The God Wave

by Patrick Hemstreet

  A trill of laughter answered the observation.

  He raised his head. Mini was peering at him from around one of the lab’s outer doors.

  “Did you like it?” she asked pertly.

  “Did I like . . . ?”

  “My doppelgänger. My apparition. My projection.” She came fully into the room on a wave of laughter. “You should see the look on your face.”

  “No, I’m sure I shouldn’t. What . . . what did you do?”

  “I projected! I made another me. I fooled you, didn’t I? You really thought it was me, didn’t you?”

  “I . . . I did.” He took a couple of steps toward her, then reached out and touched her, just to make sure. She was solid, warm, real.

  She beamed at him.

  “That was amazing. Does Chuck know you can do this?”

  “Not yet. I wanted you to be the first to see it.” Her smile faltered. “I haven’t shown the Deeps yet. Is that bad of me? I wanted you and Chuck to know first.”

  Eugene was staring at the spot the doppelgänger had occupied a moment before. “It—she looked so real. So solid. Not at all like a projection, but . . .” He rubbed his fingertips together, vaguely remembering the creeps he’d gotten when he’d tried to touch the ersatz Mini. How could a projection feel like anything at all?

  “Yeah. I’ve worked hard on that,” Mini said.

  Eugene shook off his heebie-jeebies and grinned at her. “I’ll bet you have. Let’s go show Chuck. Maybe then I can take you and your twin out for some—”

  Before he could finish, he felt an all-too-solid and sharp elbow in his rib cage.

  Chapter 21

  SHIELD

  Dice stared at his reflection in the opaque window of the government Humvee and sighed. Working with Deep Shield was like trying to see through that darkened glass. They’d told him they were having a problem with a mechanism but wouldn’t tell him which one. He’d asked which tools to bring. They said none—they would provide the tools. He had to assume, therefore, that this was one of the units they’d developed themselves, which brought up the question:

  Why am I being asked to troubleshoot and repair it?

  He became aware that he was arriving at the Deep Shield facility by a subtle shift in the road noise—as if the Humvee were driving down a narrow alley or possibly a tunnel. He ended up, as always, inside the big hangar. He was escorted to the workshop he always used when working with the Deeps and was presented with a robot brain case that might have come from one of his bots . . . except for the fact that it was twice the size and oddly shaped. The Forward Kinetics robot brain cases were nearly spherical; this one was roughly football shaped.

  Well, there was that, and the CPU was missing. He could tell that without even opening the case. All the weight was in one end.

  “What’s this from?” he asked the tech who’d been assigned to him—a sergeant named Cherise Kelly.

  Sergeant Kelly didn’t even blink. “It’s from one of our new units.”

  “Based on the Hob-bot, Bilbo designs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m flying blind here, Cherise. What else can you tell me about the unit?”

  She looked momentarily uncomfortable. “Sorry, Dr. Kobayashi, but I’m not authorized to tell you any more than that.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to tell me more, because I need to know what the heck you expect me to do with this.”

  “We were hoping you could fix it.”

  “Fix it. What’s it doing? Or not doing, as the case may be.”

  “It’s not working. The unit loses its balance.”

  “Where’s the CPU?”

  “In our lab.”

  “I’ll need to see it.”

  “Sorry, sir. You can’t. It’s classified.”

  He thought about that for a moment, then said, “Okay. You realize I might not be able to do anything without seeing the CPU.”

  She said nothing.

  He balanced the brain case on the palm of one hand. It tilted to the side the gyro was in. “If I have no idea how the casing balances with the CPU in it, I might not be able to troubleshoot this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right.” He sighed. Science without communication rarely ends in progress, he thought. How can these guys not get that? Dice put the case down on the workbench and assessed the tools they’d supplied. They were like the ones he had back at FK but reengineered to fit the closures of the larger unit. Weird. He didn’t see any reason the standard sizes wouldn’t have worked. No wonder military-issued tools cost as much as a fleet of Teslas.

  Dice snagged a tool, slipped the locking pins out of the brain case, and laid it out, open, on the bench. Inside, opposite the empty recess where the bot’s not-so-little brain should have been, was a closed housing for the gyro mechanism. Looking at it, Dice realized he had a pretty good idea of what the problem was without even popping off the housing.

  Should he let his handler know? He almost groaned aloud at even having the thought. Secrecy was the closest thing to a Newman engine he’d ever encountered—it fed on itself. He’d always worked in an open environment in which everyone shared information. Pooling information was the fuel that drove the engine of creativity and invention. Yet despite that, when confronted with Deep Shield clamminess, he felt less like sharing than he ever had in his life.

  He took a deep breath, shook off the momentary lapse of reason, and unseated the gyro cover. Yep, suspicions confirmed.

  “So the bot can’t maintain its balance, you said.”

  “Yes, sir. It can’t remain upright during the simplest maneuvers. In fact, it’s unstable even when standing still.”

