The God Wave

by Patrick Hemstreet

  Dice and Chuck exchanged looks that Dice was sure were suitably startled.

  “Wow,” he said, barely needing to feign shock. “You think it was deliberate sabotage?”

  Howard glanced aside at Reynolds. “We’re not altogether sure what to think. If it was deliberate sabotage, it was of a most peculiar kind. The perpetrator had the opportunity to do substantial damage but didn’t. I mentioned there were other bots involved—all were new models that haven’t been outside the lab since they were built. They rolled off of their charging stations in a couple of cases, doing minor damage to other equipment. But that was the extent of it. If this was deliberate sabotage, I’d have expected much more than that. Or at least theft. But nothing is missing.” He hesitated, then asked, “Doctors, have you ever had one of your bots go rogue?”

  Dice and Chuck both shook their heads.

  “Never,” Dice said. “Ours are controllable only through energy manipulation of the kinetic interface. They are robots, not sentient beings. I don’t know what’s possible with your models, though. You’ve made modifications to the design, many of which I don’t have firsthand knowledge of.”

  “So there had to be a human operator,” Howard surmised.

  “Not necessarily,” said Chuck. He set his coffee on the edge of Howard’s desk and leaned forward in his chair. “Depending on what modifications you’ve made, you may have introduced a sensitivity to the kinetic converter that interprets nondirective energy as instructions. For example, with an enhanced sensitivity level, the interface might misinterpret output from another source as an instruction set—Wi-Fi, for example, or cellular activity. A radiation leak, perhaps? That might explain the randomness of the bot’s activity. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Or maybe you’ve got someone on your staff who unwittingly manipulated the bot. Someone who’s a latent talent, perhaps, and was in the labs last night. Or maybe one of your regular bot drivers somehow fed the bot instructions unconsciously. Do your human operators ever sleep anywhere near the labs?”

  “Wait. That would mean I did it,” interrupted Reynolds, then to General Howard, “Beg pardon, sir, but he’s suggesting I did this.”

  “Not consciously,” Chuck clarified. “And not you specifically. Regardless, I’m also not saying you did it with intent. Frankly we don’t know how the subconscious mind of the operator would affect the robot. We’ve never tested that. But it stands to reason it would work once a mind was trained to exert itself in that way. Were you anywhere in the area last night?”

  Reynolds nodded slowly. “I was in the barracks two floors down. Is that . . . would that be close enough?”

  “Again, I don’t know. As I said, we never experimented with that. And our operators sleep off campus, miles away. At that distance, I don’t think it ever occurred to us something like this was possible. Two floors down, though . . .” He left the thought hanging.

  “But why would I take Thorin out into the labs? If I was dreaming, why wouldn’t I remember it?”

  “It may be the same neurological state as sleepwalking, which the subject rarely, if ever, remembers.”

  “But why would it affect me? I wasn’t the only operator in the barracks last night. There were at least three others.”

  “Again, we’re not saying it was you. But, if I had to make a guess, you’d be at the top of my list,” Dice said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re somewhat of a prodigy, Brian. You’re ahead of the curve when it comes to throwing yourself into the bot. Plus you’ve been working with the bots longer than just about anyone outside of our teams, and you have a special affinity with Thorin.”

  General Howard looked like a man with a deeply perplexing problem—which Dice supposed he was. “This poses a whole new set of possibilities we hadn’t anticipated. Not only might our own operators unexpectedly trigger unintentional behavior in a bot, but just a bit ago Dr. Brenton suggested that a third party might be able to hijack a unit. Either event poses a major problem. One that could bring the entire robotics program to a halt.” He looked from Chuck to Dice. “Gentlemen, we need to find a way to keep this from happening again, and time is of the essence. We are on the verge of a first-time deployment of our mechanicals. I need you to solve this.”

  Deployment? Dice glanced at Chuck, who was shaking his head and smiling.

