Prologue

Controlling somebody else’s mind has always been a common fantasy throughout the ages. Nothing is more fascinating than to have other human beings obeying your will without any restriction even at the risk of their own life. Many scientists have tried to uncover the secrets of the brain but so far our most complex organ has remained a mystery. We know that the braincells communicate using electric impulses, we have identified regions of the brain apparently dedicated to specialties like language, memories and so on but we failed at even the slightest attempts to decrypt memories or to visualize the dream of a sleeper. The brain is a safe haven for his owner’s thoughts, more secure than the most secure vaults at the biggest banks. Well, this was true until recently anyway.

My name is Francois Royer, and I had been working as a lead scientist at the French Cognitics & Nanoparticles Research Center in Meudon near Paris for a couple of years now. This very well known research center had hired me directly out of university as my student work had drawn some attention when I proved that it was possible to change the output of a neuron (or a braincell) by sending special formed electromagnetic waves to it. Some of the center’s researchers were trying to prove that electromagnetic waves could influence human and animal behavior and the goal was to find a way to protect people from potential harmful side effects of these waves, like for example waves from mobile phones or wireless networks. However, as everybody knows, we are just bathing in an abundance of waves from radio, TV, satellites, cell phones or just plain electric cables. Apparently waves could interfere with one neuron but this would be a tiny “accident” and all other neurons surrounding the faulty neuron would correct the signal. The “fault” would go completely unnoticed, corrected by the output of millions of other neurons.

It appeared that electromagnetic waves were harmless to human or animal brains and therefore the research team I was working with was redeployed on other more promising (say “lucrative”) research activities. I filed a special request with the center’s management to be able to continue searching on the same topic and, since our research center was quite well funded and could afford having some scientist searching on not so promising research fields, it was accepted. I kept the team’s lab and all the instruments and I essentially worked alone for several months, mostly ignored by the other researchers who were trying to achieve fame or file prestigious patents.

I had build a machine which emitted waves, interfering with each other, so as to create stationary waves at exactly predefined locations, and my goal was to be able to target each neuron of a simple brain individually. As brains were moving targets, traveling along with their owners like for example the dragonflies I was using in my experiment, a computer was recalculating the position according to the subjects movements. Also a receiver was measuring the reaction of the neurons and using this feedback to increase or release control of each brain-cell by modulating the waves of the machine. It was quite a clumsy machine with a lot of cables and interface cards connected to weird device. A parabolic antenna the size of a small TV was emitting the waves towards a cage were I was holding the different animals I was studying. The first tests were quite disappointing, the dragonflies were either not reacting at all, or they would fly around like crazy as if I had burned them badly. The controlling computer was getting billions of information and it would last decades before I would be through with analyzing all that data. Even a small brain like the one of the dragonfly was huge compared to even our most powerful computers.

The breakthrough came when I talked to a fellow researcher, Kim Chen, who was working on so called nanocomputers, extremely fast and extremely small, as they were not built using conventional microchips but rather with biological molecules. I explained my problem to him about analyzing my experiment’s data and he thought that it would be a very good test to see how powerful his nanocomputers really are. A few days later he came into my lab with a normal looking PC laptop computer and put it on my desk. It was his brand new prototype and we spend most of the day connecting everything to my wave machine, testing the interface and checking the flow of the experiment’s data. The nanocomputers were at the heart of the laptop and the data I put into it was seemingly analyzed in real time, with the biological processor running at 0.001% of its capacity. It was early morning hours when he finally left my lab with me promising to keep him up to date on how the nanocomputers would perform.