The Ghostwriter's Wife

Start Ups

The Word of God

Posted: 7/7/2015 12:00 AM

The legal firm, that helped negotiate the deal for the sale of my patent, also handled the details for the formation of a pair of corporations. The first was Magick Hat, Inc., the intended business of which was the development and marketing of the Brain Computer Interface devices Bob and I had been creating since shortly after we'd met at grad school. Of course, there would also be all the auxiliary parts and accessories required to attach these Hats to customized signal processing systems. Then, there was what would always be the star of the show: the software to analyze, and help researchers make sense of, the data they collected, which by itself appeared to be nothing but thousands of senseless static wave forms.

I'd spent hours going over legal entanglements I might encounter with the University, ad nauseam, but since I was leaving the University with nothing but the contents of my own brain, the attorneys felt there was little need for concern. A photographic memory was an extremely handy complement to the binary gene with which I'd been born. I'm not sure which parent I had to thank for these. My father, I suspected, which was ironic, since he'd never had any formal education beyond elementary school. Thanks to these gifts, not only could I see the schematics for all the electronics I intended to manufacture projected on the inside of my skull as clearly as if they'd been displayed on a computer screen, but I could also scroll through line after line of computer code. I'd regularly debugged code in my dreams, waking to know exactly which lines to fix to eliminate the problems frustrating me the day before.

I planned to get patents for my Magick Hats, copyrights for the software, and take all the other steps required to legally protect my intellectual property. But I also wasn't nearly as concerned about anyone stealing from me as I was about keeping my ultimate intentions a secret.

That was the purpose of the second corporation I had the attorneys form, which I very humbly named Telepathic Collaboration, Inc. Initially, TCI would be just another customer of Magick Hat, Inc. The world had no need to know of it, until I was ready to introduce it to them. I had a vision of a grand unveiling. I'd publicly do business through Magick Hat, Inc. until then, from which I'd funnel the proceeds to fund the research and development for Telepathic Collaboration, Inc.

I had a well-formulated master plan, which clearly went well beyond simple telepathic texting. I had dreams to share dreams. And, as much as innovation had accelerated over the past century to the present, my intention was to supercharge that creative process, accelerating it to the rate collective minds participating in Telepathic Collaboration could imagine. I believed the only limit to anything was imagination, which would accelerate as well, with what could be imagined continually building on the foundation of what already had, forever reaching out toward the infinite.

For the first time, it occurred to me, if my wife could do all she'd dreamed, my own limitation would only be my own imagination. It was my first glimpse of the possibility of becoming what I am. The thought passed through me as an adrenal jolt of fear. It was too terrifying a prospect to process and I chased it from my mind to concentrate on more immediate tasks. However fast the future seemed to be racing toward me, the truth was I was racing toward it, the only way I could; a single step, a single act, a single thought at a time. But, from that first day, my pace was far beyond pedestrian.