Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR: THREEPS

Summer Zapata, Author, “The Silent Revolution: Technology in the Wake of Haden’s Syndrome”:

The development and rapid production and installation of the neural networks was obviously the first big event in the technological history of Haden’s. We spent what some not incorrectly felt was an appalling amount of money, and arguably abandoned medical morality, to develop the networks, but at the end of the day it got done, the proof of concept was there and suddenly two dozen companies, some established, some start-ups, were in the neural network business.

But the neural networks were only a partial solution. The networks gave Haden’s sufferers their ability to communicate again with the outside world, but their bodies still didn’t work. They still couldn’t move. They were still trapped. And in many way they were still terribly isolated.

The federal government threw billions into medical research trying to get brains to talk to the voluntary nervous system, or to grow new nerve connections, but none of that was progressing at a rate that anyone was considering satisfactory. This opened the door to a left-field solution that absolutely no one saw coming.

Rebecca Warner, Chairwoman, Sebring-Warner, Inc.:

Charlie Sebring and I knew each other growing up, but not all that well, since he was a class behind me in school and we ran in different circles. I was the stereotypical student government type and he was a classic nerd. When I graduated I went to Brown and he went to Rensselaer and I didn’t see him again until the summer before my senior year, when he and I both interned at GreenWave, which my father owned. I got an internship in management, while Charlie was down in engineering. Until I caught him making things in the printers, I pretty much didn’t have any contact with him.

My internship was mostly just for show because I was the owner’s daughter and we all know how that goes. On one hand I was irritated with this because by this time I knew I wanted to run a company, and I didn’t like people thinking I wasn’t a serious person. On the other hand I really wasn’t a serious person at the time, and I spent most of my time planning my summer evenings. So I couldn’t complain that they give me a bunch of chumpy tasks that a monkey could do.

One of the chores I had to do was to prepare a weekly efficiency report for the GreenWave’s printers. GreenWave handled a lot of bespoke production jobs for design studios and small manufacturers—everyone has their own printers but they weren’t designed for large-object jobs or jobs that required more than a couple of dozen copies made. GreenWave manufactured industrial-scale printers and also kept a manufacturing wing open to handle work from other companies. Our printers were good but they were finicky and prone to breaking down, so we tracked their efficiency, and every week I compiled a report for the CTO. It was dead simple, especially since each of the printers imported their data into a spreadsheet automatically.

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