Ramez Naam - Apex

…MISSED YOU…

…told them you’re my BIG BROTHER…

“You saved my son,” someone said aloud. “Thank you.”

And it was all Rangan could do to hold on, hold on to the people who embraced him, in body and mind, and laugh and cry, and be grateful he was here.

The woman who called herself Samantha Cataranes climbed out of the cab and walked towards the house on Soi Rama 3, in the suburbs of Bangkok.

February now. February of 2041. A year since she’d stepped out of another taxi, an ocean away, and walked towards a different house.

A year, almost to the day.

Her knee twinged as she took the steps up from the level of the street and towards the higher level of the house. A reminder of wounds she’d suffered.

Her heart ached. A reminder of other wounds. Of people she’d loved. People she’d lost in the year behind her.

A group of monks walked down the path from the monastery next door, their faces serene. They smiled softly at Sam and brought their hands together in the wai . She smiled softly back, bowed her head, and made the wai of respect in turn.

The monks passed.

Sam looked up, ran her eyes over the home, the beauty of it, here in the lush green on the outskirts of the city; the vibrant red and gold of the roof tiles; the ceremonial Buddhas and demons guarding it; the proximity to the Buddhist monastery to which it was associated; the smells of lemongrass and jasmine, of food being cooked; the sounds of voices and laughter.

The sense of minds she knew. Minds she hadn’t felt in so long.

Her heart lifted. The sense of loss fell from her.

Here there was life. Here there was the future.

Sam breathed, smiled, and stepped forward.

The door opened, spilling light and sound and laughter onto the path.

Sarai ran out, and other children with her, and Sam picked them up, one at a time, whirling them around, laughing, singing – each of them looming huge in her mind, in her heart, filling her up with the joy she’d craved. And behind them, standing in the doorway of the house, Ananda was laughing, a deep booming laugh, that spoke of serenity, of a perfect, complete delight with the universe as it was.

She whirled the children around, every one, Kit and Sarai and Mali and Aroon and Ying and Tada and Sunisa and Kwan and Arinya and all the rest, her smile so bright and fierce her face ached, her heart singing so loudly she was sure they could all hear it.

And they could, they could, just as she could hear the singing inside of them.

Then they went into the house, and there was laughter. So much laughter.

And joy, so much joy.

At long last, Samantha Cataranes was home.

The Science of Apex

Like Nexus and Crux before it, Apex is a work of fiction, but based as accurately as possible on real science.

In the afterwords to Nexus and Crux I described how scientists have directly interfaced to human and animal brains to accomplish such feats as: giving paralyzed men and women the ability to move robot limbs by thought; restoring vision to a blind man by inputing electrical signals into the visual cortex of his brain; using an fMRI brain scanner to “read” what a person is seeing and reconstruct it as a video; restoring damaged rat memories by a chip implanted in the hippocampus; being able to record and replay those memories any time later in the rat; boosting the pattern matching abilities of rhesus monkeys via an implant in the frontal cortex.

In the less than two years since Crux was released, science has continued to advance. In 2013, a pair of researchers at the University of Washington demonstrated that one human being could control part of another human being’s body via a non-invasive brain-computer interface. The two researchers, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, played a video game together, in a very peculiar way. Rajesh Rao, in one building on campus, could see the video game display, but had no controls. Andrea Stocco, in another building across the campus, had the controller (a fire button), but couldn’t see the display. When Professor Rao wanted to shoot, he would think about shooting, and an EEG cap on his skull would pick up his intent and transmit it across campus. There, a magnetic stimulator on Andrea Stocco’s head would send a pulse through part of Professor Stocco’s motor cortex, causing his finger to twitch and hit the fire button.

It’s quite a long way from Nexus, but the same general principle applies.

How far are we from Nexus, really? I’m asked this question frequently. The prime obstacle is the hardware. To build something like Nexus one needs a way to interface with millions of neurons at once, and ideally to do so without requiring brain surgery. And I don’t actually expect that we’ll see something like the Nexus nanites by 2040.

That said, various teams are starting to look at ways to move beyond current hardware.

At UC Berkeley, Professor Michel Maharbiz and colleagues are working on a project they call “Neural Dust”. Their neural dust would be particles that are less than one hundred microns across. Thousands or tens of thousands or more could be sprinkled across the brain, and would then communicate wirelessly via ultrasonic sound waves. Those same ultrasonic vibrations would also provide power to the individual neural dust nodes. Reading their proposal and looking at the diagrams almost feels like reading an artifact from one of my books. Almost. Neural dust still isn’t small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, so it would still involve an incision in the skull. And it’s still on the drawing board, not something that has been built. Still, it’s fascinating to see science moving in these directions. (Maharbiz developed the world’s first remote-controlled beetle, by the way – a flying insect whose nervous system could be controlled via electrical stimulations sent wirelessly.)

DARPA, the Defense Applied Research Programs Agency, is also highly interested in this area. In recent talks and calls for grant applications, they’ve painted a vision of neural interfaces small enough that they could be injected via a syringe rather than via brain surgery; of combining multiple technologies to achieve high-fidelity communication with individual neurons; and most recently of their “cortical modem” vision: an implant the size of two nickels, with a cost of just a few dollars, that would allow the beaming of high-quality video directly into a human brain.

All of that said, I’ll be surprised if, by 2040, we have brain computer interfaces anywhere near the sophistication of Nexus. Research inside the body and brain moves slowly. The first rule of medicine is, quite appropriately, “do no harm”. And that means that experimentation is necessarily conservative. I expect tremendous progress by 2040 – restoration of senses, of mobility, of function destroyed by stroke and brain damage; perhaps even significant augmentation. But I’ll be surprised (alas) if it’s as easy as drinking a vial of silvery liquid.

I’ll be similarly surprised if uploading a human mind is possible, or even close, by 2040. I elaborated on those reasons in the afterword to Crux .

In both areas, though: progress is happening at an incredible pace. As well it should. We all live inside our brains, after all. Our minds are the seat of joy and sorrow, of peace and war, of innovation and stagnation. Unlocking the mysteries of the mind is one of the most exciting and most important endeavors I can imagine. I’m delighted to be a bystander. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Acknowledgments

Apex wouldn’t be the book it is without the help of more than sixty people who provided input along the way.