“Even me?” asked Mini, surprise evident in her voice.
“Even you. The DHS is interested in your ability as a nonprogrammer to manipulate pixels.”
She frowned, then brightened, favoring the entire room with a brilliant smile. “So I’ll still be teaching art—art of the mind. How cool is that?”
“Yeah,” said Tim wryly. “Maybe you and I can dress our critters in camouflage gear.”
“The other major change,” Matt continued, ignoring the sarcasm, “is that we will be able to staff up and build robotics assembly teams. Dice will head that project.”
Dice’s head came up sharply. “We’re going into manufacturing?”
“We’re going to build prototypes and train manufacturing teams, so the government can ramp up their own production. I gather that some of the training will take place in their bailiwick. Lanfen and Mike are going to be visiting their facility a lot, I imagine, training their folks. We’ll do the initial work here—getting them to produce viable zeta waves—then send them home for fine-tuning. They have machinery there that we don’t here. Naturally we’ll also be building them kinetic converters for their specialized machinery.”
“Like what?” asked Dice. “What am I going to be translating for?”
“Not sure yet entirely, but General Howard did mention bomb-disposal bots, reconnaissance units, that sort of thing.”
“What about our other clients?” asked Chuck. “We’ve got a serious offer on the table to negotiate with Johns Hopkins for medical applications, and NASA is interested in the potential for using this in outer space.”
Well, there it was—the elephant in the room. Matt picked up his iPad and punched it on.
“You will be able to do all the medically related research you want,” he told Chuck, his eyes on the screen of his tablet. “You will, however, have to get General Howard’s permission for and oversight of any projects that benefit other organizations.”
“Meaning they want us to work exclusively for them.”
Matt became aware that the other members of the team were now reacting like spectators at a tennis match, watching the ball shoot back and forth between the two execs.
“They did. I managed to wriggle around it by giving them some oversight.”
“Some oversight? How much?”
“They don’t want us to be exclusive to them in perpetuity,” Matt explained. “Only until they feel they’ve trained up enough zetas of their own. Look, the contracts are in your e-mail by now. Read them over. If you see something you don’t like, we can negotiate further.”
Dice looked up from his iPad, his expression opaque. “The intellectual property clause says they own any ‘defense-related’ technologies or processes we invent. That can’t stand, Matt. That’s way too vague. It’s vague as to what is considered a ‘defense-related’ technology and what ‘invent’ means in this context.”
“Not to mention ‘technologies’ and ‘processes,’” added Chuck. “At the end of the day, they could own our thoughts, our ideas. I’ve seen those sorts of contracts before. I had a writer friend who had the income from her fiction sales garnished because she had the ideas for the stories while working as a programmer for a defense contractor.”
“I’m sure—” Matt started to say, but the truth was he wasn’t sure. In his exultation at landing this momentous contract, he hadn’t considered the implications of the intellectual property clause for his own contributions to FK—the mathematical formulae that drove the programming modules for everything from the Brewster-Brenton to the individual robots. And while the near-term money was staggering, it was the patents that would truly make or break the financial success of FK.
“Yes. Okay. I see that. Look over the rest of it. I’ll talk to the agency brains about these clauses and get them tightened up. Tana, will you put that on the list of subjects to bring up with Howard?”
She nodded, her fingers already tapping the keys.
“And the med tech?” Chuck persisted.
“And the med tech,” Matt promised.
He left the conference room flogging himself for not paying more attention to the intellectual property document. If he’d been more on the ball, he might have been able to start sewing up the business end of this today. As it was, he suspected, he had a long week ahead of him.
“Matt.”
He turned to find Chuck dogging his tracks.
“Matt, in this contract, do they spell out what sort of applications they want to use kinetics for?”
Oh, for the love of . . . “That will come later. But they’ll be defense applications, Chuck. Shielding U.S. interests from harm. Surveillance. Espionage. Undertaking dangerous missions on which the American people would be horrified to send live operatives. One of the applications, I know for a fact, is deep-sea rescue and exploration.”
The speed with which the worried frown left Chuck’s face was remarkable. “Deep-sea rescue?”
“They’ve already broached the idea of having Dice’s team design bots that can function at extreme depths. There are a myriad applications for that—exploration, planting sensors of various types. From my discussions with General Howard, though, I imagine he’s most interested in the potential to rescue people from dire situations without endangering more lives than necessary. Think of the problems we’ve had with oil rigs historically. Shipwrecks. Downed submarines.”
He could almost hear the little wheels turning in Chuck’s head, see the thoughts flitting behind his transparent eyes.
“Look, Chuck,” he said quietly, aware of others passing by them in the hall. “I’m not going to pretend to you that these guys are as idealistic as you are. Hell, they’re probably not even as idealistic as I am. But they’re our guys, for God’s sake. They’re part of our government’s defense mechanism, not the enemy.”
His partner glanced away, nodded, sighed deeply.
