Quantum Night

9

Menno Warkentin was friends with Dominic Adler, a transplanted Torontonian who held the university’s Bev Geddes Chair in Audiology. They played racquetball together once a week; there was no doubt Dominic was the better player. “Balance, my boy!” he’d exclaim whenever he got in a return that astonished Menno. “And balance is all in the inner ear!”

Menno had recently bought a carbon-fiber racquet in the vain hope that better equipment would make up for his lack of coordination. He served, and wiry Dominic swatted the ball back. Predictably, Menno missed. As he went to retrieve the ball, he said, “I walked by your lab earlier. Saw a guy delivering a skid full of new computing equipment.” He tossed the ball vaguely in Dominic’s direction.

Dominic served, and Menno managed to return it three times before he missed. When Menno went to get the ball again, Dominic said, “Yeah, we got a major new research grant.”

“From who?”

Dominic put down his racquet and motioned Menno over. “The DoD.”

Menno might not win at sports, but he was a demon at trivia. “We call it the DND here in Canada. Department of National Defense.”

“Yeah, we do,” said Dominic. “But I’m not talking about the Canadian one. I’m talking about the American one: the Pentagon.”

“Ka-ching,” said Menno.

Dominic smiled. “Wasn’t he treasurer during the Ming Dynasty?”

“Ha.”

“What do the Americans want?”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said Dominic. “But they’ll never get that, so apparently they’ll settle for a battlefield headset that lets soldiers hear over top of explosions and mortar fire. My department is going to try to develop one for them.”

“Can’t you do what those newfangled noise-canceling headphones do?”

“Sure, yeah,” said Dominic. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is the microphone. The last thing you want is the soldier shouting to be heard above the explosions. Hostiles might overhear.”

“‘Hostiles,’” said Menno, amused.

“You pick up the lingo.” Dominic tossed the ball into the air and swatted it toward the wall, which was covered with skid marks from previous impacts.

“So how’s the project going?” asked Menno after he’d batted the ball back.

Dominic didn’t even try to return; he just let the ball zip past him. “It’s not. It’s damn near impossible to pick up a whisper when there are bombs going off all around you.”

Menno glanced up at the analog wall clock, behind a protective mesh. Their time was almost up. “Oh, that’s the wrong way to go about it.”

Dominic retrieved the ball and started toward the door in the side wall. “What do you mean?”

“Trying to pick up the sound is the problem. Don’t do that.”

“We have to hear what they’re saying.”

“No, you don’t,” said Menno. “Instead, pick up the phonemes as they’re being coded mentally. Grab those with a targeted scanner. The speaker doesn’t have to say anything aloud that way—nothing to overhear. He just mouths the words. Whether he actually speaks them or not makes no difference to the brain’s staging area; they have to be queued up regardless. Grab them from there, then use a voice synthesizer at the receiving end to reconstruct what would have been said out loud.”

Dom’s eyebrows climbed toward his widow’s peak. “And that would work?”

Menno smiled. “Oh, who knows? Actually, it’s only supposition that there even is such a staging area. But if I tell you a phone number and you try to remember it until you can jot it down, you’ll rehearse it over and over in your head, right? There’s a buffer somewhere that holds the data you’re repeating. Scan that buffer and pick up sounds that aren’t being said out loud.” Menno smiled. “At least you’ll get a good paper out of it.”

“Except I can’t publish. All the work is under an NDA.”

“Huh. How big is your grant?” asked Menno

“Two hundred and fifty thousand—US. Wanna collaborate?”

Menno was more used to grants from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which tended to be in the low five figures, if not four. But the Department of Defense! Menno was a Mennonite, a pacifist. The idea of working for the military was detestable, and if other members of his church found out, well, there would be devastating consequences. But this wasn’t going to be published, and, heck, it wasn’t weapons research; really, it wasn’t. It was just an intriguing physiological investigation—with a giant research budget.

“Okay,” said Menno, at last. “I’m in.”

“I don’t get it,” said Dominic, months later. “It worked fine on our first two test subjects. Why isn’t it working with this guy?”

Fine was overstating the case, Menno thought. They could indeed now pick up unspoken phonemes from the brain, but they were still having a lot of difficulty distinguishing many of them. Trying to tell a tuh from a duh was proving impossible, although Menno suspected they could write software to figure out which it should be based on the preceding and following phonemes. But telling one phoneme from another was predicated on first actually detecting the phonemes—and that had turned into a nightmare with this student volunteer from Menno’s second-year developmental-psych class.

