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Chapter 50 - Planning Changes and Changes in Plans

End of December

On Monday, Wilson and Nadine rented a car and went off to their first meeting; today it was to the State Department to see Evan Masters, who was now an under secretary. When Wilson had told him that he’d be in the D.C. area during the holiday period, Masters asked if he and Nadine could meet with a number of cultural specialists at the agency to answer a number of questions about life in Haiti. And the Haitian ambassador to the U.S. would be there too; he wanted to meet Wilson and Nadine.

In late afternoon on Monday, Tamara, who was staying with Peter’s family during the holiday break, called Nadine to find out about her day but the call went to voice mail. Fifteen minutes later, Nadine called her back and they spoke for a while.

Peter came in after doing an errand for his mother as Tamara was finishing up her phone conversation. She disconnected and turned to Peter with a big smile.

“That was Mom. She’s at Westphalia just now—they offered her that anthropology position!”

Peter hugged her. “Wow, and she accepted, right?” Tamara nodded, smiling. “However did she wind up at Westphalia?”

“So Mom and Dad were at the State Department for a two-hour meet-and-greet and lunch that Mr Masters had set up. He and Dad had hit it off when they first met and Dad kept in touch with him—actually, Masters did a lot for my family. Anyway, before they left D.C. after lunch with Masters, Dad decided to do a little exploring and they were driving around south of the Capitol when Mom got a call from Greta. She was at their council meeting and wanted to ask Mom some questions. While they were talking, Greta found out that they were driving around in D.C. and told them that they could get to the campus in about a half hour.

“So they drove over there and Mom met with a few of the council people who had stayed to meet her. Greta told her that this definitely wasn’t the normal recruitment procedure, but she hadn’t found any suitable candidates after six months of searching, even in Europe. She had read Mom’s dissertation and thought it was excellent work and that Mom was a perfect fit. The other council members also gave Mom their approval. Greta brought Mom to her department and took her around, introducing her to a number of faculty members who were there. Greta told Mom that the last step would be approval from the Anthropology faculty but, she said, that step would be a formality; the department members were letting the choice for the position be Greta’s and the council’s, since the position was chiefly for the Institute.”

“Cool. So they’re coming back now?” Peter asked.

“Uh huh. They’re stopping at the hotel first. They know to come here for dinner,” Tamara said. “Oh, and tomorrow, I heard that Dad’s lunch with the Defense guys got another person added. The Navy corpsman who served with Dad in the Marines works at Walter Reed now and Dad’s kept in touch with him by email ever since they reconnected on the hospital ship.”

When dinnertime arrived, so did the Alexanders and both sets of grandparents. Greta wanted to talk to Nadine about the Westphalia offer, and the Richardsons wanted to congratulate Nadine. After dinner, Greta told Nadine that she had spoken to both the university provost and president about Nadine’s withheld degree.

“I told them that their doing that to you was mean-spirited and academically dishonest. If you were unable to register and the only step left for you to complete the degree was your defense, which is a token formality anyway—the copy of the dissertation had the approval signatures of your committee members—then they should have found a way to accommodate you. So Westphalia University will contact Universidad de San Juan and make certain that they award your degree. I know that you are aware that President Gerston is to be Columbia Institute’s president when he leaves office. If the university has any problems with them, Gerston can get their attention,” Greta chuckled. “So I’ll be in close touch with you when you return home. We can give you two months to get your personal stuff in order and then we’d want you here. Can you do that?”

“I’ll make it work,” Nadine answered.

“Nadine’s biggest issue is letting her congregation know she’s leaving and closing her temple,” Wilson said. “All the rest I can handle if it takes longer than two months. We’ll need to look for a place here, too, but I’m not too concerned about that. And I can look for a job here when we have a place to stay.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you when I offered the job to Nadine, Wilson,” Greta said. “I’ve also been looking around to see about tradesman’s jobs and asked in the Facilities department if they know of any positions for mechanical tradesmen and...”

