chapter 14
TEAM 2, YEAR: 2016
Time Remaining: 185 Days
Owen drove to the address on the business card Riley had given him and found himself looking up at one of the most highly secure research facilities in the country. He knew organizations around the world clamoured for space in this building as if it was the last seat on the bus to heaven. Its state-of-the-art facilities and “don’t ask, don’t tell” security policies drew top-dollar from companies desperate to ensure their trade secrets stayed secret.
After a thorough interrogation at security, Owen was handed a visitor card and admitted into the building. Riley greeted Owen like an old friend, not at all surprised to see him, as if his decision to come had been a foregone conclusion.
“Welcome to our lab.” She opened her arms to the sprawling space before her. Equipment and packing crates lay in piles on the floor and counters. “We’re still unpacking. This place is huge and overkill, but it’s the privacy and security we needed.”
It became evident to Owen why organizations paid a premium for space in this facility. He stood before one of the most spacious and luxurious laboratories he had ever seen. He knew his own lab spread over 1,200 square feet and he estimated this to be easily four to five times larger, perhaps more. Every aspect of the rented space was elegant—a word he never had associated with a utilitarian work environment.
Owen stood in the centre of the open-concept space. Cinnamon-coloured lower cabinets with black, fire-retardant surfaces lined the length of the far wall. Above which, tall windows extended fully to the extra high ceiling. The late afternoon sun poured into the room and reflected blindingly off the polished stone floors. Owen was drawn in by the view of the city and walked past several rows of workstations to the back of the room to take it in. He saw heavy-duty resin packing boxes and crates littered throughout the lab like opened Christmas presents scattered around on Christmas morning, their contents in various stages of organization and assembly.
Opposite the lab space was a fully stocked kitchen befitting a million dollar home. Lights recessed into the bottom of the cabinets lit up flecks of stone in the black, quartz countertop and the polished surface glittered like scattered diamonds. Between a break in the upper cabinets hung a sixty-inch flat-screen TV. Below the TV, a shelf showcased a collection of hard alcohol, large enough to please any bartender. An oversized island commanded the remaining kitchen space with enough seating to accommodate a hungry team of lab workers. Baskets of fruit and individually wrapped pastries and muffins sat atop the massive island. As Finn rummaged around in the fridge, Owen saw it was stocked with sandwiches, bottles of juice, canned drinks, fruit and some other items he could not make out. Owen explored the rest of their rented space and found a hallway leading to furnished offices, dorm room, boardroom and a unisex bathroom.
Owen returned to the central lab area to find Riley pulling the lid off a black plastic crate. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“It’s kind of over the top,” said Riley, removing contents from a box and lining them neatly atop the nearest lab station. “We pretty much blew our entire budget on this place. Plus, we had to line a few pockets to skip the waiting list.”
“Don’t worry Rile,” said Finn. He strolled up juggling a can of Coke, a cherry pastry and a half-eaten ham sandwich. “We’ll save money on food. This place is stocked to the tea bags every day. Can you believe that? Owen, what can I get you? Beer? Coke? Wine? Juice? Coffee? Tea? Espresso? We’ve got it all.”
Owen chuckled and declined. He thought it was odd these two would have to worry about money. Surely they could zip back to the future to get more, or better yet, wait for today’s lottery numbers and then go back in time a few days and win the lottery.
Finn slid into his jacket and announced he was going for a walk to take in the nearby sites. He balanced his Coke and pastry in one hand—the sandwich was already gone—and opened the door to leave. Seconds after the door closed, there was a knock. Riley smiled and shook her head as she grabbed Finn’s access card off the kitchen counter. She held it up for him as she opened the door.
Finn took it from her with a sheepish smile. “Thanks, Rile. You know me so well.”
Owen helped Riley unpack. He came across a lot of equipment he recognized but even more he did not. Riley answered his every question with long-winded explanations that piqued his curiosity ever further.
