Game Changer (47 page)

She paused for a moment to let the prime
minister consider her arguments.

“No technology in history will be more
disruptive, more transformative,” she continued. “I get that. But we can’t
flinch. Humanity is already at a severe inflection point, just starting up the
handle of the hockey stick. There’s no turning back. The risks of self-destruction
are very real, but this train has left the station and there’s no stopping it.”

“But the longer we delay disclosure,” said
Kish, “the more time we have to perfect countermeasures.”

“Secrecy is the
problem
,” insisted Rachel, “not the solution. We have to open
source it. If you’re the CEO of Apple and you want to provide scores of innovative
apps for your new cell phone offering, you don’t hide the source code in-house.
You let it out. You let the entire world work on it.”

She paused to take another drink of peach tea.
“Civilization will adapt. Or it won’t. But we can’t hoard what we all know is a
development as important as fire, the wheel, or agriculture.”

Kish considered. “It’s a scary prospect,” he said
after a long silence. “If we set it loose, the world will never be the same.
And there will be no turning back.”

“It’s an
extremely
scary prospect,” said Rachel. “But I believe this technology will end up
solving more problems than it will create. Imagine everyone on Earth having the
same universal language implanted in their minds along with their native
tongues. Just like that, every person in the world would be able to hold a
conversation with every other. Think of all the problems, technological and
otherwise, that quick and easy education could help solve. If the inventors of
farming had kept this advance to themselves, the human race would have likely gone
extinct long ago. Either that, or the few people remaining would be in small
clans, still hunting and foraging with simple tools.”

Kish nodded thoughtfully but didn’t respond.

“These are my terms,” said Rachel. “I’ll
undergo Matrix Learning. I’m confident I’ll find a way to solve your problem
and perfect the technology. In exchange, I get to direct work on finding countermeasures
for the most dangerous misuses. The moment I solve both problems, you agree to
let the technology see the light of day.” She stared intently at the Israeli
prime minister. “I need your word.”

Kish paused for almost a full minute in
thought. Finally, he nodded. “It’s a deal,” he said. “You have my word. And not
because you have us over a barrel. But because you’re right. Perfect the
technology, and I’ll see to it that this is disclosed. Better yet,
you
can see to it.”

“I’ll support this decision as well,” said
Wortzman. “You make a lot of sense, Rachel. I’ve been battling with monsters a
long time. Might be nice to do something to actively better humanity.”

Rachel sighed. She had been confident she
would eventually get agreement, but there was part of her that worried about the
old adage,
be careful what you wish for
.
This could be the biggest mistake ever made. She was rolling some very powerful
dice.

On the other hand, she believed in what she
had argued. There was no turning back. Knowledge was the key to success, to
happiness, to progress, and it would soon be available in nearly unlimited
quantities to every single person. Illiteracy and ignorance would be wiped from
the planet. And while knowledge and wisdom were not the same thing, perhaps one
could eventually lead to the other for the human race.

“Great,” she said. “Let’s do
this thing. Load me up so we can get to work finding solutions.”

Rachel Howard seemed to glow
from within as a dazzling smile erupted onto her face. “And then let’s go
change the world,” she added with absolute conviction.
 

From the Author
: Thanks
for reading
Game Changer
. I hope that
you enjoyed it. As always, I’d be grateful if you would rate the novel on its
Amazon page
here
,
as a high number of ratings really helps drive the success of a book.

Also,
feel free to visit my
website
(where
you can get on a mailing list to be notified of new releases), Friend me on
Facebook at
Douglas E. Richards Author
,
or write to me at [email protected].

Game
Changer
: What’s
real, what isn’t, and a few personal anecdotes

As
you may know, I conduct fairly extensive research for all of my novels. In
addition to trying to tell the most compelling stories I possibly can, I strive
to introduce concepts and accurate information that I hope will prove
fascinating, thought-provoking, and even controversial.

Game Changer
is a work of fiction and
contains considerable speculation. I encourage interested readers to read
further to get a more thorough and nuanced look at each topic, and weigh any
conflicting data, opinions, and interpretations. By so doing, you can decide
for yourself what is accurate and arrive at your own view of the subject
matter.

The genesis of the overarching plot
:
I’ve long been fascinated by neuroscience and human
behavior, and wanted to do a novel that could extrapolate from current
breakthroughs in these fields and examine future possibilities from every
angle. The more research I did, the more fascinated I became. But I soon
discovered that neuroscience offered an embarrassment of riches. How could I
possibly narrow it down to a single novel given all the possibilities that a true
understanding of neuroscience, and the manipulation of the human mind, could
bring about?

