Once there he moved the robot back and forth, around in circles. Finally he parked it beneath Sara’s chair.
“That was about what you could do with the normal range of brain waves if you were wearing the neural net and were connected to the slave unit via the kinetic interface,” said Chuck.
“But he wasn’t using the interface,” said a guy sitting in the front row. His face was red, as if he wanted to yell something.
“As I said, we had no idea that something beyond these waves existed until Sara and Mike here spiked into the seven-megahertz range. It scared the stuffing out of us,” he admitted. “We thought the machinery had malfunctioned. Then we realized Dr. Streegman’s brain wave conversion algorithm just didn’t cover a broad enough range. He adjusted it, and then . . .” He glanced at Mike and scratched his forehead. “Well, then we discovered that the zeta waves were interacting directly with the slave unit—either through its native mechanisms or through the actualizer. Which depended on the subject, but all three of our initial subjects were finally able to control their slave mechanisms without the kinetic interface.”
He stopped talking and let that idea settle.
“You’re talking about psychokinesis,” said Red Blazer. “That’s nuts.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Sharkskin, gathering his stuff. “What could you possibly be selling besides snake oil?”
Chuck’s throat went completely dry, but this was what they’d prepared for. “We don’t know if everyone can learn to generate zeta waves,” he admitted, “or manipulate machinery without the kinetic interface. For some applications we may be selling a training program, for others an actual mechanism—hardware and software.”
“You can train people to do that?” asked someone in the fourth row—a woman in an Astros jersey.
“It’s a hoax,” said Sharkskin. “The concom didn’t vet them thoroughly enough.” He stood and straightened his suit. “I may lodge a formal complaint.”
Chuck was vaguely aware of sudden movement at one side of the stage. A moment later Dice was standing next to him.
“Would you like to try it yourself?” the robotics expert asked.
Sharkskin snorted. “Pushing pixels with my mind?” He gestured at Sara. “She’s not even really manipulating that CAD software. It’s preprogrammed.”
On the screen the program stopped in the middle of a shrubbery. Sara turned her head to spear the guy with steely gray eyes. “No, it’s not, and I can prove it. Pick any element in the rendering and tell me how to change it. As you can see, I can rock this stuff way faster than anyone could do it with a mouse or a track pad.”
The guy made a face.
“Aw, c’mon,” the Astros fan told him. “Don’t be a wuss.”
“All right. The building material—red sandstone.”
Sara swung back to the screen. A split second later, a red sandstone façade melted over the front of the building.
“An oak grove where the swimming pool is.”
She did it.
“Red maple by the front door.”
She grew the tree out of the soil.
“In a container.”
“Material?”
“Brass.”
“Brass it is,” Sara said and made the pot happen.
The guy made an exasperated sound. “It’s a trick! It has to be a trick. There’s someone backstage—”
“Who can translate your verbal command into an image as fast as you give it?” asked Dice. “Why? Why does it have to be a trick? I’ve been working on this project for over a year, and I can tell you it’s just science—though I admit it sometimes seems like magic.”
“And who would you be?” Sharkskin wanted to know.
The young woman in the jersey was grinning from ear to ear. “He’s Daisuke Kobayashi, the robotics wiz from MIT. I’ve seen your work.”
Dice actually blushed. “Right. Thanks. I ask again, who wants to come up and try this?”
Sara took off the neural net and held it out. There was a long moment of silence before the woman in the Astros jersey rose.
“Oh, right,” said Sharkskin. “A fangirl. You planted her.”
“Then you come up,” Dice said, taking the helm from Sara. “You can push the bot around, or you can push pixels on a screen. Which do you prefer?”
Chuck was sure the guy was going to refuse, but he didn’t. He put his conference bag down and went to the stage with an arrogant swagger.
“I’ll try the bot.”
It took only a moment to hook the guy—Greg was his name—to Roboticus’s kinetic interface. Dice explained the mechanism in the bot: a dead-simple four-way joystick.