“Have you set up your computers yet?” He smiled at the thought of what computers from 2097 could do.
“No, we haven’t set them up yet.” Riley grabbed a black, zippered case from the counter behind her and passed it to Owen. “Help yourself.”
Owen sat down on one of the comfy lab stools and as he did, made a mental note to find out who the supplier was and order in a few for his own lab. He looked over the case Riley had handed him and frowned. It looked identical to something that would hold a tablet or an exceptionally slim laptop. Convinced something far more remarkable and future-esque waited inside, he unzipped the sleeve and pulled out a black device. Its surface was black and glassy and had no markings he could see. He flipped it over in his hands. The underside was either plastic or metal; he could not be certain which, as it looked and felt like both. He recognized it as an electronic device, seeing grippy feet and ports on either side, though these ports were different from any port he had ever seen.
“This is a computer? How do you turn it on?” Owen looked over to Riley for instruction. Strands of hair had come loose from her braid and framed her face. She tucked the loose strands of hair behind her ear as she pulled a toolbox out of a crate and set it on the floor. Owen noticed that even though she wore no jewellery and very little makeup, she could rival any Hollywood beauty on the red carpet.
“This is the CI I was telling you about earlier. It’s loosely based on what you would call a computer.” She stood and stretched her knees before stepping over the boxes to join him. She picked up the device, pressed her thumb to the centre of the glassy surface and a blue light flashed beneath it. Then, she placed it on the desk in front of him and returned to her unpacking. A little green light flashed where she had just used her thumbprint to turn on the device. Owen heard some computer-type whirring sounds as the little machine booted up.
The futuristic device intrigued Owen and he wondered how the little machine would transform itself into a functioning laptop. He peered around the edges to see where the screen would slide out from.
“Where’s the screen?”
“Just give it a sec, it’ll pop up.”
Owen decided that the screen would most logically slide out from the back then fold up to take the shape of a traditional laptop. Owen slid off his chair and leaned over the top of the device, watching the back for a little door to flip open so the screen could emerge. Instead, his eyes were assaulted by a blinding light emitted from the top of the device. He swore loudly and stumbled backward like he had been punched, knocking over the stool behind him. Blindly, he felt around for anything to regain his bearings and knocked over a stack of boxes while tripping over several cords.
Startled by the calamity, Riley looked over to see Owen feeling around and trying to sit on a desk lamp she set on the floor earlier. She saw the illuminated screen of her CI and put two and two together. She hid her laughter as she leapt to his side and led him to another chair. Riley eased him into the seat and picked up the chair he had knocked over. Standing in front of him and fighting a smile, she waited for him to stop rubbing his eyes.
“Are you alright? You’re not supposed to look directly into the projection eye.”
“The projection what? The what?” Owen looked up at her, but all he saw were black spots.
“I’m sorry, I should have explained that.” Riley leaned over and looked directly into his reddened eyes as if checking to make sure they were both still there. She smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d look right into it.” She hoped he still saw spots because she
could not wipe the grin off her face.
“I was waiting for the screen to pop up. I thought you meant like a laptop.” Through his spotty vision, Owen could see something hovering above the device. It looked like a ghost of a computer screen and it hung in the air just above the device.
“What’s a laptop?” asked Riley as she grabbed the CI and placed it directly in front of where Owen now sat.
“It’s a computer. It kind of looks like this,” he pointed to her device, “but folds open, like a clamshell.”
Riley tried to visualize his description in her mind. “Really? That seems so small.”
Owen pointed to the holographic screen suspended in mid-air. “It’s bigger than that.”
“That’s just the default size. Nobody really uses it at that size. I’ll make it bigger.”
Owen felt like he was missing something. “How are you going to make it bigger? Where’s your keyboard and mouse? How do you connect it to the Internet?”
