What Really Makes A Scientist Mad Ch. 01

Chapter One

She wasn't a supermodel; in fact you would have thought her rather drab. She was a little over weight maybe 10-15 pounds and her fashion sense only exacerbated her Plain Jane image. She wore loose oversized jeans and too big Flannel work shirts with ankle high steel-toed work boots. Her coal black hair fell barely to her neck and was held tightly in place in a flattened ponytail that sort of looked like a beaver tail. She worked at the Ford plant on the assembly line. At 28, she drifted through life with very few friends and as far as I could see, no lovers.

Her name was Sherry Anne and she was the daughter of my next door neighbors. I had watched her grow up. My parents had died in an Auto accident and left me the house when I was 19 and shortly after that she was born. I was a vicarious witness to her first steps, her first bicycle ride, even her first date. I watched her grow from a skinned kneed tomboy to a vivacious teenager. Then in her Junior year of high-school something happened, I don't think it was as traumatic as a rape or something because the changes were gradual. She started dressing in looser baggier clothes and the flow of friends to her house slowed then stopped.

I don't want to make it sound like I was lecherously watching and following her around or anything, I wasn't. I had married my wife Mary about the time she was born and was happily married as she grew up. It was about the time she left for college that Mary died. She was gone for 7 years. When she returned she hadn't really changed much, if anything she was more withdrawn and private. I had heard from back fence gossiping with her mother Joan that she had gotten her degree in International Business went to work for a New York accounting firm and then got caught up in the banking scandal when her firm was found to have falsified some audits. She hadn't been involved but all the employees had pretty much been blacklisted.

All the kids in the neighborhood knew me, Mary and I couldn't have children so I probably was more tolerant to them than I would have been if I had kids of my own. I was always pulling quarters out of their ears, making dollar bills disappear and predicting what card they had in their hand. Since I was an electronics engineer there was a seemingly endless stream of boom boxes, game consoles and tape players flowing through my garage workshop, as any problem that involved electricity was brought to me. I didn't mind at all, I enjoyed the problems. As I sat there taking a console or CD player apart the kids would talk to me. I guess since I wasn't a parent, they figured they could tell me stuff they couldn't tell their parents and I never betrayed their confidences. They were all good kids; I might have said something if there had been drugs or promiscuous sex or anything serious but there never was. It was all about who liked who, what was happening at school, what they wanted to do when they were older and the part that tickled me the most trying to decipher what the adults in their life really wanted or said. Being an adult with no children I'd do my best to tackle the different request and usually could come up with a logical reason a parent would tell them to do certain things, sometimes not, some things seemed to be beyond logic and they appreciated that I saw those too.

Sherry had been a frequent visitor when she was young because Mary also spoiled the kids, always having fruit Juices and Kool-Aid and cookies or cakes. Sherry would sit and watch me work in the garage, sometimes talking about school, boys and life in general, sometimes just sitting with a faraway look, daydreaming the day away. Then in her junior year, she just stopped visiting. There was one last visit in the summer before her senior year. She had brought over a VCR that was eating tapes and I had it apart on the bench checking the tape path. She sat quiet, her large doe like eyes slowly blinking as she stared off into nothing. They had already diagnosed Mary with the cancer that would eventually kill her, though we hadn't yet told anyone, so I was somewhat preoccupied, her silence fit my mood. Out of the blue she said "Me and Donna aren't friends anymore" Perhaps if I had picked up on that and asked the right questions things would have been different. But I didn't, I just told her that it wasn't uncommon for friends to hurt each other and to give it time and it'd be better. "Not this time" her voice dying down to a sigh and her eyes staring into the void again. I looked at her, she didn't look unhappy just very inwardly focused. "You know you can always talk to me or Mary if you have a problem, don't you?" Her eyes acknowledged me and went back to her thoughts and I went back to mine.

I saw very little of her and didn't speak to her for eight years. For me, her senior year was full of the madness that is any fatal disease, denial, anger, depression and finally acceptance and the endless background grief that brings. With Mary gone and the worse of the grieving behind me, I could have maybe still been able to influence Sherry, but by that time she was gone out west to a University.

