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  Inside the car were five other seats, all of them empty. The audio preprocessor in Pax’s UV was set to “Focus” mode, which automatically removed irrelevant environmental noises such as the hum of the electric engine and the drone of the tires on the road. The result was a crypt-like silence that made the real world seem like the false one. Looking ahead out the right-side windows, he saw the tops of a clump of several buildings in the distance. They stood clearly above the buildings surrounding them, and text displayed beneath them in his UV display read “Omnitech World Headquarters - 1.9 mi. | 5 minutes.”

  A glance to the right identified the car nearest him as containing “Agent Roger Walton, Omnitech Security.” Pax’s mFarad, along with the eight Omnitech security vehicles surrounding it, was ensconced in an endless latticework of self-driving vehicles on the freeway, their positions all coordinated in real time by the California Transportation Monitoring Service. Pax was one of a very small number of people whose public status granted him priority over other riders and supported deviating from the positioning criteria the CTMS normally used, in order to accommodate his accompaniment by private security.

  As Pax looked at the Omnitech campus he wondered how many more times he would make this drive as CEO. He tried once again to wrap his mind around the manifest unjustness of a reality in which a sniveling snot like Morgan Granville could ooze his way into a position of being able to wrest control of Pax’s company from him. His company, that he had created, based on his invention.

  Never mind that the preceding 37 quarters represented a corporate ascendancy so breathtaking the fiscal punditry had exhausted all superlatives in their attempts to characterize it. Never mind that in less than a decade Omnitech had become the most profitable company of all time, with an annual net income of more than $100 billion. No, all Wall Street cared about was Omnitech had missed it numbers for three quarters in a row, and now here he was, about to be told to walk the plank.

  A positive result on the testing for Project Simon was his only real chance to win enough support to hold off Granville and his minions. But harboring such a hope, he knew, was nothing more than a sign of how desperate his situation had become. His friend Cevis had succinctly summarized the problem the last time they had met. “The truth is, Oreste,” Cevis had said, in his typical flat monotone, “although what you are trying to accomplish with Project Simon is very impressive, it’s still fundamentally an add-on to the Univiz itself.”

  If it had been anyone other than Cevis, Pax would have told them to piss off and go integrate a brain-computer interface with a Univiz themselves if they thought it was so damned easy. But Cevis was a polymath who knew more about most fields of science than almost any expert in those fields. Pax had relied heavily on Cevis’ advice ever since they’d become friends in college, and he needed his help now more than ever.

  Plus, as always, Cevis was right. Although the Univiz had rendered desktop and mobile computers obsolete almost overnight, everything Pax and Omnitech had done since then had been an extension of the massive ecosystem that had sprung up around it. Project Simon’s goal was to enable people to interact faster with a Univiz through a combination of sight and thought, rather than sight with gestures or voice. But while it sounded cool, the team working on it had predicted at most a 15-20 percent increase in the speed of interaction. Pax knew Wall Street well enough to know that improvements in efficiency weren’t going to appease a group of unhappy investors, especially when the solution required brain surgery.

  Pax thought back to the first time he’d seen a BCI in action at a tech conference a year and a half earlier. The former first chair violin for the London Philharmonic, who had lost both of her arms in a car accident a year earlier, played a solo from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons using two robotic arms and a BCI from a hot startup called CortiTrak. He had immediately felt there was some sort of kinetic potential in a UV-BCI integration he couldn’t quite articulate. But the last time he’d had a similar feeling was when he’d come up with the design for the original Univiz. Omnitech had purchased CortiTrak three months later.

  The test that morning would be the first attempt to have people use the BCI to control objects in a Univiz virtual environment. A reasonable expectation would be for it to take two to three years to integrate the two systems effectively, if it could be done at all. But he was out of time. He needed his hunch to materialize into something now.

  But the memory injected Pax with a sliver of hope. “Resume dashboard!” he barked.

  The sunlight dissipated, and two identical clouds of miniaturized graphics displayed on the inside of the lenses of Pax’s Univiz once again. The images were radially offset from the centerline of each pupil by 1.25 millimeters and refreshed at 2,000 Hz, once again fooling his stereoscopically predisposed brain into perceiving them as a real, three-dimensional environment. The audio processor switched to 360-degree SupraReal audio synchronized to within 0.05 milliseconds of the display, and Pax was immersed in the aurocular confines of the virtual world once more.

  He began gesturing rapidly with his fingers and thumbs. Every flick, tap, and swipe was captured by pinhole camera lenses on the front of the UV and translated instantly into actions. Today he deleted or delegated everything, even though he knew he was hopelessly overloading several of the people on his senior leadership team. But today he had no choice.

  Not two minutes later, however, he was interrupted again by another doodoodoo. For a moment Pax felt a surge of anger that Gabe hadn’t realized he didn’t want to be disturbed. But when the image of a man with a dour face appeared in his display, his mood changed to one of relief. “Accept call,” he said. After another doodeep he cleared his throat again and said, “Hello, Cevis.”