Dominic and Menno were on the opposite side of a glass wall from the subject, a doughy-looking Ukrainian kid named Jim Marchuk. Menno pressed the intercom button. “Jim, try again. What was that phrase you were thinking? Say it out loud for us.”

“‘Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.’”

“Right, okay. Now, again—but subvocalize, okay? Over and over.”

The headset, Menno knew, was large and uncomfortable, and much too unwieldy for battle. It consisted of a modified football helmet with a dozen electronics packs, each the size of a deck of cards, attached to it, and a thick bundle of cabling heading off to more equipment on a table beside the chair Jim was sitting on. But if they could get it working at all with this prototype, slimming the device down would be a task for the DoD engineers.

Menno and Dominic stared at the oscilloscope display, which was showing the reconstruction of the signal being transmitted by the headset. The trace was thick, running almost the height of the scope; it looked more like white noise than anything meaningful.

Dom had taped printouts from the previous two subjects on the wall above the scope. They each showed a single, distinct line spiking and falling. Underneath, he’d written in red marker the phonemes the patterns represented.

Menno shook his head. “I can’t even tell when he’s finishing one rendition and starting another.”

Dominic reached for the intercom button. “Jim, thanks. Just be quiet for a minute, would you? Don’t say anything and don’t subvocalize. Just sit there, please.”

Jim nodded, and Dominic and Menno turned back to the oscilloscope, which was just as active as before.

“Where do you suppose all that noise is coming from?” Dominic asked.

“I don’t know. You’re certain the equipment isn’t overheating?”

Dominic pointed at a digital readout. “It’s fine.”

“Okay, well, maybe this boy is a freak. Let’s test a few other people.”

Menno was wearing his heavy winter coat; Dom had on a bright blue ski jacket with a lift ticket attached. It was 3:00 P.M. on a crisp afternoon, and the sun was already well on its way down to the horizon. They were walking along the Memorial Avenue of Elms, a road lined on both sides with trees, leading from the Fort Garry campus to Pembina Highway. Menno liked trees; he hated war. As a psychologist, he understood that this particular part of the university was a physical instantiation of the cognitive dissonance he felt working on a DoD project. The Avenue had been dedicated in 1922 to the men from the Manitoba Agricultural College who had died in the First World War; two and a half years ago, in June 1998, the dedication had been extended to include many who had died during World War II and the Korean War, as well.

“The Pentagon isn’t going to be happy with a microphone that can only be used by half their soldiers,” said Dominic, the words coming out in clouds of condensation. “For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work with some people; why they have all that noise in their auditory cortices is beyond me. I mean, if they were reporting tinnitus, it’d make sense. Or maybe if they’d all listened to super-loud rock music, or something like that. But it seems completely random.”

Menno thought about that as they walked past the block of stone with the dedication plaques. “No,” he said at last. “Not quite random. You’re right that the majority of our sample group doesn’t have the background noise, but if you look at the test subjects who came from my class—Jim, Tatiana, the others—most of them do have the noise, and…”

“Yes?”

Menno continued along, the packed-down snow squeaking underfoot. “Background noise…” he said, slowly pursuing the idea as if it were a rabbit that would flee if startled. “In the auditory cortex…” His heart was pounding. “Preferentially present in those who study psychology.”

“Well, I always said psych students were a little weird.”

“It’s not just that,” Menno replied. “Psych attracts a certain kind of student: kids trying to make sense of themselves. Cheaper than therapy, you know?”

A single puff of chilled air: “So?”

“So, they’re obviously chewing things over, ruminating, wondering.” He felt his eyebrows colliding with the wool of his cap, and he lowered his voice, as if speaking softly would make the idea sound less crazy. “The background stuff. It isn’t noise.” He shook his head. “It’s—my God! It’s inner monologue—stream of consciousness! It’s the constant background of a normal life, all the stuff you’re thinking inside: I wonder what’s for lunch. Jeez, is it Thursday already? Gotta remember to stop by the store on the way home. Those thoughts—those articulated thoughts—are made of phonemes, too. They’re never spoken, they’re never even subvocalized or mouthed. But they’re words all the same, made up of phonemes. And so the question isn’t—”

“The question isn’t,” said Dominic, coming to a dead halt beneath skeletal branches, “why some people do have background noise in their auditory cortices. The question is why most people do not.”