Page 161 of The Secret of Secrets

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.