Plots swirled around in my head. What
if you could control addiction? The sex drive? Religion? Memory? Aggression and
rage? Depression? What if you could implant ten years of knowledge into
someone’s brain in days?

Unable to decide between these
possibilities, I finally decided to touch upon them all, with what I call
Matrix Learning as the central driver.

At some point soon thereafter,
while I was researching the science of memory, a scene materialized in my
brain. I imagined a Secret Service agent trying to assassinate the president
for the crime of torturing and killing his wife, only to learn later that he
had been manipulated. Before I had any idea of the characters, the story, the
background, or the settings, I knew one thing: the first section of the novel
would end with someone saying to this Secret Service agent: “How do I know the
president didn’t torture and kill your wife? Because you never married. You never
had a wife.”

It was a scene I couldn’t get
out of my head, and I knew I had to write it. In some ways, the entire novel
was built around these few sentences.

So with this brief explanation of
how
Game Changer
came to be, I’ll go
on to detail some of the science behind it, along with some personal anecdotes.
This field is producing so many astonishing results, and it has grown so
rapidly, that I regret I can only provide the slightest taste within these
pages.

Finally, I had to cram the
information I needed to write this novel into my head the old-fashioned way. By
reading books and studying. If only Matrix Learning were real, I could have
finished months sooner. What a wonderful advance this technology would represent.

Although, as we have seen, it would
not be without its dangers . . .
 

Matrix Learning
:
This
topic deserved to come first, but it is a bit long, so if you find yourself
losing interest in this or any other section, I encourage you to skip ahead to
whatever sections interest you the most (I tried to restrain myself and keep
each one short, but some are longer than others).

Here is a list of topics that I covered,
in their order of appearance:

How
often are we sure of memories that are wrong?

The
pace of technological advance

The
San Diego fire of 2007, cows, and suicide on the tracks

Neuroscience—what
makes us tick?

Addicted
to Dmitri Kovonov?

Plum
Island

Neurotheology—God
on the brain

Aluminum
foil and laser printers

The
BRAIN Initiative

A
sleeping giant

Fly
drones and fly catching

Israel,
the Mossad, and US Intelligence

Neuroscience
and the law

Miscellaneous

Now on to Matrix Learning. This is
a term I made up, but I have read articles referring to Matrix-
style
learning, and I wouldn’t be
surprised if this becomes a shorthand for the technology someday. While scientists
are a very long way away from achieving Matrix Learning like that depicted in
the novel (or in the movie), they are making progress on a number of fronts. This
progress includes the implantation of false memories (and knowledge would be
just another category of false memory), and the use of smart dust and other
technologies that could evolve into the nanites described in the novel.

I’ve included passages from four lay
articles that I found intriguing below. Again, while these only scratch the
surface, interested readers can readily find additional information online.

1) Scientists Give Mice False Memories (Elizabeth Landau,
CNN
, July 25, 2013).

Scientists say they have,
for the first time, generated a false memory in an animal by manipulating brain
cells that encode that information. What’s more, the researchers say, the
cellular events involved in the formation of a false memory resemble what takes
place in forming a real memory. This jibes with the fact that humans who have
false memories of events that didn’t happen firmly believe that those memories
are real.

“We should continue to
remind society that memory can be very unreliable,” said the study’s senior
author, Susumu Tonegawa, director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit
Genetics.

The lucky mice who
participated in this study underwent a brain exploration technique called
optogenetics, a means of manipulating individual brain cells with light.

. . . The researchers showed
that if you can activate particular brain cells using light, and those brain
cells contain memory information, then you have the power to make an animal
believe it experienced something that never actually happened.

“The results indicate that
the underlying brain mechanisms used in the recall of a false memory are very
similar to those governing a real memory,” Tonegawa said. “This may be why our
memories feel so real to us, even if they have been distorted. It’s not that
false memory is formed by forgetting, some kind of a simple mix-up, or what we
call imagination,” Tonegawa added. “No, it really happened in the brain, as far
as the brain is concerned.”

2) Twenty billion nanoparticles
talk to the brain using electricity (
New
Scientist
, June 8, 2015)

Nanoparticles can be used to stimulate regions of the brain electrically,
opening up new ways to treat brain diseases. It may even one day allow the
routine exchange of data between computers and the brain.

