BY THE TIME LANFEN GOT her first class of recruits, they had all achieved trustworthy zeta states. Chuck had shared with her how hard-won the gamma state had been and that they’d resorted to guided imagery to get everyone up to speed. Reynolds’s trick of imagining himself floating and swimming in water had sparked the others in the class to come up with things they could use in the same way, to pry the fingers of focus off their thought processes so they could glide into gamma.
That made sense to the martial artist. Lanfen had used guided imagery her entire life for everything from quelling childhood night frights to avoiding panic attacks when she made a foray into new social territory. The few times she had been required to speak publicly in college, she had used a purely mental version of her kung fu warm-up routine as a nerve-calming device.
The questions the neos in her first class asked her had mostly to do with technique and how she so easily maintained the VR connection when in direct contact with the bot—what they had come to call “ventrilokinesis.” Matt had laughed at that characterization of it, and Lanfen had admitted, ruefully, that it was her doing. She had repeatedly referred to her technique as “throwing her self,” and Steve Flores had said, “You mean like a ventriloquist?”
“Personally,” she’d told Matt, “I’d prefer something more elegant—kinetoquism maybe. Ventrilokinesis is too long and makes me think of creepy dummies.”
Whatever one called it, it proved to be hard for even the dedicated Lieutenant Reynolds to master. Lanfen found this interesting; the trainees found it frustrating.
So did Matt Streegman.
“Why aren’t they picking it up?” he asked her at the end of almost every session in which she tried to teach the “throwing” method she used.
“I honestly don’t know,” she’d told him at the end of her most recent session, in which Reynolds and one of the female recruits had managed a few seconds of connectivity after Becky’s hard interface was deactivated. “They’re certainly dedicated enough. They’re disciplined. They’re . . .” She lost the thread of the sentence in a minor epiphany.
“What?” He was reading her face, which, she figured, must have been doing something peculiar.
They were standing in Steampunk Alley, fixing hot beverages. Lanfen turned to face Matt, her lapsang souchong momentarily forgotten.
“They’re monotaskers.”
“You mean unitaskers?”
She laughed. “No. A unitasker is someone or something that can do only one thing. I mean they can do a variety of things, but they’ve been trained to do them sequentially. Step by step. They don’t juggle or multitask well, or at least that talent hasn’t been cultivated.”
“Can you help them cultivate it?”
“To be honest, I don’t know.”
His face said clearly that was not the answer he’d wanted to hear. “Lanfen, this is of critical importance. They must be able to master the VR connectivity. They must be able to learn to see through the robot’s eyes without the hard interface. Hear with its ears. Otherwise—”
“Latency issues. I get it.”
“I’m not sure you do get it,” Matt said tersely. “I’m not sure you understand what those latency issues mean to these people. The seconds of lag between the operator’s perception of the bot’s position and his translation of what he’s seeing into action may make the difference between success and failure, life and death.”
“Trust me, Matt—I get it,” she said, thinking of her fight with Reynolds. “I’m just not sure I know how to teach multitasking.”
“How did your master teach you?”
“He didn’t. I come by it naturally. In fact, he claims I taught him.”
Matt stared at her a moment, then burst out laughing. “Stop apologizing for being a prodigy, Lanfen. Just see if you can teach them what you taught your shifu.”
“It’s hard to teach something you do naturally. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Honestly,” he said, “I never really thought much about it.” He raised his espresso in a toast then and left her standing at the beverage bar.
Always enlightening talking to you, Matt.
She went into her afternoon training session with a box full of beanbags and hacky sacks, determined to teach her recruits how to juggle.
INVOLVEMENT WITH THE MILITARY BRED a certain level of order in the affairs at Forward Kinetics. Chuck reflected that while he had always appreciated order, the sort of regularity General Howard’s people brought with them was anathema to the creative dynamic he thrived on, and as Dice and Eugene had seen with their teams, it was changing the dynamic of the company. The crew that had been ever eager to throw ideas at the wall to see which ones would stick was becoming careful—timid even—in its approach to the work. He understood that any organization went through stages, but he knew without a doubt that Forward Kinetics’ research and development teams were not even halfway to the norming stage for any of their processes. The military presence was forcing changes that Chuck feared would have an adverse impact on the very processes an enterprise like theirs needed to drive development.
Which was why he was both surprised and pleased to enter the martial arts classroom to find Chen Lanfen and her team playing something he could only describe as beanbag Jeopardy.
Standing in two facing rows, eight recruits tossed beanbags back and forth, moving them up and down the rows. There was a catch, of course: the recruits were expected to snag a bag with one hand while tossing one with the other, shift the bag to the opposite hand, and toss it to the person standing kitty-corner to them even as they caught the next beanbag from their upstream neighbor. All of this while Lanfen fired questions at them.
“Reynolds! Choose a category: firearms or movies?”
Catch. “Firearms!” Shift. Toss.
“What’s the difference between a single-action and a double-action firearm?”
Catch. “Double action requires cocking the gun before pulling the trigger.” Shift. “Single action does not.” Toss.