  Chapter 2

  Cevis Pierson was Pax’s oldest friend and longest-standing source of discontent. They’d met as sophomores in an organic chemistry class at UCSD and had somehow developed an odd-couple friendship—Pax, the outgoing cognitive science student, and Cevis, the science nerd and lab rat. Cevis was far and away the smartest person Pax had ever met, his intellect matched only by his pathological avoidance of publicity.

  While still an undergraduate, Cevis’ research on the transition between pluripotent and unipotent phases of stem cell development had led to breakthrough treatments for numerous illnesses, including pancreatic cancer. Yet no one on campus except Pax knew Cevis had been the driving force behind the discoveries. Even Cevis’ professors and the students he worked with every day were unaware of how he had surreptitiously arranged the direction of their research through suggestive questions to the professors, or oblique comments to his labmates.

  After university, Cevis had gone on to found Gen6, a biotech incubator that specialized in regenerative medicine. It developed treatment concepts and took them through efficacy testing, then sold them to larger companies for commercialization. An astonishing 90 percent of Gen6 therapies wound up making it to market. But right from the start, Cevis had arranged for other people to run the company while he worked as just another senior scientist in the labs. None of the other scientists he employed had any idea he was the owner and motive force behind the company. But Pax knew. Cevis’ existence always reminded him there was genius on a whole different level than his own. Although for years laudatory articles in magazines and blogs had compared Pax to Edison, Ford, and Jobs, Pax knew Cevis was a daVinci, a Newton, an Einstein. The knowledge of where he stood in comparison festered in Pax’s psyche like a subcutaneous itch. He wanted to be a daVinci, too.

  * * *

  “Hello, Oreste,” said Cevis, as Pax’s entourage exited the freeway and began negotiating the side streets toward the Omnitech campus. Using near-field communications, the nine cars automatically arranged themselves so four of the security vehicles were in front of Pax’s mFarad and four were behind. Several years earlier, after Omnitech had accumulated its first hundred billion in cash, it had purchased two dozen contiguous homes in La Jolla Farms, an elite, coastal neighborhood s
andwiched between the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The extravagant, multi-million dollar mansions had been unceremoniously razed, and a campus of eight buildings erected in their place. The architecture was a combination of retro-surfer chic and curvilinear modernity that most observers found breathtaking. It had succeeded admirably in depicting Omnitech as a company at which the future was being made, and had helped convince much of the top tech talent in the world to work there.

  “How are things?” asked Pax. “What’s up in the shake and bake world of genetics these days?” Pax asked.

  “They’re very good, although ‘shake and bake’ isn’t the phrase I’d use to describe it.” Cevis’ Univiz was the default nickel color which, combined with his mousy brown hair, gave him a completely generic appearance. Pax had based the design of the default male avatar for the Univiz on Cevis as an inside joke, although he’d never had the courage to tell him.

  “Come on, Cevis, things are crazy over there and you know it! I’ll bet you’ve cured half a dozen more diseases since the last time we talked?”

  There was a chuckle from the other end. “Sure, Oreste. Look, it’s been more than three months since our last get-together, so I thought I’d call to see if you still wanted to meet. Of course, if you haven’t called because you don’t have anything worth discussing, I understand.”

  Pax’s jaw tightened. “Of course I do,” he lied. “I’ve just been unusually busy.” On an impulse, he added, “Plus, I wanted to spring my big news on you at the last possible second.”

  “Is that right?” said Cevis, in his usual ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ tone. “Then this promises to be a very interesting meeting, because I also have something of great importance to tell you.”

  A jolt ran down Pax’s spine. He couldn’t recall Cevis ever referring to something he’d done as being of great importance. He always downplayed his accomplishments as if they were no big deal. Coming from anyone else, it would have been a case of false modesty, but Pax knew Cevis’ self-evaluation of his work was sincere. Even when Cevis had found the cure for pancreatic cancer, Pax had practically had to drag him out to a celebratory dinner with just the two of them.

  Pax made a conscious effort not to sound nervous before replying. “How interesting, each of us with some big news to share! Where do you suggest we meet?”

  “I'd like you to come over to the house.”

  This statement was almost as surprising to Pax as the previous one. Cevis lived on Palomar Mountain, 50 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. He lived near the top, not much more than a stone’s throw away from the old Palomar Observatory. The 200-inch Hale Telescope there had been the largest optical telescope in the world for more than a quarter-century and had enabled many astronomical discoveries, including the nature of quasars, the first direct observation of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and the first observation of an exoplanet. What Cevis valued about Palomar, however, wasn’t its contributions to astronomy, but its remoteness. The mountain was over 6,000 feet high and had only two winding access roads, one on the south side and the other on the north. In all the years he’d known him, Pax had been to Cevis’ home twice before.

  “Um, sure, that works,” said Pax.

  “Excellent. How about Friday at, say, 7:30? I’ll send my helicopter to your office to pick you up.”

  Pax’s car followed the two security cars ahead onto a street called ‘Omnitech Way.’ An array of exotic trees and plants lined both sides of the street, in contrast to the burnt browns and dulled greens of the natural landscape.

  “A helicopter? When did you get a helicopter?”

