by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Dagger for Dorsal Fin
Jenner was a software engineer in the Dorsal Fin Program in the GX Operations Department of COPE. She worked on the Dorsal Fin team for several years and was the most respected and reclusive software geek there. She had developed control software and firmware for various stages of robotic demonstration and prototype components. The Dorsal Fin program manager was grateful to her for solving a couple of knotty control problems that had threatened the very existence of the program.
At a routine Monday morning technical review in 2045, Jenner commented, “I just can’t make any progress using those jerks in Engineering, and I don’t have time to do the feedback-loop optimization myself. I’ve got all I can do keeping three programmers and an analyst busy. We’re falling behind in the hardware, and we just aren’t going to get there using Engineering support like we’re supposed to.”
“Jesus, Jenner!” her boss said, shaking his head. “You know how the Engineering AD gets on my boss’s ass every time he finds out we’re going around Engineering for support. And you know Jerry believes in the gravitational theory of management—and so do I!”
“Yeah, I know. Shit roles downhill.”
“Right! And you’re in the valley.”
“Okay,” Jenner said, “Bottom line is I’ve got to use Engineering because you don’t want to piss off your boss. But if I don’t get somebody good and dedicated, you’re going to see a lot more schedule flags.”
“Look. Three times I’ve gotten you dedicated help from Engineering.”
“Yeah, the first guy was dedicated to retirement. The most work I got out of him was a nice design for his cabin up at Tahoe. Then there was that broad that really liked me. She dedicated a poem to me. And then there was that Mormon creep that kept talking to me about endowments. I think he was dedicating a new synagogue or something. I’ve had enough COPE dedication.”
Her boss sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I talked to Jerry on Friday because I figured you might hit me with this. Here’s the deal, and don’t yell at me until I finish. E-4 has this hotshot controls guy. He’s been working on some sandbox stuff that hasn’t been going anywhere, you know, Jimmy’s group? But this guy, Sherwood, is really a top nerd, and we can have him.”
“Oh, right! And the only problem is he carries a chain saw in a holster.”
“No, listen. He’s not that bad. Jimmy says he’s a little weird. He’s got a couple of women over there that complain about this guy being kind of creepy. The word is, Jimmy’s sleeping with one of the gals, and she laid the law down about getting rid of this guy, so Jimmy’s smart enough to know what that means. So we can have him.”
“Since when is it against the law for an engineer to be weird? Hell, we ought to all be in the bumper room. So when can I interview this guy?”
Jenner’s boss grinned. “They’re moving his stuff over here this morning. He’s going in Jacob’s old office, you know, next to—”
“I know where it is! But don’t I get anything to say about it? After all, he’s going to be working for me. Besides, if Jimmy hired him, he probably can’t even zip his own fly. How we ever let some retired colonel have a position of authority around here I’ll never figure out.”
“But Jimmy didn’t hire him,” her boss said. “He came in through the FBI window when we moved.”
“You mean we’re getting an FBI retread? I don’t like this!”
The other task managers had been silent throughout this exchange. The mechanical engineer then spoke up. “We’ve been after you for a month for the bandwidth requirements of each leg joint, and you don’t even have time for that. That affects stiffness, damping coefficient, moment, everything. I think you need this guy, and you ought to just go ahead and do it, and worry about his bad personal habits later.”
Thus, Sherwood had become a member of the Dorsal Fin team. All he knew about Dorsal Fin was that it was developing the world’s most advanced robots for COPE and that they had something to do with spying and espionage.
Working for Jenner was a new kind of experience. Here, at last, was a human who thought like the machines she attempted to master. She integrated herself into the very controls she cultivated. It was as if her ancestors had pulled themselves up, not from the sea, but from a cauldron of integrated circuits, memory chips, and transimpedence amplifiers. Sherwood was awed by a human being for the first time in his life.
Sherwood lived up to everything Jenner’s boss had said about him. He felt more intimacy with machines than he could with mere humans. They were superior to humans, but inferior to him, of course. His intuitive notion of how a robot acts was a perfect complement to Jenner’s sensitivity to its thought process.
The Dorsal Fin staff had soon discovered his other side, too. He was at least as weird as they’d been led to believe, living some existence to which they were excluded. His arrogance broadcast from him like a drop of gasoline blankets a water puddle, yet stays separate from the water.
He and Jenner worked together on many robot, control-system problems. He had addressed elements of these problems in school and in the Engineering sandbox; but now these problems awaited real, not academic, solutions. It ignited a passion in him like his treachery in high school. He looked at it as one of the great spy-technology sagas of history.
An early problem was to analyze the electronic feedback from the exoskeletal sensors of a robot leg so that it would apply exactly the right amount of current to each internal actuator to affect the desired mechanical response. This evolved into optimizing the shape each leg made and its rotational inertia while walking to maximize its strength and accuracy and minimize its power consumption. All the while he envisioned the robot’s ultimate function, or at least his fantasy of it.
After finally receiving the required security clearances, tickets as they called them, Sherwood had been “read in” to the Dorsal Fin program; that is, he was given access to whatever classified information he needed. With these tickets, he learned much more about COPE applications such as reconnaissance, intimidation, and burglary. But he knew there was more. He and Jenner were principal members of the small team that took the most advanced robots from contractors in Silicon Valley and developed the first fully independent COPE espionage spider. They had worked together for several years refining these operational soulless agents without being certain exactly what the objective of the robot was.