“Got it,” she said, rolling her chair aside to let me have a look.
There was so much data on the screen—meteorologists apparently care about all sorts of measurements regular folk don’t—that it took me a moment to find my way around. But at last I spotted it: Falling snow. “That can’t be right,” I said, pointing. “Are you sure you’ve got the correct date?”
She indicated where it was listed; the time was correct, too. “Can you show me the hour before, and the hour after, please?”
She nodded and did so. For 1:00 A.M., the readout was also “Falling snow.” For 3:00 A.M., it had changed to “Heavy snowfall.”
“But the sky was crystal clear,” I said. “I remember that.”
“I’ve seen a lot of wondrous weather in my day,” Sally said gently. “Tornadoes, sun dogs, hail the size of grapefruit. But I’ve never seen snow come down from a cloudless sky. Are you sure you’ve got the right day?”
“Yes.”
“And the right year? It took me to February to stop writing 2019 on things.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure about the date.” I recalled the stars so vividly that night, Orion low in the southwest. I knew my way around the night sky like the proverbial back of my hand; Orion is absolutely visible in Calgary at that time of night in the winter months. Or, at least he is when the sky is clear. I took hold of the edge of Sally’s desk for support.
9
Menno Warkentin was friends with Dominic Adler, a transplanted Torontonian who held the university’s Bev Geddes Chair in Audiology. They played racquetball together once a week; there was no doubt Dominic was the better player. “Balance, my boy!” he’d exclaim whenever he got in a return that astonished Menno. “And balance is all in the inner ear!”
Menno had recently bought a carbon-fiber racquet in the vain hope that better equipment would make up for his lack of coordination. He served, and wiry Dominic swatted the ball back. Predictably, Menno missed. As he went to retrieve the ball, he said, “I walked by your lab earlier. Saw a guy delivering a skid full of new computing equipment.” He tossed the ball vaguely in Dominic’s direction.
Dominic served, and Menno managed to return it three times before he missed. When Menno went to get the ball again, Dominic said, “Yeah, we got a major new research grant.”
“From who?”
Dominic put down his racquet and motioned Menno over. “The DoD.”
Menno might not win at sports, but he was a demon at trivia. “We call it the DND here in Canada. Department of National Defense.”
“Yeah, we do,” said Dominic. “But I’m not talking about the Canadian one. I’m talking about the American one: the Pentagon.”
“Ka-ching,” said Menno.
Dominic smiled. “Wasn’t he treasurer during the Ming Dynasty?”
“Ha.”
“What do the Americans want?”
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said Dominic. “But they’ll never get that, so apparently they’ll settle for a battlefield headset that lets soldiers hear over top of explosions and mortar fire. My department is going to try to develop one for them.”
“Can’t you do what those newfangled noise-canceling headphones do?”
“Sure, yeah,” said Dominic. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is the microphone. The last thing you want is the soldier shouting to be heard above the explosions. Hostiles might overhear.”
“‘Hostiles,’” said Menno, amused.
“You pick up the lingo.” Dominic tossed the ball into the air and swatted it toward the wall, which was covered with skid marks from previous impacts.
“So how’s the project going?” asked Menno after he’d batted the ball back.
Dominic didn’t even try to return; he just let the ball zip past him. “It’s not. It’s damn near impossible to pick up a whisper when there are bombs going off all around you.”
Menno glanced up at the analog wall clock, behind a protective mesh. Their time was almost up. “Oh, that’s the wrong way to go about it.”
Dominic retrieved the ball and started toward the door in the side wall. “What do you mean?”
“Trying to pick up the sound is the problem. Don’t do that.”
“We have to hear what they’re saying.”
“No, you don’t,” said Menno. “Instead, pick up the phonemes as they’re being coded mentally. Grab those with a targeted scanner. The speaker doesn’t have to say anything aloud that way—nothing to overhear. He just mouths the words. Whether he actually speaks them or not makes no difference to the brain’s staging area; they have to be queued up regardless. Grab them from there, then use a voice synthesizer at the receiving end to reconstruct what would have been said out loud.”
Dom’s eyebrows climbed toward his widow’s peak. “And that would work?”
Menno smiled. “Oh, who knows? Actually, it’s only supposition that there even is such a staging area. But if I tell you a phone number and you try to remember it until you can jot it down, you’ll rehearse it over and over in your head, right? There’s a buffer somewhere that holds the data you’re repeating. Scan that buffer and pick up sounds that aren’t being said out loud.” Menno smiled. “At least you’ll get a good paper out of it.”
“Except I can’t publish. All the work is under an NDA.”
“Huh. How big is your grant?” asked Menno
“Two hundred and fifty thousand—US. Wanna collaborate?”
Menno was more used to grants from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which tended to be in the low five figures, if not four. But the Department of Defense! Menno was a Mennonite, a pacifist. The idea of working for the military was detestable, and if other members of his church found out, well, there would be devastating consequences. But this wasn’t going to be published, and, heck, it wasn’t weapons research; really, it wasn’t. It was just an intriguing physiological investigation—with a giant research budget.
“Okay,” said Menno, at last. “I’m in.”
“I don’t get it,” said Dominic, months later. “It worked fine on our first two test subjects. Why isn’t it working with this guy?”
Fine was overstating the case, Menno thought. They could indeed now pick up unspoken phonemes from the brain, but they were still having a lot of difficulty distinguishing many of them. Trying to tell a tuh from a duh was proving impossible, although Menno suspected they could write software to figure out which it should be based on the preceding and following phonemes. But telling one phoneme from another was predicated on first actually detecting the phonemes—and that had turned into a nightmare with this student volunteer from Menno’s second-year developmental-psych class.
Dominic and Menno were on the opposite side of a glass wall from the subject, a doughy-looking Ukrainian kid named Jim Marchuk. Menno pressed the intercom button. “Jim, try again. What was that phrase you were thinking? Say it out loud for us.”
“‘Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.’”
“Right, okay. Now, again—but subvocalize, okay? Over and over.”
The headset, Menno knew, was large and uncomfortable, and much too unwieldy for battle. It consisted of a modified football helmet with a dozen electronics packs, each the size of a deck of cards, attached to it, and a thick bundle of cabling heading off to more equipment on a table beside the chair Jim was sitting on. But if they could get it working at all with this prototype, slimming the device down would be a task for the DoD engineers.