  “A little over a year ago.”

  “How on earth did you talk your Swiss Family Robinson neighbors into letting you fly a helicopter up and down the side of Mt. Krumpet?”

  “You’ll see. It’ll be at the Omnitech helipad at 7:15.”

  “Shall I bring some reporters with me, so that they can record our revelations for posterity?” Pax joked. He knew Cevis viewed any profession in which complete strangers felt they had a right to ask him questions to be an abomination.

  Cevis chuckled again. “You’re such a twerp, Pax. Why I ever took pity on you and helped you pass organic chemistry, I have no idea.”

  “I guess there must be a soft filling inside that hard shell of yours.”

  “Oh? I didn’t realize I had a hard shell,” Cevis replied. His voice held a whiff of warning, but for some reason, Pax ignored it.

  “Come on, Cevis. With most people, you’re about as approachable as a cornered badger.”

  There was a pause on the other end before Cevis replied. “That’s an interesting perspective, considering my work has been of such great benefit to mankind.”

  “I was referring to your interpersonal style, but since you brought it up, I’ll add that sometimes I think even your work isn’t what it appears to be.”

  “How’s that?” said Cevis. The warning tone was unmistakable now.

  “I think you just like solving the hardest problems to prove to you’re the smartest.”

  There was another long pause while the mFarad turned and made its way into a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, then turned into the driveway for the last building.

  “That’s not true, Oreste,” Cevis finally replied, his voice surprisingly placid. “My work has always had the best interests of mankind at its heart. I’ve just had a longer-term perspective than you realize. But that is part of what I want to talk to you about when we meet.”

  “Very well. Friday at 7:30 then?”

  “Yes. See you then.”

  “Ciao.” Pax gestured to hang up, and Cevis’ image disappeared.

  The four cars in front of Pax’s moved to the side as they approached a large plate in the ground at the far end of the driveway. As the cars stopped, Gabe said, “ID verification, please.” Pax held both hands up, palms toward his face, and said, “Oreste Pax.” As Pax spoke, several things happened simultaneously.

  For one, the sound waves of his voice were pattern matched against several stored in his profile. Vibration sensors located on the sides of the UV also confirmed the sound had come from the person wearing the UV, rather than an external recording. Additionally, a retinal scan was performed on the inside of the UV lenses, faster than Pax could sense it, while an ultra high def camera at the front of the UV took a 16K image of Pax’s hands and extracted the fingerprint patterns for each finger. All four checks took less than a second to complete.

  The plate in the ground snapped back, and the mFarad disappeared down into the darkness below, followed in quick succession by the four cars behind it.

  The simultaneous, quadruple user ID check, known by the acronym SQUID, was one of the hallmarks of the Univiz. Because of the strength of SQUID validation, no hacker had ever broken into another person’s Univiz, or the Univiz network, although thousands had tried. But the only way to connect to the network was through a UV, and each UV performed the SQUID check whenever a user put it on, or whenever a program or process required it, such as Omnitech did to gain physical access to its campus. Each UV would also perform random three-factor ID checks with just voice, vibration, and retinas at random times afterward since they didn’t interrupt the user from whatever they were doing. Small, random sequences of the data from user’s most recent ID checks were then added to a blockchain that was attached to all communications with the UV network. This ensured no one could access the UV network from any computing device other than their own personal Univiz.

  Most of the attempts to defeat the Univiz security had come in the first couple of years after its creation. Attempts coming from devices other than a UV simply failed, as did attempts to access anything to which the user did not have permission. If someone showed a pattern of trying to access systems to which they did not have permission, they risked a lifetime ban from using a UV. The ban had only been imposed upon a few thousand users. The UV network had become so ubi
quitous so fast, being excluded from it was the modern-day equivalent of being exiled to Siberia with nothing but the clothes on your back. It was almost impossible to function in the modern world without one. The only times where people had been exonerated from a lifetime ban was when they’d been able to prove they had been coerced by someone else. But that had only been necessary for a handful of the attempts. 99 percent of the time the UV had detected the person was being coerced and would simply shut down. The handful of times it hadn’t, it had eventually identified the people responsible.

  The tunnel opened onto an underground parking garage. Pax’s car drove to a corner near an elevator that led directly to the executive floor. He tapped the panel to his door as four agents popped out of the other cars and ran over to Pax’s. While the proper protocol was for him to wait in the car while the agents verified the area was secure, Pax felt such precautions were unnecessary once he was on the Omnitech campus, and he made a point of ignoring them every chance he got.

  Pax recognized the first agent to reach him, a blond-haired man named Gordon Hughes.

  “Good morning, Mr. Pax!" said Gordon cheerily. "Please wait for us to open your door for you next time, if you don't mind."

  "Hey, Gordy!" Pax said, cheerfully ignoring him. "Happy Wednesday!"

  “To you as well, sir,” said Gordon. “Where are we off to this morning?"

  “Believe it or not, my office,” Pax said. "So far, no one seems to know I'm here yet."

  “I doubt that, Mr. Pax. From what I understand, you're considered a relatively important person around here,” said Gordon, the hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.