The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (9 page)

Cooper is already inside of and operating Avalon when Xiadon
and I head out to the main room. Specifically, he’s running in place, thanks to the wires that keep the panda suit suspended so that its paws only just scrape the floor.

It’s mesmerizing, watching him run in the suit. It’s nothing like the goofy loping you usually see on nature shows or at the zoo. This is cheetah-fast, the back legs long-jumping forward, lunging as far as Avalon’s shoulder, while the forepaws push powerfully off the ground. Then, for a split second, the forelegs reach forward and the hindlegs stretch back, and the panda suit flies.

“Isn’t that a little speedy for a panda?” I ask Dr. Xiadon.

Her eyes are locked on the panoramic bank of view screens above the two panda suits. It looks like we’re getting an Avalon-eye view onscreen, since all I see is a bear snout and a nonstop rush of bamboo.

“Ken’s not acting like a panda right now,” Xiadon says. And I can see instantly that she’s pulled a Yoda on me. Before she was funny, friendly, even silly: not the Jedi Master I’d flown halfway across the galaxy to speak to. But this Xiadon is hard, shrewd, all-business. This is the Xiadon who runs APM when nosy journalists aren’t around. “There must be a problem.”

And when I don’t seem to get it, she adds, “Terrorists.”

We hustle to mission control, where everyone is anxious and moving fast. Dr. Anita Deeprashad, APM’s mission manager, fills us in. “Avalon has been shot,” she says.

“Damage?” asks Xiadon.

None: the robot pandas have withstood a shotgun slug at 20 yards,
and this joker had apparently shot at the robot using some “Oscar Meyer rifle” that, according to Deeprashad, “didn’t even muss Avalon’s hair.”

Deeprashad is late-sixties, with long braided hair as bright as sea salt. She’s wearing a glorious gold and purple sari, and sports an onyx-and-pearl panda bindi on her forehead. Yet she talks like a Hollywood action hero. California infects absolutely everyone.

“Any real pandas hurt or killed?” Xiadon asks. No and no, says Deeprashad.

Now Xiadon can relax a little. “And the terrorists?”

“Chasing one of them down.” Their eyes meet. They don’t say a word, but I can break their eyebrow Morse code. They’re both suddenly worried that another PR debacle could occur if Ken mutilates another 22:19er with me in the room. They’re silently debating whether to have me escorted away.

“Nope,” I say. “I’m staying right here.”

They both sigh, resigned.

“Ken’s the best there is,” says Xiadon. I think she means it, but it sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.

By contrast, there’s no doubt what Deeprashad means. “You’re about to see the professionalism and restraint we exercise when arresting these criminals,” says Deeprashad, taking my hand and patting it in an endearingly un-American way. “Ken has a light touch when dealing with these 22:19 scum. Not like me. I’d pop the bastards’ heads off like I was thumbing open champagne.”

Deeprashad is killing me! I want to talk like a Hollywood producer to her. “And … scene. You were beautiful Anita, beautiful! You’re going to be a big star, baby! Huge!”

APM’s archenemy is 22:19, a group that takes its name from that chapter and verse from Exodus: “Whosoever lieth down with an animal shall be put to death.” They formed about a decade ago in objection to any animal husbandry practice where humans harvest sperm from an animal. It doesn’t matter that you’re getting off an animal for science, says 22:19. Bestiality is bestiality in the eyes of the Lord.

22:19 started by attacking turkey farms and horse-breeding facilities, becoming increasingly more aggressive as time went on. But they gained their greatest notoriety once they declared war against the American Panda Mission. They capitalized on the perceived twin abominations of modern technology and the erosion of Christian values in American politics to appeal to radical Christian denominations. It wasn’t long before some of them saw 22:19ers as God-touched heroes waging a holy crusade against the evils of science.

With an influx of capital and new members, 22:19’s salvos became progressively more audacious, especially against APM. They claimed responsibility for the arson two years ago that caused more than $16 million in damage to APM equipment and prompted the move to this new facility. Their growing infamy and belligerence caused the United States to classify them as a terrorist organization.

Predictably, that label initially bolstered their numbers. But it also meant, under the most recent iteration of the Patriot Act, these “enemy combatants” could be captured or even killed by any citizen or legal alien of the United States without fear of prosecution.

Not too many enemy combatants have been killed or captured on U.S. soil by U.S. citizens. In fact, all combatants so captured have been from 22:19 by APM. To accomplish this feat, APM has employed the most unlikely anti-terrorism technology ever conceived: the robot giant panda.

It sounds funny, I know. But make no mistake: the robot giant pandas are shockingly effective. Their metal skeletons shrug off bullets like snowflakes, they can run through bamboo-dense terrain at 50 kph, and we have evidence of just how easily they can end human life. Two 22:19ers trespassed onto the APM campus on November 5, 2027. One of them filmed the other’s death.

