Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment - By Kyle Mills Page 0,11
wildly imperfect facsimile of what had been lost. Instead, it was an order-of-magnitude improvement over what evolution had spent millions of years creating. In the end, his great accomplishment hadn’t been helping impaired people to hear. It had been demonstrating that we were entering a world where Mother Nature could be beaten at her own game.
This step, though, was in no way hesitant. Dresner was throwing humanity headlong into what could be the next phase of its existence. Where would it go? Where would it stop? Hell, where should it stop?
Smith looked over at Janine, but she was completely immersed in her iPhone—a device that had seemed so sophisticated a few minutes ago but now seemed a little like a steam-powered stone tablet.
Having said that, a few critical questions needed to be answered. First, did it really work? Innovative technology was great but if it was hard to use or impractical, it tended to fade pretty quickly. Touchscreens, headsets, and standard voice interfaces already worked pretty well.
The second was about the body modifications. He’d spent his life trying not to be perforated and, with the exception of a few stray bullets and a knife or two, had been fairly successful. Would average people want to have bolts screwed into their skulls for the privilege of getting rid of their smartphones?
He glanced at Janine again, noting the diamond nose stud and the colorful tattoo on her upper arm. There was his answer. The generation after his seemed to look at body modification with the same trepidation he felt when changing his shirt.
The sound of thumbs on plastic died down and Dresner began pacing again, the screen behind him following along as though it were connected to cameras embedded in his retinas. “As all of you know, a piece of hardware is only as useful as the software available for it. In the end, the Merge is just a platform. It’s what we’re putting on that platform that really interests me. Of course, we have all the basic apps you’d expect: phone, email, social networking, GPS, and the like. But we’ve also created applications for the financial services industry and politics—two areas that are critical to society and I think everyone agrees need help.”
“Oh, God,” Janine mumbled, a look of horror overcoming her youthful features. “He may have invented the coolest technology since the printing press and he’s going Boy Scout on us.”
Dresner seemed to read her mind. “But don’t worry. We’ve done some fun stuff too.”
On screen, the doors of the convention center burst open and a horde of blood-drenched vampires rushed in. It was realistic enough to elicit more than a few screams from the audience as they spun in their chairs to take in the empty room behind them. When they turned back to Dresner, he was holding his hand like a gun, happily picking off the ghouls as they charged up the aisle.
“No way!” Janine said, attacking her Twitter account again. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I once saw George Clooney in a Speedo.”
The monsters faded and Dresner looked out over the slightly ruffled crowd. “The strange truth is that the main idea here wasn’t the hardware—I just needed something to run the search engine I had in my head.” He paused for a moment, seeming to ponder his next words. “The problem with the Internet—and the world in general—isn’t the availability of information, it’s that there’s too much information. And most of it’s nonsense. But what if we had a way of instantly vetting the quality of what we’re taking in? And I’m not just talking about things we look up on the ’net, I’m talking about everything around us.”
He motioned to Bob Stamen again. “Could you stand up one more time?”
He did, if a bit reluctantly, and an icon on the screen that looked like a listing wedding cake activated. Suddenly Stamen was surrounded by a hazy green aura, and his name hovered over his head in subtle lettering.
“We’ve managed to crack the facial recognition problem by hijacking the brain’s built-in software for it. So you can see that my new search engine—LayerCake—knows who Bob is and gives him a nice green glow to tell me that he’s a good guy. Based on what, you’re probably asking. Well, based on everything available in the public record—Wikipedia, news articles, and so on. LayerCake goes through all those things, combines them to some extent with what it knows about my own personal