Apex
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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 a 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 surery. 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 100 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 drawin 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-controleld 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 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 that 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 tremdendous 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.
Acknowledgements
Apex wouldn’t be the book it is without the help of more than sixty people who provided input along the way.
As ever, my partner Molly Nixon served as first reader, sounding board, and co-brainstormer. She read most passages in this book within hours of them being written – usually that night. And we may have turned a few heads at restaurants while discussing the fine details of how one might gas a large fraction of the US Congress. C’est la vie.
Nexus, Crux, and Apex all deal heavily with neuroscience, and I’ve been delighted and honored that neuroscientists have responded warmly to the books. I’m especially grateful to Christoph Koch for the invitation to speak to his team of neuroscientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, where the discussion was quite stimulating; and to Gary Marcus for fascinating conversations on the topic and the sneak peak at part of his book, The Future of the Brain.
A large fraction of Apex takes place in China. I first visited that fascinating nation in 2000 and have returned as often as I could, but I’m hardly a native. A number of people who’ve spent years actually living there provided feedback to hone those passages. I’m especially greatful to Gerald Zhang-Shmidt, Max Gladstone, Peter Atwood, David Hart, and Ben Goertzel on this front. Any errors or insensitivities are entirely mine.
Grace Stahre and Lesley Charmichael both called out biases I wasn’t aware of in my depictions of female characters in earlier drafts of this book, and helped improve it significantly.
My agent, Lucienne Diver, has been a never-ending source of support for me, this series, and this book. I’m immensely grateful to her.
I’m also grateful to my editor Lee Harris, my copy editor Ro Smith, and my publisher Marc Gascione, as well as to Mike Underwood and Caroline Lambe on the sales and publicity team at Angry Robot, who a
re already at work getting the word out about this book.
The real heroes are the fifty seven friends and acquaintances who read drafts of this book and took the time to send their feedback or meet to discuss it. Writing might be a solitary art for some. It’s not for me, thanks to my beta readers. And this book is a better work for your efforts.
So thank you: Ajay Nair, Alexis Carlson, Allegra Searle-LeBel, Anna Black, Annie Tabler, Banning Garrett, Ben Goertzel, Betsy Aoki, Beverly Sobelman, Brad Templeton, Brad Woodcock, Brady Forrest, Brian Retford, Carrie Sellars, Daniel Garcia, Dave Brennan, David Hart, David Jones, David Perlman, David Sunderland, Doug Mortenson, Ethan Phelps-Goodman, Gerald Zhang-Schmidt, Glenn Bristol, Grace Stahre, Hannu Rajaniemi, Ivan Medvedev, Jaime Waliczek, Jayar La Fontaine, Jen Younggren, Jennifer Mead, Jim Jordan, Joe Pemberton, Julian Klappenbach, Julie Vithoulkas, Kevin MacDonald, Kira Franz, Lars Liden, Leah Papernick, Lesley Carmichael, Mark Lacas, Max Gladstone, Michael Chorost, Miller Sherling, Molly Nixon, Morgan Weaver, Nat Ward, Patrick Davin, Paul Dale, Peter Atwood, Rachel Kwan, Rob Jellinghaus, Satish Bhatti, Scotto Moore, Stuart Updegrave, Ted Lockwood, and Val Giddings.
Finally, I owe absolutely everything in the world to my amazing parents. They birthed me, raised me, brought me to the US, and have served as outstanding role models my entire life. Thank you, Mom and Dad! You’re the best.
About the Author
Ramez Naam was born in Cairo, Egypt, and came to the US at the age of 3. He’s a computer scientist and an H.G. Wells, Prometheus, and Endeavor Award-winning writer of science and science fiction. He spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams working on email, web browsing, search, and artificial intelligence.
When not writing, Ramez has climbed mountains, leapt over and occasionally descended into crevasses, worked as a lifeguard, backpacked through remote corners of China, ridden his bike down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast, chased sharks and eagle rays through the ocean depths, clambered over ancient ruins, and blown things up in the desert.
He really should know better.
Ramez lives in Seattle.
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