Constance Ritter, the 22:19 member who was killed, had a head that was just as firmly attached to her neck as anyone else’s when the day began. But as the footage shows, a second later the robot Greg Furce was jockeying took a swipe at her, and tick, her head flies out of frame in a split-second. Her body takes a comparatively long time to kneel, then topple over. The male 22:19er, never identified, runs through the dense bamboo whisper-crying “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit” for the rest of the clip.

APM has the legal authority to kill 22:19 trespassers, and given how much stronger a robot panda is than a human, it’s something of
a miracle more people haven’t died. But as APM found out the hard way, in terms of public perception, even one death is one too many.

Back on the monitors, the bamboo forest has given way to an open field. We can now make out, faintly in the distance, a man is running away from the robot as if his life depended on it. Behind him, the robot’s closing, fast.

It’s extraordinary, watching the panda-mime Cooper is performing for us live while, above him, the silent viewscreens show us the field robot rising and falling as it runs in exact synchronicity. The two are precisely linked—if there is any lag, my eye can’t detect it.

With each galumph, the robot closes the gap between itself and the suspect. Terrorist or no, part of me can’t help but root for the running, terrified human. This looks like the kind of villain-cam you get in horror movie chase-scenes.

We can see the terrorist clearly now: dressed in Eddie Bauer camouflage and toting a rifle that looks plenty dangerous to me. But according to Deeprashad, against robot pandas you might as well be throwing raw hotdogs.

Cooper leaps one last time—the Avalon-suit extends into a full Superman stretch—and when the onscreen robot lands, his quarry vanishes beneath it.

“Got him,” Cooper reports seconds later, his voice throaty with adrenaline. The control room cheers.

In person, Cooper has bellyflopped onto the floor and lies there, splayed like a rug. The field robot, following suit, has bellyflopped onto its quarry.

The robot panda will lounge upon the flattened suspect until backup arrives. Said suspect will be charged with a long list of offenses, both state and federal. He’ll have the full weight of the Patriot Act thrown at him. That means life imprisonment is on the table in California. At the federal level, so is execution.

But his first journey will be to the hospital. Cooper reports he heard “a loud crack” when he landed. The suspect is now “mooing like a sick cow.”

Deeprashad moans a little. Xiadon is hard, expressionless. They’re both wondering if they made a grave mistake allowing me to witness this.

“How badly is he hurt, Ken?” asks Deeprashad.

Seconds pass. Xiadon and Deeprashad exchange looks. Then: “No worries, Anita.” Cooper replies. “This jerk will have his day in court. He’ll probably just be wearing a cast on his gun arm that day.”

Cooper has joined us at mission control, catching his breath after the chase. He sits barechested, the top half of the unitard hanging limply in front of him, his metal, bug-eyed panda helmet on his lap.

He’s smiling like an MVP and, like an MVP, can’t wait to tell the press about his game-winning play.

“The hardest part is getting back enough of your humanity before things go bad,” he says, pouring water alternately in his mouth or over his head. “That’s what happened to poor Greg. He just couldn’t become human again in time.”

“So people lose control of themselves when they operate the pandas?” I ask. “Is that what happened to Furst?”

“No,” says Xiadon.

“Yes,” says Deeprashad.

They have an eyebrow duel for a few minutes. Then Xiadon says, “Kind of. We train our jockeys relentlessly, and we have kill-switches and overrides here at mission control to take over if the jockey loses control. But we all blew it that day: Furst, me, Anita, everyone at mission control. It just happened too fast. Really, it was just like any other animal attack. You know when you hear how an animal trainer who’s been working with the same tiger or killer whale for years is suddenly mauled, out of nowhere? That’s what happened. Furst surprised us all, most of all himself.”

“But Furst isn’t a tiger or an orca,” I say. “He’s a highly-trained human being doing highly-specialized work.”

Cooper is shaking his head. “Gabby, I said it before and I’ll say it again. We’re not acting like pandas out there. Acting doesn’t work; the pandas see right through us. We go to great lengths to
become
pandas.”

Talk like this makes me wince, especially from Cooper, who I knew in a former incarnation. It’s a little too crunchy for a girl who had to
spend decades purging her Latina, magical-realist childhood out of her reason. “Look, I understand the importance of your work here. Really. You use robots so that they can look and smell right. You do everything you can to put yourselves in the right mindset. But at the end of the day it’s still acting. There’s no way to forget you’re just a human being playing the role of panda bear.”

Xiadon and Deeprashad interrupt each other explaining how wrong I am. All the technology both inside (the nanotech, the chemicals) and out (the unitard, the helmet, the panda suit) give jockeys a near-perfect panda perspective of the world. Thanks to a process called “migraineal suppression,” the left brain’s ability to process language, reason causally, and in short think like a human will be reduced to be more in-line with ursine IQ; via “cerebellar promotion,” the mammalian brain will take over the lion’s share of the decision-making process; through “synesthetic olfactory emulation,” the operator’s sense of smell will become the primary way of getting information about the world, borrowing some processing power from the brain’s occipital lobe. And so on—they release a cataract of jargon, each doctor trying to out-science the other. They might as well be reciting from
Finnegan’s Wake
.