Riley chuckled. “One thing at a time. This is called a Nexus Connection Interface, or CI as we call it for short. Everybody has one of these because without it, you couldn’t function in society. You couldn’t do most jobs and you couldn’t pay your bills. It’s your lifeline to, well, life and the world.”
“Okay, but where’s the mouse? Don’t you need a keyboard?”
She eyed him suspiciously but with good nature. “I’m uncertain of your term ‘mouse’ in this context.”
“You know, the mouse?” said Owen again, moving his right hand around in the air in a flat circular motion, like he had an imaginary computer mouse in his hand. He made a few mouse-clicking motions with his index finger. “How do you move things on the screen?”
Riley truly had no clue what he was asking and his demonstration, although entertaining, did nothing to shed light on his question. She shrugged. “You just tell it what you want it to do.” The technological gap between them was more like a canyon and for some reason it amused her. She felt like she was enlightening an underprivileged child.
“Like with an input device or do you just speak to it?”
Riley shook her head. “I tell it what to do with my mind.”
Owen stared at Riley with the same blank expression he wore when she had revealed to him that she was from the future. His confusion changed to awe as the screen grew to a size that made the sixty-inch television in the kitchen look like a watch face.
Riley chuckled at Owen’s bewildered expression. “Your brain is going to be hurting tonight.”
Owen slid off his chair in amazement and stared up at the massive screen now spanning nearly the full width of the lab. “How did you do that?”
“I just think about what I want the screen to do and it does it. It’s very easy and very complicated at the same time. Basically, I have a controller that interprets my thoughts and executes them on the CI.”
“A controller?” Owen asked. He looked at her hands and saw she held no controller. Nor was there any controller on the desk around her. “Where is it? Are you wearing it?” he asked, thinking of a clip-on microphone.
“Actually, I am.” Riley pointed to her eyes.
Owen looked confused. “It’s in your eyeball?”
“In a matter of speaking. You’re familiar with contact lenses, right?”
Owen nodded. “You have contact lenses that you control your computer, sorry, your CI with?”
“Essentially. And my phone, my house, my car and everything else.”
Owen shook his head and looked sceptical. “Surely you’re joking?” He was very conscious that Riley and Finn could spin the wildest tale and he would never know the difference.
Riley laughed and stood in front of Owen. “I’m serious. Look into my eyes.”
Owen looked into Riley’s eyes and saw only plain contact lenses. He was just about to say something to that effect when he noticed two tiny lights—one red and one lime green—illuminated against her vibrant green eyes.
“Whoa,” he breathed. “That is overwhelmingly difficult to wrap my mind around. How does that work?”
Riley pulled herself up to sit atop the lab station behind them and as she did so, the screen shrank to a more manageable size. “Most of the devices in 2097, for example, CIs, phones, the lights and heat of your house, cars and TVs are controlled telepathically. But for it to work, there needs to be something that interprets your thoughts and translates them into commands that your computer, car, phone or whatever will understand. That’s where the Icomm communication system comes in. When I wear these contact lenses, they show me the interface of whatever device I want to control. So if I need to make a phone call, I think about making a phone call. And as I think about the numbers I want to dial or the name of the person in my contacts file, the numbers or name will appear in my vision.” Riley fell silent for a moment and then continued. “There, I just thought about calling my grandfather and his number appeared right about here.” Riley reached out in front of her with both hands and traced the empty air in front of her to show where she saw the numbers. “It won’t work obviously, being here and all. So, if I want to turn up the volume on the stereo in my car, I just think about it. If I want to turn up the heat inside my house or pay my Visa bill, I just think about it, and it happens. If there are options I need to choose between, the appropriate menu appears in front of me. I’ll then mentally choose from the options presented to me and ta-da! It’s done.”
“That sounds kind of dangerous doesn’t it?” asked Owen. “What if you’re driving and you’re thinking about something and the menu pops up and obscures your vision?”
