The Reconstruction, Part I

The scans and comparisons and analyses took years.  Seventeen, to be exact.  The first was almost on a whim--a desperate project for an undergraduate psychology class.  It was a 200 level course and Max needed to come up with a test and a paper.  He was clueless.  He ended up deciding to use what he had ready access to--a radiology lab at the hospital where he spent 20 hours a week earning $10 an hour so he could pay some of his college expenses.  He got permission from his lab supervisor, got appropriate consents, and hooked a friend up to the MRI and conducted a brain scan while he watched a cartoon.  He finished his paper, got a C-, but never stopped his experiments.

Now, seventeen years later, he was putting the finishing touches on the software that could translate brain scans into visual images.  Feed the computer some brain scans, and it produced a still image or video of his thoughts. Some thoughts were visual, some were not.  Cleaning out non-visual noise was the hard part.  But he did it.  Among the many things he discovered in the process was that people think visually usually when their eyes are closed.  Not always true, and it varied from person to person, but sleepers were the best.  Hook up his brain-scanner to a sleeping person, and voila! a video feed from the dark recesses of his brain.

His brain-scanner, which he called Hal, had become safer and smaller to use.  What he had now was something that looked like simple headphones, but which could extract soundless images from a person's head.  Thankfully, Max had no diabolical plans.  Or so he wrote in his journal.  We can be the judges of that.