“All right. Yes, you’re right about all of that. But we’ve got to get those intellectual property rights issues straightened out, and we’ve got to be certain we can do business with other organizations for civilian purposes. I especially want us to be free to work with agencies like FEMA and NASA. And medical applications absolutely must be allowed. That’s a deal breaker for me.”
“I understand,” Matt told him. I just hope I can make General Howard understand.
“YOU’RE KIDDING.” MATT DROPPED HIS stylus to the tabletop and leaned back in his chair, flipping his iPad closed.
Across the desk from him, General Howard did not look as if he were kidding. The man did not look as if he ever kidded.
“I assure you, Dr. Streegman, our experts have put a great deal of thought into what may or may not constitute defense capacities. I assume your partner is looking at the possibility of using kinetics to do EVAs in space. That is, at least, a sister technology to our deep-sea tech.”
Your deep-sea tech? Matt thought. Without us you’ve got no deep-sea tech.
Aloud he said, “What if we put your experts to work defining what we may or may not do for different agencies? Take the deep-sea and space applications, for example. Yes, there are some similarities, but there are some important differences as well. While you want your deep-sea bots to be relatively heavy and dense and to have the capacity to increase and decrease weight situationally, the space bots will need to be as light as possible so as not to increase payload extravagantly.”
Howard considered that. He considered it long enough that Matt’s patience evaporated.
“Look, General, I can tell you straight up that if you preclude his working with the medical establishment, Dr. Brenton will never—and I do mean never—sign this contract. If you trample his heartfelt desire to use this technology to help other people, to further scientific research and extreme exploration, he may also be persuaded that you are not the sort of organization he wants FK to be in bed with.”
The general’s face reddened. It was the most emotion Matt had ever seen him show. “We represen
t the best interests of the American people, Dr. Streegman. I can assure you we will require . . . we will ask nothing of you or Dr. Brenton that does not further those interests.”
“I have tried to impress that on Chuck. Trust me. But I think what he’s looking for here, General, is a show of goodwill.”
The general quirked a graying eyebrow. “Peace on earth and goodwill toward men?”
“That is my partner in a nutshell.”
Howard rose. “I’ll see what we can do. What you can do is try to keep your partner’s attention focused where it will do all of us the most good: on his lab.”
IT TOOK SOME DOING, BUT Deep Shield finally came up with a contract that Chuck was willing to sign. The intellectual property and secrecy issues were spelled out in exhaustive detail such that no one found them onerous. Everyone but a single lab tech checked out; he was restricted to the civilian projects. Security clearances were issued, agreements were signed, and Dice’s team—supplemented with newly hired (and vetted) staff and engineers from Deep Shield—was set to design and build prototypical robots of different types.
There was a part of Daisuke—a part he tried to keep under wraps—that was almost disappointed that Chuck had been won over. Yeah, sure, there was an eight-year-old, robot-loving kid jumping up and down deep inside him, thrilled to have his playground suddenly expanded almost infinitely. But while he understood the tight-lipped protectiveness and competitiveness of academia, the level of secrecy Howard and his cohort required was unnerving.
Dice had been relieved not to have been faced with his own decision, which, once the owners of Forward Kinetics had signed the contract, was to either sign on or leave FK behind. He had given no more than a second’s thought to that option.
The changes wrought by their new partnership were immediate. Some were marked—their hired security company was replaced by men and women from Howard’s group. They wore suits, not military uniforms, but the suits, coupled with their military bearing, led to the inevitable comparisons to iconic movies. Within the week everyone was referring to them as the Smiths.
Other changes were more subtle. The inclusion of military robotics engineers changed the dynamic in Dice’s lab. The new recruits were not inclined to blend in with existing staff. Most seemed perplexed by the give-and-take, consultative atmosphere that was the norm in Dice’s domain. That had a chilling effect on his team, gradually making them quieter and less inclined to levity. It wasn’t anything the government recruits did exactly, but they were so watchful and so damned serious. Even the eight-year-old inside Dice had trouble keeping up his giddy good cheer in the face of that.
His staff responded at first by trying to include the Deeps, as they called them, in their conversations, their meals, their moments of relaxation. But the recruits refused to mingle. They took their breaks and meals together and kept talk to a minimum. They spoke to the civilian techs only to ask questions, gain clarification, or make observations. Dice couldn’t fault their behavior. They followed his orders respectfully and expediently, but with the exception of one young female officer named Megan Phillips, who seemed to bubble over with ideas, they rarely offered anything to the creative process.
The FK lab techs reacted by circling their wagons more tightly. Within weeks of the start of the new regime, Dice felt as if he were the chief of two separate tribes. He knew from the muted conversations he had with Eugene that the folks on the kinetics teams were having similar experiences. Still, he—no less than his colleagues—threw himself into training the neos he’d been given and thanked God they learned quickly. Dice was used to working with robots.
Working with these androids was something else entirely.