  “Ironic, isn’t it? All the efforts we’ve made to allow the human mind to interact with mechanicals, and we didn’t foresee having to prevent them from doing it. I don’t think the answer is on the human end of the equation, General. The human mind is a delicate instrument—”

  “So it has to be at the mechanical end,” Dice said, thinking fast and out loud. “We may need to establish a storage protocol. Delink the converter from the servo. That effectively breaks the circuit.”

  “Yes,” said Chuck, seamlessly picking up the thread. “Good idea. I think we need to design a sleep experiment. See if it’s even possible to sleepwalk a robot.”

  Dice watched the two military men weigh what they’d said, barely daring to breathe. He swore he could feel Chuck’s gaze on the side of his head. Chuck knew as well as he did that no storage protocol would keep the Forward Kinetics zetas from manipulating the robots. If the Deep Shield zetas were able to manipulate mechanicals directly, Howard would know that delinking the converter and servo interface wouldn’t do a damn thing.

  Howard only frowned a bit less and nodded. “Yes. A storage protocol. Dr. Kobayashi, I would appreciate it if you would begin working with my staff on such a plan first thing tomorrow. While you, Dr. Brenton, can get to work designing an experiment that will show us if there’s a potential for unwitting sabotage by our own operators.”

  Dice nodded, and Chuck said, “Certainly.”

  “Would a storage protocol help if it was a clumsy attempt at sabotage?” Reynolds asked. “If it wasn’t me dreaming or sleepwalking or whatever?”

  “It should,” Dice lied. “But how likely is it that it’s sabotage? Like the general said, as sabotage goes, it was pretty lame.”

  “Maybe the saboteur wasn’t an expert at manipulating this sort of mechanism. Or maybe they were there for a different purpose. Maybe they were just spying or going for a joyride.”

  Dice forced his head to move up and down. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see that, I guess. I mean it might be tempting for someone—I dunno, a guard or maintenance guy—to just, you know, try to move one of the bots. If that’s what happened, though, they probably scared themselves half to death.”

  The general’s frown deepened again. “We’ve questioned everyone on duty last night. Perhaps we should do so again—with a slightly different emphasis.”

  “You said you have a deployment coming up,” Chuck said with surprising outer calm. “How much time does that give us?”

  The general shot him an inscrutable glance, then said, “The end of the week, gentlemen. You have until the end of the week.”

  CHUCK AND DICE WERE BOTH silent on the way back out to the less-top-secret confines of the top-secret facility. They found Lanfen in the canteen, holding a cup of tea and looking wary.

  Chuck slid into the chair next to hers. “We’ve been asked to fix a little problem with the bots,” he said. “One wandered away from its charging station last night and got everyone in an uproar.”

  She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Fix it? Can you?”

  “We have to if the program is going to succeed. And we don’t have a lot of time. General Howard says they’re planning a first deployment soon. I’m thinking at the beginning of next week because he’s asked us to solve the hijacking problem by the end of this one.”

  She stared at him. “A deployment? Of . . . never mind. That’s not a lot of time.”

  “No, it’s not. We’ve got a lot of work to do before then.”

  She nodded, then rose and bent over to drop a kiss on his hair. Her hand brushed the lapel of his suit coat and patted his chest lightly. “Back to class,�
�� she said and left the canteen.

  He sat, stunned for a moment by the intimate gesture, then realized she’d slipped something into the breast pocket of his blazer. The jammer. Great, because he was going to need it.

  Still, it was a bit hard to concentrate on his way back to Forward Kinetics.

  God, she smells good . . .

  When Chuck returned to FK, he tracked Matt down. His partner looked up from his laptop and grimaced as Chuck wandered through the door of his office.

  “We—”

  “Need to talk. Yes, Chuck. You should just have those words embroidered on your lab coat. What are you worried about now?”

  Chuck hesitated, deliberately unknitting his brow. “No, it’s just . . . Look, has anyone from Deep Shield contacted you about the incident in their labs last night?”

  Matt’s face testified eloquently to his complete surprise. “What incident?”