  “That’s about what I’d expect. The brain case sits at the vertical, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I suspect you’ve got two problems. One is that the gyro mechanism is too small; the other is its placement. Either you need a larger gyro that rests on top of the CPU, or you need two gyros a hair bigger than this one—one to each side of the CPU. That’s especially true if you ever plan on having the brain case balance horizontally, which I assume you do.”

  “I couldn’t say, sir.”

  “Of course not.”

  The tech was regarding the brain case thoughtfully. “If I may ask, Doctor, why do your bots not require a double gyro?”

  “Your engineers changed too many variables at once, Sergeant. They altered the size, shape, and orientation of the brain case, changed the placement of the gyro within it, and—unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am—they also increased the size and weight of the CPU. And they did all of that without modifying the gyro or supplementing it to compensate. That’d be my educated guess anyway.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of the tech’s mouth. “Megan said you’re a smart cookie, Dr. Kobayashi. She was right. You could tell all that just by looking at a nearly empty brain case?”

  “Sergeant Kelly, I live, breathe, and dream robots. Well, I used to dream about them . . . until I got a girlfriend.” That didn’t get the laugh he was looking for. “Anyway . . .” He gestured at the mechanism lying on the worktable. “That was never gonna work.”

  “No, sir. I can see that.”

  “You know this would get fixed a lot faster if you’d just let me into your lab to work on it.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. We can’t do that. It’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s classified. Why, though? What’ve you got in there that I haven’t already seen?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Look, Cherise, I just want to see the robot this came from. I don’t want access to anything else.”

  She just looked at him for long moment, then said, “You can’t see the robot, sir.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I designed the damned things!”

  “I’m sorry, sir. You can’t see the robots. Except for the improved Hob-bot and the Thorin seri
es, all of our robots are classified.” This was delivered in a cool voice that brooked no argument.

  “Let me talk to Megan.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Lieutenant Phillips isn’t available right now. She’s engaged in field testing.”

  Dice didn’t even bother to ask what Megan Phillips was field testing. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  He made some recommendations for a redesign of the robot skull based on the sketchy information he’d surmised and then climbed into the big Humvee for the return trip to Forward Kinetics. He was surprised to find Lanfen already ensconced in the backseat, apparently on her way back to home base from her training class.

  He said very little to her on the ride, but as soon as they disembarked at their facility and the Humvee had driven away, he said, “I need to talk to you.”

  She gave him a sideways glance. “Sure. Your office?”

  “Yeah. No, wait.” He stopped and peered at the building. What if his office was bugged? For some reason, the idea didn’t seem as crazy as it would have a year ago. “Let’s just take a stroll around the park, okay?”

  “Ooookay,” she said and followed him out along the garden path.

  He headed away from the building, carefully avoiding the gardeners who were bent over their plantings. He was pretty sure he’d spooked Lanfen but kept walking without speaking until he felt sort of safe.

  Finally he stopped. “I have no idea how to start this conversation, so I’m just going to dive in,” he said. “Have you noticed anything really spooky out in the Deeps?”

  She didn’t seem that surprised by the question. “Define spooky.”

  “Do I really need to?”

  That got him a wry smile. “Not really. What’s the matter?”

  “I got called out to troubleshoot a part—a gyro they thought was malfunctioning. It was in a brain case created from one of my designs, but they’d changed the size, shape, everything. They wouldn’t show me anything but the malfunctioning bit. They wouldn’t even let me see the bot’s CPU, never mind let me in the lab with the bots. I had to do everything in the hangar.”

  “Yes. I know they’re making changes. Their fu-bots are bigger, heavier. Is that what it was—a fu-bot skull?”

  “No. I helped with the fu-bots. This brain case was several times larger than even their fu-bots, and it was a different shape.” He pantomimed an oblate spheroid. “Whatever it was, it was falling over.”

  “So . . . secret government designs. That was to be expected, right?”

  “Was it?”

  She chewed her lip. “I don’t know. The secrecy does seem a bit excessive. Unless . . .”

  “Unless they’re doing something that’s not in the contract,” Dice said, finishing her thought.

  “How could we find out? I mean they’re not going to let one of us—”

  She stopped walking and stared at him. He felt a shot of something tingly go down his spine. He was pretty sure they’d had the thought in unison or at least in close harmony.

  She smiled. “I can get into their lab. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “It had occurred to me.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow. I won’t be able to stay long.”

  “You don’t need to. You just need to see what’s back there.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s all I can ask.”

  They swung around as if by mutual agreement and strolled back to the building as nonchalantly as possible for two people who had just decided to spy on their own government.

  BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, BOUGHT a T-shirt and already shredded it.

  That was the way Mini had started to think of her involvement with Deep Shield’s crew. She was over the first flush of exhilaration at having something to teach these übercompetent people. They were a singularly focused lot who looked at her strangely when she enthused about the art she was teaching them. To them, she realized, this painting with pixels and photons served a purpose external to the art itself or the joy of creation. They concentrated on that external purpose absolutely and drilled obsessively at constructing seamless pictures generated entirely by their thoughts. They were good at it, too, but in Mini’s opinion they lacked real passion. To them it was an exercise in control, not creation. And control kind of bored her.

