The God Wave (18 page)

He
could
promise it, too, because tomorrow the U.S. military would come to see the show.

Matt was excited . . . and nervous. Nervous enough that he had to force himself to eat breakfast. Nervous enough that he kept glancing at his watch, though he knew Howard and his cronies wouldn't be arriving at the show until the lunch slowdown. During this traditionally thin period on the convention floor, crowds tended to dwindle, and most booths sent their excess staff off to nearby eateries.

It was this lull into which Matt planned to drop Chen Lanfen and Bilbo. The martial artist was awaiting her cue in the comfort of one of the upstairs conference rooms. The bot was backstage, under what looked like a pile of pallet pads. Dice was the key to making it work. During the half-hour break the core team would take for lunch, he would stage everything. Then it depended upon Matt to offer Mike a breather so Lanfen and Bilbo could do their routine.

None of his nerves were showing, Matt assured himself as he
watched Chuck's team go through their initial presentation. Tim was the first trick pony of the day and cheerfully (cheerful for Tim anyway) showed off his code fu and creativity to a standing-room-only crowd. Word of Forward Kinetics' kick-ass show had obviously spread. In fact he recognized a number of the folks who appeared for the Saturday morning session; he'd seen them the day before, some repeatedly. All of this was good news.

When eleven thirty rolled around, and booth staff began trickling off to get lunch, Matt insisted that Chuck and Eugene do the sandwich run since they'd just done two shows back to back.

“Stretch your legs and take some deep breaths,” Matt told Chuck. He watched him all the way to the exhibition hall doors, then went to retrieve Lanfen while Dice got the robot out from under wraps.

Let the shock and awe begin,
he thought, knowing that was one doctrine the military couldn't resist.

CHUCK STARTED THE TWELVE-THIRTY SHOW
with a larger crowd than Matt had expected. Howard and his guests—four of them—were seated in the front row. Even in suits, Matt thought, they exuded military, something about the set of the shoulders and the pike-up-the-spine posture that gave high-ranking military men that peculiar aura of detached wariness.

In addition to rigid posture, Matt reminded himself, the military had deep, deep pockets. Even Chuck wouldn't be able to say no to the level of resources Howard's agency could command. If there were a God, Matt decided, he would pray for Lanfen and Bilbo to knock Howard's dress socks off.

Matt watched Chuck go through his opening spiel, watched as Sara built her house (she could probably do it in her sleep by then), watched as the audience displayed various shades of disbe
lief (or amusement at the disbelief of others). When Chuck asked Mike to come forward with Roboticus, Matt took that as his cue to walk out onstage.

“I gave Mike the session off,” he said, smiling first at Chuck, then out at the audience, “because I have a bit of a surprise for everyone. Ms. Chen, if you would bring your little friend out onstage.”

Lanfen entered gracefully from backstage, trailing Bilbo, who effectively aped her movements, right down to the sway of her hips. Granted it looked a bit comic on the robot, but even so, its motions were far more elegant than they had any right to be.

“THIS,” MATT SAID WITH A
sweep of his arm, “is Chen Lanfen, an expert in the martial art of kung fu. Her companion robot is Bilbo.” There was some laughter at the sight of the little bot, but Dice's beaming face put Matt at ease. “Bilbo was designed by Daisuke Kobayashi and the robotics team at Forward Kinetics. The robot has been fitted with sophisticated gyro mechanisms for balance, and, as you can see, he is extremely flexible—in some ways more than a human being. Lanfen is going to put Bilbo through her paces for you, so you can get an idea of the potential for kinetic technology in the areas of security and law enforcement. Imagine, if you will, a SWAT team charged with infiltrating a place where hostages are being kept. Imagine the potential for disarming bombs or doing rescue work in situations that would put a human operative in dire jeopardy but require one's delicacy and intelligence.”

He turned to Lanfen and bowed. “Ms. Chen, if you would.”