Scott had popped his head into the room. “I’m letting everyone know that dessert and coffee’s ready, but what’s that about mechanical trades jobs?”

“Greta was talking about looking for possible mechanic’s jobs,” Wilson told him. “I take care of the heavy equipment, stationary or mobile, for Miami-Dade. Any other mechanicals too, in fact.”

Scott came into the room. “That’s right, we were so focused on Nadine that we didn’t think of your job, Wilson. You’re an auto mechanic, then, right?”

“Actually more of a general mechanic. I repair anything with any kind of motor or engine, pretty much anything mechanical. I’ve even worked on the county’s watercraft and birds—ah, rotary-wing craft, but for those, the FAA-licensed mechanics need to supervise my work. But an engine is an engine and a tranny is a tranny. I also work on generators, refrigeration systems, and vacuum pumps—anything that has moving parts, actually. Ah, sorry for all the detail. I’m not trying to brag.”

“So I have a thought,” Scott mused. “A good mechanic can get a job easily around here, but you’ve got really diversified experience. You’d probably be bored with working in an auto shop. Out at the APL, we have a bunch of mechanics but they’re all really specialized. I wonder if the facilities chief would consider looking at you to bring on board. The APL has a huge amount of facility-associated mechanical systems plus all of the mechanical systems we build for the research projects. Have you done any electrical or electronic work?”

“Oh sure. In vehicles, all the time. Much of the repair work needed on modern vehicles is on the vehicle electronics, and in modern tractor rigs, there’s miles of wiring. Police vehicles, fire equipment, ambulances, they have all kinds of electronics. The county has three heavy-rescue rigs and I’ve worked on them. Reefer trailers, the refrigeration controls are complicated. I can read schematics and use electronic test equipment—well, not the stuff like Tamara used in the medical school, but I’ve been known to use a frequency analyzer a time or two to troubleshoot a system.”

“Sounds good, Wilson,” Scott said. “How about you put a resume together and get it to me? I can’t promise anything, but with Greta and me, we’ll look at opportunities. Oh, and Claire can see if there’s anything at the Naval Academy. As a vet, you’d have a preferred shot at any opening there.”

They gathered at the dining room table again for dessert and told the others what had been discussed. Then Werner looked at Wilson and Nadine with a smile.

“It looks like the whole family here has jumped on the ‘help the Alexandres’ bandwagon, so let me put an oar into the stew, to mix some metaphors pretty badly,” he remarked and the others laughed. “I may be in commercial real estate, but I ‘know people,’” he made finger-quotes. “Nadine, just let me know what you’re looking for in a new home. You can let Wilson give suggestions, but we all know that the final choice is yours.”

Everyone laughed and Wilson said, “How true.”

“I’ll get my account executives on it—give ‘em a challenge, in fact, to find good residential properties with a good deal. And I know people from some national chains who can help you with your Miami property, too. That way you both can concentrate on the stuff that only you two can do. Sound good?”

Wilson got up and went over to shake Werner’s hand.

“Many thanks,” Wilson told him. “Your family’s been wonderful to us.”

Nadine hugged him and went to Greta to hug her.

She whispered in Greta’s ear, “...and thanks for making it so I’ll get to see Tamara more. We’ve been so close while she grew up and I miss her closeness.”

