CRO-MAGNON (2 page)

“
I’m not going,” Calder said.

Her beak cleaved the air. “What?”

“
Not to Cambridge, anyway, not this weekend. Tell Rolf Mathiessen that if he wants to talk to me he can fly up to Burlington from Boston over the weekend.

Lamb looked nonplussed. “You can’t—”

“
I’ll be at the Green Mountain Inn with the other candidates. Otherwise, I’m available the next weekend.”

Before the department head could frame a further objection, Calder strode from the room.

#

As soon as Caitlin Blaine opened the door to the High Performance Computing Center, she knew something was amiss. In order to accommodate some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, the temperature and humidity were controlled more precisely than anywhere else in the Maui Industrial Park, and the dry air sucked at the seawater that permeated her bikini, raising goose bumps on her exposed flesh.

But that wasn’t what bothered her. It was the worried look on the receptionist’s face. Early this morning, instead of surfing on the windward side of the island as was her habit, Blaine had loaded her scuba gear aboard her beat-up van, hooked up the boat-cum-trailer she kept in the parched yard of her bungalow in Kihei, and gone diving in the marine life park at Molokini crater a few miles south. As a consequence, she was a few minutes later than usual. What might have happened this early in the day?

“
He’s here,” the receptionist said in a hushed tone.

“
Who?”

“
The boss.”

“
I don’t have a boss here,” Blaine said. She padded across the lobby, eager to shower and change into her lab clothes. “My boss is Laszlo Salomon, and he’s thousands of miles away.”

“
No, he’s not.”

Blaine halted. The owner of Salomon Industries was known for making unannounced visits, but she’d never experienced one.

“
Mr. Salomon is here?”

“
He’s waiting for you.”

Cold fingers clutched at Blaine’s chest. Laszlo Salomon was also known for precipitous actions, and her project was running over budget. Way over.

“
Tell him I’ll be right with him, as soon as I shower and—“

“
He said now. He’s waiting in the lab with Dr. Volker and Mr. Golub.”

The thought of the head of Salomon Industries grilling her two assistants petrified Blaine. Henrik and Peter, while tops in their fields, were hardly paragons of diplomacy, and Salomon had been known to axe major projects on the spot. While she hurried toward the lab, she summarized what she knew of the industrialist.

Laszlo Salomon had grown up in modest surroundings in Buda-Pest, the son of high-school teachers. After his parents were arrested during the 1956 uprising, he had lived on the street. When they failed to reappear, he emigrated to Boston to live with a security-guard uncle in the South End. He attended Northeastern University on work-study and earned a degree in mechanical engineering.

While working as a model builder for Arthur D. Little, he invented, on his own time, a universal joint still used in prostheses. He invested his proceeds in a robotics firm, bought out his two partners after a string of murky but profitable deals, and never looked back.

He was now the super-wealthy owner of Salomon Industries, a conglomeration of diversified technical firms. He was revered for his charity, respected for his life-enhancing products, and feared for his ruthless business methods.

Blaine opened the door. Volker and Golub were standing amid a clutter of equipment. Between the two scientists stood a dapper man looking ten years younger than the sixty-something he had to be.

Laszlo Salomon was not a large man, but he radiated power. A black widow’s peak and matching angled eyes lent him a demonic air, which his tight smile did nothing to dispel. Two-tone leather shoes and ironed charcoal slacks implied a degree of vanity.

Blaine had worked for Salomon Industries for three years, all of it on Maui. She had met the reclusive founder only briefly, on the day she was hired. She had heard the man called a natty dresser and a hardnosed businessman. She could now confirm the first part, but it was the second one that worried her.

What could be so important that he would fly to Hawaii? Or was he on Maui for some other reason? Maybe he intended to contract some additional work on the supercomputer.

Even casually dressed, Laszlo Salomon did not look like a courtesy caller.

Was she about to be fired? Her project, the centerpiece of her life, cancelled? Would he even bother to do that in person?

She stuck out her hand, wishing she were dressed in responsible-looking lab clothes instead of a skimpy bikini.

“
How are you, Mr. Salomon. I’m Caitlin Blaine.”

“
I remember you.” His slim fingers felt strong as he took her hand, and his direct stare and faint accent imparted a disquieting air.

Or perhaps it was her own anxiety, she thought.

Try to put him at ease.
She gestured at a folding chair.

“
Would you care to sit?”

“
No.” He continued to stare.

“
Mr. Salomon, I know we’re over budget, but—”

A peaked eyebrow lifted. “Do you realize, Dr. Blaine, that the rental costs for the Jaws supercomputer system, together with the magnetic resonance imaging costs at Massachusetts General, have exceeded the budget of every other Salomon Industries research project?”

Blaine’s mouth went dry. “Yes, sir. But please understand that we are on the verge of a major breakthrough.” She tried to puff herself up and lower her pitch. “One that could transform the human condition.”

“
Human condition,” he repeated. “I’m concerned with the company, Dr. Blaine. I don’t want to see you drive us into Chapter 11.” He glanced at the arcane equipment strewed around the room. “Perhaps it’s my own fault, but your project is so cloaked in secrecy that even I don’t have a good grip. Perhaps you could update me in layman’s terms.”

All right! At least he was giving her a chance. But the
layman
word worried her. Also, she’d heard that Salomon had killed a promising line of cancer research without considering the underlying specifics, because costs had gotten out of hand. She couldn’t let that happen here.

She glanced at her team’s two senior members, Peter Golub and Henrik Volker, and drew a deep breath.