He drew the gaping Chuck off to the side of the stage, lifting the slender podium and carrying it off with them. Lanfen now had the entire platform on which to display her kin(etic) fu—and display it she did. She started by having Bilbo face the audience
and bow in a mirror image of her own motions. The two of them executed a series of kung fu postures in eerie unison. Matt knew that the robot lagged a split second behind Lanfen's body, but to the human eye the difference was imperceptible.

At the end of the routine, Lanfen moved to stage left, leaving Bilbo at center, frozen in a middle lotus position. Then she wheeled, settled into a horse stance, and proceeded to put the robot through a series of astonishing kicks, rolls, and tumbles calculated to show, in quick succession, how well the little bot could copy human movement and how well it could do things no human could do. Matt noticed that the audience reacted particularly strongly when Bilbo reversed direction by simply swiveling his head and flipping his back and front, and again when he dropped into a pill-bug curl and rolled across the stage.

Matt glanced at Howard. The man sat stone-faced, showing little more reaction than a slight widening or narrowing of his eyes or the occasional blink. The men who flanked him were only marginally more transparent.

Time,
Matt thought,
to up the ante
.

When Bilbo had completed a tumbling pass that brought him to the lip of the stage, balanced on his hands, Matt stepped back up onto the platform.

“Now, as you might expect, the key in many of the duties a robot like Bilbo might be assigned is the operator's ability to see what Bilbo sees. Of course many of you are no doubt thinking we can do that already with VR systems. I see a number of repeat offenders out there. You've already been filled in on the advantages of kinetic training over VR. For the rest of you, we're now going to offer a demonstration. Dice, if you'd be so kind as to bring up the main screen.”

Dice, stationed by the Brewster-Brenton monitor, brought it online. The big, flat-screen TV lit up and gave the audience a
view of themselves, which was what Bilbo's forward cameras were focused on.

“What you're seeing,” Matt told them, “is the signal that Bilbo's optic unit is sending back to the Brewster-Brenton's CPU. It's no different in its basic technology from standard VR. But let's imagine for a moment that Bilbo is on a critical mission. Let's say he's been sent down a mine shaft to see if the miners trapped at the bottom are dead or alive.”

The robot dropped to its hands and knees and began to slink along while the audience was treated to a camera-eye view of the carpeted stage and its environs.

“Then just before he reaches his goal, you lose your mechanical connection.”

The screen went blank. Lanfen smiled. Matt faced the audience and shrugged.

“Oops. Connection lost. Now what? With standard VR tech, unless the problem is at the operator's end and could be fixed with mechanical intervention, the mission would likely have to be scrubbed. If it's the result of intervening material that is blocking your signal, you're basically screwed. However, with kinetic technology, the loss of signal need never occur. Ms. Chen, if you please.”

Lanfen closed her eyes. A moment later the picture returned to the screen, and the audience was treated to a high-definition view of the carpet and Lanfen's red Converse high-tops.

“You're now seeing what Lanfen is seeing through the robot's optics. The connection to the robot is managed not by outboard tech but by the operator herself. The only way for the signal from the mechanism to be lost, insofar as we can determine, is if the cameras are physically damaged or the operator is disabled or severely distracted. The ideal operator, obviously, is someone like Ms. Chen, who is trained not only in martial arts but in
meditation and who is a master of multitasking. As long as the robot's servomechanisms are intact, the kinetic agent can operate them.”

Matt allowed the show to continue a few minutes more and ended it with Bilbo cartwheeling down the central aisle of the audience and all the way down the length of the booth to the stairs. There he went to a four-footed stance and galloped up and into the conference room at the top. All the while the onstage display faithfully recorded what Lanfen saw through Bilbo's optics.

“You can come back to us now, Ms. Chen,” Matt told Lanfen.

She opened her eyes, and for a moment the audience—at least those who were not still staring at the staircase—saw the world as the martial arts expert saw it. Then the screen went black.

The questions were fast and furious. Matt had to defer to Dice and Lanfen for many of them. There were questions about the range of the effect, how it felt to operate the bot in that way, the weight and possible materials of which the robot could be constructed. Conspicuously, none of those questions came from Mr. Howard or his companions. At the conclusion of the show, those gentlemen simply rose from their seats and disappeared, leaving Matt with a lump the size of a softball in the pit of his stomach.

