Lanfen’s eyes flew open in time to see Bilbo the ninja hobbit break apart, its upper half crashing to the mat while its lower half flipped through the air and into the equipment rack, sending Matt and Dice scrambling. It struck the BPM dead-on, smashing the console and the display as if they were made of tin and calling forth a cascade of sparks. The equipment rack wobbled, then toppled in slow motion, falling against a workbench before skidding along it and crashing to the floor. The sound was deafening. The silence after more so.
Lanfen pulled the neural net from her head and ran across the mat to the fallen machine.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” She was winded; the words barely made it past her lips. She glanced from Dice to Streegman. “Are you all right?”
Dice, who had fallen, picked himself off the floor. “I’m fine. That wasn’t your fault.”
Streegman was already kneeling over the broken equipment. “What happened? Was it her intermittent signal?”
Dice shook his head, sinking to his haunches beside his boss. “No. How could it have been? The bot came apart because it wasn’t ready for this level of trial yet. The spine is a weak point. I think it needs an exoskeleton as well as a backbone. Or at least a musculature to hold the frame together. Look. It broke apart right at the fourth vertebra.”
Lanfen moved to stand behind the two men. She could feel Dice’s anger, could see Streegman’s determination to ignore it in his icy-blue eyes.
“My signal was intermittent?” she asked.
Streegman glanced up at her. “You weren’t producing a solid zeta, just spikes in a strong gamma.”
“Then why did you—”
“You gave us a sustained burst. I figured it would stabilize, so I had Dice turn the back end of the interface off. The monitor was still tracking your brain waves, but the kinetic converter in the Brewster was dormant. Only Becky’s actualizer was still live.”
“Well, it’s dead now,” said Dice. He held up the bot’s onboard computer. It had been crushed.
Lanfen wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the two men pried the broken machinery apart, laid the robot out on the mat in pieces, and stood the machine rack back up on its casters. Intermittent. What did that mean? That she didn’t have what it took to do this? She’d spent years learning the meditative state necessary to master kung fu and couldn’t focus well enough to create a decent zeta state? That was too ironic for words.
Matt stood. “I’m going to take the hard drive out of the Brewster and see if I can get the data off it. Is there someone on your team who’s especially handy with that?”
Dice gave him a sidewise glance. “You’re forgetting what time it is, boss. They’ve probably all gone home.”
“Fine, then I’ll see what I can do. Lanfen, why don’t you go on home?” He didn’t wait for an answer but moved to the BPM and unfastened the brain wave monitor’s casing from the machine rack. Then he tucked it under one arm and left without a backward glance.
Lanfen watched him go, then turned back to Dice, who was inspecting the bits of bot. “Do you need help?”
He shook his head. “You can go home.”
“Let me rephrase. May I help? I feel like I ought to do something to . . .” To what? Make up for destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of specialized equipment?
Dice raised his gaze to her face. “Lanfen, you didn’t cause this. Maybe the intermittent zeta caused the bot to hesitate, and maybe that sudden hesitation torqued the thing’s spine, but if it’s going to do kung fu and smash through barriers or chase bad guys, it’s got to be able to take some rough-and-tumble. It wasn’t ready.”
And she realized what he was saying. “Which isn’t your fault, either.”
Dice sighed and looked at the severed vertebrae in his hands. “I suppose I could have said no more forcefully.”
Lanfen settled beside him, cross-legged. “Does he hear no? Does he even know what the word means? I get the feeling not.”
“Definitely not. Here, see this?” He tilted the robotic joints so she could see the spinal column—or what was left of it. A bouquet of particolored wires and transparent fiber-optic strands exploded from the piece he held. “We had to jury-rig the big connectors to the pelvic bus. Solder and pins. The solder parted, and the pins pulled apart. These long pieces . . .” He flicked several dangling ends, some of which still had flat, gold connecting pins attached. “Pulled out of the bus altogether, which means the fiber optics must have parted first. And they did that because they’re too fine. Part of my team was working on that angle of the problem. They’d recommended braiding the fiber-optic cabling to give it additional strength, but . . .”
“Dr. Streegman didn’t give you time for that.”
“Dammit!” Dice threw the broken piece to the mat. It hit with a heavy thunk. “If he’d been willing to wait one more day—two at best—we’d have been able to strengthen the core enough to have avoided this. But he just . . .” He shook his head and made a frustrated gesture with both hands.
“What will you do now?”
“Go back to the drawing board and design . . .” He frowned and picked up the broken piece of bot again. “A coax,” he murmured. “That’s what it needs—a coaxial core structure.”
“A what?”
“A coax is a cable that’s essentially got three layers. The interior core, which would be our core power and data cables, then a sheath composed of shielding and an outer mantle of some sort of fabric or coating.”
Lanfen raised an eyebrow. “Kevlar maybe?”
Dice laughed. “Not Kevlar, but it’s going to have to be something strong, flexible, and resilient.”
“What if he doesn’t give you time?”