Greta nodded. “I’m glad it worked out.”

~~~~

The following day, the Alexandres and Peter drove to Arlington. They were meeting a group put together by Secretary O’Rourke for lunch at a steakhouse a short distance away from the Pentagon. The group was supposed to be made up of some people who wanted to meet the Alexandres.

It turned out to be several families, and the group had been put in a private dining room. O’Rourke was there with his wife, but the big surprise was that Master Chief Gilbert Bronson was there too, with his family. There also were several of Wilson’s old unit members; a few had retired to the D.C. area and several were still on active duty, well advanced in rank, and now assigned to staff jobs in the Pentagon.

But it was Bronson who Wilson was most interested in. They had kept in touch by occasional email exchanges and Wilson knew that Bronson was now assigned to Walter Reed. He didn’t know what the assignment was, however, and was amazed to learn that his old comrade was now the command senior enlisted leader of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. He was at the head of the medical center’s administration, together with the center’s director and the chief of staff.

Bronson introduced Wilson to his family; Doris was a college freshman at the University of Virginia, the twins Iris and Ivy were high school juniors, and Jonas was in eighth grade.

Jonas greeted Wilson with big eyes. “Dad and Mom named me after you ‘cause you saved him,” he said. “So how come your name’s Wilson?”

“Ah, there’s a story there, Jonas. Your dad only knew me by my middle name—Jonas. I did a kinda bad thing; I falsified my age to get into the Corps. See, my mom passed away while I was still a minor and I had no dad, so the state was talking about putting me with foster parents. I didn’t want that. But I always wanted to be a Marine, so I got some fake ID and was able to get signed up. That’s something you should never do, but I did it all for good reasons, see?”

“Yeah, okay. And Dad said you got the Medal of Honor for when you saved him.”

Bronson came over and put his hand on Jonas’ shoulder.

“Son, he saved more than just me back then. He personally saved two Marines from sure death, saved about 35 more Marines in his platoon by leading the defense of our position, and saved hundreds of Afghan civilians and U.N. personnel in the town we were guarding. Wilson’s a true hero.”

Wilson was blushing as Nadine took his arm. “He also helped Haiti by getting rid of a political threat,” she told Bronson.

“Yes, I know about that, too,” Bronson answered. “Good man.”

Wilson, with Nadine in tow, went on to talk to his other unit members and their wives, making this an emotional reunion, while Tamara and Peter were regaling Bronson’s kids with tales about their high school and college life. Doris wanted to study medicine; the twins were completely undecided, and Jonas wanted to follow his father in a career in the Navy. But after meeting Wilson, he admitted that possibly the Marines would be okay too.

They spent a few hours at the restaurant, socializing after their lunch, and then people began to leave. Wilson now had a number of additional contacts from the area.

The Alexandres spent a quiet New Year’s Eve with the Winsbergs and the kids and then left for the airport the next day. They would have a busy month or two packing and closing out their Miami affairs. Nadine was still considering whether to continue her part-time manbo ministry after they moved.

Applied Physics Laboratory, North Laurel, Maryland: early January

During the week after the new year began, Tamara’s new employees, an electrical engineer named Betty Miskin and an engineering tech named Saul Freeberg, had joined the research group in Emma’s lab and were assisting the techs in Emma’s lab in working on collecting the magnet coil data that Emma had requested. Fox was showing the new people the other projects which Tamara had in progress. Tamara herself was completing the final checks on her high-resolution MRI coil. Her experiments on the volunteer subjects would begin in three weeks. It was the intersession period, so she was spending all her time at Emma’s APL lab, which the APL administration had enlarged somewhat by shuffling room assignments, giving her additional space. Tamara was talking to Fox when Davy Foster, the lab’s MRI tech, stopped by the lab at the beginning of the second intersession week.

“The system’s all calibrated for using your new coil,” he told her. “But the T1-weighted and T2-weighted scans that were set with the phantom are kinda approximate—I can see that the resolution is way, way up but there’s no blood flow or cellular structure in the phantom.”