“Flores! Category: television series or music?”
“Television!”
“Who played the title role in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?”
“Uh . . .” said Flores, catching a beanbag with his left hand while tossing one to his opposing neighbor with his right. “Solo something.” He shifted the new beanbag to his right hand.
“Wrong. That was the name of the character.”
“Oh, ah—” Toss, catch. “Uh, um, Robert-Robert-Robert . . . Vaughn! Robert Vaughn!” He shifted the incoming bag and missed it with his right hand. It plopped between his feet. “Dammit!”
His upstream partner smiled, and the whole line of Deeps relaxed. Lanfen clapped her hands sharply. “Keep it going, guys! No stopping! Keep the bags moving until everyone gets back into the swing of things. Don’t drop the ball, okay?”
She glanced over at the door and saw Chuck standing there watching (and, he thought, probably looking goofy).
He straightened. “How’s it going?”
She glanced back at her group and nodded. “It’s going well. In fact, why don’t you guys take a break?”
Lieutenant Reynolds frowned. “I think we’ll keep going, if you don’t mind. Practice the catch-throw sequence without the trivia questions.”
Lanfen looked like a proud parent glancing back at her prodigies as she left the room.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Chuck told her as she joined him in the hallway.
“No, it’s fine. I wanted to go grab a cup of tea anyway.” She nodded back toward the lab. “They’ve been at that for a couple of hours in one form or another.”
“Did you think that exercise up yourself?” Chuck asked her as they fell into step.
“Yes.”
“I’m impressed. How are they doing really?”
“They’re doing well. Really. Some more than others, of course. Mr. Flores has a bit of a problem, as does his lieutenant.”
“Reynol
ds? That bothers him a great deal, I imagine.”
“I don’t judge. We just keep running the drills until everyone is either locked in or ready to collapse. If they’re ready to collapse, I have a backup exercise that’s not quite as hard, so they can succeed at something.”
They turned in to Steampunk Alley. “You’re good at this,” Chuck told her. “And you just made my day.”
She shot him a sidewise glance. “How so?”
“I was moping around the halls, feeling like our organizational creativity is just seeping away, and here you are inventing a program to teach multitasking.”
Lanfen laughed. “Necessity is a mother, I guess. Dr. Streegman made it pretty clear that if we couldn’t teach them how to interface directly with the bot’s VR unit, it could blow up the whole deal. Or someone could get themselves blown up.”
“Latency,” Chuck murmured. “The slip betwixt the cup and the lip, the thought and the action.”
“In a word, yes.”
Chuck watched Lanfen pour herself a cup of hot water and deposit a tea bag in it. “Do you think teaching them to multitask will facilitate their learning to throw themselves?”
“You know, Matt asked me the same thing. You two are a lot alike.”
“True,” he said. “Except in every way.”
Lanfen laughed. “I know what you mean on the surface. But you’re both equally driven, just by different things. Two true believers. You’d see it if you were standing outside yourself. Maybe through Bilbo’s eyes.”
Chuck smiled but tried not to think too much about the comparison—or its implications. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“The new recruits? They’re certainly disciplined enough to throw themselves. A couple of them even meditate.”
He pounced on that. “Are the ones who practice meditation doing better than the ones who don’t?”
“Yes. To different degrees, though. I’m starting to think the real essential element is self-awareness. Meditation isn’t just about emptying your mind. It’s about connecting with your self, becoming aware of all the processes happening in your body, mind, and spirit. Your breathing, your heartbeat, your senses, your inner climate and thoughts. It’s like . . . you can’t throw a ball unless you can feel the ball in your hands. You can’t throw your voice unless you have an awareness of where it comes from and what shapes it—diaphragm, throat, vocal cords, everything. If you’re uncertain that there’s anything to sense, you might be less than effective in doing much more than achieving a resting state. Do you understand?”
“You can’t throw your point of view—your self—unless you have some grasp on what that is or at least a belief that there’s something there to throw.”
“Exactly. And my recruits are each coming at that from a different set of experiences and beliefs. I think Sergeant Masterson has the best grasp on it. She’s done yoga and meditation, and she has a sort of . . . well, a spiritual foundation.”
She was blushing, which suffused her golden skin with subtle shades of rose.
“What?” he said. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“Not at all. I was afraid . . . well, you’re a scientist. You probably find all that spirituality talk silly. Or at least irrelevant. I know Dr. Streegman does.”
“That’s Matt. And that’s where we’re not actually alike. He’s a mathematician. I’m a neurologist. The human processes—the processes that make us human—are my whole focus. I’m not at all uncomfortable with the idea of a spiritual reality. In fact I accept it as a given.”
“Oh. Then maybe it’s you and me that are alike.”
Chuck grinned. “Has Matt given you any milestones for teaching your students to know themselves well enough to throw their selves?”
She groaned at the play on words—something he found immensely satisfying. He was not known for his sense of humor.
“I need to show results in ten days, and I don’t think Matt’s going to accept a fast and furious game of Trivial Pursuit: Beanbag Edition as results.” Her brow furrowed. “What do you think will happen if I can’t do it?”