“Oh, he will now. I know Matt. When his hubris blows up in his face, he disappears for a while, I think in the hope that by the time you see him again, you won’t want to wring his neck. Or at least won’t feel compelled to remind him of his mistake. My team can probably count on at least a week of blissful solitude before we have him in our faces again. I hope to have this flaw fixed by then—at least on paper. Besides, Chuck’s got that TED Talk coming up next week. I expect Matt will be too busy pestering him to think about Bilbo’s last stand.”
Lanfen nodded, turning her gaze back to the disassembled robot. “Poor Bilbo. I feel like I hardly got a chance to know him.”
Dice stood. “Lanfen, I promise you that Bilbo Mark II will be better, faster, and more flexible.” He grinned. “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
“I DID THAT,” MINI ASKED, “without the machinery?”
She was still not ready to believe it, Chuck could tell, and he had to wonder what or who had convinced her that her artistic talent should be described with such adjectives as just or only.
“Why shouldn’t you have?” he asked her. “In fact, if I’d known this sort of thing was possible, I would have said you were the most likely candidate to do it. You’re so passionate about your art.”
Mini gazed at the equipment, a slight frown between her brows. “Is that what this is really about? Passion? Is that what the zeta wave represents?”
Chuck had to think about that one for a moment. “I can’t prove it—it’s hard to really quantify passion—but I also can’t help but think it is an integral part in all this.”
She looked at him, her eyes squinting slightly, her lips pursing. “You’re a passionate person. Have you experienced the zeta state?”
“Me? No. I’ve gone into gamma a little bit, and I can manipulate a slave unit through the interface, but I’ve never experienced zeta.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure I could.”
She laughed at him. “Charles Brenton! Really? You’re lecturing me about self-doubt?”
He smiled ruefully. “Guilty as charged. But a large part of my self-doubt, as you put it, is just an extreme lack of time to experiment on myself. I’m pretty busy tracking everyone else’s progress.”
“And working on your TED Talk, I’ll bet
.”
He felt his stomach tighten. “That, too.”
“You’re nervous, Doc? You?” She was laughing at him again.
“I am. Public speaking has never been one of my core skills.”
“What are you using for show-and-tell?”
In answer he ran the playback of her session and watched her watching herself make a stunning piece of art using her talent alone.
“I’d like to use that, if I may. That wolf is extraordinary. And the detail in the forest scene . . .”
She blushed. “I don’t know. You won’t give my name, will you?”
“No—unless you want me to.”
“God, no!”
Chuck laughed. “Pretty shy yourself. But I’ll say one thing: people are going to know your name one day. You’re too talented—regardless of this experiment—to go unnoticed for much longer.”
She blushed harder.
Eugene came through the lab doors just then, shrugging into his jacket. Mini’s trench coat was draped over one arm. He looked at both of them with curiosity . . . and possibly a touch of jealousy.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes!” Mini said. “Chuck is just being silly about my art.”
“Not silly,” he said. “I’m sure Euge here would agree your art is amazing.”
There was no hesitation in Eugene’s vigorous nod. Chuck smiled broadly.
“Ready to go?” Eugene asked. “Or should I ask Chuck if he’s ready to let you go?”
Chuck just waved them toward the door. “You go. Have fun. I’ll lock up.”
“Thanks, Doc.” Eugene helped Mini into her coat. “Oh, by the way, did you know that Matt is still here? I just saw him come up from the delta lab with what looked like a damaged BPM processor. What’s he doing over there?”
“I’m not sure,” said Chuck, “but I suspect the same thing we’re doing here—experimenting. I don’t know who they’ve got in the lab, but I’d bet it involves the robots Dice’s team has been working on.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, on the theory that if I didn’t poke into his extracurricular activities, he wouldn’t poke into ours.”
Mini wrinkled her nose. “You guys have a weird relationship, you know that?”
That was true enough. Chuck turned to Eugene. “Did you talk to him?”
“No. I don’t think he saw me, and I was kind of in a hurry, so I didn’t want to stop and schmooze.” He winked and tilted his head toward Mini.
Chuck smiled. “Have fun.”
Eugene hooked his arm through Mini’s and started to lead her to the door. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Get some dinner, Doc. You know you could come with us.”
“No, he couldn’t,” said Euge quickly.
“No, I couldn’t,” echoed Chuck and pointed at the door. “Out.”
When they were gone, he sat for some time, looking at the equipment and wondering why he hadn’t experimented with it himself more than he had. Was it fear?
God, he hoped not. He could admit to nerves. He was nervous about working with the rig. What he couldn’t identify was why he was nervous about it. Was he concerned about losing his scientific objectivity? Or was he afraid of losing something else? Did he have some vestigial fear that what his subjects were experiencing now was changing them irrevocably?
He stood slowly, a chill creeping up from the pit of his stomach. What did that say about him if he was willing to subject others to something he was afraid of?
He had turned the system off. Now he turned it back on and picked up the neural net.
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
Chapter 13
PATIENCE
Matt watched Dice and his techs work on the new, improved ninja bot for several minutes before he let them know he was in the workshop. Dice noticed him first and gave him only a swift, goggled glance and a nod before returning to his inspection of the bot’s vertebrae. His two assistants afforded Matt smiles and brief greetings before reengaging with their fearless leader.
