Faster

by Alex Schuler

  “If something’s not working the way you need it to, then replace it with something else! Start clean. This is about finding the right solution for the right problem. If you need to revise the hardware to fit the software, change it. If you need to throw out your code and start from scratch, start over. If we do this half assed, it will only come back to bite us later.”

  Rusty glanced at his hand. Two small cuts on the inside of his thumb glistened red, and a few remnant shards sparkled on his skin. He wiped his hands against one another to shake off the glass and looked out at the room, ignoring the stunned looks staring back at him. He picked up the stack of papers he’d brought with him from the watch room and handed the pile to Lori before returning to the podium.

  “Here’s today’s punch list of critical items that, if not addressed, will completely derail our critical path in the project plan. I’ve listed the name of the person at fault, as well as who I’ve decided will fix it. As always, that person may not be the one to blame.”

  Lori took the top sheet and passed it to Harry. Harry pointed at the bloodstain on the upper edge of the paper before giving the pile to Ted.

  Rusty walked behind the podium to the center whiteboard. Grabbing a marker, he wrote competition across the top.

  “There are forty copies in that pile,” Rusty said. “But only thirty-nine people in this room. We lost another one—another quitter. I won’t bore you with his name, and his work has already been reassigned, as noted in the report. I’ve been busy collecting intel on who else besides DSU has signed up for the DARPA competition next year. Does anyone in here know who Vinod Malik is?”

  “He’s from here,” Lori said. “DSU. He worked under you, didn’t he?”

  “Indeed he did,” Rusty replied. “He was my protégé. Vin was my best student. His software skills are beyond anyone’s in this room. Vin helped me design the NASA moon rover. I mention this because Vin is now at Ashton University. And before you ask, yes, he’s heading up their team for the DARPA competition.”

  Several groans went around the room. Ted was about to speak but raised his hand instead. Rusty pointed at him and motioned for the rest of the room to settle down.

  “With all due respect, there’s no way Ashton has a gimbal system as sophisticated as ours. Some of that tech is proprietary from what I built back in Nevada.”

  “Be that as it may, Ted, I’ve learned never to underestimate Vin. Going forward, I want everyone to assume that Ashton will be our biggest competition. I’m going to continue to try and squeeze whatever I can out of Vin, but I don’t expect him to give away any secrets. Just consider them our top rival going forward.”

  “Do you know what they’re driving?” Harry asked. “I doubt anyone has anything as brutal as our Humvee.”

  “We can just roll over the competition,” Ted added.

  Many in the room started to laugh, and a few even applauded. Rusty slammed his bloodied hand on top of the podium and waited for the room to quiet down.

  “Do I have to remind all of you of the rules?” he asked. “This isn’t BattleBots. If we damage any other vehicle, we are disqualified. Teams can’t run each other off the course. And we can’t pair up against others or block vehicles faster than ours. Every other team out there is trying to solve the same problems we are. There is no predicting what we will find in the Mojave next year. That’s why I want all of you working beyond full capacity.”

  Rusty took a moment to grab a napkin from the table in front of the podium. He methodically set about wiping the blood from his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Harry raise his hand. “Yes?”

  “I know it’s not on the project plan, but when can we name the Hummer?” Harry asked.

  “This again?” Rusty let out a heavy sigh. “All right, Mr. Palmer. Go for it.”

  “I know everyone has different ideas.” Harry jumped from his seat and glanced around the room. “But now that we have that big rotating lidar unit on top, I thought we should call it Sauron.”

  Several students looked around the room with confusion.

  “Sauron!” Harry continued. “From The Lord of the Rings. He sees everywhere.”

  “Actually, Harry, the lidar can’t see a full three hundred and sixty degrees,” Ted said. “I do like your idea of a big eye looking around. How about—”

  “Gort!” Harry said.

  “You really are a geek,” Ted said. “Let’s keep it simple. How about Cyclops?”