Over the years I had come up with a number of different processes and circuits used in the Audio-Video field and the patents I owned supplied me with, in my opinion, the exact right amount of money, a little more than I could spend in a year. I wasn't extravagant, new car every two years, kept the house up and maintained and had money for new gadgets and experiments. Once a year or so one of my experiments would supply another patentable idea so it slowly grew. I was happy, life was good.

For the last year or so I had been experimenting with audiovisual cues, how different frequencies of sound, different types of sounds coupled with the right visual patterns would invoke emotions and responses. It was pretty amazing what you can do with the two but it wasn't until I threw a third variable in the mix that it became both heaven and hell to me. I had been reading in the journals of experiments involving small amounts of current being radiated into parts of the brain evoking neurons to fire, letting a person experience pleasure, pain, emotions and even sometimes memories. I wondered how this would interact with my current experiments. A few short weeks later, after a number of overnight deliveries from parts houses and the smell of burned components, I had exactly what would answer that question.

It looked and felt like a semi-soft plastic ring that circled the head with a soft nylon webbing that fit snugly across the top of the head holding the 1/3 of an inch thick circlet firmly in place. Inside were three separate micro-current transmitters spaced evenly around the circlet, which could be electronically aimed at any portion of the brain. Any two of the beams were too weak to trigger the neurons. It was only when all three beams were precisely focused that it would fire them. I was very pleased even if the experiment failed I had designed a couple of circuits worthy of a patent. I used my own brain to calibrate it, saying I was extremely careful is an understatement. Over the next weeks I mapped out my brain using the major studies for known regions and expanding as much as I could while using myself as a guinea-pig. I stayed away from the visual and auricular regions since I had sophisticated external effects for those regions. My biggest fear was the memory and sensation regions worried that I'd hit that perfect feeling or the perfect memory and I'd keep going back over and over till like the rats in the cocaine experiments I'd quit doing anything else till I died. I was diligently watching for the dangers I perceived and the one I didn't almost killed me. It was my very first program where I was going to sync audiovisual with the cap as I'd come to think if it. It was a simple program a short repetitive sequence of sounds and visuals designed to relax the mind and body, with the cap following a complex algorithm of short semi-random burst in the regions I thought of as safe. I had tried this algorithm before and its seemly random firings filled you with a tremendous feeling of wellbeing. I could see how over time it could possibly be addictive. Checking to make sure I was recording, something I do for all my experiments I hit "Enter".

My body screamed with pain from being in one position too long and I would have screamed physically except my mouth was so dry no sound would come out. As more sensation returned to my body I could tell I had soiled myself repeatedly. I could hear a steady pounding on my back house door. Stumbling to the sink I doused my head and drunk straight from the faucet, cleared my throat and kept repeating till I felt I could talk. I opened the upstairs garage window where my shop was and yelled down to Don, Sherry Anne's father. From the looks of the day it looked about dusk so I had been out for at least 10 hours. He said he hadn't seen me for a while and just wanted to see if I was okay. I told him still being perfectly honest I was involved in an experiment and had lost track of time. He said "Let me know if you need anything" which I thought a little strange but was in too much pain to worry about. I hobbled over to the kitchenette table and sat down hard, starting to feel sleepy and hungry. All that was on the table was a basket with a blackened shriveled up banana that...I had bought that morning! Suddenly wide awake I grabbed my phone from on the counter, I had 3 voice messages and it was 7:38 PM On Friday! I had turned the program on at 9:30 AM on Monday. I was much too tired and hungry to figure out what happen now, I took a hot shower to clean the filth off me, it had the added benefit of loosening my muscles, I quickly heated and ate 3 cans of soup and stumbled into bed. I slept for 17 hours.

Over the next week I looked at every aspect of the accident. One of the first things I did, even before reviewing the data, was to incorporate an automatic shut off to the program. If it completed two complete loops with no new input, it would shut down. Satisfied that I wouldn't accidentally kill myself, I started digging into the causes. The first thing I realized was just how lucky I had been, Don had saved my life.