He opened his mouth to say, “I don’t know,” but what came out was, “You’ll do it. I have no doubt.” He was surprised to realize that was the absolute truth.
MATT WAS A FUNNY GUY. He seemed to be the most laid-back and casual when he was really the most nervous or ill at ease. When he strolled into the robotics lab with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his khakis and a smile on his face, every alarm bell in Dice’s head went off.
“Hey, Dice, how’re things going?”
Dice glanced sidewise at Brenda, who was helping him test a new appendage design for the ninja bots. The rest of the crew had gone to lunch. “Uh, things are going really well. We’ll have two units ready for testing tomorrow morning.”
Matt stopped in the middle of the lab, looked off into the middle distance, and scratched behind one ear. “Yeah, about that. You’re pushing the limits of our facility here to get two of these done in a week’s time, aren’t you?”
That wasn’t a question.
“Pretty much. But we really don’t have the resources to do more than that.”
“We could get more manpower . . .”
Dice shook his head. “That won’t do it. Even if I had twice as many people, we don’t have the workspace. We could retool our space to create an assembly line, but these things aren’t cookie-cutter constructs. The other option is to move, which would take time away from—” He gestured at the bot.
“Yeah, I can see that.” Matt looked around the lab as if he were seeing it for the first time. “Well, looks like there’s only one solution, then. We’ll send a couple of the bots over to Deep Shield with schematics for them to assess. Then you and some of your trainees can go over there and teach more of their folks to assemble them.”
“O-okay. When—”
“I don’t know. Tomorrow maybe. That’ll give them the rest of the week to look the units over and have some idea of who’s going to be taking your class. You can go over next Monday. They’ll be—well, they ought to be ready by then.” He smiled. “Great. I’ll tell General Howard.” He sketched a salute and sauntered back out of the lab.
Beside Dice, Brenda made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort. “What was that?”
“That,” said Dice, “was me being thoroughly manipulated. He came in here to tell me that Deep Shield was demanding access to the bots in their own labs. He ended up asking if they could take some of the work off my hands.”
“Wow,” said Bren. “He’s good.”
“Yeah. Yeah, he is. Scary, isn’t it?”
Chapter 20
DEEP
Two days after Lanfen was able to get all but one of her first class to throw with some level of success, she arrived at Forward Kinetics to find her classroom lab empty. None of her charges were in evidence; there was no message explaining their absence; there was nothing on the organizational calendar to clarify it.
Puzzled, she headed for Matt’s office to see if he knew what was up. She was reaching out to tap on his door when someone called to her.
“Ms. Chen?”
She turned to see Brian Reynolds standing up the hall, toward the foyer. As always he was wearing an unadorned, navy blue uniform.
“Hi, Brian. Where is everybody?”
“They’re waiting for us at the facility. We’ll be working from there from now on.”
Lanfen was an even-tempered soul, but the cavalier attitude this last-minute change suggested raised her usually slumbering ire. She took a deep breath and exhaled, wondering if she should just fling open Matt’s office door and find out what this was about.
“Ma’am?” Reynolds was watching her with that air of well-tested patience she’d begun to suspect was taught—no, mandated—by the military.
Fine. She’d take this up with Matt when she got back. She nodded and followed Brian out to the government-issued car that waited for them in the par
king lot.
The Deep Shield kinetics facility was impressive, or at least the part of it that Lanfen saw. The working space was large, well laid out, and fitted with everything a kung fu workout required and then some. The main floor area was taken up by a huge, blue mat; around its perimeter stood the members of her class, each accompanied by a gleaming new robot.
It took a moment for Lanfen to realize there was a lone robot standing sentry to one side of the large double doors: Bilbo.
The anger she’d felt earlier rekindled. That they had simply swept her away without warning was bad enough, but that they had come into her domain and taken Bilbo without so much as a word to her . . .
She wasn’t sure where to direct the anger—at Howard and his team for absconding with her, her class, and her robot or at Matt and Chuck for letting Howard do it in the first place.
Except, of course, that Bilbo wasn’t really her robot.
She gently reined the anger in again. It would do her no good here and would only hamper her training efforts and her personal progress. Nor was it fair to her students to hold them accountable for their masters’ behavior. For not the first time today, she promised herself she would have a serious discussion with Matt Streegman when she got back to FK. She took a deep, cleansing breath, let it out, and inspected her class and their metal counterparts.
“I had no idea that Dice’s team had built so many of these little guys,” she said, realizing only as she said it that these “little guys” were bigger than Bilbo by about a third. There were other differences as well—slightly different dimensions, thicker limbs, a different material on the torso shielding.
“Actually,” said Reynolds, “we brought over a few prototypes and built the rest of them here.”
She turned to look at him. “Does Dice know?”
Was there just the slightest reddening along his cheekbones?
“Dr. Kobayashi helped set up our operation.”
Lanfen relaxed a bit. “Fine, then. Well, let’s get going, shall we? We need to put these new bots through a shakedown process, and we’re running late.”
The God Wave Page 20