They were quickly immersed in a discussion of the gear in a language Matt only half understood. Words like coax and impedance and tensile strength were sprinkled liberally throughout. Matt knew the meaning of the individual terms; still it was difficult to assign connotation in the fast-paced patter of tech talk.
Rather than interrupt, for he sensed the discussion was important, he circumambulated the workbench the three tech heads were gathered around and observed the object of their attention: the ninja’s spinal column. It was disconnected from the rest of the components at the moment, and Matt couldn’t help but notice that where before he had been able to see the wires and cabling that connected the vertebrae within the spinal cord, they were now covered with a flexible coating of gunmetal gray; only the ends of the connecting wires and their terminal pins were visible. The pins were significantly more robust than the ones the prototype had used. Instead of the long, flattened connectors, they sported thicker, barrel-shaped pins that would, he supposed, be less inclined to bend or break.
He waited for a lull in the conversation before asking, “How’s it coming?”
Dice glanced up again through his safety goggles, his brown eyes wary. “It’s coming. We’ve made a number of improvements.”
“So I noticed—heftier hardware and a sheath over the components. Isn’t that going to make them harder to get to if something goes wrong?”
“Nope. Because the cabling is pulled through from the top of the spine. If we need to get to something, we just detach the lower torso, pull the core out, open up the sheath, and fix whatever needs fixing. Then we apply a new sheath, shrink it, pull it back through the vertebrae, and wire it up.”
Matt frowned. “There’s more holding it together than just wires and pin connectors, though, right?”
Dice’s mouth twitched. Before he could respond, one of his minions said, “Of course. There’s a physical locking mechanism in the pelvis.”
The minion was a pretty, young thing—slender, athletic-looking, and blond, her long hair braided and dangling over one shoulder. Matt tried to remember her name. Brenda something. He tried not to take offense at the fact that her “of course” sounded an awful lot like “well, duh.”
It wasn’t any easier as she continued.
“The spine anchors there,” she explained as if she were speaking to a small, dim-witted child, “and then the pelvic structure clamps shut over the connection.”
“We’re working on an external sheath for the whole megillah,” added Dice. “A tough one. Not Kevlar, but tough. We’re still working on the specs for that.”
Matt stifled a smile. It was weird to hear his Japanese-American cohort spouting Yiddish. He wondered if Eugene had picked up as much slang from Dice as the robotics engineer had picked up from him. “Not an exoskeleton?”
Dice shook his head. “We think having a brittle exterior would be a bad idea.”
“Okay. But what if someone shoots at your robocop? Then what?”
“Fit it with a Kevlar vest or body armor. It’d be cheaper and more flexible in a number of ways.” He paused and gave Matt a speculative look. “You need something?”
“Actually I just finished analyzing the data from that train wreck we had last week. Got a minute?”
Dice glanced at his techs, then nodded and removed his goggles. “Bren, why don’t you connect Bilbo up and get him ready for a systems trial?”
The young woman smiled. “Sure thing, boss.”
She was huddled over the bot before Matt and Dice were halfway to the door.
“So what did you find?” Dice asked once they’d reached the privacy of Matt’s office.
“You tell me.” Matt went to his desk and turned his laptop so that Dice could see the display. It showed a jagged bar of brilliance that, if it were an audio waveform, would indicate a loud, continuous noise with spikes of explosive percussion.
“What the hell?” Dice glanced up at Matt. “W
hat is this?”
“This is Lanfen’s state just before she swept old Bilbo off his feet.”
“She swept him off his feet?”
Matt shrugged. “Or so it appears. Her zeta is . . . rambunctious, to say the least. So rambunctious it blew my formula right out of the water.”
Dice straightened. “It overloaded the input?”
“Basically. My formula assumes an input that falls within a certain range. When the others have gone into zeta, just raising the threshold on the input filter has done the trick. But Lanfen’s topmost output—”
“Is outside the range.”
“Way outside the range, which may or may not mean she’s more powerful. It may just mean she’s got a chaotic profile.”
Dice raised a sleek eyebrow. “A martial arts master who’s got a chaotic energy profile? That’s counterintuitive.”
“I suppose it is. At any rate I set up a new unit in the lab and adjusted my equations to broaden the range significantly.”
“But that means she’s not bypassing Becky, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure what it means. I’m not sure it will solve the problem even if she isn’t bypassing Becky. There’s only one way to find out if it will.”
Dice shoved his hands into his pockets and met Matt’s gaze. “The bot’s not ready,” he said slowly, emphasizing each word.
Matt bit back his impatience and took a deep breath. “Okay. When?”
“Not until the beginning of next week at least.”
“What?” Matt’s attempt at patience failed catastrophically. He pointed in the direction of the team working on Bilbo. “I saw the bot, Dice. All the components are there—”
“And need to be thoroughly tested, so we don’t have to start from scratch . . . again. If you want this to be the centerpiece of our stealth Applied Robotics presentation, we have to be double damn sure it’s not going to fly apart on us during a demo.”
Matt swallowed his frustration. “Yeah. Sure. I see that. Okay, look, however long it takes, okay? In the meantime I’ll have Lanfen work with Roboticus to try to get her zeta waves calmed down.”
The God Wave Page 12