And then Dr. Everett Sealy’s bald head came around a corner. He locked eyes with me, and his face cracked into a smile.
“We’re all here!” he declared. “Miranda, this is Sid”—he gestured to a well-built, handsome East Asian guy—“and this is Paxton”—he nodded toward a kinda scrawny white guy, his brown hair poking out from under a gray knitted beanie. We all shook hands, and Dr. Sealy, who looked like he’d just received a Christmas present, continued, “No need to waste any more time, let’s get going!”
The pilots who had been sitting with their coffee then stood up, smiling, and introduced themselves to me, having apparently already met the rest of the crowd. One of the pilots said, “If you want to use the restroom, now is a good time. There’s a head on the plane, but it’s a bit awkward in there.”
So there was some toilet time, which I also used to freshen my face a bit, and then we walked through the doors and up to a private jet.
A. Private. Jet.
I kept waiting to go through security, but apparently that isn’t a thing if you own the plane. I took a moment to watch Sid and Paxton’s reactions, which were both suitably wide-eyed. Likewise, I watched Dr. Sealy watch them, his head gleaming in the sun. He looked genuinely happy to be giving some young people a cool and unique experience, though that could easily have been because he was excited to see his plan to impress us was working.
In the end, private planes are like planes but smaller. There was more leg room, and there were unlimited snacks. Two of the seats faced forward and two faced back, so we were all looking at each other the whole flight. That made it so we pretty much had to chat. Luckily, Dr. Sealy was good at keeping everything from getting awkward.
First he got us to open up about what we did for work. Knit-hat-wearing Paxton worked on machine learning algorithms. Well-built Sid had been working for a software company doing design and what they called “UX” or “user experience.” Basically, he figured out what the software would actually look like and how best to guide the user around inside of it.
I was definitely the youngest person in the plane.
“So,” Dr. Sealy said after I’d finished explaining my research, “what do you all think Altus is up to?”
“I didn’t think you’d want us speculating in front of each other,” I said, surprising myself a little.
“Not at all! Obviously you’ve all been thinking about it. And here’s a secret. If you give smart people a bunch of ingredients, different people will come up with different ideas. Each of those ideas probably has merit, and none of them will be the exact thing you’re doing. But it might still be really valuable. So, what do you think?”
Sid chimed in first. “We all know it’s some kind of brain-machine interface, right?” Paxton and I nodded. “The usefulness of a robust connection of inputs and outputs is limitless, right? What’s the focus? I don’t know, I don’t think there has to be a focus. Though it is very curious that so many computer scientists seem to be involved. That makes me think that the bandwidth of the connection is high, and that there may be a novel use beyond the obvious.”
“The obvious being,” I said, “treating disease?”
“That first, yes, but also possibly recreation. People want the Dream back. Maybe we could give it to them.”
Dr. Sealy’s eyes widened at this, but he just said, “Paxton?”
He stared into the distance for a moment and then said, with his warm Alabama accent, “Actually, my first thoughts were in the opposite direction.”
“What do you mean by that?” Dr. Sealy asked. Sid and I leaned in to listen.
“Well, the obvious thing is that the machines are somehow helping the brain. But with so many computer scientists and the disciplines you’re looking at—it made me wonder if possibly the goal was to have brains help machines.”
Somehow, in the rumbling cabin of that airplane, I got a set of goose bumps all the way down to my toes. That was an idea.
“That’s very interesting,” said Dr. Sealy. “How do you think that would be achieved?”
“Well, if you have a high-bandwidth system, like Sid guessed you do, then it could help people do things they’re bad at, or have become bad at because they’re sick or hurt. Yeah, that’s economically valuable because it helps people do things they can’t do. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think the most valuable use would probably be allowing humans to help computers do stuff they’re bad at. Creativity, humor, object identification, asynchronous processing, probabilistic cascades. If a computer can coexist with a brain, receiving constant feedback, you can use that to model true AI. Computers understanding how humans solve problems.”
“But that kind of connection is impossible, right?” Sid said. “Something that deep feeding data, extracting data. That’s not next-generation technology, that’s next-millennium technology.”
It was right then that my brain caught on fire, and without thinking at all I opened my mouth and said, “You didn’t build a link.”
“What?” Dr. Sealy said at the same time Sid and Paxton said, “Huh?”
I wished I had kept my big dumb mouth shut, but I guess it was too late now.
“Altus—you didn’t build a link, you found one. The one Carl built in all of us. It’s still in there, and you found it.”
“Fuck,” Sid said.
“Holy shit,” Paxton added.
Dr. Sealy just smiled.
The trip to Altus just kept going. We had been in the plane for more than three hours. Either my internal understanding of where Puerto Rico was wasn’t correct, or we’d been flying around in circles for some reason. When we finally started descending, I looked out the windows but only saw a few tiny islands. The runway, it turned out, was perpendicular to the coastline and butted right up against the shore, so there was nothing but water to see out the windows. Just before the wheels hit the ground, I glimpsed the lush, green, rolling foothills of a massive volcano-like mountain.
“Any last text messages, send them now, I’m taking your phones before we get off the plane. It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s that we don’t trust anyone.”
I shot off a last-minute text to Andy: I’m getting off the plane in Puerto Rico now, they’re taking my phone for espionage reasons. I should be back in touch in a few days max.
Then I texted Dr. Lundgren: Arrived in PR, you were right, they’re taking my phone! TTYS!
Sid, Paxton, and I each handed over our smartphones to Dr. Sealy. My phone case showed one of Maya’s cats saying, “But what about a Maximum Wage?” Dr. Sealy glanced at it and gave a little chuckle. I winced, thinking I probably should have taken that off.
The air was warm and humid, and the sun was low in the sky.
“Welcome to Val Verde,” Dr. Sealy told us as we stumbled off the little jet.
“Val Verde? I thought the lab was in Puerto Rico,” Sid asked.
Dr. Sealy smirked. “That is the first of several secrets you’re going to learn today. We tell the press we’re in PR, and we even have a satellite office there, since it’s part of the US and a lot closer than Florida. But the operation is actually run out of Val Verde.”