“You think about pressing the joystick forward; it will go forward. Right to go right. Left to go left. Back to go back. If you get crazy confident, you can push it diagonally left or right to make a shallower turn.”
“I think . . .”
“You think about the joystick,” Dice repeated. He glanced at Chuck, who turned to the rest of the audience, which had grown considerably, and explained how the Becky interface translated the subject’s brain waves into kinetic motion.
Chuck tried not to read the expressions of distrust on many faces, instead concentrating on the Astros “fangirl” and others who looked merely curious or actively interested.
Greg’s first efforts were shaky, but they produced results. Roboticus moved tentatively at first, then with more confidence, and Greg’s brain waves played across the big display behind him. The expression on his face went from skeptical to intent as the bot moved shakily around the stage. He completed his dance with Roboticus by turning the gleaming little bot into a tight left-hand spin and generated a fitful gamma wave on the display.
Dice shut down the interface and lifted the net from Greg’s head. “Questions?”
The expression on the man’s face was priceless. The open mockery was gone, replaced by a look of bewilderment. “It worked. Or at least it seemed to work. How did it work?”
“Well, sure it worked,” said a man in jeans and a sweatshirt, standing on the sidelines. “You obviously work for them.”
“No, I don’t.”
“No, he doesn’t,” said another guy in an immaculate suit. “He works for Minolta. In the same department I do.” He flashed his convention badge. It matched Greg the sharkskin skeptic’s.
“You could be in on it, too.”
“In on what?” asked Chuck, suddenly fascinated by the phenomenon of knee-jerk disbelief. “What is it about this you find so hard to accept or even consider?”
Sweatshirt Man made a broad gesture. “Well, it’s . . . it’s fantastic.”
Chuck mirrored the gesture—arms out, palms up. “As fantastic as robotics itself? As fantastic as brain surgery? Or having a space station orbiting the planet that can support human life? As fantastic as discovering new subatomic particles by building massive underground racetracks on which they collide?
“As fantastic as having a machine that tracks brain waves through their direct manipulation . . . like an EEG?
“What is it, exactly, that you find so much more fantastic about this?”
When he got no answer, he came out from behind the podium and gestured at the screen behind him, still showing the last brain waves recorded from Greg the skeptic’s session with Roboticus.
“That is just a three-D EEG. It’s not magic. It’s not supernatural.” He paused and considered that. “Well, it’s not magic anyway. I’d argue that what the human mind does is supernatural by definition, but that’s a different discussion. If human brain waves can push a pin up and down on a piece of paper, why can’t they move other things, like Dice’s robot here?
“Sara can do it. Mike can do it. This man,” he said, pointing to Greg, “can do it. Why can’t anyone?”
There was a lot of nodding at that. Murmurs of agreement. People slid into empty seats, wanting to see more. Chuck summoned Tim to the stage and gave them more.
CHUCK, MAT
T, AND EVERYONE ELSE on the team were run ragged for the rest of the day. Their presentations were standing room only from then on; their interns were slammed, each one having his or her own bevy of curious, eager, skeptical, and sometimes combative conventiongoers to take through the TED Talk or the various components of the Forward Kinetics system or the significance of brain waves. They gave out a ton of literature, answered several complaints that sent Matt to Con Ops to present the same credentials they’d had to show to apply for a presentation booth, and required the security guards to come and shoo off patrons who couldn’t tear themselves away.
They ate dinner off campus, toasting each other, Roboticus, and each link in the Forward Kinetics chain. They began the meal with a high degree of energy and a lot of chatter and finished it almost falling asleep over their plates.
It was a short walk back to the hotel, and Matt and Chuck ended up strolling side by side at the rear of the group. Matt scuffed along with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans. The evening was balmy but cool, normal for April in San Antonio.
“So,” said Chuck, “you were fielding the business cards. Any serious bites?”
“A couple I’d call serious. A major teaching hospital is interested in the machines for retraining people with disabilities. They asked about the cost of the FK systems and hiring trained personnel to run an installation.”