Did we fail? How could that happen to me?

Lanfen and Bilbo had been brilliant. Dice's work was brilliant. Chuck's process was sheer genius. The possible applications were legion. Howard would have to be a blind man not to see the potential.

Christ, even a robot could see it.

Matt was so busy sweating Howard's precipitous departure, he was blindsided by Chuck's response to his surprise. When he caught up with his partner after the show, he found him deeply engaged in an intense discussion with Chen Lanfen about her experiences with the kinetic technology. When Chuck caught
sight of Matt, the conversation had arrived at the one point that gave Matt pause: Lanfen's so-far unique ability to ride the robot in VR mode even after the physical connection had been severed.

Matt steeled himself for—well, just about anything but what he actually got. Chuck came at him with a face beaming with scientific zeal.

“Matt, this . . . this is amazing. I mean I knew you were working on something after hours—so was I—but this? I'm speechless.”

Matt slid a side glance at Lanfen. “You weren't speechless a moment ago.”

“I have so many questions.”

“Well, Lanfen is the one to answer them. I'd hang around to watch the fun, but I've got to go make a phone call.”

Pleased that he had at least dodged the Chuck bullet, Matt was about to head upstairs to call the number Howard had given him.

“Wait, before you go . . .”

To Matt the sound was like cats clawing a chalkboard. And man, he hated cats. He froze, silently counting to ten to control his temper as Chuck walked over to him.

“I really appreciate the work you put into this. This whole thing. And I have a sort of surprise for you, too—”

“Listen, Chuck, if it involves Mini, I already figured something was up. I've seen her coming in—”

“No, not Mini. That's for tomorrow.” He held out a manila folder and said another name: “Lucy.”

Matt froze for real this time—not just his strides but his insides. His mind went blank. White. Like a glacier.

“I . . . took the liberty. I remembered what you told me—about wishing you could interpret . . . about why you'd thought of finding me in the first place,” Chuck stammered uncomfortably.

Matt didn't move. He was torn between hugging his partner and breaking into tears. Internally he was doing both.

Externally he took the folder and lightly shook Chuck's now-empty, outstretched hand. “I . . . Thank you.”

The two men were barely able to meet each other's eyes. But the brief moment they did said everything they couldn't.

Matt turned on his heels and headed upstairs, forcing the emotions down. Chuck had just handed him a message from the past. Matt wasn't sure he wanted to know.

What he needed to do now was make a phone call for his future. He wouldn't let himself wonder about what was in the folder. He wondered instead about how he was going to tell Howard that the kinetic tech he'd just seen came with a small caveat: he wasn't sure if just anyone could do all that Chen Lanfen could. For whatever reason, it already seemed as if the government agent had not been as impressed as he should have been.

Matt's cell phone buzzed just as he started to dial Howard's number shakily. He did not say the first thing that came to his mind, which was, “I was just going to call you.” He didn't want to sound overeager. He wanted to sound confident.

“May I assume you enjoyed the show?”

He wasn't sure he succeeded at confident. But he was happy to have gotten the words out.

“It was most enlightening. However, I need further verification that the technology is what you claim it to be.”

Matt quashed his irritation at Howard's skepticism and his anxiety over revealing the possible limitations of the tech. “Sure,” he said. “Perfectly understandable. What do you have in mind?”

“I need you to bring your operative and the robot to a location controlled by my agency, so I can verify that you're not using covert carrier signals or other mechanical means of achieving kinesis.”

“What loca—”

“The show closes at six on Sunday. A car will pick you, Ms.
Chen, and the robot up at the rear of the conference center at seven. Is that acceptable?”

“Uh. Yeah. Quite acceptable.”

“Very good. Thank you, Professor Streegman.”

“Oh, and Dice. I'll need Dice Kobayashi, too. In case there's a problem with the robot.”

There was a moment of hesitation. “Very well. If there are any specialized tools Dr. Kobayashi needs, he should bring them.”