  Rusty surveyed the room, relieved to see everyone nodding in agreement. Everyone except Harry.

  “Cyclops it is,” Rusty said. “All right, people, you’ve got the punch list for today. Getting the new gimbal and lidar integrated with our core controls is top priority. Any other questions?”

  The team members sat silently, many focused on Rusty. Several were busy scanning the status report. Some appeared lost in their coffee mugs, looking defeated.

  “Look, I know I’m pushing all of you hard. You knew when you agreed to be on my team the goal was to change the world.” Rusty walked around to the front of the table and leaned back. “DARPA had Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics working on self-driving technology for over a decade with no progress. Now they’re looking beyond military contractors. We’re not just competing with Ashton. There are dozens of schools out there clamoring to lead the way forward. There are also private sector businesses. Corporations. We have no idea what sort of competition we’re facing. All I know is the most brilliant minds are on this. Everyone sitting in this room is part of this. These big companies have proven they are slow and out of touch. They can’t innovate, no matter how much money they spend. Let’s show these corporate bastards how we get things done here at DSU.”

  9

  The DSU Robotics Lab’s workshop floor was cold and empty of team members. The industrial heaters hanging from the twenty-five-foot ceiling struggled to keep the space warm. Outside, the early morning temperatures, typical for January, were below freezing and not expected to get much higher. Snow and ice pellets hammered the windows at the top edges of the walls, their thin panes covered in crystallized dew. The tin roof sang as it deflected the tiny bits raining down from the gloomy overcast sky.

  Rusty glanced at his Seiko as he made his way across the workshop floor. The watch showed him the year—2007. He always felt the passage of time for weeks every January—the shock of the new numbers only slowing fading. The thud of his heavy boots echoed against the concrete walls surrounding the garage. It was fifteen seconds before 9:00 a.m. when he entered the war room. He marched past the small group of people mingling around the food area and walked behind the front table, dropping the forty-four copies of the status report next to the podium.

  The war room was warmer than the workshop floor, thanks to the lower ceilings. Even so, most were bundled in sweatshirts, and some even wore hats. Bagels and cream cheese from a local bakery spread across the food table.

  The center whiteboard directly behind Rusty was filled with mathematical equations. He grabbed an eraser and wiped the board clean as several groans rose up around the room. With a marker, he wrote three dates in large letters across the board.

  JANUARY 24

  AUGUST 19

  SEPTEMBER 9

  Turning to face everyone, he tossed the marker onto the desk. The last two getting coffee hurried to their seats. Rusty glanced down at Lori, Harry, Ted, and Nico in the front row.

  “We have less than seven months until we arrive in the Mojave for final prep and testing,” Rusty said. His voice had grown hoarse over the past week, a result of too many heated arguments. “Three weeks later, on September ninth, the DARPA FAST Challenge begins with the qualification round. Where are we at? Lori, you’re up.”

  He walked around to the front row and handed Lori the stack of papers to begin passing around. She took the top sheet and handed the rest to Harry.


  “DARPA has confirmed all teams will get GPS data with a thousand waypoints exactly two hours before the start of the road race,” Lori said. She slowly stood up as she studied her team’s latest project summary report. “The course will include only ten percent of paved roads. The remainder will be barren desert, including rocks and a small stream to forge through.

  “Going through the latest info, we’ve come up with five areas that could be the potential course. One has an overpass, and two have train tracks. We’ve therefore expanded our original area to survey. We’ve got 37,000 of the 47,000 square miles of the Mojave mapped, and less than 400 of the 1,600 sections to go. I’m projecting we will be done ahead of schedule.”

  “Ahead of schedule?” Rusty asked. “Finally, some good news. Harry?”

  “The interior of Cyclops has been maxed out with seven Pentium computers,” Harry said as he hauled himself out of his chair. Bits of sesame seeds were wedged in the corners of his mouth. He licked cream cheese from his fingers before continuing. “We just passed one million lines of code. The simulation software is running perfectly. Lori and I are in sync. Every new map profile can immediately be run through the simulator. We’ve started running the simulations on the final urban challenge this week.”

