Page 105 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

As Langdon and Katherine pushed through the revolving door into the RTD facility, they found themselves in a small antechamber—an immaculate glass cubicle with shoe racks, storage cubbies, and a series of hooks holding clean white jumpsuits.

In addition, there were two “air showers”—enclosed cubicles with high-velocity jets of filtered air to blow particles and contaminants off clothing and skin.

Like the narthex of a cathedral, Langdon mused. A room to purify the unclean…before they enter the sanctuary.

In this case, the sanctuary was apparently whatever lay beyond the glass wall directly in front of them, its entrance delineated by a second airtight revolving door rather than a Gothic arch.

Katherine was already pushing through the second door, and Langdon followed.

The halogen lights that blazed to life overhead were as bright as any Langdon had ever seen.

Their brilliance was further amplified by the room’s contents; nearly everything in this huge space was stark white—walls, floor, tables, chairs, work counters, even the plastic coverings on all the equipment.

“It’s a clean room,” Katherine said.

Row after row of countertops housed perfectly organized tools, along with electronic devices and machinery beneath plastic protective sheaths. The computer systems looked elaborate, but all the displays were dark.

Katherine walked into the center of the room while Langdon moved along a side wall, stopping to peer through a window into an adjoining space.

On the other side of the glass was some kind of biology lab—microscopes, flasks, petri dishes—much of it unpacked.

Against the rear wall—in its own glass isolation booth—stood a piece of equipment that Langdon had never seen.

The delicate-looking device consisted of hundreds of long glass vials that hung down vertically through a perforated platform.

Each appeared to be fed by its own ultrathin tube that descended from the upper body of the machine.

It reminded Langdon vaguely of a precision hydroponic drip system he had once seen at an indigo exhibition. Are they growing something in there?

“Over here,” Katherine said, standing beside a large contraption that was about three feet tall and looked like some kind of futuristic Rube Goldberg invention. Langdon headed over to her and examined the device.

“It’s a photolithograph,” she said.

Langdon sensed his knowledge of Greek was about to fail him. “So, it writes…on rocks…with light?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Provided the light is deep ultraviolet…and the rock is a silicon wafer.” She motioned to a stack of glossy metallic disks sitting beside the machine. “This lab has everything required to design and build custom computer chips.”

Computer chips? The notion seemed totally unrelated to human consciousness or to whatever Katherine might have written about in her manuscript. “Why would they be designing computer chips down here?”

“My best guess,” Katherine said, “is brain implants.”

The idea startled him, but he quickly made the connection. “The robotic brain surgeon…”

“Exactly. I think I was wrong when I guessed it was extracting brain samples. It seems pretty clear the robot is used for implanting brain chips.”

An uneasy silence settled in the bright room.

“Didn’t you say brain implants were basic surgery?” Langdon asked.

“ Epilepsy chips, yes. They’re tiny electric shock machines embedded in the skull. But an advanced implant would be more deeply placed and would definitely benefit from robotic surgery for implementation.”

Langdon thought about Sasha and felt a trace of dread. He wondered if she could have been implanted with a prototype chip—probably under the guise of an epilepsy procedure. She would have no idea what was really inside her head…or that Threshold even existed, for that matter.

“If Gessner lied,” Langdon said, “and the implant she put into Sasha was actually a more advanced, subcranial chip…”

“Then that implant could easily function as the RLS stim device to control Sasha’s epileptic seizures, and yet, at the same time…it could have countless other functions.”

“I hesitate to ask…like what?”

Katherine tapped her index finger on the top of the photolithograph machine, thinking.

“There’s no way to know without examining the chip,” she said.

“But it looks like they’re starting to build them here.

I’m guessing Sasha and that other male subject were probably their first patients…

an initial validation study and proof of concept before shifting this facility into high gear. ”

Langdon felt intensely disturbed by what he was hearing.

“Whatever they did,” Katherine said, “it must have gone well, because Threshold is clearly gearing up for a larger-scale operation.” She glanced around the room and frowned.

“Unfortunately, there’s nothing specifically incriminating here.

All it proves is the CIA appears to be developing some kind of brain implant—a project that would surprise absolutely nobody. ”

True, Langdon realized. Brain implants are the future.

Langdon had read enough science columns to know that implanted brain chips, despite conjuring images of cyborgs and science fiction, were already functional and startlingly advanced.

Companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink had been working since 2016 to develop what was known as an H2M interface—human to machine—a device that could convert data obtained from the brain into understandable binary code.

One of Musk’s first milestones had been to implant a monkey with a Neuralink chip and teach it to play the computer game Pong using only its brain impulses to move the paddle.

When Neuralink had finally received FDA clearance to test on humans, they had implanted Noland Arbaugh, a thirty-year-old quadriplegic, with a device called PRIME and miraculously returned a fair number of the patient’s motor skills.

Unfortunately, after only a hundred days, the chip’s electronic threads—the metallic sensors by which the chip communicated with the brain’s neurons—retracted from the brain, apparently rejected by the biological neurons they were supposed to monitor.

Nonetheless, it was a substantial leap forward.

Other industry leaders like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos’s Synchron, along with BlackRock’s Neurotech, were designing less invasive, more specialized chips that they claimed would accomplish stunning results such as overcoming blindness, curing paralysis, overcoming neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, and even providing “type with your mind” capability.

Although Langdon was still unclear on this technology’s link to human consciousness and Katherine’s work, he had no doubt that brain chips would have critical implications for military intelligence—drones piloted by the mind, telepathic battlefield communication, endless applications for data analysis—so it made perfect sense that the CIA would be investing heavily.