“Yeah, okay, but can you still use the standard TR and TE times for the T1 and T2 scans? And did you try the Flair sequence?”

“Oh sure. That gives the highest contrast—but I think you’ll need to limit Flair with your coil. The very high contrast might drop out fine detail.”

“Hmm, good point. I’m thinking we need to do a few runs with an actual brain, not a phantom brain,” Tamara said.

“Hey, I’m not volunteering,” Fox laughed. “What’s all the jargon, anyway? Those letters.”

“They’re just shorthand for the MRI pulse sequences,” Tamara said. “You know tissues have different densities and amounts of free water and that means different free hydrogen nuclei concentrations, the MRI-visible ones, that is—it’s called the proton density. The T1 and T2 sequences give us the ability to look at structures within each tissue slice where greater and lesser dense tissues are shown in the image with different contrast. So we get the T1-weighted images by using short TE and TR times. TE is the ‘time to echo,’ the time between when the RF pulse is produced and when the coil receives the echoed signal, and TR is ‘repetition time’; it’s the amount of time between each pulse sequence delivered to the same tissue slice.

“Now, the T1 and T2 relaxation rates are related to the amount of water in particular tissues. The T1-weighted images highlight the returned proton signals from fatty tissues of the body while the T2 images show the proton signals from both fatty and water-based body tissues. And finally, think of the ‘Flair’ sequence as a super-long T2 one that increases the T2-image contrast. The bright areas on the images that the computer generates represent strong signals. Enough?”

Fox nodded, grinning. “I think I got it. X-ray images are bright for dense tissue like bone and MRI images are bright for high levels of returned RF signals.”

“Exactly. So the operator sets the signal timing and capture details based on the kind of study. That’s all stored in the machine program which runs it automatically. The system needs to be tuned for the pulse generator and signal receiver properties and that’s what Davy was doing. Then the chosen settings can be stored. This is a research unit, not like one you’d see in a hospital, so all the functions are individually adjustable. So Davy, we need to get a human guinea pig?”

“Yeah. For maybe two hours. That’s enough time for the fine tuning.”

“Okay, I’ve spent a ton of time as an MRI subject,” Tamara told him. “We don’t need contrast, I’m assuming.”

“Correct. We don’t do that here at the APL, typically, even though they have those new non-toxic fMRI agents based on calcium, manganese, and iron.”

“Fine, I’ll need to call the Research and Exploratory Development office and clear my being a phantom stand-in with them. Emma stressed my following the lab’s rules, after all.”

She contacted the office and wound up speaking to the department head, who gave her permission to do the final calibration.

The following day, Tamara went to the building where the MRI unit was located and Emma went along. She was interested in seeing how the external coil was used in an actual fMRI study.

Tamara explained to her, “You know that the basis of fMRI, when it was first developed, was that MRI could detect the diffusion of the hydrogen nuclei from the water in the brain from blood vessels to cells and also the movement of blood in vessels in the brain.”

Emma nodded.

“So early on, an effect was noticed with deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood, there was a drop in the T2 signal, both natural and effective—you know what that is?”

“Yep. The T2 and T2✱ signals. Got those basics when I designed the magnet. Go ahead.”

“Good. So that drop is known as the ‘BOLD effect,’ for blood oxygenation level-dependent. The BOLD effect is weird and completely counterintuitive. When neural activity increases in a part of the brain, not only does the blood flow to that region increase, but also the blood flowing to that area becomes more highly oxygenated than blood moving to other areas. Now, deoxygenated hemoglobin is paramagnetic; it’s weakly attracted to magnetic fields. And oxygenated hemoglobin is the opposite, a magnetic field has a slight repulsive effect—that’s diamagnetism—and in this case, it makes the MRI signal slightly stronger. That diamagnetism is what makes fMRI work. We see the actual structures which are using the oxygen, which means their activity’s increased. And knowing what the subject is doing, allows us to link physical or mental actions with specific parts of the brain.”

Emma chuckled. “Lecture mode off?”

Tamara blushed. “You do that too, Emma!”