  DSU had elected to do their early testing using simulation software. Harry and his team built a virtual world based on the map detail from Lori and her team. Because these were topographical maps, they were aware of hills, valleys, and changes in elevation. The team then built a virtual Humvee they could drive across the terrain. The sensor arrays and outputs on Cyclops’s roof were also simulated, allowing them to drive the vehicle through any part of the desert they had mapped. This approach proved invaluable, as it allowed them to determine how to get the short-, middle-, and long-range “eyes” of the vehicle to interpret what they saw properly. This information would be relayed to the servos controlling the steering, accelerator, and brakes inside the Hummer. Doing this in the virtual world allowed them to develop the bulk of the software before taking Cyclops out on the road.

  Rusty gave Harry a slight nod, and looked past Ted and over at Nico. Harry took his seat and returned to his bagel. Nico twirled his pen across his thumb and fingers, then let it roll into the palm of his hand.

  “Working with Harry, we’ve been able to adjust the sensors to get Cyclops to go faster without losing visibility.” Nico adjusted the sleeves on his Caltech sweatshirt, exposing his hexadecimal tattoo. “We have him at just under forty miles per hour right now with no problems. Once we get past forty, he, well, starts to get a bit confused.”

  “That’s still too slow,” Rusty said. “We need to be faster.”

  “We’re ahead of the deadlines on the project plan,” Nico continued. “Ted’s rotating lidar is working brilliantly. Every week we bump our speed up a notch. We will hit forty-five ahead of schedule.”

  “Make it fifty,” Rusty said. Two of Harry’s teammates gasped from the back of the room. Rusty ignored the theatrics. “You’re all getting a little too comfortable—too sure of yourselves. I guarantee you the competition is not.”

  “There’s no way anyone else has this level of technology,” Ted said abruptly. “I guarantee it.”

  “There are no guarantees,” Rusty said. “Last night I talked with Vin at Ashton. The bastard still won’t cough up any details on what they’ve got, but he somehow knew we had a modified Humvee. I have no clue how he found out. I’m guessing one of the quitters snitched. He seemed overly confident in what his team was building.”

  Rusty walked behind the podium and leaned forward. Half the students were busy studying the report. A few small sidebar conversations had broken out. He stood patiently, resting against the old walnut lectern. He lowered his eyes to see if any of his team leads had looked at the status report. He knew right away they had not.

  “As some of you may have noticed, I moved up the outdoor test schedule.” Rusty watched as Harry dusted bits of sesame seed from today’s report. He smiled as Harry’s jaw slowly fell open. “I’ve secured a testing site not too far away. It’s in an abandoned train depot along the Allegheny River. The dean had to call in a few favors, but we will have it for as long as we need.”

  “Starting tomorrow?” Harry practically squeaked.

  “Tomorrow,” Rusty replied. The room erupted and he slammed his fist against the podium. “Is there a problem?”

  The room responded with silence. Nico slowly raised his hand.

  “We’ve designed this equipment for the desert and extreme heat,” Nico said. “Snow and ice were not in our plans.”

  “We work with what we’ve got. What we’ve got right now is cold. I know the plan was to begin outdoor testing in April, but that conversation with Vin told me we need to be ready for anything. As far as I’m concerned, temperature extremes are extremes, one way or the other. We have no idea what DARPA will hit us with. We must be ready for the unexpected.”

  Harry shook his head, his eyes darting wildly as he flipped back and forth between the first few pages of the report. His hand shot up.

  “What now, Mr. Palmer?” Rusty asked.

  “You didn’t just move up the timeline to start earlier. You cut the duration. A lot. We have a lot less time to complete the testing.”

  “What’s your concern?”

  “That’s . . . that’s impossible. I mean, we’d have to work night and day to hit these dates.”

  “Then I suggest you pack a sleeping bag. It can get chilly once the sun goes down.”