Human-to-machine interface is the future.

Langdon recalled what he had witnessed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where modeling software was predicting the future evolution of the human race: Humans will merge with another quickly evolving species…technology.

“Okay, so the key question is, where does this intersect with your manuscript?” Langdon pressed, eager to find the connection. “Did you write about computer chips?”

“A little bit,” she said, visibly frustrated, “but it’s nothing that could be of any interest or threat to this program.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. My only mention of brain implants was in the final chapter, and it was more of a theoretical narrative musing about the future of noetic science.”

Noetics Tomorrow, Langdon thought, having glimpsed her chapter index before adding it to the fire in the library. “And brain implants played a role in that chapter?” he urged, sensing they might be close.

“ Hypothetical implants, yes,” she said. “Implants we won’t have for decades…if ever. ”

Langdon had once heard that the technology available to the intelligence community was years beyond what was known publicly. “Katherine, is it possible that the CIA is further along than you imagine?”

“It’s possible, but not that much further,” she said.

“What I wrote about is more of a thought experiment, rather than a plausible technology. Think of Maxwell’s demon or the twin paradox—obviously you can’t invent a molecule-sorting demon or propel twins to the speed of light, but imagining it is helpful in understanding the bigger picture. ”

I’ll take your word for it, he thought. “Tell me what you wrote.”

Katherine sighed. “It was a fantasy relating to my discoveries about GABA. Remember we talked about the brain being a receiver…a kind of radio that receives signals from all around us—from the universe?”

Langdon nodded. “And the brain chemical GABA functions like the radio dial …filtering out unwanted frequencies and limiting the amount of information and consciousness that flows in.”

“Precisely,” she said. “So I hypothesized that one day, in the distant future, we would figure out how to build an implant that could regulate GABA levels in the brain—essentially lowering our filters on demand…so we could experience more of reality. ”

“Incredible,” Langdon said. The mere thought of it was thrilling. “And that’s not possible ?”

“God, no!” she said, shaking her head. “The most advanced noetic science is not even in that ballpark yet. In the first place, we would have to be correct about the noetic theory of a Universal Consciousness or the Akashic Field or Anima Mundi—or whatever you want to call the field of consciousness that is theorized to surround all things.”

“Which you believe.”

“I do. We can’t yet prove this cosmic realm exists, but it seems to be regularly glimpsed by minds in altered states. Unfortunately, these experiences are fleeting, uncontrolled, subjective, and often nonrepeatable—making them suspect scientifically.”

“And easy targets for skeptics.”

“Yes. We have no quantifiable method, machine, or technology capable of receiving signals from the cosmic realm. Only the brain can do that.” She gave a casual shrug.

“And so I proposed a hypothetical chip that could piggyback on a brain, lower its GABA levels, widen its bandwidth, and turn it into a far more powerful receiver.”

Langdon stared at her in awe. Not only was Katherine’s idea indisputably brilliant, it might finally explain exactly why the CIA was panicked about her manuscript.

What if Katherine was about to publish a book that described an ultrasecret chip the CIA is already building?!

“Katherine,” he said, “Threshold is taking consciousness study to the next dimension, and your book might have been about to blow the lid off the centerpiece of their secret technology.”

“There’s no chance of that,” she said. “Like I said, the chip I described is not buildable. It’s interesting conceptually, but strictly hypothetical.

The technical barriers to its construction are immovable—specifically this: regulating system-wide levels of a neurotransmitter would require complete physical integration with the brain’s neural network…

and the brain has over a hundred trillion synapses to monitor. ”

“But scientific progress is accel—”

“Robert, believe me, complete physical integration is unachievable. It would be the equivalent of directly wiring every single lightbulb on earth to one switch, a million times over. It’s genuinely impossible. ”

“So was splitting the atom…” Langdon retorted. “But science has a way of figuring things out, especially with unlimited budgets. Remember the Manhattan Project?”

“Huge difference…Nuclear technology already existed in 1940. Uranium existed. Scientists just pulled it all together. The chip I proposed requires technology and materials that don’t even exist on earth.

Before we can even talk about integrating with the brain’s dendritic tree, someone has to invent a nanoelectric biofilament. ”

“A nanoelectric what?”

“Exactly—it’s not even a real thing. I invented it in my book as a way to talk about a technology that does not exist. It would be a futuristic, ultrathin, flexible filament made of biocompatible material that can carry both electronic and ionic signals. Essentially, an artificial neuron. ”

“And artificial neurons are not possible to create?”

“No, we’re not even close. Last year, two guys in Sweden made international headlines by persuading a Venus flytrap to open and close by chemically stimulating a neuron.

Just a single binary impulse—and yet it sent scientific shock waves around the world.

That’s the state of the art, Robert, and it’s generations away from an artificial neuron. ”

Langdon was already moving across the room toward the window of the biology lab he had seen several minutes earlier. “Theoretically speaking,” he said, “would you build artificial neurons…or grow them?”

She thought a moment. “A nanoelectric biofilament? Well, it would be a biological filament, so you’d have to grow them.”

Langdon stopped at the window and peered at the machine with hundreds of long glass vials and tubes. “In a liquid suspension, I imagine?”

“Yes. Fragile microstructures are always cultivated in suspension.”

“Then I think you should come over here,” he said, waving her to the window. “It looks like Threshold is growing something …and I’m guessing it’s not arugula.”