Page 166 of The Secret of Secrets

“It’s an incredibly unlucky coincidence,” Langdon said sympathetically. “At least now we underst—”

“This is not a coincidence, Robert!” Katherine’s eyes were alive with anger. “The CIA stole my idea!”

Stole? The claim made no sense to him; clearly the CIA had been developing artificial neurons long before Katherine had started writing her book.

“They stole my design!” she repeated. “All of it!”

For as long as he’d known Katherine Solomon, Langdon had never heard her make a single irrational claim, much less a paranoid outburst. “I don’t understand,” he said, offering a reassuring smile. “You’ve been writing this book for a year, and the Threshold program is more than twenty—”

“I’m not being clear,” she said, cutting him off. There was a fierceness in her eyes that he had never seen before. “My manuscript included a section about artificial neurons, which explained the details of this very design. But in that section I was talking about my passion and work as a young grad student, when I was already dreaming about the future of noetics…designing hypothetical technologies that future scientists might one day use to deepen our understanding of human consciousness.”

Her meaning suddenly became clear to Langdon. “My God…what?!”

She nodded. “Yes! Robert, I first proposed—and documented—the exact design for these artificial neurons in my postgraduate thesis…twenty-three years ago.”

Chapter 105

Katherine could see from Langdon’s stunned expression that he was still struggling to comprehend the logistics of what she’d just told him.

“This is my exact design for artificial neurons,” she said, tapping Threshold’s classified binder. “From twenty-three years ago. There’s no mistaking it.”

“So you wrote your doctoral thesis on artificial neurons?” Langdon asked.

“Not directly, no. I was in neuroscience, and my thesis was titled ‘The Chemistry of Consciousness’—a geeky paper about neurotransmitters and awareness, but at the end, just like in my manuscript, I wrote a section about the future of consciousness research. I fantasized about various hypothetical breakthroughs, including the most significant advance that could ever occur in my field—artificial neurons—a technology that would finally make possible a true H2M interface and allow scientists to monitor the brain’s consciousness in new ways…and finally to see how it all worked.”

“And you’re positive…there’s no coincidence with the CIA’s work?”

“Robert, the neurons in this binder are identical to what I proposed in my thesis, right down to the nomenclature! The description literally refers to ‘nanoelectric biofilaments’ and ‘bilateral organo-technic fusion’—both are terms I made up!”

Langdon now looked convinced. “Wow…for starters, that means you, Katherine Solomon, figured out how to make artificial neurons…while in grad school?”

“I was a kid with an overactive imagination. The idea was a fantasy. Don’t forget that twenty-three years ago, artificial neurons were science fiction!”

“So were genetic engineering, self-driving cars, and AI,” he countered. “But here we are. Courtesy of Moore’s law.”

True, she thought, the future comes at us faster every day.

“Twenty years ago, people in the field assumed artificial neurons would turn out to be silicon-based, which made sense considering neurons were essentially binary on/off switches like those in a computer chip. I disagreed and argued in my thesis that because the ultimate goal of artificial neurons would be integration with the brain, any true solution would need to be biological. And so I let my imagination go, and I designed, in great detail, my best guess at how such a neuron might someday be created.”

“I’d say it was a pretty good guess,” Langdon said, still looking impressed. “The CIA has probably been working on developing this for decades…and finally succeeded. The question of ownership or credit is another issue.”

“I’m just wondering how they heard about my idea…or got their hands on it.”

Langdon shrugged. “Well, they are the largest intelligence-gathering operation in the world.”

“Actually,” Katherine said, memories now flowing. “It just now occurs to me…” She hesitated, lost in thought.

“Tell me on the way out,” Langdon urged, picking up the binder and heading for the door. “We need to get out of here with this—and get it into the ambassador’s hands. Let’s hope it’s enough.”

Katherine hoisted her shoulder bag and followed Langdon across the lab, her thoughts now racing. “Something odd happened with my thesis. I never really understood it, and I haven’t thought about it in decades…but it might explain something.”

“What happened?” Langdon asked as they hurried across the brightly lit computer lab in the direction of the revolving door.

“My thesis adviser at Princeton,” she recalled, “was the A. J. Cosgrove, legendary chemist, who took me under his wing. He loved my thesis and told me he believed it could win a Blavatnik Award—a national prize for postdoctoral science research. Anyhow, I lost, which was fine with me, but for some reason it really pissed off Cosgrove, and he ended up having some kind of spat with the head of the prize committee, a hotshot professor from Stanford. When the dust finally settled, Cosgrove told me I deserved the prize and that I was denied for ‘reasons other than merit.’ I chalked it up to academic politics. But I told him I didn’t care, because I had decided to pursue noetics anyway. Then he said something strange. He said that before I left neuroscience entirely, he strongly suggested I…” Katherine stopped short of the door. “Oh…no.”

Langdon turned. “What is it?!”

Katherine closed her eyes in disbelief, setting her bag onto a worktable. In all the chaos, it hadn’t dawned on her until this very moment. “Robert,” she whispered, opening her eyes and running a hand through her thick dark hair. “There’s an even bigger reason the CIA needs my book to disappear forever.”