Chapter 18

# Chapter 18

They worked for eleven days before Chen told them they were building a weapon.

Not in those words. Chen's mind operated in the symbolic notation he had developed over the course of the mission—a private mathematics that mapped emotional and cognitive states onto formal structures with a precision that natural language could not achieve. What he said, standing in the doorway of the bridge at 0340 ship time, his logbook open in his hands, was: "The harmonic envelope of the signal you're constructing will produce irreversible neural restructuring in any brain that receives it for more than ninety seconds."