Wired - Douglas E. Richards [130]
“Good. Because after we’ve showered and gotten some sleep, I’ll be ready for that third date. We can go out to dinner. I’m buying.”
“Really,” said Desh, amused. “That sounds like too good of a deal to pass up.”
“Well, you did bring Matt Griffin to the team. And he did just deposit half a billion dollars in my account. So I suppose I owe you a nice dinner.”
“A half billion dollars only gets me dinner?”
Kira flashed an incandescent smile. “That remains to be seen,” she said, her eyes dancing.
Desh grinned. There was a long silence as he gazed deeply into her eyes. As he did so, he couldn’t help but feel they were truly in love. But he knew this could well be an illusion. It could prove to be nothing more than a passing infatuation, catalyzed by their being thrown together in desperate circumstances and forced to fight for their lives side by side.
If only emotions were as simple as pure reason, he thought. But they weren’t. They were primal, and often incomprehensible.
But that’s what made emotion the most critical part of being human, Desh realized. If life could be reduced to the purely rational, to a solvable equation, there would be no mystery, no excitement. Life would become utterly predictable; a tedious movie that could never surprise. The truth was that neither he nor Kira, normal or enhanced, could know for sure if their feelings for each other would diminish or grow as time marched on.
Desh knew that Connelly and Metzger were waiting for them. “We’d better go,” he said softly, pulling his eyes away from Kira’s and nodding toward the oversized front door of the mansion. “Our chariot—and our future—await,” he added.
“Gallantly said,” noted Kira with a smile. She raised her eyebrows. “Any guesses as to what that future might hold?”
Desh shook his head. “Not a one,” he replied. “But I can tell you this,” he added happily. “I suddenly can’t wait to find out.”
EPILOGUE
“The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.”
—James D. Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word of it.”
—Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winning physicist.
David Desh studied his wife through the thick Plexiglas barrier as anxiety ate at his stomach. Jim Connelly, Matt Griffin, and Ross Metzger stood quietly beside him, each lost in their own thoughts.
The core team had debated taking this step for the better part of a year and had finally reached a decision. They had to know. Even if it cost them everything. They had to know what might await human consciousness at the next level of optimization, a level Kira had experienced for all of two seconds: long enough to understand that she had achieved intelligence as far beyond her first level of optimization as that level was beyond normalcy.
If anything was universally accepted as the hallmark of humanity, it was the insatiable curiosity at the heart of the species. But would this insatiable curiosity cost them everything?
It was impossible to predict.
Kira had extended the effect of this second level of enhancement from two seconds to five minutes in duration. For five minutes she would exist in a realm that approached the theoretical limit of thought that could be achieved by one hundred billion neurons; a level staggering in its power. If the sociopathic tendencies scaled up as well, and they failed to contain her, the consequences would be unpredictable and potentially disastrous—even given the limited duration of the effect.
So they had taken precautions. A steel chair had been bolted to the floor, and Kira was immobilized in it more securely than any human had ever been immobilized in history. She sat in the middle of a thick plexiglass cube that looked like a transparent racquetball court, with enough sleeping gas to tranquilize a herd of elephants poised above her head, ready to