The God Wave by Patrick Hemstreet Read Free Book Online

watch?”
    He followed Mini as far as the door to the lab where Eugene was slaving over a computer model for the CAD/CAM interface. She went directly to his workstation and stood silently for a moment, then moved just enough to make the fabric of her long skirt rustle.
    Eugene glanced up at her, his eyes focusing on something outside his head faster than Chuck had ever seen.
    â€œMini. Hi. I didn’t know you were here.”
    â€œI’m just here to say good-bye, Euge. Doc Brenton just told me he won’t be needing me anymore for the program, so . . .” She shrugged artlessly. “I guess I won’t see you.”
    Euge’s eyes were locked on hers with a stunned expression. He’d known, of course, that her part of the program was going to be terminated but, in true Eugene Pozniaki fashion, had apparently not considered the ramifications of that.
    He glanced from Mini to the clock on the wall above his lightboard. Almost one. “Look, I’m at a stopping point here. Can you . . . that is, can we go get some lunch?”
    She nodded, smiling. With her hands laced together in front of her, her head tilted to one side, and her short hair haloing a heart-shaped face, she managed to look pleasantly surprised by the whole exchange she had just orchestrated. Chuck almost felt sorry for Eugene. Almost.
    Grinning, he turned and went back to his office. Minerva Mause might be small, but she was clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Chapter 5
LAB RATS
    Matt loved to win. He had definitely won the battle to steer the neurokinetics program toward the commercially viable side. He could only shake his head at Chuck’s wish list of disciplines for initial experimentation. Leave it to the academic to come up with impractical, feel-good choices. Of course looking at medical and mobility applications would make sense at some point, but medicine was a low-margin operation given that only well-funded teaching hospitals such as Johns Hopkins had the wherewithal to make substantial financial commitments. People covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act were underwritten by public funds that were at the mercy of the ballot box, which shivered every time the political winds changed. Besides which, the Food and Drug Administration was notorious in delaying approval, and delays were the last thing they needed.
    Matt had his eyes on a cadre of investors that would be able to provide almost limitless funding and would enable Forward Kinetics to produce commercially viable applications for Chuckand Dice’s co-invention, the Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface, or BKKI.
    The Brenton component was a highly modified Brewster Brain Pattern Monitor—so modified, in fact, that Matt was already pursuing a patent on the unit. The CPU ran a program based on his conversion algorithm. Dice’s input, in addition to continual work on the miniaturization of the monitor, was a lightweight transceiver system that linked the monitor to the mechanism it was intended to drive.
    It was all coming together.
    And now, after months of preparation, they were ready to begin working with their first round of subjects.
    They were in the lab, getting ready for some field testing with the devices Dice and his select team of self-described minions had modified to take input from the BKKI, or Becky, as they insisted on calling it. In addition to Sara Crowell and Tim Desmond, there was a raw recruit named Mikhail Yenotov.
    They were a study in diversity, Matt reflected as he watched them through the high window of the gallery, which gave their main lab the appearance of a huge operating theater. Sara was a tall, cool brunette in her thirties. No nonsense. Remote. Watchful, with high-intensity gray eyes. Matt understood that she used her privacy like a shield. Understand? Hell, I practically invented that . Like him, something in her past had hurt her, had gotten in somehow. Probably a relationship. Possibly a woman—Matt