeting of the hundreds of millions of neurons that are required to reactivate a memory.
And finally, Infrastructure is building the chair for human trials.
It has been a good day. Perhaps even a great one. She met with Slade, Jee-woon, and the project managers to review progress, and everyone is ahead of schedule. It is four o’clock in the afternoon in late January, one of those fleeting winter days of warmth and blue. The sun is plunging into the ocean, turning the clouds and the sea into shades of gray and pink she has never seen before, and she’s sitting on the edge of the platform, westward-facing, her legs swinging out over the water.
Two hundred feet below, waves swell and crash against the immense legs of this fortress in the sea.
She cannot believe she is here.
She cannot believe this is her life.
Day 225
The MEG microscope is nearly finished, and the reactivation apparatus has progressed as far as it can while everyone waits for mapping to get their arms around the cataloging problem.
Helena is frustrated with the delay. Over dinner with Slade in his palatial suite, she levels with him—the team is failing because their obstacle is a brute-force problem. Since they’re scaling up from mice brains to human brains, the computing power they’re working with is insufficient to map something as prodigiously complex as human memory structure. Unless she can figure out a shortcut, they simply don’t have the CPU cycles to handle it.
“Ever heard of D-Wave?” Slade asks as Helena takes a sip of a white burgundy, the best wine she has ever tasted.
“Sorry, I haven’t.”
“It’s a company out of British Columbia. A year ago, they released a prototype quantum processor. Its application is highly specific, but ideal for the sort of enormous data-set mapping problem we’ve run up against.”
“How much are they?”
“Not cheap, but I was interested in the technology, so I ordered a few of their advanced prototypes for future projects last summer.”
He smiles, and something about the way he studies her across the table leaves her with the unnerving sense that he knows more about her than she should be comfortable with. Her past. Her psychology. What makes her tick. But she can hardly blame him if in fact he has peeled back some of the layers. He’s investing years and millions in her mind.
Through the window behind Slade, she sees a single speck of light, miles and miles out to sea, and is struck, not for the first time, by how utterly alone they are out here.
Day 270
The midsummer days are long and sunny, and progress has halted while they await the arrival of two quantum-annealing processors. Helena misses her parents desperately, and their once-a-week talks have become the highlight of her existence here. The distance is having an odd effect on her connection to her father. She feels closer to him than she has in years, since before high school. The smallest details of their lives in Colorado carry a sudden significance. She drinks in the minutiae, and the more boring the better.