“
The development of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging in the nineteen seventies allowed scientists to scan the structure of the brain, slice by slice, and reassemble it in a computer. In 1991, Richard Ernst won a Nobel for his work in pulsed-Fourier-Transform MRI. And in 1993 this technique led to so-called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which enables mapping of brain function.”

“
I’m aware of that,” Salomon said. “Ernst used to consult for me.”

She hurried on. “Advances in fMRI, plus faster supercomputers, have brought us to the point where we can scan a brain and map its billions of synapses. And this opened the possibility of storing, on optical disks, the sensory impressions that constitute memory. We—”

“
Hold on,” Salomon said. “I’m not a neurophysiologist, but even I know that we don’t yet understand where and how memories are stored.”

Blaine motioned to her fortyish colleague, who did happen to be a neurophysiologist. One of the world’s best, as his high salary attested.

“
Henrik.”

“
We are not required to understand the details of the process,” Volker said in his German accent, a humorless grin uniting with his baggy face, thick glasses, and club foot to create a Dr. Strangelove aura. “Any more than a five-star chef has to know how taste buds work.”

He shifted his weight, but Blaine knew that he was not uncomfortable. Despite his thick-soled left shoe, he liked to think on his feet. Blaine had seen him stand at his desk for hours.

“
A mammalian brain contains between one billion and one hundred billion neurons, depending on the species,” Volker said.

He glanced around, and Blaine knew he was looking for a way to draw one of his beloved diagrams. She was glad the whiteboard was in the other room. The last thing she wanted was to enmesh the big boss in esoteric technical explanations.

“
The job of these nerve cells,” the neurophysiologist continued, “is to process bits of information and convey them to other neurons. They do this by means of synapses—gaps of varying transmissiveness that lead to large numbers of other neurons.”

Volker pursed his thin lips, obviously warming to his task. “The number of possible connections is, of course, astronomical, but still finite. Which is why we need the most powerful magnetic resonance imager, the fastest computer, and a large amount of storage.”

He glanced around and seemed to resign himself to the missing whiteboard.

“
You are correct, Mr. Salomon, that we do not know exactly how a specific memory is stored. But we do know the process is similar to a hologram, in which information is distributed via electromagnetic interference patterns across a surface. Uncovering part of an image makes the remainder accessible.”

Volker paused to peer at the industrialist through his Coke-bottle lenses.

“
Image,” Salomon repeated. “But the brain is not a photograph.”

“
Hologram,” Volker said. “Memory is analogous to one, in that the initial experience leaves a pattern of strengthened connections that stores the thought on a network of neurons.”

Volker stumped to the table behind Blaine and Golub, where an oversized replica of a brain rested in a wire frame.

Uh-oh, Blaine thought. He was about to plunge into a mind-bending technical treatise.

She spoke up. “The bottom line is that we can map these altered synapses by means of fMRI. Which allows us to recover the electromagnetic interference fields that constitute thought.”

“
But you can’t know what they signify.” Salomon black eyes bored into hers. “This is my money you’re playing with.”

“
As Dr. Volker pointed out, we don’t have to know exactly what the mapped signals mean in the aggregate, just as long as they do.”

Salomon’s eyebrow lifted again. “How is this ‘mapping’ accomplished?”

She glanced at Golub. “In layman’s terms, Henrik.”

Peter Golub was a pudgy man in his late twenties, with the couch-potato build of a computer geek. Like a superannuated teen-ager, his doughy face was marred by junk-food zits. He swallowed something he’d been chewing.

Blaine saw Salomon frown.

“
I’m sure you know that Peter is one of the world’s top computer programmers,” she said. You may remember him as the teenager who hacked the Army Security Agency’s computers a decade ago and won a vacation at a federal country club.”

“
It’s not all that complicated,” Golub said in his reedy voice. “The MRI machine bombards successive slices of the brain with radio waves, causing the individual atoms to emit signals. We map these signals, transform the billions of neural networks to digital form, and store them.”

He beamed at Salomon, as if he’d just explained string theory in one sentence.

“
But you don’t know how the whole thing works,” Salomon said. “I don’t see—”

“
We trust the neural network to do its job.”

“
I still don’t understand how you acquire and process the signals,” Salomon said.

Golub glanced at Blaine, who nodded. He reached into his shirt pocket, mouthed a Corn Nut, and squirreled it, his pudgy face becoming animated.

“
After the fMRI gives us a signal based on altered spins of hydrogen atoms, we do a fast-Fourier transform to break the spectra into digital form. Then we store each of the billions of digital strings at distributed locations specified by the Helvig-Samuelson memory model.”

He rolled the Corn Nut while peering at his audience of three. “Similar to a photographic hologram, but multiplied by a few orders of magnitude. Hence the high cost for the supercomputer and the need for terabytes of storage.”

He paused again. Blaine thought Salomon looked bemused.

Golub chewed the nut. “More?”

Salomon turned to Blaine.

“
This will be important to mankind, you said.”

“
Absolutely! We—”

“
Where do you stand in the overall project?”

“
We’re scanning mouse brains,” Volker said.

“
Mouse brains.” Salomon gazed out a small window at the bulk of Haleakala, seemingly lost in thought.

Blaine, eager to get past this sticking point, said, “A mouse is like a human with a smaller cortex. Genetically—”

Salomon returned from wherever he’d been. “And what do you do with the mice?”

“
We scan the brain and store the result. Then we clone a new mouse—that’s my department— from the original subject and pour the memory back in.”

“‘
Pour’ it.’ How do you accomplish that?”

Golub said, “We upload the signals one at a time through the optic nerve into the hippocampus.” He reached into his shirt pocket, popped another Corn Nut, squirreled it. “Of course, it takes time. Considering how many—”