“So true. And you’re set for the first volunteers in two weeks, then?”

“Uh huh. But the test today should show the coil’s best spatial resolution. The current fMRI best, with a 3 tesla magnet, is approximately one to two millimeters. I think we can get down to maybe ten to twenty micrometers and that’s about the size of a nerve cell body. Theoretically, we might even be able to see activity at the synaptic clefts between neurons in the brain and that’s a thousandfold smaller, 20 to 30 nanometers. In reality, though, with the molecular noise at those dimensions, I’d expect just to see clusters of synapses being activated.”

Foster ran through the full sequence of scans that Tamara’s protocol had planned, with her using the scent tests to examine the MRI’s sensitivity in the olfactory tract. Close to the end of the study, and during the final sequence with the grape scent, Tamara’s mind went off-task as she suddenly got one of her inspirations.

Hey, I can try firing up my limbic system and see what it does! Cool!

There was a loud clang as the MRI shut down and a red light began flashing over the control room window. The room’s intercom crackled to life.

“What the fuck was that, Tamara?” Foster shouted and Tamara could hear in the background, “What the bloody hell...” from Emma.

Tamara laughed, “Shit. Sorry. Brain fart...”

Foster retorted, “If that had been a fart, it would have blown the side of the building out. It looked like your brain just exploded then!”

“Okay. I’ll tell you after. It’s recorded?”

“Damn straight it is,” he answered.

“Save it. I’m going off-script now, so please don’t hit the fire alarm,” she giggled. “Set up that last scan sequence again.”

“Roger, I think. Let me check the circuits to be sure nothing got blown... Damn, the signal amp setting was only at 15 percent and it still overloaded... good thing we’ve got the high-speed amp overload protection... okay, all good. Starting in ten seconds, so watch the countdown clock.”

This time, instead of using the scent stimulus at the appropriate time in the scan, she collected a big cloud of light green taste shot with silver streaks—calming and healing thoughts—and “pushed” it toward the control room. Fifteen seconds later, the red light over the control room window came on again, indicating another unprogramed shutdown. Once again, Foster came on the intercom.

“Okay, what did you do to overload the computer? It couldn’t handle the amount of data coming in and shut the sequence down.”

“Well, that tells me that we could use a faster data system. We’ve got what, sixteen channels and a data acquisition rate of 100 megabytes a second?” Tamara asked.

“Yeah. That was fine till you blew it up.”

“Okay, let me get out of this thing and I’ll come look.”

Tamara went into the control room where Foster and Emma were looking at the scans. Emma looked up from the screen.

“Davy put up a scan using the old coil and one from the new one before you did the overload,” she said. “Even to my entirely untrained eye, the resolution improvement is huge.”

“Yeah, look at this,” Foster said as he zoomed in on the second image. And zoomed further, and still further. “The computer is compensating as we zoom in and filling in the skipped data, which the Fourier transform ... um, averages out, you could say, when we display the overall image. This looks amazing. The radiologists will love this. We couldn’t see this detail in the phantom ‘cause that had nothing but gross structures for density calibrations. So what the hell happened here, Tamara?” he asked as he switched to the last set of scans.

Tamara looked at the image; it was the overall image from her brain, and the entire scan was lit up.

“Um, I see some detail in the white,” she said. “Did you zoom it at all?”

“No—isn’t that, like, overexposed?” Foster asked.

“I think it’s a mathematical artefact of how the transform works, trying to display average intensities over wider areas,” Tamara said. “I saw that happen with regular MRI images when contrast was used and the program setting was a bit off. The individual voxels should still have their original values.”

“I’m showing my ignorance here,” Emma said. “So what’s a voxel?”

“A voxel in MRI is analogous to the pixel in a two-dimensional picture,” Foster told her. “The size of the voxel is the spatial resolution of a single element of the image. It’s a three-dimensional chunk from the image which is given a single value based on the intensity of the signal for that chunk. Tamara’s right, overexposure is caused by light spilling over to adjacent pixels or washing out the photosensitive granules in film. Tamara, how sensitive to cross-talk are your receiver coils?”

“Very little, especially how they’re activated,” she answered.