  “The one where the robot wandered off.”

  “What?” Matt’s fingers froze over his keyboard. “Which robot?”

  “One of their training bots. Brian Reynolds’s unit, Thorin, went for a stroll, apparently. General Howard said there were several other highly classified bots liberated and some minor damage to lab equipment.”

  “Let me get this straight: one of their robots went rogue?”

  “No, not rogue. Well, not insofar as they can tell. They . . .” How to put it? “They’ve been less than forthcoming about the sort of changes they’ve made in their proprietary units. When they say they can’t think of any reason for them to go rogue, I have to take them at their word.”

  “Sabotage?”

  Chuck shrugged, trying to ignore the flush of heat he felt creeping up the back of his neck. Stick to the facts. “The general thinks not. He said a real saboteur would have done more damage. This almost seemed accidental, a by-product of clumsiness. We’ve got two theories at this point: one of their trainees was manipulating the bot unintentionally, or someone who’s not in the program was playing at being a zeta.”

  “Is either of those things even possible?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about. They’ve asked us to come up with some way of keeping the bots from being hijacked. If that’s what happened. As I said, we really have no idea what they’ve been doing to their mechanicals, what sort of features they’re giving them.” He shrugged again.

  “You want to know if I have a clue what they’ve been experimenting with, is that it?”

  “I never did have a good poker face,” Chuck said. “Yes, Matt—it would be nice to know, because we might be able to fix it. I’ll add that Dice is particularly concerned that they’ve done something like writing AI code into the interface.”

  “I can imagine they might,” said Matt. “After all, what happens if the operator is injured or killed or disabled in some way? You’d want to be able to retrieve the unit, so maybe they wrote some ‘run home to Mama’ code for it.”

  “If they did, they didn’t mention it to us. I just want to understand what we’ve got to contend with. Especially since they’re planning some sort of deployment for next week.” He watched Matt’s face carefully for signs of . . . something.

  Matt’s brow furrowed. “Deployment? Deployment of what exactly?”

  “I don’t know. The bots they’ve been building, presumably. Do you know—?”

  He was cut off as Matt’s cell phone rang, spraying the office with Thomas Dolby’s “One of Our Submarines.” The irony was not lost on Chuck.

  “Speak of the devil,” Matt said, glancing down at it where it sat beside his laptop. “It’s Howard.”

  Chuck took a step backward. “Oh. I’ll just head back to my office. Come by when you get a minute, okay?”

  He beat a hasty retreat then, reflecting that he’d be surprised if Matt bothered to track him down. He was, therefore, surprised when Matt did precisely that roughly forty minutes later, face neutral, hands shoved deep into his pockets.

  Bad sign. Hands in pockets indicated Matt was restraining himself in some way. The deeper the hands pressed, the stronger the emotion he was suppressing.

  Chuck resigned himself to an unpleasant interview and cast a glance at Lorstad’s little jammer to make sure it was still on. Mike had “adjusted” the surveillance cameras around Chuck’s office, so there was a long blind spot just outside the door in his private lab. Chuck had developed the art of fading into it and turning on the jammer before returning, invisibly, to his office.

  He wondered, as he shifted the device farther out of sight, if the mysterious Lorstad was using it to track him. It had never even occurred to him to ask one of the zetas to check that for him. Once again he was reminded that he was not cut out for espionage. His life’s work was about revealing things, not hiding them.

  And yet, here I go again . . .

  “Earth to Chuck,” Matt said. He sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk.

  Chuck willed his face to relax and met his partner’s gaze, trying not to look as if he had anything to hide. “I take it the general filled you in on the excitement last night.”

  “Yes, he did.” Matt was silent for a moment, his eyes never leaving Chuck’s face. “He mentioned that Dice is designing what he called a storage protocol to shut the kinetic interface down manually.”

  “Yes, that was something they wanted us to look into.”

