Chapter 7

"More tea, Laura?"

"Yes please..." Laura held out her mug, and David poured the hot tea from the thermos. Laura gazed out at the brown and pale green hill before them, rolling down to the black rocks and the gray ocean. "This is so beautiful. Having a last picnic breakfast was really a nice idea. And the view here of the lighthouse is so grand! Bravo, David!"

David smiled and glanced at the time on his cell phone. "To make the ferry in time to catch your plane, we'll have to start heading back within the hour."

"I know... I'll have so many memories of our time here... One of my favorites is the, what did you call it? Oh yes, the widow's walk. The small high balcony at the top of the house, where a sea captain's wife would pace and watch and wait for her husband to return... There's a certain elegance to the practice, don't you think? I think I'm going to take it up. My condo in California faces east. I'm going to find the exact great-circle path from my balcony to M.I.T., and I'm going to pace very morning and stare towards Cambridge, and dream of the time my true love will return to me..."

"Laura, you're such a sweet girl, I don't know if you're joking or not..."

"I'm not joking... Well, maybe just a little. Maybe I'll only do it six days a week..."

David and Laura stared in each other's eyes for a moment, and then they both burst out laughing at the joke, their voices echoing softly against the gentle sound of the surf. David sighed, kissed Laura and smiled. "We made a tremendous, tremendous amount of progress in the last week."

"Yes, we augment each other. The theoretical advances are huge. I have a much better understanding of what we're dealing with now."

"Laura, your grasp of combining theory with lab engineering is fabulous. I'm blown away how quickly you designed the integrated communications / diagnostics arrays..."

"It was your theoretical leap that showed me how to do it. Your intuitive understanding of the core of chatterbox is much greater than mine... Of course, whether we'll ever have the nerve to do any of this... well, it's still an open question, isn't it?"

"Yeah. What's the first law of robotics Laura, from Asimov's I Robot?"

"That a robot will do nothing to harm a human, or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm."

"And what's the first law for a chatterbox resonance to follow?"

"Nothing at all! There are no laws in free-will! It can never be locked. We've proved that rigorously in the mathematics over the last week. Consciousness is self-focusing, the thoughts organize themselves. But there can be principles in free-will. And the best we can do is communicate, and teach the chatterbox principles. And the principles we will teach will be good principles. But the chatterbox can choose to follow them or not, and even if it does decide to follow them, it might follow them in pride and conceit. The choice will not be ours, nor perhaps should it be. Free-will owes its ultimate accountability to God alone."

"This will change the world..."

"I know David... I'm not sure I've got the guts to do it... I'm so glad we'll be making the decision together. I'll need your guidance in this... Ha! It's amazing that funding wouldn't be an issue. We could buy a house, and do all the development in our basement. I estimate, soup to nuts, the lab set-up would cost less than $10M."

"Sounds like a lot of money to me! I still haven't gotten used to how rich you are Laura!"

"I've been pretty quiet about it, but I should tell you. $10M is barely 10% of my current post-tax worth. I got intrigued a couple of years ago, hearing all the stories of people getting wiped out in the stock market. I don't know if you know this, but I've got the same office Richard Feynman once had at Cal Tech. It's quite an honor. Dr. Feynman had a sign in his office, and now the sign is in mine. It says YOU CAN'T FOOL NATURE. But it turns out you can fool a marketplace. Marketplaces have a wondrous ability to have perception create its own reality. It's the same with the human mind and with chatterbox! You just won't see this in classical physics. I modified the generalized form of a self-enfolding flow tensor to appreciate the fact that a market can be fooled., and then turned the mathematics loose on the market data..."