Foster had changed the view to the last scan, the one where Tamara had “pushed” the calming taste, and was zooming in the view. Very quickly they could see definite structures begin to appear, and as Foster advanced the zoom level, he began to point out the areas that showed the intense activity.

“I’m no radiologist,” he said, “but this looks like... um, nothing like I’ve ever seen before. Look at those white lines in the olfactory tract. They go from these tiny patches along both sides of the olfactory bulb, and other lines radiate from there going toward the hypothalamus-thalamus area.”

He zoomed out a bit and panned over to the midbrain and zoomed in.

“More of those threads are leading out to the parietal lobe of the neocortex...” he panned again, “and there are more of those bright patches along the sides of a whole lot of sulci there—all lined up in rows. I’ve never heard of structures like I’m seeing here. Are you sure you’re human?” he laughed.

Tamara laughed too, and said, “Guaranteed 100 percent. I’ll bet this hasn’t been seen before ‘cause the resolution is so high. Can the computer display a scale of the resolved area?”

“Oh. Sure it can. Let me center on one of those patches. They’re... um ... about 100 micrometers wide and maybe 200 long.”

“Can you get a depth?”

“The bright area extends deep into the cortex. Several millimeters.”

“Ah... let’s see. That would be maybe 75 to 100 nerve cells of some kind per patch. How close can you zoom into a patch?” Tamara asked.

Foster worked on the keys a bit.

“I’m in quite a bit but the image is washed out. I see some faint structure but the signal is too strong here. But if I move just 500 micrometers away, the signal is gone. This resolution is unbelievable. What were you doing that ramped up the signal so much, anyway?”

“Okay, so, you know that this is covered by your NDA too—medical info from the study.”

“Sure. And the lab’s NDA too.”

Emma was watching the exchange with interest; she wondered how Tamara would handle this question. She had already linked the signal overload to Tamara’s ability to influence emotions.

“All right,” Tamara was saying. “When I was a kid and had to have surgery, my parents were told that I have a strong cerebral blood flow ‘cause the anesthetic they used was cleared almost immediately after it was stopped. And I learned a trick in meditation—it’s to isolate a body part by concentrating on it. So if I concentrate on thinking, that ups the blood flow more. Did you look closely at the first scan you had up when I came in? I saw how my whole brain looked lighter than the scan you were comparing it to.”

“Yeah, I did see that. I figured it was just a contrast setting. Let me look.”

Foster reset the view and loaded the other images. Then he played with the contrast settings.

“Damn, you’re right, Tamara. That’s really a higher blood flow.” He laughed. “No wonder you’re so smart!”

The others laughed, and Tamara said, “Let’s let our radiologist, Dr Marcos, look at these scans. See what he makes of them. Is the data on the secure server?”

“Yeah. But I’m gonna need to reduce the file sizes—downloading the images over the internet will be a chore otherwise. The routines they use for the medical MRIs are okay, especially the ones based on compressed sensing, but I’m gonna try a couple others I found. They work like the data compression methods used for digital imaging, like one called the portable network graphics routine. It’s a lossless compression method. If you use digital images, that’s called a PNG file.”

“Will doing that interfere with Marcos accessing the images?”

“Nope. The cyber group’s got someone assigned to work on that already. It’s part of the lab’s communications mission area—data compression,” Foster said.

Tamara helped put the equipment they used away and she left with Emma to return to Emma’s lab.

“Now that was fascinating,” Emma said. “And your coils worked just about the way you planned, didn’t they.”

“I’m pleased too,” Tamara answered. “They did.”

Emma laughed. “So tell me... You lit up the real-time scans twice. They looked entirely different to the first several, even to this untrained eye. The first time, your forebrain went all white and like a bolt of lightning, the white area streaked over the top... is that the cortex?... and then slowly faded. You called it a ‘brain fart,’ but I reckon that it was your intuition machine in action, innit?”

“Yep. Got a good idea then.”

“So I’m chuffed to have the distinct honor of being one of the first people to witness a true ‘brainstorm.’ In high resolution and full contrast, even, to be sure.”