Chapter 19
TRUST
It took roughly two months to train the first class of robotics engineers, neurology techs, and kinetics subjects sent by Deep Shield. They were assigned eight to a zeta class, with a lieutenant in each group as ranking officer. They were quick studies, focused, dedicated. They performed with military proficiency every day and disappeared every night into buses sent to return them, Chuck supposed, to their base. The kinetics trainees came in five flavors: security/combat, machine operators, programmers and VR technicians, architects/construction engineers, and holographic specialists.
They were sharp, every last one of them, and asked a lot of questions about brain waves and the Brewster-Brenton technology. Especially Lieutenant Reynolds—whose first name, Chuck discovered after much prodding, was Brian. Reynolds was the leader of the pack. Everyone else in the first class deferred to him.
Chuck was surprised to find that the biggest hurdle Howard’s recruits had to overcome was getting to the gamma state in which the brain used several different modalities in concert. Roughly half the candidates had mild difficulty achieving gamma; the remainder had moderate to great difficulty and had to work harder at it. Chuck was, of course, curious to know why. He sought—and got—General Howard’s permission to put all the candidates through a series of neurological tests and to do a full profile of each one to see if any patterns emerged. None did that he could see, with the possible exception of the military training they had all received.
“Is that enough?” Eugene asked him as they pored over the results of their work in Chuck’s office early one morning, before the Deeps arrived for their training. “I mean is the fact that they all had the same style of training and indoctrination enough to account for their difficulty . . . I don’t know . . . letting go?”
Chuck pulled up a different view of the data, looking at the recruits’ answers to a series of questions about their experiences with family, school, and the military.
“Lanfen’s recruits have all had martial arts training,” he noted. “I thought that was one of the things that made her a good candidate—the mental discipline. Now I don’t know. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Maybe it’s not the training. Or at least maybe the training isn’t their first common denominator.”
“Their family and schooling factoids are all over the place.” Eugene tapped his laptop’s screen with a pen. “This one’s from a fully functional family—middle kid. This one’s an only child. Lost his father in his junior year of high school. This one’s the youngest of six, the only girl in a family of boys.” He glanced at Chuck. “What? You’re thinking something. I can see it.”
Chuck was thinking something. The data on his screen had gone into soft focus. “I think we need to back up a step. Maybe the question isn’t what they do in the service but why they went into the service in the first place.”
“Did we ask them that?”
Chuck ran a quick search of the survey. “Number twenty-four.”
The question had produced some interesting results. Every one of the responses was a variation on a perceived need for order, certainty, a place to belong. Additionally there were refinements that had to do with wanting to be part of a team, wanting to be part of something bigger than oneself, wanting to be of service to the country. But when all had been asked and answered, Chuck Brenton was looking at a group of people who, for various reasons, felt at a loss to define their own futures. Except for the two who had been determined to go into the military at a young age—both from military families—none had a deep-seated calling, secret talent, or sense of purpose that had to be expressed in a particular way.
Certainly they had passions. Reynolds loved martial arts and had learned a variety of different styles. Seneca Hughes liked to paint but thought of it as a hobby (“who pays for art anyway?” she’d asked). Steve Flores collected baseball memorabilia, which he shipped home to his dad in California. But none had risen to the level of a calling that the individual felt he or she must pursue. Each of them had, instead, handed many major life decisions over to the military.
Trust.
Chuck sat back in his desk chair. Every member of his zeta team trusted his or her own perceptions, his or her own inner voice, his or her own intuitions. In order to work for an agency of govern
ment such as Deep Shield, these operatives had to put their trust in their government, their command structure, the officers giving them their orders.
Was that it? Was it a matter of whether trust resided inwardly or in an external power? Surely the martial arts training, which called upon a practitioner to learn to trust his or her own reflexes and judgment, was a balancing factor.
Brian Reynolds had achieved gamma late the previous afternoon. Chuck got up from his desk and went to see if the lieutenant had arrived yet. He found him in the company café (dubbed Steampunk Alley because of the glorious, copper-clad espresso machine that was its centerpiece) making himself an espresso.
“I need your help,” Chuck told him. “I need a breakthrough to get the bulk of your team to the next level.”
“Of course, sir. What can I do?”
“I want you to think about your own breakthrough yesterday. How it felt. What caused it. What its genesis was. Then I need you to get your team and see if they can’t take that same . . . leap of faith.”
“Leap of faith,” Reynolds repeated. “Sounds sort of religious.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. I’m not sure it matters what you have faith in, just that you have it.”
Reynolds nodded and looked down at his hands. “For me it was just coming to the realization that if I could master kung fu and tae kwon do, I could master this. Then I just got into it.”
“Any imagery associated with that?”
“Imagery?”
“Did you use some sort of image or sound or other element to get into it?”
“Yes, sir. Swimming. I imagined I was swimming. Backstroking across a pool.”
Chuck smiled. “Backstroking. That’s great. Blind, trusting the water to keep you afloat, moving all your limbs. Yes. That’s a great environment. Let’s see if that or something like it will work for your team.”
The God Wave Page 19