“Good question. First of all, the list is usually small, so it’s rarely in your line of sight. The lenses are also smart enough to change the colour of the menus and text if the contrast is too low, so if I’m in a dark room, the menus will be white. If I’m outside and it’s too bright, the menus will be dark. And, if you found yourself in a situation where your full attention was needed elsewhere, just the change in your thought process would abort the menu. Secondly, your brain is always churning through thoughts, even while you’re doing or thinking about other things. It’s what we call subconscious noise. Subconscious noise consumes only about five percent of your thought processes and the lenses need ninety-five percent of your undivided attention before they’ll execute a command. So, if you’re mulling over all the nasty things you may want to say about your boss or mother-in-law while you’re cooking dinner, you don’t have to worry about calling them by accident.
“Now the CI is different. Most devices, like phones, have an interface through the lenses, but more complex devices—like the CI—have their own interface, as you’ve seen. For the CIs, the Icomm lenses interpret my commands and transmit them to the device and the changes are reflected on the screen.”
As she spoke, items on the screen began moving around. Owen watched in awe. Riley stared at the screen while objects and icons moved around. Files unlike anything he had ever seen appeared and disappeared. He recognized nothing on the display but saw a mess of moving symbols, graphs and dials. Owen ached to try but guessed that Icomm lenses, like regular contact lenses, were not something one shared.
“Wanna try? I brought quite a few extra sets, just in case,” she said. She dug through her backpack, pulled out a small, cellophane-wrapped box and handed it to him. “You can order them with optical prescriptions if you need. These are plain. No prescription. I noticed you don’t wear contacts and you’re not wearing glasses, so I expect you’ll have no problems with these.”
Owen took the box from her, removed the protective wrap and opened it to find two sealed blister packs. Owen had never worn contact lenses in his life. After a few minutes of fighting with them—the right one continually popped off and landed on his cheek or stuck to his eyelashes—and a bit of coaching from Riley, he finally got them in. It was a weird sensation and they made his eyes feel heavy and tired. But weirder still was the little red blinking dot at the bottom of h
is vision area on the right-hand side. When he looked straight ahead, the light was less prominent and blurry, but if he looked directly at it, it came into focus. It looked like he could reach out and touch it but when he did, there was no change. He held his hand close to his face and the dot remained the same. He closed his eyes. Still there. Unlike the CI screen that was physically projected from an unmoving location, the dot was not projected, it just looked like it.
“All I need to do now is do a retinal scan of your eyes, add your retinal data as an allowable entity to my CI security settings and you’ll be ready for flight. The retinal authentication is a security measure so people can’t go around hijacking other peoples’ cars, CIs, bank accounts and things like that. Once I capture your retinal data, we can both use this. Finn’s been added, too.”
Within seconds, Owen was able to move things around on Riley’s CI the way she had. It was a lot easier than he had expected. Owen assumed that he would have to mentally command, Move this icon from one side of the screen to the other. But as he thought of the words he planned to say in his mind to execute the mental command, the action happened.
Owen found the CI to be very intuitive. After only a few minutes, he located what would be Riley’s equivalent of a word-processing program and some photo albums, but also a lot of things he did not recognize. Owen marvelled at the interface. While the projected screen remained stationary, the icons and interface moved at differing speeds in an almost parallax-fashion. The screen itself looked 3D, but when he walked up to it and looked at it from the side, it nearly disappeared. The elaborately layered graphics not only looked three-dimensional but real in a way he had never seen in a 3D movie. Most actions were animated and information was frequently shown graphically in colourful, three-dimensional, animated charts and illustrations. Things he wanted came to the front of the screen and other things slid to the back and became partially transparent. Unable to resist, he reached out and touched it. His hand penetrated the image like a typical projection. He saw only a faint outline of his hand through the screen.
“So how do I get my email on this thing?” He returned to his seat and the interface moved around as he searched for the Firefox browser icon. “Doesn’t it get the Internet? Or is the Internet in the future different? How do you Google things?”