My house is not overly fancy, a 3 Bedroom ranch set on 2 acres, I have a large 3 car garage with a "Maids" apartment over top. It was the Maids apartment that I had converted into my laboratory. The closest neighbors Joan and Bob were across a side flower garden opposite the side the garage was on. Over the years we had developed a friendship of shared property lines and interests in flowers and decorating. Between our two side gardens we shared a chest high whiteboard fence with a gate in it. Most of the property extended to the rear where I had a covered stone barbecue pit, a rather large building that I had originally envisioned as either my shop or perhaps a woodworking shop but as of now it was a junk house filled with garden tools and equipment. A few years ago, the neighborhood had been plagued by a series of break-in's and vandalism, In response, I had installed a number of high amperage flood lights around the back and sides of the house. They were setup to only work at night when something set off one of the proximity detectors. I had installed them before I decided to make the garage my workshop so I had added them to the garage electrical box. As I added more and more equipment to the garage I passed the maximum load for the main breaker. It had never been a problem before because I seldom worked past six and I could count on one hand the number of times the lights had been triggered. Don, coming over to check on me, had triggered the floodlights overloading the garage since I had most of my equipment on also. The loss of power had stopped the Cap and the AV machines. The Generator I had installed for the shop had kicked in but thankfully everything went to its standby state when power was restored.

A week later I took stock of what I knew, first off, I was damn lucky to be alive, only a fluke had broken me out of the loop. But that paled to insignificance when I listened to the three voice messages. The last one was nothing just static; the middle one was Joe Parker thanking me for my quick response and excellent design. The first one was Joe asking me if I could design a board for him. The first call was from late afternoon Monday and the second early Tuesday.

A couple years before I had installed a camera system in the shop, three cameras pointed to the bench from different angles since that's were most experiments were setup. Only the 4th a wide view of the entire shop area was of any help.

Spot checking up until the time of the phone call I could see myself sitting, apparently not moving a muscle. When the phone rang I still didn't move a muscle it was only when Joe called my name and asked if I was there that I turned my head and said "Yes I'm here." Joe said "I need a board designed as quickly as you can; I sent a copy of the Specs to your email." I watched myself stand up turn to the computer and open the email program and look at the Specifications. I continue watching as I open a CAD program and drew out a schematic and a board layout, I skipped thru it, and it took me 9 hours to do it. I attached it to an email and sent it out. I returned to my seat and sat back down, as far as I could see from skipping through I didn't move again till the cameras suddenly quit from the power going out. I looked at the design, it was one of my best, crisp and clean, it did exactly what it was supposed to with no wasted circuits. The board layout was the best I'd ever done. I've went thru the video a number of times during the entire process I never pull out a reference book, recalling everything from memory, including the physical sizes of the components on the circuit board.

I spent the next few months rebuilding, retesting and exploring the effect. The more I learned about it the more exhilarated and intense I became and yet at the same time the more scared and paranoid. I started slow and built up, first I had everything shut down after 30 seconds gradually increasing the time to an hour. I measured all of my vitals both before and afterward and they never showed any significant difference, if anything they were a little closer to ideal for a relaxed seated person. I thought about buying an EEG but after looking over the Specs I realized it wasn't precise enough and I sure couldn't afford to spend a couple Million on an MRI suite though I could see the advantages of using the system with an MRI it'd allow a very precise mapping of the brain and in conjunction with the cap would allow very precise control. I knew of a half a dozen firms that would instantly fund me just from the tape and my reputation. Having a firm as a partner would basically let the cat out of the bag, from what I knew now I wasn't at all sure if I wanted anybody to know about it. At times I was tempted to make myself forget I had ever discovered the effect. From my research and experiments I knew I could do that. While in a trance state any suggestion took on the power of a command, even post trance orders were carried out to the letter. I was very thankful that during my "Trance" a telemarketer hadn't called and told me I couldn't live without something, it would have become true. I knew I had come as far as I could alone, I needed an assistant and I knew the perfect one.