Corrigan made some final adjustments to the collar that she was wearing above the neck of her blouse. It consisted of a lightweight aluminum frame entwined with electrical windings and pickup heads, rising high under the chin like a surgical brace and close-fitting at the base of the skull. The whole assembly rested on padded shoulder supports, and a cable connected it to an electronics cabinet alongside the display unit, where another man was watching the screen as he entered setup commands from a keyboard. He was older than Corrigan, graying, with a ragged mustache, and looking more Evelyn’s idea of the old-time engineer, in a tweed jacket with open-neck plaid shirt, and cords. Corrigan had introduced him earlier as Eric Shipley, a senior scientist on the project.
“Did you ever hear of Tempest technology?” Corrigan asked Evelyn. “From the late seventies.”
“I was just being born then,” she replied.
Just turned thirty, smooth, confident, crisply dressed, Corrigan looked the part of the young, successful, upward-bound executive. The pretty young thing from Massachusetts, nervous, yet excited at the prospect of trading academia’s security for the greater opportunities—and hopefully glamour—of the commercial world, was impressed. And he knew it.
“It was a technique that the security agencies developed for tapping in to a data-transmission cable by reading the magnetic field fluctuations around it.” He nodded to indicate the collar. “This combines a much more sensitive pickup system with standard front-end neural decoding and a lot of the mathematics from various medical imaging systems. In fact, it was a joint venture between your place and here: Boston and Pittsburgh. MIT and Carnegie Mellon put it all together about three years ago. It’s called MIMIC.”
“That has to be an acronym for something.”
“Miniaturized Motor Intercept Collar. You’ll see why in a moment.” Corrigan looked over at Shipley. “How are we doing, Eric?”
“Just about there. . . .” Shipley entered a final command, and the silhouette of a human female figure appeared, centered in the screen. “Okay,” Shipley said. Evelyn looked at Corrigan questioningly—mainly by moving her eyes, since the collar impeded head movement.
“Move one of your arms,” Corrigan directed.
Evelyn raised an arm, and the figure on the screen did the same thing. She raised both arms, then swung them in circles; the figure duplicated the motion. She smiled, enjoying the spectacle. “Hey, I’m impressed,” she said, smiling and talking through her teeth.
“You can move about,” Corrigan said. “Watch the cable, though.”
Evelyn stepped forward, then a pace sideways, cautiously at first; then, getting really into the experience, she laughed and broke into a short routine of dance steps and gestures. The figure on the screen mimicked everything faithfully. “I had no idea it would be so smooth.”
Her movements were not being interpreted from TV images, position-detectors in suits, body-mounted light-emitters, or by any of the other familiar methods for encrypting human physical motion directly into computers. Instead, the collar surrounding Evelyn’s neck and lower brain stem was picking up the motor output signals on their way down to the spinal cord to direct her musculature system. The same signals were being fed to the programs controlling the figure dancing on the screen—which Shipley had adjusted to superficially resemble Evelyn in shape and body proportions.
Evelyn spent more time experimenting, showing a lot of interest, asking some good questions. The figure’s head didn’t move, she discovered, since the system only picked up signals on their way down from the brain. It didn’t matter very much—she was hardly able to move her own head anyway. As an input interface it was ahead of anything that she had realized existed.
“I’m surprised that it’s in your museum already,” she said as Shipley switched off the equipment and Corrigan helped her remove the collar.
“It’s been three years,” Corrigan said.
“That still seems soon.”
“The accelerating rate of progress. It got overtaken. We’re into a new version now.”
“Do I get to see it?”
“Yes, but not here. We’ll have to go over to the labs. It gets better.”
They went through an exit at the rear of the building and followed a path by a lawn between the several other buildings and parking lots forming the rest of the complex. The architecture was a mixture of old brick-and-stone and new concrete-and-glass, standing on the site of a former steel plant. The ovens and furnaces had gone, but the serviceable buildings had been restored and converted into office and laboratory space, and a number of brand-new facilities erected in the spaces created by the demolitions.