Chuck’s eyes lit up. “Really? That’s . . . that’s just what I was hoping—”
“I know.” Matt looked off down the curve of the river as they turned to climb up to street level. “Not sure they’re going to be able to come through with the bucks, though. You’ve worked in a medical school with public outreach. You know what it’s like.”
“Which hospital?” Chuck wanted to know.
Matt chuckled. “Johns Hopkins, as a matter of fact.”
Chuck grinned. “Anybody else?”
“New York State.”
“New York State what?”
“New York. The state. You know, where the Statue of Liberty is?”
“The state government is interested in the kinetic system?”
“Well, the attorney general’s office anyway . . . so law enforcement.”
“That’s all?”
Matt glanced over at his partner. Good God, he was actually disappointed. “Chuck, it’s the first day of the con. We just unleashed a brand-new, squeaky-clean science fictional idea on people—”
“A lot of people. Hundreds.”
“Maybe even a thousand. But this is revolutionary stuff. We need to be realistic about how people are going to react and how long it’s going to take them to go home and look around and see practical applications. But, hey, we’ve got two more days of the convention to go. And tomorrow is going to be the biggest day. We’ll get a bigger bite then, I promise.”
He could promise it, too, because tomorrow the U.S. military would come to see the show.
Chapter 16
SURPRISE PARTY
Matt was excited . . . and nervous. Nervous enough that he had to force himself to eat breakfast. Nervous enough that he kept glancing at his watch, though he knew Howard and his cronies wouldn’t be arriving at the show until the lunch slowdown. During this traditionally thin period on the convention floor, crowds tended to dwindle, and most booths sent their excess staff off to nearby eateries.
It was this lull into which Matt planned to drop Chen Lanfen and Bilbo. The martial artist was awaiting her cue in the comfort of one of the upstairs conference rooms. The bot was backstage, under what looked like a pile of pallet pads. Dice was the key to making it work. During the half-hour break the core team would take for lunch, he would stage everything. Then it depended upon Matt to offer Mike a breather so Lanfen and Bilbo could do their routine.
None of his nerves were showing, Matt assured himself as he watched Chuck’s team go through their initial presentation. Tim was the first trick pony of the day and cheerfully (cheerful for Tim anyway) showed off his code fu and creativity to a standing-room-only crowd. Word of Forward Kinetics’ kick-ass show had obviously spread. In fact he recognized a number of the folks who appeared for the Saturday morning session; he’d seen them the day before, some repeatedly. All of this was good news.
When eleven thirty rolled around, and booth staff began trickling off to get lunch, Matt insisted that Chuck and Eugene do the sandwich run since they’d just done two shows back to back.
“Stretch your legs and take some deep breaths,” Matt told Chuck. He watched him all the way to the exhibition hall doors, then went to retrieve Lanfen while Dice got the robot out from under wraps.
Let the shock and awe begin, he thought, knowing that was one doctrine the military couldn’t resist.
CHUCK STARTED THE TWELVE-THIRTY SHOW with a larger crowd than Matt had expected. Howard and his guests—four of them—were seated in the front row. Even in suits, Matt thought, they exuded military, something about the set of the shoulders and the pike-up-the-spine posture that gave high-ranking military men that peculiar aura of detached wariness.
In addition to rigid posture, Matt reminded himself, the military had deep, deep pockets. Even Chuck wouldn’t be able to say no to the level of resources Howard’s agency could command. If there were a God, Matt decided, he would pray for Lanfen and Bilbo to knock Howard’s dress socks off.
Matt watched Chuck go through his opening spiel, watched as Sara built her house (she could probably do it in her sleep by then), watched as the audience displayed various shades of disbelief (or amusement at the disbelief of others). When Chuck asked Mike to come forward with Roboticus, Matt took that as his cue to walk out onstage.
“I gave Mike the session off,” he said, smiling first at Chuck, then out at the audience, “because I have a bit of a surprise for everyone. Ms. Chen, if you would bring your little friend out onstage.”
