Chapter 20
Murphy and Summa sat in a booth at a bar. The TVs drowned out their conversation. Summa had to tell Murphy what he’d done and to let her know that Long wanted to take the invention from Stone.
Murphy was aghast at the news.
“You tried to steal a copy of the software? And you stored it on that lady’s property? What were you thinking? I would have had you arrested. I think the thousand dollars was meant as a slap in the face. He showed you three zeros to remind you that it would have been nine or ten. You’re a stupid jerk. Our only choice now is to take control of the invention before Stone sells it. Too bad all of us don’t see eye to eye on this. There’s far too much scheming going on now. When we started out, we had a common goal: the betterment of the human condition by understanding what makes us tick, not through psychoanalysis but by reading thoughts and sharing them with the person whose thoughts are being read,” Murphy said.
“I did what Long asked me to do, and I admit that getting caught was because of my stupidity. I believe what Stone intends to do, sell it, is wrong. You do, too, so don’t get high and mighty on me. But you know something? We can still make scads of money if we take the invention away from Stone and make sure the invention is used for good purposes. Because yes, after seeing a demonstration of the power of the invention, I’m less certain that any thought-reading done with it will be anything other than intrusive, except for ‘locked-in’ people and people with epilepsy. Maybe what we do can is supplement both psychoanalysis and drugs given to patients based on their symptoms in order to help people have healthier minds, but I think that it’s more likely that the invention will ultimately be used for nefarious purposes if Stone sells it,” answered Summa.
“What you deem as nefarious others may rationalize as necessary, but I understand what you mean, and I agree. I understand now that we cannot sell our product to anyone, in spite of the fact that we have a contract that says we will. We must have control of its power at all costs,” Murphy replied.
“Nice thought, but how do we accomplish that? The client who contacted Long yesterday won’t react well if his order is cancelled. He’ll sue and may threaten us physically. Long has vetted him, and he knows that while he has the finances, he also has the temperament to be vindictive,” answered Summa.
They spent the next few minutes in silent thought when Summa had an idea.
“What if we meet him without Long being with us and tell him that he has to let us use the product on him before he acquires it. We will ask him how he intends to use it and we’ll see how his thoughts compare to what he says. We won’t tell him what we will ask so he can’t prepare his thoughts.”
Murphy nodded agreement.
“Do you believe that people can prepare how they will think, like some do in anticipation of taking a polygraph, hoping to fool it?”
“If what you are asking is, can the brain be trained by conscious thoughts to say something untrue while at the same time suppressing the truth in such a way that our invention cannot discern the truth? I have no idea. I hope not. I don’t think any of us pondered the full scope of what it means to read people’s thoughts. We took on the challenge of doing it, and for a good cause, helping ‘locked-in’ people. We didn’t take on the challenge of determining if we were right to do it on any other level. I think we can be criticized for that. However, and I’m not trying to rationalize what we’ve done, if we didn’t do it, someone else would have. And for all we know, perhaps someone has. I doubt that any of our competitors spent more time than we have on determining the moral, ethical, and legal issues of this. The fact that we have now thought of some of these issues and won’t sell our product to just anyone is a hopeful sign. Let’s meet with the client before Long does and before Stone stumbles on to what we’re doing,” said Summa.
Stone was more competitive than most people, including all of the people who worked for him. That’s not to say that he was a better candidate for heart disease than most type A personalities, because he was not prone to anger or hostility. Nor did he suffer from high blood pressure, tend to overreact, or lack pride in his work. Perhaps it was because he tended to look at life through the eyes of a child, accepting and challenging things without his life’s experiences, his education, or his biased influencing him. But he always had a sense of urgency and disliked delays. It was his willingness to accept a challenge and embrace it with a passion that helped to propel his success. He had to be on the team that invented the process to read people’s thoughts. Once that work was started, he had to be on the team that invented the tool, the eyeglasses and software, which displayed the intercepted thoughts as words.
The work on both was done, the objective reached. The inventions were ready to be used. But the team was in discord. Stone urgently wanted to keep as proprietary the software the inventions used, and make trillions of dollars when it was sold to the highest bidder. He knew that someone wanted to do something with it other than make trillions; specifically who and what, he wasn’t sure. Maybe whomever it was wanted to keep the invention all to themselves and rule the world, or maybe they wanted to take a more altruistic approach and keep some of the source code as proprietary and the rest as open. Obscene amounts of money would still be made, but not as much. Stone felt that approach was misguided. Other companies and governments were working feverishly to create thought-reading software and were likely close to finishing. What if someone was only a few weeks away from rolling out a product similar to the product his teams created? Then Stone’s group profit would be brought down to a comprehensible number of hundreds of billions. Stone wanted to strike now before the opportunity passed.
How had it come to this, in such a short time? That was a question he didn’t dwell on for long, much as he hadn’t considered for any length of time the nuances of what reading people’s thoughts would encompass.
Stone estimated that he had less than a week to take full control of the computer, eyeglasses, and the eyeglass software. Any longer than that and he would be the loser to the competition he never met, but knew was out there.