She whirled the children around, every one, Kit and Sarai and Mali and Aroon and Ying and Tada and Sunisa and Kwan and Arinya and all the rest, her smile so bright and fierce her face ached, her heart singing so loudly she was sure they could all hear it.

And they could, they could, just as she could hear the singing inside of them.

Then they went into the house, and there was laughter. So much laughter.

And joy, so much joy.

At long last, Samantha Cataranes was home.

The Science of Apex

Like Nexus and Crux before it, Apex is a work of fiction, but based as accurately as possible on real science.

In the afterwords to Nexus and Crux I described how scientists have directly interfaced to human and animal brains to accomplish such feats as: giving paralyzed men and women the ability to move robot limbs by thought; restoring vision to a blind man by inputing electrical signals into the visual cortex of his brain; using an fMRI brain scanner to ‘read’ what a person is seeing and reconstruct it as a video; restoring damaged rat memories by a chip implanted in the hippocampus; being able to record and replay those memories any time later in the rat; boosting the pattern matching abilities of rhesus monkeys via an implant in the frontal cortex.

In the less than two years since Crux was released, science has continued to advance. In 2013, a pair of researchers at the University of Washington demonstrated that one human being could control part of another human being’s body via a non-invasive brain-computer interface. The two researchers, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, played a video game together, in a very peculiar way. Rajesh Rao, in one building on campus, could see the video game display, but had no controls. Andrea Stocco, in another building across the campus, had the controller (a fire button), but couldn’t see the display. When Professor Rao wanted to shoot, he would think about shooting, and an EEG cap on his skull would pick up his intent and transmit it across campus. There, a magnetic stimulator on Andrea Stocco’s head would send a pulse through part of Professor Stocco’s motor cortex, causing his finger to twitch and hit the fire button.

It’s a quite a long way from Nexus, but the same general principle applies.

How far are we from Nexus, really? I’m asked this question frequently. The prime obstacle is the hardware. To build something like Nexus one needs a way to interface with millions of neurons at once, and ideally to do so without requiring brain surery. And I don’t actually expect that we’ll see something like the Nexus nanites by 2040.

That said, various teams are starting to look at ways to move beyond current hardware.