Lanfen entered gracefully from backstage, trailing Bilbo, who effectively aped her movements, right down to the sway of her hips. Granted it looked a bit comic on the robot, but even so, its motions were far more elegant than they had any right to be.
“THIS,” MATT SAID WITH A sweep of his arm, “is Chen Lanfen, an expert in the martial art of kung fu. Her companion robot is Bilbo.” There was some laughter at the sight of the little bot, but Dice’s beaming face put Matt at ease. “Bilbo was designed by Daisuke Kobayashi and the robotics team at Forward Kinetics. The robot has been fitted with sophisticated gyro mechanisms for balance, and, as you can see, he is extremely flexible—in some ways more than a human being. Lanfen is going to put Bilbo through her paces for you, so you can get an idea of the potential for kinetic technology in the areas of security and law enforcement. Imagine, if you will, a SWAT team charged with infiltrating a place where hostages are being kept. Imagine the potential for disarming bombs or doing rescue work in situations that would put a human operative in dire jeopardy but require one’s delicacy and intelligence.”
He turned to Lanfen and bowed. “Ms. Chen, if you would.”
He drew the gaping Chuck off to the side of the stage, lifting the slender podium and carrying it off with them. Lanfen now had the entire platform on which to display her kin(etic) fu—and display it she did. She started by having Bilbo face the audience and bow in a mirror image of her own motions. The two of them executed a series of kung fu postures in eerie unison. Matt knew that the robot lagged a split second behind Lanfen’s body, but to the human eye the difference was imperceptible.
At the end of the routine, Lanfen moved to stage left, leaving Bilbo at center, frozen in a middle lotus position. Then she wheeled, settled into a horse stance, and proceeded to put the robot through a series of astonishing kicks, rolls, and tumbles calculated to show, in quick succession, how well the little bot could copy human movement and how well it could do things no human could do. Matt noticed that the audience reacted particularly strongly when Bilbo reversed direction by simply swiveling his head and flipping his back and front, and again when he dr
opped into a pill-bug curl and rolled across the stage.
Matt glanced at Howard. The man sat stone-faced, showing little more reaction than a slight widening or narrowing of his eyes or the occasional blink. The men who flanked him were only marginally more transparent.
Time, Matt thought, to up the ante.
When Bilbo had completed a tumbling pass that brought him to the lip of the stage, balanced on his hands, Matt stepped back up onto the platform.
“Now, as you might expect, the key in many of the duties a robot like Bilbo might be assigned is the operator’s ability to see what Bilbo sees. Of course many of you are no doubt thinking we can do that already with VR systems. I see a number of repeat offenders out there. You’ve already been filled in on the advantages of kinetic training over VR. For the rest of you, we’re now going to offer a demonstration. Dice, if you’d be so kind as to bring up the main screen.”
Dice, stationed by the Brewster-Brenton monitor, brought it online. The big, flat-screen TV lit up and gave the audience a view of themselves, which was what Bilbo’s forward cameras were focused on.
“What you’re seeing,” Matt told them, “is the signal that Bilbo’s optic unit is sending back to the Brewster-Brenton’s CPU. It’s no different in its basic technology from standard VR. But let’s imagine for a moment that Bilbo is on a critical mission. Let’s say he’s been sent down a mine shaft to see if the miners trapped at the bottom are dead or alive.”
The robot dropped to its hands and knees and began to slink along while the audience was treated to a camera-eye view of the carpeted stage and its environs.
“Then just before he reaches his goal, you lose your mechanical connection.”
The screen went blank. Lanfen smiled. Matt faced the audience and shrugged.
“Oops. Connection lost. Now what? With standard VR tech, unless the problem is at the operator’s end and could be fixed with mechanical intervention, the mission would likely have to be scrubbed. If it’s the result of intervening material that is blocking your signal, you’re basically screwed. However, with kinetic technology, the loss of signal need never occur. Ms. Chen, if you please.”
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