  Harry was about to speak but changed his mind, lowered his head, and sunk deeper into his chair.

  “Any other questions?” Rusty scanned the room, taking inventory of his flock. Most had their heads down. Some were reading the report, others simply looked exhausted. “The status report lists the teams and schedules for testing. Dismissed.”

  He turned his attention back to the whiteboard. The room filled with unhappy groans as people pushed their chairs back and headed for the exit. A few stopped to top off their coffee or grab a bagel or two to take back to the lab. The whiteboard to the far left listed major project milestone tasks and dates. Rusty erased the dates for testing and replaced them with the modified ones he’d just shared with the team. When he turned around, he was surprised to see Ted quietly standing behind him.

  “Do you have a problem with the new test schedule?” Rusty asked.

  “Nah, I grew up in Ohio. I can deal with the snow and cold.” Ted looked over his shoulder and waited for the last of the team members to leave the room. “I had a question. About Ashton. More specifically, about Vin.”

  “Vin?” Rusty folded his arms across his chest and looked Ted up and down. The lanky young man had proven himself resilient since he had joined the team a little more than fourteen months ago. Rusty was surprised to see a look of genuine concern and confusion on Ted’s face. “Why do you ask?”

  “I got an email from some guy named Sam over at Ashton. He said he’s working for Vin on the DARPA project. According to Sam, Vin said you offered to help them configure their hardware. Is that true?”

  Rusty closed his eyes as he replayed last night’s phone call with Vin. It was well past ten o’clock when they’d spoken. Rusty remembered a tennis match of boasts lobbed back and forth, each trying to impress the other with hints about the breakthroughs their teams were making.

  “Shit.” Rusty dragged the palms of his hands from his eyebrows to his chin, finally letting out a long sigh. He sat down on the edge of the desk and began to chuckle. “Vin was telling me his software lead was doing amazing things with their sensor array to try and tame the environment we’ll be facing later this year. Something to do with their hardware being too fragile. I told him we solved that over a year ago. I might have even mentioned you by name. If my memory is correct, I told him that if they hit a dead end with their hardware configuration to let us kno
w. But I meant it as a joke. Vin had to know that.”

  “So, what should I do about Sam?”

  “Nothing. Don’t respond.”

  “But this might give us some insight into—”

  “What part of ‘don’t respond’ don’t you understand?” Rusty crooked an arm toward the revised testing dates he’d just scrawled across the whiteboard. “We have more important things to focus on. Vin is just calling my bluff and using this guy Sam to try and figure out what Ashton’s up against. I said enough on the phone last night. Give them nothing. Am I clear?”

  “Crystal.”

  “I’m serious, Ted.”

  “It’s a promise.”

  ***

  Ted struggled to open the door of the watch tower. One hand was clutched around his DSU coffee mug. The other had a napkin with a cinnamon-raisin bagel generously smeared with peanut butter, as well as a folded copy of Rusty’s status report. He managed to get the door open a crack and used his foot to push it the rest of the way. Harry was the only one in the room, intently focused on his set of three computer screens.

  “I need some guidance,” Ted said. He took a seat in Lori’s chair and dropped his bagel, coffee, and report beside her workstation. “I also need you to swear secrecy.”

  “What now?” Harry spun around and rolled closer to Ted. “I don’t trust that grin on your face.”

  “I got an email from some guy at Ashton,” Ted continued. “He’s working on the DARPA project just like us. Apparently, Rusty and Vin got in some pissing match, and Rusty told Vin if they needed help tuning their hardware to give us a yell.”

  “That was stupid,” Harry said.

  “Rusty wasn’t serious. He told me to ignore the email.” Ted took a huge bite of his bagel and continued speaking with his mouth half full. “This guy Sam reports to Vin. Seems like a total dick. After raving about their groundbreaking software, he tells me they’re having trouble smoothing out the readings from the sensors and that Rusty said we had the fix.”