  By the end of that Friday’s session, she was ready to climb the walls. Several times she had almost lost her temper with the group leader, Rachel Cohen. If it weren’t for the puppy in the group—a corporal named Morris Baxter, who seemed to appreciate the sheer joy of creation—she would have snapped. She didn’t like to snap. It wasn’t a good look on her. Something like the mouse that roared.

  When the last of the Deeps had left her lab at the end of the day, she saluted the empty doorway sarcastically and thought about throwing up a middle finger or two, then felt an immediate wave of guilt. They were to be pitied, not scorned. Except for Corporal “Call Me Bax” Baxter, they had no idea what they were missing by focusing so entirely on the product that they failed to derive happiness from the process.

  “I need a fix,” Mini told herself aloud and headed for the gardens to look for Jorge. A quick talk with the gardener—someone who was passionate about something, even if most people would say they were just plants—would make her forget all about her frustration with her class.

  Usually at that time on a Friday, Jorge was cleaning up the tool barn and prepping for the next week’s work, but when Mini reached the barn, he was nowhere to be seen. She poked around, looking for him, then gave up and decided a walk along the garden paths would have to suffice to detangle her snarled mood. She’d gotten almost all the way back to the Forward Kinetics building when she saw him working in the shade of a small cluster of maples. But as she drew closer, she realized it wasn’t Jorge. She figured it must be another member of his crew, though, who would surely know where his boss was. It was only when she got practically on top of the man that she realized he was a complete stranger.

  He turned to look at her as she reached the little grove of trees and smiled. “Hello, miss,” he said. He was nothing like Jorge. He was much younger, his black hair cropped rather than slicked back.

  “Hi,” she said. “Um, have you seen Jorge?”

  “Who?”

  “Jorge Delgado, the head groundskeeper. He’s not sick or something, is he?”

  “I’m sorry, miss. Jorge doesn’t work here anymore. His company’s contract was terminated.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, miss.”

  “So you’re with the new groundskeeping company?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “I don’t know, miss. I was just assigned here effective Wednesday.”

  “I see,” she said. “Well, thanks.”

  She made her way back toward the building, with her mind in a worse tangle than before. Jorge hadn’t known his company was going to be terminated the last time she’d spoken to him, which had been—good God—Wednesday morning. It wasn’t her imagination that this new guy sounded just like the guys in her art class. “Effective Wednesday”—that was almost formal, as were the “miss” this and “miss” that.

  Military speak—that’s what it was.

  Nor was it her imagination that he’d had a walkie-talkie peeking out of his pocket. She paused to pick a bloom from a shrub rose and watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was speaking into the walkie-talkie. Reporting on his conversation with her?

  She set her jaw, tucked Jorge’s rose behind her ear, and marched into the building. The effect was half flamenco dancer, half toreador on her way to find the source of this bullshit.

  EUGENE WAS CREEPED OUT. THERE was no other phrase that described it. He’d gone off campus to get what Mini called “candy coffee” at a local bistro—so heavy on the whipped cream and extra mocha that he couldn’t be sure there was any actual coffee in it at all—and had decided to stop at a drugstore to grab a handful of PayD
ay bars and some red Twizzlers to restock his desk drawer.

  He’d thought nothing of it when a young man in an Orioles T-shirt and mirrored shades had lined up with him at the coffee shop, but when he saw the same guy in one of those angled overhead mirrors at the drugstore, it sent a chill all the way from the top of his geek-chic hair to the soles of his high-tops.

  He somehow managed to look nonchalant as he walked back to his car and climbed in. He pretended to mess with the radio and the cell phone charger for a minute or two. It allowed him to see the guy out of the corner of his eye when he exited the store and stood on the sidewalk.

  Eugene couldn’t tell if the guy glanced at him, thanks to the mirrored shades, but he wasn’t surprised when he fished out a cell phone and started talking into it as he paced back and forth in front of the store.

  Fine. Play that game.

  Euge started his car and backed out of the parking place. He drove across the lot to the exit, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirror. Somewhere between one glance and the next, the Orioles fan had disappeared. By the time Eugene had made it across the parking lot to the street, a silver-gray Honda was pulling out.

  He drove back to Forward Kinetics via an alternate route that included the drive-through window at a Dairy Queen, where he forced an Oreo blizzard down on top of the macchiato. He last saw the silver Honda as he turned in at the business park’s main entrance. It drove straight past.

  Eugene headed directly for Chuck’s office, the queasy feeling in his stomach caused by something other than a sugar overload.

  ALL WEEK LANFEN HAD LOOKED for an opportunity to get behind the scenes at Deep Shield. The problem was, of course, that she was rarely alone. She was escorted everywhere and spent the bulk of her time with her class.

  The opportunity finally came when her class broke up on Friday afternoon. They’d quit a bit early to attend a debriefing, and the limo and driver usually assigned to her were otherwise engaged.

  “Do you mind waiting for your driver here?” Brian asked her, gesturing around their practice room. His classmates had already marched their bots out of the room, but Thorin was standing at attention next to him. “It should only be about twenty minutes.”