“Hey, that’s awesome. I gotta remember that,” Tamara laughed. “But I did see a bunch of artefacts at the high-resolution views and those were obviously caused by noise. I’ll need to see if that can be filtered by programming or if it needs some circuit tweaking.”

Emma nodded. “How much time will that need, and will it delay the rest of the project?”

“It won’t delay anything, but to answer the first part, I’ll need to look at the data files first. But, Emma, did you see those patches that lit up? That shows a new brain functionality. The sites are too small and widely distributed so they’ve never showed up in medical MRIs. And I can’t be the only person who has those structures. Why are they at the brain’s surface, too? And lined up like that... oh jeez...”

Emma chuckled. “What thought did your incredible intuition prompt now?”

“Lined up like an antenna... the antennas in RFID chips have a similar pattern. I wonder if those nerve cell patches have an electromagnetic output? EEGs detect the brain’s electrical activity. Beauford said my EEGs showed a very high activity... Emma, I need to get an EEG to work with.”

“Oh dear, I’ll need to...”

“No, wait. Maybe my old med school hospital still has the one that they surplussed. Tim’s a pack rat; he never throws old stuff away. I’ll ask him. If he has it, we could get it for nothing. I know it was, um, the hospital called it ‘deaccessioned’ so it’s not in the inventory anymore. I’ll call him.”

When they got back to Emma’s lab, Tamara called Tim and got his voice mail. She left a message for him to call back when he was free. Then, turning to Emma, she asked to meet with her in the office. Emma looked at her quizzically, but led her in and they sat.

“So what’s up now?” Emma asked.

Tamara dug into her ever-present backpack and brought out a sheaf of papers and Emma recognized that some of them were the microphotographs that Tamara had taken of the first coil chip she had tested, the one with the coil alignment distortion.

“A few days ago, I was doing some additional calcs on the coils and had taken these papers out of my file for reference,” Tamara began. “Then I noticed something that I had missed before. This photo shows the view zoomed in on coil one, and the ‘scope light is illuminating the chip there.” She pointed out the feature to Emma. “But look here, at coil two. See the light there? It’s in shadow from the ‘scope light, yet it’s lit up from the inside somehow.”

Emma looked at the photo and then up at Tamara. “Could it be reflections from the room somehow?”

“No, I had the area dark to get better photo contrast. That made this ‘ghost light’ show up better, actually. So here’s the latest. Just before we did that MRI experiment earlier, my engineer Betty gave me these photos.” She laid them out. “We got the original coil chips out and ran tests shining light into just one and got nothing. But then I told Betty to try applying a bit of power to the circuit, and look.”

The photo showed a bright spot in the center of the unlit coil.

“Here it is with a red filter on the source.”

Now the photo had a red spot where the white one was.

Tamara continued, “I told her to get some other original coil chips out and try them to see if the effect is characteristic of the coils and it turned out it wasn’t. So something else was happening. Then I got...”

Emma interrupted, laughing, “One of your famous insights, I’m sure.”

Tamara shot a pouting look at her and went on, “I theorized that those two original coils had gotten somehow linked, kinda like a form of quantum entanglement, but at a macro scale.”

Emma nodded and said, “You can see the implications of that insight here, can’t you.” Tamara grinned at her and nodded to go ahead. “Einstein, you know I love to quote him, said something like ‘Measurement of one subatomic particle can instantaneously affect the measurement of some other particle, no matter how much distance separates them.’ In writing about this counterintuitive idea in physics, he made the famous statement, complaining, ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ He also used the phrase ‘Spooky action at a distance,’ but that was a general comment about observations of quantum states, not specifically about quantum entanglement, but people eventually began to link those comments to his thoughts about entanglement. So what did you do to test your theory?”

“That’s what Betty gave me earlier, the results of those experiments. I figured that when the two original coils interacted and pushed each other away when they were energized, it somehow linked or entangled them. So I asked her to take two separated coil circuits and energize them while they were in very close proximity—of course while allowing for their violent repulsion. Here are photos of the light testing on those coils.”