“We have something called the Nexus. It’s like your Internet but more all-encompassing. We can access it from anywhere in the world, even on the top of a mountain or in the middle of the ocean. The CIs are our windows to the Nexus. They’re really just an interface. The applications and file storage is all on the Nexus. Everyone has personal file space on the Nexus. That’s where everyone keeps their documents, files, photos and all the other crap everyone accumulates, but it’s so much more than that. I control appliances, order takeout, call a cab, log into my car for maintenance updates and watch TV on the Nexus through my CI. I use it for work and every student from kindergarten to university will use one in school. Everything is on the Nexus. Unfortunately, I can’t show you any of it because I can’t access it from here.”
“If you can’t access the Nexus and your CI’s only real function is to connect to the Nexus, what good will it be here?” Owen asked.
“This CI has been modified for this operation. Since I can’t access the Nexus to access the notes, files and preliminary research we’ve compiled, this one has been modified with memory for file storage.”
“And if you guys use this to pay for things, does that mean there’s no physical money?”
“It’s around, but you don’t often see it. I don’t think it will ever disappear entirely. It’s a good way to keep something off the books if you want some discretion. You just need to get it from the bank.”
“So you have to lug that thing out when you want to buy a coffee?” He motioned to her CI.
“The CI payment system is more for banking-related transactions. You wouldn’t pull this out to buy a coffee. There is a more portable payment method.” She reached back into her bag and pulled out the keys that Owen had seen earlier. “I’ve seen people here use plastic cards to buy things. I suspect those work kind of the same way these do.” She held up one of her keys, this one the shape of an elongated V. “I can order a coffee, swipe this at the pay station, and that’s it.”
“What if someone steals your keys and goes on a shopping spree?”
Riley pointed to her eyes. “If my keys are out of proximity to my lenses, they won’t work.”
“What’s stopping someone from stealing your eyeball with the contact on it and hiding it in their bag?”
Riley laughed. “My eyeball would be dead and the contact wouldn’t function, rendering it and my keys useless. And, they can’t just steal my contacts and wear them because the retinal data wouldn’t match.”
Riley resumed unpacking while Owen continued to explore the CI and the different settings on the contact lenses. Every once in a while, Riley would hear a knock as Owen subconsciously reached out to grab something and rapped his knuckles on the lab station in front of him.
Finn returned from his walk with a bag of gummy candies and an energy drink. He explained to Owen how funny it was to have actual, physical money. The sun had long since sunk below the city skyline by the time the team had finished unpacking. The lab finally looked more like a functional working space than a vacant room. Riley used her VersaTool to shrink the pile of empty crates and boxes down to the size of a toaster. Owen helped, using Finn’s VersaTool. Riley was very fast and accurate and could resize the boxes three or four times faster than Owen when they started. By the end, Owen’s proficiency had increased significantly.
The three stood in the centre of the lab space and took in the new surroundings. “Well, I think this’ll do just fine,” said Riley.
Finn rummaged through his backpack. Unable to find what he was looking for, he zipped up the bag in mild frustration. “I left the orientation documentation back at the hotel. If we order something to eat now, it should be at the hotel by the time we arrive.”
“Always thinking with your stomach, eh?” said Riley. “That sounds good. Plus, if we start the briefing tonight that’ll give us a good jump on tomorrow, and then Owen can decide whether or not he wants to help.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Owen, gathering up his banana peel and muffin wrapper and tossing them into the garbage. “Where are you guys staying?”
“We’re at the Fore Seasons.”
After seeing their lab space, it was no surprise to Owen that they would be staying in a hotel of comparable comfort. “Nice. The NRD’s spared no expense, eh? The Four Seasons. I thought you said you were low on cash?”
“We are. We’re not in the Four Seasons, as in the number, we’re in the Fore Seasons, as in golf.” Finn swung an imaginary golf club. “It’s off of Route 54. You know, the motel with the gigantic golf ball out front?”