The Silent History: A Novel by Eli Horowitz & Matthew Derby & Kevin Moffett

Author:Eli Horowitz & Matthew Derby & Kevin Moffett [Horowitz, Eli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710941
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

AUGUST BURNHAM

RAHWAY, NJ

2034

I met Russell and Abigail Andersen in the waiting room on the morning they arrived to pick Calvin up. They usually only met with me in my office at an appointed time to go over Calvin’s charts. It must have been strange for them to see me in the wild, so to speak, but I had something to show them. I shook hands with Russell and gave Abigail a hug and ushered them down the corridor, past the tunnel scanner and the vapor deposition station to the evaluation room where I’d spent the better part of the past six months working with their son. Calvin was sitting at a table at one end of the room, wearing the prototype—a white skullcap with multicolored leads dangling from the contact points along the scalp, which can be shocking, seeing your son wearing this menacing-looking bit of cranial tech. I assured them that it was harmless and asked them to sit down across from Calvin. They looked nervous. I told them there was absolutely nothing to be concerned about. I said the surprise I had for them was a good surprise.

The biggest challenge I’d faced in creating the implant wasn’t activating the areas of the brain where speech is physically produced and parsed. It wasn’t the construction of the implant, most of which I had outsourced overseas. It was the words themselves, those building blocks of language that my patients lacked entirely—the words were the primary obstacle. This is a gross simplification, but I had to essentially seed their brains with a foundational catalog of words and word categories, the basic set of tools that any three-year-old possesses, but which my patients couldn’t access. I tried various methods of inserting this grammatical DNA into their heads, with little success until Paul Warner came out with his modular memory actuator, which allowed me to flood a patient’s language processing center—again, I’m speaking broadly here—with every word that the patient had stored in long-term memory. The fact was, all of those words and phrases, all of the necessary grammatical architecture, they were already inside the patients. They just had no way of interpreting the sounds they heard coming from other people’s mouths as a formalized language. What’s more, these sounds were already linked to a complex array of emotional and neurological states, everything my patients had experienced but had been unable to verbalize. The memory actuator made all of this raw data available, and through a persistent networked exchange with the central data center, the patient could spontaneously create a nearly infinite range of expressions using only the words they stored as pure sound in their memory, correlated with their naturally occurring neural-emotional patterns.

The Soul Amp was still in its infancy at that point. I was waiting for the self-assembling docking pins, which were stuck on a cargo ship in the South China Sea for weeks until the trade embargo with Vietnam got cleared up, so I had to use the skullcap and an external power device and work in a whole slew of hacks just to be able to run the demo.

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