She showed Emma the photos; the center of the unilluminated coil was glowing the same color as the source coil.

“The coils need some power, but use only a tiny amount to do this. Betty took the second coil to the next room and then to the next building and the light intensity in the second coil was unchanged. These pages show the results of applying RF or other electromagnetic energy to the first coil and it can be detected at the second one. But there was a bit of a change in the received signal—instead of any attenuation, the energy out exceeded the energy in by a certain percentage.”

Emma sighed. “Once again, you’ve staggered me, Tamara. This discovery is as revolutionary—no, even more—than your others. This discovery implies that travel of information at speeds faster than light is possible.”

“Um, not really. It doesn’t violate the principle that light-speed can’t be exceeded. Remember, the coils appear to open a portal into another... um ... space or universe or dimension or whatever. I’m guessing that the coils, when entangled, somehow warp that interdimensional space so that they are physically close. I plan to try to explain what happens mathematically. But meanwhile, I’ve got Betty looking into trying to scale this up and I’m thinking that this could be a way of achieving wireless power transmission at distances, especially since there appears to be a power gain. It would be nice to be able to exploit that.”

Emma was grinning broadly. “Don’t neglect highly secure communications. A pair of linked coils would be an impossible communication method to break into.”

“Yep. That’s in my development notes too, Emma. I thought of a bunch of applications and wrote them down. They’ll become my patent claims.”

“I taught you all too well,” Emma sighed and grinned. “Are you going to look into removing those signal artifacts we saw in the MRI scans now?”

“Right. I’m getting on that right now.”

Tamara went back to her corner of the lab where she had her desk and logged into the secure server used for storing the MRI data. She opened the image file containing the artifacts she had seen. After examining the data and looking at the output of the surrounding coils, she realized that the noise was caused by incomplete hysteresis damping in the coils’ signal receiving section. That kind of noise could be removed by the signal processing software, so she sent a message off to the MRI programming support person with the details. While she was doing that, Tim called her back.

“Hi there, Tim,” she answered.

“Hi yourself, Tamara. What’s up? Last you told me, you were about to start on your big project. Still on schedule?”

“Oh, sure. The tests with the phantom worked and the signal levels are all set but we had no idea if the spatial resolution was what the numbers had suggested, so I had them do a series on me.”

“And? You sound happy so I’m guessing it’s good news.”

“The best news. The resolution is a three-order-of-magnitude improvement over the best 3-tesla equipment. I can’t wait to see what it would be with a 7-tesla machine. They’re thinking of making an 11 or 12-tesla MRI here, like the 11.7 one at the NIH in Bethesda, but that would be two years. There’s a lot of concern with the health effects of the 7-tesla system, so until its safety profile is better known, there won’t be any work on a stronger magnet. So anyway, the images we got are excellent.”

“That’s great, girl, but it’s not why you called, right?”

“You know me too well. We saw detail of fine structures in my images and those structures showed activity in the fMRI. But we don’t know what kind of activity, so I thought that trying an EEG would show something. Do you still have that decommissioned one I used to play with?”

“Still have that one.”

“Nice. Would it be possible to send it to the Johns Hopkins Physics Department? Like do an official transfer or donation?”

“That should be easy; that equipment isn’t on our inventory anymore. The thing’s got several dead channels so it can’t be used clinically and, although you fixed those channels by cobbling up bypass circuits, the machine isn’t FDA compliant anymore. I’ll check it out and let you know. To add to that deal, the med school Neurology Department has an excessed EEG electrode head-cap assembly. They replaced it with a wireless self-contained unit. It’s a bit shopworn but it has many more electrode positions than the clinical ones use, the 10-20 layout.”

“Thanks, Tim.” She disconnected.

Now I need to find a neurologist to look at the EEG tracings. This is getting complicated, she thought.

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