  Matt’s gaze did a circuit of the room, as if he were looking for a hidden message somewhere. “The way Howard described it, it was Dice’s suggestion. Did you happen to mention to him that this protocol will only protect his bots from zetas who don’t know how to manipulate the mechanics directly?”

  Chuck felt heat rise up the back of his neck. “I didn’t, figuring that none of his zetas are doing that.”

  “Why not?”

  “We taught them to use the kinetic interface. Just the way our zetas do—did.”

  “You withheld information from a U.S. government agency. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  Chuck licked his suddenly dry lips but decided to turn the conversation. “I’m not certain that’s really what they are, Matt.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Any of his composed neutrality was now gone.

  “I told you I contacted the Pentagon and the CIA about these guys. I also went to a personal contact in the FBI. My security clearance there goes pretty high because of some work I did for them a couple of years ago. My contact went to his superiors and got back to me. He said he needed to look into it, and I wasn’t to discuss it with anyone else.”

  “Like me, for instance.”

  “Like you.”

  “Chuck, you’re being paranoid—”

  “Of course I am! They’re building robot warriors, Matt. Can’t you understand that? They’re building a robot army. Like—like something out of a Star Wars movie. They’re building tech into them that our contract specifically precludes.”

  Matt’s expression was suddenly guarded. “And you know this how?

  “You did it, didn’t you? You—” Matt broke off and glanced frantically around the room. “Shit, you realize they’ve been overhearing every word we’ve—”

  “They don’t even know we’re in here. Don’t ask. Just accept it as fact. My office is a bug-free zone. A dead spot.”

  “You did the break-in last night, didn’t you? Somehow you got one of their bots to . . . Sabotage, Chuck? For the love of—”

  “No. Not sabotage. Just a little reconnaissance. About our company and our technology. We needed to know, Matt.”

  “Building a robot army . . .”

  “Yes. There are bots in there with treads, flamethrowers, plasma weapons, EMP generators. Missile launchers! They’ve got one model that comes with a tank for sarin gas.”

  Matt’s mouth popped open as if to retort, but nothing came out. He closed it and put on the face that said he was thinking rapidly and frenetically—gaze distracted, brow furrowed, mouth pursed.

&n
bsp; Chuck waited a beat, then said, “And they’re planning a deployment, Matt.”

  Matt looked up at him. “They are part of the U.S. government. Our military. Whatever it is they’re doing, they’re entitled to do it. Frankly, you’re the reason for all that mealy language in the contract about no offensive uses of the tech. If they’re building robots in secret labs where we can’t see them or know what’s going into them, it’s your damn fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “I have to tell you, Chuck, General Howard would like nothing better than to get you off the team. He views you as a risk. You’re a Pollyanna. Your ideals are unrealistic. You’re not a businessman.”

  “No, I’m a scientist. I’ve never pretended otherwise.”

  “In a soft, squishy science. You’re a true believer. A crusader.”

  “And you’re an asshole.”

  Matt didn’t even flinch. “Yes—but one who understands that we’re going to be in a lot more trouble breaching their security than they are breaching the contract. You need to stay out of the business side of this and let me deal with it. Right now Howard thinks he needs you to work on this bogus protocol. He doesn’t suspect you’re the one responsible for last night’s intrusion, and I think we should do everything we can to keep it that way.” Matt paused. “How’d you do it, by the way? Who was the bot driver?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “I won’t tattle on you, Chuck. Howard doesn’t need to know. He’ll get his tech and his training, and he’ll pay us the money, and the contract will be done. I don’t care if he never finds out who penetrated his secret kingdom. It was your girlfriend, wasn’t it? That’s who you got on the inside.”

  Chuck suspected he was blushing. He felt as if he was. “My girlfriend . . .”

  “Chen.” Matt sat back in his chair, a grin unexpectedly creasing his face. “Damn. I would really love to know how you did it—and I don’t mean landing a beautiful woman like Chen, although I’m sure there’s an interesting story there, too.” Matt laughed. “I have to say I didn’t think you had it in you. You’d better hope General Howard never suspects you do.”