The Speed of Sound (Speed of Sound Thrillers #1)(15)
After a moment, he lifted the needle from the record, and the music stopped. “But when it’s no longer audible, where does that energy go?” He looked around the room to the various members of the audience like a master showman. “Ha! Wrong question, right? We know it’s here. Know it, know it, know it!” He looked in one corner, then another. He checked under a trash can, then peeked behind the whiteboard.
The room was SILENT. Or, at least, as silent as it could be given the constant din of the fluorescent lighting, heating vents, and other nuisances, which Eddie did his best to ignore.
He continued. “The question is, what form?”
Skylar looked on in amazement as he moved to the echo-box prototype, which was now connected to a somewhat bulky-looking laptop computer. At the press of a button, the sides of the echo box sprang open, revealing eight one-inch satellite microphones pointed around the room. Each one cost $20,000. When Eddie clicked a command on the laptop, the microsatellites came to life, performing a perfectly synchronized ballet as they acoustically mapped the room.
Their movements were mesmerizing. Programming them had been a nine-month project during which Eddie almost never left his room. Everyone on the staff had grown worried about him except for Dr. Fenton, who had assured them that he would never let any harm come to any of their patients, especially not Eddie.
The statement was a lie. Eddie would have had no trouble flagging it as such, had he ever heard it. Which was why Fenton had never said it in front of him.
Everyone in the recreation room sat perfectly still, staring at the echo box, except for Nurse Gloria, who moved slowly toward Eddie.
“The basis for sound-wave retrieval and reconstruction, which is called acoustic archeology, has existed since 1969. We just haven’t had equipment sensitive enough to acoustically map an enclosed space or the algorithms necessary to re-create the original sound wave.” He paused for emphasis. “Until now.”
Several of his spectators turned toward the computer, realizing it did not bear any type of familiar brand name. That was because the machine wasn’t commercially available. It was a portable supercomputer, one of the very few in the world. Clocking in at 17.2 PFLOPS (petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second), the machine could easily make the International Supercomputing Conference’s biannual list of the five hundred fastest supercomputers in the world, if the government ever admitted this machine existed. There were fewer than a dozen laptops on the planet with this much unique computing power. The machine cost in excess of $3 million—which had utterly no meaning to Eddie, because he had never used money in his life. His father had never allowed him to buy anything as a child, and residents of Harmony House had no need for currency. They were never allowed to leave the facility, so no one on the staff had bothered to teach the patients about money and its purpose.
Gloria kept creeping toward him.
“While decaying infinitely, a sound wave retains a distinct signature, which can allow us to reconstruct its original form the same way a mastodon can be recreated from a partial bone fragment.” Eddie had read about the recent proof of gravitational waves when two different Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detectors, instruments two and a half miles long, simultaneously moved one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. That was an almost unimaginable level of sensitivity, which had led Einstein to believe that no one would ever be able to prove his 1916 theory. It only took a hundred years. By comparison, Eddie’s scientific leap of faith was more of a small skip. He was truly certain the proof of his theory was at hand as he clicked “Reconstruct” on the laptop. The computer was SILENT for a moment, then produced a horrendous, shrill SCREECH.
Eddie cringed, quickly closing the laptop. He then exploded, screaming at the top of his lungs, “As soon as I can figure out what the equations are!”
He slapped himself hard across the face. Once. Twice. Then instinctively grabbed for any sharp object within reach to do some real damage. Nurse Gloria immediately moved to restrain him. His flailing arm punched her repeatedly in the face and pulled her hair, but she was not about to let go. She gritted her teeth as she held on tight. “Easy, Eddie. Take it easy.” He was hyperventilating and on the verge of a seizure.
The other patients all reacted immediately. The shy woman in the front row wearing the Harvard sweatshirt began to whimper uncontrollably. The heavyset Dartmouth guy in the back fled the room, pulling his hair out. Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, and all the others screamed or cried or babbled incoherently.
Nurse Gloria raised her voice loud enough to be heard over the cacophony without sounding too alarming. “That’s all for today, everyone! Head on back to your rooms!”
More staff arrived quickly. So quickly, it was as if they had expected this to happen. Which, of course, they had. Each knew exactly what to do. They moved with precision. It was impressive. Skylar went toward Nurse Gloria, who continued holding Eddie tight, carefully pulling him down to the floor. Nurse Gloria turned to Skylar. “Do us all a favor. Before you think of them as geniuses, think of them as children, because that’s what they are.”
“How did you see it coming?”
The veteran nurse shook her head at the young doctor. Even with all her schooling, she still could not see what was right in front of her face. “I didn’t see anything, Doctor. It always happens at the exact same point every time he gives his lecture.”