When “magnetoelectric” nanoparticles (MENs) are stimulated by an external
magnetic field, they produce an electric field. If such nanoparticles are
placed next to neurons, this electric field should allow them to communicate.

Sakhrat Khizroev of Florida International University in Miami and his team
inserted 20 billion of these nanoparticles into the brains of mice.

Khizroev’s goal is to build a system that can both image brain activity and
precisely target medical treatments at the same time. Since the nanoparticles
respond differently to different frequencies of magnetic field, they can be
tuned to release drugs.

“When they are injected in the brain, we can ‘see’ the brain,” says
Khizroev, “and if necessary, we can release a specific drug inside a specific
neuron on demand.”

3) How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain
(MIT Technology Review
, July 16, 2013)
Intelligent dust particles embedded in the brain could
form an entirely new form of brain-machine interface, say engineers.

Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of
California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the
brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles
into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The
ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.

Each particle of neural dust consists of standard CMOS
circuits and sensors that measure the electrical activity in neurons nearby.
This is coupled to a piezoelectric material that converts ultra-high-frequency
sound waves into electrical signals and vice versa.

[Note: this last one is on editing and erasing memory
—
the flip side of the coin
—
which is also featured in the novel.]

4)
Brain
Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory (Benedict Carey,
New York Times
, April 5, 2009)
 

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with
a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a
traumatic loss, even a bad habit. Researchers in Brooklyn have recently
accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug
delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory.

The discovery of such an apparently critical memory molecule, and
its many potential uses, are part of the buzz surrounding a field that, in just
the past few years, has made the seemingly impossible suddenly probable:
neuroscience, the study of the brain.

Now neuroscience, a field that barely existed a generation ago, is
racing ahead, attracting billions of dollars in new financing and throngs of
researchers. The National Institutes of Health last year spent $5.2 billion,
nearly 20 percent of its total budget, on brain-related projects. Endowments
have poured in hundreds of millions of dollars more, establishing institutes at
universities around the world.

The influx of money, talent, and technology means that scientists
are at last finding real answers about the brain—and raising questions, both
scientific and ethical, more quickly than anyone can answer them.

“This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and
raises huge ethical issues,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a neurobiologist at
Harvard.

How often are we sure of memories that are wrong?
 

My own memory is atrocious. I
have always been able to learn things very quickly, but I forget them just as
quickly. When I’m writing a novel and have an idea, I have to record it
somewhere or it will soon be gone forever. I get out of the shower and use my
phone to e-mail the idea to my computer upstairs, while I’m still dripping wet,
or I pull off the side of the road and send a message to myself. As much as I
think I’ll never forget an idea, I’ve done so too many times to take that
chance.

The section describing the memory experiment conducted at
Emory, comparing students’ recollections of the Space Shuttle
Challenger
explosion the day after it
happened and over two years later, is accurate—and truly scary. We all know
human memory isn’t great, but what is jaw-dropping to me is that not only is
our memory unreliable, it is unreliable even when we’re absolutely certain
we’ve gotten it right.

This really calls into question everything we think we
remember. When my version of past events differs markedly from my wife’s, I
used to be sure that I was right. Now I’m pretty sure that we’re both wrong.

In my view, the most entertaining description of the Emory study
and its implications can be found in an article that appeared in
The New Yorker
, and which is available
online, entitled, “You Have No Idea What Happened” (Maria Konnikova, February
4, 2015).
 

After I read the Emory memory
study, I was still skeptical. I discussed this study with my sister, Pam, and
she was skeptical also. We both agreed that for something like the
Challenger
disaster, misremembering was
a possibility, but surely not for something as profound as 9/11.

But then Pam had an idea. She
had been at a conference with two colleagues on 9/11, giving a presentation. So
why not ask them where they were on this tragic date? When they laughed at her
for asking, because, of course, they were with
her
—how could she not remember?—she could explain the findings from
the Emory study.

Sure enough, the first colleague
she asked
did
remember they were
together at the conference when it happened.

But the other colleague did not.
She remembered being at home, and learning about it there. My sister was
flabbergasted. Perhaps the Emory study wasn’t so crazy after all. When Rachel Howard
describes being at a sleepover with two friends on 9/11, and learning that they
have different recollections of even this memorable day, this was meant as a fictional
recounting of my sister’s experiment.