“Striptease!” Adler calls. Bowen wolf-whistles.
“No,” I tell Knight, “this is good. Is it okay if I touch your face?”
“Go to town.” He closes his eyes, utterly trusting.
I remove my prototype from the case. There are three pieces: the pads, the visor, and the control screen. Right now, I’m just using a tablet that can connect to the other two pieces via Bluetooth. In the future, I’d like to come up with a version that can work offline, but for now, I’m working with what I’ve got.
The team gathers around as I wipe Knight’s face with a clean towel. Then I clean the test areas with an alcohol pad. I stick the three nodes to Knight’s face, taking care to align them properly. Two go to the temples, one goes on the forehead.
“It kinds of looks like the pads for my TENS unit,” Violet says.
“Or an EKG,” Viktor ads.
“Ooh, are you gonna shock him?” one of the guys asks. “I’ll give you a Benjamin if you crank it up to high.”
I don’t look up from my work. “They’re similar, but instead of emitting a current, they take readings. I initially wanted a third pad, but it’s hard to attach without shaving the subject’s head. Three is good enough, especially with these.” I slide the visor onto Knight’s face. “Open your eyes, please. In addition to monitoring your brain activity, I want to be able to track your eye movements, response to light, and monitor pupil size.”
I pull up the software on the tablet and step back. My screen is divided up so that I can see brain response on the top portion of the screen, Knight’s eyes and the metrics on the lower half, and a box off to the right that will automatically populate with results once there’s any data to analyze.
“Do I look tech-sexy?” Knight asks. He strikes a pose for the team.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Viktor grumbles. “But you’re not sexy in any capacity.”
It takes me about twenty minutes to run the full routine. It will be faster when I’ve had a chance to sort out the bugs. I babble too much, info-dumping about my process in a way that most people would find annoying. Violet stays riveted to the screen the whole time.
“Minerva, this is fucking incredible,” she says when I’m done. “Do you know what it would mean to have access to all this real-time data? Heart rate. Head impact sensors. Neurological response times… all in one place. This is brilliant.”
“You think?”
“I know.” Violet points to the readouts. “I know you think this is too slow, but that’s because Knight’s brain is, eh, relatively normal.”
“Hey!” Knight crosses his arms.
“Only kidding. You’ve got a great brain, little buddy.” She gives his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “But if you had a concussion, it would have shown up right away, and we’d get a sense of how serious your injuries were in minutes. We’d probably be able to catch a brain-bleed, or ocular damage, too. And in rehab cases?” She lifts both hands and shakes her head. “I can think of so many uses for this thing, I’m not even going to list them.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” I ask. “Is there any other information that you might want to collect?”
“Sure. I can make a list.” Violet bobs her head.
I catch Tristan’s eye, and he gives me a thumbs-up.
Coach Metcalfe doesn’t appear to have followed my technobabble as closely, but he grunts his approval. “Can we get a pilot version? Next month, maybe?”
“Next month?” I squeak. “I don’t know…”
“I’ll bankroll the next prototype,” Dante says.
I clasp the tablet to my chest. “When did you get here?”
My godfather chuckles at my obvious alarm. “Coach texted me that you were showing off your brain machine. I wanted to see for myself, and the potential is there, cupcake. You’re a goddamn Marino, all right. But the good kind.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Praise from my family has always felt like a trap, a setup. But Dante’s voice doesn’t have claws in it.
It lands… warm. Steady.
Safe enough that my throat goes tight. “That’s an oxymoron.”
“Agree to disagree.” Dante nods to Tristan, keeping his voice low for my benefit. “And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Maybe you can get me one, and I’ll use it on Sergio.” He raises his voice and points at Knight. “And you’re right, kid. You look tech-sexy as hell.”
